Brief Notes on Various Topics -- 56

21 July 2025

Brief Notes on Various Topics – 56

1.  One of the aspects of Platonism that interests me is how the soul is variously depicted.  At times the soul is depicted as immune from the temptations of the body and not involved in the desires for sensory stimulation and sense-based pleasures.  At other times the soul is depicted as having more complex contours such as reason, emotions, and capable of succumbing to the seductions of the material world.  Sometimes this more complex soul is depicted as having a three-part character and extended metaphors are used to illustrate this such as a chariot with three horses pulling in different directions.

I think the difficulty here is that at times the distinction between soul and mind is not clear, and at other times the soul is being described differently depending on which level of reality, or hypostasis, the discussion is centered on.  This happens in Platonic discourse where the same term has different meanings depending on the hypostasis that is being referred to.

I lean toward viewing the soul as a manifestation of the first hypostasis; I like to say that the soul is the presence of eternity in the ephemeral individual.  But you could say that the soul is the presence of the Good and the One in each individual.  Or you could say that the soul is the presence of the transcendent, that which is immortal and unchanging, in the mortal and changing individual.  I tend to view the soul as not under the influence of things like emotions and reason.

I lean toward viewing the mind as a noetic reality and as a manifestation of the second hypostasis.  I say this because a primary function of mind is discrimination, by which I mean making distinctions.  The first hypostasis is ineffable and therefore does not make distinctions.  The second hypostasis does make distinctions and this is possible because of the emergence of mind as an emanation from the first hypostasis.

I think looking at mind and soul in this way makes sense of the idea, found particularly in the Phaedo, of separating body and soul as the task of philosophy.  Mind belongs to body and part of the task of philosophy is to separate soul from mind; not an easy thing to do.  But because mind is inherently an instrument of distinction and discrimination, and the Good and the One is not a realm of such activity, the mind needs to be separated from the soul in order to ascend to the One.  If this separation does not happen the soul will remain captured by the second hypostasis, and reside in the noetic instead of the final ascent to the fully transcendental.

But the mind is an immortal unchanging reality, as all noetic realities are.  That is why, I think, that the individual tendencies built up over lifetimes travel with the soul into subsequent lives; because both mind and soul are immortal and unchanging.  The sharing of these two aspects by both mind and soul makes it difficult for the soul to separate from mind, but it can be done (see Ennead VI.9).

2.  I mentioned a few weeks ago that David Litwa was working on a translation of Porphyry’s Against the Christians based on the fragments remaining as quotes in critiques of this work.  Litwa has now published his translation and it is available on Amazon; there are both hardback and paperback editions.  I haven’t read it yet myself, but I hope to do so soon.

3.  I don’t think Platonism is about aligning with the Gods.  Rather, I see Platonism as the process of aligning with eternity. 

4.  The world feels more spacious when the truths of Platonism become a part of one’s consciousness and daily life.  I mean that the rise and fall of material things takes place in a larger context, a kind of vessel that contains all of these ephemeral appearances, but is itself not dependent on these ephemeral appearances. 

In Platonism time expands; first time expands cyclically into everlastingness.  Then time dissolves into eternity, that from which time emerges.

In Platonism our own troubles (material, psychological, political, personal and interpersonal, and so forth) are placed within a larger context and because of this they lose much of their punch.  This is very healing, and stabilizing.

5.  Porphyry’s Sentences: 2

“Things essentially incorporeal, because they are more excellent than all body and place, are every where, not with interval, but impartibly.” (Thomas Taylor)

“The incorporeal in itself, by the mere fact of its being superior to every body and to every place, is present everywhere without occupying extension, in an indivisible manner.”  (Kenneth Guthrie)

“Intangible beings are present everywhere, not in the form of disjointed beings, but as a whole, and it is their integrity that allows them to be above any location.” (Isaak Samarskyi)

5.1  The second ‘Sentence’ contrasts the nature of material beings with the nature of noetic, or non-material beings.  Material beings are located in space and time.  Incorporeal beings are not located in space and time; instead incorporeal beings are ‘everywhere.’

5.2  How does that work?  How could that which is non-material be everywhere?  It is like the sun being everywhere on earth, even when it is night.  The sun is a presence for earth.  The metaphor of the sun fails as a noetic reality, but it is communicative as a symbol.

Or you could say that the everywhere nature of the incorporeal resembles numbers.  The reality of numbers is found everywhere and is not limited to a specific location.  Even in a situation when a particular number is not instantiated, that number is still a presence in that situation in the manner of a potential.

5.2.1  The everywhere nature of the incorporeal would seem to undermine the idea of the fully descended soul that became a part of some streams of late Classical Platonism.  If the soul, an incorporeal reality, is fully descended then it is not everywhere; instead it is separated from at least some part of the cosmos.

5.3  It seems to me that what Porphyry is communicating here is what we today might refer to as the holographic nature of the incorporeal.  I mean that in a hologram, a part of the hologram contains the whole of that reality in the sense that the whole can be presented from only a part.  It would be difficult to reconstruct a table from only a small part of the table; say a small piece of a table leg.  But what Porphyry is saying is that the everywhere nature of incorporeal realities does not shatter those realities.  Instead those realities are whole wherever they are found, which is everywhere.

5.3.1  There exists a literary device which resembles this holographic nature.  It is called ‘synecdoche’ and it happens when a small fragment of a reality is used as a stand in for the whole.  Some people say, for example, ‘wheels’ as a stand in for ‘car.’  In news media synecdoche is often used to simplify a presentation by saying something like ‘Downing Street said’ or ‘The White House said’ and so forth.  Both of these are stand ins for more complex realities.  This is not exactly the same as a hologram, but I think it might be a part of what Porphyry is presenting.

5.4  The translators use three different terms to indicate the superior nature of the everywhere reality of the incorporeal: ‘more excellent,’ ‘superior to,’ and ‘their integrity.’  I understand this superiority to refer to three facets of incorporeal reality which are: that they are everywhere, that they are everywhen, that they are present to everything.  This three-part nature is received from the Good and the One as differentiations of eternity.

6.  I was walking on the side of a road in the early morning light of summer.  There was very little traffic; the desert landscape was windless with only a distant bird calling out now and then.  I saw someone walking on the side of the road coming towards me; this happens now and then.  I’m not the only one who likes early morning walks.

As he came closer it seemed to me that I recognized him.  We came close and he turned around, joining me in my walk.  I asked him who he was.  He told me he was Plato and he thought he would join me to encourage me in my journey on the path of Philosophy.  I accepted this.  We walked on without much talking.  Plato indicated he wanted to go down an almost invisible, unpaved, side road and I agreed.

We came to an attractive building, two stories tall.  Two people opened the door and greeted Plato who introduced me to them.  The building was in a mediterranean style with a courtyard surrounded by rooms.  A fountain was in the middle of the courtyard from which our hosts offered me a cup of water which was fresh and cool.

They took me to one of the rooms.  It was a large room and there were other people already there, all of them in silence.  Some were sitting on chairs, others on cushions, others standing, but I picked up that they were all in contemplation.  My hosts explained that this was the hall of contemplation and that there was also a hall of study and a hall of dialectic and others they would tell me about at some other time.  They gestured for me to join them.  I looked around for Plato and saw him standing near a window already engaged in contemplation.  I found a chair and sat down.  The hosts explained to me that a session of contemplation in this place would last ten thousand years.