The Cambridge Platonists

Viewed historically, none of the world’s major religious traditions is a monolith. The Cambridge Platonists were not so much philosophers as Christians who sought new ways to avoid the destructive sectarianism that became especially common in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. They stand out as sincerely religious figures for whom religion ought to put ethics first, rather than questions of doctrinal purity. The world needs more of those.

We are still walking through J. B. Schneewind’s The Invention of Autonomy, which seeks to characterize the full complexity of 17th- and 18th-century moral philosophy in the European tradition, and in so doing to explain the background of Kant’s innovations in ethics. In particular, it documents the existence of alternatives to the widespread medieval and early modern tendency to reduce morality to a matter of obedience to divinely sanctioned law.

Beyond the scope of Schneewind’s argument, it is also important to note that none of the Greek philosophers sees morality as reducible to obedience. It is commonly claimed that Christianity is ethically superior to Greek philosophy, but historically it is just wrong to claim that only Christianity introduced criteria of love and forgiveness. If we look seriously at what is usually translated as the cardinal virtue of “friendship” in Aristotle, it is first and foremost a kind of non-possessive love. A readiness to forgive is one of the principal characteristics of Aristotle’s other cardinal virtue of magnanimity. Aristotle’s generous, non-exclusive outlook also recognizes yet other other cardinal virtues in free and open deliberation, unbiased practical judgment, and a kind of generous fairness or equity (epieikeia) that looks beyond the letter of the law. There are multiple summits. Rather than claiming that Christianity is by definition morally superior to such a philosophical outlook, the apologetic claim ought rather to be that it is capable of reaching the same heights.

“Thomasius’s rejection of servility in our relation to God is a late articulation in Germany of an attitude that found full voice earlier in England. ‘A right knowledge of God, John Smith wrote in the middle of the seventeenth century, ‘would beget a freedom and liberty of soul within us, and not servility’. ‘Reverence God in thyself’, Benjamin Whichcote exhorted his readers, ‘for God is more in the mind of man, than in any part of this world besides’. Ralph Cudworth quoted Athanasius in order to assert that ‘God was therefore incarnated and made man, that he might deify us’. From the 1640s on, these three formed part of a group engaged in a radical rethinking of Protestantism” (p. 194).

“Like many others who contributed to the development of thought about morality, these thinkers were responding to religious controversies that were tearing their society apart. Sectarian Calvinism was swamping out the Thomism that Hooker had thought foundational for a national church…. Could one appeal to reason and decency to hold society together? Many held that such a view smacked of Pelagianism in modern dress. The appeal to reason was dangerously like Arminianism in its denial of arbitrary prevenient grace; it also resembled the anti-Trinitarian doctrines of Socinianism. Could one insist on natural law without suggesting that one was either a papist or a Hobbesian? Everyone who had opinions seemed to be absorbed in questions of doctrinal purity. Finding biblical texts to prove one was right, denouncing those who did not accept exactly the correct formulation of saving truth, taking political action to exclude those in error from membership in one’s church — these matters seemed to be overwhelmingly important. The disagreements that they occasioned and exacerbated threatened not only to destroy the possibility of a common faith among English Protestants. They were a threat to maintaining any common social and political life” (pp. 194-195).

We have already seen this concern to avoid conflict over religion in Schneewind’s coverage of the natural law tradition. It is important to see why even intensely religious thinkers were motivated to defend what we may think of as secular values. They could see very concretely the evils of rampant sectarianism.

“Whichcote, Smith, More, and Cudworth were deeply embroiled in these local battles. Unlike many of their opponents, however, they developed a stance and a philosophy that in important ways transcended the particularities of the quarrels of the times. Commonly called the Cambridge Platonists, the group’s central members were divines who spent much of their lives as academics at Cambridge. The originators of the movement were not philosophers but preachers and reformers. Though they developed a complex and coherent outlook, they did not wish to present it in the kind of systematic form that philosophers often strive for. They worked out their views in terms of Scripture, and argued, as did most of those whom they addressed, by interpreting biblical texts. Such theory as they presented was offered largely to show the implications of their new way of reading texts. Their Platonism was much mediated by Plotinus and the Greek fathers of the church. Using Plato to provide help for a new Christian exegesis was an incidental, not a central, aim. The most coherent philosophical account of the group’s outlook seems indeed quite Platonic, or neoplatonic. But Ralph Cudworth’s Plato, an all but overt Christian who had learned about God’s revelation to the Jews from the Egyptians, is not exactly the Plato of modern scholarship. The extent of genuine Platonism in the group matters far less than its attempt to put Christianity in a new light” (p. 195).

This aspect of Schneewind’s emphasis will be mine here as well.

“Benjamin Whichcote (1609-83) originated the movement. In sermons and personal teaching he insisted on two conclusions: that morality is the heart of religion, and that reason and religion are the same thing. ‘There are but two things in religion’, Whichcote writes, ‘Morals and Institutions: Morals may be known, by the Reason of the thing; morals are owned as soon as spoken, and they are nineteen parts in twenty, of all religion’ ” (p. 196).

It is important to recognize that this was not part of a minimalist, common-denominator view of religion, like that promoted by deism. Positive embrace of poetically rich specific religious heritage need not be accompanied by insistence that the virtuous pagan and others who do not share the same heritage of symbolic identification are automatically consigned to hell.

“[Whichcote] is no Deist. Unlike Lord Herbert of Cherbury, he aims to preserve the essentials of Christianity. Where Herbert had given conscience the primary role as a test of true revelation, Whichcote gave morality a place no one since Pelagius had dared to give it. His radical claim is that ‘the Moral part of religion does sanctify the soul; and is Final both to what is instrumental and instituted’. Morality suffices to win salvation and must be the controlling factor in the arrangements we make about both worship and church governance; and morality is to be known by reason, rather than by appeal to authority, including biblical authority” (ibid, internal citations omitted here and throughout).

Religious beliefs offer additional motivation and sustenance for us to act ethically ourselves, not additional requirements by which to judge others.

“The one part of religion in twenty that comes by institution — by God’s positive will revealed in scripture — has, Whichcote holds, merely instrumental value…. But the moral part of religion ‘is necessary in itself’, containing requirements dictated directly by reason. The requirements of morality are not due to God’s will; any sane person would want to abide by them even if God granted a dispensation from them. It is only if we live in accordance with these necessary moral laws that we will be truly happy. ‘Morality’, Whichcote says, ‘is not a means to anything but to happiness; everything else is a means to morality’…. Like Cudworth and Smith, Whichcote cites scripture to authorize his claim that we can be deified by making ourselves virtuous” (p. 197).

“The central thesis is that we are each able to know, by thinking for ourselves, how we are to live and behave, and that we each have ‘power to execute and perform’ according to this knowledge. Because Whichcote is strongly opposed to voluntarism, he insists that there is something to be known at the base of morality. ‘Moral laws are laws of themselves’, he tells us, ‘without sanction by will; and the necessity of them arises from the things themselves. God made us to know both him and his creation, and so made the mind with sound faculties. If we use them properly we are in accord with ourselves; to refuse to seek truth and to refuse to think for oneself are equally to be at odds with oneself. The important truths are readily accessible to us, moreover, and are neither recondite nor difficult” (ibid).

This is the principle of self-governance that we have already seen in the neo-Stoics.

“When we are immoral, we act against our own principles and contradict our own reason. We therefore need no external tribunal to tell us we have acted wrongly. ‘The unrighteous are condemned by themselves before they are condemned by God.’ Being self-condemned is what is really meant by being in hell; being self-consistent and filled with ‘humility, modesty, righteousness, temperance, reverence of deity and the like’ is what is meant by being in heaven. Heaven and hell are not places; they are states of mind…. To be saved, and so deified, simply means to live in accordance with what we ourselves see to be right” (p. 198).

“Like Lord Herbert, Whichcote argues in several sermons that because God holds us all equally accountable, he must have made saving knowledge available to all alike…. In Whichcote’s thought, then, moral knowledge [is] more widely accessible than knowledge either of the natural world or of revelation…. That inner governance which is both morality and religion must lead to virtuous action, or it is nothing” (p. 199). ” ‘The longest sword, the strongest lungs, the most voices, are false measures of truth’ ” (p. 199n).

Hear hear.

“John Smith (1618-52) … agrees that morality concerns one’s inner condition, not only law-abiding external action, that heaven and hell are states of mind, that sanctification and justification must go hand in hand, that the laws of morality do not arise from God’s arbitrary will, and that we participate in God’s mind…. Even ignorant men feel an instinctive yearning toward union with God…. If we can only bring ourselves to act better, we will know more. This is what Smith means by saying that we learn more about God through action than through speculation. Truth and goodness ‘grow both from the same root and live in one another’ ” (p. 199-200).

“It is just obvious that though we should love ourselves, we should love other people and God even more. We can increasingly transform our desires to fit that insight. The search for our own perfection is, in Smith’s eyes, an effort to increase the extent to which we act out of love for others” (p. 200).

If our own “perfection” consists in acting out of love for others, the end goal must encompass a good deal more than our individual perfection.

“Smith’s opposition to voluntarism and his belief that God is essentially a loving being push him in the direction of a consequentialist view of morality. Although it would be absurd to think of God obeying anyone else, he is ‘not Ex Lex and without all law’…. God follows his reason, and so he takes the goodness of things as a reason to bring them about. God’s aim must be to bring goodness into being in the world; and the law of nature that he has inscribed within our souls tells us to do the same…. Not only is the law inscribed in us a law of goodness. It is one which we need not be made to follow by threats. A law of that kind — the kind Grotius and Hobbes took as central — can exact only external observance” (pp. 200-201).

“Henry More (1614-87) was the one member of the Whichcote group to publish a systematic work on moral philosophy during the seventeenth century. The Encheiridion Ethicum of 1666 … is in some respects eclectic and a little eccentric. It nonetheless spells out the consequences of the views of Whichcote and Smith when those are given a philosophical form. More does not take up all the ideas they raise — he rejects voluntarism, for instance, but without elaborating on the rejection or arguing for it…. Yet its main thesis is quite straightforward, and plainly in line with the Cambridge emphasis on love and reason as together forming the center both of morality and of our relations with God” (p. 202).

What more could we need in order to be ethical, besides love and reason?

” ‘In morality we are as sure as in mathematics’, Whichcote pronounces, and More produces some twenty-three ‘moral axioms or noemas’, which, he says, in a phrase recalling Whichcote, are ‘agreed to as soon as heard’. The noemas are self-evident and can serve the purpose in moral reasoning that ‘first undeniable axioms’ do in mathematics. More introduces them because they will make morality plain and compelling even to those unfortunately lacking in what he calls the ‘boniform faculty’, a brief account of which opens his treatise” (pp. 202-203).

I have a few doubts about this part. More’s noemas, summarized below by Schneewind, all in all seem pretty reasonable, but I regard appeals to self-evident principles as a weakness, even in mathematics. (Martin-Löf’s constructive type theory manages to do without.) Some things are so evident that they are hard to explain; but that does not make them self-evident. On the other hand, this is a rather technical point. Somewhat more seriously, while we may feel something close to certainty about the abstract principles themselves, all practical applications involve interpretation at the point where universals are applied to particulars, and such interpretation is in principle always open to further development. But again on the other hand, in practice what is almost self-evident is hard to distinguish from what “is” self-evident.

“What exactly that faculty is remains somewhat of a mystery even at the end of the book. But it is at least a love of the highest good as well as an insight into it; it leads us to do good as well as to desire it for ourselves; it makes us ‘pant after God’; and it is the supreme faculty in our minds or souls, through which we resemble God, ‘who is goodness it self’ ” (p. 203).

It is undeniable that the whole human being (often, at least) has a kind of overall sense for what is good in various situations. Calling it a faculty seems a bit reified.

“Noema I tells us that the good is that which is ‘grateful, pleasant, and congruous’ to any living being. In III and IV we learn that some beings are superior to others, and that goods may differ in quality, in quantity, or both. These noemas also underlie sincerity, the virtue by which the mind is wholly devoted to the pursuit of the best and brought to pursue the greatest good with the greatest zeal. Noema V instructs us to choose the good, preferring not simply the greater to the smaller but the more excellent to the less. The seventh noema recognizes an asymmetry of good and evil: it is better to miss a considerable good than to suffer a comparable evil. Noema IX suggests that there might be a trade-off between a lesser good of more ‘weight and duration’ than a superior good of less extent. Noemas X and XI tell us that, allowing for probabilities, pursuit of good and avoidance of evil should not be affected by the times at which they occur. These plainly show the rationale of prudence; and noema XII gives the ‘demonstration’ of that virtue, saying that a calm mind undisturbed by the passions judges better than a mind roiled by desires. Noema XIII, finally, requires that we purse the greater good with the greater zeal” (pp. 203-204).

What is perhaps most noteworthy in this enumeration is the passing mention of sincerity. A bit further below, Schneewind characterizes More’s ethical stance, as he previously did that of Cumberland, as consequentialist (that action is good which brings about good). This invokes one of the two major dimensions relevant to ethical assessment: consequences. The other, invoked by the mention of sincerity, consists in our intentions, good will, and acting in good faith.

“Noema XIV, grounding justice, is simply More’s version of the golden rule: if you want someone to do good to you, you are bound to do the same good for him in similar circumstances. In XVI we are told to return good, not evil, for good. Noemas XVII-XIX say that it is good for people to have the means to live well, and that the more who have the means, the better. Moreover it it is better for one person to be prevented from living luxuriously than for many to be in want. There are two noemas concerned with obedience: we are to obey the magistrate ‘in things indifferent’ and to obey God rather than men. Finally, we are to give people what is due to them, without troubling them”; but we should recognize that people can forfeit their rights by bad behavior” (p. 204).

This all seems unobjectionable, if a bit pedantic. But I expect I would find the views of More’s opponents truly horrendous.

“More has no sense that there is any tension among these axioms; he seeks no reduction of their number; and he believes in addition that being fully virtuous will make us perfectly happy. He plainly thinks that morality is wholly a matter of the pursuit of good, and that there can be no ultimate conflict or disharmony among the parts of that search” (ibid).

I don’t see tension either. But in attempting to specify universal principles of good at this level of detail, it is inevitable that not all of the principles will be of the same kind. Moreover, this being the case aggravates the worry that it is hard to know whether the enumeration is complete.

” ‘Therefore it is necessary … first to inquire and find out, what is the mode and standard of this right reason?’…. The principle, perhaps not surprisingly, turns out to be the boniform faculty, which is now equated with an intellectual love of all good. Because this is the divine in us, ‘it ought in preference to be the rule and standard of all the rest … this most simple and divine sense and feeling in the boniform faculty of the soul, is that rule or boundary, whereby reason is examin’d and approves her self’. It is a single and simple idea, ‘but all the shapes and modes of virtue and well doing’ come from it — including justice, temperance, and fortitude. If your boniform faculty is operating, you need not appeal to the noemas, which cover the same ground” (pp. 204-205).

We have encountered the Stoic criterion of right reason numerous times recently. Here More raises the good question of its “mode and standard”, though he answers it rather quickly. But his answer is not vacuous, even if it does raise further questions.

While the “intellectual love of all good” sounds a bit like Spinoza, Spinoza’s library and correspondence, which have been well studied, contain no reference to any of the Cambridge Platonists. Like many of their contemporaries, More and Cudworth in fact denounced the conclusions of Spinoza. But a century later, Herder would synthesize what became the influential Romantic view of Spinoza by integrating Cudworth’s notion of “plastic natures”, mentioned again below.

“More thus presents a fully consequentialist ethic. He is quite willing to speak of laws of nature, even giving a rather Grotian account of the rights involved in them. But he plainly intends the laws to be explained in terms of their tendency to produce good. Divine reason, he says, has dictated to us ‘such laws as tend, in their own nature, to the happiness of all mankind’. And we find in the supreme rule derived from, or constituted by, the boniform faculty, a principle that everyone can use to make moral decisions. Considering the value of things other than virtue, More dismisses subtle wit and strong memory as unimportant as long as we are filled with love of neighbor and goodwill to mankind. ‘For the good and perfect man is not so much actuated by a list of precepts gotten without book, as by living inwardly and printing in his mind a single and sincere sense of things.’ We are to pursue in singleness of mind that which is the best. And the rules for doing this are plain enough for everyone to use” (p. 205).

As mentioned above, Schneewind has previously noted a consequentialist turn in Cumberland. But in Cumberland, it is natural law that anchors and gives shape to our love of the good, whereas in More, the validity of law is derived from our sense of the good. Law is no longer a voluntaristic fiat ex nihilo.

“Love is thus the source of law. The law is the expression of the boniform faculty, which is what is divine within us. By living in accordance with it, we ourselves approach divinity. That is what Plato taught when he spoke of virtue as a thing divine, ‘and how much ally’d, and resembling unto God himself’ ” (ibid).

“That [Cudworth’s] orientation is the same as Whichcote’s and Smith’s is clear from a notable sermon preached by invitation to the House of Commons in 1647. The moral quality of our lives — ‘willing or not willing as we ought to do’ — matters more than anything else. Those who turn themselves away from self-centered love to love the good in all things, as God loves, will find heaven within and thus need nothing more. They will be moved by a law of love which leaves them free in obeying it because in this obedience, even though they are under ‘the most constraining and indispensable necessity’, there is no ‘narrowness and servility’. They are a law unto themselves. Doctrinal differences are unimportant; following the commandment to love is the sole way to know more about God. And our chief task is to perfect not our intellects but our wills or hearts” (p. 206).

Will is now a definite intent that can be explained, rather than a faculty serving as a supernatural unexplained explainer, as it is for the voluntarists.

“Like his Cambridge colleagues Cudworth thinks that when we come to know God better through reforming our will and loves and lives, we are coming to know God’s mind directly. The aim of his True Intellectual System is to spell out a metaphysics that explains how this is possible” (ibid).

Here will has the unobjectionable sense of a definite intent, rather than an unexplained super-power that disrupts and hijacks our ability to reason about the good.

“He is opposed also to the occasionalist element in Cartesianism — the thought that God and God alone sustains the world and its apparent activity, by exercising his power at every moment to keep things existing and working in accordance with his plans” (ibid).

Occasionalism usually arises as a consequence of theological voluntarism, so to oppose the latter is also implicitly to oppose the former.

“Yet we are not forced to say that God does everything. Nature is not divinity itself, but there are what Cudworth calls ‘plastic natures’ that affect natural things, acting without consciousness but as if intelligently. They serve as God’s under-ministers to do the job of maintaining order. Animal reproduction and the ‘mellification’ of bees are examples of this. Plastic natures are at work as much in the macrocosm of the universe as in the microcosm, ‘which makes all things thus to conspire every where, and agree together into one harmony’ ” (ibid).

In effect, Cudworth’s plastic natures act as natural agents of providence. Cudworth is highly aware of the fact that Descartes’s mechanistic view of nature allows no place for any such agents. Meanwhile previous Christian accounts of providence had implicitly assumed an overtly supernatural direct control of, or intervention in, natural events by God. By this innovation, Cudworth charts a course between Scylla and Charybdis. Cudworth has little use for Aristotle, but his plastic natures take over the role of what for Aristotle is “internal” teleology embedded in the workings of nature.

Following the old scholastic pattern that was also adopted by the Renaissance Platonist Marsilio Ficino, More and Cudworth both explicitly attack the unity of the material intellect in Averroes. More wrote an elaborate poem “Antimonopsychia” that uses Plotinus to refute the “monopsychism” that various writers misattributed to Averroes. But Cudworth also uses Platonic ideas in God’s mind in a way that unwittingly resembles Averroes’s use of the “treasury” of forms in the material intellect to underwrite and explain the human intellect’s capability for objective understanding of essences.

“Cudworth’s Platonizing theory is that unless we were in direct contact with God’s ideas no one could think or speak in ways that could be understood by anyone else…. But when all created minds contemplate the very same ideas or truths in God’s mind, ‘they do all of them but as it were listen to one and the same original voice of the eternal wisdom that is never silent’ ” (p. 207).

“What, then, do we learn about morality when by living in love we manage to suppress the passions and desires that muddy our thoughts and obtrude between our minds an God’s? ” (ibid).

The Cambridge Platonists seem generally to adopt the Stoic and neo-Stoic view that human passions both can and need to be radically suppressed so that they do not impede our reason, rather than the more moderate Aristotelian view that desire and reason can come to form an integrated whole in the human being. They identify Plato’s eros with the caritas that Augustine sharply distinguishes from cupiditas.

“A central part of the answer … is that there are special moral ideas in God’s mind that guide him in his creativity and which ought to guide us. Voluntarism is, consequently, false.”

“Cudworth is quite willing to accept God’s omnipotence, but he denies what he accuses Descartes of thinking, that it alone entails voluntarism. It is not limiting God’s power to say that he can do only what is not self-contradictory. God’s wisdom is as much a part of God as his will, so if the latter is limited by the former, God is still not controlled by anything external to himself” (pp. 207-208).

“To make a more positive case, Cudworth brings in some considerations about essences and concepts. Like Suarez, he holds that essences are immutable. One might change the name one attached to the essence, but doing so would not touch the essence. Now it is essences that make things what they are; and if essences cannot conceivably be changed, then even God cannot change them. So God cannot by will alone make something that is essentially good into something that is not essentially good. God can either make something exist or refrain from doing so; but if that thing is by its nature good, then God in creating it is necessarily creating a good thing. And God cannot make something good without endowing it with the essence of goodness. Will alone, therefore, Cudworth concludes, cannot be what makes good things good” (p. 208).

“In chapter XLVI of Leviathan Hobbes used his theories of language and knowledge to attack the kind of theory of meaning to which Cudworth is here appealing…. Cudworth plainly knew Hobbes’s view and saw the threat it posed to his own Platonism. He adverts parenthetically to the possibility that moral terms might be ‘meer names without significance, or names for nothing else but willed and commanded’ ” (ibid).

“Against materialism Cudworth erects a theory of plastic natures, based on the view that the evidences of design in nature would not have come about from matter alone, and on the rejection of occasionalism. In defending the irreducibility of moral concepts, his purpose is to defeat voluntarism, whether Hobbesian or Cartesian. To do so he moves to arguments about essences and meanings that are quite general, and not tied specifically to morality as such. His other Cambridge colleagues did not use arguments of this kind. But Cudworth was plainly not satisfied with the kind of view that underlies Smith’s and More’s rejection of voluntarism…. The upshot of this view, as I pointed out in the case of More and of Cumberland after him, is a proto-utilitarian ethic, a consequentialist view that tells us that God necessarily loves good generally and acts to bring about as much as he can, and that we ought to do likewise” (p. 209).

“John Smith spells out a further consequence, as I noted earlier. Punishment cannot be retributive; it must be either determent or reformative. Cudworth raises an objection to this conclusion, an objection we do not really expect…. Consequentialism must be rejected because it forces us to the wholly unacceptable conclusion that God could not reasonably carry out retributive justice. But if consequentialism cannot be accepted, then the argument from God’s goodness will not give a satisfactory reason for rejecting voluntarism. Cudworth seems to think he is forced by his moral concerns into arguments about meaning and metaphysics” (pp. 209-210).

Even the proto-deist Herbert of Cherbury had included reward and punishment in an afterlife in his minimalist program. Cudworth clearly recognizes Smith’s point that punishment or retribution cannot be a good in itself. As Schneewind points out, this results in an impasse for Cudworth, who also clearly wants to hold onto a traditional Christian view of supernatural reward and punishment.

“It is as if he would like to attribute to God two moral attributes, goodness and justice, yet hesitates to do so…. His view of eternal punishment suggests that he believes that divine retribution does not do good in the way that beneficience does. Hence justice and love might conflict. But not only is such conflict theoretically inadmissible in Cudworth’s harmonious universe. The question is politically loaded. The Puritans emphasized an Old Testament deity of justice and vengeance. If Cudworth were to give justice priority in God’s moral nature, he would seem to have gone over to their side. But insisting on the priority of love, as he generally does, leads him into serious difficulties explaining eternal punishment. Perhaps silence seemed the best way out” (p. 210).

I will devote a separate post to Cambridge Platonist views on free will.

Passivity Revisited

One point on which I sharply differ from Pippin is his claim that Aristotelian intellect is purely passive. I think I have sufficiently documented that this is not historically accurate. But the context of Pippin’s claim is Kant’s great elaboration of the active side of judging and thinking. And undoubtedly, Kant was arguing against a received view. So whose view was it?

I think the answer has to be Leibniz, his popularizer Christian Wolff, and the Wolffians like Mendelsohn and Baumgarten who dominated philosophy in German universities in Kant’s time. An examination of Kant’s work shows that most of the received views Kant argues against are Wolffian views.

Basic to Leibniz’s and the Wolffians’ point of view is a very categorical preformationism. One of Leibniz’s best known theses asserts a pre-established harmony that not only aims to explain the relationship of mind and body, but encompasses all things whatsoever. According to Leibniz, God creates nothing less than an entire, coherent world, every detail of which is providentially anticipated in advance. Once there is a world, God never “intervenes” in it, because all the work of providence was done in creation. (Providence in the Greek (pronoia) is literally forethought.) God’s creative act consists in the selection of the best of all possible worlds. I personally regard the pre-established harmony as a kind of Platonic myth or “as if” — a speculative hypothesis that makes a kind of poetic sense, but is nonetheless very extravagant.

Consistent with his assertion of pre-established harmony, Leibniz denies that there is real causal interaction between things in the world. Instead, each being carries within it a microcosm of the whole, and is causally affected only by God.

One of Kant’s earliest publications was a defense of real causal interaction against Leibniz. Whether or not Kant thought about it at the time, he was effectively defending an Aristotelian view of the reality of secondary causes. Against this wider background, Kant’s later insistence on the active character of thought can be seen as taking the perspective that we too rank among the real secondary causes.

If the harmony of all things were pre-established, there would be no active work for intellect to do. It would just need to assimilate itself to the pre-established harmony. Intellect would thus be a passive recognition of pre-existing structures. Thus the Leibnizian-Wolffian world view intrinsically promotes the passivity of intellect that Kant opposes.

The Self in Plotinus

Besides standing at a half-way point between Plato and Aristotle and later articulations of monotheistic theology, Plotinus occupies a special place in the history of subjectivity. In a 2016 document “Power, Subject, Sovereignty”, prepared for her confirmation as a director of research at the Centre National de la Rechereche Scientifique, Gwenaëlle Aubry treats her extensive work on Plotinus as the connecting theme of her philosophical investigations. I’m still waiting for the 2nd edition of her Aristotle book to arrive, and wanted in the meantime to extend my coverage of her work on subjectivity in Plotinus.

For the Routledge Handbook of Neoplatonism (2014), Aubry wrote an outstanding more introductory article that was translated to English as “Metaphysics of soul and self in Plotinus”.

“One of the great singularities of the philosophy of Plotinus consists in thinking of the self for its own sake and, in particular, in producing a concept of it different from that of soul. This philosophical breakthrough is inseparable from the discovery of immediate reflexivity, that is, the subject’s ability to apprehend itself independently of its relation to an object or to another subject. In Plotinus, however, this reflexivity occurs only in an interrogative form” (p. 310).

“In other words, it does not, as in Descartes, assume the form of an intuition by means of which the subject, grasping itself as consciousness, would, at the same time, have an evident revelation of its essence….[W]e will see how Plotinus, although he seems to think of the self by means of the connected notions of soul and human being, but also of individual or even of consciousness, ceaselessly produces and renews a gap between them and the self” (ibid).

Plotinus was the first to assert a kind of immediate reflexivity, and indeed arguably the first to speak of generalized consciousness in something like a modern sense, independent of particular contents. But this reflexivity remains associated with a sort of Socratic questioning, and does not degenerate into the dogmatic intuition of a present self that we find in Descartes.

“The self properly so called, which Plotinus refers to as the hēmeis (“we”), is distinct both from the essential or separated soul and from the soul linked to the body. Situated rather than defined, it cannot be substantified. To use Plotinian terminology, the hēmeis is neither god nor animal, but rather the power to become either one. These two possible and exclusive identifications depend on the orientation it gives to its consciousness. Consciousness therefore does not appear, as it will in Descartes, as a revelation of identity, but as a means of identification” (ibid).

“Another singular aspect of the philosophy of Plotinus is that it affirms the existence of a
separated soul, which remains in the Intellect and alien to both the powers and the passions of the body. This doctrine was to be rejected by the later Neoplatonists, particularly Iamblichus and Proclus…, but it occupies a fundamental place in Plotinian thought” (p. 311).

The “separated soul” is a unique doctrine of Plotinus that seems to have indirectly influenced the more unified scholastic notion of an “intellectual soul”. Later, Aubry refers to it as an “intellective soul”. By means of it Plotinus gives us an especially close connection to the divine.

“[I]f the Plotinian subject grasps itself only in an interrogative form, that is, not as something obvious but as something strange, it is because it undergoes the experience of several modes of relation to itself” (ibid).

“[S]trictly speaking, the intellective soul cannot be counted among the parts of the soul, and yet, it is indeed ours (hēmeteron); in fact, he continues, “it is ours without being ours … It is ours when we use it; it is not ours when we do not use it” (pp. 311-312).

Here Plotinus remains faithful to Aristotle in maintaining that intellect is not a proper part of the soul, and yet can still be said to be “ours”.

“Like the total Intellect, and each of the intellects of which it is composed, the higher soul is characterized by intuitive thought, that is, by the simultaneous, inarticulated and non-propositional grasp of a complex content – comparable to a glance that embraces all the features of a face in a single vision” (p. 312).

This is precisely the kind of originary intellectual intuition that Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel would deny. As Kant would say, this kind of unitary vision could only be a result of synthesis. But for Plotinus, unitary intellectual intuition is the starting point of all thought, which Aristotelian “thinking things through” only weakly imitates. Nonetheless, he retains a partial faithfulness to Aristotle in maintaining that this does not include a putatively full intuition of self.

“The soul’s forgetfulness of the Intellect is also a forgetting of its own intellective origin –
an origin that nevertheless has not come and gone, nor does it belong to a mythic past,
but that remains in a state of unperceived presence. This forgetfulness is characteristic of
pre-philosophical consciousness. Unaware of its dignity, soul is fascinated by externality:
the body, the sensible. Narcissistic, it prefers its reflection to itself, ignorant of the fact that
without it, this reflection, which is merely the effect of its power, could not subsist” (ibid).

For Plotinus, we remain potentially in touch with the separate intellective soul. All that is required to experience it is that we choose to turn ourselves toward it, but Plotinus says many people never make this choice, and instead remain ensnared in what Aubry calls narcissism.

“[T]his essential self constituted by the separated soul must indeed be distinguished from the hēmeis and from what we may call the biographical subject, that is, the bearer of a history, a memory, and the form of consciousness that is linked to them” (ibid).

“Like memory and individual history, consciousness disappears in the Intellect. More precisely, it gives way to a feeling of presence in which the duality between subject and object is abolished. In this state, Plotinus writes, we are ‘only potentially ourselves’ (Enn[eads].IV.4[28].2.5–8). We merge with that which we contemplate” (p. 313).

Here we really do have a “metaphysics of presence”.

“This state in which the subject no longer experiences itself as such, but in its unity
with being and with the others, is nevertheless designated by Plotinus as the site of its
greatest proximity to itself, at the same time as it is genuine self-knowledge: “Being in this
way, we are more than anything conscious of ourselves (hautois synetoi), and we acquire
knowledge of ourselves as we make ourselves one” (Enn. V.8.[31].11.31–3)” (ibid).

The subject experiences itself “in its unity with being and with the others”. Here we can see a precedent for the nonprivate interiority that distinguishes Augustine’s thought from that of Descartes and Locke. Clearly we have here a non-empirical notion of self.

“Still, the question arises of what the subject, thus identified with the intellective soul and unburdened of all biographical content, then grasps of itself. At this essential level, can we still speak of identity? Of individuality?” (ibid).

“The paradox of the Plotinian personal self is thus illuminated: if, for Plotinus, one is never
more oneself than when one is no longer conscious of oneself, this is because the subject identified with its essential soul is not abolished in the universal. Rather, it is identified with the very source of its individuality, that is, with the singular viewpoint of its intellect upon the total Intellect, as well as with the logos that bears the power of its own becoming” (ibid).

“Indeed, the notion of a separated soul orients Plotinian ethics, which has no other goal than to transform this constant but ordinarily unperceived presence into a conscious presence. Far from being immediate or mechanical, this transformation is given as a demanding, normed itinerary, whose various stages correspond to various degrees of virtue…. This ethical itinerary, and we shall return to this point, is inseparably a trajectory of consciousness, which gradually turns away from the body to orient itself towards the separated soul” (ibid).

Once again, here is a real “metaphysics of presence”.

“In truth, then, the Plotinian beyond is very close: to reach it, it is enough to make oneself deaf to the tumult of the body, to release oneself from narcissistic fascination. For Plotinus, Odysseus represents the anti-Narcissus: he is the one who was able to resist the spells of the sensible, the charms of Circe and of Calypso (Enn. I.6[1].8.18–20). Yet the Plotinian Odyssey is a return to something that is always-already-there, which is the locus in us of a divine autarky, lucidity and happiness” (p. 314).

Again, for Plotinus the divine is very near.

“[S]trictly speaking, for Plotinus the soul does not descend. What descends, or mixes with the body to animate it, is the power, the dynamis, that emanates from the separated soul” (ibid).

Here we have a profound difference from Aristotle. In Aristotle, soul is strictly emergent. Souls don’t pre-exist and there is no “descent” at all, only an upward movement.

“In its confrontation with the body and with temporality, noēsis [pure thought] is transformed into dianoia [thinking things through]. This is the moment by which the soul is truly constituted qua soul, in its difference from the Intellect” (ibid).

Plotinus has the unprecedented idea that soul is constituted as a “procession” from Intellect.

The pre-existent “separate” soul lives eternally in unitary intuition. For Plotinus, ordinary human “thinking things through” is the result of the extension, folding, and division of originary intuition into time. This “descent” is necessary in order for anything to be manifested, and therefore not to be equated with anything like Biblical original sin.

“The descent can be considered as a fall or a fault only when dianoia and the consciousness linked to it, forgetful of the separated soul, are completely oriented towards the body” (ibid).

For Plotinus, we are “fallen” beings not by virtue of our embodiment, but only insofar as we are individually lost in the soul’s narcissistic pursuit of its own reflection.

“As early as chapter 2 of Enn. IV.8[6], Plotinus states a principle: ‘It is not a bad thing for the soul to provide the body with the power of good and being, since it is not true that all providence applied to lower reality prevents this providential agent from remaining in what is best’ (2.24–5)” (ibid).

Soul in Plotinus is not just something that descends. It is the very agent of providence. But it is capable of being waylaid or losing its way.

“[T]he World Soul [as distinct from soul in general] does not “descend”. What is “sent” into the world is not it, but its “lowest power” (dynamis). Yet it is precisely because the World Soul does not descend that it is able to govern the universe, to set it in order into a cosmos, a beautiful totality. This point of doctrine is explicitly formulated elsewhere, for instance at Enn. IV.3[27].6.21: “The souls that incline toward the intelligible world have a greater power”; or else Enn. II.9[33].2, where one reads that the World Soul governs “simply by looking at what is before it, thanks to its wonderful power. The more it devotes itself to contemplation, the more it is beautiful and powerful” (15–16)” (p. 315).

Unlike Aristotle and the scholastics, Plotinus also speaks of a Soul of the World that is distinct from individual souls.

“This description of the mode of governance of the World Soul is nothing other than an application of the Plotinian model of causality. This states that from every being in act (energeiai) there necessarily emanates an active, productive power (dynamis), which in turn is the cause of a new being and a new act” (ibid).

This sheds light on how the descent of the soul is not inherently a fall. It is part of the larger cosmic process of procession (known via the Latin translations of Avicenna as “emanation”), which is what in Plotinus takes the place of creation. Plotinus seems to claim that when we turn toward the separated soul, from us too will proceed or emanate a productive power, capable anew of spontaneously carrying forward our engagement with the world in all its complexity. This spontaneous engagement, freed from narcissistic pursuit of our own reflection, is for Plotinus strictly more capable than a narcissistically involved engagement.

It is not worldly engagement as such but narcissistic attachment to worldly things that corresponds to the Fall.

“For the individual soul as for the World Soul, however, Plotinus emphasizes that it is this power, this dynamis, and not the soul itself, that descends and is mixed with the body. This is why the Aristotelian definition of the soul as first entelechy of the body must be opposed by the assertion that the soul is itself in act, already entelekheia, without the body, and that only for this reason there can be a body. Thus, the synamphoteron, that is, the living body, is not a mixture of body and soul, but only of the body and the power emanated from the soul” (ibid).

Again we see the dramatic difference between Aristotle’s modest experience-oriented and biologically grounded emergent notion of soul, and the grand metaphysical or divine pre-existent intellective soul posited by Plotinus.

“If the higher soul does not descend, if only its emanated dynamis is mixed with the body, how should we understand Plotinus’ words that the soul ‘leaps’ towards its own body? The answer is that this motion is what constitutes the soul qua soul, in its difference from the Intellect, or again that by which noēsis is modified into dianoia. Indeed, dianoia is the result of the encounter of intellective thought with time. It deploys the immediacy and totality of intuition into successive moments, to respond to the demands of the body, of action, and of a life diffracted by temporality (Enn. III.7[45].11). Thus, it must be considered “the sign of a diminishment of the Intellect” (Enn. IV.3[27].18.1–7)” (ibid).

Here we have a major source for all the arguments about whether intellect should be conceived as originally immediately intuitive or as originally discursive. Many people read Aristotle as if his notion of intellect were the intuitive one that Plotinus articulates explicitly. I think Aristotle is closer to Kant and Hegel’s position that intellect is inherently discursive, and that unifying intuitions only come about as the result of processes of synthesis.

“This movement seems to attest an oscillation between two conceptions of the subject: the reflexive subject and the subject of attribution (the logical or ontological substrate). What in fact appears, however, is that once again the reflexive subject – the hēmeis – does not allow itself to be reduced to the subject of attribution…. In this irreducibility of the hēmeis to the various levels of the soul, we may see an effect of Plotinus’ discovery of the difference between subject-consciousness and subject-substrate” (p. 317).

Here indeed we have the root of modern notions of “the subject” as consciousness. This same gap that Aubry speaks of is what leads Augustine to deny that the soul, spirit, or mind is to be identified with a subject as substrate.

“Consciousness is therefore not so much constitutive of identity as it is a condition for identification. We are not what we are aware of: quite the contrary, we become what we become aware of. If the reflexive question ends up in the acknowledgement of a duality, becoming aware, for its part, is equivalent to the choice of an identity” (p. 320).

For Plotinus, consciousness in itself is not a foundation for personal identity, as it is in Descartes and Locke. Instead, Aubry locates the basis of individuality for Plotinus in the “separated” soul.

The idea that we make a sort of primordial choice of what kind of being we are is unprecedented.

“[T]he constant activity within us of the separated soul is the necessary condition for such everyday cognitive operations as judgment…. It is in the latter — identical to the pure ousia, that is, the separated soul — that the foundation of individuality resides, together with the most intense life and an unalterable happiness” (p. 321).

The suggestion that the separated soul is involved in judgment is new to me, and intriguing. This makes it seem not so “separated” after all.

“Plotinus, for his part, is able to conceive both the permanent, impersonal subject and the
ethical subject defined as what makes the choice of its identity” (ibid).

The Knowledge Sought

Following the emphasis of al-Farabi on demonstrative “science”, the Latin scholastic tradition treated “metaphysics” as a completed science. Some writers attributed such a completed science to Aristotle, while others, following in the wake of Avicenna, put forward their own improvements.

With respect to being, Aristotle himself speaks of knowledge sought rather than possessed. In inquiring about being “as such”, he is exploring a question given prominence by others. Far from claiming to have final knowledge of being as such, he highlights the ambiguity of “being”. There can be no “as such” — and hence no final knowledge — of an ambiguous thing.

This is not the end of the story, however. The very first sentence of the Metaphysics is “All human beings by nature stretch themselves out toward knowing. A sign of this is our love of the senses; for even apart from their use, they are loved on their own account (book capital Alpha (I), ch. 1, Sachs tr., p. 1).

We are after knowledge of something. It is just not clear that that something would be accurately characterized as “being”, full stop.

“[A] sign of the one who knows and the one who does not is being able to teach, and for this reason we regard the art, more than the experience, to be knowledge” (p. 2).

“Further, we consider none of the senses to be wisdom, even though they are the most authoritative ways of knowing particulars; but they do not pick out the why of anything” (ibid).

“[T]he person with experience seems wiser than those who have any perception whatever, the artisan wiser than those with experience, the master craftsman wiser than the manual laborer, and the contemplative arts more so than the productive ones. It is apparent, then, that wisdom is a knowledge concerned with certain sources and causes” (p. 3).

This concern with sources and causes, with the why, is the true subject matter of the Metaphysics. This is emphasized again at length in book Epsilon (VI).

“Since we are seeking this knowledge, this should be examined: about what sort of causes and what sort of sources wisdom is the knowledge. Now if one takes the accepted opinions we have about the wise man, perhaps from this it will become more clear. We assume first that the wise man knows all things, in the way that is possible, though he does not have knowledge of them as particulars. Next, we assume that the one who is able to know things that are difficult, and not easy for a human being to know, is wise; for perceiving is common to everyone, for which reason it is an easy thing and nothing wise. Further, we assume the one who has more precision and is more able to teach the causes is wiser concerning each kind of knowledge. And among the kinds of knowledge, we assume the one that is for its own sake and chosen for the sake of knowing more to be wisdom than the one chosen for the sake of results” (ch. 2, p. 3).

“Now of these, the knowing of all things must belong to the one who has most of all the universal knowledge, since he knows in a certain way all the things that come under it; and these are just about the most difficult things for human beings to know, those that are most universal, since they are farthest away from the senses. And the most precise kinds of knowledge are the ones that are most directed at first things, since those that reason from fewer things are more precise than those that reason from extra ones” (p. 4).

For long I struggled with this last statement. How could a knowledge of first things be the most precise of all? In the Topics, he says that first principles can only be investigated by dialectic: “[T]his task belongs properly, or most appropriately, to dialectic; for dialectic is a process of criticism wherein lies the path to the principles of all inquiries” (Collected Works, Barnes ed., p. 168).

Some commentators — influenced by al-Farabi and the subsequent tradition’s overwhelming emphasis on the place of demonstration as opposed to dialectic in Aristotle — have considered it a puzzle or a defect that the Metaphysics and other Aristotelian texts do not seem to consist in demonstrations as described in the Prior Analytics. The answer is that the Metaphysics and the others generally do follow the model of dialectic articulated in the Topics, as the Topics itself says they ought to.

Returning to the Metaphysics, Aristotle has already stressed that the most universal knowledge is also the most difficult. Also, he standardly distinguishes between how things are “in themselves” and how they are “for us”. The knowledge of first things would be most precise in itself, not necessarily for us in our relative achievement of it.

To anticipate, I think the final conclusion of the Metaphysics will be something like “All things are ultimately moved by love of the good”. The qualification “ultimately” is essential to making sense of this.

(For Aristotle himself, all becoming and terrestrial motion are grounded in — though not in detail determined by — the entelechy or entelechies of circular celestial motion. The stars are a kind of everlasting living beings endowed with superior intellect, and are directly moved by love of the first cause. This might seem quaint to modern people. I find the love part beautiful in a poetic sort of way, but think Aristotle’s theoretical astronomy in general and his views of the special status of celestial objects have relatively little impact on interpretation of the rest of his work — particularly with respect to the teleology affecting earthly things and the discussions here in the Metaphysics.)

Plato says that the Good surpasses all things in ancientness and power. He represents Socrates as provocatively arguing that all beings desire the good, regardless of how confused they may be about what the good really is. No one deliberately and self-consciously desires what they recognize as evil. That is impossible, because it is logically self-contradictory. For the same reason, there also could not be a “principle” of evil. This is a tremendously powerful thought, of unparalleled importance for ethics. It sets a fundamental tone of charitable interpretation, in diametrical contrast to the kind of point of view that says those people over there are just evil.

Aristotle, however, says that Plato does not clearly explain the mode of activity of the Good, or how it acts as a cause. According to Aristotle, when Plato does gesture in this direction, he lapses into treating the Good as either a formal cause or an efficient cause, or both. But speaking in terms of formal or efficient causality loses what is most essential about the good — what many contemporary philosophers would call its normative character.

Aristotle considered his own contribution in this area to be a thorough account of how all things are ultimately moved by that for the sake of which, and of how the Good indirectly influences things just as that for the sake of which. This, once again, is what Kant called “internal teleology”.

After the horrors of the 20th century, many people have lost faith in the fundamental goodness of life. This is basically an emotional response. The indubitable factuality of horrendous evil in the world is not an Aristotelian or Hegelian actuality, and does not touch actuality. The factuality of evil does pose a roadblock for common interpretations of particular providence or “external” teleology, but not for Aristotelian or Hegelian teleology.

But how could a knowledge of first things be exact? We certainly don’t have knowledge of the first cause in itself. But coming back to my formulation “All things are ultimately moved by love of the good”, this does meet Aristotle’s criterion of simplicity: all things are said to be ultimately moved by one thing (even though more directly, they are moved by their own love of whatever they do love, which seems good to them within the limits of their understanding).

We have exact knowledge neither of the first cause in itself nor of the particulars we encounter in life, but perhaps we can after all have exact, certain knowledge that “All things are ultimately moved by love of the good”. This is the kind of thing I think Aristotle is suggesting. (See also Aristotle on Explanation.)

Next in this series: The Four Causes Revisited

Something from Nothing?

The idea of something from nothing always seemed to me like pulling rabbits out of a hat. Taken in a piecemeal sense, it would seem to be completely arbitrary, and arbitrariness leads to all sorts of bad things. Nothing good is arbitrary.

Leibniz defended creation from nothing and particular providence, while insisting that God does not intervene arbitrarily in the world. Already Augustine had said that what are called miracles are only exceptions to the usual course of nature, and that God never contravenes nature in an absolute sense. This leaves room for debate as to what kinds of exceptions can occur.

If God is the pure To-Be that gives being to beings as Aquinas says, creation from nothing would seem to mean only that the giving of being is not a case of “making from”. But why is this not just called Being giving being? What does “nothing” have to do with it? Of course, the doctrine of creation from nothing long predates Aquinas, and Aquinas was a consummate diplomat in matters of doctrine. Common doctrine is not a simple matter of truth, as the dogmatists would have it; it is a kind of social compromise that helps keep the peace. Preserving accepted phrases while giving them new meaning is a time-honored diplomatic move.

Aquinas’ notion of creation was likely also in part developed to oppose the dualist teachings of the Cathars, according to whom the physical world was created by an evil power.

I have considerable sympathy for the eternity of the world, or alternatively some sort of eternal creation, such as Aquinas recognized to be logically possible. More sophisticated accounts of creation like those of Augustine and Aquinas explicitly include the creation of time, so that there would be no “time before creation”, even though they affirm a beginning. I have trouble distinguishing a beginning outside of time from eternity.

Proclus’ Elements

The later neoplatonist Proclus (412-485 CE) was head of the Platonic Academy in Athens, at a time when the Athenian Academy was somewhat notorious as the intellectual center of resistance to the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire. Nonetheless, his work had a profound influence on the Arabic, Byzantine, and Latin traditions. He is usually cited as the main philosophical influence on the early Christian theologian pseudo-Dionysius, who was taken very seriously by Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas.

Proclus wrote extensive commentaries on Plato, as well as an influential commentary on book 1 of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry. Hegel called him the greatest dialectician of antiquity. Though I think Hegel by his own principles really should have given that title to Aristotle, Hegel was right to recognize Proclus as important.

Aquinas is credited with recognizing that the Latin Book of Causes — a translation of the Arabic Discourse on the Pure Good — was mostly derived from Proclus’ Elements of Theology. Aquinas treated Proclus himself with considerable respect. Dietrich of Freiberg made significant use of his work, and his student Berthold of Moosburg wrote a very long commentary interpreting the Elements of Theology in Christian terms. The Renaissance theologian Nicolas of Cusa and the maverick Giordano Bruno were much inspired by Proclus.

Along with Spinoza’s Ethics, Proclus’ Elements shares the peculiar distinction of being written in a style visibly influenced by Euclid’s Elements. Euclid’s work has often been cited as a sort of paradigm of demonstrative reasoning. Though Proclus, unlike Spinoza, did not work from explicit definitions and postulates and used a looser style of demonstration, his Elements consists of theorems and a sort of demonstrations.

Proclus defends the neoplatonic idea of a One that transcends being, but as Gwenaëlle Aubry and Laurent Lavaud point out in the introduction to the French collection Relire les Éléments de théologie de Proclus (2021), perhaps his most influential idea is that of a very strong continuity from the highest principles to the most mundane effects, which has been read as a strong assertion of immanence as well as transcendence. He is an important source for all the later theological traditions that want to argue for simultaneous immanence and transcendence.

Proclus very explicitly crystallizes what I have called the generalized “unmoved mover” model of causality in Plotinus. For Proclus, “higher” and “lower” causes cooperate in the constitution of worldly things, but the higher cause is always more of a cause than the lower cause. At the same time, he rejects Plotinus’ identification of matter with evil, while emphasizing all of Plotinus’ more positive affirmations of the goodness of manifestation and the beauty of the cosmos.

In a separate treatise On Providence, he develops a sort of epistemic analogue to the generalized unmoved mover theory. “Providence” (pronoia — literally, “forethought”) is a knowledge-like thing that is superior to knowledge in that it is supposed to be eternal and unextended, and to involve no separation of what we might call subject and object. Proclus develops a subtle and suggestive account of something metaphorically like implicit, unextended “seeds” of forms within the overflowing of the One that transcends all extended form. While the One does not “know” worldly things, it “pre-knows” their unextended “seeds”, within something like what Schelling later paradoxically called the identity of identity and nonidentity.

In the Elements, Proclus argues for an interdependence of being, life, and intellect. While one obvious reading of this would emphasize a foundational role of spiritual beings in Proclus’ metaphysics, I am intrigued that it can also be interpreted as a somewhat “deflationary” account of being, closer to Aristotle, and far removed from later notions of pure abstract existence. We can’t begin to have an account of being, without also having an account of life and intellect. With his endorsement of a One beyond “being”, Proclus had no need for a commitment to a notion of pure “being”.

Spinoza on Teleology

“All the prejudices I here undertake to expose depend on this one: that men commonly suppose that all natural things act, as men do, on account of an end; indeed, they maintain as certain that God himself directs all things to some certain end” (Spinoza, Collected Works vol. I, Curley trans., p. 439).

“[I]t follows, first, that men think themselves free, because they are conscious of their volitions and their appetite, and do not think, even in their dreams, of the causes by which they are disposed to wanting and willing, because they are ignorant of [those causes]. It follows, secondly, that men always act on account of an end, viz. on account of their advantage, which they want. Hence they seek to know only the final causes of what has been done, and when they have heard them, they are satisfied, because they have no reason to doubt further” (p. 440).

“Hence, they consider all natural things as means to their own advantage. And knowing that they had found these means, not provided them for themselves, they had reason to believe that there was someone else who had prepared those means for their use. For after they considered things as means, they could not believe that the things had made themselves; but from the means that they were accustomed to prepare for themselves, they had to infer that there was a ruler, or a number of rulers of nature, endowed with human freedom, who had taken care of all things for them, and had made all things for their use” (pp. 440-441).

The famous appendix to book 1 of Spinoza’s Ethics, from which the above is excerpted, is a sort of psychological exposé of the superstition-like attitude behind the kind of “external” teleology that sees everything in terms of ends, but treats all ends as resulting from the conscious aims or will of a supernatural being or beings, more or less on the model of what theologians have called “particular providence”.

But though he explicitly refers only to this kind of conscious providence that implies ongoing supernatural intervention in the ordinary workings of the world, he nonetheless in an unqualified way dismisses all explanation in terms of ends. At the same time, the notion of determination or causality that he does acknowledge as genuine is too narrow and rigid (too univocal). (See also Thoughts on Teleology.)

Most of the historic criticisms of Spinoza have been extremely unfair; this includes remarks by Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. Spinoza rightly pointed out that we tend to overrate the role of conscious intentions in human affairs and the workings of the world. But Leibniz rightly pointed out that Spinoza’s exclusive emphasis on unconditional divine power or omnipotence (as contrasted with goodness) — which reduces everything to efficient causes — has undesirable consequences.

Essential Goodness

By essential goodness I mean a kind of multiple potential that is always there. With Aristotle, I don’t assume there is a single Platonic form of the Good. I also don’t assume that the potential for goodness is evenly distributed, but it seems to be plentiful. As befits its potential status, it is simultaneously over- and underdetermined. There is more than one way for a situation to turn out well. This is not automatic, and usually requires our cooperation and active participation.

Part of what makes meanings meaningful to us is their involvement with contingency. Contingency means that what we do matters, but it also means there will always be things beyond our control that we passively experience.

A few of these may be terrible. We lose loved ones. After seeing horrors like the Nazi concentration camps, some people lost their faith, because God did not prevent those things from occurring. This was based on a wrong expectation of a universally present guiding hand in events. Enough wonders do come to us in life that metaphors of providence speak to us, and hope is a good thing. But providence does not necessitate anything, because goodness is a potential that typically requires a cooperating agent(s) for its realization.