Reading Neoplatonism: Non-discursive Thinking in the Texts of Plotinus, Proclus, and Damascius.

Meconi, David Vincent

RAPPE, Sara. Reading Neoplatonism: Non-discursive Thinking in the Texts of Plotinus, Proclus, and Damascius. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xxii + 266 pp. Cloth, $59.95--It was Plato who informed the Greek philosophical tradition of how the King of Egypt declared that writing will inevitably "implant forgetfulness in men's souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks" (Phaedrus 275a). Plotinus likewise knew how these "wise men of Egypt" therefore chose to inscribe only one image in their temples and thus "manifested the non-discursiveness of the intelligible world" (Enneads 5.8.6). Sara Rappe reminds us that such passages are not infrequent throughout the history of Neoplatonism, suggesting how Plato and his followers struggled to understand the proper use of the written word, the role of images and symbol, as well as the very possibility of the transmission of truth itself. Focusing on the question: "How is intuitive wisdom communicated, especially within the context of a philosophy that repudiates language but continues to practice speculative metaphysics?" (pp. 1-2), Rappe has produced a helpful work aimed at examining the Neoplatonic hermeneutic.

The first half of this work (pp. 25-114) begins with an examination of Plotinus' criticism of discursive thinking. Although dependent upon Aristotle's notion of [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], the immaterial, precognitive union between the knower and the known, Plotinus "wants to lead the mind out of its habit of looking at the world as essentially outside of the self, as composed of a number of objects with discrete essences that are known in all sorts of ways, but primarily through the senses and through thinking about the essences" (p. 44). Given his metaphysics of unity, a point that is unfortunately not developed here, Plotinus' henology insists on the denial of essentialism and discursive reasoning so as to transcend any subject-object duality. As Rappe so vividly pictures it, Plotinus wants to train and exercise the mind to realize that it can only see the beautiful objects of the world by seeing through the world: "the world as a whole ... is conceived as an icon, a sacred image of the god who can be encountered face to face within his shrine.... The exercise helps the student to treat the world as a theophany, as an image of the deity whose real presence is yet to be recognized. This recognition is best attained, according to Plotinus, within an introspective search: Plotinian prayers employ the formula, `alone to the alone'" (p. 89). Throughout this discussion, Rappe shows how although Plotinus may have prefigured Descartes in the use of "thought experiments," the Plotinian turn within is anything but Cartesian, the latter being a discursive introspection reifying and personifying the thinker. This section concludes with an examination into Plotinus' understanding of personhood, self-knowledge, subjectivity, as well as the importance of symbolic language throughout the Enneads.

By the beginning of the second half (pp. 117-243), Rappe's main point becomes clear: Neoplatonism's understanding of knowledge as union sought a way of transmitting truth that did not threaten the very unity it sought. She therefore next demonstrates how later thinkers came to incorporate the images and symbols of Orphic cosmology and Pythagorean number because "the authority extracted from the prestige of these symbols allows an alternative to the authority of the texts themselves. It is this freedom or hermeneutic space occasioned by the appropriation of the Pythagorean elements that now allows for self-reflection" (p. 120). That is, Proclus saw the text as a didactic process aimed at initiating and transforming the reader into the ways of vision and union. Like Proclus' Platonic Theology, later writers such as Damascius, the last of the platonic Diadochi (d. 538), also saw the text as pointing to theurgic ritual. Rappe accordingly shows how these later texts wish to reveal "a sacred space that the soul is supposed to fill out with its vision" (p. 185).

It is refreshing to see the later Neoplatonists receiving more and more scholarly attention. Sara Rappe is an Associate Professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Michigan and has produced a path-breaking study. Often the transitions within and between chapters could be clearer, possibly due to Rappe's borrowing from four previously published articles. More important, one seeks in vain for a reason why Neoplatonism is limited to non-Christian thinkers. Would not the rich apophatic tradition of Christianity, so well expressed in Pseudo-Dionysius' criticism of those who "are concerned with meaningless letters and lines, with syllables and phrases" (On the Divine Names 708c), be a welcomed complement here? These criticisms withstanding, this work will prove helpful for all interested in Neoplatonism and the role of language and symbol within philosophical systems.--David Vincent Meconi, S.J., University of Innsbruck.