Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 078 - Middle Men - the Platonic Revival.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Middlemen, the Platonic Revival. If your handwriting is anything like mine, then even you may not be able to read what you have written. Certain letters in particular may be easily confused. A lowercase b and a lowercase k, for instance. If I wrote out the name of my favourite silent film comedian in lowercase, you might read it and wonder why you've never heard of this Custer Beaton, if he's supposed to be so great. And I'm not alone. You'll remember my saying last time that Greek manuscripts made a transition from being written in capital letters to being written in miniscule letters, and in some types of miniscule script, the Greek letter beta, or b, looks similar to the kappa, or k. It turns out that a potential confusion between these two letters is at the heart of one of the niftiest philological controversies in ancient philosophy. At question is the name of the man who wrote a book called the Didascalicos, or Handbook, a guide to the philosophy of Plato. He probably wrote it in the 2nd century AD. As for his name, a 9th century manuscript, the earliest that preserves this text, tells us that he was called Alkinoos. Here's the nifty part. We know of no Platonist from this period called Alkinoos, but we do know of a thinker named Albinos. So, in 1879, a German scholar ingeniously suggested that our Alkinoos could be a scribe's mistaken version of Albinos, the Greek letter kappa replaced with the letter beta. The suggested correction would banish Alkinoos from the scene, leaving the already familiar Albinos as the author of the Didascalicos. But a century later in the 1970s, another scholar pointed out that, even in manuscripts that are written in minuscule, the heading with the title and author's name is written in nice bold capitals, and no one is going to confuse a capital K with a capital B. So, it's now widely accepted that we are stuck with Alkinoos. But why is it of such capital importance to find out who wrote the Didascalicos? Well, it is one of the few complete texts to survive from a philosophical movement in the early Roman Empire which re-established Platonism as a force to be reckoned with. Before them came the skeptical Academy, after them the dominant tradition of Neo-Platonism inaugurated by Plotinus, and these guys were in the middle. Thus, they have come to be called the middle Platonists. The very name shows the lack of esteem they have received from historians of philosophy. If the whole history of philosophy is footnotes to Plato, they can sometimes seem like a footnote to one of the footnotes, mere transitional figures whose ideas are often preserved only inadequately in fragments and testimonies found in later authors. But in this episode, I want to give a little love to the middle Platonists. They set the basic agenda for the Platonism of later antiquity, defending doctrinal Platonism at a time when skepticism was still a going concern, and when Stoics and Aristotelians provided serious competition. This period of the Platonist tradition also gave us two figures who have left extensive surviving writings, Philo of Alexandria and Plutarch. Because of their importance, I will be devoting an episode to each of them, but first I want to look at the movement as a whole. In terms of chronology, we're basically talking about the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, the heyday of the Roman Empire. But the action begins already with two thinkers of the 1st century BC. We've looked at one of them already, Antiochus of Ascalon. When we discussed Cicero, back in episode 71, we saw that Antiochus rejected the new academy's skeptical reading of Socrates and Plato. For him, the Platonic dialogues were a rich source of positive doctrines, which he saw as being fundamentally in agreement with Aristotle and the Stoics. He also admired still earlier figures like Pythagoras, but he did not put Pythagoras front and center in his history of philosophy. For that, we need to turn to a second, slightly later philosopher of the 1st century BC, Eudorus of Alexandria. He was apparently not the first dogmatic Pythagorean of this era. Cicero mentions a man with the rather wonderful name of Publius Nigidius Figulus, who would have been a generation older. Cicero credits Figulus with reviving the tradition of Pythagoreanism which had fallen into oblivion in its Italian homeland. Sadly, we know nothing more than this about him, but further evidence of Pythagorean activity comes from texts that pass themselves off as writings by antique authorities. The most interesting of these pretends to be a treatise by Timaeus, the main character of Plato's dialogue of that name. There is debate about how early these Pythagorean texts were written. With Eudorus, at least we have a name, a place, and a rough time for his activity, but we don't know much about him either. None of his writings survive, and we have little information about his personality. Eudorus adopted something like Antiochus' idea of a unified tradition centered on Plato's writings. But unlike Antiochus, he did not claim that all non-skeptical philosophers were basically in agreement with one another. Rather than embracing Aristotle as a mostly faithful student of Plato, Eudorus criticized points in Aristotle's logical work The Categories. He also differed from Antiochus in that he did not make Plato the fount of all philosophical wisdom. Instead, he saw Pythagoras as the primary figure. For instance, Plato's famous exhortation that mankind should seek likeness to God was said by Eudorus to be lifted straight from Pythagoras. Plato supposedly merely added the caveat that we should seek such assimilation to God only insofar as is possible for mankind. In keeping with this, Eudorus had a rather selective approach to reading Plato's dialogues, emphasizing passages and themes that could be made to harmonize with Pythagoreanism as he understood it. Particularly important was Eudorus' scheme of first principles. With some changes of detail, this scheme appears in nearly all the middle Platonists and it will be revised to become the core of Plotinus' metaphysics in the third century. To understand what Eudorus was after, we need to put ourselves in a Pythagorean frame of mind. This, of course, means thinking about numbers. As we saw long ago when we looked at Pythagoras and his first followers, Pythagorean philosophy sees numbers as fundamental to reality as a whole. This isn't a crazy thought. You don't need modern science to tell you that the physical world displays mathematical regularities, from the revolutions of the heavens to the fingers on our hands. And already in the ancient world, mathematics was taken as a paradigm of certain knowledge. It's invoked, for instance, in Aristotle's posterior analytics when he is explaining what he means by demonstrative understanding. But there is a bit of a problem with numbers. There are an awful lot of them. I don't know if you've tried counting them, but if you have, I assume you gave up at some point, or you would still be at it. Ancient philosophers, of course, realized that there are an infinity of numbers. Usually, they regarded infinity as something that we cannot know. The infinite has no limit, and its indefiniteness threatens to elude human understanding. So, paradoxically, numbers appear in antiquity both as a paradigm object of knowledge and as something that is potentially unknowable. Eudorus and other Pythagoreans squared this circle by following Plato's immediate successors, the old academy. They had proposed that indefinitely many numbers can be derived from only two basic principles, the so-called monad and dyad. These are, respectively, the principles of unity and multiplicity. Picking up on terminology used by Plato himself, these two principles are also sometimes referred to as limit and the unlimited. Whatever they are called, the picture remains basically the same. We have a source of oneness and a source of manyness. When these two principles come together, an ordered but infinite series is produced. The monad, or limit, bestows no ability and order, the dyad gives the series its unbounded multiplicity. This is also how the old academy explained the mathematical structure of things. From the monad and dyad, they generated not just numbers but forms, geometrical figures, bodies, in short, everything. Their theory may seem obscure, but at its root is a fairly straightforward idea, that the properties and determinations of things are produced by imposing a limit or order on something indefinite. Unity or limitation is furthermore seen as a source of goodness and beauty, since the goodness of each thing will consist in its having correct order and proper proportion. Take the very Pythagorean example of a string on a musical instrument, like a guitar or a Greek lyre. To produce notes you have to strike or pluck strings of specific lengths. One can apply the same idea to colors and even to three-dimensional shapes. A cube, for instance, is space enclosed by the limits that are its sides. And remember that in Plato's Timaeus, the fundamental elements are argued to consist of geometrical atoms. Earth, for instance, is made up of cubes at the atomic level. Examples like these show why Pythagorean Platonists from the old academy onwards portrayed the universe as an ordered ladder of mathematical structures and harmonies, in which all things are made, and made to be good, from a mating of unity with indefinite multiplicity. Eudorus added a rung to this metaphysical ladder. Perhaps he was disturbed by the idea that an opposition between two principles should be fundamental. After all, Plato's Republic envisions a single form of the good, which has no partner. So Eudorus insisted that above the primordial generative couple, monad and dyad, there should be an even higher principle. Over the next centuries, Platonists will call it by several names, not only the good, but also the father, and even God. But most often, it will take the name Eudorus gave it, the One. This is a big step in the direction of Neoplatonism. Plotinus, too, will posit a single One above all things, a source of goodness, order, and unity for everything else. Other Neoplatonists will follow him in this, and agree that the fundamental principle of unity is also the fundamental principle of goodness. In other words, the One is the good. Though Eudorus had a major role in the development of this idea, he was not Plotinus' most immediate source. That distinction instead goes to Numenius, a Platonist of the mid-2nd century AD. The works of Numenius were read in Plotinus' school, and in fact Plotinus' critics claimed that he plagiarized his philosophy from Numenius. Since we have far less evidence for Numenius than for Plotinus, it's hard to know how justified that accusation may have been. But certainly, Numenius would have been a direct inspiration for the doctrine of a highest One, or good. He also anticipated Plotinus in writing about this One with a flair for evocative imagery, which was sorely lacking in most middle Platonists, as far as we can tell. In one fragment, Numenius compares the philosopher who fleetingly grasps the good to a lookout who glimpses a one-man boat floating far out upon the endless ocean. With Eudorus and Numenius, we ourselves fleetingly glimpse a problem faced by middle and neo-Platonists alike. If the principle of goodness is identical with the principle of unity, wouldn't it be better if no multiplicity were produced by the One? Why can't it just remain alone, serenely unproductive and perfect? This is arguably the central difficulty of late ancient Platonism. I raise it now because Eudorus and Numenius seem to have adopted the two obvious but incompatible solutions. For Eudorus, the highest One is the principle of all things, including the monad and dyad. It is, thus, a single supreme cause for everything. Numenius doesn't like this idea. He doesn't see how a principle of multiplicity like the dyad can come from a principle of unity. So, he says that both monad and dyad are fundamental. His system reduces all things to an opposed pair, rather than a single source. This allows him to sidestep the problem of how one gives rise to many, but if God has an opposite, an enemy if you will, does that make the universe a kind of battleground in which unity struggles to overcome a source of multiplicity that is its equal? As we'll be seeing, that was precisely the view taken by a religious group called the Gnostics. Plotinus was occasionally tempted by this idea, but ultimately rejected it, and along with it, the dualist elements found in Numenius and some other middle Platonists. With Numenius, we've taken our story up to the 2nd century AD, and that's where I want to stay for the rest of this episode. This means returning to our friend Alcinous with a K. As I've said, his Didascalicos was a guide to reading, or perhaps teaching, the works of Plato. It moves swiftly through the main features of Plato's philosophy, depending especially on the Timaeus, but drawing on a range of dialogues. Alcinous takes it for granted that the dialogues are a source of positive doctrines, and has no time for the skeptical approach to Plato or Socrates. Indeed, he doesn't even mention it. Other middle Platonists were not so tactful. Numenius, for instance, wrote a polemical work called On the Divergence of the Academy from Plato. For middle Platonists, as for Antiochus, Plato was what the skeptics would have called a dogmatist. In some cases, middle Platonists also agreed with Antiochus in presenting all the non-skeptical classical philosophers as a unified tradition. Alcinous is an example. Of course, he takes Plato to be the greatest of philosophers, but his greatness includes his having supposedly thought of Aristotle's and the Stoics' ideas before they had a chance to do so themselves. Alcinous would have us believe that all of Aristotelian and Stoic logic is already contained in the dialogues, a point he proves by the rather dubious expedient of pointing out that arguments presented by Platonic characters have various logical structures. Of course, it's one thing to use an argument of the form, if A, then B, but A, therefore B, and another thing entirely to do what the Stoics did, isolating the argument form in its own right and calling it a hypothetical syllogism. Alcinous was willing, indeed eager, to overlook this distinction. Similarly, Alcinous casually ascribes to Plato some very Stoic-sounding ideas about the importance of resisting emotion. All in all, his strategy is to kill the rival schools with kindness. Their best insights are quietly incorporated into a Platonist system and claimed to be the discoveries of Plato, while other features of their thought are just as quietly dropped. This strategy, so reminiscent of Antiochus, was not universally adopted by the middle Platonists. We already saw that Eudorus attacked Aristotle's categories. This seems to have been something of a favorite pastime for Platonists in the early Roman Empire. Two obscure philosophers named Lucius and Nicostratus are known only for their criticisms of the categories. They may have been Platonists attacking Aristotle out of school rivalry. A more important figure was Atticus, the leading Platonist in the city of Athens towards the end of the 2nd century AD. We have an extensive report of his withering criticisms of Aristotle, especially on ethical topics. As we've seen in previous episodes, the Stoics reacted harshly to Aristotle's admission that external goods, like health and wealth, might make some difference to our happiness. Atticus, too, seizes on the point. He complains that it makes our happiness depend on chance rather than virtue, as if Aristotle had built his whole ethical theory around the importance of external goods. Of course, the divine Plato would never make such a mistake. For him, virtue guarantees happiness, and nothing else matters. Although our Platonists tend to agree with the Stoics about virtue and happiness, they take exception to other features of Stoicism. It almost goes without saying that they reject Stoic materialism. As Platonists, they in fact see immaterial principles like Platonic forms as being more real than physical objects. But actually, they have a bit of a problem with these forms. Whatever one makes of the forms, there are clearly going to be a lot of them. So how do they relate to the highest source of unity that sits at the top of their metaphysical hierarchy? Many middle Platonists simply make the many forms ideas in the mind of a single god. Problem solved. More difficult for them is the question of what to do with the Stoic teaching on Providence and fate. They enthusiastically agree with the Stoics that the physical world is governed by divine providence, but they find the Stoics' determinism repellent. They therefore develop a cunning theory according to which divine providence is exercised over the physical world only by bestowing general laws and order on that world. Individual events within the physical world, such as those due to human choice, are not caused by fate, but they do fall under its jurisdiction. What this means is that fate establishes laws of cause and effect that can be triggered by human choice. Consider good old Oedipus Rex. The laws of fate do not force him to kill a king at the crossroads and marry the dead man's queen, but they do ensure that once Oedipus has taken these actions, the rest of the story will unfold with its unstoppable logic, until Oedipus has discovered the horrible truth and taken his own eyes out. At that point, Oedipus has quite literally met his fate. Again, these features of middle Platonism set the stage for Neoplatonism. Plotinus, too, deals with the rival schools, especially Aristotelians and Stoics, by criticizing them loudly while accepting many of their ideas quietly. He, too, attacks the categories and Aristotle's stance on external goods, yet accepts important principles of Aristotelian metaphysics and psychology. Likewise, he absorbs Stoic ideas about universal providence but rejects their determinism. Above all, he simply assumes, as the middle Platonists had assumed before him, that Plato is a dogmatic philosopher whose theories can be extracted from the dialogues. Though we do not know much about how Plato was read in Plotinus's school, we can already see that in middle Platonism there was a trend towards organizing the Platonic material along doctrinal or pedagogical lines. The first attempt to arrange Plato's dialogues was by a Platonist named Thrasyllus. He grouped them into sets of four, and reasonably enough, he sometimes let himself be guided by their dramatic order. So, he suggested starting with the four dialogues Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, which tell the story of Socrates's trial, imprisonment, and execution. Our friend Albinus, with a B, found this superficial. He instead began with dialogues that would provide an ethical orientation for beginning students. However the dialogues were organized, it's clear that for all these Platonists they were something akin to sacred texts. In late antiquity, Plato's adherents often called him divine and they were not kidding. They believed that the dialogues contained inspired and superhuman truths. The same truths had been taught by Pythagoras, but Plato elaborated them in a substantial body of texts that could become the object of teaching and commentary. Of course, Plato's dialogues were not the only writings to be held in reverence in the ancient world. There were many pagan religious texts, and paganism was starting to get stiff competition from Judaism and Christianity. Sometimes the traditions mingled together. Already in the early 1st century AD, we find middle Platonist doctrines showing up in the rather unexpected context of Jewish philosophy and theology. This remarkable combination was the work of an equally remarkable man. Though he is often described as a Platonist, he wrote commentaries not on the dialogues, but on the books of Moses. He will give us our first chance to see Greek philosophy interacting with the Abrahamic religions. I hope you won't choose next week to make an exodus away from the podcast, since if you do, you will miss Philo of Alexandria, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps. you