The philosophy of Plotinus: on contemplation

Posted on November 22, 2019 by philstanfield under Aesthetics, G.W.F.Hegel, Mysticism, Neoplatonism, Nicholas of Cusa, Plotinus, Proclus, the aesthetics of self

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Wilhelm Uhde, 1910. Oil on canvas, private collection. 'No doubt the wisdom of the artist may be the guide of the work; it is sufficient explanation of the wisdom exhibited in the arts; but the artist himself goes back, after all, to that wisdom in Nature which is embodied in himself; and this is not a wisdom built up of theorems but one totality, not a wisdom consisting of manifold detail co-ordinated into a unity but rather a unity working out into detail.’ Enneads V.8.5. The ‘faceting’ of ‘Analytic Cubism’ could be interpreted as depicting the ghostly, fragmentary nature of material existence at the same time as seeking to evoke the second hypostasis, Intellect.

The object dissolved in the unity of consciousness: Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Wilhelm Uhde, 1910. Oil on canvas, private collection. ‘No doubt the wisdom of the artist may be the guide of the work; it is sufficient explanation of the wisdom exhibited in the arts; but the artist himself goes back, after all, to that wisdom in Nature which is embodied in himself; and this is not a wisdom built up of theorems but one totality, not a wisdom consisting of manifold detail co-ordinated into a unity but rather a unity working out into detail.’ Enneads V.8.5.
The ‘faceting’ of ‘Analytic Cubism’ could be interpreted as depicting the ghostly, fragmentary nature of material existence at the same time as seeking to evoke the second hypostasis, Intellect.

14.10.1998

But how are you to see into a virtuous Soul and know its loveliness? Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendour of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine.

The Enneads I.6.9

Plotinus’ Enneads are built on contemplation. Its practice enables Soul to rise to Intellect. Inseparable from the notion of will, contemplation is the self-directed and self-contained thought of the higher realm. For Plotinus contemplation, thought and life are synonymous. They are most true and perfect in Intellect. The contemplation of Ideas is above the contemplation of images and the contemplation of the Good is above the contemplation of Ideas.

Plotinus differentiated between contemplation and reasoning,¹ defining ‘reasoning’ as ‘the research into what a thing has in itself’, into that which exists independently. He asked whether ‘research’ means not yet possessing.² Again, contemplation is not concerned with the mass, size or shape of matter perceived by the senses. It draws upon a higher vision which nurtures the Soul in its purpose³

Plotinus wrote of ‘creative contemplation’.⁴ Contemplation is perfect creative activity, and the latter occurs spontaneously when the former is entered into. In its activity, contemplation creates what is contemplated – from the weak and dreamlike contemplation underlying creation by Nature to that by Soul which in its contemplating (since it is more complete and therefore more contemplative than Nature) gives birth in a way and to a product superior to that of Nature.

‘And my act of contemplation makes what it contemplates, as the geometers draw their figures while they contemplate…What happens to me is what happens to my mother and the beings that generated me, for they, too, derive from contemplation, and it is no action of theirs which brings about my birth; they are greater rational principles, and as they contemplate themselves I come to be.’⁵

Contemplation is the true source of all production⁶ and activity and it is the goal to which these aspire at every level, from the earth and plants of Nature, upwards to the Soul’s contemplation in Intellect of the One.⁷ Because it is not perfect, Soul is eager to penetrate and unite with the object of its contemplation which is for it an object of knowledge.⁸

Plotinus distinguished between creative activity in Intellect and in this world. Though also – like the Soul(s of the strong) – driven by recollection, a longing for inward vision, and the desire to share that vision, those with weak souls create an object in the sensory world as a focus for outward sight – a poor imitation of the object of inward vision and of the contemplative process of and in the other world. We contemplate in that one in order to create all else, by becoming One.⁹

‘Men, too, when their power of contemplation weakens, make action a shadow of contemplation and reasoning. Because contemplation is not enough for them, since their souls are weak and they are not able to grasp the vision sufficiently, and therefore are not filled with it, but still long to see it, they are carried into action, so as to see what they cannot see with their intellect. When they make something, then, it is because they want to see their object themselves and also because they want others to be aware of it and contemplate it, when their project is realised in practice as well as possible.’¹⁰

In Intellect, contemplation (thinking), substance and being are the same. In it, there are no parts but there is complete unity and identity of the ‘knowing faculty’ (Soul – become the activity of knowing) and the non-physical, known object of its knowledge (Being). Soul enters Idea as Idea infuses Soul.¹¹

Plotinus proposed a method for ‘dematerialising’ by contemplation the visible universe comprised of separate elements in order to ‘see’ that of the spiritual intelligible in which all elements have no perceptible shape, magnitude, temporal or spatial difference – since each is all, and all, though distinct, are an infinite one.

‘Let us then apprehend in our thought this visible universe, with each of its parts remaining what it is without confusion, gathering all of them together into one as far as we can, so that when any one part appears first, for instance the outside heavenly sphere, the imagination of the sun and, with it, the other heavenly bodies follows immediately, and the earth and sea and all the living creatures are seen, as they could in fact all be seen inside a transparent sphere. Let there be, then, in the soul a shining imagination of a sphere, having everything within it, either moving or standing still, or some things moving and others standing still. Keep this, and apprehend in your mind another, taking away the mass: take away also the places, and the mental picture of matter in yourself, and do not try to apprehend another sphere smaller in mass than the original one, but calling on the god who made that of which you have the mental picture, pray him to come. And may he come, bringing his own universe with him, with all the gods within him, he who is one and all, and each god is all the gods coming together into one; they are different in their powers, but by that one manifold power they are all one; or rather, the one god is all; for he does not fail if all become what he is; they are all together and each one again apart in a position without separation, possessing no perceptible shape – for if they did, one would be in one place and one in another, and each would no longer be all in himself…nor is each whole like a power cut up which is as large as the measure of its parts. But this, the [intelligible] All, is universal power, extending to infinity and powerful to infinity; and that god is so great that his parts have become infinite…’¹²

Everything that exists and happens in the higher universe has its poor copy in this one – objects in this universe are the replicas of Forms in the other, physical reason the replica of contemplative reason, physical sight the replica of the vision of Intellect, physical activity in the creation of an object to be seen with a vision limited to the sensation of that object the replica of contemplative activity in the creation of an object which enables vision.

One acts in and engages with this world because one’s capacity for contemplative activity, for vision, is lacking. In Intellect, through contemplation, the subject’s thought and the object of desired knowledge (that is – being, itself the product of contemplation) have identity as self-living sight and real substance, as the partless essence of what is, complete within itself.

‘…as contemplation ascends from nature to soul, and soul to intellect, and the contemplations become always more intimate and united to the contemplators, and in the soul of the good and wise man the objects known tend to become identical with the knowing subject, since they are pressing on towards intellect, it is clear that in intellect both are one, not by becoming akin, as in the best soul, but substantially, and because thinking and being are the same.’¹³

The wise man is so because he has become vision, directed within himself.¹⁴ In contemplating (creating and seeing) eternity within oneself, one moves towards it.¹⁵ In bringing one’s contemplation to vision, one perceives substance from within it,¹⁶ and comes to unity with oneself. One contemplates…(One)self – as the god ‘silently present’. ¹⁷

‘But whoever has become at once contemplator of himself and all the rest and object of his contemplation, and, since he has become substance and intellect and “the complete living being”, no longer looks at it from outside – when he has become this he is near, and that Good is next above him, and already close by, shining upon all the intelligible world. It is there that one lets all study go…’¹⁸

Contemplation and living Being unite in Intellect as truth, beauty, eternal life and vision. The life (activity) of ‘Mind’ is far superior, far more vital, creative and real, than life in this world.

Notes

1. On this point which is crucial not only to an understanding of this Platonic/Neoplatonic current in philosophy and its influence on the Western visual arts, but, more broadly, to an understanding of how our reasoning functions, Plotinus, like Plato, confusingly used the term ‘reason’ both in reference to an activity of the physical body and the activity of Soul. For Plato and Plotinus, the former activity is concerned with the material world and the latter with contemplation of and in the spiritual. As with everything in the two realms, the first reason is the inferior copy of the latter. Ficino’s contribution to this confusion of reason as a function of matter with (disembodied) spiritual contemplation is exemplary: ‘Reason by itself grasps the incorporeal Reasons of all things…reason investigates heavenly things, and does not have a seat of its own in any part of the body, just as divinity also does not have a particular seat in any part of the world…’ followed immediately by ‘Reason…perceives not only those things which are in the world and the present, as sensation does, but also those which are above the heaven, and those which have been or will be.’ Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, Trans. J. Sears. Dallas: Spring Publications, 1985, Speech V, Chapter 2, pp.84-85. ↩

2. Enneads, III,8,3 ↩

3. ‘When therefore he who is embarked on the contemplation of this kind imagines size or shape or bulk about this nature, it is not Intellect which guides his contemplation because Intellect is not of a nature to see things of this kind, but the activity is one of sense-perception and opinion following sense-perception.’ VI,9,3. Thus, an attempt to accurately depict the physical appearance of a person or an object, because it would focus the viewer’s attention on the sensory world, is not only not necessary but might distract the Soul from its purpose. Porphyry wrote of Plotinus ‘He showed, too, an unconquerable reluctance to sit to a painter or a sculptor, and when Amelius persisted in urging him to allow of a portrait being made he asked him, “Is it not enough to carry about this image in which nature has enclosed us? Do you really think I must also consent to leave, as a desirable spectacle to posterity, an image of the image?”’ Porphyry, ‘On the Life of Plotinus and the Arrangement of His Work’ in The Enneads, Third ed. Abridged. Trans. S. MacKenna. London: Penguin, 1991, cii. ↩

4. III,8,5 ↩

5. III,8,4. Compare with Plato on birth in Phaedrus. Also compare with Rorty on Aristotle’s notion of activity: ‘An activity can only be identified as such if it has been brought to its natural fulfilment: so, for instance, the activity of reproduction has not occurred unless an offspring has been produced…’ A. Oksenberg Rorty, ‘The Psychology of Aristotelian Tragedy’. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XVI (1991), pp.70-71. ↩

6. ‘… all things are a by-product of contemplation…the truest life is life by thought…’ III,8,8. ↩

7. ‘… all things aspire to (the activity of) contemplation, and direct their gaze to this end – not only rational but irrational living things, and the power of growth in plants, and the earth which brings them forth…’ III,8,1. ‘…we must strike for those Firsts, rising from things of sense which are the lasts. Cleared of all evil in our intention towards The Good, we must ascend to the Principle within ourselves….It must be our care to bring over nothing whatever from sense, to allow nothing from that source to enter into Intellectual-Principle…’ VI,9,3. ↩

8. ‘The Soul has a greater content than Nature has and therefore it is more tranquil; it is more nearly complete and therefore more contemplative. It is, however, not perfect, and is all the more eager to penetrate the object of contemplation, and it seeks the vision that comes by observation … it possesses its vision by means of that phase of itself from which it had parted.’ III,8,6. ↩

9. Nietzsche believed that the artist of genius, inspired by the Dionysiac impulse, goes beyond physical phenomena and, through an inward vision, finds unity with the eternal One: ‘Only insofar as the genius in the act of artistic creation coalesces with this primordial artist of the world, does he know anything of the eternal essence of art; for in this state he is, in a marvellous manner, like the weird image of the fairy tale which can turn its eyes at will and behold itself; he is at once subject and object, at once poet, actor, and spectator.’ The Birth of Tragedy, (1872) Section 5, in F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, Trans. W. Kaufmann. New York, Vintage, 1967, p.52 and ‘…the tragic artist…creates his figures like a fecund divinity of individuation…and as his vast Dionysian impulse then devours his entire world of phenomena, in order to let us sense beyond it, and through its destruction, the highest artistic primal joy, in the bosom of the primordially One. The Birth of Tragedy, Section 22, in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, op. cit., p.132. The same religious belief in creativity was held by another extremely influential vitalist and Neoplatonic contemporary of Nietzsche’s – Bergson, whose best known work is titled Creative Evolution (1907). ↩

10. III,8,4. See note 1. Superior to representational art with its referent in this world is the art of which it is desired to evoke, in the viewer’s ‘mind’ through contemplative ‘reason’, its referent in Intellect – the art of physical creation (resulting in the viewer’s critical appreciation of the work of another) contra the art of contemplative creation (in which the viewer is stimulated to complete the process, internally). On the determination of aesthetic value: ‘“Do you think that it will be a poor life that a man leads who has his gaze fixed in that direction, who contemplates absolute beauty with the appropriate faculty and is in constant union with it? Do you not see that in that region alone where he sees beauty with the faculty capable of seeing it, will he be able to bring forth not mere reflected images of goodness but true goodness, because he will be in contact not with a reflection but with the truth? And having brought forth and nurtured true goodness he will have the privilege of being beloved of God, and becoming, if ever a man can, immortal himself.”’ Symposium, 211a-212c. ↩

11. ‘In proportion to the truth with which the knowing faculty knows, it comes to identification with the object of its knowledge. As long as duality persists, the two lie apart, parallel as it were to each other; there is a pair in which the two elements remain strange to one another, as when Ideal-Principles laid up in the mind or Soul remain idle. Hence the Idea must not be left to lie outside but must be made one identical thing with the Soul of the novice so that he finds it really his own. The Soul, once domiciled within that Idea and brought to likeness with it, becomes productive, active; what it always held by its primary nature it now grasps with knowledge and applies in deed, so becoming, as it were, a new thing and, informed as it now is by the purely intellectual, it sees (in its outgoing act) as a stranger looking upon a strange world. It was, no doubt, essentially a Reason-Principle, even an Intellectual Principle; but its function is to see a (lower) realm which these do not see.’ III,8,5. Compare with. Met., and De Anima 430a: ‘…(intellect) is itself thinkable just as the thought-objects are, for in the case of things without matter that which thinks is the same as that which is thought. For contemplative knowledge is the same as what is so known. …Each of the objects of thought is potentially present in the things that have matter, so that while they will not have intellect, which is a capacity for being such things without matter, the intellect will have within it the object of thought.’ ↩

12. V,8,9. Compare with Phaedo on Plato’s differentiation between the visible world and the true world ‘not in nature’, attainable by those who have purified themselves through philosophy (108a-114c), Ficino: ‘Therefore go ahead; subtract its matter if you can (and you can subtract it mentally), but leave the design. Nothing of body, nothing of matter will remain to you. On the contrary, the design which came from the artist and the design which remains in the artist will be completely identical.’ Ficino op. cit., pp.92-93, and Bergson’s method for bringing duration into consciousness: ‘Matter (separate from consciousness) thus resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other and travelling in every direction like shivers through an immense body. In short, try first to connect together the discontinuous objects of daily experience; then resolve the motionless continuity of their qualities into vibrations on the spot; finally fix your attention on these movements, by abstracting from the divisible space which underlies them and considering only their mobility (that undivided act which our consciousness becomes aware of in our own movements): You will thus obtain a vision of matter, fatiguing perhaps for your imagination, but pure, and freed from all that the exigencies of life compel you to add to it in external perception. Now bring back consciousness…At long, very long, intervals, and by as many leaps over enormous periods of the inner history of things, quasi-instantaneous views will be taken, views which this time are bound to be pictorial, and of which the more vivid colours will condense an infinity of elementary repetitions and changes. In just the same way the multitudinous successive positions of a runner are contracted into a single symbolic attitude, which our eyes perceive, which art reproduces and which becomes for us all the image of a man running…The change is everywhere, but inward; we localise it here and there, but outwardly.’ Matter and Memory. (1896). Trans. N. Paul, W. Palmer. New York,1988, p.208. ↩

13. III,8,8 ↩

14. ‘The Sage, then, has gone through a process of reasoning when he expounds his act to others; but in relation to himself he is Vision: such a man is already set, not merely in regard to exterior things but also within himself, towards what is one and at rest: all his faculty and life are inward-bent.’ III,8,7. ↩

15. ‘What then, if one does not depart at all from one’s contemplation of it (eternity) but stays in its company, wondering at its nature, and able to do so by a natural power which never fails? Surely one would be (would one not?), oneself on the move towards eternity and never falling away from it at all, that one might be like it and eternal, contemplating eternity and the eternal by the eternal in oneself…eternity is a majestic thing, and thought declares it identical with the god…’ III,7,5. ↩

16. Bergson believed that intuition probes the flow of duration, placing one within the object, giving an absolute. ↩

17. V,8,11 ↩

18. VI,7,36 ↩

Image

The philosophy of Plotinus: part three

Posted on October 21, 2019 by philstanfield under G.W.F.Hegel, Mysticism, Neoplatonism, Nicholas of Cusa, Plotinus, Proclus, the aesthetics of self

Movement and rest in ‘thought’, the most intense activity and stillness in unity

The creative process is a result of illumination from the One which from its superabundance, overflows and generates its image, Intellect. Living Mind in turn, stable beyond change, spontaneously and eternally pours forth the multiple power of the Forms in its image, Soul. It does so without reason, calculation, imagination or memory.¹

Soul, like Mind, is moved and aspires to and returns into its prior. There it is filled and in the movement of its own excess, creates through its image Nature, the universe of sensation. As the lowest part of Soul, Nature does not know, but only gives form to matter. Because it brings form into being, creation is both contemplation and consummation,² the divine contained in every act. Yet man,³ having ceased to be Intellect, cannot produce true images of himself. On the contrary, restoring himself to Intellect, he again becomes creator of everything, he again becomes God.⁴

Plotinus valued the dynamic creative soul⁵ and the principle (power) of creation over the created object.⁶ The two-way dynamism of his doctrine – the flowing from, return to, and absorption in the Absolute – is a complex dialectics of ‘mind’ involving a simultaneity of identity and difference, rest and movement. Plotinus theorised a dual activity on each level of being: one activity that is internal to it and one that goes out from it. The dynamism and fluidity of his doctrine is paramount.⁷

In the Enneads, movement is not the sign of life, it is the primary life. It is common to all life in ‘the sleepless light’⁸ of Intellect. It is the life of ‘mind’ and the active actuality of being and substance. It is being and substance itself.⁹ Being and movement are a unity since movement, in taking being from potentiality to actuality, makes it perfect, makes form awake.¹⁰ The artificial separation of being from movement occurs in discursive reason.¹¹

Movement occurs through elevation, introversion (intensification and concentration), and a flowing outwards (dispersion and diminution). The fourth method of ‘thought’ which produces movement is in the dialectical opposition between the one and the many. This underlies the other three. Plotinus’ usage of the term is spiritual and moral,¹² and he emphasised its importance with many metaphors:

‘…the Good stays still in himself; but intellect moves about him in its activity, as also it lives around him. And soul dances round intellect outside…’¹³

Movement, rest and being are the inseparable genera of real beings.¹⁴ When Intellect thinks these, they therefore exist, beyond the physical universe. Rest is not the opposite of movement, but is different to it. It is not a passive state of being.

‘…it is impossible to say that rest is the abolition of movement because it does not exist when movement has stopped, but when movement exists rest also exists. And rest there in the intelligible does not consist in the fact that something which is naturally adapted to move is not moving, but in so far as rest has a hold on it, it stands still, but in so far as it is in motion it will always be moving: therefore it stands still by rest and moves by movement. But here below it moves by movement, but when movement is not there it stays still because it is deprived of the movement which it ought to have.’¹⁵

For Soul, knowledge of itself is self-movement aspiring towards its purity.¹⁶ In bringing the copy of Intellect to this world, Soul originates the copies of movement and rest – motion¹⁷ and stillness.

Part three/to be continued…

Notes

1. This function of Intellect, the true creator of this universe, is based on the Demiurge or Craftsman of the Timaeus, in which thought in its movement is creation. In this dialogue Plato argued that the elements of the universe – earth, air, fire, and water – are composed of planes, which are in turn made out of elementary triangular shapes. Bergson, who thought that we are all born Platonists (Selections from Bergson. op. cit., 64), that there exists nothing positive outside Ideas (Creative Evolution.1907, trans. A. Mitchell, New York, 1911, reprint., 1983, 316), and that ‘consciousness does not spring from the brain’ (Creative Evolution. op. cit., 262), thought that there are ‘thousands of different planes of consciousness’ (Matter and Memory. 1896. Trans. N. Paul, W. Palmer. New York,1988, 241). Aristotle attributes a highly mathematicised account of the Forms to Plato’s later years. ↩

2. ‘And lovers, too, are among those who see and press on eagerly towards a form.’ III,8.7 ↩

3. I use this gender consciously, both because Plotinus did, and in order not to disguise the patriarchal nature of his philosophy. ↩

4. ‘…To me, moreover, it seems that if we ourselves were archetypes, Ideas, veritable Being, and the Idea with which we construct here were our veritable Essence, then our creative power, too, would toilessly effect its purpose: as man now stands, he does not produce in his work a true image of himself: become man, he has ceased to be the All; ceasing to be man – we read – “he soars aloft and administers the Cosmos entire”; restored to the All he is maker of the All.’ V,8.7. Beyond this, ‘The vision has been of God in travail of a beautiful offspring, God engendering a universe within himself in a painless labour…’ V,8.11. ↩

5. IV,3.10 ↩

6. ‘What we long for is the originating power, not the originated thing. For this reason, nature, having an immediate relationship to the creative power, also has a precedence over art.’ In Barasch, M. Theories of Art, From Plato to Winckelmann, New York, 1985, 37. ↩

7. Plotinus drew on the Stoic notion of a dynamic power diffuse throughout the universe, which he concentrated in the One. ↩

8. VI,1.8 ↩

9. ‘For if movement is the activity of substance, and being and the primary genera altogether are actively actual, movement could not be something incidental, but, being the activity of what is actively actual, could not any longer be called something which contributes to the completion of substance, but is substance itself: so that it has not entered some subsequent genus, not even quality, but is ranked as simultaneous.’ VI,2.15. ↩

10. On this particular point, compare Republic Bk VII 529-530 in which Plato argued ‘that the true, philosophical astronomer should not seriously study the motions of the visible heavenly bodies, which, being material, are imperfect and changeable, but devote his attention to the laws of motion perceived by the intellect alone.’ Armstrong, op. cit., Vol. II, 12. The text around that to which Armstrong refers is ‘“Isn’t the true astronomer in the same position when he watches the movements of the stars?” I asked. “He will think that the heavens and heavenly bodies have been put together by their maker as well as such things can be; but he will also think it absurd to suppose that there is an always constant and absolutely invariable relation of day to night, or of day and night to month, or month to year, or, again, of the periods of the other stars to them and to each other. They are all visible and material, and it’s absurd to look for exact truth in them.”’ At 529d2-3 Plato equated ‘the true realities’ of the stars with their ‘true relative velocities’. As I have stated previously, the precedent for Plotinus regarding movement and motion was clearly in the import and text of Plato’s writing. See Note 40. ↩

11. ‘…(movement) is found in being not as inhering in a subject; for it is its active actuality and neither of them is without the other except in our conception of them, and the two natures are one nature: for being is actual, not potential…discursive thought says that they are separate…’ VI,2.7. ‘…if we bring in also Intellect and its life, we shall posit as common to all life a single genus, movement. And we shall posit substance and movement, which is the primary life, as two genera. For even if they are one, [the observer] separates them in thought, finding the one not one; otherwise it would not have been possible to separate them. But observe in other things also how movement and life are clearly separated from being, even if not in the true being, yet in the shadow and that which has the same name as being. For as in the portrait of a man many things are wanting, and especially the decisively important thing, life, so in the things perceived by sense being is a shadow of being, separated from that which is most fully being, which was life in the archetype.’ VI,2.7. ↩

12. ‘When the soul begins again to mount, it comes not to something alien but to its very self; thus detached, it is in nothing but itself; self-gathered it is no longer in the order of being; it is in the Supreme.’ VI, 9.11. ↩

13. I,8.2. ↩

14. In VI,2 Plotinus expounds the Platonic doctrine of the categories of the Intelligible World (Sophist 254D-257A), Being, Rest, Motion, Same and Other. ↩

15. VI,3.27. In the Timaeus is an encapsulation of a process and purpose which is of the greatest importance to Western philosophy, Christian theology and Western art theory and practice. ‘And (the Demiurge) gave each divine being two motions, one uniform in the same place, as each always thinks the same thoughts about the same things, the other forward, as each is subject to the movement of the Same and uniform; but he kept them unaffected by the other five kinds of motion, that each might be as perfect as possible.’ (my Italics) Timaeus, 8,40. Timaeus and Critias, op. cit., 52. (‘And he bestowed two movements upon each, one in the same spot and uniform, whereby it should be ever constant to its own thoughts concerning the same thing; the other forward, but controlled by the revolution of the same and uniform: but for the other five movements he made it motionless and still, that each star might attain the highest completeness of perfection.’ The Timaeus of Plato. Ed. R. D. Archer-Hind. New York: Arno, 1973, 131-133.) This little group of words summarises the pathway Plato established and Plotinus maintained – comprising at the same time identity and difference, stasis and movement – between perfection, its divine medium, and creation. It asserts that creation and ‘thought’ in its motion are equivalent and defines the nature of that process. The motions of Plato’s divine beings differ from those of the sensory world – they are effects of the soul in its activity. Plato is too often simplistically remembered as having given us eternal Forms (Plato as an eternal Form?). This quotation again exemplifies the importance and complexity of motion in his philosophy. ↩

16. III,7.4. ‘…knowledge is self-movement, since it is a sight of being and an active actuality, not a state; so that it also comes under movement – but, if you like, under rest, or under both; but if under both, it is as something mixed…’ VI,2.18. Plotinus considered the ‘unchanging’ stars as part of Soul – therefore their movement is not spatial as in this universe, but one of divine life and vitality. It is therefore a self-referential and eternal movement of being which, to anything outside, would appear to be at rest. (my Italics) ‘This is the origin of the fixed stars, which are living beings divine and eternal and remain always rotating in the same place and the same sense…’ Timaeus 8, 40. ↩

17. ‘…soul is the “origin of motion” and is responsible for the motion of other things, and it is moved by itself, and gives life to the ensouled body…’ IV,7.9. The quotation within the quotation is from Plato’s Phaedrus 245C9. Plato believed soul to be the ultimate cause of motion: Laws Bk X 895-897 – ‘Athenian: So what’s the definition of the thing we call the soul? Surely we can do nothing but use our formula of a moment ago: “motion capable of moving itself”. Cleinias: Do you mean that the entity which we all call “soul” is precisely that which is defined by the expression “self-generating motion”’?…Athenian: Very well, then. So soul, by virtue of its own motions, stirs into movement everything in the heavens and on earth and in the sea. The names of the motions of soul are: wish, reflection, diligence, counsel, opinion true and false, joy and grief, cheerfulness and fear, love and hate…Soul also uses all related or initiating motions which take over the secondary movements of matter and stimulate everything to increase or diminish, separate or combine…’. Notice that Plato cited emotions as motion(s of soul). ↩

The philosophy of Plotinus: part two

Posted on October 17, 2019 by philstanfield under G.W.F.Hegel, Neoplatonism, Nicholas of Cusa, Plotinus, Proclus, the aesthetics of self

Movement and rest in ‘thought’, the most intense activity and stillness in unity

The hypostases are interconnected, with Body having its existence in Soul, Soul its source in Intellect¹ and Intellect its generation from the One. At the same time the One has independence from Intellect as Intellect in turn has from Soul. The notion of illumination passes through the Enneads. The One lights Intellect which in turn illuminates Soul which gives light to this universe. The further away from the One, the weaker the illumination.

The double movement in Plotinus’ doctrine – from unity to increasing multiplicity and return to unification and unity concerns an eternal outpouring from a transcendent One, descending through levels to the lowest reality – the universe of matter and the senses. With the purpose of showing the way to God, it is also an urging of soul through purification² and simplification to ascend from a meditation on this universe to the one of intelligible reality, to union with the Good, which alone can give Soul true satisfaction. The impetus for the ascent is the memory of a beauty infinitely greater than its weak presence in this world.

Plotinus believed we have forgotten our true nature, which lies within us. So this ‘ascent of the mind to God’, fuelled by desire and remembrance, is equally a journey within, to the core of our being. The One is like the centre of concentric circles. It is beyond thought and desire, and therefore beyond movement. Intellect, which is thought and desire, both moves around the One, and is at contemplative rest. Soul, moved by aspiration towards and desire for Intellect, revolves around it.³

Progress of the soul in freeing itself from illusion and moving towards its goal, beyond the Platonic world of Forms, requires enormous moral and spiritual striving, of which few are capable⁴ and signifies a deepening contemplation, a closer communion between soul and its origin in pure reality.⁵ Plotinus’ philosophy unites the religious and the philosophical. Armstrong wrote that it amounts to a prayer.⁶

The perfect One, without movement, eternally creates and actuates its image, Intellect. Number gives Intellect – the eternal living reality and perfect unity-in-multiplicity – its structure. It in turn produces its image and activity, Soul. Nature is the lower phase and image of Soul, which, as its rational forming principle, carries form to matter.⁷ Though aspiring to Intellect in a ceaseless contemplation and therefore productive, it is almost the lowest form of contemplation, producing weak and dreamy forms, below which is only matter:

‘What does this mean? That what is called nature is a soul, the offspring of a prior soul with a stronger life; that it quietly holds contemplation in itself, not directed upwards or even downwards, but at rest in what it is, in its own repose and a kind of self-perception, and in this consciousness and self-perception it sees what comes after it, as far as it can, and seeks no longer, but has accomplished a vision of splendour and delight.’⁸

Matter (which also exists in Intellect), receives the Forms in the three-dimensional space of this universe. Though often referred to in the Enneads as ‘evil’, it has a weak tendency towards the One and so shares in its superabundant productivity.

Activity in the divine is reflected in the activity of the material universe. Existence at every level tends through quickening aspiration to rejoin the level above, of which it is a product and image. Contemplation of the source of an hypostasis always precedes and generates activity and production:

‘The procession of Intellect from the One is necessary and eternal, as are also the procession of Soul from Intellect and the forming and ordering of the material universe by Soul. This emanation from the One is because everything perfect is creative and produces something else. Here we touch an element in Plotinus’s thought which is of great importance, the emphasis on life, on the dynamic, vital character of spiritual being. Perfection for him is not merely static. It is a fullness of living and productive power. The One for him is Life and Power, an infinite spring of power, an unbounded life, and therefore necessarily productive.’⁹

Plotinus’ philosophy concerns one vast living system, streaming from the One: ¹⁰

‘…as the (Divine) plan holds, life is poured copiously throughout a Universe, engendering the universal things and weaving variety into their being, never at rest from producing an endless sequence of comeliness and shapeliness, a living pastime.’¹¹

Life is an activity and power which is omnipresent, ever fresh, inexhaustible, ‘brimming over with its own vitality’,¹² unquantifiable and indivisible – what is in the whole is in the part. The greater the living movement, the greater the beauty, and the more the embodied Good, which wakes and raises up the souls of those who respond to it. Hence the more intense is Soul’s desire for the source of that life, for the unity which overcomes loneliness and spiritual incompleteness: ¹³

‘So here below also beauty is what illuminates good proportions rather than the good proportions themselves, and this is what is loveable. For why is there more light of beauty on a living face, but only a trace of it on a dead one, even if its flesh and its proportions are not yet wasted away? And are not the more life-like statues the more beautiful ones, even if the others are better proportioned? And is not an uglier living man more beautiful than the beautiful man in a statue? Yes, because the living is more desirable; and this is because it has soul; and this is because it has more the form of good; and this means that it is somehow coloured by the light of the Good, and being so coloured wakes and rises up and lifts up that which belongs to it, and as far as it can makes it good and wakes it.’¹⁴

Life for Plotinus is eternal creativity and creation, ultimately that of self.¹⁵ He several times used the metaphor of a tree to illustrate the process:

‘For the gathering together of all things into one is the principle, in which all are together and all make a whole. And individual things proceed from this principle while it remains within; they come from it as from a single root which remains static in itself, but they flower out into a divided multiplicity, each one bearing an image of that higher reality, but when they reach this lower world one comes to be in one place and one in another, and some are close to the root and others advance farther and split up to the point of becoming, so to speak, branches and twigs and fruits and leaves; and those that are closer to the root remain for ever…’¹⁶

Part two/to be continued…

Notes

1. Both Intellect and Soul are Forms. ↩

2. Plotinus distinguished between ‘civic’ and ‘purificatory’ virtues. The former pertain to life in this world, the latter to those which lead the Soul to ‘another life, that of the Gods’ and in Intellect. I,2.7. ↩

3. ‘All things are around the King of all, and That is the cause of all good and beautiful things, and all things belong to That, and the second things are around the Second and the third around the Third.’ I,7.2. This is one of the foundation-texts of Neoplatonic theology and is quoted from the questionably authentic Second Letter of Plato (312e1-4). In the Timaeus circles are the governing force in the universe and in our heads. Also ‘…if one ranks the Good as a centre one would rank Intellect as an unmoved circle and Soul as a moving circle; but moving by aspiration.’ IV,4.16. ↩

4. ‘…to those of power to reach, it is present; to the inapt, absent.’ VI,9.7. Cf. Bergson’s identification of two moral and spiritual types and his comparison between ‘static religion’ and ‘dynamic religion’ in ‘The Two Sources of Morality and Religion’, 1932. ↩

5. Soul arrives at Intellect by contemplation but Intellect arrives at the Good through immediate unity with it. ↩

6. Ibid, Vol.5, 29. ‘What is new (in Plotinus’ system)…is the notion of making the ‘Ideas’ states of being of the Intellect and no longer distinct objects, of bringing the very subject of thought into the intelligible world, of considering the hypostases less as entities than as spiritual attitudes.’ Henry op. cit., li. ↩

7. Here I use Armstrong’s terminology. MacKenna translated this as ‘Lower Soul’, ‘Nature-Looking and Generative Soul’, ‘Logos of the Universe’ and ‘ Reason-Principle of the Universe’. ↩

8. III,8.4. Also ‘the Nature best and most to be loved may be found there only where there is no least touch of Form.’ VI,7.33. ↩

9. Armstrong, op. cit., vol. I, xviii-xix. ↩

10. ‘…Life streaming from Life; for energy runs through the Universe and there is no extremity at which it dwindles out…’ III,8.5. ‘…the law is, “some life after the Primal Life, a second where there is a first; all linked in one unbroken chain; all eternal; divergent types being engendered only in the sense of being secondary”.’ II,9.3. ↩

11. III,2.15. ↩

12. VI,5.12. The vital power of Romanticism, traceable to Plotinus’ doctrine, does not imitate nature, it is the hand of nature. Thus the artwork is not at third remove from the Idea, rather, it carries the viewer ‘upwards’ and ‘inwards’ to it. See Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790) Bk II, Analytic of the Sublime, No. 46 (Fine art is the art of genius) ‘Since talent, as an innate productive faculty of the artist, belongs itself to nature, we may put it this way: Genius is the innate mental aptitude (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art.’ The Sturm und Drang movement in Germany between 1770 and 1790 (with parallels in England and France) was the earliest expression of Romanticism and had vitalism as its nucleus. ↩

13. ‘Here is living, the true; that of today, all living apart from Him, is but a shadow, a mimicry.’ VI,9.9. Although the Cubists’ use of (developments on) the philosophies of Plato and Plotinus was certainly influenced by the ‘alienating’ effects of rapid technological developments at the turn of the century, Panofsky positioned this in a deeper, historical context, arguing that doubt and the turn to speculative thought (questioning the relationship between reality, senses, ‘mind’ and artistic production) dates from Mannerism. ‘…the Mannerists considered it obvious that this “idea” or concetto could by no means be purely subjective or “psychological”; and the question arose, for the first time, how it was at all possible for the mind to form a notion of this kind – a notion that cannot simply be obtained from nature, yet must not originate in man alone. This question led eventually to the question of the possibility of artistic production as such…precisely such a way of thinking was bound to realise that that which in the past had seemed unquestionable was thoroughly problematical: the relationship of the mind to reality as perceived by the senses…Before the eyes of art theorists there opened an abyss hidden until then, and they felt the need to close it by means of philosophical speculation…Earlier art theory (pre- mid-sixteenth century) had tried to lay the practical foundations for artistic production; now it had to face the task of proving its theoretical legitimacy. Thought now took refuge, so to speak, in a metaphysics meant to justify the artist in claiming for his inner notions a suprasubjective validity as to both correctness and beauty.’ Panofsky, op. cit., 82-83. Also ‘At odds with nature the human mind fled to God in that mood at once triumphant and insecure…’, ibid., 99. More broadly (or perhaps more profoundly) – ‘the opposition between “idealism” and “naturalism” that ruled the philosophy of art until the end of the nineteenth century and under multifarious disguises – Expressionism and Impressionism, Abstraction and Empathy – retained its place in the twentieth, must in the final analysis appear as a “dialectical antinomy.”…To recognise the diversity of these solutions and to understand their historical presuppositions is worthwhile for history’s sake, even though philosophy has come to realise that the problem underlying them is by its very nature insoluble.’ Ibid., 126. ↩

14. VI,7.22. ‘Why are the most living portraits the most beautiful, even though the other happen to be more symmetric? Why is the living ugly more attractive than the sculptured handsome? It is that the one is more nearly what we are looking for, and this because there is soul there, because there is more of the Idea of The Good…and this illumination awakens and lifts the soul and all that goes with it, so that the whole man is won over to goodness and in the fullest measure stirred to life.’ VI,7.22. Plato also tied life to truth. On the superiority of speech to writing – Socrates: ‘I mean the kind that is written on the soul of the hearer together with understanding…’ Phaedrus replied: ‘You mean the living and animate speech of a man with knowledge, of which written speech might fairly be called a kind of shadow.’ Phaedrus 276. ↩

15. ‘If there had been a moment from which He began to be, it would be possible to assert his self-making in the literal sense; but since what He is He is from before eternity, his self-making is to be understood as simultaneous with Himself; the being is one and the same with the making, the eternal ‘bringing into existence’.’ VI.8,20. Also ‘Is that enough? Can we end the discussion by saying this? No, my soul is still in even stronger labour. Perhaps she is now at the point when she must bring forth, having reached the fullness of her birth-pangs in her eager longing for the One.’ V.3,17. ↩

16. III,3.7. Also ‘The Supreme is the Term of all; it is like the principle and ground of some vast tree of rational life; itself unchanging, it gives reasoned being to the growth into which it enters.’ VI,8.15, and IV,4.11. In Creative Evolution, Bergson wrote ‘…life is tendency, and the essence of a tendency is to develop in the form of a sheaf, creating, by its very growth, divergent directions among which its impetus is divided.’ In H. Larrabee, ed. Selections from Bergson. New York, 1949, 72. Also compare Plotinus – ‘The fact that the product contains diversity and difference does not warrant the notion that the producer must be subject to corresponding variations. On the contrary, the more varied the product, the more certain the unchanging identity of the producer: even in the single animal the events produced by Nature are many and not simultaneous; there are the age periods, the developments at fixed epochs – horns, beard, maturing breasts, the acme of life, procreation – but the principles which initially determined the nature of the being are not thereby annulled…this is the unalterable wisdom of the Cosmos…’ IV.4,11 with Bergson ‘The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.’ From Creative Evolution in Selections from Bergson. op. cit., 105. ↩

Battle of the time lords

Posted on June 19, 2015 by philstanfield under Capitalist ideology, Creativity, dialectical materialism, Henri Bergson, Neoplatonism, Philosophy, Plotinus

Plotinus (204/5-270), Anonymous, white marble, Ostiense Museum, Ostia Antica, Rome

Comment for The Philosopher’s Zone 21.06.15

Hi Joe,

Jimena Canales said in your interview of her that she looked at the entry in the SEP on time and was ‘astounded’ and ‘very shocked’ to see that Bergson was not even mentioned.

Yet at that entry it points to another on temporal consciousness where Bergson, appropriately, appears.

Canales dated the beginning of Bergson’s philosophical fall towards disappearance to 06.04.22, describing her subject as ‘an incredible, untold story’.

A dramatic sales-pitch from one who herself continues to ‘overlook’ one of the greatest influences on Western philosophy and culture.

What has ‘disappeared’ – been suppressed – has not simply been Bergson’s philosophy but a philosophy for which he was the primary vehicle into the twentieth century – Neoplatonism – the pornography of academic philosophers, assiduously studied and drawn upon in private while its influence was and is not acknowledged or was and is lied about in public.

Your astounded and shocked guest asked ‘Why, given the evidence, did Bergson not agree with what Einstein was saying?’ failing to answer that it was because his view of time was Neoplatonic – a concept neither you nor she used once. Neither once mentioned the name ‘Plotinus’.

Your guest referred to Bergson’s ‘élan vital’ which came straight and unadulterated from The Enneads. Did she make that basic point? No.

She said she ‘paid a lot of attention’ to what Bergson and Einstein were citing in their argument and twice spoke of her ‘care’ on this matter. Her fundamental failures counter that assertion.

You asked who was right, Einstein or Bergson. Canales said she wanted to move past this but one can’t move past that question which underlies all others and which can be expressed another way – Which is prior to or the product of the other – objective reality or consciousness and its products? The former subsumes the latter, irrespective of how rich and rewarding the latter is.

In her book, she gave Plotinus one mention and not one to Neoplatonism. The Enneads are not cited in her bibliography.

Bergson tried to hook his ancient philosophy to Einstein’s revolution, just as Kant attempted to do with his in relation to scientific knowledge with his carefully worded ‘turn’ inspired by the hypothesis of Copernicus.

In Australia’s authoritarian and anti-intellectual culture I have sought since 1982 to understand and publicise the profound impact of mysticism and its primary Western form Neoplatonism on Western culture.

Much of my effort has been counter to time-serving academics who have built their careers aboard the ideological caravans of modernism and pomo – themselves suffused with mysticism.

There has never been a greater dishonesty and failure of scholarship and a more prolonged pandering to Western supremacism on the back of a claim to be the bearers of ‘reason’ than in regard to this matter.

My proposals to run courses on this since 1999 have been rejected at the University of Sydney, UNSW and the WEA.

In an essay ‘Henri Bergson, Neoplatonist, and the Cubist Aesthetic’ at my blog philipstanfield.com I explicate Bergson’s philosophy as it is – Neoplatonist.

This philosophy via the consummate Neoplatonist Hegel, having been stood on its feet by Marx, is the philosophy and epistemology of science and the future.

Philip Stanfield

Image

Henri Bergson, Neoplatonist, and the Cubist Aesthetic: Part Thirteen

Posted on September 20, 2014 by philstanfield under Aesthetics, Art and Ideology, Capitalist ideology, Concealed priesthood, Henri Bergson, Mysticism, Philosophy, the aesthetics of self

Bergson’s view of man as a creator, above the approval of fellow humanity, reads as Nietzschean. In Mind – Energy he wrote ‘the joy he feels is the joy of a god.’¹ He equated this person with ‘superman’² – in Nietzsche’s philosophy the higher state of Übermensch embodies the ‘will to power’ and creation.

Another parallel between these two philosophies is that just as creative intuition entails a willed effort to transcend logical patterns of thought, Bergson’s élan vital and Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ both represent a struggle to gain freedom from the social and material environment. Bergson also distinguished between the artist or poet and ‘the common herd.’³ He wrote that the aim of art is to lay bare the secret and tragic element in our character,⁴ and that ‘True pity consists not so much in fearing suffering as in desiring it.’⁵

Bergson wrote that the ‘inward states’ of creative emotion are the most intense as well as the most violent.⁶ His words ‘for what interests us in the work of the poet is the glimpse we get of certain profound moods or inner struggles’⁷ are closely echoed in those Picasso used with regard to Cézanne and Van Gogh.

‘It is not what the artist does that counts, but what he is…What forces our interest is Cézanne’s anxiety – that’s Cézanne’s lesson; the torments of Van Gogh – that is the actual drama of the man. The rest is a sham.’⁸

Bergson held that the object of art is to put to sleep the resistance of the viewer’s personality (a spiritualised hypnosis), to bring the viewer ‘into a state of perfect responsiveness, in which we realise the idea that is suggested to us and sympathise with the feeling that is expressed.’⁹ To provoke an intuitive response, the elements of the canvas must first arouse the viewer’s emotions and sensitivity to the flow of true duration.¹⁰ This can be achieved in a number of ways. Devices include the rhythmical arrangement and effect of line and words

Juan Gris. Still Life with Checkered Tablecloth, 1915, Private collection

‘it is the emotion, the original mood, to which they (artists) attain in its undefiled essence. And then, to induce us to make the same effort ourselves they contrive to make us see something of what they have seen: by rhythmical arrangement of words.’¹¹

Bergson also gave the example of letters (of words) which are parts of a poem which one knows, but randomly mixed. Because one knows the poem, one can immediately reconstitute the poem as a whole. This is an example of the reconstitution of the real parts of intuition (and metaphysics), distinct from the partial notations of analysis and the positive sciences, which cannot be reconstituted.

It was Bergson’s philosophy that the Cubists drew on in their use not only of material not previously associated with art (sand, wallpaper etc.) but also of part words and lettering.

‘Now beneath all the sketches he has made at Paris the visitor will probably, by way of memento, write the word “Paris”. And as he has really seen Paris, he will be able, with the help of the original intuition he had of the whole, to place his sketches therein, and so join them up together.’¹² Negation also affirms and suggests aspects of an object.¹³

Another device is the conveyance of the notion of passage. The technique of passage derives from Cézanne, but its stimulus may well lie in Bergson’s philosophy.¹⁴ Not only did Cubism develop on this, a similar treatment can be seen in art contemporary with it and which has established connections with Bergson’s philosophy – that of Gleizes, Metzinger, the Futurists and Delaunay.¹⁵ Bergson wrote of flexibility, mobility, ‘almost fluid representations, always ready to mould themselves on the fleeting forms of intuition.’¹⁶ Evocative of the refined and far more relaxed methods of so-called Synthetic Cubism are Bergson’s words ‘Intuition, bound up to a duration which is growth, perceives in it an uninterrupted continuity of unforeseeable novelty.’¹⁷

Pablo Picasso, ‘Ma Jolie’, 1913-14, oil on canvas, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis

‘So art, whether it be painting or sculpture, poetry or music, has no other object than to brush aside the utilitarian symbols, the conventional and socially accepted generalities, in short, everything that veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to face with reality itself…realism is in the work when idealism is in the soul and…it is only through ideality that we can resume contact with reality.’¹⁸

Bergson’s entire philosophy, and the fundamental problem with it, lies in his distinction between the ‘mind’ (consciousness) and the brain, between subjective reality and objective reality. This is encapsulated in the following

‘That there is a close connection between a state of consciousness and the brain we do no dispute. But there is also a close connection between a coat and the nail on which it hangs, for if the nail is pulled out, the coat falls to the ground. Shall we say, then, that the shape of the nail gives us the shape of the coat, or in any way corresponds to it? No more are we entitled to conclude, because the physical fact is hung onto a cerebral state, that there is any parallelism between the two series psychical and physiological.’¹⁹

Georges Braque. Pitcher and Violin, 1910

Georges Braque, Violin and Pitcher, 1910

It is my contention that it was very likely to this most fundamental of philosophical issues than a play on illusion that the nail in Braque’s Pitcher and Violin 1909-10, referred. As Bergson and Braque would have been aware – a lot hangs on it.

Part thirteen/to be continued…

Notes

1. Selections from Bergson, op. cit., 114 ↩

2. Ibid., 101, from Creative Evolution, op. cit. ↩

3. Laughter, op. cit., 151 ↩

4. Ibid., 160 ↩

5. Time and Free Will, op. cit., 19 ↩

6. Laughter, op. cit., 158 ↩

7. Ibid., 166 ↩

8. From an interview with M. de Zayas in Theories of Modern Art, op. cit., 272 ↩

9. Time and Free Will, op. cit., 14 ↩

10. Antliff wrote that for Bergson, the provocation of an intuition depends on the activation of the beholder’s subliminal ‘mind’. ↩

11. Laughter, op. cit., 156 ↩

12. An Introduction to Metaphysics, op. cit., 33 ↩

13. Creative Evolution, op. cit., 288 ↩

14. See G. Hamilton, ‘Cézanne, Bergson and the Image of Time’ Art Journal, xvi, Fall, 1956, 2-12 ↩

15. See Antliff on the use of passage to evoke the apprehension of the dynamism of form. Definition was not sought but suggestion ‘so that the mind of the spectator is the chosen place of their concrete birth.’ Inventing Bergson, op. cit., 52 ↩

16. The Creative Mind, op. cit., 198 ↩

17. Ibid., 39 ↩

18. Laughter, op. cit., 157 ↩

19. Matter and Memory, op. cit., 13 ↩

Image sources: 1st/2nd/3rd

Henri Bergson, Neoplatonist, and the Cubist Aesthetic: Part Twelve

Posted on September 13, 2014 by philstanfield under Aesthetics, Art and Ideology, Capitalist ideology, Concealed priesthood, Henri Bergson, Mysticism, Philosophy, the aesthetics of self

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Mona Lisa, oil on poplar wood, 1503-1506, Musée du Louvre, Paris

* * *

In ‘The Life and Work of Félix Ravaisson’ (1904) Bergson praised da Vinci’s Mona Lisa as an example of artistic intuition (da Vinci’s experience of his model) in which the line, form and colour lead us ‘toward a virtual centre located behind the image.’¹ By entering into or identifying with a character

‘out of that indivisible feeling, as from a spring, all the words, gestures and actions of the man would appear to me to flow naturally…The character would be given to me all at once, in its entirety…Symbols and points of view…place me outside him; they give me only what he has in common with others and not what belongs to him and to him alone…his essence cannot be perceived from without…nor be expressed by symbols…Coincidence with the person himself would alone give me the absolute. It is in this sense and in this sense only, that absolute in synonymous with perfection.’²

While an image cannot replace the intuition of duration, a mix of distinct but balanced images can work together to stimulate a viewer to make the necessary effort to achieve an intuition.

‘many different images, taken from quite different orders of things, will be able, through the convergence of their action, to direct consciousness to the precise point where this is a certain intuition to seize on. By choosing images as dissimilar as possible, any one of them will be prevented from usurping the place of the intuition it is instructed to call forth, since it would then be driven away at once by its rivals. By seeing that in spite of their differences in aspect they all demand of the mind the same kind of attention and, as it were, the same degree of tension, one will gradually accustom consciousness to a particular and definitely determined disposition, precisely the one it will have to adapt to…to produce the desired effort and, by itself, arrive at the intuition.’³

Georges Braque, 1910, La guitare (Mandora, La Mandore) oil on canvas, Tate Modern, London (Image, Wikipedia)

The ‘austere’ and subtle use of tonality by Picasso and Braque in their so-called Analytic Cubism (and less capably by other Cubists) may derive from Bergson’s philosophy in order to not only focus the viewer’s attention on geometric form and space but to convey interpenetration and the ‘greyness’ of duration.

‘philosophy consists precisely in this, that by an effort of intuition one places oneself within that concrete reality, of which the Critique (of Pure Reason) takes from without the two opposed views, thesis and antithesis. I could never imagine how black and white interpenetrate if I had never seen grey; but once I have seen grey I easily understand how it can be considered from two points of view, that of white and that of black.’⁴

For Bergson, artistic practice ‘aims at impressing feelings on us rather than expressing them (my emphases), it suggests them to us, and willingly dispenses with the imitation of nature when it finds some more efficacious means.’⁵ The artist aims at sharing his emotion with the viewer ‘so rich, so personal, so novel and at enabling us to experience what he cannot make us understand.’⁶ Bergson regarded emotion as transcendent. As Deleuze wrote, it ‘is like the God in us.’⁷

‘emotion is creative (first because it expresses the “whole of creation, then because it creates the work in which it is expressed; and finally because it communicates a little of this creativity to spectators or hearers.’⁸

Consider the use of musical instruments and notation in Cubist art, in the light of Bergson’s words

‘When music cries, it is humanity, it is the whole of nature which cries with it. Truly speaking, it does not introduce these feelings in us; it introduces us rather into them, like the passers-by that might be nudged in a dance.’⁹

Georges Braque, 1912, The Violin (Mozart-kubelick), oil on canvas, private collection, Basel, Switzerland (Image, Wikipedia)

For Bergson, this creative emotion is precisely a cosmic Memory that liberates man from ‘mere’ duration in order to make him a creator, through whom flows the whole movement of creation.¹⁰

‘This liberation, this embodiment of cosmic memory in creative emotions, undoubtedly only takes place in privileged souls. It leaps from one soul to another…(and) it traces the design of an open society, a society of creators’¹¹

Part twelve/to be continued…

Notes

1. In ‘Bergson and Cubism: A Reassessment’, op. cit., 345 ↩

2. An Introduction to Metaphysics, op. cit., 22 ↩

3. From An Introduction to Metaphysics in ‘Bergson and Cubism: A Reassessment’, op. cit., 345. Cf. the use of lettering etc. by the Cubists. ↩

4. An Introduction to Metaphysics, op. cit., 60. A critic wrote less specifically, ‘The “gravity” of intuitive emotion caused them (the Cubists) to subordinate colour to form’ , in Inventing Bergson, op. cit., 31. ↩

5. Time and Free Will, op. cit., 16. Very important to cf. Bergson on this point with Plotinus on the function of the emotions. Also, to impress feelings rather than to express them suggests the notion of the artist seeking to control the viewer’s response. Cf. Republic. ↩

6. ‘Bergson and Cubism: A Reassessment’, op. cit., 343. ↩

7. Bergsonism, op. cit., 110. ↩

8. Ibid. ↩

9. Ibid. ↩

10. In The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, Trans., Audra and Brereton, 1935. Bergson wrote ‘create creators’ 243. ↩

11. Bergsonism, op. cit., 111 ↩

Mona Lisa

Henri Bergson, Neoplatonist, and the Cubist Aesthetic: Part Two

Posted on May 8, 2014 by philstanfield under Aesthetics, Art, Capitalist ideology, Concealed priesthood, Henri Bergson, Mysticism, Neoplatonism, Philosophy, the aesthetics of self

Bergson asked how it is possible, having posited unchanging Ideas, to make change come from them, then argued ‘there is more in the motionless than in the moving’,¹ that Ideas are contained in matter and that nothing, the source of becoming, moves between Ideas, creating ‘endless agitation’, which leads to the degradation of Ideas. Hence duration coexisted with Ideas. Forms are ‘snapshots’ of changing reality. ‘They are moments gathered along the course of time’:²

‘Beneath the changing phenomena will appear to us, by transparence, a closed system of concepts subordinated to and co-ordinated with each other…It will be prior to human knowledge…prior also to things, which awkwardly try to imitate it…Its immutability is therefore, indeed, the cause of the universal becoming.’³

He argued:

‘But when we put immutable Ideas at the base of the moving reality, a whole physics, a whole cosmology, a whole theology follows necessarily. We must insist on the point.’⁴

Bergson thought that we are all born Platonists⁵ and that there exists nothing positive outside Ideas.⁶ He gave the example of the Idea of a poem, how thousands of people write on an Idea and how our minds can leap from the words to the images and from these to the Idea:⁷

‘the philosopher, ascending again from the percept to the concept, sees condensed into the logical all the positive reality that the physical possesses. His intellect, doing away with the materiality that lessens being, grasps being itself in the immutable system of Ideas.’⁸

In view not only of form in art but of the highly philosophic nature of Cubism, Bergson’s treatment of form is very important, and is both Platonic:

‘the philosophy of Ideas…starts from the Form; it sees in the Form the very essence of reality…it posits Form in the eternal’⁹

and most productive in comparison. For example, the following:

‘Things re-enter into each other. What was extended in space is contracted into pure Form. And past, present and future shrink into a single moment, which is eternity.’¹⁰

compared with Picasso’s statement in 1923:

‘When I hear people speak of the evolution of an artist, it seems to me that they are considering him standing between two mirrors that face each other and reproduce his image an infinite number of times, and that they contemplate the successive images of one mirror as his past, and the images of the other mirror as his future, while his real image is taken as his present. They do not consider that they are all the same images in different planes.’¹¹

Again, on the limitation and unreality of appearance:

‘(Forms) tend to withdraw into their own definition, that is to say, into the artificial reconstruction and symbolical expression which is their intellectual equivalent. They enter into eternity, if you will; but what is eternal in them is just what is unreal.’¹²

Nietzsche wrote:
‘The more ‘Idea’ the more being. (Plato) reversed the concept ‘reality’ and said: ‘What you take for real is an error, and the nearer we approach the ‘Idea’, the nearer we approach ‘truth’ – Is this understood? It was the greatest of rebaptisms…Fundamentally, Plato, as the artist he was, preferred appearance to being! lie and invention to truth! the unreal to the actual! But he was so convinced of the value of appearance that he gave it the attributes ‘being’, ‘causality’ and ‘goodness’ and ‘truth’, in short everything men value.’¹³

Picasso who had read most of Nietzsche’s works by seventeen and who co-edited a magazine recommending The Birth of Tragedy in 1901 stated:

‘Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realise truth…The artist must know how to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.’¹⁴

Part two/to be continued…

Notes

1. Creative Evolution, op. cit., 316 ↩

2. Ibid., 317 ↩

3. Ibid., 328. This is what Cézanne sought to express in his late work ↩

4. Ibid., 315 ↩

5. Selections from Bergson, op. cit., 64 ↩

6. Creative Evolution, op. cit., 316 ↩

7. Ibid., 320 ↩

8. Ibid., 321 ↩

9. Ibid., 318 ↩

10. Ibid., 320 ↩

11. Picasso in a statement to M. de Zayas, ‘Picasso Speaks’, The Arts, New York, May 1923, reprint., in E. Fry, Cubism, London, 1966, reprint., 1978, 167 ↩

12. Creative Evolution, op. cit., 317 ↩

13. F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, W. Kaufmann, ed., New York, 1968, 308 ↩

14. Picasso to M.de Zayas in Fry, op. cit., 165-166 ↩

Henri Bergson, Neoplatonist, and the Cubist Aesthetic

Posted on May 3, 2014 by philstanfield under Aesthetics, Art, Capitalist ideology, Concealed priesthood, Henri Bergson, Neoplatonism, Philosophy, the aesthetics of self

Bergson at his reception at the Académie française, 1918

30.07.1996

The philosophy of Henri Bergson was a major and perhaps the most important direct influence on the development of the Cubist aesthetic – as well as central to the development of early twentieth century Modernism. It is my contention that it was on the back of Bergson’s philosophy that a set of philosophical ways of thinking with a fundamentally Platonic and Neoplatonic core were carried into at least a number of the leading art currents in the first two decades of the twentieth century – particularly that of Cubism – itself pivotal to Modernism.

The connection between Cubism, Bergson and Platonism has been written about since the early development of Cubism, notably by those involved with that development. Yet despite the evidence, to my knowledge it has only been explored to some degree by R. Antliff. Antliff’s writing is exemplary of the confusion and hesitancy of scholarship on this subject. On the one hand he argued that Bergson played a seminal role in shaping the art and politics of the Fauvist, Cubist and Futurist movements¹, that the first attempts to align Cubist theory with that of Bergson began in about 1912², and that ‘no sustained comparative examination of Cubism’s precepts with those of Bergson has been undertaken thus far.’³

On the other, he wrote not only that Bergson’s influence on Cubism has remained enigmatic⁴ but that his question was not whether the progenitors of Cubism and Fauvism invented their art forms in response to Bergson, but how his ideas were received in a pre-existing (my emphasis) Fauvist and Cubist milieu.⁵ Other writers recognised an interesting connection between Bergson’s philosophy and Cubism or dismissed any possible influence of the former on the latter.⁶ Hence, since Bergson’s philosophy has long been ‘out of favour’, I consider it necessary to state the following as an exposition of that philosophy, focusing particularly on those aspects I consider relevant to my subject. I will also make a number of connections with Cubism and the relevant artistic and philosophical work of others.

Bergson was one of the most influential and widely read philosophers of the first decades of the twentieth century. His lectures at the College de France (where he was a professor from 1900) were immensely popular with students and wealthy intellectuals. By 1910 he was regarded as a national sage, receiving the Legion d’honneur in 1918 and the Nobel Prize for literature in 1928. His most influential works were written in between 1889 (Time and Free Will) and 1907 (Creative Evolution).

They are Matter and Memory (1896), Laughter (1900) and An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903). Many, particularly some religious and political zealots regarded him as an ally against positivism. In his introduction to an edition of Creative Evolution, Peter Gunter referred to that book as the first metaphysical system of the twentieth century. This book is regarded as Bergson’s most important work and it had a very strong impact when it was published.⁷

Bergson’s philosophy played a major part in the ‘revolt against reason’ in French culture from the late nineteenth century. His epistemology put ‘intuition’ in the place of ‘reason’. His notion of ‘mind’ was plainly dualist – ‘consciousness is essentially free, it is freedom itself‘⁸, ‘consciousness does not spring from the brain’⁹:

‘the mind overflows the brain on all sides, and…cerebral activity responds only to a very small part of mental activity…mental life cannot be an affect of bodily life…it looks much more as if the body were simply made use of by the mind, and…we have, therefore no reason to suppose the body and the mind united inseparably to one another.’¹⁰

Bergson thought that existence moves as a flow and not dialectically. For him, the unity of opposites resulted in a false movement. Deleuze noted that in this there is a Platonic tone.¹¹ The implication of Bergson’s philosophy is that he did to Plato what Marx claimed to have done to Hegel, yet his philosophy sought to maintain the development of Platonism ‘on its head’. He opposed his eternity of creative evolution to Plato’s immutable eternity based on Ideas and defined ‘eidos’ as ‘the stable view taken of the instability of things’.¹²

He wrote that Plato was the ‘first and foremost’ to seek true reality in the unchanging, whereas for Bergson, this reality lay precisely in what does change. For him, Plato did not take becoming seriously:

‘The whole of the philosophy which begins with Plato and culminates in Plotinus is the development of a principle which may be formulated thus: “There is more in the immutable than in the moving, and we pass from the stable to the unstable by a mere diminution.” Now it is the contrary which is true. Modern science dates from the day when mobility was set up as an independent reality.’¹³

Yet, on investigation, this eternal and ‘independent reality’ is revealed as precisely the immutable of Plato.

Part one/to be continued…

Notes

1. R. Antliff, Inventing Bergson, Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde, New Jersey, 1993, 6 ↩

2. R. Antliff, ‘Bergson and Cubism : A Reassessment’, Art Journal, Winter 1988 vol. 47 no. 4, 342 ↩

3. Ibid., 342 ↩

4. Ibid., 341 and ‘The Relevance of Bergson : Creative Intuition, Fauvism and Cubism’, Ph.D thesis, Yale University, 1991, 8 ↩

5. Antliff, ibid., 3. In his important study on the relationship between Neoplatonism and certain artists involved in the development of early twentieth century abstraction, Cheetham omits discussing Bergson. ‘I do not discuss Bergson, because in spite of his tremendous interest in memory and his influence in modern painting (especially Futurism), he was overtly anti-Platonic in his theorising.’ In the next paragraph, ‘Notions of purity are also central to Cubism and Orphism, as Apollinaire makes clear.’ M. Cheetham, The Rhetoric of Purity, Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting, Cambridge, 1991, xiv, xv. ↩

6. Antliff cites G. Beck and M. Roskill in ‘Bergson and Cubism: A Reassessment’ , op. cit., 347 ↩

7. H. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 1907, trans. A. Mitchell, New York, 1911, reprint., 1983, xxv ↩

8. Ibid., 270 ↩

9. Ibid., 262 ↩

10. H. Larrabee, ed., Selections from Bergson, New York, 1949, 119 ↩

11. G. Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans., H. Tomlinson, B. Habberjam, New York, 1988, 44; also ‘This multiplicity that is duration is not at all the same thing as the multiple, any more than its simplicity is the same as the One’, 46 ↩

12. Creative Evolution, op. cit., 315 ↩

13. H. Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. Hulme, New York, 1955, 54 ↩

Image

The Man of Reason: Part Eight

Posted on April 26, 2014 by philstanfield under Capitalist ideology, Philosophy

Lloyd wrote ‘What is new is the decline in optimism about the eventual victory of reason.’64 An extraordinary statement for a philosopher to make. Why the negativity? Victory over what? ‘Irrationality’? If so, isn’t this the great fear of the Man of Reason?65 Plumwood addressed the issue with pertinent questions – ‘Where does the remarkable set of values enshrined in the Platonic system of thought come from? Why is reason developed in oppositional ways as hostile to nature? The attractions of choosing the shadowy, abstract world of the Forms over the living world of experience are not immediately obvious.’66

A constituent running strongly through the existence of the Man of Reason is his retreat from life. In his Seventh Letter Plato wrote of the experience of his youth:

‘I had much the same experience as many other young men. I expected, when I came of age, to go into politics…When I saw all this (the treatment of Socrates), and other things as bad, I was disgusted and drew back from the wickedness of the times.’67

For Plato and Plotinus, the return of soul to its source is the escape from matter. More than once in his Enneads, Plotinus calls it a flight, an escape. He cited Plato – “ ‘Likeness to God’, he says, ‘is a flight from this world’s ways and things’…”68 Such a proposition, resulting in union with God in solitude is individualist and elitist. It is a doctrine of the salvation of the self from the world. The Enneads conclude:

‘This is the life of gods and of godlike and blessed men, deliverance from the things of this world, a life which takes no delight in the things of this world, escape in solitude to the solitary.’69

Lloyd noted the Man of Reason’s ‘transcendence’ of the feminine,70 Plumwood called it ‘the flight from the feminine’.71

In her essay, Lloyd quotes Descartes from a letter to Princess Elizabeth: “True philosophy teaches that even amid the saddest disasters and most bitter pains a man can always be content, provided that he knows how to use his reason.”, adding ‘His own mastery of reason over the passions, he claims, has cured him of his hereditary dry cough and pale colour and ensured that even his dreams are pleasant.’72 In view of my criticism of the Man of Reason’s flight from the engagement of his complete being in life, Spinoza’s desire to transcend ‘the passions’, hatred, anger, envy, derision, pride, ‘excessive love’, suspicion and enmities can be interpreted as having a more prosaic motive than his Man of Reason would have us believe. This same desire to transcend (escape) ‘the vagaries’ and obligations of life lies at the heart of Neoclassicism, Romanticism and the philosophy of Bergson.

The Man of Reason personifies a rejection of those aspects of ‘mind’ and life which are beyond his control. Poets were to be banned from Plato’s Republic.73 ‘The gravest charge against poetry still remains. It has a terrible power to corrupt even the best characters, with very few exceptions’.74

‘Poetry has the same effect on us when it represents sex and anger, and the other desires and feelings of pleasure and pain which accompany all our actions. It waters them when they ought to be left to wither, and makes them control us when we ought, in the interests of our own greater welfare and happiness, to control them.’75

Yet not only is Plato’s writing, with his notion of eternal Forms and their shadows and his use of simile highly creative, his own writing reveals a rich and idealistic emotional life and a great sensitivity to art and inspiration:

‘arranged as they are in the plumes of rapid imagination, (poets) speak truth. For a Poet is indeed a thing ethereally light, winged, and sacred, nor can he compose anything worth calling poetry until he becomes inspired, and, as it were, mad, or whilst any reason remains in him…(they compose) from the impulse of the divinity within them’76

His treatment of the ‘divided soul’ is exemplified in the Phaedrus, in which the sexual love of beauty is an inspirational bridge between matter (appearance) and knowledge (of the realm of Ideas):

‘the whole soul of him whose wings begin to grow seethes and throbs with an itching irritation such as is felt in the gums at the forming of the teeth…And as it looks upon the beauty of a boy and particles then come flowing thence upon it, which is called desire, it is warmed and refreshed, it is relieved of its pain and rejoices.’77

Part eight of nine/to be continued…

Notes
64 G. Lloyd, ‘The Man of Reason’, in Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy, Eds., A. Garry and M. Pearsall, Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989, 126

65 Lloyd argues Hegel’s faith in Reason can be taken not only ‘as the expression of an ideal’, but ‘as an affirmation of faith that the irrational will not prevail. Such a faith may well appear naive; but that does not mean it is bad faith.’ G. Lloyd, The Man of Reason, ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy, London: Methuen, 1984, 107

66 V. Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, London: Routledge, 1993, 97

67 Plato, The Republic, Trans., D. Lee. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979, 14

68 Plotinus, The Enneads, Third ed. Abridged., Trans., S. MacKenna. London: Penguin, 1991, 18 (I,2,3)

69 Plotinus, Enneads, Trans., A.H. Armstrong. In seven volumes. London: William Heinemann, 1966-1988, Volume VI, 345 (VI,9,11). Armstrong referred to this as ‘the flight of the alone to the Alone’.

70 G. Lloyd, The Man of Reason, ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy, op. cit. 104

71 V. Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, op. cit. 74. Also 112 ‘Descartes is plainly the heir of the Platonic and rationalist flight from and devaluation of the body, nature and the feminine.’ 116 For Plato and Descartes, knowledge is not only freedom from doubt, but also ‘freedom from the body and its deceptions, weaknesses and hindrances, its personal and emotional ties…In Cartesianism, as in earlier rationalism, the excluded and inferiorised contrast of ‘pure’ thought includes much more than the feminine. Its contrasts now include not only animality and the body itself, but also material reality, practical activity, change, the emotions, sympathy and subjectivity.’

72 Descartes to Elizabeth, 6 October 1645, in Descartes Philosophical Letters, Ed. and Trans., A. Kenny. Oxford University Press: Oxford. 1970, in G. Lloyd. ‘The Man of Reason’. op.cit. 118

73 Cf. Rousseau’s exclusion of women from citizenship.

74 Plato, The Republic, Trans., D. Lee. op. cit. 436

75 Ibid. 437

76 Plato, ‘Ion’, Five Dialogues of Plato Bearing on Poetic Inspiration, London, 1929, 7

77 Plato, Phaedrus, In S. Mainwaring. ‘Winckelmann and the Platonic Educative Eros’, Fine Arts IV thesis, University of Sydney, 1988, 65

* * *

I will soon begin a series on the philosophy of the Neoplatonist Henri Bergson

The Man of Reason: Part Six

Posted on April 20, 2014 by philstanfield under Capitalist ideology, Philosophy

Lloyd asserted that ‘Robert Pirsig’s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance represents an attempt to get at the unity underlying “Classical” and Romantic” thought styles. This is a very different kind of critique of reason from that attempted by the Romantics, who were concerned rather with affirming one side of the dichotomy.’42 It is generally thought that Romanticism followed Neoclassicism – in fact they existed roughly concurrently, Neoclassicism beginning about forty years earlier and waning by 1820 whilst as a movement, Romanticism is generally considered to have passed by 1830.

The Romantics, though they did consider themselves to be in passionate opposition to those who maintained the ‘reason’ side of a dichotomy, in fact represented the other side of a coin – they affirmed the ‘Plotinian’ strand of Platonism, as Neoclassicism affirmed the ‘Platonic’. Whereas Romanticism involved the subordination of form to content and the evocation of the Ideal through dynamism, positioning Nature at the centre of all things, Neoclassicism involved the subordination of content to form and the evocation of the Ideal through stasis, positioning Man at the centre of all things. The Ideal in both cases is ultimately the same – a return through contemplation to unity with the self as God. The contemplation of ‘pedestalised’ (idealised) female form (as opposed to thought about the lived content/reality) was a means to this for the male.

I strongly disagree with Lloyd’s reading of Bergson. His philosophy was a rejection of reasoning in favour of a non-rational mode of access to reality. His notion of ‘mind’ was plainly dualist. He thought that consciousness does not spring from the brain.43 He also thought that ‘there is more in the motionless than in the moving’44 and that Ideas are contained in matter, that we are all born Platonists 45 and that there exists nothing positive outside Ideas.46 Bergson acknowledged his profound obligation to Plotinus 47 and gave a course of lectures on him at the College de France in 1897-98. He suggested the possibility of applying the term ‘God’ to the source from which all things flow.

He claimed that intuition (for him, the immediate non-intellectual knowledge not of discontinuous moments but of the indivisible flow of ‘real’ time), brought the flow of reality (‘duration’) to consciousness as opposed to a succession of changing states. Yet (consistent with the function of Plotinus’ primary hypostasis) he referred to this duration as lifting the soul above the Idea.48 His notion of duration amounts to the intuitive apprehension of the passage of spiritual reality. Bergson’s intuition is the same non-discursive contemplation of perfection in ‘mind’ as that advocated by Plotinus.

If the philosophy of Bergson had any energy to its élan vital, or any flow to its durée, it did so because it was a pale image and a shadow of a vast structure created by a man of far greater integrity to his purpose and of far greater historical and cultural significance.49

In Plotinus’ system, a system containing an Intellect ‘teeming’, ‘boiling’ and ‘seething’ with creative energy and life are all of the concepts central to the philosophy of Bergson – particularly the relationship between contemplation, movement or flow (Bergson’s durée) and the ultimate goal of oneness achieved through that process of ‘mental’ activity in stillness. In that system, exists the source of Bergson’s multiplicity-in-unity, the same distinction between discursive reasoning and intuition, the same aspiration of soul to the Absolute, the same stance on time and space, on extension or absence of extension, the same desire to reject the material world and to orient his audience to their true, perhaps unconsciously remembered, spiritual purpose.

Part six of nine/to be continued…

Notes
42 G. Lloyd, ‘The Man of Reason’, in Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy, Eds. A. Garry and M. Pearsall. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989, 127

43 H. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 1907, Trans. A. Mitchell. New York, 1911, reprint. 1983, 262

44 Ibid. 316

45 H. Larrabee, Ed. Selections from Bergson, New York, 1949, 64

46 H. Bergson, Creative Evolution, op. cit. 316

47 H. Larrabee, Ed. Selections from Bergson, op.cit. xiii

48 H. Bergson, The Creative Mind, Trans. M. Andison. New York, 1946, 229

49 Bergson used the achievements of science to refute the ‘positive sciences’ and justify his theories. For example, discoveries concerning the atom. He also tried to argue that his philosophy was consistent with Einstein’s theories. See H. Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, with Reference to Einstein’s Theory, Trans. L. Jacobson. 1922, reprint. New York, 1965. That Plotinus and Neoplatonism are not taught (distinct from mysticism being advocated) at every institution where philosophy is taught is, because of the implications, the most gross failure of social and intellectual responsibility by time-serving academics.

* * *

I will soon begin a series on the philosophy of the Neoplatonist Henri Bergson.

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Tag Archives: Henri Bergson

The philosophy of Plotinus: on contemplation

The philosophy of Plotinus: part three

The philosophy of Plotinus: part two

Battle of the time lords

Henri Bergson, Neoplatonist, and the Cubist Aesthetic: Part Thirteen

Henri Bergson, Neoplatonist, and the Cubist Aesthetic: Part Twelve

Henri Bergson, Neoplatonist, and the Cubist Aesthetic: Part Two

Henri Bergson, Neoplatonist, and the Cubist Aesthetic

The Man of Reason: Part Eight

The Man of Reason: Part Six

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