Neoplatonism

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Template:Platonism Neoplatonism (also Neo-Platonism) is a school of philosophy that took shape in the 3rd century A.D. Based on the teachings of Plato and the Platonists, it contained enough unique interpretations of Plato that some view Neoplatonism as substantively different from what Plato wrote and believed. Neoplatonists generally prefer to say what they advocate was previously taught by Plato. The prefix "neo" (Greek for "new") was only added by modern scholars to distinguish between the two, but the practitioners of the time simply called themselves Platonists.

Neoplatonism took definitive shape with the philosopher Plotinus, who claimed to have received his teachings from Ammonius Saccas, a humble dock worker and philosopher in Alexandria. Plotinus's student Porphyry assembled his teachings into the six Enneads.

Subsequent Neoplatonic philosophers included Hypatia of Alexandria, Proclus, Simplicius of Cilicia, and Damascius, who wrote On First Principles. He was born at Damascus and was the last teacher of Neoplatonism at Athens.

1 Teachings
2 Christian Neo-Platonism
3 Islamic Neoplatonism
4 Renaissance Neoplatonism
5 Modern Neo-Platonism
6 Publications
7 External links

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Teachings

Neoplatonism is a form of idealistic monism. Plotinus taught the existence of an ineffable and transcendent One, from which emanated the rest of the universe as a sequence of lesser beings. Later Neoplatonic philosophers, especially Iamblichus, added hundreds of intermediate gods, angels and demons, and other beings as emanations between the One and humanity. Plotinus' system was much simpler in comparison.

Neoplatonists believed human perfection and happiness were attainable in this world, without awaiting an afterlife. Perfection and happiness— seen as synonymous— could be achieved through philosophical contemplation.

They did not believe in an independent existence of evil. They compared it to darkness, which does not exist in itself, but only as the absence of light. So too, evil is simply the absence of good. Things are good insofar as they exist. They are evil only insofar as they are imperfect, lacking some good that they should have. It is also a cornerstone of Neoplatonism to teach that all people return to the Source. The Source, Absolute or One, is what all things spring from and as a superconsciousness is where all things return. It can be said that all consciousness is wiped clean and returned to a blank slate when returning to the source.

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Christian Neo-Platonism

This aspect of Neoplatonism helped the great Christian theologian Augustine of Hippo, on learning of it, to abandon dualistic Manichaeism and convert to Christianity. When, three or four years after his 387 baptism, he wrote his treatise On True Religion, he was still thinking of Christianity in Neoplatonic terms. But, after he was ordained priest and bishop and had acquired greater familiarity with Scripture, he came to see contradictions between Neoplatonism and Christianity.

Nevertheless, many Christians were influenced by Neoplatonism. They identified the One as God. The most important and influential of them was the fifth century author known as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. His works were significant for both Eastern Orthodox and Western branches of Christiantiy. John Scotus's ninth century Latin translation of the writing of pseudo-Dionysius was widely studied during the Middle Ages. Neoplatonism also had links with the belief systems known as Gnosticism. Plotinus, however, rebuked Gnosticism in the ninth tractate of the second Enneads: "Against Those That Affirm The Creator of The Kosmos and The Kosmos Itself to Be Evil" (generally quoted as "Against The Gnostics"). Being grounded in platonic thought, the neoplatonists would have rejected the gnostic vilification of Plato's demiurge, a deity discussed in Timaeus.

In the Middle Ages, Neoplatonist ideas influenced the thinking of Jewish Kabbalists, such as Isaac the Blind. However, the Kabbalists modified Neoplatonism according to their own monotheistic belief. A famous Jewish Neoplatonic philosopher from the early Middle Ages was Solomon ibn Gabirol. During this period, Neoplatonist ideas also influenced Islamic and Sufi thinkers such as al Farabi and through him Avicenna.

Neoplatonism survived in the Eastern Christian Church as an independent tradition and was reintroduced to the west by Plethon. It was subsequently revived in the Italian Renaissance by figures such as Marsilio Ficino, the Medici and Sandro Botticelli. Thomas Taylor, "The English Platonist", wrote extensively on Platonism and translated almost the entire Platonic corpus into English.

Neoplatonism has influenced some modern Christian theologians as well.

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Islamic Neoplatonism

Islamic Neoplatonism developed in a milieu already saturated with the thought of Plotinus and Aristotle. The former studied in Alexandria, and the Alexandrine philosophical syllabus included such figures as Porphyry of Tyre and Proclus. Associated with these scholars were two major channels of Islamic Neoplatonism, the so-called Theology of Aristotle and the Liber de Causis "Book of Causes". Other cities beloved of the philosophers at the time of the rise of Islam in the 1st Century AH (7th century CE) included Gondeshapur and Harran.

Islamic Neoplatonism stressed one aspect of the Qur'anic God, the transcendent, and ignored another, the creative. For the Neoplatonists, all things emanated from the deity. Islamic philosophers were imbued to a greater or lesser degree with either Aristotelianism or Neoplatonism or, as was often the case, with both. Al-Kindi, the father of Islamic philosophy, has a Neoplatonic aspect, but the doctrine reaches its intellectual fruition in the complex emanationist hierarchies developed by al-Farabi and ibn Sina. Their views are later developed (or metamorphosed) by later thinkers into an emanative hierarchy of lights, as with Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi, or the doctrine of the Unity of Being espoused by Ibn al-'Arabi. While al-Ghazali and Ibn Rushd both vigorously opposed Neoplatonic views, the latter attacked the former for his general opposition to the philosophers.

Neoplatonism itself had a major impact on the Shīˤa Muslims known as the Ismā'īlī and became the substratum for its theology. Historically, Neoplatonism in Islam achieved its climax with the Fatimid Ismā'īlī conquest of Egypt towards the end of the 4th century AH (10th century CE). While Neoplatonism later declined in philosophical importance in the face of rampant Aristotelianism and Hanbalism, it may be said to have bequeathed an important religious, historical and cultural legacy to the Islamic world, which in the Ismā'īlī movement endures to this day.

In addition, Fatimid theology led to the Druze religion, which to this day reveres Plato and other Greek philosophers as prophets. Their self-designation is Muwaħħidūn or "Unitarians" to reflect their theology.

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Renaissance Neoplatonism

Renaissance Neoplatonism cannot really be easily considered as a school or even a coherent movement. Unlike humanism or Aristoteleanism, it was not a program of education and so did not constitute normal studies, nor did it ever become a program of study or curriculum. Aside from the Academy founded by Marsilio Ficino and Cosimo de'Medici, it had only the slimmest of institutional support as a distinct discipline. Only a few philosophers, such as Cardinal Bessarion, Nicholas Cusanus, Marsilio Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola, can be unabashedly classified as "Neoplatonists." In the history of ideas, Renaissance Neoplatonism is more important for its diffusion into a variety of philosophies and cultural activities, such as literature, painting, and music.

The humanists, beginning with Petrarch, associated themselves in part with Platonic philosphy as a reaction against Aristoteleanism, though the early humanists knew little or nothing about Platonism. It wasn't until the arrival of Byzantine philosophers, most importantly John Chrysolas and Pletho, that the Italians were really introduced to the entire corpus of Platonic works. The first to undertake translating and transmitting Plato to the rest of Europe was Cardinal Bessarion, who, as a student of Pletho when he visited Italy, had thoroughly internalized Platonic ideas. This translation project, begun by Bessarion, would be completed a few decades later when Ficino undertook the herculean task of translating all of Plato's works into Latin.

The first highly influential Neoplatonic philosopher in the Italian Renaissance was Nicholas Cusanus who developed a rich and complex view of the universe and human knowledge. Among his most important and far-reaching ideas was the idea that mathematical knowledge was always absolutely certain knowledge; as such, the mathematical sciences were higher than all other sciences, including the qualitative empiricism of Aristotle. Cusanus also argued that there was one single, archetypal idea in the mind of God and that this idea is present in every other idea and in every physical object. With the proper understanding, one could arrive at this archetypal idea by studying any object whatsoever. This is a remarkably similar conclusion to that arrived at by the School of Principle in Chinese Neo-Confucianism. The critical difference between Cusanus and the Chinese Neo-Confucianists was that Cusanus advocated a mathematical approach while Neo-Confucianism led to a qualitative empirical science such as that practiced by Aristotle.

Marsilio Ficino Template:Main

The most important of the Renaissance Neo-Platonists was Marsilio Ficino, who developed original and highly influential ideas from Plato and Neoplatonism. Ficino was an active and dynamic mind; as the founder of the Academy in Firenze under the auspices of Cosimo de'Medici, he, more than any other person in the Renaissance, was responsible for its widespread diffusion. The Academy resembled no academic organization that you might think of; it was part discussion group and part literary club. Discussions were wide ranging and activities included poetry and games. The overall character of the Academy, however, was syncretic and synthetic. The members of the Academy believed at some level that all human thought and arts could be discussed in a common language based on Neoplatonic ideas. Ficino translated all of Plato's dialogues into Latin and produced a number of commentaries, but his most important and systematic work was Platonic Theology , in which he outlines Neoplatonism and synthesizes it with other philosophical systems, in particular, Christianity. Ficino's philosophy is based on one central doctrine: the human soul is immortal and the center of the universe. It is the only thing that sits midway between the abstract realm of ideas and the physical world—as such, it is the mediator between these two worlds:

"All things beneath God are but single things, but the soul can truly be said to be all things . . . For this resaon, the soul is called the center of creation and the middle term of all things in the universe, the entirety of the universe, the face of all things, and the binding and joining center of the universe."

This special, central position in the universe made humanity the most dignified of all objects in creation; Ficino's emphasis on the dignity of humanity was derived from humanistic currents. From the standpoint of religion, Ficino was a syncretic in that he believed that all the world's religions could be related to one another. At the heart of every religion was a belief in the one God and the variety of relgions was not a bad thing but rather an expression of the complexity and beauty of God worshipped in all his infinite aspects. Of course, Christianity was a more complete religion.

Ficino believed that the purpose of human life was contemplation. The ultimate goal of human life was to be reunited with God, at least in an intellectual sense. This goal, according to Ficino, was realized through contemplation. At first, the human mind removes itself from the outside, physical world, and thinks about abstract ideas concerning knowledge and the soul. As it rises in knowledge it eventually reaches a point where it can arrive at an unmediated vision of God itself—this last stage would occur only after death and the immortality that the soul would enjoy would be an eternity of this vision of God.

From this program, Ficino developed a concept he called Platonic love, which had far-reaching consequences in the history of love and social reality in the European tradition. While Ficino believed that the human soul pursued contemplation more or less in isolation, he acknowledged that human beings were fundamentally social. When the spiritual relationship between God and the individual, sought through contemplation, is reproduced in a friendship or love with another person, that constitutes for Ficino spiritual or Platonic love. In other words, when the love and spiritual activity in a friendship mirrors the love for God, then the two individuals have attained the highest type of friendship that they can. Ficino did not condemn sexuality or erotics nor deny that Platonic love was only possible outside sexual relations; his only concern was the nature of the spiritual bond between two people.

Consequences

The two most influential aspects of Neoplatonism for Western culture were its emphasis on the priority and certainty of mathematics and Ficino's doctrine of Platonic love. While Renaissance artists, thinkers, and other cultural producers only picked up Neoplatonism in part, the doctrine of Platonic love diffused quickly all throughout the culture.

Nicholas of Cusa expanded the Platonic argument that mathematics were a form of certain knowledge to the radical thesis that mathematics represented the divine ideas. This extreme position, accepted by Neoplatonists (except of Pico), eventually became the basis for a new form of science. Through the high middle ages, scientific inquiry was dominated by the qualitative, empirical science of Aristotle combined with the doctrine from the Arabic philosopher, Averroes, that inquiry into the physical world should never include speculation about God or any other kind of metaphysics. In distinction to this, the Neoplatonists believed that the physical world was fundamentally mathematical and that a knowledge of that mathematics would provide access to the divine mind.

The most famous advocate of this scientific position was Joahnnes Kepler and, a century later, Galileo Galilei. Their story is told in the chapter on the so-called scientific revolution, but we can look forward at the conclusion of this essay. Kepler, working in the first half of the sixteenth century, believed that the mathematics of the universe was the truth of the universe. Until Kepler, astronomers and astrologers believed that the qualitative understanding of the universe superseded the quantitaive understanding of the universe.

The Ptolemaic universe, which was a mathematical system for describing the movements of the heavenly bodies in relation to the earth as the center of the universe, had long been regarded as a nearly insane mathematical system. That wasn't the point, though. Even though the Ptolemaic universe didn't make much sense mathematically, it served its purpose in that it provided the math to successfully predict movements of the heavenly bodies. For Kepler, the math of the movements of the stars and planets was the movement of the stars and planets; the most rational mathematical universe was one in which the planets and stars orbitted the sun. This, because it was the most rational mathematics, represented the physical truth. This is a unique reorientation of mathematics to physical phenomena and remains the standard world view of European physics.

While Galileo's relationship to Neoplatonism is controversial, he seems to have inherited from Neoplatonism this same view of mathematics. The fundamental truth of the universe, as Galileo saw it, was mathematical. Only when our understanding of the universe corresponded to the math of the universe could we say that we understood the universe. In the dogmatic throes of the counter-Reformation, the church wasn't willing to accept some of the conclusions that resulted from this viewopint, such as understanding that the sun is the center of the solar system. It wasn't until Newton that this mathematical view of the universe finally took hold and perpetually changed the face of European science. So, the next time you walk into a physics course, remember, the fundamental understanding of the universe that they're using has its origins in Renaissance Neoplatonism. Richard Hooker

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Modern Neo-Platonism

In the essay "Inner and Outer Realities: Jean Gebser in a Cultural/Historical Perspective", Integral philosopher Allan Combs claims that ten modern thinkers can be called Neo-Platonists: Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Coleridge, Emerson, Rudolf Steiner, Carl Jung, Jean Gebser and the modern theorist Brian Goodwin. He sees these thinkers as participating in a tradition that can be distinguished from the empiricist, rationalist, dualist and materialist Western philosophical traditions[1].