On the Inside

essay and verse

ON THE INSIDE

“The world-soul is not a further divine being created by the primary god, but is that primary god, himself functioning as the world’s immanent nature. Thus a simple conflation within the Platonic pantheon has delivered a world immanent deity already barely distinguishable from the Stoic god, especially when we bear in mind that the Platonic world-soul, just like the Stoic god, is co-extensive with the entire cosmos (Ti. 34a-b).”¹

In the above quotation, David Sedley is addressing the development of a certain way of thinking in Plato’s academy, which seems to have taken definite shape with Xenocrates’ successor, Polemon, to the effect that the creation myth in Timaeus becomes the true parent of Stoic theology, and it is not found, as is sometimes assumed, in Aristotle’s philosophy.

The tendency to look for the origins of the Stoic Zeus in Aristotle is largely based on the fact that it is with the latter that the concept of ‘matter’, hule, enters as a significant element in physics and metaphysics. Plato used the term hule, but not to describe the receptacle, the passive and ‘all receiving’ substrate upon which his active, creative principle, represented by the Demiurge in the myth, exerts itself (with the Ideas, or Forms) and thus generates the world. In all, it seems more likely by far that the concept of an integrated ultimate principle or deity pervading all things, and the entire universe itself, a concept which the Stoics would ‘materialize’ as the ‘craftsmanly fire’, emerged with Polemon’s lectures, attended by Zeno, the founder of Stoicism.

The question is sometimes raised, and since ancient times as in the case of Alexander of Aphrodesias, how can such an immanent principle be granted the dignity of being called “God”? Does it do proper honour to the name by suggesting that the God is as much the active force within a pile of dung as in the motions of the stars and galaxies, or the intelligence supporting the minds of certain animals, humans, and even the gods?

While peccadilloes about what is dignified and what is not may or may not have been the real reason for Alexander’s criticism of the Stoic concept of God (probably not, I would think) an answer as to how an immanent principle could be regarded as divine can be found later in the European tradition, with the German post-Kantians, particularly Eduard Von Hartmann.

Hartmann, in volume 2 of his “Philosophy of the Unconscious” discusses at length this problem of characterising the Absolute in terms of consciousness (as referencing the same without too much discrepancy, as what in classical terms is denoted psuche, nous, and logos).

What he basically says is this, appropriately echoing the Upanishads; that while consciousness as we normally regard it is always a ‘consciousness of’ something, in other words, consciousness in this sense presupposes a distinction between that which is conscious, and that of which it is conscious, the same does not hold when, as with the Absolute, there is nothing that is ‘outside’. The Absolute (and with this term the ancient immanent deity of Polemon and the Stoics can be identified) since there is nothing apart from it, cannot be, in the same sense as described above, conscious.

This however, is not a limitation for the Absolute. Rather it is the type of individual consciousness, so described above that is limited, knowing as it does the ‘other’ as mere object to its subject. The Absolute, that is, the God, or Zeus, is not conscious in the way we are. In fact, such a divine psuche would be to us “unconscious”, yet in being such, so far transcends our consciousness as to be the inner cause of the latter, along with the inner cause, the generator and arranger of the universe perceived in our consciousness.

He says –

“... neither in Fichte’s earlier doctrine, where the Absolute is represented by the unreal, insubstantial abstract moral world-order, nor in his later doctrine, where it stands as the eternally unchangeable veiled Being behind our consciousness which reveals it, nor in Hegel...., nor in Schopenhauer does the Absolute possess a consciousness outside of the individuals pervaded by it.”²

In Platonic terms, the World-Soul, while unconscious by our ordinary definitions of what a consciousness should be, is nevertheless supremely intelligent, is both the active principle generating or arranging this phenomenal universe from the passive one, which is itself another aspect of the same, as well as the matrix of the eternal Forms or ideas, according to which the myriad ‘beings’ of this fluctuating realm of appearances are shaped. Our consciousness, at best, can be mere witness to the creative play of this supreme ultimate, this immanent Deity.

And here, the remarks of the great Platonist scholar and fellow Irishman regarding Antiochus of Ascalon are apposite –

“.... Antiochus may have adopted what one might term a ‘Kantian’ interpretation of the forms, seeing them as inherent in the structure of the human mind, but also as present in the cosmic mind, that is the mind of God, in his Stoicising system”³

THE FAL OF KINGS

Unmute, but rather silent they,

the stones, a quiet sermon nod,

and neither signs their mourning grey

of death, but common bone with god

***

for in the element exerts,

the mind, upon a single will,

and moved as soul, or rock inert

awakes as man or lingam hill

1. Sedley, David, “The Origins of Stoic God”

2. Von Hartmann, Eduard, “Philosophy of the Unconscious, Volume 2”

3. Dillon, John, “The Middle Platonists”