3 August 2026
Brief Notes on Various Topics – 103
1. Lloyd Gerson on Proclus
Lloyd Gerson has published his analysis of Proclus in his latest book, The Platonism of Proclus. Its release date is not specified, but it looks like it will be some time this year. It’s interesting to me that, according to the write-up on the book on Amazon, Gerson approaches Proclus through the commentaries that Proclus wrote on various Platonic dialogues. According to the write-up there are about 3,000 pages of portions of these dialogues that have survived.
The choice Gerson has made to base his study of Proclus on these commentaries, instead of works like The Elements of Theology or Platonic Theology is unusual; at least as far as I have observed there is a tendency to focus on these kinds of works in contemporary scholarship on Proclus, though I might be wrong about that. This shift in focus will, I think, generate a ‘different’ Proclus than the one who emerges from reading works like the Elements.
I’m not a fan of Proclus, but I am a big fan of Gerson. I look forward to reading Gerson’s book on Proclus and finding out how Gerson interprets Proclus.
2. Transcendence
There is a YouTube channel that I listen to now and then. The presenter has studied the Dialogues of Plato thoroughly and can easily refer to them and often paraphrases key passages. The presenter is focused on political philosophy and interprets Plato in the tradition of Leo Strauss, Carl Schmitt, and Alexander Dugan, among others. His understanding Plato’s philosophy is that Plato is primarily a political philosopher and he doesn’t really go into other aspects of Platonism.
When listening to one of his recent talks I became aware of how he uses the word ‘transcendence.’ He used the word frequently in this particular talk so I got a good sample of how he understands ‘transcendence.’ When he used the word transcendence what he meant was moving from a limited context to more encompassing context; meaning that when you shift your understanding from a more limited view to a less limited view you are ‘transcending’ the limited view or understanding.
This is how he maintains his focus on Plato as a political philosopher (and I wonder if others who maintain this idea also use ‘transcendence’ in this way; I’ll have to listen to them to see if it is a general pattern). So even when Platonist writings speak of the transcendental he interprets that in worldly terms.
This is not unusual; many people use the word ‘transcendence’ in this way. Carl Jung uses it that way. And I once heard a recording of a talk by Roger Scruton in which he used the word in exactly that way which kind of surprised me.
You might think of this way of understanding transcendence as ‘horizontal’, like shifting focus from a small forest grove to the forest as a whole; something like that. Or, perhaps, shifting one’s focus from a particular symphony to the symphonic tradition as a whole. Like I said, it’s a common way of understand what ‘transcendence’ means.
But in Platonism transcendence is ‘vertical’; to transcend means to leave behind material reality as the focus of one’s attention. This is done by turning away from sensory stimulation, whether pleasurable, painful, or neither pleasurable nor painful. It is the practice of the asceses that trains us to engage in such turning away.
Transcendence in Platonism is not aimed at a larger context; it is aimed at the experience of the ineffable (which is prior to all contexts) rather than a more convincing explanation of some aspect of reality or mental formulation. The Good and the One are ineffable; as Plotinus points out the Good is not good. We call it the Good, as a kind of stand-in for its actual reality which is beyond affirmation or negation and beyond conceptualization.
I think this is difficult for people to understand. The contemplation of the ineffable is simple, but it is, at first, difficult to recognize, and difficult to stabilize. But that is the reality of transcendence that Platonism asks of us.
3. Hidden Heritage
I listened the other day to another person who wants to merge Platonism with Buddhist Tantra. Naturally they think of theurgy as the culmination of Platonism and draw upon the authors who wrote from a theurgic perspective and then attempt to show significant similarities between Theurgy and Tantra (usually Tibetan Buddhist Tantra, but they sometimes make brief references to Shaivism and its Tantric manifestations as well).
What came to mind after listening to the presentation is the idea that Platonism is, in a sense, a hidden heritage. By that I mean that for over one thousand years, Platonism was embedded in other spiritual traditions who interpreted Platonism as insufficient on its own terms and needed something additional in order to be complete; this additional something was supplied by the non-Platonist tradition. Christianity was the most successful among those traditions that took this approach.
When I say that Platonism is a ‘hidden heritage’ I mean that Platonism as a sufficient spiritual tradition that does not need supersessionist assistance. What I am intuiting is that contemporary theurgy is replicating this context by arguing that wisdom is insufficient for the divine ascent and that therefore carefully crafted rituals (some of which can violate, or at least undermine, basic Platonist ethics) is essential. It’s like the centuries long habit of having Platonism embedded in other spiritual contexts is internalized, but instead of using Christianity, they use theurgy.
This is just an intuition, but it arises out of my reading of theurgic works both ancient and modern and being impressed by how casually ceremonial efficacy is substituted for wisdom.
3.1 Rereading this, it came to me that perhaps I mean something more like a ‘hidden hermitage’ than ‘hidden heritage’. The two aren’t contradictory, but I think the image of Platonism as a hidden hermitage leads in nourishing directions. Platonism is about turning away from, or turning around (periogoge, apostrophe). It is a turning away from basing one’s life on sensory gratification and fulfilling pleasures. It is a turning towards soul and its presence and following its guidance to the One. It is a turning away from the unsatisfactory nature of material existence to the serenity of the hermitage of the transcendental.
3.2 Rereading this again, I think what I posted could be construed as asserting that Platonism, or Orthodox Platonism, to use Gerson’s phrase, is in some way sealed off from interacting with other traditions. That isn’t what I am getting at. What I am getting at is that a tradition like Buddhism does not normally think of its tradition as needing ‘completion’ by following, say for example, Confucianism. Imagine if East Asian Buddhism elevated the teachings of Confucius above, or over, those of the Buddhist tradition itself. I’m not saying that East Asian Buddhism was not influenced by Confucianism, I’m pointing out that the relationship between East Asian Buddhism and Confucianism was not one of supersessionism. In contrast, the Platonic tradition has been in a relationship with other spiritual traditions in exactly that way, primarily through the way traditions like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam have placed Platonism in a ‘handmaid’ role. It is my view that Theurgy does exactly the same thing to Platonism and that the move that Theurgy makes vis a vis Platonism is structurally the same as other spiritual traditions; that is to say the Theurgic tradition's relationship to traditional, or Orthodox Platonism, is that of supersessionism.
What I think is needed is for Platonism to become confident of itself in the sense that Platonism is a complete spiritual tradition with the insights and resources to function as a guide for spiritual understanding, transcendence, and awakening to the presence of eternity.
4. Natural
There is a section in Laws, Book X, beginning about 891c, where Plato discusses first principles. Plato contrasts those who think of first principles as found in nature with those who think of first principles as transcendental. Plato begins by referring to those who consider fire, water, earth, and air are the first principles.
This reminded me of the discussion in Phaedo where Socrates talks about how he was, as a young man, initially attracted to Anaxagoras, but was disappointed by Anaxagoras’s material explanations of causation (even though Anaxagoras seemed, when Socrates first encountered him, to place Mind as a first principle). In Laws Plato points out that those who think of the elementals as first principles argue that soul is derivative of the elementals. The Platonist view is that soul precedes elementals and material realities, that the immaterial precedes the material, and is the foundation for that which is material. You can read modern philosophers such as Bernardo Kastrup arguing the same thing (I’m not saying that Kastrup is a Platonist).
The more I read and reread Plato I find these kinds of connections between dialogues. I sometimes like to say that Plato’s Dialogues are actually a single book with each dialogue being a chapter; one reason I say this is because of the way insights and themes are revisited, expanded, sometimes amended. This offers the sense that the reader is sharing in the unfolding thoughts of Plato over time, even when Plato is talking about the timeless. I find that feeling very inviting.
