The Greek insight was that Reason, the Logos, is nature steering all things from within…Nature is neither supernatural nor material; it is an organic whole, and man is not outside nature but within it. Huntington Cairns introduction to Plato Dialogues
Manichean: An adherent of Manicheism taught by Persian prophet (3rd – 7th century AD – Manes or Manicheus) Combines Zorastrian, Gnostic, Christian, and Pagan elements, and based on doctrine of contending principles – good/evil; light/dark; soul/body; god/satan.
Daimon (Daemon): see Demon. In Greek mythology, any of the secondary divinities ranking between the gods and men; hence a guardian spirit; inspiring or inner spirit or a demon, devil.
The Greek insight – this writer’s opinion – is comparable to the Buddhist idea of world as process on which is founded their statement that nothing is permanent which in turn is reflected in Heraclitus’ thought that all is flux.
In Plato’s Symposium we have Socrates speaking of Diotima, a woman from Mantineia who he says taught him that love and the like are not in themselves gods but daemons that act as a go between for gods and man. They carry commerce back and forth, so to speak, and were created by the gods to this purpose. Being unable to have direct contact with man they created these daemons to act as intermediaries.
Now, my mentor, G.V. Desani (and here), said this a little differently. Love is a spirit, he said. Our participation in love, he held, acts as an agent for love’s increase, growth, proliferation. This path having been established, is easier to follow at the next choosing. Moreover, it increases the attraction of love to others as a mode of being, a means of getting on in the world.
All is Flux – Heraclitus, opposed to Parmenides’ “all is one”. I’ve made a lot of this contrast in my study and finally have come to a more nuanced understanding of the apparently contrary view for these two ancient Greek thinkers. Namely, there is room in the fluxuations of manifested, relative reality, of empirical knowledge of things; there is room in the one whole of the unitary view, for the contraries. One is an extension of the many as the many is an outgrowth of the one. They are not different yet neither are they the same. And, from my study of Aristotle, If there is a one the one is both all things and nothing.%
It’s said (Huntington Cairns) Aristotle claimed that Plato accepted Heraclitus’ doctrine that things, as we are aware of them through our organs of touch, taste, sight, and hearing, are all in constant flux and therefore our sense organs cannot give us knowledge. “(Plato) was thus led to the view that if we are to have knowledge it must be of permanent entities distinct from those we know through the senses.” These he related to as forms or ideas, as principles, the actual reality of that which changes, which, Aristotle would call the actual substance or substratum, if I understand correctly. For we do not know that to which the manifest, the relative reveal – the actual substance, substratum. Phenomena serves the purpose of revealing this ‘essence’ though being neither different nor separate therefrom. The myriads of manifested reality have no being in themselves, that is, while all the same serving to reveal that from which they come. Forms and ideas give us permanence and order discoverable by intelligence setting aside the world of perceived fluxuating things. Our senses put us in contact with the world of becoming. Our consciousness puts us in contact with being itself. So it comes to pass – for Plato – that these principles become the basis for knowledge. Think. There are many instances of love or beauty but let us have the form or idea of same then we can truly know.
This is a kind of refutation of Heraclitus’ “All is flux.” The senses must give way to guiding principles, intelligence, ideas, forms. And these must in turn give way too, to the soul, psyche, the principle of life force itself, mind, reason, and finally to consciousness, the illuminative factor which – not that I know of as a Greek idea – is the overarching principle that we see in Eastern thought, systems of Yoga, Vedanta (Advaita of Sankara and Guadapada) philosophy, Buddhist thought.
There is sensory perception. There is that which presides over the senses. There is that which presides over that which presides over the senses. Thus: Consciousness, mind, sensory perception. Or: Illumination, reasoning, data input or phenomena. Consciousness and mind are not the same but neither are they different. Say consciousness is the illuminative factor of mind and will, intention, the focusing factor. An adept of the spiritual practices of the east is said to, upon quieting the mind completely, ‘experience’ consciousness alone, in and of itself. Put another way, witdrawing from sensory input, the mind, the sense of self identity, consciousness alone remains. This would be the Asparsa yoga of Advaita (non-duality) Vedanta.
Now Aristotle held that matter is not inert. He had the idea of energia which I take to be the potency held within matter itself. This is further expressed in his notion of entelechy, the end within. Logically this makes matter the raw form of courage, of anything at all, including love, beauty, justice, wisdom, truth, honor, duty, liberty, and the like. Diotima, via Socrates: These, then are daimons, “…envoys and interpreters that ply between heaven and earth…” Plato thought these were windows to the transcendent, and in reality were, in a sense, the transcendent. At least they were thought by Plato and Socrates, to be facets of the “Good”. Plato considered beauty the outward manifestation of the world’s ultimate nature. And, which, the ultimate reality being without attributes – generally the view of Eastern thought – can not therefore, being inscrutable, at least it would seem, ‘actively’ show its true nature. How is this different from the idea that God sleeps in matter, as it were, descends into matter as part of the process of creation, in order to reemerge, awaken, a fully self realized being? That being the lesson in the story of Christ, or any great Lord or Seer.
In this connection recall the conversation between Arjuna and Krsna in the Bhagavad Gita. Arjuna beseeches the great God, Krsna, to reveal himself in his true form. Krsna says to Arjuna that were he to do so he (Arjuna) would perish for he is not capable of seeing such in his current embodied form. Krsna, beneficently grants him the ability and does reveal his true nature.
Meanwhile in the western tradition God appears to the ancients, similarly, in some form of light. The burning bush of Moses’ experience on the mountain, the light that debilitated Saul, later Paul, on his way to Damascus. The effulgence permeating and surrounding Jesus when he appears to some disciples after the resurrection.
While the ultimate reality might not have attributes in itself surely these daemons of Love, and so forth, the herein named go-betweens, messengers, are facets of divine nature, the sacred, sharing that distinction with all manifestation. It depends on one’s standpoint. Love, beauty, truth, wisdom – I call these concomitants of consciousness, are no more or less sublime than a lovely flower. We can’t have or hold or own these attributes any more than we can own the “frost white felicity”* of a rose. We can, however yield to the attributes the better to actualize the rose. Some would say that the affirmation of phenomena is a necessary step, even part of its actualizaion. One might think this an example of the anthropic principle gone wild but a postulate of quantum mechanics holds ‘reality’ results from the conscious gaze. Things only happen, quantum states only resolve themselves, because we look at them. And Einstein is said to have asked about this idea, with some sarcasm, ‘would a sidelong glance by a mouse suffice?’ – Plato thought the universe a product of reason seeking to actualize. Quantum theory: “Matter and consciousness are regarded as dual aspects of one underlying reality.” That being another idea from quantum theory seems somewhat in tune with the thinking of some ancients.
Impicit in the universe is the identity axiom, that is, the universe is defined by itself. Only by itself. It is a tautology and conveys no information even though it contains all information. Truth doesn’t act. It just shines. So, the ultimate ontological principle is the principle of participation. And, the truth can be experienced but never written. Aristotle and Plato.%
Reason is a conveyance, then, and God is not to be seen because all that manifests is God – ‘he’ being immanent in nature – from the standpoint of ultimate reality. Yet, in the habit of being able to see or know who made particular things we ignorantly believe, trust it possible to know or see what (who) made the world itself. Assuming God is like man easily leads one wayward. God created man which, to many of the ancients is the same as saying man is an extension of God, Jesus being a prime Judaic example. So, the true way to know God begins with self knowledge which one might say the reason we worship God is ‘he’ is imponderable. Faith will quickly lead to understanding.
The soul, psyche. Plato thought the soul, the activating power of being, imperishable, closely related to consciousness. Every ‘thing’ is subject to change – is perishable. All not perishable, changeable, are the forms, ideas, crowned by the soul. My thought is that the perishable proves the imperishable, the one the many, the impermanent the permanent. This is language playing here. Illusion is only known because there is the non-illusionary which we elect to call the ultimate reality, God – or Om – As activating principle capable of self manifestation. Advaita Vedanta holds that from the standpoint of the ultimate reality there is no change, that in reality, nothing is born, nothing perishes. One must go beyond all means of grasping, knowledge, void all attributes and so, the only thing that makes sense; “I am that” which happens to be what God said to Moses. “(Tell the people) I Am sends you.” In Vedanta this wording “I am that” or “That I am” is also used.
If you doubt then doubt is all that is. If you have faith then faith is all that is. The universe fills, informs, is that. Put differently, you confer individuality on the world and the universe confers on you eternality. I first encountered this in studying Aristotle.
The idea, the form, for instance, of a ‘table’ is eternal in which all tables in their myriads participate, are extensions. The activating principle of being is constant. Psyche, translated as soul might be more properly translated as reason, mind, intelligence, life, vital principle in things. Plato thought the soul tripartite. It is one, many, and the proportion that fuses them.
Also, and I quote, “No soul which has not practiced philosophy, and is not absolutely pure when it leaves the body, may attain to the divine nature; that is only for the lover of wisdom. This is the reason…why true philosophers abstain from all bodily desires and withstand them and do not yield to them.” (from the Phaedo dialogue) That might be taken as from Manichean influence.
Consciousness is likely additive and the unknowable, God, is likely increased, made real even, by participation of creature existence in his transcendence, or, if you like, our yearning for same. That is to say, when you, for instance, love your family, love itself, transcendent principle of love – a facet of the good – is made stronger.
From Mary Renault, on love, “the Last of the Wine”: “Yet sometimes in the night watch, when the Galaxy unrolled its book across a moonless sky, I knew what we were about, and where Sokrates was sending us. When Lysis had left me and gone to sleep, I would feel my soul climb love as a mountain, which at the foot has wide slopes with rocks and streams, and woods, and fields of every kind, but at the top one peak, to which if you go upward all paths lead; and beyond it, the blue ether where the world swims like a fish in its ocean, and the winged soul flies free.”
Is the ultimate reality one or is it many? It is both. The ultimate reality is one but has many within. So, what Heraclitus says might be restated as, all manifestation that is within the one of the ultimate reality is changeable and knowledge is precluded therein because knowledge can only be of something unchanging. Like the petals of a flower Plato viewed the varied ideas or forms around the center as variations on a single theme. The theme was the intelligibility of the system, its power of self manifestation, and taken as a whole with the variations, without meaning in themselves, but organically coupled with the whole, purpose and meaning develops. The singular parts constantly change but their combination into a whole and unitary process does not. It’s there that one finds meaning and purpose which all sundry singulars reveal in their myriads. Multiplicity is in the all while the all subsumes multiplicity, the manifest.
And, when the Buddhists hold that nothing is permanent it might be said they are taking something akin to Heraclitus’ view as developed by Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. Likewise, when the Vedantists state that an object of our thought can never actually be the changeless absolute. Reason, Logos, is eternally about relative things and cannot enter the realm of the ultimate reality, being, however, useful to take one to the borders of said realm.
A bit more from Aristotle for whom substance is quite similar to the substratum of Vedanta. Substance for Aristotle stands under and supports all other realities. It is fundamental. Real things, i.e., substances do not exist in degrees, nor do they have opposites. Man need not have an opposite to be intelligible as white is intelligible only on the face of black. Real things can put off contraries while still remaining identical with itself, that is, while it is itself it can be other things. “John Smith at 81 is the same person as John Smith at 20. His qualities are just different.” The mark of a real thing for Aristotle is not an eternal and immutable thing (These characterized Plato’s real being.) But it is a ‘self’ that is able to maintain these qualities while undergoing change. But what is, then, after all this, substance? It is the substratum that remains when all qualities are taken away. All these things – form, matter, their composites – are substance, but not alone. They are all necessary for understanding. As mentioned above regarding the identity axiom, the substratum, like any tautology, is meaningless; conveying no information it is unknowable, can’t be understood, though it contains all information. However, when attributes, qualities, form, matter, their components, are expressed, knowledge and understanding come to be. Being is not universal but equivocal. Being is different for different things. All cats are cats in the same way. All things have being in different ways. The first, regarding cats, is universal, the second, regarding things, is equivocal. Being is like the word health – an equivocal term, as, I’m healthy, food is healthy. All things are one by virtue of their reducibility to substance, or primary reality.%
Those who take Heraclitus’ view should incorporate the idea that empirical means must be used to gather knowledge of things. Empirical knowledge is only of relative things, things we can know by comparing them to other things, mainly ourselves, in short, measurable things, but we can somewhat understand that which is changeless, without attributes; understanding unlike knowing requires no measurement. So, understanding is beyond knowledge, is in fact where knowledge leads then ends. Restatement. Heraclitus’ statement – all that is in flux is empirically knowable, but taken as a whole, as Parmenides’ one, is not, which one is rather understandable. Understanding being a function of wisdom not of mind which is limited to knowledge gathered through measurement.
Go deep! The discrete seemingly unconnected moments of consciousness aren’t consciousness at all. They are perceptions, empirical in nature. Consciousness illuminates them making them seem connected. Think rather – the mind serves to make them seem connected but even it arises anew with each perception – like musical notes. Memory plays an important part here. Remembering the antecedent note(s) the successive notes are intelligible, grow in meaning and purpose. But only consciousness is continuous, a kind of light shining on all. That is, consciouness does not arise and fall away with the iota of perception, discrete parts of the ‘waterfall’ are united by mind, illumined by consciousness. Music might provide a more apt metaphor. Without each moment being related to the antecedent and the subsequent moments there could be no music. Music has, alludes to, illusion, uses illusion to further its purpose which is reflexive; it points back to itself as a means of illuminating that by which it is illuminated. Or, something like that. It changes constantly yet it is held together in a unity. How is that not reflective of the very nature of the ultimate reality? Only the unfathomable unity is real, the flux being somewhat mere instances of the whole intended to promote awareness of that which cannot be named.
The mind, and musical notes, are “born every moment” as discrete instances of the effulgent flux. Consciousness is the field in which their connections manifest and are made sensical.
Be mindful the universe is system and as such is organic, orderly, alive. That is – has always been recorded – as the Greek view. The real is exhausted by manifestation. That is, nothing is held back; relative things are a complete revelation of reality. But consider that though fully revealed in manifestation means not that change is absent in new, ever increasing revelation. So effulgence is ongoing. Creation should not be thought to exhaust an infinite potentiality which potential increases apace with continuing creation. Like a fractal. So it depends on one’s standpoint. Put another way, we have the power to make of it what we will which is a consequence of being a part of the whole in which we have life. Our individual lives are extensions, outgrowths of the life of the whole.
Now Jesus, it’s said, is love and is the word made flesh. So, with this scheme, he would be a vehicle to carry god’s love back and forth between man and the ultimate reality – to the Jews, a somewhat separate being likened as a father and named god. In this I don’t intend to reduce him to a mere ‘go between or messenger. Look deeper. We can’t know the incomprehensible god; even his real name is unpronounceable**. Instead we are given someone like us, Jesus, who though not god himself is not different from god either. Loving Jesus we love the father. We cannot own, grasp, hold the immeasurable father but we can the son, whom by grace is much like us. We can also, seeking wisdom, study the word, but we must simply accept, affirm the existence of the father as a matter of faith.
The erotic, Don Juanism, as a principle of nature is not daemonic in the Platonic sense of a spirit that acts as a messenger or go-between for the divine and man. It is an actual demon, corruption of the divine. Kierkegaard’s claim that it was Christianity itself that loosed this daemonic spirit on the world by ascribing evil to material nature is, I think credible. Thus Christianity ironically served, by his measure, that which it intends to defeat.
The duality of mind and body, soul and body, good and evil, follows the scheme of the Manicheans. But these, I think, are false dichotomies as the ultimate reality is not either/or but process itself, that is, both/and. The body is a continuation of soul, man a continuation of god, and so forth, like a rose is a continuation of its soil. Meaning that evil is a continuation of good. Of course, the good is life enhancing and evil is life destroying or corrupting. We must choose which to embrace. We will see eventually, I expect, if the struggle for dominance between cosmic forces of good and evil is real?
Huntington Cairns goes on in his introduction saying that in the Phaedrus dialogue Plato argues that writing is like painting. It has the appearance of life but if you ask it a question it preserves a solemn silence. Collingwood – of whom I’ve also written – said the same. Art is mute, yet is foundational for ensuing modes of being. Art evolves into religion, science, history, philosophy. Collingwood – this is contrary to Plato’s view – traces the modes of being from art through philosophy but thought that philosophy was where man’s activity found redemption after so many false starts wherein discovering a true path. Kierkegaard thought of the aesthetic mode of being as a “stage on life’s way”.
Kierkegaard used Mozart’s opera, Don Giovanni, to illustrate, give body to his notion of the forever disappearing, fleeting, doomed, apotheosis of the erotic on a perpetually receding horizon. Kierkegaard thought that the erotic in nature had gone wild. This madness is characterized by an urge to go beyond the self. This he named the daemonic urge which expressed as Don Juanism was fittingly suited to music as in Mozart’s opera; this, in other words, could be stated as viewing reality as greater than itself, a characteristic of Romanticism. Don Juan says his need is too great to ever be satisfied. Soren Kierkegaard’s daemon is not the daemon of the Greeks, of Diotima. He sees it as a real entity, not a messenger or go-between. As will, as power, the erotic in nature comes alive as a principle of nature, a force that lives through, within restlessness, yearning for the infinite satisfaction of longing, the insatiable desire to own, have, hold, continuous gratification of sensual desire. Don Juan’s only care is to find them, bed them, forget them.
This longing of Don Giovanni is a corruption, I think, of the longing for self realization or actualization, for a complete understanding of the Real. Furthermore, this corruption is the basis of the urge for self annihilation. But reality is here staring us in the face requiring only our affirmation, for whatever there is, be sure, is everywhere – and eternal – and without attributes – thus being freely given by the ‘primal spirit whence of old issued forth the whole cosmic activity.’***
Man’s enterprises continue unabated to follow this pattern. Salvation, for those who live by faith, is available only to those who go beyond life, and is to be granted in a separate, unsearchable realm sometimes called heaven. Science translates heaven into the so called grand unified theory which if reached would explain reasonably all that is, including the origin and the final end of the entire universe. History promises a utopia at its end which is approached dialectically one system of governance replacing another getting more perfect with each iteration. These are all on an ever receding horizon the closer to which one comes the more inaccessible. You can’t get there from here being the underlying principle.
Cairns also writes Plato thought, the Greeks thought, the world pervaded by reason and that its beauty is an outward manifestation of its ultimate nature. In the end one finds that their are elements in the thought of the ancient western world, in Greek philosophy and in Judaism complimentary to that of Buddha, Guadapada, Sankara, Nagarjuna, and Desani. I would only reiterate what I’ve written before and that is, what we seek, the ultimate truth, a full, complete understanding with accompanying appreciation of life’s purpose and meaning, can’t be finally owned because it hides in plain sight. You can’t find it because the premise you don’t already have it, is false. This, I think is the logical, reasonable outcome of being, as individuals, an extension of the universal which gives us eternality in exchange for our giving it individuality.
I never tire at similar points to bring T. S. Eliot’s apt expression of this into the picture: “We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
The search for Truth and the other concomitants of consciousness – beauty, love, justice, etc.; the search for communion with the divine, or at least what is close to the divine, needs begin with love of wisdom. That love is the bottom rung, so to speak of a ladder. One needs take the first step then the following steps follow with increasing ease. Diotima: “(Love) is neither mortal nor immortal, but is a mean between the two. He is a great spirit (daimon), and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal. He interprets between gods and men, conveying and taking across to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men the commands and replies of the gods; he is the mediator who spans the chasm which divides them, and therefore in him all is bound together…For God mingles not with man; but through Love all the intercourse, and converse of god with man, whether awake or asleep, is carried on. The wisdom which understands this is spiritual. Now these spirits or intermediate powers are many and diverse, and one of them is Love.”
I’ve written disparagingly of reason in this space many times saying particularly that it is disposed to address things in the relative realm – the measurable. A more nuanced view comes forth that while this is true and the implication also, that the transcendent can’t be revealed by reason alone, reason, nevertheless is doubtless a device for approaching the transcendent which, when got in sight one must make a leap of faith. At least I think so. This, however, is not the faith of which Kierkegaard so disparagingly wrote. There are esoteric teachings that the popular movements have forgotten if they ever really appreciated them. Romanticism grew out of the teachings of the ancients wherein are the roots of its failures. Indeed, this should be said of all that passes for knowledge, understanding. Key. A device is necessary. Reason, the mind, consciousness, the concomitants of consciousness, Love, Beauty, Truth, Liberty, and the like are given us. What is their purpose? Why is it they seem to only emerge concurrently with sentient life? Aren’t they truly the means – some of the means – by which we might become fully self realized beings? A teacher is needed and to deserve one an effort must be made with the available means. Working to reveal the transcendent allies will come. Looking back, looking around, is fruitful. One learns from others who have studied this. It would be foolish not to take advantage of their efforts. They failed here and there but also had successes. We will fail and will, likewise, have succeses. There most certainly are patterns to be discovered but, going back to Kierkegaard, we should recall gratefully perhaps the best advice one could have: “Life is a mystery to live not a mystery to solve.”
In that connection the wisest of our forbears, East or West, hold – and this writer concurs – all we can do is “soar to the sublime temple of solitude” and bask there in silence. For, as Socrates was known to say, the only thing I know with certainty is I do not know. He also said “We shall either find what we are seeking, or free ourselves from the persuasion that we know what we do not know.”
* Desani’s words
** In Africa it’s traditional that the most revered’s name is forbidden to be spoken. This, as a means of reverence. (To speak “God’s” name is to claim a familiarity denied. We are thus taught not to be presumptuous.)
# Huntington Cairns, introduction to Plato’s Dialogues, Bollingen series, Princeton University
*** Bhagavad Gita
% Notes from Professor Louis Mackey‘s Ancient Philosophy class, University of Texas, Austin. These statements harmonize with those of Guadapada and Sankara (Advaita Vedanta as expressed in the Mandukya Upanishad.