Soul in Proclus and German Idealism

Notes on Chapters 1 and 2 of Trouillard's L'une et l'âme selon Proclos

As I read through Jean Trouillard’s wonderful L’une et l’âme selon Proclos, I’m going to post summaries of a sort, as well as my reflections and questions, which largely concern the relationship between Neoplatonism and German Idealism, which appears tantalizingly close on Trouillard’s telling. I’m interested especially in questions of negative theology and pinning down how exactly the Hegelian notions of retroactive causality and the concrete universal differ from the most sophisticated Neoplatonic views.\

Ch. 1: What is Philosophy According to Plato?

Brief answer: for Trouillard, Plato sees philosophy as the total reflection of soul upon itself. For the Neoplatonic tradition, this necessity of “total reflection” is seen as a metaphysical happening as a discursive or epistemic procedure. The discursive procedure of Platonic dialectics, in which self-knowledge is impossible apart from dialogue, reflects the supranoetic ecstasy at the heart of the soul, which only returns to itself as intelligible through the detour which constitutes the serialized or discursive world of appearance and opinion.

For the Neoplatonic tradition, the dialogues Parmenides and Timaeus become central in a way that is not the case for a lot of contemporary schools. Key questions determinative for that tradition are the relationship of Being to the One, in the Parmenides, and the role of Soul in generating its world, in the Timaeus.

The shift in the late dialogues, or at least the Neoplatonic interpretation of them, from a distinction between the intelligible and sensible worlds to the tensions, operative in both these worlds (if differently), between limit and unlimited, movement and rest, One and Dyad. Contradiction and conflict become central in a way that doesn’t fit into one’s normal story of Plato.

Trouillard promotes the view that Ideas are not “entities” of a certain, but higher sort, but rules or limits: the system of conditions for spiritual spontaneity (anticipations of Kant?).

He then explains one of his key notions: the idea of the “autoconstitution” of a particular epistemic/metaphysical “level” beneath the one above. The lower, while depending on the higher, is also totally self-determining in unfurling and unfolding itself, its constitutive determinations which are precontained in a more unified way by the higher levels. It does not merely passively proceed, but constitutes itself by recapitulating in its characteristic mode all the other levels.

Ch. 2: The Mediation of Soul

Trouillard expounds on the way in which, for Neoplatonism, all the whole is in all things, but according to different proportions.

On his telling, when Neoplatonists hold that all things are produced by soul they do not mean a cosmic Soul alien to us. This is something which is true of soul as it is in us as well, which seems to suggest a rapprochement with certain forms of German idealism.

Similarly, the metaphysical importance of mathematical knowledge for the Neoplatonists, and  the interest in the conditions of its possibility, is strikingly reminiscent of the Kantian synthetic a priori.

In addition to “autoconstitution,” one of Trouillard’s key doctrines is the idea of the “generative genus,” the Proclean position the universals precede and envelop their particulars. This is opposed to any view, including the Aristotelian, in which universals are abstracted from and less - at least no more - real than their particulars.

This is related to Proclus’ conviction that the soul is not only all things potentially, or in power, but is at all times all things in act. We, on the level of our empirical “I,” which is determined by our level of primary investment and activity, may not have access to this act, which nonetheless is the unacknowledged center and hearth of the levels we *do* occupy.

The soul is the mean between the undivided and divided, and is characterized by the two cycles of dianoia and doxa which meet in it and are most proper to it, joining it to spirit above and sensible objects below, ultimately bounded by matter below these and the One above.

Questions I Have

At the end of chapter 1, Trouilllard raises the question of the possibility of a truly “circular” movement of complete return to the One. He seems to think this is left unsettled in the Platonic corpus itself. This would be striking indeed, for Platonism seems to both require it and render it impossible, which I take to be where the Christian notion of Incarnation distinguishes itself.

I’m left wondering, once “soul” takes on such a critical mediating role in the metaphysics (as the meeting point and equalization of extremes and the joining of the lower and higher circle) whether it threatens to “invert” the Platonic hierarchical scheme and become the system’s center of gravity. Something similar happens in Eriugena’s “man,” in his use of Proclus. But in both cases (less in Eriugena and more in Proclus) is there an unwillingness to complete this modern/Hegelian shift? A clinging to the hierarchy even as it threatens to capsize?

What does it mean that universals “envelop” their particulars, and how is this different from Hegelian “overgrasping”? One suspects a refusal at some level of the logic of retroactivity?

Is there a dialectical relationship between “remaining” and “conversion”? Can they really be understood in a “logic of sequence”? Again, retroactivity?