Neo-Platonism: emanation, procreation, and metaphysical goodness

Hey ya'll.  So I've had some exposure to Emerson before, but it was mostly through his journals (which are great) as opposed to his essays, so I never really got to experience some of his weirder strains of thought, most notably those stemming from Eastern religions (e.g. the Vedas) and neo-Platonism, before now.  We talked about neo-Platonism in class today, but I'd like to go further; I find NP fascinating, and I like the idea of tracing its influence throughout history.  Here goes:

First of all, NP is really freaking weird.  It's not so much a philosophy as it is a religion.  However, talking about it as a religion is a little anachronistic; early neo-Platonists like Plotinus would've seen themselves as just being Platonic philosophers, but as time went on, the school of thought became officially mystical, and thinkers started to see themselves as increasingly separate from Plato.

In any case, here's why it's important:

1. Justin Martyr
2. Pseudo-Dionysius
3. Augustine
4. Boethius
5. Bonaventure
6. Maimonides
7. Hegel
8. Emerson

All of these guys (and a lot more) are either neo-Platonic outright, or have pretty deep neo-Platonic roots.  NP basically forms the building blocks of Medieval philosophy and theology.

Justin Martyr, for example, was a church-father.  Aquinas (and by association, Catholic theology) drew a lot of his thought from Pseudo-Dionysius, Maimonides, and Augustine, so between himself and Augustine, there's two of the four church-pillars with Neo-Platonic influences.  The mystical side of NP also permeated into figures like St. Teresa of Avilia.  So, it's a pretty powerful movement, and one that tends to get glossed over.  Here's how it started:

During Plato's lifetime, his school (the Acadamy) was one of the hot-spots for education in the ancient world.  Near the end of Plato's life, he started writing lots of technical dialogues, such as The Timaeus and The Laws.  So, after Plato died, his followers continued this tradition, and the Acadamy became the center for technical philosophy.  This is in contrast to some of the later Hellenistic schools and movements, such as Stoicism, which focused more on ethics and practical philosophy.

Eventually, the Platonic and Hellenistic schools started reacting in opposition to one another.  The Stoics, for example, claimed that knowledge was possible.  The Acadamy, in turn, became very dogmatic about the nature of knowledge, and claimed (in a huge contrast to what Plato actually thought) that we are cut-off from all knowledge, period.  So, at this point, the intellectual ancient world has become fairly segregated between the Academics, the Skeptics, the Stoics, and the Epicureans.

As all of this is going on, around 250 AD, along comes a guy named Plotinus.

Plotinus is the first real neo-Platonist.  He didn't write anything down (mystical!), but his teachings were compiled by his student Porphyry (who was pretty Aristotelian, strangely enough) in the Enneads, meaning "Nine" (there were nine books).  The Enneads makes up the core of NP doctrine.

Plato thought of the Forms as hierarchical.  He thought of lesser forms (e.g. Human-ness) as subordinate to higher forms (Truth and Beauty), which in turn are subordinate to the Good.

What Plotinus did, essentially, was to replace "the Good" with "God."

There's a lot of other weird doctrine going on, as well (e.g. his theory of emanation, in which the higher levels of being "emanate" the lower forms, but frankly, no one really knows what Plotinus meant by that anyway, so I wouldn't worry about it).  The main thing to remember is that Plotinus added a religious element to ancient thought, and that this justified a lot of later thinkers (e.g. Augustine, Maimonides) in utilizing Plato's thought in things like literary criticism, simply because of the belief that philosophy and theology could be reconciled.

The other thing that NP did was make matter the lowest of the low.  Matter (i.e. everything in this world) was considered vulgar and worthless.  So, the only way to connect with the higher reality was through religious experience.

This is huge for the Romantics; NP really anticipated the idea that it's the subject (i.e. the soul of a person and its relationship with God) rather than the object (i.e. worthless matter) itself that matters.  Aesthetic appreciation for Plotinus became much less about mimesis and much more about self-perfection--making oneself able to see the beauty.  At the same time, for NP, sensation is only the beginning of knowledge; they want to go farther than someone like a medieval like Sidney ("the purpose of poetry is to teach and delight"), or even a Romantic like Wordsworth ("good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings").

The concept of matter being worthless is also important for feminist theorists like Wollstonecraft.  The culture that sprung from NP believed that men possessed the Form of human-ness in their sperm, while women possessed the bare, formless matter in their egg.  So, this propagated the belief that men were superior and women were inferior, as well as the idea that any "problem" with the child (e.g. birth defects, still-births, or even if the child was born a female, rather than the more "perfect" male), then it was the fault of the woman, and she was in some sense responsible.  This belief was really not that uncommon throughout the most of the middle ages, and while that's not to say that NP is wholly responsible for the subjugation of women throughout Western history, it certainly played a major role, and definitely influenced some of the major feminist writers, from de Pizan to Mary Wollstonecraft, to speak out.

Another thing about mystical experience is that we can experience the One-ness, but we cannot properly express that experience through language.  In terms of literary criticism, this is huge for Augustine, Maimonides, and even Schleiermacher, whose notion of the hermeneutic circle plays in this doctrine big-time.

So, to sum up, neo-Platonism is big.  We (perhaps justifiably) like to ignore it in today's hyper-analytical Western thought because it's mystical and weird, but NP really does permeate Medieval, Romantic, and (in some sense) contemporary culture.  And it doesn't seem that literary theory (as far as we've experienced it) has been exempt from that fact.  I'm really interested in seeing how NP ties into the postmodern theorists, as well; hopefully we'll get to see some more connections between Hellenistic and contemporary thought down the road.