Limit, Procession, and Negative Theology

Reflections on Chapter 2 and 3 of Trouillard's L'un et l'âme selon Proclos

[The following is at times paraphrase, venturing on translation, and at times a freer form of summary. It should not be cited for scholarly purposes. Followed by brief reflections focusing on my broadly Hegelian concerns with retroactivity and apophaticism].

Limit and Unlimited

Trouillard once again takes the relationship of Proclus to Aristotle. If before, the Aristotelian position was the abstraction of universals, now it is the unity of form and matter. And in both cases, says Trouillard, Proclus only accepts the Aristotelian portion by fundamentally remaking it.

Form/matter unity is a fact, but rather than a fundamental metaphysical law, it is the lowest expression of a more fundamental dynamic: that of the determining and the infinite. Limit and the unlimited.

Limit and the unlimited are present at every metaphysical level, in a particular way. The last sense of the infinite is matter, and the most inferior extremity of limit is form.

The indeterminacy of matter, on this view, in some ways reflects the indeterminacy of the One, which allows Proclus to go further than Plotinus in affirming the goodness of matter.

Proclean procession occurs according to the opposition of complementary functions, limit and the unlimited. A procession by antitheses, a cosmos constituted by the harmonization of opposites. This is expressed mythopoetically by the theogonies.

Each reality is a mixture of limit and unlimited in a particular form. Proclus can cash this out in the case of mathematics. Number is a limitation of otherwise indefinite plurality by unity.

Proclus’ dualism is somewhat different than Plotinus’, for the hierarchical division of rank passes through soul itself. There is intelligible matter in ideas, alterity in thought, and a constituting unity in soul. This connects with his adoption of theurgy and its relative optimism about matter.

Proclus is to Plotinus as Spinoza is to Descartes, a vertical transposition of a horizontal dualism. [I find this usage of horizontal/vertical somewhat confusing]

There is ultimately not an order of rank between limit and the unlimited. Proclus borders on saying that matter is as divine as form, but does not.

Proclus seems to have two schemes of procession, one a scheme of descending degrees (being, life, spirit, soul) and one in which each radiates out directly from the One.

These are not incompatible, if viewed from a higher perspective, the monadological, which reconciles them. Each level emerges directly from the One, but constitutes itself in such a relation (at once dependence and auto-constitution) by recapitulating all the levels up to itself.

Procession and Conversion

The second step in understanding Proclean hylomorphism is to understand limit and the unlimited in the light of procession and conversion.

Limit and the unlimited (and determination and the infinite) are laws of realization, as procession and conversion. One is the indefinite movement of diffusion, the other a definite and rigorous norm of return.

Every reality involves both, but in differing proportions. The straight line is more procession/unlimited, circumference more conversion/limit.

What is number: a procession of the multiple from unity and a regression which happens by coming back to unity.

The generation of number is performed by soul in its auto-constitution, a circuit by which soul is projected and takes possession of itself.

Thus Xenocrates: soul is self-moving number.

Soul comes from itself as well as from its causes, and it wins back and transfigures its receptivity. Spirit does this first, but soul is hetero-constituted as well as auto-constituted.

The lesser degrees cannot be created directly, or they would be auto-constituting (and thus not the lesser degrees). Who other than Eriugena, Trouillard asks, has realized the consequences of this for the doctrine of creation?

Soul is cause of itself; remember that the One is not, for this would introduce duality in it.

Auto-constitution is equivalent to being substance. One can only be in-itself by being for-itself. To be is auto-affirmation.

Every level projects and recapitulates, as itself, the whose circuit of procession and conversion culminating in itself.

In each reality, the Principle is expressed is infinitizing (the unlimited/procession) and normative (limit/conversion). But the Principle is not, in itself, either.

Remember that for Proclus there are no divine attributes (whether Thomist or Spinozist). [Trouillard had stated this earlier].

The One and the All cannot be identified. It is the auto-constitution of the lower which establish the powers which are attributed to the Principle but which it does not properly have.

Auto-Determining Negation

The One signifies procession, and the Good conversion, but neither can be positively predicated of the Principle. Remaining, the activity proper to self-moving cycle, does not correspond to any predication.

Here every negation of negative theology corresponds to the unfurling of a positive ontology. In denying things of the Principle, lower levels are constituted (and also show the presence in them of divine denial). Divinity refuses all content, but communicates something more divine, its power of negation.

Form and matter complete, as its lowest expressions, the cycle of procession-conversion, corresponding to the antinomy of limit and unlimited. The informing of matter is the last instance of spontaneity, and folds nature into soul’s conversion.

Here Trouillard ventures a daring comparison: “if it were permitted to borrow, for a moment, regarding Proclus the Hegelian language of Karl Marx, one could readily imagine him saying: these old notions of matter and form were somewhat drowsy. He forced them to dance in playing them their own dialectical melody.”

My Reflections

Proclus seems to allow for a form of “retroactivity,” but regards it as relegated to the level of pure spirit and below, at least some form of ontological degradation.

When Proclus compromises hierarchy, it is always displaced on another level. Thus if each level recapitulates in itself the others, it is in its own form, and one constantly wonders about the status of the “one in us” relative to the One. He gives and takes away.

Only where we coincide with the entirely negative “power” of the principle, in the mystical union which is the generative center of soul, does a hierarchy seem to disappear, but this is precisely where there is no longer any content.

Striking that there seems to be a valorization of determination, since it is equal to the infinite—but really both are devalued in another sense in being excluded from the Principle.

Soul as the lowest level in which recapitulation occurs. Unfurls the most into determinacy and indefinition, and in this sense highest? But in the most discursive and divided form.

Trouillard’s comparisons in this chapter to Spinoza, Leibniz, Descartes, and Marx are dazzling.