Brief Notes on Various Topics -- 76

8 December 2025

Brief Notes on Various Topics – 76

1.  Embracing the Past

To be a Platonist means admiring the past; or at least admiring one thing from the past.  It means basing the activities of your life on artefacts from the past in the form of written works such as Plato’s Dialogues. 

This is obvious, but I think it is worth considering how this Platonist relationship with the past runs counter to the spirit of our time which considers the modern world to be the result of overcoming the past.  This is a feature of modernity that is pervasive.

I’m not sure if this difference in attitude towards the past results in intense friction; I tend to think that it results in a kind of low-level but constant disconnect with central features of modernity. 

2.  Cruelty

Human beings are immensely and consistently cruel to each other; I am not thinking of cruelty at this moment in a subtle way.  I mean cruelty in very gross and obvious ways.  Some of this cruelty is widely supported as in the enthusiastic response to war by most people. 

It is also true that human beings are immensely and consistently cruel to other creatures, to animals of various kinds.  There is a lot of confusion about this because there are certain animals, such as pets, for whom we are inclined to act towards with great affection and caring and at the same time other animals that are just as intelligent are treated very poorly by human beings.  There are even laws against cruelty towards certain animals while other animals are, as the saying goes, fair game.

Plato’s teachings on non-harming and non-retaliation run counter to this habit of cruelty.  In a world, and amongst the human species, where cruelty is approved of, even in very horrific forms, it is difficulty to put non-harming into practice.  And being committed to these teachings, and their attendant practices, will separate such practitioners from widespread societal habits and norms.

But it is worthwhile to enter into the way of non-harming; for those who want to walk the spiritual path of Platonism, it is essential.  Commitment to the way of non-harming calms the mind and body, and this calmness is a precondition for turning to the soul, turning to eternity.

3.  Those Who Oppose Transcendence

I’ve been aware for quite a few years that there are those who oppose transcendence.  One such group are materialists; they are widespread but my remarks here will not be about them.  I’m more interested in the group(s) that oppose transcendence for what they regard as spiritual reasons.

From my perspective, I am thinking about groups, or views, that regard something prior to transcendence as ultimate and that therefore transcendence is to be avoided.  Most often the anti-transcendence views come to rest on some kind of unusual sensory experience as the ultimate.  Others, though, regard ritual, often precisely and repetitious done, as the key to attain that which is ultimate.

For example, one of the reasons those who opposed the Quietists in the 17^th century was that the interior silence advocated by the Quietists undermined the status of certain key Catholic rituals, including the Eucharist.  This was the ground for regarding Quietism as a heresy.

Another example of the view of ritual that is similar to that which opposed the Quietists is found in theurgy which ejected Wisdom because contemplative Wisdom leads to ineffable transcendence.  In contrast, theurgy is focused on sensory deities, Gods and Goddesses, who have all the characteristics of third things.

Another example is the way Jungian psychology interprets the realm of images in the form of archetypes as the ultimate achievement of human consciousness; that is to say that becoming aware of archetypes and their functions surpasses something like Wisdom that leads to the experience of that which is beyond all images and from which all images emerge.

There are also individuals who talked about an ultimate reality beyond image, beyond affirmation and negation, who had difficulties with authorities who regarded this approach as suspect.  I am thinking of Meister Eckhart as one famous example.

I suspect that there are various reasons for wanting to halt the spiritual journey before stepping into the ineffable.  But one reason for some, I think, is fear.  In a way, an early experience of the transcendent that precedes image can feel like falling off a cliff.  This can be very uncomfortable.  Plato addresses this in the allegory of the cave in terms of feeling blinded by the light upon emerging from the darkness of the cave; it takes time to accustom oneself to this light and one possible reaction is to reject the experience altogether as nothing more than an uncomfortable sensation.  If you have a good spiritual teacher, a good and experienced guide, a practitioner can stick with it and get past those early moments of fear and discomfort.  The Dialogues of Plato are such a spiritual guide.

4.  Phaedo

I tend to think of Phaedo as Plato’s most significant, most important, dialogue.  This means that I take the teachings put forth in Phaedo as definitive and interpret other teachings in accordance with Phaedo’s teachings and perspectives.

I think this accounts for some differences I have with other contemporary Platonists.  I have observed, for example, that Parmenides is sometimes thought of as being the most significant, or highest, teaching that Plato offers us.  I can understand that; there is a great amount of wisdom in Parmenides.  But I tend to read Parmenides as expanding on teachings presented in Phaedo such as how predication works and the implications of living a life based on the experience of transcendence.

What I find in Phaedo that leads me to place Phaedo in the center of the Platonic Canon, so to speak, is that Phaedo offers the reader specific instruction on how to live a philosophical life.  This happens specifically in the famous passage where Socrates lists various activities that a philosopher will refrain from participating in such as being concerned about beautiful clothing and jewelry, or involvement in sexual pursuits and pleasures.  What I have found is that most readers don’t look at these kinds of passages as instruction; I can understand this because for many years I had the same response.  I mean that I didn’t read this passage as Socrates giving me, the reader, instruction in how to live a Philosophical life.  Instead I read it as Socrates, and/or Plato, giving their opinion, or reporting on their own lives.  These passages of ascetic instruction are embedded in a moving narrative and perhaps the presence of the narrative hides the teaching function of these ascetic passages.  I mean that by becoming wrapped up in, and attentive to, the unfolding story of the last hours of the life of Socrates, and his interactions with various people, we may react to Phaedo on a strictly literary level, concluding that Phaedo is a very well written story.  The shift to understanding Phaedo as a kind of guidebook for living a Philosophical life happens, I think, by repeatedly reading Phaedo.  What I mean here is that by rereading Phaedo we can approach the dialogue with the story of the last hours of Socrates already a known feature and so the story drops a little bit into the background and the teachings of Phaedo move into the foreground.  I don’t mean that the story found in Phaedo disappears; I mean that the presentations of guidance for a philosophical life are finally noticed as actually having that function.  When that happens it is very satisfying and one realizes that all of Plato’s dialogues are written in multiple layers, and one of those layers is the layer of instruction.

5.  Middle Platonism

I have a fondness for what scholars today refer to as Middle Platonism.  Middle Platonism covers a significant period of time.  The Academy founded by Plato went through a period of extreme skepticism but following a kind of restoration, a kind of return to what Plato actually wrote we enter into this period of Middle Platonism.  Generally speaking this period lasts into the second or third centuries of our era. 

These periods of Platonism are a tool that contemporary philosophers and historians use to designate periods in the long history of Platonism.  Middle Platonists didn’t think of themselves as Middle Platonists, of course.  But the term is a convenient way to designate a certain time period in the history of Platonism.

Specific Platonists from the Middle period that I am fond of are Maximus of Tyre, Alcinous, and Plutarch.  Plutarch is the most complex because Plutarch had many interests beside philosophy including history and literature.  He spent a great deal of time on these other interests and the majority of his writing is about historical or literary topics.  This doesn’t bother me because I am also interested in literature and I enjoy reading ancient views on this topic.  But Plutarch does discuss Platonism fairly frequently and he was clearly well versed in Platonism.  As I have mentioned in a number of posts, Plutarch wrote three essays on refraining from harming animals and vegetarianism which documents the existence of vegetarianism in the Middle period of Platonism.  But Plutarch discusses other Platonist topics as well such as the nature of forms and Platonist ethics in general.

In contrast to Plutarch’s wide ranging interests, Maximus’s writings are narrowly focused on Philosophy, specifically Platonism.  Often when he writes about a topic in Philosophy he will directly quote, or paraphrase, a dialogue; so Maximus is rooted in study of the dialogues.  I particularly appreciate that Maximus wrote about the practice of contemplation in a Platonic context in one of his most beautiful Orations.

As far as I know there is only one work on Platonism by Alcinous, the Handbook of Platonism.  Some scholars suggest that the handbook was written for those who were teaching Platonism.  Others think it had a wider circulation.  Of these three writers Alcinous is the most systematic which is in line with the purpose of a Handbook.  Alcinous writes with clarity as he covers various topics in Platonism and because of this we have a good idea of how Middle Platonists understood their own tradition.

One Middle Platonist I have not read, but hope to get to in 2026, is Apuleius.  I have wanted to read the philosophical works of Apuleius for a long time and I’m hoping I will be able to read what he has to say soon.  Apuleius is most famous for his work The Golden Ass which is a very early example of a novel, according to scholars.  But I am more interested, again, in his philosophical works.

One thing I have observed about Middle Platonists is that as a group they seem to have an interest in literature; their works demonstrate literary skill and that they have spent a lot of time reading and studying literature.  I think this is in keeping with the Platonist tradition as a whole because Plato was a very skillful writer so it is only natural that those interested in literature would find Plato’s works attractive.

I have to confess that I prefer these Middle Platonists to the Platonists who wrote in the Late Classical period.  For my purposes I think of these writers as ‘Post-Porphyry’ and beginning with Iamblichus.  There are a number of contrasts, I think, between these two groups (Middle Platonists vs. Post-Porphyry Platonists).  The first is that the writing about Platonism found in Middle Platonism is direct and far more accessible than that of Post-Porphyry authors.  Middle Platonists seem to think of their task as to transmit what Plato wrote, what Plato’s views were, instead of elaborating on Platonism based on their own eccentricities.  Middle Platonists refrain from complicating the Platonic system and presentation which became an obsession with Post-Porphyry Platonists.

The other aspect of Middle Platonist writing that I appreciate is that they seem to me to have a strong interest in ethics and virtue.  This is likely controversial, but it seems to me that this focus on ethics and virtue declines in Post-Porphyry Platonism as elaborate cosmology assumes center stage.  I’m not saying it is completely absent from Post-Porphyry Platonism but it seems to me the unnecessary complexity of the cosmology which they present takes a lot of energy away from other aspects of Platonism such as ethics and virtue.

For these reasons, if I were teaching a group of students an ongoing course in Platonism my recommendation for further reading beyond the Dialogues and the Enneads would be the writings left to us from the Middle Platonists rather than the writings of the Post-Porphyry Platonists.  I think the Middle Platonists are more grounded in actual Platonism (what I sometimes call Orthodox Platonism), less prone to elaborately complex and difficult to understand mental speculations, and write in a manner that is helpful to the daily practice of Platonism.  Contemporary Platonists are very fortunate to have the resources left to us by these Middle Platonists.