The N-word
Offline If this has already been pointed out, feel free to let me know. It was a revelation to me.
The theist opposition to materialism is largely seated in Neoplatonism. For those of you who don't know, Neoplatonism is roughly the opposite of scientific physicalist thought, and seems almost designed to counter the Epicurean notion of a material world.
In the Epicurean view, the world is material and is composed of atoms which follow a non-linear path. From those, all things are built, and from the bottom-up, we arrive at a universe. Now, that's about as much detail as we get, but give the guy a break, he came up with this stuff 300 years before Christ.
Fast forward to 350 years after Christ, and St. Augustine gives us his view of the world in stark contrast to that of Epicurus (mostly from Plotinus, it seems). This is a world that starts from the top down. The top is capital-I "Intellect", and "the one", which is the source of all things. From Intellect, the universe is created.
This must be where the idea of the equivalence of validity comes from. That is, it can by argued by a Neoplatonist that "materialism" is an argument that can be countered with the Neoplatonist position, and one cancels the other out, rendering both mere opinion, and devaluing the rigour of scientific work.
The reason I don't say "... and devaluing the rigour of theological work" is because the Neoplatonist can argue forever about things that may or may not exist until they're blue in the face, but cannot produce "theological technology". There is no proof-of-concept in theology that applies to the world it is meant to describe, and not surprisingly so. Theology is limited to imagination.
To be fair, so is the world of mathematical physics, to a certain extent. The difference, of course, is that one can be proven wrong in theoretical physics, whereas one is safe from ever being wrong in theology.
Neoplatonism is the school of thought that produces such marvels of imagination, and given that I've been called a "materialist" hundreds of times by now, I think it's fair to whip out the N-word, you wacky Neoplatonists, you.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
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Interesting post. But I think such a fancy word gives them too much credit. Most of them wouldn't know what a Neoplatonist was if one hit them upside their head.
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Will, you are absolutely correct, and honestly, this is something that ALL atheists/materialists/neo-Epicurians
should know about. I learned about the intertwining history of Neoplatonism and early (almost post-Nicene) Christianity in my own research. To the point that I've started referring to the Christian god as a Neoplatonist god.... with damn near ZERO Judaic influence, ironically enough.
Though I did miss the implications of the various burdens of proof and evidence- that theology just says "Mind itself is proof for God! END OF DISCUSSION!!" and sees the material world as just one of the emanations, or sometimes, imperfect/sinful perversions of the 'true' reality of God. Which, logically enough (for them) is by necessity removed from the imperfections of 'this world,' and thus, unprovable through material evidence. GAH!!! The joys of discussing philosophy with a newly converted Catholic, I tell ya.
And natural is right: Christians wouldn't know Neoplatonism if it hit 'em like a stray bullet in a firefight during the climax of a John Woo film. But it thoroughly permeates the Gospels and Epistles (oh, ESPECIALLY the Epistles) and had an ever-greater hold on Christian thought, mostly via Augustine (thank you, sir, for your pages-long agonizing over the sinfulness of eating a fruit.... the world is forever in your debt.)
Uh.
Didn't the big-wig Neoplatonic philosophers also believe that the Dodadecahedron (as per their strange beliefs regarding the 'perfect solids') held some dangerous secret to life, the universe and, well, everything?
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
Okay, there's this bizarre website that promotes Socrates as some great mystic and goes by the moniker of 'the Perrenialist Tradition'.
One of the essays on this website is called Plato as a Perennialist Teacher.
Can someone briefly explain to me the connection between Socrates, Plato, and Neo-Platonism. (That is, if there is indeed such a connection.) Is this 'Perrenialist' website an example of the modern Neo-Platonism that Will describes? If it is, then why is the guy all swooning over Socrates? I thought Socrates was more of like a free-thinker type.
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Wow. You really managed to pick a winner there. Looks like your standard neo-Theosophy bullshit, really. All this crap about hidden masters (they use a different term- Perennialist Teacher) and esoteric knowledge that, somehow, only *they* have right.... seen it, very dull, and really, really misleading. But good for a laugh.
As far as a connection between Socrates, Plato, and neo-Platonism: Socrates as we know him comes to us from three sources. We have the very large collection of the Dialogues of Plato, we have fragments from the Persian-colony backing ex-Athenian Anaxagoras, and we have Socrates in Aristophanes' "The Clouds." Now, Plato and Anaxagoras were both, apparently, students of Socrates- but Plato learned from Socrates when the latter was in his 60s, and Anaxagoras was more concerned with a written defense of his support of Persia (before the rhetoric turned against the 'barbarian' Persian armies and war erupted) than he was with a realistic portrait of his teacher (who was, as I recall, closer to his mid-30s or early 40s when he taught Anaxagoras.) Aristophanes, as usual, was busy poking holes in social niceties, and gives us a particularly unflattering portrait of Socrates as a money-hungry teacher of morals who is not above teaching that white is black, up is down, etc.
It's Plato's Socrates that people know, however. This Socrates is essentially a literary character; we know nothing about his true beliefs, we know nothing about his true life, and all we can glean of his life is in the Dialogues. Well, unless we want to take Aristophanes at his word (never a good idea) or take Anaxagoras' word over Plato's (there are some scholars who believe Anaxagoras may have copied Plato's study of Socrates, so that's a bit suspect as well.) So, we're pretty much left with Plato's Socrates, who often switches between rapid-fire q-and-a and long diatribes. Many suspect the latter is Plato's addition, as he was known to go on and on... but again, this is all a guess.
It's also very probable that Socrates' focus on 'virtue' as the greatest good was real. Or at least it was believed to be real by the Cynics, and later the Stoics, who took the idea and ran the length of six football (American) fields with it. Though that just shows there were people who believed that Socrates believed it.... it could have been Plato's projection.
Aaaanyway- once we get past Socrates, things get more clear. Here we have Plato- anti-democratic supporter of oligarchy (and hence, REALLY glad when his relations ended up getting involved with the '40 Tyrants' installed by the victorious Spartans), whose basic position is that the realms of senses are all we can see, but not all there is. According to Plato, there is a realm of pure Being, where the Forms exist and which project their essence onto the world we know. Meaning that we can say we know about, say, chairs, but not about 'chairness,' or what THE CHAIR is.
Knowlege, to Plato, is revealed from this higher realm. It is the job of the thinker- or any thinking human being- to use their brains to try and connect, or understand this realm. Ultimately, if thinkers do their job, the knowlege will come down from this realm and enlighten the thinkers.
To get to neo-Platonism, we need to fast-forward several hundred years. And we need to talk about different 'neo-Platonic' groups. The group that Will's talking about is often refered to as 'middle Platonists' because they're more or less in between the *old* neo-Platonists (I....think they had their heydey during the later Hellenistic/Punic Wars period, 'bout when Rome conquered the Greek-speaking world, but I'm kind of hazy on that time period) and the *new* neo-Platonists (who were alive and kicking as late as the 4th century, when all non-Christian religions were outlawed in the Greek-speaking world).
Middle Platonists, well represented by Plotinus, basically took their positions from Plato (Forms, etc.) and applied it to their time (c. 3nd century CE). They also added the moral obsession of the later Stoics to their repetoire. All of this made them very appealing to early Christianity, and so we find Plotinus' work popping up again and again, in pseudo-Dionysus, Origen, the Cappadocians, various theologians in the Eastern Orthodox Churches, even, from time to time, in Islamic thought. Where Plotinus differed from Christians- and others who thought like them (he did live, after all, for quite a few years in Alexandria, THE crossroads for philosophy at the time)- was in terms of creation.
He believed that creation or emanation was an inevitable consequence of the source-point being what it is, not that it was an act of will of the source-point. Plotinus also believed that the source was not diminished by its creations, but that its creations, being further removed from the source, were. This latter piece was *ahem* borrowed by the various Gnostics.... if you read some of the more Valentinian of the Nag Hammadi texts, you can see that (esp. the bits about Sophia and its failed creation- this universe, essentially).
So, there you are. The connection between the things you asked for. And a connection between Middle Platonism and Christianity, which you didn't ask for, but I gave you anyway.
Not sure about the site, seeing as I can't bother reading about mysticism any more, but Plato is where we get most of Socrates' ideas from.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
But it's an ingrained part of the culture, and forms an important part of the Neoplatonist/Calvanist North American mind, regardless of whether anyone might recognize it or not.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
At least it's something to throw back when you've been called an "atheist materialist". I'd prefer "Epicurean", since, if you're going to get what I believe completely wrong, it might as well sound cool.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
Much appreciated! That was a very thorough post, and answered my question completely.
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Good point. And then we can out-pretension them by calling ourselves post-Platonists and sneering in derision at them.
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This is very, very true. Unfortunately, that same ubiquitousness makes it VERY hard to point it out as something that's *not* universal. Trying to argue that certain philosophical axioms weren't always so axiomatic (granted, they've been so for a LONG time, but...) is sort of like trying to argue your way out of the Platonic universe to begin with. Every single answer you can come up with ends with the other side saying "Well, that's just *this* world... we can't know about the *other world*, but it's there... I *know* it." And then one proceeds to bang one's head against the wall trying to make sense out of what is essentially an unprovable assertion, but which has become, for many, the very basis of their world view. Very weird, once you start thinking about it.
Much appreciated! That was a very thorough post, and answered my question completely.
Thanks. Glad to know my odd obsession with trying to sift the true story about the early Christian church(es) from the false one has come in handy. Some of the philosophy is actually pretty interesting- Origen is one of my favorites, despite his often downright frightening look at Matthew 10 and his dreadful misappelation of the Neo-Platonic label to Celsus (with whom, BTW, he had a dialogue, via a book- no small feat, considering Celsus was in the ground some 80 years at that point.)
Though really, what mostly interests me about the so-called 'Church Fathers' is reading the points at which dogma came... well, basically out of nothing. Or from pre-existing philosphy. Like, for instance: The reason Bibles have 4 Gospels wasn't just because of political wrangling at the Council of Nicea. It's also because Irenaeus, a 2nd century bishop of Lyons, INSISTED there be 4. Why? Platonic balance: The gospels were to represent the 4 quarters of the air and 4 ideal animals (I can never remember them off hand). The Nicene council merely followed his centuries-old lead.