Brief Notes on Various Topics -- 40

24 March 2025

Brief Notes on Various Topics – 40

1.  Lloyd Gerson is publishing a second edition of the translation of the Enneads; Gerson was the head of the group that did this translation.  I believe this second edition will become available in late September or early October of this year.  The paperback edition is currently priced at Amazon for $69.99 and the hardback is listed at $175.00.  This second edition contains some revisions as well as additional cross-references.

It is common, though not universal, for translators of Plato and Plotinus to have subsequent revised editions based on feedback they received after the publication of their first edition.  Jowett, I believe, had three editions.  McKenna had several revised editions of his translation of the Enneads (some of these changes are found in footnotes to the Larson Publications’ edition of the MacKenna translation).  Translating the Dialogues of Plato or the Enneads of Plotinus is a big job that rests on years of study before even attempting such a project.  It makes sense that the translator might find certain passages lacking after publishing their first edition and then proceed to make corrections.

For those interested, the second edition of the Gerson edition of the Enneads can be pre-ordered from Amazon.

2.  A friend of mine sent me a quote from Iain McGilchrist that I thought readers would find interesting:

“For over two thousand years, in the Platonic, and later the Christian, tradition of Western thought, human life was seen as orientated towards three great values: goodness, beauty, and truth, each of them in turn seen as a manifestation of an aspect of the sacred.  During my lifetime, I have seen each of these important values, along with the sacred, repudiated and reviled.  Less and less attention is given these days to the inner nature of goodness as a disposition of the world.  Too often it seems that goodness has been reduced to rule-following, and good actions determined by a form of bloodless, utilitarian accountancy.  Beauty is dismissed as irrelevant, in an era that respects only one value, namely, power – so that no artist now wishes his or her art to be praised for its beauty, only for being ‘powerful’.  And truth is dismissed, inevitably, as part of the rhetoric of power, supposedly decreed at whim to suit those who hold the power: everyone, it is argued, is entitled to their own truth.  What are we left with?”

I’m not sure of the exact location of this quote; I suspect it comes from a recorded talk (McGilchrist has quite a few talks on Youtube).  My friend put in the topic line of the email he sent that contained this quote, “Plato Gutted”.  

I think McGilchrist sums our current situation very accurately and succinctly here.  In my own journey away from modernity, it was the rejection of beauty that first signaled to me that something was wrong with our current cultural situation.

3.  I’ve been listening to a presentation on Youtube by an academic, a Professor of Philosophy, on Plato.  It is a series of posts.  Overall the presenter seems kindly disposed towards Plato which is why I have continued to watch the series.  At the same time I find the presentation frustrating because it reflects the manner in which academia is unable to comprehend Platonism as a spiritual tradition as opposed to a philosophy in the way that contemporary philosophies are types of philosophy.  For example, there has so far been no mention of rebirth, or purification, or asceticism, among other topics that I focus on when reading Plato.  The basic problem, as I see it, is that academia as an institution is committed to modernity in ways that make it difficult to present Platonism as a spiritual tradition that has the purpose of transcending the world and offering a path to salvation.

On the other hand, if Platonism was presented to an audience of college students in the way I would prefer, it is likely that college students would simply dismiss it as superstitious, outdated, unscientific, and deficient.  In a college context a tradition like Platonism needs to be presented in a manner that can actually connect with a young modern audience.  My first contact with Platonism was in such a context and it planted the seed for a later blossoming of a fuller, more traditional, approach to Platonism.

4.  “Animal sacrifice was not the most common ritual in the ancient world.”  This is the opening sentence from the book Animal Sacrifice in the Ancient Greek World, edited by Sarah Hitch and Ian Rutherford, published by Cambridge University Press.  I have enjoyed the collection of essays.  And the opening sentence highlighted for me one of the reasons why I find theurgy to be questionable as a Platonic practice.  What I’m getting at is that the emphasis on theurgy has obscured the many other ways that ceremony functions and presents meaning.  A widespread use of ceremony is to generate cultural memory so that certain events, views, or persons are not forgotten.  The repetition of a ritual on, for example, a yearly basis that is designed to bring to the minds of the participants something that happened in the past is a way of focusing the culture as a whole towards certain realities from the past and keeping them alive for the future by re-presenting them in the present, usually in a symbolic way.  A simple form of this is having a celebratory meal in honor of an event or person.  I see this as a more fruitful use of ritual than theurgy, as well as more powerful.

5.  If I think of the One as pure light, which is consistent with Platonic symbols and metaphors, I see the names of the One, Divine Names, as emerging from the pure light of the One streaming through the prism of Mind as found in the Noetic realm or sphere.  Mind is a prism for the light of the One, the Good, and the Beautiful.

These names are of two types.  The first type of name, or color that emerges when the mind differentiates the pure light of the One, consists of abstract nouns such as the Good, the One, the Beautiful, the Eternal, and so forth.  The second type of name consists of personifications such as Apollo, Athena, Aphrodite, Hermes, Zeus, Hera, and so forth.  

The colors that emerge from the pure light of the transcendental are the result of the mind’s differentiating the unity of the One into distinct aspects.  As a crystal produces colors when the light of the sun flows through the crystal, the mind produces differentiated names when the energy of the One flows through mind.  This is the process of differentiation that is the essence of emanation.

6. I have self-published in book form my blog posts. I have published two volumes. They are available at Amazon. If you put in the key words "Blogging Platonism" both of them will come up.