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| Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie |
A short digression before beginning: despite the extensive amount of study Neoplatonism has garnered in the last 100 years, I think that it is a philosophy that remains undervalued and misunderstood, considering that it was a major part of the
intellectual worldview in the West and the Middle East for at least a thousand
years (mainly in the Aristotelian form known as the ‘Ammonian synthesis’, (after Ammonius Hermiae (c. 440 – c. 520), a philosopher who has been largely forgotten, but who is actually extremely influential in the history of philosophy) the
last major expression in the west being with the Cambridge Platonists like Ralph Cudworth
(1617 –1688). The greatest thinkers of the Medieval period in the Christian,
Islamic and Jewish worlds, Aquinas (1225–1274), Avicenna (980-1037), and Maimonides
(1135-1204), were all thoroughly steeped in Neoplatonic philosophy (3). The main problem, as I see it, that there is a prevalent tendency for modern historians to interpret that philosophers of that period with a modern form of
Aristotelianism that is more in tune with the sceptical, empirical, and
rationalistic tendencies of modernism, an approach to Aristotelian thought that has no
historical precedence, and as Lloyd Gerson argues
(see Aristotle and Other Platonists, Cornell University Press; 2006), is not an
accurate presentation of Aristotle’s thought, but a rather materialistic one. Although this approach dominated the academic world from roughly 1930-1985, fortunately there are signs that things are changing as post-modern perspectives being to take hold.
Soon after, the academic world began to pay more
attention to Plotinus. The academic world was already in the process of a major
re-evaluation of Greek philosophy, spear-headed in Germany with the Bibliotheca
Teubneriana extensive series of ancient greek texts. In the English
world, Arthur Hilary
Armstrong, (1909 –1997) was a pioneer and Émile Bréhier (1876-1952)
produced an excellent complete French translation (1924–1938). By the 1960s, Plotinus
broke a kind of academic embargo on Neoplatonic philosophers with his
inclusion in the Cambridge Loeb Classical Library (A. H. Armstrong, Enneads,
1966-1988) and in the French world, a comparable translation by Paul Henry
and Hans-Rudolf Schwyzer appeared (1951-1973), capping a considerable
breakthrough that saw his status rise from an obscure excentric footnote in the
history of philosophy to a figure regularly considered to be the greatest
philosopher between Aristotle and Aquinas.
Moreover, Wayne Hankey argues how neoplatonism plays
an important role in contemporary French philosophy, beginning with Bergson and
Heidegger:
In 1959 Hadot published a criticism of Heidegger‘s
treatment of Platonism in the course of judging both that Heidegger is ―the
prophet of this end of Platonism, which is, at the same time, the end of the
world‖
and that ―one is able to be tempted to interpret the thought of Heidegger as a
sort of néo-platonisme. Pierre
Aubenque‘s―Plotin et le dépassement de l‘ontologie grecque classique, was published in 1971. It
sets up the question about the alternative metaphysics which might derive from
Neoplatonism in the Heideggerian terms which have dominated French philosophy
in the last two-fifths of the twentieth century.
By either, or both, of these ways Plotinian thought
might escape Heidegger‘s critique of onto-theology. Aubenque also suggests how
Neoplatonism relates to a Derridean deconstruction of ontology: ‘’Fundamental
Ontology or ―overcoming metaphysics: this alternative, which the contemporary
project of a ―destruction or
better of a ―deconstruction of
the pseudo-evidences of classical ontology confronts anew, finds its exact
prefiguration in Neoplatonism.’’ (Neoplatonism
and Contemporary French Philosophy Dionysius 23 (2005): 161 - 190.)
Furthermore, Plotinus has even worked his way into
mainstream French bookstores, thanks mainly to the "Les Écrits de
Plotin", Les Éditions du Cerf, Paris, which publishes individual treatises
in French translation, started by Pierre Hadot. As discussed previously, a
renewed interest in Iamblichus (c. AD 245 – c. 325) would follow, and even a much-shunned
philosopher like Proclus (412 –485 AD), has been the object of a renewed interest in study
since the mid-1980s. Moreover, Platonism has continued to exist in a vital way in certain individual and collective efforts. For example, Manly P. Hall, David Fideler, with his Phanes Press
and Alexandria journal, Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D , the
thriving Prometheus Trust and
the International Society for NeoplatonicStudies. It is therefore safe to say that there has not been this much interest in Neoplatonism since the days of Ralph Cudworth and the Cambridge Platonists.
(1) For a history of American Transcendentalism see: Bregman J. (2009) Proclus Americanus. In: Vassilopoulou P., Clark S.R.L. (eds) Late Antique Epistemology. Palgrave Macmillan, London
(2) Bowen, Patrick D. and K. Paul Johnson, eds. Letters to the Sage: Selected Correspondence of Thomas Moore Johnson Volume One: The Esotericists. Forest Grove, OR: The Typhon Press, 2016.
(3) See Christian Platonists and Platonizing Christians in History: http://www.john-uebersax.com/plato/cp.htm
See also:
The Brothers Guthrie: Pagan Christianity of
the Early 20th Century
Interview
with Tim Addey, co-founder and chair of The Prometheus Trust,
a UK
charity that supports scholarship in the Platonic tradition.
