Brief Notes on Various Topics -- 55

14 July 2025

Brief Notes on Various Topics – 55

1.  I’ve started reading the Enneads at night.  This is new for me.  Most of my reading is done in the early morning hours.  I was looking for a way to settle down before sleep, to sort of bring my mind to a place that prepared it for rest, and I thought that the Enneads might be a good vehicle for that.  I don’t think this would work for someone who is reading the Enneads for the first time because the Enneads can be complex and dense.  But after years of reading the Enneads I have become familiar with its language and the modes of expression that Plotinus uses.  The result is that I am more relaxed and at ease with the writing.  I also think that the ease I am feeling is due to many years of practice in contemplation bearing fruit.  I think that some of Plotinus can be difficult to understand if the reader has no experience with contemplation and the mystical, which is to say transcendental, experience.  Passages that directly refer to this kind of experience are hard to access without the reader having some experiential base.  I’m not saying that readers have to have attained full union with the Good and the One in order to understand these passages; but some kind of brief encounter with the transcendental is very helpful.

I any case, I am finding reading the Enneads right before sleep very relaxing and seems to have a positive impact on the quality of my sleep.

2.  Metaphors matter.  And the specific metaphor chosen to make a point also matters.  I started thinking along these lines because of the various metaphors that I have run across for the spiritual journey and ascent; not only in the Platonic tradition but in other spiritual traditions as well.  (As an aside, it might be a fruitful project to gather the metaphors for walking the spiritual path that are found in the Dialogues.)

One metaphor for spiritual work is cultivation; I mean things like gardening.  You cultivate the garden of the soul so that the soul can blossom.

This kind of metaphor contrasts with metaphors of athletic training where spirituality is compared to rigorous training involved in gaining facility in various sports.  This is in some ways similar to the metaphor of the spiritual warrior because warriors also undergo intense physical training in order to be ready for combat.  The comparison leads to an understanding of ‘doing combat’ with temptations in order to subdue them.  There are entire books, both ancient and new, that base their view of spirituality on the archetype of the warrior; it has a broad appeal.

But I think we should be careful with our metaphors in the context of spirituality because the metaphors have a tendency to be taken literally; in the case of the warrior metaphor, it has happened that a spiritual tradition that uses this type of metaphor begins to laud real life warriors with little discrimination or understanding of the mayhem that is the warrior’s purpose.

The Buddha liked to use the metaphor of crossing a river and that spiritual training is designed to take practitioners to ‘the other shore.’  The Platonist tradition appears to like using metaphors involving an image of ascent such as climbing a ladder or a mountain path.  These are very useful metaphors and are unlikely to slip into supporting questionable behavior.

3.  One of the most difficult tasks for a Platonist practitioner is learning how to negotiate the chaos of the human realm.  I mean that human institutions, particularly political institutions, do not have the welfare of spiritual practitioners in mind, nor are they concerned that what they are doing may not be helpful for a spiritual practitioner.

Economic, political, and military dislocations are very frequent in human affairs and all of them can be disruptive for those on a spiritual path.  There seems to be a tendency in the history of philosophy for some philosophers to want to place themselves in the midst of such chaos as guides, or teachers, who understand how to stabilize such situations.  This rarely works (in fact I can’t think of a single situation in which it did work). 

It is my view that at some point in the philosopher’s journey the philosopher comes to a realization that they must leave such situations behind as best they can; that is to say the philosopher needs to withdraw from the fields of politics, economics, and military strife as much as is possible in the context of their particular situation. 

This is not an original observation.  A classic example is Lao Tzu abandoning his job as an archivist for a Chinese state during the Warring States Period and vanishing in the mountains to the West, never to be seen again.  Surprisingly, this kind of withdrawal is also found in Confucian history when the Mongols took over China in the withdrawal of some Confucian Sages from participation in what they regarded as a corrupt State.

In the West we have models such as the Desert Fathers who withdrew into the desert of Egypt to practice as hermits.  And in Platonism we have a few precious stories about Platonist practitioners who gave up positions of wealth and influence to practice the Platonic Dharma.

I have not been able to discover a formula for how to negotiate the chaos of the human realm.  It is helpful to know that others have found a way to step away from human involvements.  But inevitably our specific situation will differ from what others lived in and so there will always, I think, be an element of discovery as we find our way in this difficult and dangerous world.

4.  Porphyry wrote a work that is sometimes called ‘Sentences’ and has also been given the title ‘Launching Points to the Realm of Mind’ by Kenneth Guthrie who translated the work.  I think Guthrie’s title is a good one because it points to the purpose of the short work which is to highlight features of the ‘realm of mind’, meaning Nous, or the realm of forms.  ‘Mind’ in Guthrie’s title refers to noetic mind, one of the three primary aspects of the Noetic Realm: mind, being, and life. 

Guthrie has the view that the sentences found in Porphyry’s work are based on certain passages in the Enneads of Plotinus.  This makes sense since Porphyry was a student of Plotinus, but the sentences may also refer to other Platonic writings.

It appears to be the case that Guthrie’s translation is a kind of update of the translation of the same work by Thomas Taylor, who published his translation as part of a collection of some of Porphyry’s work.   

The title ‘Sentences’ is a little misleading since some items consist of more than one sentence and some are a paragraph long.  I wonder if the title ‘Topics’ might be more accurate.

Here is the first sentence:

Every body is in place; but nothing essentially incorporeal, or any thing of this kind, has any locality.  (Thomas Taylor) 

Every body is in place; the incorporeal in itself is not in a place, any more than the things which have the same nature as it.  (Kenneth Guthrie)

Every material body is in a spatial dimension with its own place, while none of the non-material beings have such a spatial dimension.  (Isaac Samarskyi)

4.1  The Isaac Samarskyi translation was published in 2024.  There is also a fourth translation published in a scholarly journal that I can’t figure out how to access yet.

4.2  This opening sentence gives the reader the basic difference between noetic realities and material realities.  Noetic realities are not placed in space, they have no coordinates or mappable locations.  This point is made by pointing to the ‘incorporeal’ nature of nous itself and noetic realities residing in nous.

4.3  The overall focus of ‘Sentences’ is to illuminate the nature of the incorporeal for the student of philosophy which is why this sentence opens the work.

4.4  I think this work might have been used by Porphyry as an outline for instruction, as prompts for when he would give a talk about nous, and as a way of distilling the topic to its essentials which the student could use to recall the points that were made by Porphyry in such a talk.

4.5  I think ‘Sentences’ or ‘Launching Points to the Realm of Mind’ can be used today by students of Platonism as a tool for contemplating the incorporeal and as a guide to the noetic.

5.  Two weeks ago I posted some thoughts about a Platonist Canon; that was item 53.3.  I think I would add the works of Olympiodorus to such an imagined canon.  I think his works fit in with the contemplative and ascetic understanding of Platonism which I find in the Dialogues and the Enneads. 

I want to clarify that I am not opposed to people reading and studying what I call hyphenated Platonism.  I have learned a lot from various Christian Platonists, particularly about the specific nature of Platonic Grace.  And though I am at variance with Theurgic Platonism, I have benefitted from reading their works because even when I disagreed with what they are saying encountering their different views helped me to clarify my own understanding and has allowed me to articulate what I refer to as Contemplative Platonism with a greater assurance.

The purpose of thinking about a Platonic Canon is to sift through the vast library of Platonism to uncover the jewels of the contemplative and ascetic teachings found therein.