Chapter 4 Platonisms as ways of life

Chapter 4 Platonisms as ways of Life Introduction: Platonisms Platonism, the first ancient school, survived in different forms until the Academy in Athens was finally shut by Emperor Justinian in 529 CE, a date often cited as the definitive end of antiquity. But there was not ‘one’ Platonism, any more than the literary and pedagogical legacy bequeathed to the tradition by Plato was unequivocal. Plato authored thirty-five dialogues and fourteen letters, several of whose authenticity remains contested. Yet he was also an outspoken critic, in writing, of the efficacy of writing for practicing philosophy. Of the highest truths at stake in philosophy, the Seventh Letter (341c-d) famously tells us: “There neither is nor ever will be a treatise of mine on the subject. For it does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself.” Many of the Platonic dialogues are aporetic, like the Laches, Charmides, Lysis, Ion or Euthyphro. Socrates proceeds dialectically, soliciting and challenging others’ opinions concerning some virtue, like moderation in the Charmides or piety in the Euthyphro. He ends by professing his own ignorance. Other Platonic dialogues, like the Republic or Laws, are more apparently programmatic. Yet commentators still divide as to their meanings. There is thus small wonder that, in the generations after Plato’s death, rival legatees of the master duly emerged. These were divided in nearly the sharpest manner imaginable. On one side, after Arcesilaus (315-240 BCE) forms of “academic” scepticism developed, which questioned the very possibility of knowledge, physical or metaphysical. On the other side, in the immediate generations after the master, and then again in the first century BCE, forms of ‘Platonism’ emerged which developed elaborate metaphysical and theological systems, at the farthest removes from all scepticism. The first four scholarchs of the Academy after Plato (Speusippus, Xenocrates, Polemo and Crates of Athens) carried forwards the metaphysical dimensions to Plato’s oeuvre. After the sixth scholarch Arcesilaus (c 320-240 BCE), nevertheless, “Academic” forms of scepticism developed which looked back for their inspiration to Socrates, rather than Plato himself. As Cicero tells us in his De Oratore, Arcesilaus was: … the first to adopt from the varied books of Plato and from Socrates’ dialogues, especially the idea that there is no certainty that can be grasped either by the senses or the mind… and also to have been the first to establish the practice – although this was very characteristic of Socrates – of not revealing his own view, but of always arguing against any view that any one else would assert. (Cicero De Or. 3.67; cf. Cicero de Fin. 2.2; Ac. 1.16) In the first century before Christ, the Platonic Academy split apart a second time, when Aenesidemus (c 80-10 BCE) broke with the Academy completely. He contended that the last Athenian scholarch of the Academy, Philo of Larissa (159/8–84/3 BC)’s softened version of “probabilistic” scepticism (maintaining that, while certainty was impossible, we could still measure the different probabilities of beliefs being true) betrayed what is decisive in Socrates’ heritage. Aenesidemus instead founded Pyrrhonism, a rival, more radical form of scepticism which we will examine momentarily. At nearly the same time, a second pupil of Philo of Larissa, Antiochus of Ascalon (c. 125–c. 68 BC), broke with Philo’s academic scepticism, but in the opposite, metaphysical direction. (Cicero, Acad. 1.46) While it is unclear what Antiochus maintained concerning the Platonic Ideas and teachings concerning the immortality of the soul, within a generation, Eudorus of Alexandria had initiated an increasingly “dogmatic” species of Platonism. This is what is now known as “middle Platonism”, which maintained that the goal of philosophy was homoiôsis theoi, rather than the suspension of all uncertain beliefs. See Dillon, Middle Platonism, 52-183. There is little extant evidence concerning life and pedagogy within the Academy. Debates will almost certainly continue as long as Western philosophy does, concerning Plato’s programmatic intentions. One does not want to stir up a hornet’s nest. But we know with great probability that the metaphysical doctrines are programmatically Platonic and not Socratic, since there is no equivalent for them in Xenophon’s Socratikoi Logoi. Moreover, the Stoics had little interest in Plato, while drawing heavily on the Platonic Socrates, even though Zeno had studied under Xenocrates and Polemo, the 3rd and 4th academic scholarch. Cf. A.A. Long, “Socrates in Hellenistic Philosophy”, The Classical Quarterly 48: 1 (1988): 150-171. There is ample ancient testimony concerning Plato’s agrapha dogmata, for example in Aristotle Metaphysics 1, and that these unwritten doctrines were metaphysical (concerning the relation of the One and the Good and the “indeterminate dyad” (aoristas dyas), cf. John Dillon, The Middle Platonists (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). 1-11 with Giovanni Reale, Towards a New Interpretation of Plato, ed. & trans. By J.R. Caton (Catholic University of America Press, 1996) and Hans-Joachim Kramer, Plato and the Foundations of Metaphysics (New York: SUNY, 1990). Finally, Speusippus and Xenocrates, Plato’s immediate successors in the academy, were supremely interested in these metaphysical doctrines and “first principles”, a situation which seems extremely improbable were Plato to have only taught them “esoterically”, ad captum vulgi, as the Straussian school has suggested in the 20th century. See Dillon, Middle Platonists, 11-39. For a recent attempt to reconstruct the Platonic reading order, on pedagogical principles, see William H. F. Altman, Plato the Teacher: The Crisis of the Republic (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2012); The Guardians in Action: Plato the Teacher and the Post-Republic dialogues from Timaeus to Theaetetus (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2016); and The Guardians on Trial: The Reading Order of Plato's Dialogues from Euthyphro to Phaedo (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2016). It is proverbial that Plato placed over the gate of the Academy the challenge that anyone not educated in mathematics need not enter. We know also that the medieval curriculum of the seven liberal arts (see 5.3 below) evolved out of Plato’s recommendations for the ideal philosophical education in Republic VI-VII, including what would become the mathematical quadrivium of astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, and music. Ilsetraut Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie dans la pensée antique: contribution à l'histoire de l'éducation et de la culture dans l'antiquité (Paris: Vrin, 2005). Whatever the precise teaching program of the Old Academy, the definitions of philosophy and its intentions that survive from its votaries confirm philosophy’s practicist, eudaimonistic conception within the Platonic legacy. Speusippus thus defined happiness as “the state of perfection in natural things”, and appears to have identified this as involving aochlēsia, “freedom of disturbance”, although Diogenes Laertius tells us he was himself a slave to pleasure. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, IV.1; Dillon, Middle Platonistsi, 18. Xenocrates defined philosophy as aiming at “the elimination of all sources of disturbance in life” See Dillon, Middle Platonists,33., and happiness as involving “life according to nature”, echoing Stoic definitions. Harald Thorsrud, Ancient Scepticism (Stocksfield: Routledge. 2009), 38; Dillon, Middle Platonists,,33. Polemo, who famously converted to philosophy after a night of debauch, likewise stressed philosophy’s ethicist calling: And Polemo used to say that a man ought to exercise himself in action, and not in dialectic speculations, as if one had drunk in and dwelt upon a harmonious kind of system of art, so as to be admired for one's shrewdness in putting questions; but to be inconsistent with one's self in character. Diogenes Laertius, Lives, IV.18. Happiness, Polemo opined, involved “autarcheia regarding all goods, or at least the most and greatest goods”, again echoing Stoic formulae: a mode of life in this regard “in accordance with nature”. As reported via Cicero and Antiochus, see Dillon, Middle Platonists, 40-41. As we shall see in this chapter, in fact, this eudemonistic conception of the telos of philosophy [7], if little else, continued to unite the sceptical legatees of Arcesilaus and the more metaphysical forms of Platonism up until the final Justinian closure of the Academy. From Arcesilaus to Pyrrhonism: scepticism as a way life “At first”, we are told, the first of the sceptical Academicians Arcesilaus “defended the position adopted by the School from Plato and Speusippus up to Polemo”. Index Academica, col. 18, at Thorsrud, Ancient Scepticism,39. Nevertheless, he soon came to question the epistemological credentials of Plato’s metaphysical claims. Arcesilaus came instead to maintain that in Plato’s dialogues “nothing is affirmed, there are many arguments on either side, everything is under investigation, and nothing is claimed to be certain.” Cicero, Ac. 1.46. According to Cicero’s account in De Academia, Arcesilaus followed Socrates in arriving at a sceptical confession of ignorance. He did so by reflecting upon the limitations of our minds and senses, and the shortness of life: For these reasons, [Arcesilaus] thought that we shouldn’t assert or affirm anything or approve it with assent: we should always curb our rashness and restrain ourselves from any slip. But he considered it particularly rash to approve something false or unknown, because nothing was more shameful than for one’s assent or approval to outrun knowledge or apprehension. His practice was consistent with this theory, so that by arguing against everyone’s views he led most of them away from their own ... Cicero Ac. 1.45; see DL 4.28, 32. Instead, Arcesilaus proposed what would come to be called in Pyrrhonism the epochē or suspension of judgment as the key to wisdom: a refusal to assent to anything definitively about the way the world is. The academic scepticism of Arcesilaus then developed by way of an ongoing sceptical engagement with, and refutation, of the claims of the “dogmatic” Hellenistic schools, led by Stoicism, which did claim to build their philosophy upon a basis of established, certain claims. The academic Carneades is supposed to have quipped: “without Chrysippus, I could not have existed”. The sceptical refutation of the Stoics turns on their disputing of the possibility of kataleptikē phantasia: clear and distinct, verifiable, certain impressions as the “criterion” of simple true beliefs, like the claim “it is day” in Epictetus’ Discourses (I, 28). Even the sage’s perspective on the world must be built out of a systematic body of such basic, true beliefs. “So he [Arcesilaus] asked Zeno,” Cicero recounts: “what would happen if the wise person couldn’t apprehend anything, but it was a mark of wisdom not to hold opinions? Zeno replied, no doubt, that the wise person wouldn’t hold any [mere] opinions because there was something apprehensible [kataleptike]. So what was that? An impression, I suppose [said Zeno]. Well, what kind of impression? Then Zeno defined it thus: an impression from what is, stamped, impressed and moulded just as it is. After that, Arcesilaus went on to ask what would happen if a true impression was just like a false one? At this point, Zeno was sharp enough to see that no impression would be apprehensible if one that came from what is was such that there could be one just like it from what is not. Arcesilaus agreed that this was a good addition to the definition … So then he set to work with his arguments to show that there is no impression from something true such that there could not be one just like it from something false.” Cicero, Ac. 2.77; see Thorsrud, Ancient Scepticism, 36-58. We have already met, in Stoicism, the refusal to give one’s assent to doubtful beliefs, for instance about others’ behaviour, as a means to temper a passion like anger. In Arcesilaus’ scepticism, the argument is that all our beliefs, even the most apparently indubitable, are finally uncertain, and as such demand the withholding of assent of the sage. DL 4.32; see Thorsrud, Ancient Scepticism, 44-45.. Arcesilaus, we are told, accordingly ‘set to work’ to justify his position by directing arguments, especially against Zeno and the Stoics, ‘to show that there is no impression from something true such that there could not be one just like it from something false.’ Ac. 2.77; cf. De or., 3.67; Thorsrud, Ancient Scepticism, 45-47.. With the Pyrrhonian scepticism inaugurated by Aenesidemus in the first century BCE, Arcesilaus’ sceptical orientation was (if possible) radicalised. Only fragments are known of Pyrrho of Elis’ own life (c. 365-270 BCE). Several of these fragments suggest that Pyrrho travelled to India with Alexander and conversed there with the “gymnosophists” (naked wise men), bringing back Eastern, aporetic wisdom to Greece. Christopher Beckwith, Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). However that may be, we know that Pyrrho originally conceived of philosophy as concerned, first of all, with how to live; and that only in this light did his radical scepticism emerge. “The person who is to be happy”, Pyrrho’s disciple Timon tells us, must for Pyrrho as for the Stoics or Epicureans “look to these three points: first, what are things like by nature? Second, in what way ought we to be disposed towards them? And finally, what will be the result for those who are so disposed?” Aristocles, On Philosophy, in Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, at Thorsrud, Ancient Scepticism, 19. Pyrrho’s responses to these philosophical questions however sets apart his conception of the philosophical bios from those of the ‘dogmatic’ schools, as the Sceptics labelled their competitors: [Timon] says that [Pyrrho] reveals that things are equally indifferent and unstable and indeterminate (adiaphora kai astathmêta kai anepikrita); for this reason, neither our perceptions nor our beliefs tell the truth or lie. For this reason, … we should not trust them, but should be without opinions and without inclinations and without wavering, saying about each single thing that it no more is than is not, or both is and is not, or neither is nor is not (ou mallon estin ê ouk estin ê kai esti kai ouk estin ê oute estin oute ouk estin). Aristocles in Eusebius, Preparationi, 14.18.1–5, at Thorsrud, Ancient Scepticism, 19. The fullest extant account of Pyrrhonism is Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Scepticism, a work whose rediscovery in the renaissance was, via Montaigne, to have a profound effect in shaping early modern philosophy (chapter 6.2). “Scepticism is an ability (dynamis)”, Sextus tells us: which opposes appearances to judgments in any way whatsoever, with the result that, owing to the equipollence (isosthenia) of the objects and reasons thus opposed, we are brought firstly to a state of mental suspense (epôchê) and next to a state of ataraxia. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism, I.8. Several things jump out from this definition. First, philosophy here is a dynamis, not a technê, as for the Stoics. Note here on this. A technê implies systematic body of knowledge, a dynamis need not do so. Secondly, the key notion of isosthenia differentiates the Pyrrhonists’ ‘critique of judgment’ from those of the ‘dogmatic’ Hellenistic schools which in some respects it resembles and radicalises. At issue in this isosthenia is the conviction of the equal persuasiveness or likelihood of the truth or falsity of any two beliefs: As regards sense-impressions, we say that they are equal in respect of probability and improbability, so far as their essence is concerned, whereas they [the academic sceptics after Arcesilaus, led by Carneades, see 4.2 below] assert that some impressions are probable, others improbable. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism, I.33. Thirdly and above all, the Pyrrhonists adopt the same term, ataraxia, that Epicureanism in particular used to describe the existential goal of philosophising. Pyrrho, it seems, had first sought after this inner tranquillity by trialling the different dogmatic philosophies of life. It was then by a kind of happy failure that he was led to his Pyrrhonism: The Sceptic… had the same experience which is said to have befallen the painter Apelles. Once, they say, when he was painting a horse and wished to represent … the horse's foam, he was so unsuccessful that he gave up the attempt and flung at the picture the sponge on which he used to wipe the paints off his brush, and the mark of the sponge produced the effect of a horse's foam. So, too, the Sceptics were in hopes of gaining quietude by means of a decision regarding the disparity of the objects of sense and of thought, and being unable to effect this they suspended judgment; and they found that quietude, as if by chance (hoion tuchikôs), followed upon their suspension [of judgment], even as a shadow follows its substance ... Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism, I.28-29. Sextus’ explanation for this happy accident again radicalises a direction present in Stoicism and Epicureanism. This tied the pathê to forms of erroneous evaluative judgments, and conceived philosophy’s therapeutic efficacy as involving the correction of these beliefs. It is just that, for Pyrrhonism, there are no certain evaluative judgments which survive sceptical examination. Indeed, it is the contrary supposition that underlies our mental sufferings: … the man who opines that anything is by nature good or bad is for ever being disquieted: when he is without the things which he deems good he believes himself to be tormented by things naturally bad and he pursues after the things which are, as he thinks, good; which when he has obtained he keeps falling into still more perturbations because of his irrational and immoderate elation, and in his dread of a change of fortune … On the other hand, the man who determines nothing as to what is naturally good or bad neither shuns nor pursues anything eagerly; and, in consequence, he is unperturbed. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism, I,27-28. As again in the Stoa and the Garden, Pyrrhonists are enjoined to have procheiron maxims like “to every argument an equal argument is opposed” Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism, I.180-209., to assist them on an ongoing basis in withholding assent to any positive assertions. Certain tell-tale qualifiers, amounting to a kind of permanent discipline of judgment, will mark their discourses. The sceptic thus will never categorically assert that “this is square” but say things like “this is not more square than not square”, or “perhaps this is a square”; “maybe”, “possibly”, “maybe not ... this is a square”; “I am unable to say that …” Sextus Empiricus, Outlines, I.ch.19-22. Decisive for the lived practice of scepticism, indeed, are a series of argument-types known as “Modes [tropoi]”, which the student should have at ready command, in order to live a Pyrrhonian life. Like the rhetorical “topics”, memorised forms of plausible argumentation the orator could call upon to invent speeches, these sceptical modes can be used on nearly any occasion, when the sceptic is confronted with someone asserting a determinate, affirmative claim. Aenesidemus, as reported by Sextus, adduced ten such “modes”: That different animals have different senses, and evidently perceive the world differently than we do, so we cannot be certain that what we perceive is (the most) accurate; That like differences are evident between individual human beings, with like epistemic implications; That for the same person, information perceived with the senses is sometimes self-contradictory, and thus doubtful; That what we perceive, even of the apparently same things, varies over time and depends for example on one’s state of mind, whether we are dreaming or awake, etc.; That the data we receive through our senses is perspectival, differing according to local relations (the sun for example looks as big as a small ball to the naked eye, etc.); That objects are experienced by us indirectly, and thus uncertainly, through the media of air, light, moisture, etc.; That objects seem to be in a condition of perpetual change in colour, temperature, size and motion, so our impressions of them must be uncertain; That all our perceptions are relative to other perceptions, and interact one upon another, rendering each uncertain; That our impressions tend to become less critical and discerning through repetition, habit, and custom; And finally, that all men are brought up with different beliefs, under different laws and social conditions, rendering each perspective uncertain (i.e. ‘cultural relativism’). Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism 1.35-163, Against Theoreticians 7.345, see also Diogenes Laertius 9.79-88, Philo of Alexandria, On Drunkenness, 35-162. To this sceptical arsenal, Agrippa (1st century CE) developed five converging modes which again serve to motivate epôchê, and produce its attendant ataraxia: The argument from diaphônia: that in almost any matter you can think of, even the most learned disagree; The argument eis apeiron ekballonta (or “infinite regress”): that any reason brought forward to explain something needs something else in its turn to make it credible, and so on ad infinitum; The argument pros ti, attesting to the relativity of any perception to the subject judging and to the things observed together with it This is where Aenesidemus’ ten modes lie.; The argument that first principles are indemonstrable (anapodeiktôs): that all positions which demonstrate anything must rest on axioms or beliefs that themselves cannot be justified by the system they justify; The argument ton diallêlon: that the proposition which ought to ground or confirm a given investigated matter itself very often requires confirmation (pistis) from that very matter, in a circular manner. I.163-167. As the reader can see, the practices of Pyrrhonism seem necessarily to have an ambivalent standing vis-a-vis the conception of philosophy as a way of life which we are studying in this book. On the one hand, Pyrrhonism is itself advertised as one such philosophical form of life, uniquely conducive to the ataraxia that the other schools had sought and allegedly failed to achieve by dogmatic means. On the other hand, it is a philosophical therapy for a few, struck by the riddles which present themselves to the senses and mind; as against a philosophy for the many, addressing the passions common to philosophers and laypeople. See Sextus, Outlines, I 12-13. Pyrrhonism also seemingly leads one to be sceptical about the very possibility of any wisdom at all—let alone a wisdom which would have to rest on more or less katalapetikê impressions whose existence the Pyrrhonist doubts, as well as a basic decision to pursue some particular way of life which necessarily preceded the acquisition of the wisdom the philosophy promises, and which as such must likewise be subject to scepticism. Finally, Pyrrhonism’s doubts about even the most everyday, functional beliefs seems so radical as to lead necessarily either to apraxia, the inability to navigate through practical life: or to a paradoxical conformism to whichever nomoi the Pyrrhonist finds in the society around him. The Pyrrhonist will not believe in these standards and conventions. Like the postmodernists of today, some of Pyrrhonism’s distant legatees, he is equally unable to furnish any alternatives. See Sextus, Outlines, I 23-24. Cicero’s eclecticism: the philosopher as rhetorician and physician of the soul Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE) is the author of two books (De Academica I & II) on the Academic scepticism that developed after Arcesilaus. In his philosophical writings, Cicero repeats his own allegiance to a “probabilistic” version of this scepticism, as practiced by Carneades, the Academic sceptic who came to Rome in 155 BCE and scandalised the Senatorial elite by showing himself equally adept at arguing for and against the cause of natural justice. For Cicero as for the Pyrrhonists, there is nothing “rasher and more unworthy of the dignity and strength of character of a wise man than the holding of a false opinion, or the unhesitating defence of what has not been grasped and realised with proper thoroughness …” Cicero, De Div. I 1. Yet, for Cicero—who was also, as we know, a leading Roman statesman, advocate and orator—Pyrrhonism indeed leads to crippling apraxia and the inability to reason productively on normative questions. “[W]e Academicians are not men whose minds wander in uncertainty and never know what principles to adopt,” Cicero thus explains in De Officiis: For what sort of mental habit, or rather what sort of life would that be which should dispense with all rules for reasoning or even for living? Not so with us; but, as other schools maintain that some things are certain, others uncertain, we, differing with them, say that some things are probable, others improbable. What, then, is to hinder me from accepting what seems to me to be probable, while rejecting what seems to be improbable, and from shunning the presumption of dogmatism, while keeping clear of that recklessness of assertion which is as far as possible removed from true wisdom? De Off. II 7-8. Disputes surround Cicero’s exact philosophical position and intentions. His De Finibus (On Moral Ends) contains the longest continuous ancient presentation of Stoic philosophy (placed in the mouth of Cato the Younger). His Stoic Paradoxes presents these infamous propositions in attractive guise to Roman readers. De Officiis, which is addressed to his own son, likewise announces its deep debts to the Stoicism of Panaetius. And much of Tusculan Disputations, including the account of the pathê in books III-IV can be read as thoroughly Stoic. Yet, at other times, Cicero expresses his great admiration for Peripatetic philosophy, in particular for the aids it provides to the orator. See James Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1968), 24-25. William H. F. Altman has recently put a case for Cicero’s metaphysical Platonism, glimpsed in “Scipio’s Dream” from De Republica VI William H. F. Altman, The Revival of Platonism in Cicero’s Late Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2016)., but also arguably evident elsewhere, as in the proofs for the immortality of the soul proffered in Tusculan Disputations I. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, I.11-31. Perhaps it is safest to say that Cicero was meaningfully eclectic, with the proviso that this eclecticism itself is justified by him in terms of his Academic allegiances: that liberty which no one has the privilege of using in philosophy but those of our school, whose discourses determine nothing, but take in everything, leaving them, unsupported by the authority of any particular person, to be judged of by others, according to their weight. Tusculan Disputations, V.29; cf. IV.4. Alongside two works of political philosophy, De Republica and De Legibus (both written circa 53-52 BCE), Cicero wrote a further twelve philosophical dialogues in the last three years of his life, following his expulsion from public life with the fall of the Republic. The sweep of subjects in these texts, alongside his several texts on rhetoric, reflect Cicero’s evident conviction that philosophy involves inquiry concerning things human and divine (see chapter 3.1), if not a claim to certain knowledge thereof. De Off. I.43. Cicero writes texts on fate, divination, and the nature of the gods. As well the two books on Academic scepticism, there is De Finibus on the goal of the good life, the Tusculan Disputations on practicist, therapeutic concerns, as we will see momentarily; and De Officiis on the duties of the good man, and the reconcilability of honestum and expediency. Of particular note in our context are also two lost dialogues, the first (the Hortensius) a protreptic text defending philosophy against the charges of its uselessness for serious men See Michel Ruch ed. L'Hortensius de Ciceron: Histoire et reconstitution (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1958); Altman, Revival, chapter 1.; and secondly, a Consolatio ad se that Cicero penned to console himself after the devastating loss, in childbirth, of his beloved daughter, Tullia, in early 45 BCE. See Han Balthussen, “Cicero’s Consolatio ad se: Character, Purpose and Impact of a Curious Treatise”, Greek and Roman consolations: eight studies of a tradition and its afterlife, ed. H. Baltussen (Wales: Classic Press of Wales, 2013),.67-91. Cicero’s surviving dialogues, in particular in their Prefaces, yield many of the most sustained, extant statements we have attesting to the predominant classical conception of philosophy as a way of life or therapy for the psyche. On these prefaces, see Yelena Baraz, A Written Republic: Cicero's Philosophical Politics (Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012); Michael Ruch, Le Préambule dans les oeuvres philosophiques de Cicéron (Essai sur la genèse et l'art du dialogue) (Paris: Broché, 1958). As the first Roman author, alongside Lucretius, to write philosophy in Latin, and as a renowned republican politician, Cicero acutely felt the need to justify his interest in philosophy, and to show why politically-minded Romans should share this interest. For himself, Cicero tells us severally that his writing of philosophy, and the leisure it required, was forced upon him by the fall of the republic. Indeed, to write philosophy was in his eyes a continuation of his vita activa by other means: After serious and long continued reflection as to how I might do good to as many people as possible and thereby prevent any interruption of my service to the State, no better plan occurred to me than to conduct my fellow-citizens in the ways of the noblest learning—and this, I believe, I have already accomplished through my numerous books. De Div. 2. Cf. Seneca, De Otio, 3-4. One signature of Cicero’s philosophy is therefore his simultaneous attraction to (and sometimes rapt descriptions of) the joys of contemplation, which sits alongside his continuing insistence that public duty and justice is nevertheless the superior end of life: again, that wisdom which I have given the foremost place is the knowledge of things human and divine, which is concerned also with the bonds of union between gods and men and the relations of man to man. If wisdom is the most important of the virtues … [however] that duty which is connected with the social obligation is the most important duty. And service is better than mere theoretical knowledge, for the study and knowledge of the universe would somehow be lame and defective, were no practical results to follow… And so, if that virtue [justice] which centres in the safeguarding of human interests, that is, in the maintenance of human society, were not to accompany the pursuit of knowledge, that knowledge would seem isolated and barren of results ... Hence, it follows that the claims of human society and the bonds that unite men together take precedence over the pursuit of speculative knowledge. De Off. I 43-44. As for philosophy and its justification in martial Rome, Cicero repeatedly stresses philosophy’s “practicist” aims to combat its detractors. Far from a source of moral dissipation, philosophy inculcates the virtues necessary for the good citizen. Eg: De Fin. 1.4: “for what problem does life offer so important as all the topics of philosophy, and especially the questions raised in these volumes — What is the End, the final and ultimate aim, which gives the standard for all principles of well-being and of right conduct? What does Nature pursue as the thing supremely desirable, what does she avoid as the ultimate evil? It is a subject on which the most learned philosophers disagree profoundly; who then can think it derogatory to such esteem as each may assign to me, to investigate what is the highest good and the truest rule in every relationship of life?” Indeed, philosophy is capable of furnishing ethical and therapeutic counsel for nearly all the vicissitudes of life. In a single encomium to philosophy in the Preface to Tusculan Disputations V, philosophy is successively depicted, in an apostrophe, as law-founding (“to you it is that we owe the origin of cities; you it was who called together the dispersed race of men into social life; you united them together, first, by placing them near one another, then by marriages, and lastly, by the communication of speech and languages …”); as law-making (“you have been the inventress of laws; you have been our instructress in morals and discipline”); as asylum (“to you we fly for refuge; from you we implore assistance”); as well as a “guide for life”: “[w]hose assistance, then, can be of more service to me than yours, when you have bestowed on us tranquillity of life, and removed the fear of death?” Tusculan Disputations, V 2. It is in the Preface to Tusculan Disputations III, however, that we find one of the most famous and influential depictions of philosophy as a medicina animi in the Western heritage: What reason shall I assign, O Brutus, why, as we consist of mind and body, the art of curing and preserving the body should be so much sought after, and the invention of it, as being so useful, should be ascribed to the immortal Gods; but the medicine of the mind should not have been so much the object of inquiry ...? We, who increase every approaching evil by our fear, and every present one by our grief, choose rather to condemn the nature of things than our own errors. But the amendment of this fault, and of all our other vices and offences, is to be sought for in philosophy … Philosophy is certainly the medicine of the soul (medicina animi), whose assistance we do not seek from abroad, as in bodily disorders, but we ourselves are bound to exert our utmost energy and power in order to effect our cure .... Tusculan Disputations, I 1, I 3. Cicero’s stress in this central Proemium in the Tusculan Disputations reflects the therapeutic practice of philosophy that we find within this text. This needs to be contrasted with that which Cicero undertakes in his political and rhetorical dialogues. The Tusculan Disputations, after Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius, is perhaps the longest dedicated text of philosophical therapy in the Graeco-roman tradition. Its five dialogues take as their objects the fear of death (book I), pain (II), the emotions (III) and grief (IV), before a closing dialogue examines the virtues of the sage (V). The central books III and IV indeed bequeath us the most extended extant treatment of the Stoic theory of the four genii of pathê (grief, joy, fear, hope)—united by their founding, erroneous conviction that we need to possess or avoid some present or future external thing/s in order to be happy (see 2.2 above). See Margaret Graver, Stoicism and Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 10-12, 30-46, and 6.1 below, on Petrarch’s De Remediis, directly indebted to Cicero’s account of the emotions. “The whole cause [of mental suffering] … is in opinion,” Cicero agrees with the Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics. For instance, grief arises “from an opinion of some present evil, which includes this belief, that it is incumbent on us to grieve.” Tusculan Disputations, III, 31. It follows, for Cicero as for the Stoics, that philosophy’s therapeutic efficacy rests upon its capacity to contest and overturn such putatively erroneous beliefs. The dialogues that make up the Tusculan Disputations each form, with this in view, spiritual exercises that Cicero stages both for his readers and ad se, in his continuing struggles with grief for Tullia and the fallen republic. Han Balthussen, “A Grief Observed: Cicero on Remembering”, Mortality: Promoting the Interdisciplinary Study of Death and Dying, 14:4 (2009), 355-369; Altman, Revival of Platonism, ch. 4-5. To focus here on grief: Cicero rehearses an eclectic regimen of different remedies for this pathos Comparably, Cicero’s eclectic liberty is evident in Book I on death, wherein he adduces Epicurean arguments against the fear of being dead (“Well, then, I … own that the dead are not miserable, since you have drawn from me a concession that they who do not exist at all cannot be miserable” (Tusculan Disputations I 5-7)); Stoicising arguments against the fear of having to die, as against being dead (Tusculan Disputations I 8-11)); an extensive rendition of Platonic consolations contending “that souls do exist after death …” (Tusculan Disputations I 12-31); before returning to more Epicurean and Stoic arguments as to “…why, even allowing [mortality of soul], death cannot be an evil.” Tusculan Disputations, I 32 ff.—from the strict, Stoic suggestion that the cure lies in convincing the bereaved that they have suffered no evil; to the importance of recalling exempla of others who have survived similar losses; to the argument we also find in Seneca, that it is folly to continue grieving when it does not help either the dead or the living. Tusculan Disputations, III 32-33. Nevertheless, Cicero shows a doctor’s or a rhetorician’s sensitivity. Thus, he comments that several of the Stoics’ proposed cures, including the argument that what most prevents people from overcoming grief for a loved one is their own opinion that they should grieve, will in many cases be simply too demanding to call upon, although they are philosophically true. “As to Chrysippus’s method, it is certainly founded in truth; but it is difficult to apply it in time of distress. It is a work of no small difficulty to persuade a person in affliction that he grieves merely because he thinks it right so to do. Certainly, then, as in pleadings we do not state all cases alike (if I may adopt the language of lawyers for a moment), but adapt what we have to say to the time, to the nature of the subject under debate, and to the person; so, too, in alleviating grief, regard should be had to what kind of cure the party to be comforted can admit of.” (Tusculan Disputations, III.XXXIII). For Cicero, the philosophical physician needs also to tailor his arguments, as a physician does his medicines, to the different individuals with whom he is in dialogue, and to the specific situations of each case. Cicero also shows himself aware of how deep-set peoples’ ‘pathological’ opinions often are, and how recalcitrant they prove to simply intellectual, argumentative cures. A regimen of daily practices is necessary to prevent mourning from becoming melancholia, Cicero writes in a passage which we can well suppose reflects his own difficult experience: we have the greatest proof that the strength of it [the pathos] depends not merely on time, but on the daily consideration of it. For if the cause continues the same, and the man be the same, how can there be any alteration in the grief …? Therefore, it is from daily reflecting that there is no real evil in the circumstance for which you grieve … that you procure a remedy for your grief. Tusculan Disputations, III, 20. Cicero’s central place in any history of Western philosophy as a way of life does not however rest either on his protreptic defences of philosophy as medicina animi, or upon his illustrative, eclectic practice of this medicina in the Tusculan Disputations, Cato Major (on old age and dying), and the lost Consolatio ad se. In the Renaissance in particular (Chapter 6.1), in figures led by Petrarch, it would be Cicero’s double-identity as both philosopher and rhetorician that would underlie his abiding influence, so we need also to add something on this side of his persona here. The key Ciceronian text in this connection is De Oratore, a dialogue in three books. Herein, Cicero purports to show two things: first, that the complete philosopher will be a master rhetorician; and second, that the consummate orator will need also to be a philosopher. Cicero undertakes this symmetrical task by crafting a kind of speculative history which carries forwards a claim he first presented in De Inventione. De Inv. I 1-5. This is the claim that the original founders of human communities were extraordinary men, both wise and eloquent. In the beginning, Cicero claims: “the ancients … united all knowledge and science in all things, whether they appertained to morality, to the duties of life, to virtue, or to civil government, with the faculty of speaking …” “… the same system of instruction seems to have imparted education both in right conduct and in good speech; nor were professors in two separate groups, but the same masters gave instruction both in ethics and in rhetoric, for instance the great Phoenix in Homer, who says that he was assigned to the young Achilles by his father Peleus to accompany him to the wars in order to make him ‘a speaker of words and a doer of deeds’.” (De Or. III. 57; cf. Iliad, 9, 443) The seven sages, excluding only Thales, were statesmen; and Thales was successful in business. De Or. III, 34. The contemporary situation, in which philosophy finds itself scorned by political men at the same time as philosophers scorn rhetoric as beneath their dignity, is therefore neither desirable nor inevitable. It is the result of a kind of secular, humanistic ‘fall’ in which the two pursuits split apart, to their mutual detriment. For its part, philosophy has withdrawn from public life, its very modes of speaking and arguing increasingly esoteric and sectarian: a diagnosis which remains telling today. “… they have a manner of speaking which is perhaps subtle, and certainly acute, but for an orator, dry, strange, unsuited to the ear of the populace, obscure, barren, jejune, and altogether of that species which a speaker cannot use to a multitude” De Or. III 66. Rhetoric, cut loose from the ethical moorings philosophy had provided it, has become a by-word for amoral trickery: again, an observation for which we might propose contemporary exempla. In brief, philosophy without eloquence is “is but of little advantage to states”, while “eloquence without wisdom is often most mischievous, and is never advantageous to them ...” De Inv. I 1; cf. De Or. III 61. If there is a villain to this piece, it is the Socrates of the Gorgias. Except, as Cicero archly argues, that if Socrates is so successful in devaluing rhetoric unguided by philosophy to being a mere “knack”, “it was because Socrates was the more eloquent and convincing, or, as you term it, the more powerful and better orator” than Polus, Callicles or Gorgias. (Tusculan Disputations, III 129) In any event, if philosophy is to resume its more elevated calling as a force which can shape individuals’ or communities’ lives, it must be reunited with the arts of speaking: “when I have given [philosophers] liberty to reason on all these subjects in corners to amuse their leisure, I shall give and assign to the orator his part, which is, to set forth with full power and attraction the very same topics.” De Or. I 12. It is above all the power of oratory to move the pathê—the principal objects of philosophical therapy, as we know—that Cicero sees as so decisive, if philosophical wisdom is to follow Socrates back down into the streets and marketplaces of civic life. As he explains in De Oratore: “the highest power of an orator consists in exciting the minds of men to anger, or to hatred, or to grief, or in recalling them from these more violent emotions to gentleness and compassion.” De Or. I 12. In a celebrated passage from the Brutus**, Cicero thus describes the power of the orator to move (movere) and to please (placere) in these terms: “When he rises to speak, silence is signalled by the crowd, and followed by repeated applause and much admiration. They laugh when he wishes; when he wishes, they cry; so that if someone were to catch sight of the proceedings from afar … he would still recognise that an orator was pleasing his audience and that a Roscius [viz. an exemplary orator] was on the stage … Cicero’s calls to reunite philosophy with rhetoric are tied to his lauding of republican politics, wherein the ability to move large audiences was a premium political skill. Cicero’s ethical texts however see him deploying all of the rhetorical arts of invention and style—notably apostrophe, personification and enargeia, the vivid presentation of examples—geared to the different subject matter and intentions of these texts. The Stoic Paradoxes is indeed directly advertised as a rhetorical popularisation of the Stoics’ esoteric syllogising, and Cicero comments to his son Marcus in De Officiis that reading his philosophical dialogues will also serve to perfect his mastery of Latin. (De Off. I.2) And as we shall see, it is the avowedly Ciceronian sense of the philosophical value of rhetoric as a necessary means to move the passions will that re-emerge as central in the philosophising of the humanists of the Italian renaissance (Chapter 6.1). Plotinus and philosophical mysticism as a way of life With the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus (204-270 CE), we seem to move not simply centuries, but entire worlds away from Cicero: the philosopher as orator, statesman and psychotherapist. Whereas Cicero is eclectic and elusive, in Plotinus we are presented, sans ironie, with a fully-fledged, syncretic metaphysical System. According to this System, the material world is not fully, but only derivatively, real and alive—let alone the political affairs of human beings dear to Cicero. Human souls are part of a larger order of “Soul” which is supramaterial and immortal. Above and prior to this level of Soul is the level of the Intellect (Nous). Herein reside the Platonic Forms or Ideas; timeless, purely intelligible realities unsullied by change and matter. The imperfect order of our world is the imperfect, changing “image” or “reflection” of this greater eidetic order. All the intelligibility it has, which makes possible our ability to understand, comes from how material things imperfectly ‘participate’ in these eternal Ideas. The highest principle of all, however, unifying and conditioning the Ideas themselves, is the One or Good: which Plotinus sometimes also calls (and calls upon) as God. This One is the metaphysical origin of all the lower levels of reality, reaching down even to material beings. All reality is an emanation (aporrhoia) from it into the hypostases of Intellect, Soul and Matter. It is nevertheless a mistake to conceive of Plotinus’ metaphysical system, indebted very deeply to the Middle Platonism of figures like his teacher Ammonius Saccas (175 CE-242 CE), as wholly “abstracted” from all experience, or from all concerns with shaping distinctly philosophical modes of life. Plotinus himself, from the little we can glean about his life from the biography by his disciple Porphyry, lived in an extraordinary ‘atopian’ manner. Throughout his life, he would offer prayers and sacrifices annually on the birthdates of Plato and Socrates. Plotinus and his students refrained from eating all meat. The philosopher is said to have slept little, and paid scant attention to his physical wellbeing, despite continuing commitments to teaching, and to looking after children bequeathed to his care by wealthy Romans (remarkably enough). See Porphyry, Life of Plotinus, 1-2, 7-10. All in all, “Plotinus, the philosopher our contemporary, seemed ashamed of being in the body,” as Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus opens by telling us: So deeply rooted was this feeling that he could never be induced to tell of his ancestry, his parentage, or his birthplace. He showed, too, an unconquerable reluctance to sit for 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 desired spectacle to posterity, an image of the image?’ Porphyry, Life of Plotinus, 1. As Pierre Hadot has argued in Plotinus, or the Simpliccity of Vision, we accordingly need to be very careful before we take Neoplatonic metaphysics to have been wholly an ‘intellectual’ exercise, in anything like modern acceptations of the term. Pierre Hadot, Plotinus, or the Simplicity of Vision, trans. M. Chase (Chicago and London: university of Chicago Press, 1998). Our reading of Plotinus in this section is heavily indebted to this remarkable work. At stake everywhere in Plotinus’ work, as it is collated and written down by Porphyry as the Enneads, are instead a very particular set of experiences, moving upwards from more mundane ethical concerns (the principal subjects of book I) towards mystical union with the One (the principal subject of book VI). The sole autobiographical passage we have from Plotinus is devoted exactly to the kind of “unitive” or “mystical” experience that he manifestly held to be the culminating point of the philosophical life. “Many times it has happened,” Plotinus begins: Lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-encentered; beholding a marvellous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine; stationing within It by having attained that activity; poised above whatsoever within the Intellectual is less than the Supreme … Enn. IV.8.1.1-11 [italics ours]. Each of the stages of Plotinus’ Neoplatonic metaphysics, in this light, correspond to different “levels of inner life”, in Hadot’s formulation: within this framework, the experience Plotinus describes for us consists in a movement by which the soul lifts itself up to the level of divine intelligence, which creates all things and contains within itself, in the form of a spiritual world, all the eternal Ideas or immutable models of which the things of this world are nothing but images. Our text [the Enneads] even gives us to understand that the soul, passing beyond all of this, can fix itself in the Principle of all things … All this traditional terminology is used to express an inner experience. Hadot, Plotinus, 26-27; cf. Michael Chase, “Translator’s Introduction”, in Plotinus, or the Simplicity of Vision, 2-3 For most modern readers, it will be Plotinus’ deeply Platonic hostility to the body, and his acceptance of the Platonist understanding of philosophy as a dying to embodied experience [5], which seems most foreign and inaccessible. The true sage, Plotinus writes—for his Enneads, also, contain a highly developed series of characterisations of such an ideal figure [9]—will “work down or wear away the tyranny of the body by inattention to its claims; its rulership he will lay aside…” Enn. I.4.14. From such an other-worldly perspective, as Plotinus echoes a famous passage from Plato’s Laws, the lives of non-philosophers [8] can seem no more serious than the antics of players on the stage: “[m]urders, death in all its guises, the reduction and sacking of cities, all must be …just such a spectacle as the changing scenes of a play; all is but the varied incident of a plot, costume on and off, acted grief and lament.” Enn. II.2.15. Nevertheless, Plotinus remains struck, as his teacher Plato had been struck, by the sheer facts of beauty and order, even in the material world of the body and its passions. If Plotinus attacks the Gnostics for their teaching concerning the ‘evil’ nature of matter, as he notably does, it is firstly because they do not know how to “look at the world” here below. It is this blindness which means that they are also “far from being able to see the spiritual world” with any clarity. Enn. II.9.16. What is needed, Plotinus argues, is instead to cultivate a philosophical manner of seeing which, like Homer’s Lynceus, can discern in the least things the traces of an invisible, higher Order: We cannot but recognize from what we observe in this universe that some such principle of order prevails throughout the entirety of existence … Consider the marvellous art shown not merely in the mightiest works …, but even amid such tiny things as one would think Providence must disdain: the varied, wonderful workmanship in any and every animal form; in the world of plants, too; the grace of fruits and even of leaves, the lavishness, the delicacy, the diversity of exquisite bloom; and all this not issuing once, then to die out, but made ever and ever anew ... Enn. III.2.13. At issue is a kind of wonder before the fact of this order which has parallels in the other ancient schools*: “… surely no one seeing the loveliness lavish in the world of sense; this vast orderliness, the Form which the stars even in their remoteness display; no one could be so dull-witted, so immoveable, as not to be carried by all this to recollection, and gripped by reverent awe in the thought of all this …” Enn. II.9.16.43-55. This experience of beauty is formative and profound, for Plotinus. It can shake our ordinary sense of reality, provoking “awe-stuck terror and astonishment”, and a pleasure “mixed with pain.” Enn. IV.5.12.33-35 But for Plotinus as for the Middle Platonists, it is just that the Order informing the material things which we sense so piquantly in experiences of wonder cannot reside in these things’ transient, changing materiality: “material forms, containing light incorporated in them, need still a light apart from them that their own light may be manifest …” Enn. VI.7.21. And it is this higher, nonmaterial “light” (one of Plotinus’ recurring, Platonic metaphors) that the soul must learn to discern, within but beyond what the senses can convey: “when the soul further sees that the beauties of the world flow away, she knows full well that the light which was shimmering above them comes from elsewhere.” Enn. V.7.31.28. Above all, as in Plato’s Symposium, the experience of beauty for Plotinus provokes Eros: from the desire for sexual union, at the most basic or physical level, up to the philosophical desire to know the causes of all things. The soul, sensing the order of the Ideas that underlies its experience, is moved by a longing to unite itself with this generative Order: Why else is there more of the glory of beauty upon the living and only some faint trace of it upon the dead, though the face yet retains all its fullness and symmetry? Why are the most living portraits the most beautiful, even though the others happen to be more symmetrical? Why is the living ugly man more attractive than the sculptured handsome one? 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, because there is some glow of the light of the Good and this illumination awakens and lifts the soul and all that goes with it. Enn. VI.7.22. Far from a simple misanthropy, that is to say, Plotinus maintains that there is always some part of the human soul which has remained transcendent, ‘in us more than ourselves’. Philosophy’s task is to reawaken this transcendent dimension: if it is desirable to venture the more definite statement of a personal conviction clashing with the general view—even our human soul has not sunk entire; something of it is continuously in the Intellectual Realm, though if that part, which is in this sphere of sense, holds the mastery, or rather [if it] be mastered here and troubled, it keeps us blind to what the upper phase holds in contemplation. Enn. IV.8.8. Above Soul, as we have said, stands the world of the unchanging Intellect and the Platonic Ideas. Each Idea, Plotinus tells us, is at once perfectly well-defined, at the same time as it forms a part of the larger taxis of the totality of the Ideas: so the Idea of humanity includes animality within it, also rationality, materiality, spatiality … This totality is structured according to rational relations discernible by philosophical dialectic. Cf. (eg) Enn. VI.7 10 ff.; V.8.4 36-7. With that said, Plotinus’ language more often falls upon the marvellous beauty of this interconnected Order, the metaphysical model which all the beauty we experience can only dimly echo or intimate: Situated in pure light and pure radiance, it [Nous] includes within itself the natures of all beings. This beautiful world of ours is but a shadow and an image of its beauty …. It lives a blessed life, and whoever were to see it and—as is fitting—submerge himself within it and become one with it, would be seized by awe. Enn. III.8.11.26-33; cf. V.8.10.26-30. Nevertheless, even this awe does not mark the apex of the Neoplatonic ascent. “To be sure, if the soul remains within the Nous, it sees beautiful and venerable things,” Plotinus concedes, “but it still does not have all that it is looking for. It is as though the soul were approaching a face which, although beautiful, was not yet capable of stimulating our sight, since there did not shine forth from it that grace which shimmers on the surface of beauty.” Enn. VI.7. 22. For the Order of the Ideas, we know, itself emanated from and reflects the prior, unifying principle of the One or Good. The final End of the soul’s erotic itinerary, accordingly, must likewise involve a transcendence of the discursive, dialectical modes of reasoning with which we standardly associate philosophy. Dianoia and even Nous can allow us to ascend only to the level of the Ideas. At stake is instead something which Plotinus describes as belonging to the order of love: Once the soul receives an “outflow” [emanation] from the Good, it is stirred; seized with a Bacchic passion, goaded by these goads: thus love is born … when there enters into it a glow from the divine, it gathers strength, awakens, spreads true wings, and however urged by its nearer surrounds, speeds its buoyant way elsewhere, to something greater to its memory: so long as there exists anything loftier than the near, its very nature bears it upwards, lifted by the giver of that love. Beyond Nous it passes, but beyond the Good it cannot go, for nothing stands above That. Enn. VI.7.22. Plotinus’ texts on this unitive experience, which Porphyry tells us Plotinus himself achieved only very rarely, strain against the limits of language. Alongside a language of love and desire, we thus find recurring metaphors of intoxication, inspiration, divine madness, flight, light, and initiation into the mysteries (epopteia). In the unitive experience with the One, Plotinus explains, knower and known, seer and seen, consciousness and its object become fused. This is a complete transcendence of ordinary modes of consciousness. Indeed, again and again, Plotinus tells us that the highest vision, this wordless union of the Soul with the One, comes to us by “chance” or “good fortune”, beyond anything the philosopher herself can effect: Suddenly, a light bursts forth, pure and alone. We wonder whence it came, from the outside or the inside? It came from nowhere … Here, we put aside all the learning; disciplined to this pitch, established in beauty, the seeker holds knowledge still of the ground he rests on but, suddenly, swept beyond it all by the very crest of the wave of Intellect surging beneath, he is lifted and sees, never knowing how; the vision floods the eyes with light, but it is not a light showing some other object, the light is itself the vision. Enn. V.5.7.33-36. At this culminating apex of Plotinus’ mystical itinerary, we see, his Enneads stretches the paradigm of philosophy as a way of life as far as it can perhaps go without becoming a distinctly religious or “theurgic” vision. Plotinus’ abiding influence on Orthodox spirituality, and via Augustine and Ambrose on the meditative traditions within Latin Christianity, is testimony to this characteristically later antique longing for world-Transcendence which also underlay the rise and spread of Christianity. Plato had distinguished Dianoia, discursive reasoning, from Nous, which carries the sense of an intellectual ‘seeing’ of the Ideas. Aristotle, in Nicomachean Ethics X, famously depicted the life of theoria, a species of contemplation, as the highest, indeed most Godlike, form of human life. Again, the Platonic account of love given by Diotima in the Symposium had involved a “ladder” of loves and their objects, leading to a vision of Transcendent Beauty. Yet in this Platonic text, so vital for Plotinus, love at each rung is depicted as an active force, productive of “multiple thoughts and actions, producing science, education, and the organisation of the state” Hadot, Plotinus, 56.; just as the philosophers who have seen the Good are compelled to “go back down” into the cave of the city in Plato’s Republic VII. See Altman, Crisis of the Republic for an extensive analysis of this “to go back down” which, in the mouth of Socrates, is the first word of Plato’s Republic. By contrast, Plotinian Eros for the One is an entirely sufficient End. And “if [the seeker] feels that political activities are beneath him, let him remain up above, if he so desires, and this will be the conduct of one who has seen a great deal.” Enn. VI.9.7.21-23, 26-27. Nevertheless, Plotinus’ discourses remain grounded in the Graeco-Roman philosophical tradition that they also decisively transform. We have noted above that Plotinus develops a discourse surrounding the idealised figure of the sage and his attributes [9], which forms the flipside of a critique of non-philosophers’ ways of life [8]. We have likewise remarked that dialectic remains at least one, enabling means to attain to the Ideas, although not to the One And in fact, we know from Porphyry that he conducted his classes through dialectical questioning. See Porphyry, Life of Plotinus, 13; cf. Hadot, Plotinus, 53, 83, 87.. Above all, Plotinian philosophy remains a means of self-transformation, conceived in light of a larger vision of the whole, as in the great Hellenistic schools. Plotinus thus memorably describes the formative action of philosophy [6] as like the work of a sculptor, who produces a beautiful human face not by adding to raw stone, but by artfully chipping unformed parts away. “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 smooths 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 from you the godlike splendour of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine.” I.6.9 In the works of his mature years, Hadot contends, Plotinus became increasingly attentive to ethical subjects, increasingly stressing the need for his philosopher—again, in contrast to the Gnostics—to cultivate the virtues: For to say ‘Look to God’ is not helpful without some instruction as to what this looking imports: it might very well be said that one can ‘look’ and still sacrifice no pleasure, still be the slave of impulse, repeating the word ‘God’ but held in the grip of every passion and making no effort to master any … God on the lips, without a good conduct of life, is only a word … Enn. II.9.15.24 ff.; cf. II.9.9.45-60. However, for Plotinus, the meaning of the virtues is fundamentally reshaped by reference to the Transcendent Good his philosophy extols. After individuals have attained to the highest vision of the Truth, Plotinus argues, or even if they have momentarily glimpsed it, their souls “necessarily become, as it were, amphibious, alternately living the life up above and the life down here below.” Enn. IV.8.4.31-33. The task then becomes to keep the memory of the Good “up above” alive, in the individual’s mundane existence. Needed then is a difficult inner discipline or what Porphyry, describing his master, terms an attentiveness (prosochê) See Hadot, Plotinus, esp. 82-86., vigilance, or “wakefulness”: When one falls from contemplation, he must reawaken the virtue within him. When he perceives himself embellished and brought into order by the virtues, he will be made light again, and will proceed through virtue to intellect and wisdom; then, through wisdom, to the One. Enn. VI.9.11.46-51. The civic virtues as we usually understand them—in contrast to the contemplative, higher virtues of the philosopher—are accordingly refigured by Plotinus as “purificatory”, by contrast to “contemplative” excellences. See Hadot, Plotinus, 69-73. The Platonic origins of this conception of the virtues again comes from the Phaedo, 82d-83c. Their aim, in contrast alike to Peripatetic, Stoic or Epicurean depictions, becomes to allow the soul to separate its attention from material things, which are not for the Neoplatonic philosopher simply indifferent, but meaningfully unreal Enn. I.2.4.16.: so that, “while separating itself, the soul is already separate while still remaining in this world”. Enn. I.1.10.7-10. As well as purificatory, that is to say, these lower Plotinian virtues are also preparatory steps on the ladder towards contemplative ekstasis: Newly awakened, [the soul] is all too feeble to bear the ultimate splendour. Therefore the soul must be trained—to the habit of remarking, first, all noble pursuits, then the works of beauty produced not by the labour of the arts but by the virtue of men known for their goodness: lastly, you must search the souls of those that have shaped these beautiful forms. Enn. I.6.9. In this context, finally, many of the Enneads can only be read as prescribing, often in imperative terms, spiritual exercises to enable the acolyte’s spiritual transfiguration [3]. As well as exercises cultivating our sense of the beauty in external things, many of these exercises involve injunctions to turn one’s attention inwards, away from all material things, on the model of Plato’s Phaedo. Thus: If there is to be perception of what is thus present, we must turn the perceptive faculty inward and hold it to attention there. Hoping to hear a desired voice, we let all others pass and are alert for the coming at last of that most welcome of sounds: so here, we must let the hearings of sense go by, save for sheer necessity, and keep the soul's perception bright and quick to the sounds from above. Enn. V 1.12.12-21. Or again: “The novice must hold himself constantly under some image of the Divine Being and seek in the light of a clear conception; knowing thus, in a deep conviction, whither he is going- into what a sublimity he penetrates—he must give himself forthwith to the inner and, radiant with the Divine Intellections, be no longer the seer but, as that place has made him, the seen.” (V.8.11) But let us close this section with the following exacting directions for a staged meditative process, a view from above See Hadot, “The View from Above”., culminating in a Plotinian form of prayer: Let us, then, make a mental picture of our universe: each member shall remain what it is, distinctly apart; yet all is to form, as far as possible, a complete unity … bringing immediately with it the vision, on the one plane, of the sun and of all the stars with earth and sea and all living things as if exhibited upon a transparent globe. [Next] bring this vision actually before your sight, so that there shall be in your mind the gleaming representation of a sphere, a picture holding all things of the universe, moving or in repose … [Then] keep this sphere before you, and from it imagine another, a sphere stripped of magnitude and of spatial differences; cast out your inborn sense of Matter, taking care not merely to attenuate it. Then call on God, maker of the sphere whose image you now hold, and pray Him to enter …He who is the one God and all the gods, where each is all, blending into a unity, distinct in powers but all one God in virtue of that one divine power of many facets ... Enn., V.8.9. Boethius and the end of ancient philosophy With Plotinus’ conception of philosophy as a transcendent religion, predicated on a hierarchical monotheism and verging into a scorn for this world, we also see how close the pagan thought of the later Imperium had drawn to the Christian religion which would soon definitively supplant it. The Athenian and Syrian Neoplatonists who succeeded Plotinus and Porphyry would in fact “place beyond philosophy what they call ‘hieratics’: that is to say, sacred operations, the strict observance of rites and sacraments desired by the gods.” Pierre Hadot, “La fin du paganisme”, in Etudes de Philosophie Ancienne (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2010), **. For these figures, led by Iamblichus, human nature is far too debased due to its union with the body for the kind of contemplative union with the One which Plotinus had envisaged to be attainable: the only way which is open towards the divine world is … that which the gods themselves have fixed. It can appear repugnant to our reason, which understands neither the sense of rites, nor even the names that the gods want us to pronounce in the ceremonies. But it is precisely necessary to renounce the intelligence to the profit of faith. We must carry out the rites without understanding them, because their effects surpass our intelligence. Hadot, “La fin du paganisme”, **. Nevertheless, Plotinus’ Enneads cannot be accounted the last, great philosophical work of antiquity. Nor is the Enneads the last work bearing witness to the ancient pagan sense of philosophy as a way of life. This laurel goes to The Consolation of Philosophy (De consolatione philosophiae), the final work of Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (480-524 CE), written in the very decade in which Justinian would definitively close the Athenian schools. Boethius was famously called by the great renaissance humanist Lorenzo Valla “the last of the Romans, and the first of the Scholastics”. Cited by H. Chadwick, Boethius: The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology, and Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), xi. Alongside the Consolation, which would become one of the most popular works of the Middle Ages, Boethius wrote several works on mathematics, dialectic and logic. He also translated Aristotle’s works Of Interpretation, the Topics and Sophistical Refutations, together with the Prior Analytics: translations which would play a profound role in shaping Scholastic learning (chapter 5.3). Boethius, finally, authored several works of Christian theology, including a book on the Trinity, and is recognised within Catholicism as a Holy martyr. It has nevertheless puzzled commentators that, in the consolatory book Boethius penned in the final year of his life (523-524 CE), as he languished in prison facing execution on false charges of treason against Theodoric the Great, we find exactly no citations of Christian texts, nor any references to the life and passion of Christ. For a summary of the positions, see John Marebon, Boethius (Oxford: OUP, 2003), 146-163 (ch. 8). Instead, the Consolation of Philosophy opens with the lamenting Boethius receiving a distinctly pagan divinity, Lady Philosophy. On her gown is imprinted the form of a ladder, leading upwards from a Greek Pi (for praxis) to a Theta (for theory). Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, I.1. The title announces the book’s genre. Like Seneca’s four Consolations, Cicero’s lost Consolatio ad se and the Tusculan Disputations, philosophy is to be called upon in this remarkable work to provide solace to a man against whom fortune has turned her harshest blows: a man who had fallen from Kingly favour and public fame to present disgrace and imminent death. On the literary form of the Consolation as important to determining its content, see Seth Lerer, Boethius and Dialogue: Literary Method in the Consolation of Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Rivkah Zim, The Consolations of Writing Literary Strategies of Resistance from Boethius to Primo Levi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). As is almost poetically fitting for this last work of ancient philosophy, moreover, the opening three books of the Consolation bring together, as in a concise compendium, almost all of the features of philosophy as a way of life which we have been examining. John Haldane, “De Consolatione Philosophiae,” Philosophy, Supplement 32 (1992), 31–45 makes the case that as we proceed, the text passes from broadly Stoic to broadly Platonic arguments, a thesis with which we agree, as will become clear. See also Allison Glasscock, “A Consistent Consolation: True Happiness in Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy”, Stance 2 (2009), 42-48. Firstly, the text mixes dialectic, dialogue and rhetorical speeches with poems or “songs” which Lady Philosophy sings to Boethius [5], despite having initially expelled the muses of poetry and the other liberal arts. Boethius, Consolation, I 1. Compare chapter 5.4 below. Secondly, the action of the dialogue is structured around the medicinal metaphor which we have seen in this chapter so prominent in Cicero [6]. Also, Platonic, Odyssean metaphorics of the return homewards. Like a skilled physician, Lady Philosophy will first deliver to the embittered prisoner her less demanding cures, before ascending in the face of Boethius’ recurring protests to the delivery of her “sharper” medicines after III 10: But since a throng of tumultuous passions hath assailed thy soul, since thou art distraught with anger, pain, and grief, strong remedies are not proper for thee in this thy present mood. And so for a time I will use milder methods, that the tumours which have grown hard through the influx of disturbing passion may be softened by gentle treatment, till they can bear the force of sharper remedies. Boethius, Consolation, I.6; cf. II.3; II.4; III.1. Thirdly, Lady Philosophy’s milder cures, directed at overcoming Boethius’ passions, all rest upon the fundamental Socratic claim that it is not fortune that oppresses the prisoner, but his “mistaken” opinions about fortune and the nature of happiness: “error and ignorance bewilder you”. Boethius, Consolation, II 4. Fourthly, and reflecting the eclecticism characteristic of later Platonisms, Lady Philosophy’s remedies bring together into a concentrated regimen different Stoic, Epicurean and Platonic arguments or exercises to help cure Boethius of his erroneous beliefs [3]. Fortune has always been fickle: this is Her most constant feature. Boethius, Consolation, II.1. The goods that She commands and which have presently been taken from Boethius—money and property, power, fame, glory and pleasure—were by nature never his to possess or to lose. Everything and everyone that climbs upwards on Fortune’s wheel must eventually come down. Boethius, Consolation, II.1. Boethius’ ailment then hails specifically from his false beliefs—which his own philosophical training should have inoculated him against—that these externals he has lost were ever his own, that they could somehow not be transient, and that they had intrinsic worth, such that attaining them would make anyone happy or virtuous. Boethius, Consolation, II.5-7; III 1-8. Yet Boethius’ dignity as a rational animal is above that of any of these externals. He has degraded himself by taking them, unphilosophically, to be essential to his happiness. Boethius, Consolation, II.5. Money cannot provide the security, power the respect, nor glory the happiness that people seek in their wrong-headed pursuit of these externals. Boethius, Consolation, III.3-6. Indeed, when it comes to the desire for glory—positioned by the text as particularly tempting for a man “of noble quality” like Boethius Boethius, Consolation, III.7.—Lady Philosophy proffers her charge one of the purer prescriptions of the spiritual exercise of the view from above, to diminish glory’s seductions: yet consider with me how poor and unsubstantial a thing this glory is! The whole of this earth's globe, as thou hast learnt from the demonstration of astronomy, compared with the expanse of heaven, is found no bigger than a point … Now, of this so insignificant portion of the universe, it is about a fourth part, as Ptolemy's proofs have taught us, which is inhabited by living creatures known to us. If from this fourth part you take away in thought all that is usurped by seas and marshes, or lies a vast waste of waterless desert, barely is an exceeding narrow area left for human habitation. You, then, who are shut in and prisoned in this merest fraction of a point's space, do ye take thought for the blazoning of your fame, for the spreading abroad of your renown? Why, what amplitude or magnificence has glory when confined to such narrow and petty limits? Boethius, Consolation, III.7. Compare the comparable use of the view from above to counter the desire for glory in Petrarch’s secretum, in chapter 6.2 below. When Boethius arrives at III 10, however, ameliorated by these remedies of his unphilosophical claims against Fortune, the dialogue turns away from ethical concerns towards a philosophical theology which also directly ushers in the Christian problematics that would now dethrone philosophy as ‘queen of the sciences’ for nearly a millennium. If happiness is the highest, and by definition self-sufficient good—that unto which nothing better could be added—Lady Philosophy argues that this happiness can only be identified with God Himself. Boethius, Consolation, III.10. The validity of this argument could seemingly be contested, insofar as it changes the subject for whom happiness might be at issue. This God, who by definition can want for nothing, must accordingly be all-powerful, all-governing, and all-knowing. Boethius, Consolation, III 11; V 1-6. As for the evil Boethius laments, and the seeming power that wicked men enjoy here below, these are rightly speaking nothing positive. For evil men will the good through their evil actions, but do not have the power to attain it through their vices. Boethius, Consolation, IV 2. As Plato’s Socrates had taught in the Gorgias, it is in truth better for such men to be punished, since punishment participates in justice Boethius, Consolation, IV.4., than for them to be able to wrong innocents like Boethius with impunity: a fate which leaves them, like animals, prey to their untethered passions. Boethius, Consolation, IV.3. And when Boethius protests one last time that, with this all being granted, he would still rather be a free man, “in his own country, powerful, wealthy, and high in honour” Boethius, Consolation, IV.5., Lady Philosophy proposes to show him that, despite appearances, all is for the best in the Providential ordering of the Divine Mind. It is just that humans cannot understand this: “[a]nd so it happens that, although to you, who are not altogether capable of understanding this order, all things seem confused and disordered, nevertheless there is everywhere an appointed limit which guides all things to good.” Boethius, Consolation, IV.6. Indeed, “absolutely every fortune is good fortune,” even that which would soon see Boethius unjustly executed. Boethius, Consolation, IV.7. The last book of the Consolation is then given over to Boethius’ highly influential, purported demonstration of the consistency of human free will with the postulate of Divine prescience. Boethius, Consolation, V.1-6. Scholars still dispute whether the Consolation of Philosophy can be taken to have succeeded in curing Boethius, or those in like positions of adversity, whatever the comforts figures like Alfred the Great and Dante report having taken in it (chapter 5.4). Some have argued that the very apparent failure of the last theological arguments to speak to the specificity of Boethius’ laments must itself have been intentional: an esoteric Boethian means to demonstrate the limits of philosophy and the crowning need for faith. See Marenbon, Boethius, 154-159, and 161. However that may be, it is appropriate that, after having begun by arraigning in sequence almost all of the therapeutic arguments of the Hellenistic and Roman philosophical schools, Boethius’ text closes its second half, given over to theological medicines, with a call to hope and prayer, beyond the virtues. Boethius, Consolation, V 6 end. 46