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عدد الرسائل : 1500
الموقع : center d enfer
تاريخ التسجيل : 26/10/2009
وســــــــــام النشــــــــــــــاط : 6
 | | Soul and Nature | |
According to the second law of thermodynamics, structural and dispositional diversities present in the inanimate material world converge towards irreversible entropy and disorder. In the biosphere, however, we witness a tendency to ever increasing diversification of natural kinds and species. From a Neoplatonic point of view, this latter fact is readily explained by the entirely non-Darwinian supposition of eternal Forms of natural kinds in the hypostasis of Consciousness which gradually emerge in the world, limited by space and time, in some sort of evolutionary organic process. As has already been pointed out, the Neoplatonists assumed as axiomatic that nothing could come to be here below that is not prefigured paradigmatically in the intelligible realm.Although one might think that the phenomenon of evolution militates against Neoplatonic theory, it is actually compatible with it; to some degree, it is precisely what we should expect as the empirical upshot of such metaphysical assumptions. Moreover, in distinction to the Forms posited in the old Academy of Plato and his immediate successors, the Forms of the Neoplatonists, far from being mere schemata, definitions, or ghostly blueprints of the natural world, are rather noetic entities teeming with conscious life. They actively and dynamically interrelate in such a way as to constitute a living noetic cosmos; and it is their rich inner life, the conscious activity of thoughts that they are, which is ultimately responsible for the appearance of images of them in space and time to make up the physical universe and everything contained in it. But this is by no means easy to understand. How exactly can images of eternal and immutable Forms, prefigured in Consciousness as such, become manifest in, and in fact constitute, the material world?To understand and explain how precisely it is that mind and matter interact with one another in general is a considerable and perennial philosophical problem. Approaches to it that start from modern materialist assumptions have not yielded plausible answers any more readily than the Neoplatonists’ idealist perspective. Even though the Neoplatonists afforded it extensive treatment, they, unsurprisingly, have not satisfactorily explained it either. In a nutshell, the answer they gave has something to do with their fundamental understanding of the realm of the psychic. Plotinus in particular struggled in long and meandering treatises to explicate the precise functioning of the general phenomenon of what the ancients called “Soul” (psychê). Soul, a further hypostasis of being that effortlessly “falls out of” the inner activity of Consciousness in a similar way as Consciousness “fell out of” the First, is the link that facilitates the manifestation of form in matter. Their ingenious speculation about Soul, understood in its relationship to its cause (pure Consciousness) on the one hand and its effect (the emergence of the living material universe) on the other, lies at the heart of Neoplatonism. In a manner of speaking, Neoplatonism is nothing but a philosophy of the soul, or “psychology” in the original sense of that word.In living beings, and human beings in particular, consciousness is but one psychic activity among others. The realm of the psychic extends in a continuum from the loftiest processes of knowing, memory, and imagination down to the most rudimentary forms and expressions of life that characterize the world’s biosphere (natural processes of metabolism, growth, etc.). Many influential ancient thinkers, both philosophers and poets, regarded the universe as a living being, not only in its parts but also and especially as whole. In the Timaeus, Plato had described in detail the structure and function of the world soul, and had recounted the way in which it was put together by a divine craftsman (demiurge) and conjoined with the realm of disorderly matter, upon which it controlled and imposed order. Plotinus and his followers had a quite different view. There is no planning on account of anyone, no “construction” of one metaphysical entity by another; instead, soul, that is to say the general phenomenon of life capable of animating matter, is merely the manifest outer aspect of the inner activity of Consciousness.The general idea is that Soul, qua outer activity of Consciousness, looks back at its cause in order to understand itself so as to truly be what it is. Gazing thus at the forms and ideas eternally present in Consciousness, it becomes “informed” by them and carries forward, by some manner of benevolent necessity, images of the eternal forms into the lower realm of Being. Giving birth to the entire universe and the biosphere on earth in this way, one could say that the sum total of the corporeal, sensible world rests in Soul, not the other way round, that soul resides in the bodies it animates.According to Neoplatonic theory, then, the world as we know and experience it in its formal and structural characteristics is the outer effect of the activity and life of Consciousness, an activity that was thought to be mediated “from above” by another, intermediate metaphysical entity, Soul. The precise ontological status of Soul as another hypostasis in its own right remains somewhat underdetermined, for in a manner of speaking Soul is the very process of expressing the intelligible world in the derivative form of sensible natural living beings and the lives they live.The Neoplatonists drew a distinction between “Soul” and “Nature” (phusis) that amounts to a hierarchical separation of higher and lower psychical functions. For the Neoplatonists, “Nature” denotes not only the essence or nature of each natural being or the entirety of the natural world (Nature as a whole), but also, and in the first instance, a lower aspect of conscious life (the “autonomic” life activities that are not consciously controlled by the individual animal’s consciousness) which beholds, in a kind of diminished vision, relevant aspects of the intelligible world and brings them forth in an act of silent contemplation. Thus, every aspect of the natural world, even the meanest piece of inorganic and apparently useless matter, has an eternal and divine moment. For all the other-worldliness often associated with Neoplatonic philosophy, then, it needs to be emphasized that the material world they inhabited was for this reason an essentially good and beautiful place, the effortless product of cosmic providence and divine power, and worthy of reverence. | |
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