CHAPTER TWO
RELATION TO OTHER WORKS IN THE SAME FIELD
2.1 Productivity of Negation as Ignorance Giving Knowledge--General Orientation to Works in the Same Field
If we have achieved anything in attempting to follow Heidegger's lead
in Chapter 3, Hermeneutical-Philosophical Sketch of Socratic Ignorance,
it would be to have rendered visible in outline a projection of the problematic
of Socratic ignorance as the homologue to the inner essence of the movement
of the Beiträge as a whole on the basis of the homologous way
the productivity of negation works for both problematics. Insofar as our
analytical method is concerned, chapter 3 is believed to be "pioneering."
But as to result, the linkage projected between virtue, as the areteof
the soul, and the divine (daimon), the story is quite different.
For our "discovery" amounts, as we shall see, to little more than a recovery
of what the ancient tradition of philosophy, almost without exception,
already knew. It is only we moderns for whom it may be something of a discovery.
Contemporary Heideggerian scholarship of the Beiträge, despite
the deep roots in the tradition that Heidegger everywhere displays, has,
as we shall see, almost always remained bound to analysis of Heidegger
in his own terms as if his philosophy were somehow self-standing. As a
result, our claim, that the link between virtue, as the arete of
the soul, and the divine, is homologous to the inner essence of the movement
of thought of the Beiträge as a whole, remains almost without
anticipation from the side of contemporary Heideggerian scholarship. We
accordingly present our discussion of the tradition as a whole (including
some influential modern Anglo-American linguistic-analyst and Platonic
scholars) and of Heideggerian scholarship that interprets the Beiträge
as a whole under two heads, 2.1.1 and 2.1.2 below, respectively dealing
with our two criteria for the work most closely related to our own problematic.
2.1.1 Productivity of Negation as Ignorance Giving Knowledge (Daimon)--Tradition as Embracing the Divine and Some Influential Modern Views
For our purposes here, it is enough to show, if only in a rough and ready fashion, that in the century that followed upon Socrates' death in 399 B.C., the five (1)major "schools" that emerged, the Cynics, the Porch, the Garden, the Peripatetics and the Academy, each defined virtue, as the arete of the soul, in relation to the divine (daimon). (2) In the following, our aim is not to critically review the several schools, but only to render our claim not impossible; for that, it is enough to cite passages and authorities that support our view.
As to the Cynics (Antisthenes, Diogenes, Crates), the specific virtue of their Sage was self-mastery (egkrateia) and imperturbability (apatheia) (D.L. 6.2; 6.5), gained through the practice of a rigorous discipline of asksis (D.L. 70-71). Our evidence that the virtue of the Cynic Sage is connected with the divine is twofold.
The first evidence comes from Julian. Julian says: "The goal proposed by Cynicism is apathy, which is equivalent to becoming God."(3) The second evidence is the controversial conclusions J. L. Moles draws from an examination of the question of Cynic cosmopolitanism.(4) After recognizing that his claim that Cynic cosmopolitanism relates the Cynic Sage to the gods is "fiercely contested by modern scholars" (113), he says: "The gods, who are man's benefactors, provide a paradigm for Cynic self-sufficiency; the Cynic himself is godlike, friend of the gods, their messenger, their agent, and, in being agathos daimon('tutelary god,' 'guardian angel'), he is himself virtually divine" (113).
Let us then turn to the Epicureans. (5)The ethical instruction of the Garden sought to provide "eudaemonia[happiness] via ataraxia [peace of mind]" (26), "pleasure" understood as freedom from "pain and fear" (30). Closely connected with this is phronesis, "The capstone of Epicurean ethics" (64).
The divine element of the virtue of the Epicurean Sage is brought out in the concluding sentences of the Letter to Menoeceus,(6) where Epicurus delivers his doctrine of ethics: "Meditate therefore on these things and things akin to them night and day by yourself, and with a companion like to yourself, and never shall you be disturbed waking or asleep, but you shall live like a god among men. For a man who lives among immortal blessings is not like to a mortal being" (33).
Bailey, in his commentary on these lines, says that living "like a god among men" is not:
"A mere rhetorical exaggeration. The gods in their perfectly untroubled life are the ideal of what human life might become, and the man who has come near to this ideal might justly be said to have become a god on earth (cf. Lucr. iii. 222 'dignam dis degere vitam'). This explains how, again not metaphorically or in mere adulation, his later disciples could speak of Epicurus himself as a god, e.g. Lucr. v. 8 'deus ille fuit, deus.'"(7)
The Stoics, by a well-known lineage, trace their origin to Socrates through the Cynics. They maintained a "school" that continued from Zeno to Epictetus, and instructed students seeking virtue in ethics, as well as in logic and physics. We first find our evidence of the divine element of the virtue of the Stoic Sage in the lines 31 through 39 of Cleanthes' famous Hymn to Zeus.
But, Zeus all-bountiful! the thunder-flame
And the dark cloud thy majesty proclaim:
From ignorance deliver us, that leads
The sons of men to sorrow and to shame.
Wherefore dispel it, Father, from the soul
And grant that Wisdom may our life control,
Wisdom which teaches thee to guide the world
Upon the path of justice to its goal.
So winning honor thee shall we requite
With honor, lauding still thy works of might;
Since gods nor men find worthier meed than this--
The universal Law to praise aright. (8)
Our second is from Chrysippus. Specifically, we draw our evidence from Long. (9) In context of a discussion of Stoic ethics and eudaimonism, and particularly of the telosof Stoic ethics as "living in agreement with nature," Long says:
"In a well-known passage from his On Ends book I, Chrysippus elucidated 'living in agreement with nature' [the telos of Stoic ethics] as follows: 'Engaging in no activity which the common law is wont to forbid, which is the right reason pervading everything and identical to Zeus, who directs the organization of reality. And the virtue of the happy man and his good flow of life consist in this: always doing everything on the basis of the concordance of each man's guardian spirit (daimon) with the will of the director of the universe'" (165).
Our final evidence for the divine (daimonic) element of the virtue of the Stoic Sage we draw from Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. As to Epictetus, we have the word of the editor of Arrian's Discourses of Epictetusthat: "Sometimes this [genius] is rendered literally by the word 'daemon' and it connoted to the Stoic the higher element within man, his reason."(10) For Marcus Aurelius, we find much the same equation of moral reason (virtue) and the daimon. In meditation V.27, for example, we read:
"Live with the gods. And he does live with the gods who constantly shows to them that his own soul is satisfied with that which is assigned to him, and that it does all that the daemon wishes, which Zeus hath given to every man for his guardian and guide, a portion of himself. And this is every man's understanding and reason." (11)
As to the Peripatetics, we find our evidence of the divine element of the Aristotelian Sage in the Eudemian Ethics:
"Here as elsewhere one should conduct one's life with reference to one's superior, and more specifically with reference to the active state of one's superior. A slave, for instance, should look to his master's (sic) and everyone to the superior to whom he is subject. Now a human being is by nature a compound of superior and inferior, and everyone accordingly should conduct their lives with reference to the superior part of themselves. However, there are two kinds of superior: there is the way in which medical science is superior, and the way in which health is superior; the latter is the raison d être of the former. It is thus that matters stand in the case of our intellectual faculty. For God is not a superior who issues commands, but is the raison d être of the commands that wisdom issues. But 'raison d être' is ambiguous, as has been explained elsewhere-- this needs saying, since of course God is not in need of anything. To conclude: whatever choice or possession of natural goods--bodily goods, wealth, friends, and the like--will most conduce to the contemplation of God is best: this is the finest criterion. But any standard of living which either through excess or defect hinders the service and contemplation of God is bad (1249b6-21)." (12)
Kenny interprets:
"None the less the final chapter of the EE does offer a general standard for the exercise of virtue. ... Each virtue does indeed have its own internal criterion, the mean; but what the mean is in each case is to be determined by wisdom; and wisdom gives its commands for the sake of God" (100).
With regard to the Academy after Plato, Dillon describes its history in The Middle Platonists (13) in terms of the Old Academy (Speusippus, Xenocrates, Polemon), the Skeptical Academy (Carneades), the New Academy (Antiochus), to which "came to be added, after Antiochus, a strand of Pythagorean transcendentalism" (422). For our purposes here, we limit ourselves to the Old Academy, and note, that as Dillon tells it, so far as Antiochus was concerned, the Old Academy, in the case of Polemon in particular, was Stoic: "Polemon was also, as we have seen, the key factor in Antiochus' second principle: the substantial identity of the teaching of the Old Academy with that of the Stoa" (58).
With the rise of the so-called enlightenment of the modern period, the humility of the ancient seeker after virtue who, somehow knowing his or her ignorance, wanted thereby to become wise in emulation of the Sage, is displaced by a calculating-reason that, in advance, makes all things accessible to everyone in equal measure. The divine piety of the ancient seeker after wisdom, based on the belonging together of perfected moral understanding (virtue) and the divine, loses its foundation, as the same calculating-reason drives the divine and the way of being of the daimonicman outside of the domain of reason proper, either into the sphere of religion, or into the realm of the merely superstitious, or dismisses them as mere myth or as a curiosity. (14)
Of the recent Anglo-American scholarship on the Socratic question, we limit ourselves here to a consideration of Gregory Vlastos' research, specifically to the texts Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher and Socratic Studies. (15) We follow him in three points; 1.) the so-called "tremendous assumption," his interpretation of the Socratic elenchus; 2.) the distinction between knowledge "C" and knowledge "E," his interpretation of Socratic ignorance, and 3.) his conception of Socratic "religion," that the divine is not an extra-rational source of knowledge "C." The first two points are drawn from the text Socratic Studies,and the third from Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher.
Considering the early Platonic dialogs as examples of logical argument, Vlastos presses them to extract the necessary and sufficient conditions by which the Socratic elenchus can be understood as a form of logically coherent refutation. As Vlastos puts it, "Socratic elenchus is a search for moral truth by question-and-answer adversary argument in which a thesis is debated only if asserted as the answerer's own belief and is regarded as refuted only if its negation is deduced from his own beliefs" (4). Its logical moments are (11):
"(1) the interlocutor asserts a thesis, p, which Socrates considers false and targets for refutation.
(2) Socrates secures agreement to further premises, say q and r (each of which may stand for a conjunct of propositions). The agreement is ad hoc: Socrates argues from {q, r}, not to them.
(3) Socrates then argues, and the interlocutor agrees, that q & r entail not-p.
(4) Socrates then claims that he has shown that not-p is true, p false."
Between moments (3) and (4) lies the "problem in the elenchus." Of this we are told: "How is it that Socrates claims to have proved a thesis [p of the set of theses {p, q}] false when, in point of logic, all he has proved is that the thesis is inconsistent with the conjunction of the agreed-upon premises for which no reason has been given in that argument? Could he be blind to the fact that logic does not warrant that claim?" (21).
That is to say, the refutand, in the face of the evidence, could throw out q just as well as p, so the falsity of p would not be proved by proving not-p true.
Vlastos then proposes that even if the interlocutor threw out q, Socrates must have believed that he "would have the resources to recoup that loss in a further elenchus" (22), which leads to the so-called "tremendous assumption" (25):
"Socrates then is making a tremendous assumption. Stated in fullest generality, it comes to this: [A] whoever has a false moral belief will always have at the same time true beliefs entailing the negation of that false belief."
In this tremendous assumption we think Vlastos to be correct, for in it we see lying frozen in Vlastos' cold logic the truth of the moral consciousness.
But the irony of it may be, that Vlastos, seeking certain knowledge, may in the end have only ended up with true opinion. The decision would turn on how the "tremendous" in the tremendous assumption were understood. If in the sense of "an amazingly brazen thing to say and maintain," then the truth of the moral consciousness would still lie inanimate in the chill of cold logic. But if in the sense of "something awesome," then perhaps there is already a stirring of the moral consciousness itself, moving out from the conceit of knowledge into "ignorance."
In the next chapter of the same book, Vlastos sets knowledge "C," the certain knowledge of scientific proof and demonstration, distinctly apart from knowledge "E," the kind of knowledge that belongs to the Socratic elenchus. In this, we think Vlastos to be both correct and incorrect. Correct, in that knowledge "E" certainly is not knowledge "C." Incorrect, in that Vlastos always only understands knowledge "E" from the point of view and frame of reference of knowledge "C," incorrectly making knowledge "E" out to be an inferior form of knowledge "C."
In a profound confusion, apparently oblivious to the fact that for Aristotle there are indeed archai (Nicomachean Ethics VI, 12) in the domain (endeComenon allwV) of the moral consciousness (jronhsiV), Vlastos nonetheless relies on Aristotle (16)to set up the ideal of all knowledge as knowledge "C," and concludes from this (56):
"Socrates could not have expected his knowledge E to meet the fantastically strong standards of knowledge C. No great argument should be needed to show this. In elenchic inquiry nothing is ever 'known through itself' but only 'through other things' and there is always a security gap between the Socratic thesis and its supporting reasons" (17)(emphasis mine).
Though correct in separating knowledge "C" from knowledge "E," the confusion of the archai of the moral consciousness for those of the sciences is a disfiguration that totally buries the truth of moral consciousness, so-called knowledge "E."
Finally, with regard to the question of the divine, Vlastos' analysis of the daimon is irredeemably corrupted by the distinction between knowledge "C" and knowledge "E," so we content ourselves here only to outline his analysis. (18) For Vlastos, what is at stake is to deny that the daimon is an extra-rational source of knowledge "C" while somehow retaining the Platonic texts that undeniably make reference to the "divine sign." (19)
He accomplishes his aim by denying knowledge "C" to what the daimongives, in every case requiring the assent of knowledge "E" to what the divine sign may give. (20), (21)
We conclude the present topic by way of recounting what Guthrie has to say of the relation of Socratic virtue and the divine in his History of Greek Philosophy.(22) In a beautiful passage, which we quote below, Guthrie relies on the Alcibiadesto show the intimate connection between reason itself, as the virtue of the soul, and the divine.
"'Can we mention,' he asks (133c), 'anything more divine about the soul than what is concerned with knowledge and thought? Then this aspect of it resembles God, and it is by looking toward that and understanding all that is divine--God and wisdom--that a man will most fully know himself.' God, he goes on, reflects the nature of psyche more clearly and brightly than anything in our own souls, and we may therefore use him as a mirror for human nature too, if what we are looking for is the aretéof the soul, and this is the best way to see and understand ourselves" (473-474)."
Although intellectually honest, "How far one is justified in translatingQeoVsimply
as 'God' is a difficult question" (474), Guthrie's account of thedaimonperhaps
suffers the fault of being too careful and reticent. After considering
various passages in the Apology and Euthyphro, he resolves
this question by saying: "Yet in some cases he [Socrates] seems to have
advanced beyond the popular theology to the notion of a single divine power,
for which 'God' is the least misleading modern equivalent" (474).
2.1.2 Heideggerian Homologue of Socratic Ignorance
We group here those Heideggerian authorities who venture to interpret the Beiträge as a whole. But because no authority interprets the link between virtue, as the arete of the soul, and the divine (daimon), as homologous to the inner essence of the movement of the Beiträge as a whole, they are only of peripheral relevance to our problematic. Accordingly, we limit ourselves here to giving a general summary of each of their views.
Franjo Zenka's article, entitled "Die Zeit: Via negativa der Fundamentalontologie,"Synthesis Philosophica 4, no. 2 (1987 ): 385-398, insofar as it treats of Sein und Zeit, does not properly belong here that includes authorities that treat of the Beiträge in general and as a whole. But it is included nonetheless, inasmuch as it squarely faces the intrinsic negativity of Heidegger's program of philosophy and speculates that temporality may indeed be the "via negativa" of fundamental ontology, a speculation that we share.
Hans-Helmuth Gander, in an article entitled "Wege der Seinsfrage, Aus Anlaß der 100. Wiederkehr des Geburtstages Martin Heideggers veröffentlichte Texte aus dem Nachlaß,"Heidegger Studies 6 (1990): 117-123, characterizes the Beiträge as "laying the foundation for the whole of Heidegger's later philosophy" (118), a characterization with which we find ourselves in full agreement, and, among other things, gives a brief reading of the way of joining of its six "joinings."
Parvis Emad, in an article entitled "The Echo of Being in Beiträge zur Philosophie--Der Anklang: Directives for its Interpretation," Heidegger Studies 7 (1991): 15-35, among other things, gives a reading of the guide and ground questions that interprets the transformation from the former into the latter as the Enteignis in the Ereignis of the "Anklang" of the Beiträge.
Kenneth Maly, in an article entitled "Soundings of Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis)," Research in Phenomenology 21 (1991): 169-181, among other things, reflects on the way from Being and Time to theEreignis, finds it in Seinsgeschichte, the "historical root unfolding is really a handing over ... of being" (173), and sounds out "the words that name ...[such] thinking" (174), namely, as "going the way" (175), "transformation" (176), "questioning that frees up" (176), as "doing" (176), as "thinking all the way through and out of being" (177), as "preparing opening the way" (177), and as "saying" (178).
Alfons Grieder, in an article entitled "Essential Thinking: Reflections on Heidegger's Beiträge zur Philosophie," Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 23, n. 3 (1992): 240-251, ponders, among other things, the definition of Dasein, and the relation of Dasein andSeyn, and, although attempting to think that as "Essention," in the end remains content with such aporiai as how two (Dasein andSeyn) are to be thought as one (Essention). "Essention" is Grieder's translation of Wesung, understood as the "happening of the Truth of Being... the Event (das Ereignis)" (241-242).
George Kovacs, in an article entitled "The Leap (der Sprung) for Being in Heidegger's Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis)," Man and World 25, no. 1 (1992): 39-59, presents reflections that (1) indicate the nature of thinking at work in Heidegger's Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis); (2) analyze the radical leap in the effort to reformulate the entire question of Being, and (3) unearth some questions that are at stake in Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy. In the course of the article it is noted that "to think Being means ... to hold fast to the abyss (Abgrund) brought forth by the not-knowing of Being" (42), but no attempt is made to venture an interpretation of Socratic ignorance as such.
Joan Stambaugh, in her book The Finitude of Being (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), which is everywhere concerned with the question of concealment ("negation") and its meanings, includes a chapter (19) on the Beiträge, which ventures to interpret it in each of its main "joinings," and, when it comes to the central question of the essential relation of concealment with the open as found in the Beiträge, concludes: "The persistent question remains whether the meaning of this concealment is sheltering (Bergung) or distortion and disessence (Unwesen). One would somehow like to say what belongs to being is sheltering, and the disessence is a kind of degeneration of that sheltering, but one cannot do that without distorting Heidegger. 'Whence does the sheltering have its need and its necessity: From self-concealing. In order not to get rid of self-concealing, but rather to preserve it, the sheltering of this occurrence is needed'" (citing Heidegger'sVier Seminare (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977) 340 (145)).
Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, in his book Wege ins Ereignis, zu Heideggers "Beiträgen zur Philosophie," (Vittorio Klostermann: Frankfurt am Main, 1992), considers in four separate parts Ereignisand its joinings, and Ereignis' relation respectively to art and technology, to speech-poetry, and to the man/god relation. The considerations, however, appear to take little account of concealment ("negation") as such.
In another article entitled "Grund-und Leitstimmungen in Heidegger's 'Beiträge zur Philosophie,'" Heidegger Studies 10 (1993): 15-31, Hans-Helmuth Gander, among other things, gives a reading of the guide and ground questions that pays close attention to the "Vollzugs-character" of their corresponding "moods" as they play out in each of the six "joinings" of the Beiträge.
William J. Richardson, in an article entitled "Dasein and the Ground of Negativity: A Note on the Fourth Movement in the Beiträge-Symphony," Heidegger Studies 9 (1993): 35-52, reflects on the negativity ingredient to Being, and, among other things, identifies the Grund with Truth, conceives Truth as theLichtung für das Sichverbergen, faults, with Heidegger, the Greeks (Plato and Aristotle) for failure to preserve the "negative," and notices that Heidegger attempts with his "Abgrund" to compensate for this fault, in that it "comports acquiescence to the hidden dimension of concealment that lurks within the entire reach of luminosity" (43). However, when attempting to interpret this very concealment, Richardson does so largely in negative terms, as suffering and death, and as un-truth, finding "truth ... permeated by a subversive element, effect of primordial contention, that insinuates itself into the clearing as such" (48).
George Kovacs, in another article entitled "The Power of Essential Thinking
in Heidegger's Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis)," in From
Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire: Essays in Honor of William
J. Richardson, S.J., ed. Babette E. Babich (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic
Press, 1995) 37-53, among other things, names thinking as the "opening
up of the hermeneutic circle (the order of a historical destiny) of understanding,
as the appropriating event of Being, of the clearing and withdrawing of
the truth of Being" (38), characterizes such thinking as the need for "education
in the art of essential thinking" (42), but, although venturing to offer
certain directives to that end, seemingly despairs, in the observation
that Heidegger only appears to ask "further questions rather than ... (give)
some pedagogical instructions" (45).
2.2 Productivity of Negation as Blindness Giving Realm of Truth--General Orientation to Works in the Same Field
If we have achieved anything in attempting to follow Heidegger's lead
in chapter 4, Hermeneutical-Philosophical Sketch of Blindness, it would
be to have rendered visible in outline the projection of what Plato left
unsaid in the eclipse-analogy of the Phaedo (the preservation of
a "negative relation to the origin" in the "flight to the logoi,"
which (negative relation to the origin) not only constitutes the "best"
in the second best, but also determines the "second best" as always-seeing-in-a-light,
the zugon as the realm of the truth of the Ideas) as a homologue
of the Lichtung für das Sichverbergen of the Dasein,
found in the central sections of the part of the Beiträge,die
Gründung, where truth is under investigation, based on the homologous
way the productivity of negation works for both problematics. Insofar as
our analytical method and results are concerned, chapter 4 is believed
to be "pioneering." But there have been Platonic scholars, both ancient
and modern, who have considered the question of the place, i.e., constitution
of the realm, where the ideas are properly found, which we present under
the heading 2.2.1 below, as well as contemporary Heideggerian scholars
who have dealt with the question of truth, which we present under the heading
2.2.2 below. As we shall see, although our Platonist authorities do not
conceive of the realm of truth of the logoi in "negative" terms
as such, they do make the question of the realm of the logoi into
a problem, and grasp that realm in relation to the One or Good (the intelligible
sun); to that extent, they are believed to be the works most closely related
to our own problematic. As we shall also see, Heideggerian scholarship
on the Beiträge, despite the many clues Heidegger scattered
about in his writings, such as those we have seen above from the Basic
Problems, Essence of Reasons and Plato's Sophist, has,
for the most part, failed to take seriously Heidegger's equation of his
question of Being with Plato's inquiry into the epekeina, so that
our problematic, the question of the positive role the negative plays in
the constitution of the realm of truth, the Lichtung für das Sichverbergen,
remains largely unanticipated from the side of contemporary Heideggerian
scholarship.
2.2.1 Productivity of Negation of Blindness Giving Realm of Truth of the Eclipse-Analogy -- Platonic Scholarship
Damascius (23) in his exegesis of thePhaedogives account both of what the "best" is, and of how thelogoi are to be understood as "second best" in that context. As to the best, "intelligence," Damascius explains its "final causality" as a necessity of its metaphysical origin (222):
"Intelligence is the first to revert to the Good, because it is separated from it and yet closest to it of all separate existents and, in the phrase of the Philebus, its 'kinsman' [30e1]; because, having been projected as the 'eye of Love' of the Good, it is the first of all beings that have detached themselves and therefore need such an eye. It is for good reason, then, that Socrates links the efficient cause, intelligence, directly with the final cause [the Good], and cannot view intelligence apart from finality."(24)
As to how the ideas are second "best" in the context of this intelligence as best, Damascius explains that the logoi too share this noetic realm, in such a way that the efficient and final causes are comprehended in the logoi. "Once exemplary causes are posited, the efficient cause is somehow comprehended in them (things here below are what they are by participation in the prototypes), and so is the final cause" (224). Being thus comprehended, the logoi are second "best," in that they accomplish the same thing that the intellect accomplishes, namely, in their own way to comprehend the efficient and final causes.
As to their character as "second" best, Damascius explains as follows:
"He [Socrates] begins by presenting as the true causes of things sensible the efficient and the final cause. However, since the sensible world is indefinite and in it sense-perceptions and opinions take the place of pure reason, he resorts to 'reasons', i.e. universal forms (the fact that he calls them 'reasons' and considers them superior to sensible things proves that he locates them in rational soul), because on this level he expects to find what he is seeking. So the 'alternative course' is after the final cause the exemplary clause, or after the world of intellection that of disclosive thought, or else, starting from below, after the search in the sphere of sense-perception the approach to the sphere of disclosive thought" (222). (25)
Although Philo (26) does not consider the Phaedo's "flight to the logoi" as such, nor speak of the realm of the logos in negative terms, we include him here because we believe the account of the logos he does give is consonant in material respects with our interpretation of the eclipse-analogy of thePhaedo. For Philo, the logos, the place of the logoi, is understood as the "shadow" of God. (27), (28) The logos is further understood by Philo as a headwater of two powers,(29)which (two powers) are understood as "second best" for a "mind which has vision" initiated into the "minor rites." (30)The "mind which has vision" (cf. our always-seeing-in-a-light) is multivariate; it apprehends the central Being, on the one hand, as One, and on the other, as Three (the logos and its powers), the latter being said to be a "second-best voyage."
The "second best" for Philo is to see the central Being through the powers of the logos, while the "best," reserved for those initiated into the "highest mysteries," is to see it as One, both possibilities (of the One (unmixed) and Three (mixed)) for the "mind which has vision." Just as the "mind which has vision" does not apprehend the central Being directly as One but sees the central Being as Three via the powers of the logos, so our "always-seeing-in-a-light," as realm of the truth of the ideas, is not blinded by the sun; provided, of course, that the sun, as the intelligible sun, and the central Being, as One, name the same matter.
By the time Archer-Hind produces his edition of the Phaedo,(31) the hermeneutical situation is entirely different from that of Philo and Damascius. Unlike these authors, who already grasped the logosin a "metaphysical" context, Damascius, in context of the One-noeton-nous(final cause, exemplary cause, efficient cause) triad, and Philo, in context of seeing the central Being as "Three," Archer-Hind found it necessary to begin his account of the "flight to the logoi" by opposing a materialist interpretation of the origination of the ideas. The view of the materialists that he opposes, and we think rightly, is the understanding that it is the blinding spectacle of phenomena (corresponding to Socrates' fear of being blinded) which motivates Socrates to study these same phenomena through the medium of the logoi. The latter conception (to study the phenomena via the ideas as formal causes), Archer-Hind objects, wrongly construes the character of the second best as an absolute rather than as a relative best, and leads the materialists to the erroneous view that the logoi, as "images" of matter, are second best to phenomena or matter, which is what is "best."
"Socrates has in the previous chapter given us two perfectly precise statements: (1) that he had actually tested and discredited the methods of the physicists, (2) that his hope was to discover Tagaqon kai deon as the ultimate aitia; in other words, to construct a teleological theory of the universe. This then is the 'great and wondrous hope', which the physicists could not gratify, and which he himself failed to fulfill; and this is it for which the method of logoi offers a substitute. I conceive then that Professor Geddes has fallen into error as to the nature of the prwtoV plouV by failing to keep a firm hold upon the meaning of deuteroV plouV: for I cannot imagine that he would maintain that Plato even for a moment could speak of the study of logoias inferior to the study of phenomena" (188-190).
The former conception (the sun as the blinding spectacle of phenomena), Archer-Hind objects, wrongly construes what Plato elsewhere (Republic508c, 516a) always only sets forth as the intelligible sun, which leads the materialists to the erroneous view that the sun, for Plato, symbolizes matter.
"But I have another very grave objection to his interpretation. He [Geddes] speaks of the 'dazzling maze of phenomena', 'the blinding spectacle ofta erga, as studied by the physicists'; and in his exposition the sun symbolizes material particulars. But where shall we find such language in Plato? If we turn to a part of the Republic with which our present passage is intimately connected [Republic 508c], we shall see something very different. ... Thought is always to him [Plato] the region of truth and light, matter of dimness and uncertainty: and that he should even for moment represent thought as a medium to temper the blinding glare of material existence is in my judgment unnatural and inconsistent with the whole tenor of his language on this subject" (189).
With his objections made, the way is clear for Archer-Hind to present his own views of the "best," and of the "second-best." As to the best, he finds it to be a "teleological theory of the universe," for which the method of the logoi offers a substitute. Archer-Hind explains what he has in mind as follows:
"Socrates in fact, since he despairs of actually grasping the eternal ideas, of which all natural phenomena are symbols, endeavors to form from those symbols, mental concepts or universals, which shall represent the ideas to him: they are the ideas as reflected in his intelligence. The verity of these concepts cannot be thoroughly ascertained, as the Republictells us, until the ideas have been actually apprehended and compared with them: meanwhile they afford the best working hypothesis that can be obtained. No prospect of this verification is held out in the Phaedo; in theRepublic however Plato speaks more hopefully" (190).
Gadamer, in The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy,(32) makes reference to the Phaedo at different points, but does not give an exegesis of it as such. Like Archer-Hind, he rejects the hypothesis of the ideas as a materialist thesis of the scientific investigation of nature:
"The test of 'experience' would be a complete absurdity for the postulation of an idea. What constitutes being a horse can never be confirmed or refuted by a single empirical horse (101)."
And also like Archer-Hind, by the postulation of the ideas as second-best,
Gadamer does not understand Socrates to have abandoned altogether his search
for a final cause in favor of merely formal causes, but rather understands,
and we agree with him, the hypothesis of the ideas as "an interim stage
on the way to the Idea of the Good(25)."
2.2.2 Heideggerian Homologue of Blindness
None of the authorities that treat of the Beiträge was concerned with the problematic of our fourth chapter. So, as second best, insofar as our fourth chapter deals with the generation of the realm of truth, we group here those authorities that carry on the already decades-old debates of whether or not truth was understood in the pre-classical period in terms of Heidegger's aletheia, whether or not Heidegger was right that Plato was responsible for its collapse, and on the interpretation of Heidegger's text Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit. Since these authorities are only of peripheral relevance to our problematic, we limit ourselves here to a general summary of each of their views.
Robert J. Dostal, in chapter 7 entitled "Beyond Being: Heidegger's Plato," found inMartin Heidegger, Critical Assessments, ed. Christopher Macann (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), among other things, recognizes in the course of his observations on Heidegger's text Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit Heidegger's equation of "time" with the epekeina, and its equation in turn with the Dasein, but for the most part finds Heidegger's analysis flawed, for such reasons as focusing too much on the "light," which, in his opinion, prevents Heidegger from fully appreciating man's "erotic attachment to the Good" (79), or the "Good (as) the mixture which the human in its weakness and finitude longs to attain" (79).
In Reading Heidegger, Commemorations, ed. John Sallis (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), Adriaan T. Peperzak has a chapter (14) entitled "Heidegger and Plato's Idea of the Good," which, among other things, considers some early and late texts of Heidegger where Heidegger understands himself to think the epekeina with his analysis of the Dasein, and presents an account of the aletheia-as-unconcealment controversy; but, in the course of reflection on Heidegger's text Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit, the article merely equates the Good with the Idea of the Good, which, in the end, limits its depth of penetration.
John Sallis, in the second, expanded edition of his book Delimitations,
Phenomenology and the End of Metaphysics (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1995), includes a chapter (14) entitled "At the
Threshold of Metaphysics," which gives an account of the Friedländer--Heidegger
controversy, whether or not truth had the meaning of unconcealment for
the preclassical Greeks, and attempts a close reading of Heidegger's textPlatons
Lehre von der Wahrheit, which, in its concluding question, recognizes,
but does not elaborate, the need to think a presence in an absence: "In
the course of his lecture text Parmenides, Heidegger poses the following
question: 'Is the shadowness of Being in Hades connected with the essence
of the Greek experience of beings and of their unconcealment?' Then it
would be a matter of tracing in the dialogue the lines -- or, rather, the
shadows -- of archaic closure, of the closure belonging to the , belonging
within the origin at the origin, at the threshold of metaphysics" (185).
2.3 Productivity of Negation as Not-Being Giving One in Us--General Orientation
If we have achieved anything in attempting to follow Heidegger's lead
in chapter 5, Hermeneutical-Philosophical Sketch of Not-Being, it would
be to have rendered visible in outline the projection of the ultimate God
of the Beiträge as the homologue of the One in Us on the basis
of the homologous way the productivity of negation works for both problematics.
Insofar as our analytical method and results are concerned, chapter 5 is
believed to be "pioneering." But there has been some speculation on the
"productive aspects" of negative theology by contemporary scholars of Platonism,
which we present under the heading 2.3.1 below, as well as a wide variety
of speculation as to the identity of the ultimate God by contemporary Heideggerian
scholars, which we present under the heading 2.3.2 below.
2.3.1 Productivity of Negation of Being Giving One in Us--Platonic Scholarship
"I have left myself little time to explain why this extremely negative doctrine of God, which the Fathers of the 4th and 5th centuries, in the East, I think, as well as the West, could not accept, and which has on the whole remained alien to Western religious thinking, may have something very positive to contribute to theology in the intellectual climate of our period." (33) We begin the present section with a quote from A. H. Armstrong, because it, talking of the "Neoplatonic doctrine of the One or Good beyond Being and Intelligence (which is what I mean by Neoplatonic apophatic theology) (77)," nicely makes two points that we agree with: 1) that it has remained alien to "Western... thinking," and 2.) that it "may have something very positive to contribute."(34) The first point may help to explain the paucity of contemporary scholarship on the question of the One in Us, and the second may shed light on what Armstrong understood of the One in Us. We shall treat each of these two points in turn.
The reasons advanced by Armstrong for the nearly complete lack of reception of Neoplatonic apophatic theology are three-fold. In the first place, Armstrong notes that the "Christian theologians, before the author of the Dionysian writings,...[remained,] as has often been observed, in a pre-Neoplatonic rather than a Neoplatonic position" (77), motivated, he says, at least partly, to a "not unjustified fear that if you sweep out [by full Neoplatonic apophatism] the room in your mind where God should dwell quite as thoroughly as this, and leave it quite so empty, devils will come in" (78).(35) The second is that full Neoplatonic apophatism as "the One gives what he has not got, the multiplicity-in-unity of the Forms which are Intellect's content" (81), is antithetical to the "generally rather simple-minded doctrines of the Ideas as the 'thoughts of God' to be found in his [Plotinus'] predecessors, of which the first Christian thinkers and their successors made use (80)." Armstrong goes on to say: "This doctrine does not simply move the Supreme Being and Supreme Intellect down to second-place" (81), but: "Even Divine Intellect must leave itself behind" (81), in such a way that: "It is in its 'loving, mad, drunken' state... that the Divine Intellect and ourselves in it can find what we want" (cf. the One in Us) (81). The third reason advanced for the failure of Western thought to obtain to a genuine appreciation of the Neoplatonic understanding of apophatic theology, Armstrong says, lies in the doctrine of the Trinity, insofar as "the Orthodox insistence on the consubstantiality and co-equality of the persons of the Trinity, must, it seems, inevitably lead to the thinking of the Godhead as Supreme Intellect and Supreme Being" (86).
Of the second point, the positive content of negative theology, he finds it in the "'criticism without limits' of which Trouillard speaks" (87). As opposed to the "ex cathedra utterances of an ecclesiastical authority" (87), and its attendant truth as certainty, this criticism without limits leads to:
"...the denial of an eternal unchanging intelligible reality, which is in principle the supreme object of thought of all minds and must control our thinking, whether we come to know it by reason or by revelation. This means the end of two-world thinking, (36)in which the static intelligible or spiritual world, the living but immobile Divine Mind, is the superior archetype of this changing and imperfect world of ours. The only kosmos noetos which will survive in this way of thinking is a Heraclitean one, the ever-changing succession of created thoughts about the ever-changing created world, in which we may hope and believe that we receive lights from the Good sufficient for our personal needs in our particular time and place, but not of the kind which we can appropriate and fix and demand that others should accept as unchanging universal truths. The Good does not give us a share in his own ideas: he has not got any. He creates ideas in us to supply our needs at the time. He gives us each day our supersubstantial bread" (84).
Of this "criticism without limits," Armstrong, in another essay, "Negative Theology," found in the same book, in a remarkable passage that brings together the three aspects of the productivity of negation (knowledge, truth and Being) that concern us in chapters 3-5, goes on to say:
"Finally, we discover that the intellectual labor of the negative theology is never-ending. ... We are not looking for Absolute Truth which we can contemplate in static repose, but for the Cause of all truth of whom all truths are untrue. (37) And the Neoplatonists have discovered that if you cease to be active at any level at which God is present and pressing us to let him return in us,(38) and he is present at all levels, including those of creative imagination and discursive reason, (39)you fall out of the great cycle of procession and return as far you can (never completely) into formless and sterile fantasy... . The ultimate silence generates ever-new critical discourse. The watch word of Neoplatonic negative theology, and of all true Platonic philosophy, is 'We must begin again'."(40) , (41)
A dimension of the One in Us that is outside the scope of the present chapter, but which may be noted in passing, is the theurgic dimension. As Siorvanes (42) puts it: "At the pinnacle of the operation, the priest-theurgist entrusts the soul's 'one' to the One itself." Of the One in Us itself, he tells us that it "reaches beyond the definition and limit of cognitive knowledge" (191) and so is "beyond the grasp of its ordinary awareness" (191), and that the gap is bridgeable by an "experiential journey to God...[rather than] intellectual theorizing about God" (191). As such, the One in Us is an awareness of God's activity (theourgia)--but not conceptual knowledge.
We conclude our treatment of the present topic with Jean Trouillard, who we have already heard of in Armstrong, and who presents in his "L'Un et l'Âme selon Proclos" (43) views of the productivity of negation which are, as we already have seen from Armstrong's elaboration of Trouillard's "criticism without limits," quite congenial to our own. Our presentation of Trouillard as such however must remain provisional, and fragmentary, not only since we know no French and must rely on Beierwaltes' epitome of Trouillard,(44) but also because we learned of the importance of his work only after we completed the substance of our own research. We accordingly shall list as propositions that which we find congenial to our own understanding of the productivity of negation and the role it plays in producing knowledge, truth and the One in Us.
1.) The soul comes to know its ground, the One, via negation.(45) , (46)
2.) The soul, or the world phenomenon, as "middle," is the being betweennousand aisthesis. (47) , (48)
3.) The act of mediating is understood as the activity in the Soul of the One unifying the two worlds, its "power" or "immanence."(49) , (50)
4.) The soul, and the intelligible world with it, first come-to-stand
by means of a productive negation. (51),
(52)
2.3.2 Heideggerian Homologue of One in Us
As to the Heideggerian authorities that treat the "ultimate God" of the Beiträge, the answers as to whom he might be range from Be-ing, the Moment, Christ, No-thing, and, among others, the Inscrutable, but no authority saw fit to see in it the One in Us as such, as in chapter 5 of the present investigations. As such, they are only of peripheral relevance to our problematic. Accordingly, we limit ourselves here to a general summary of each of their views.
Otto Pöggeler, in his book entitled Neue Wege mit Heidegger(Freiburg und München: Karl Alber GmbH, 1992), has a section (387-482) on the great traditions, comparing and contrasting Heidegger to Lao Tse, and mystical thought, and that analyzes, among other things, the "passing of the last God" in the Beiträge. On the latter topic, among other things, in the Lichtung für das Sichverbergen is seen the Streit of Erde und Welt, from inside of which the essence of God is marked off in an experience of a final whole, like that of the celebrated Vorlaufen zum Tode of Being and Time, which brings one back to the moment of decision and ever again to the beginning of possibilities, and in that whole is seen the place to renew the question of God precisely in the moment that makes time full, and thus, according to the article, as Vorbeigang.
Reiner Thurnher, in an article entitled "Gott und Ereignis--Heideggers Gegenparadigma zur Onto-Theologie," Heidegger Studies 8 (1992): 81-102, among other things, shows that Heidegger's counter-position to onto-theo-logie lies in a "Betroffenheit durch die Gottferne" (97), and shows the way thereto to lie in the Enteignis of the Ereignis. The latter allows the experience of the collapse of truth, which first makes possible the former, understood as "Nichtmehr der entflohenen Götter und im Nochnicht des Kommenden" (97).
Dennis Schmidt, in an article "On the Memory of Last Things," Research in Phenomenology 23(1993): 92-104, attempts an historical account of the fifth and sixth "joinings" of the Beiträge, and thinks of the "last God" as that "history" "that calls for a new sense of memory, one that Heidegger refers to as 'Andenken'" (103). Of what he has in mind withAndenken, Schmidt tells us no more than: "Of course Andenken is a form of memory that understands the finitude of its own recuperative powers and never presents itself as possessing the keys to the gates of time" (103).
Gail Stenstad, in an article entitled "The Last God --a Reading," Research in Phenomenology 23 (1993): 172-183, provides a reading of the Last God in an analysis that in turn reflects on "last," "(Not-)God," "De-cision," "Ab-grund" and "Attuning" in a non-metaphysical way, which, in the "Attuning" section thereof, concludes that the "beckoning hint of the passing by of the last God" (181) may first be experienced in Da-sein, understood as "the 'there' which is needed by be-ing -- the opening for the disclosive play of revealing and concealing," likening the same to "a ringing dance and resounding echoing" (182).
Günter Figal, in a chapter entitled "Philosophie als hermeneutische Theologie, letzte Götter bei Nietzsche und Heidegger," in ¸¸Verwechselt mich vor Allem nicht!, Heidegger und Nietzsche, ed. Hans-Helmuth Gander (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994), among other things, after giving an interpretation of hermeneutics as embracing one's not-knowing by analogy to Socratic ignorance, concludes that the Last God can only be found in such hermeneutics if the Wink of the Last God "serves as a giving to understand" (103), one which "arrives in flight--and simultaneously its arrival remains refused" (104). In such openness is found the Vorbeigangof the ultimate God in the "overpowering of the openness of space-time, which can only be, insofar as it is experienced as the intensity of the exchange of flight and arrival" (104), in which is found the belonging together of "presence and absence" (105), and in that, the Last God.
Otto Pöggeler has a chapter entitled "Destruction and Moment" in the book Reading Heidegger from the Start, Essays in His Earliest Thought,ed. Theodore Kisiel and John van Buren (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), which discusses the notion of moment as found in a widely-ranging consideration of Heidegger's texts, and concludes, in the last pages (150-156) with theBeiträge, where the moment is related to the passing of the last God. However, he only gives a clue of what he has in mind: "Can 'being called' in the singularity of the moment still be claimed for our life today? ...It [man's relation to God] can be regained only in God's call out of that passing in which God only shows His back to the human being" (155).
Constantino Esposito, in an article entitled "Die Geschichte des letzten Gottes in Heideggers Beiträge zur Philosophie," Heidegger Studies 11 (1995): 33-60, finds the being of god in the withdrawal of Being, and apparently interprets that refusal purely literally, in pondering whether that comes to the same as the "impossibility of an answer," for if so, he concludes, "In the end this impossibility indeed is genuinely itself: God" (60).
George J. Seidel, in an article entitled "A key to Heidegger's Beiträge," Gregorianum76, no. 2, (1995): 363-372, offers a Christology of the last God, which the article notes, is a logos rather than a Marcan Christology. He says he came to the realization while working on Fichte, "I came across the distinction Fichte makes between Seyn (God) and Daseyn(Christ). At that point a different sort of reading of the Contributions to Philosophy ... began to suggest itself" (365). By Marcan Christology he means a Christology "without the final chapter (ch. 16) of St. Mark's gospel, one without resurrection appearances" (366). He explains that: "The Christology of the Beiträge, on the other hand, would be of a very different sort. It is a Logos Christology, more specifically that of the Prologue to the Gospel of John" (366).
Jean Greisch, in an article entitled "The Eschatology of Being and the
God of Time in Heidegger," International Journal of Philosophical Studies
4, no. 1 (1996): 17-43, among other things, draws attention to Heidegger's
1927 characterization of Plotinus as a "theosophist," with "wild and windy
speculations," and conducts a six-section investigation of eternity and
time. The first section implicates eternity into time; the second observes
that the problematic of time and eternity may best proceed from a more
original temporality; the third section seeks to find the same in the enigmatic
"summits of time," in a time "fissured with abysses," or in "the god who
is 'only time'"; the fourth section recapitulates the inquiry into such
time in terms of some of the central themes of the Beiträge,
linking Ereignis as Zerklüftung to the moment, and Daseinto
the Ereignis; the fifth again follows the lead of the Beiträgeand
thinks original temporality in terms of Ereignis as Time-Space;
and the sixth section ventures to interpret the "passing of the last God,"
first by noting that "'in the Ereignis and as Ereignis the
last God is hidden'" (36), thinks that in terms of a destinal eschatology,
and then seeks to find its passing in such eschatology by noting that the
last God "will never be present in the sense of a constant, available presence.
Its being will be nothing other than passing. The Ereignis is the
space of encounter in which such a passage can be produced. But it is a
passage that has nothing of the ephemeral and transitory. ... On the contrary,
it is itself accorded an
Augenblicks-Stätte" (37). How he understands
this passing Greisch does not say, but the concluding words may well be
telling: "Has Heidegger himself not 'departed from the phenomena' in order
to deliver himself over totally to a speculation which could itself be
misunderstood as a strange kind of 'theosophy' (38)?"
1. We should note, in passing, a sixth, the Skeptics, who, apparently taking Socratic ignorance literally, embraced the paradoxical position of an anti-dogmatic knowledge. For the Skeptics, see, for example, Edwyn Bevan, Stoics and Skeptics (London: Lowe and Brydone Printers, 1959).
2. With reference to the Cynics, Epicureans, Stoics, Peripatetics and, among others, the Academy, Hadot takes a similar position. "Our claim has been, then, that philosophy in antiquity was a spiritual exercise. As for philosophical theories: they were either placed explicitly in the service of spiritual practice, as was the case in Stoicism and Epicureanism, or else they were taken as the objects of intellectual exercises, that is, of a practice of the contemplative life which, in the last analysis, was itself nothing other than a spiritual exercise. It is impossible to understand the philosophical theories of antiquity without taking into account this concrete perspective, since this is what gives them their true meaning. ... Contemporary historians of philosophy are today scarcely inclined to pay attention to this aspect, although it is an essential one. The reason for this is that, in conformity with a tradition inherited from the Middle Ages and from the modern era, they consider philosophy to be a purely abstract-theoretical activity." Pierre Hadot, Philosophy As a Way of Life, tr. Michael Chase, ed. Arnold Davidson (New York: Blackwell, 1995) 104, 107.
4. John L. Moles, "Cynic Cosmopolitanism," in The Cynics, the Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy, ed. R. Bracht Branham and Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) 105-121.
5. For our account of the Epicureans, we rely on Hibler. Richard W. Hibler, Happiness Through Tranquility, the School of Epicurus (Lanham: University Press of America, 1984).
6. Epicurus, "Epicurus to Menoeceus," in Whitney J. Oates, The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers, the Complete Extant Writings of Epicurus, Epictetus, Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius (New York: Random House, 1940) 30-33.
7. Cyril Bailey, Epicurus, the Extant Remains(Westport: Hyperion Press, 1979) 343.
8. E.V. Arnold, Roman Stoicism (New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1971) 86-87.
9. A.A. Long, Stoic Studies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
10. Oates, The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers, 485 n. 11.
11. Oates, The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers523.
12. Anthony Kenny, Aristotle on the Perfect Life(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) 95.
13. Dillon, The Middle Platonists, 2d ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).
14. Cf. Hadot, "When, in the modern age, philosophy regained its autonomy, it still retained many features inherited from the medieval conception. In particular, it maintained its purely theoretical character, which even evolved in the direction of a more and more thorough systematization. Not until Nietzsche, Bergson, and existentialism does philosophy return to being a concrete attitude, a way of life and of seeing the world. For their part, however, contemporary historians of ancient thought have, as a general rule, remained prisoners of the old, purely theoretical conception of philosophy. Hadot, Philosophy As a Way of Life, 107-108.
15. Gregory Vlastos, Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Socratic Studies, ed. Myles Burnyet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Of the same genre, see Terence Irwin, Plato's Moral Theory, the Early and Middle Dialogs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); and Mark L. McPherran,The Religion of Socrates (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996).
16. Pr. An. 64b34-6, Metap. 1051b31-1052a1 (52); Post. An. 71b15-16, 72b3-4 (53); and, among others, N.E. 1139b19-21 (54).
17. To the same misguided effect, compare: "Now, I suggest, we can understand why Socrates is startled by Delphi's accolade. He can hardly bring himself to believe that his own understanding of the good life, chancy, patchy, provisional, perpetually self-questioning, endlessly perplexed as it is, should have any value at all in the eyes of the god who enjoys the unshaken heart of well-rounded truth--the perfect security, the serene completeness of knowledge C" (64).
18. The analysis is found in Vlastos, "Socratic Piety," Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher, 157-179.
19. "Should this incline us to believe that Socrates is counting on two disparate avenues of knowledge about the gods, rational and extra-rational respectively, yielding two distinct systems of justified belief, one of them reached by elenctic argument, the other by divine revelation through oracles, prophetic dreams and the like? If we did, ... we would have to conclude that he would look to the intimations of his daimonionas a source of moral knowledge apart from reason and superior to it, yielding the certainty which is conspicuously lacking in the findings of his elenctic searches" (167).
20. "For Socrates diviners, seers, oracle-givers, poets are all in the same boat. All of them in his view are know-nothings, or rather, worse: unaware of their sorry epistemic state, they set themselves up as repositories of wisdom emanating from a divine, all-wise source. What they say may be true; but even when it is true, they are in no position to discern what there is in it that is true. If their hearer were in a position to discern this, then he would have the knowledge denied to them; the knowledge would come from the application of his reason to what these people say without reason. Though Socrates does not apply this theory explicitly to prophetic dreams or to his own 'divine sign' the connection with the latter is unavoidable, since he refers to the functioning of his daimonionas his 'customary divination' and to himself as a 'seer,' without ever denying, directly or by implication, that what is true of divination generally would also apply to that homespun variety of it with which 'divine dispensation' has favored him" (170).
21. It may be noted that if Vlastos' distinction between knowledge "E" and knowledge "C," and with it, its present problem context, were thrown out, because irremediably corrupted, in a curious way, although barely recognizably, Vlastos too accords with what we have called the traditional view. For what would then remain over would be the link between knowledge "E," as the moral consciousness, and the divine.
22. W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 3 (Cambridge: University Press, 1969).
23. Damascius, in L. G. Westerink, ed. and tr., The Greek Commentaries on Plato's Phaedo (New York: North-Holland, 1976).
24. Of this "eye," that characterizes the relation of the intellect and the One, Damascius does not tell us more in the present context, but following Westerink (222 n. 3), just as we would expect, it is conceived (Dam., princ. 188.8-10) as "jwV anaptousa to oikeion " (cf. our always-seeing-in-a-light).
25. Insofar as we are only concerned with the generation of the realm of the logoi, the problem of the nature of the logoi themselves lies outside the scope of the present considerations.
26. We draw our account of Philo from the epitome of Philo in Dillon's The Middle Platonists, 139-183.
27. Dillon, The Middle Platonists, 160.
28. Via its "shadow," it is interesting to speculate, is another way to view an eclipse of the sun without becoming blinded thereby.
29. "In the exegesis of the two cherubim with the flaming sword guarding Paradise, the cherubim are the two Powers, and the sword between them is the Logos. The relation of the Logosto the two Powers is not quite clear in this passage, but ... we gather that it is superior to them. They are divided off from it, 'as from a fountainhead'." Dillon, The Middle Platonists, 161-162.
30. "So the central Being, attended by each of his Powers, presents to the mind which has vision the appearance sometimes of One, sometimes of Three; of One, when that mind is highly purified and, passing beyond not merely the multiplicity of other numbers, but even the Dyad which is next to the Monad, presses on to the ideal form which is free from mixture and complexity, and being self-contained needs nothing more; of Three, when, as yet uninitiated into the highest Mysteries, it is still a votary only of the minor rites and unable to apprehend the Existent alone by itself and apart from all else, but only through its actions, as either 'creative' or 'ruling' [the Powers]. This, as they say, is a 'second-best voyage'" (De Abrahamo 120ff.) Dillon, The Middle Platonists, 162-163.
31. R. D. Archer-Hind, The Phaedo of Plato(London: Macmillan and Co., 1883).
32. H. G. Gadamer, The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, tr. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).
33. A. H. Armstrong, "The Escape of the One," in Plotinian and Christian Studies (London: Variorum Reprints, 1979) 87.
34. Armstrong stops short here, and throughout the article, of making explicit reference to the "productivity of negation" in connection with his treatment of "Neoplatonic apophatic theology," but it is interesting to speculate that this choice of words may reflect that sense.
35. Armstrong stops well short of making explicit the character of the daimonic man we find to be at work in the problem of the productivity of negation of ignorance as knowledge (cf. chapter 3), but, as we shall see below, among other things, his "supersubstantial bread" shows him to be not unfamiliar with its "giving" character.
36. Compare, in this connection, our chapter 1, section 2.
37. Notice that for Armstrong, negative theology involves the question of the generation of the realm of truth; cf. our chapter 4.
38. If we substitute the One for God, notice that for Armstrong negative theology involves the One in Us; cf. our chapter 5.
39. Notice also that for Armstrong, negative theology involves the generation of knowledge; cf. our chapter 3.
40. Armstrong, "Negative Theology," in Plotinian and Christian Studies, 187.
41. We agree with Armstrong in seeing "beginning thinking" at the root; compare our chapter 3, section 2, and what follows.
42. Siorvanes, Proclus, Neo-Platonic Philosophy and Science, 197. In this connection, also see G. Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul, the Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995).
43. Jean Trouillard, L'Un et l'Âme selon Proclos (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1972).
44. Werner Beierwaltes, "Marginalien zu Jean Trouillards Proklos-Interpretation, zugleich ein Beitrag zum Begriff der Negation," in Denken Des Einen (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985) 281-296. Beierwaltes himself, it may be noted, contra Trouillard, founds negation in self-affirmation (287 ff.), but neither this nor anything else in the chapter leads us to suspect that his account of Trouillard is other than accurate and balanced.
45. "In dem 1972 erschienenen Buch 'L'Un et l'Âme selon Proclos' hat Trouillard ... dieeine Thematik explizieren, die der Grundgedanke des Proklos zu sein beansprucht: die wechselseitige Relation nämlich der 'Seele' und des 'Einen.' Daß dies ein möglicher ... Interpretationsaspekt ist, legt die Intention der proklischen Platon-Auslegung nahe: ...Reflexion auf die Negation, in der die Seele ihres eigenen Grundes--des Einen selbst--bewußt wird ('Parmenides', in Verbindung zu 'Alkibiades')" (282).
46. Cf. our interpretation of the epekeina as a "negative" determination, chapter 1, section 5.
47. "Konkretisiert wird dieser Grundgedanke der Relation von Seele und Einem ... durch die ausführliche Beschreibung der Seele als Mitte (meson, mesothV ) oder als aktiver Vermittlung. ... Aktive Vermittlung ist die Seele -- die Welt- oder Einzel-Seele in einer inhaltlich je verschiedenen Weise--, insofern sie Gegensätze in sich zu einer Einheit fügt und sich so selbst als seiende Mitte konstituiert. Eine Einheit vollzieht sie zwischen dem intelligiblen (zeitfreien) und dem zeithaften ... Bereich" (282-283).
48. Cf. our interpretation above (chapter 1, section 2 ) of the "third thing" as "ground of the two worlds."
49. "Als besonderen Index und Grund des Vermittlung-Seins der Seele hebt Trouillard den Gedanken der Immanenz des Einen oder der 'Kräfte' des Einen in der Seele heraus. Der Akt der Vermittlung also wird als die Gegensätzliches verbindende, einigende Wirkung des Einenin ihr verstanden" (284).
50. Cf. our interpretation above (chapter 1, sections 2, 5) of the "third thing" as "ground of the two worlds," here the "act of mediating," and also our interpretation of the Idea of the Good as a further determination of the third thing, which (Idea of the Good) is itself determined by "power."
51. "Der Vollzug der Einheit der Seele kann auch von dem Begriff des auqupostaton, des Sich-selbst-Konstituierenden her erhellt werden. ... Trouillard verbindet mit dieser Theorie ... eine Interpretation des proklischen Begriffs Negation... Negation versteht er als das Medium der Selbstkonstitution der Seele: dadurch, daß die Seele alles, was das Eine selbst nicht ist, in Bezug auf dieses Eine negiert, konstituiert sie sich selbst ... . Nicht mehr die 'Selbststrukturation' ist für Trouillard ... das Interpretament der Selbstkonstitution der Seele, sondern die produktive Negation. ... Im Horizont des Begriffs einer produktiven Negation nennt Trouillard die Seele-- in Analogie zu dem proklischenplhrwma eidwn oder logwn (in Parm. 896, 4. In eucl. 55, 18)-- plhrwma twn apojasewn, Fülle der Negationen... ." (285-286).
52. Cf. our interpretation (chapter 4) of the realm of truth, here the noetic realm, as generated by a negation.