A Few Texts on Presence
And a couple of updates
Over the past week I’ve returned to Plotinus. Below you’ll find a few updates—including a new video and a publication announcement— followed by a short dossier of texts I’m assembling for my upcoming course on Ennead III.7, “On Aion and Time.” The dossier addresses a certain Heideggerian story about presence that, I think, badly misrepresents much of the metaphysical tradition.
Contents
Update: Plotinus on the Daimon (New video)
Publication: Platon und die Zeit chapter on Proclus and the Statesman
A Few Texts on Presence
1. Update: Plotinus on the Daimon
The newest video in the Neoplatonic Virtue series is now online. This week, Yitzchok Lowy and I begin reading Plotinus’ Ennead III.4, “On Our Allotted Spirit.”
We focus on the opening chapters, where Plotinus raises the question of how the soul, through its choices and migrations, becomes the cause of the diverse forms of life in the cosmos—including, it seems, plants. We explore the metaphysical implications of this claim, as well as what it might tell us about soul, freedom, and the nature/culture divide.
▶️ Watch here:
ChatGPT’s new image generation tool has been very useful in illustrating my slides. I’ve been thinking about why I use AI images and the reason seems to be basically that I generate many powerpoints (either for my lessons or my astrological consultations) or alternatively social medi aposts. EIther way, I produce a lot of content for screens and it is better to see images on a screen than text: it is easier to focus and absorb information in my experience. Furthermore, although I enjoy painting, I don’t have the time to produce all the images I would need to illustrate my intellectual output and therefore CHatGPT and Bing are very handy tools and I certainly don’t have the money to hire illustrators for everything I do. And finally, I really like some of the images that AI has offered up to me: its more like curating content than making art, but there can still be some very evocative and even beautiful images that result from these collages. Here are a couple of images from the slides for this class:
2. Publication Announcement: Platon und die Zeit
The volume Platon und die Zeit, edited by Klaus Corcilius and Irmgard Männlein, is now out from Mohr Siebeck. It includes a chapter of mine titled “The Older You Get, The Younger You Get: Making Sense of Proclus’ Neoplatonic Interpretation of the Statesman Myth.”
The chapter examines how Proclus interprets the myth of alternating world periods in Plato’s Statesman—one of aging and another of rejuvenation—as a physical doctrine, rather than a merely political allegory. I argue that Proclus sees this myth as expressing two simultaneous aspects of cosmic life: a visible, fated world ruled by necessity (the reign of Zeus), and an invisible, teleologically ordered world ruled by nous and pronoia (the reign of Kronos). These dual logics reflect the cyclical nature of time and the soul’s capacity for return. They also provide a key to how the Sophist and the Statesman were seen as complementary dialogues about the natural world.
Anyone interested in reading the chapter is welcome to write to me.
📚 Link to the book at Mohr Siebeck
3. A Few Texts on Presence
These texts are a few that I’m bringing together in preparation for my upcoming course on Plotinus’ Ennead III.7, “On Aion and Time.” The course will be taking place Fridays 14h-18h at the University of Brasília and I am happy to be able to announve that for those interested it will be accessible via Zoom, and all sessions will be recorded and made available on YouTube.
While professional commitments led me to teach this text now, I’m also motivated by the need to respond to a certain Heideggerian fable that reappears in Hilan Bensusan’s Memory Assemblages (Recordings of the recent Symposium on the book can be found here):
“This can be understood with the help of the tale of the two beginnings, which is crucial for going beyond metaphysics according to Heidegger. The two beginnings are conceived in the context of a reflection on the inception of the metaphysical thinking that Heidegger sees as still prevalent and perhaps even inescapable. That thinking is guided by a drive toward unveiling and exposing to the best of one’s innate or acquired (technical) capacity the secrets underlying the way things present themselves and withdraw by themselves. The fact that things unfold of their own accord is what is associated to φύσις and is the assumption that eventually gives rise to metaphysics. This assumption is that there is a secret or a hiding place that can be uncovered, and this is what gives rise to the search for the intelligibility of things through their οὺσίαι—their substances, or presences, or homes. οὺσία can be seen as a hypostasis of the overall intelligent appearances that something displays. Roughly, this is the general path leading from φύσις to metaphysics—and from a notion of truth based on letting things unveil themselves, ἀλήθεια, to one that centers on adequately grasping what can be exposed about them, associated to ὁμοίωσις, correction and appropriateness. Heidegger understands that the endeavor of metaphysics is one in which the intelligibility of things is extracted, to the effect that everything—including humans—becomes commandable and is placed in standing reserve.”
— Memory Assemblages, pp. 24–25
And later:
“Heidegger contrasts φύσις to the more primordial non-grounding beginning of Ereignis—the event. This second beginning cannot ground anything; it commences without commandment and therefore cannot be followed by anything but a disappearance into a farewell (Untergang in den Abschied), which is itself followed by a further commencement. These successive twists (Verwindungen) ensure that each inception makes no claim over anything else—the second beginning brings forth inceptions that multiply themselves.”
— Memory Assemblages, p. 26
(To be clear, Hilan himself does not exactly embrace this tale, and contrasts his own “fable of an irrelevant beginning” to it, I am simply quoting from him because it’s the msot recent version of the Heideggerian narrative that I’ve come across)
According to this narrative, metaphysics seeks to lay everything bare and present—and thus ends in Gestell, in a world where even human life becomes part of the behavioral data economy described by Zuboff. But this narrative, although it might help identify some current trends, is false as history of philosophy, as the late Wayne Hankey rightly pointed out:
“In “The Word of Nietzsche,” Heidegger’s treatment of the Platonic allegory of the sun renders the sun as what ‘forms and circumscribes the field of vision wherein that which is as such shows itself.’ He moves on to maintain that modernity absorbs this horizon into subjectivity. Neoplatonism opposes exactly this. The Good is the very opposite of a horizon which the rational or intellectual self can grasp. The Neoplatonic doctrine of the transcendent One has a basis in Plato’s Good as the epekeina of the Republic and in the One-Nonbeing of the Parmenides, even if it does, nonetheless, go beyond Plato. It depends upon a hermeneutic of Platonic dialogues which specifically characterizes Neoplatonism, where the Good and the One non-being are identified. The great problem for henological Neoplatonism is to prevent the construal of the non-being of the One as non-subsistence, making it nothing—rather than no particular thing—and, thus, depriving it of separateness…
In antiquity, the elevation of the One and Good does not make the gods disappear, by means of the reductionism of a demythologizing science, into an intellectual horizon which can then be surpassed by the human as subject. Rather, it maintains them as the omnipresent intermediaries by which we are opened to the universal presence and activity of the One within and without…
Beyond the host of Hellenic teachers in the henological tradition from the second to the sixth centuries, we need to remind ourselves of a few of the later Western metaphysicians in this tradition so that we do not suppose that it is either a dead or a marginal way of philosophizing: Boethius, Dionysius, Eriugena, Bonaventure, Eckhart, the mystics of the Rhineland (for example, Berthold of Moosburg), Cusanus, Ficino, etc…
Whether or not onto-theology is the truth about metaphysics, it is not the truth about the divine, and if it has reached its conclusion, its end is not the fate of the gods. In our witnessing the return of the gods we begin to see, against Heidegger, that for much of our history metaphysics as onto-theology did not contain or subdue the divine.”
— Wayne Hankey, Why Heidegger’s "History" of Metaphysics is Dead (2004)
In other words, metaphysics does not culminate in a will to total presence. Neoplatonism thinks of the divine precisely as beyond presence. Presence is not ultimate—it is relativized, subordinated, even overcome. The One (or as I prefer: Unity) is not a being, not an ultimate presence, and sometimes is even denied to be a principle, as in Proclus’ Platonic Theology II.
Indeed, the dialectical science in Plato’s Republic is said to involve two movements: one in which we ascend from hypotheses to the unhypothetical starting point - Unity or Value itself which is beyond presence and where we break through the charmed circle of intelligibility and conditioning - and another where starting from Unity we descend through the whole of the intelligible - thereby showing that it is through and through conditioned by what is beyond presence. No thinker that has stayed true to this project has been content to simply sit in the immanent totality of presence.
This Neoplatonic move becomes deeply embedded in later religious metaphysics as well: in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions alike. To ignore this is to erase the piety of the philosophers—both their philosophical piety and their mystical inheritance. This is why Heidegger’s narrative, if taken as history, is not only false but offensive: theophobic and secularizing to a fault.
Some Heideggerians themselves saw this. Vicente Ferreira da Silva, for instance, found this opening beyond presence in myth:
“Beings have been determined as what is suggested in possibilities. As such they manifest themselves as Fascination, that is, as the being gripped (Ergriffensein) by the revealed as revealed. Fascination is the rigor proper to a projection of the world. Fascination is the ultimate essence of beings, understood as a reality dis-covered by Fascination. The experience of Being would take place in entering and becoming intimate with the tropic force of fascinatio.
We might make these phenomena clearer by approaching them from a more illustrative angle. For us, the originary document of Being manifests itself in the prototypical divine life, that is, in Myth. If, for Heidegger, the setting to work of the truth of Being takes place in Poetry, for us, this should be understood, above all, as transhuman Poetry, as Poetry in itself, as the transcendent life of the divine powers. The Gods embodied, in an unsurpassable way, the immediate flashing-out of the Source of Fascination: the Gods are this flashing-out of that Source, the Gods are this very flashing-out, as life that is productive both in itself and by itself.
Should we meditate, on the other hand, on the action of the Gods on the scene of History, on the aftershock of their pouring themselves over beings, we will observe that the presence of a God manifests itself always and essentially as Fascination and through the awakening of a world of passions.
Christian theology accustomed us to consider solely Satan as the Tempter, not considering that the divine pole opposite to him also manifested itself to the Christian sensibility as temptation and amorous attraction, as Fascination. The creation of a God is the area revealed by the divine eros, it is what is prospected and delineated by the force of this theophany.”
— Vicente Ferreira da Silva, Mythology and the Tropic Experience of Being
(Translated by me; full version here)
Finally, Plotinus. The text we’ll be studying—Ennead III.7—speaks of Aion, Eternity, as pure presence, but this presence is complex and therefore not ultimate:
“If, then, you actually assemble them again into one so that there is one life together in them, concentrating Difference together with inexhaustible activity, Identity that is never different, and no intellection or life that goes from one thing to another, but a state of stability and constant lack of extension; when you have seen all this you have seen eternity.
It is when you have seen life abiding forever in the identical state and possessing everything in its presence, not now this, again something else, but all at once, and not now some things, now others, but a partless perfection; it is just as in a point where all things are together and none of them ever flows forth but remains in identity in itself and never changes, being always in the present because nothing of it has slipped away or again will come to be, but what it is is what it is.”
— Ennead III.7, trans. Gerson et al.
And later he sees Plato’s own text indicating that pure presence is already turned towards unity:
Since a nature of this kind is all beautiful and everlasting, in attendance on the One, originating from it and turned towards it, and never falling away from it in any way, but remaining always around it and in it, and living in conformity with it – and which has also, I think, been beautifully described by Plato in profound and5 careful thought, as ‘eternity remaining in unity’ 26 – to indicate that it not only turns itself back to the One in turning to itself, but is also the changeless life of being around the One – this is what we are indeed searching for. And that which remains in this way is eternity. For what remains like this and remains itself what it is, an10 activity of a life which remains in itself turned towards the One and in it, an activity that does not falsify its existence and its life, this would possess eternity. — Ennead III.7, trans. Gerson et al.
More soon.
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