Being and Logos - Introduction to Middle-Platonism - 1 of X - The Shadow of Plato

Añadido: 2026-05-28

[00:00:22]I'm Dr. Justin Sledge and allow me to welcome you to being and logos, an introduction to metal platonism. This seminar hopes to explore the philosophical foundations, especially in metaphysics at the heart of Western philosophy following the death of Plato and before the rise of Platinus in Neoplatanism. But really importantly, this seminar is an example, an experiment really in crowdfunded university level education. No payw walls, no subscriptions, no fees, just here's a class for free. And that's only really possible through the generous support of my Patreon. If you want to support this project, please consider taking a look down below at the links for my Patreon. But otherwise, I'm honored to welcome you to this course as we explore the fascinating philosophical development at the very heart, at the very origin of Christianity, of hermeticism, ofnosticism, and the foundations of Western esotericism.

[00:01:22]Welcome to being and logos. All right, everyone. Well, with great pleasure uh and some trepidation, I'm really happy to begin our exploration of middle platonism. uh a topic that on the surface sounds incredibly boring when you call it middle platonism. It's just sort of the middle between the old and the new. And of course with the neoplatinism getting most of the attention, I feel like that neoplatinism or middle platinism rather doesn't get nearly enough attention. But um with great thanks to the patrons of this channel, I'm I'm happy to begin the first lecture uh of our course being at Logos, an introduction to middle platonism. And a little bit about why this course and that we always start I think when we think about Plato with the famous quote by the founder of process philosophy Alfred Nord Whitehead who famously declared that the safest generalization or characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists in a series of footnotes to Plato and this is an off quoted and you know patentedly true statement about basically all of western civilization is that or the thought of western civilization is that it is a series of footnotes to Plato. But this should actually inspire deeper philosophical reflection. And one of the things that it should uh immediately raise into deeper philosophical reflection is what do we mean by Plato?

[00:02:44]What teachings do we mean specifically?

[00:02:47]Uh and what is Platonism? It's certainly the case that we think we all know what Platonism is. We have a general idea about what Platonism is. But the problem is that once you begin to interrogate the nature of Pltonism itself, the thought of Plato, all kinds of um monkey wrenches begin to be thrown into the mix of what we think we know. And as we probe into that, we're going to start that process today, is that even the things that we read in the dialogues that all of us take for granted as being Platonism, those might not be Pltonism at all. And so this is a problem that we face as we begin to dive into middle platonism. What is middle platonism? Is it the case that Plato died and then bequeathed a series of dogmas that were meant to be defended as a kind of orthodoxy or is it something much more amorphous which is to say Plato was uh you're defending Plato and the thought of Plato in a much more abstract way as opposed to specifically a set of orthodoxies that become Plleonism. So that's one of the big problems. The second problem that we're going to encounter is what are those earliest footnotes? Because if we take seriously that the earliest footnotes to use the language of Whitehead here, it's footnotes to Plato. If those earliest footnotes are people that actually studied at the feet of Plato, we should take their voices very seriously. They learn directly from the guy. I mean, imagine if we had something similar with Jesus, that we had a dozen books written by people who actually sat at the foot of Jesus. we would take their books very seriously. What's interesting is that we all admit to the centrality of Plato.

[00:04:23]And what do we not do? We don't take the admittedly fragmentaryary evidence of what became western philosophy. We don't take those people closest to Plato with the exception of one person, that of course being Aristotle. We don't take those footnotes, those earliest footnotes terribly seriously. So, one of the questions that we need to get at are what are those earliest footnotes? Who are those earliest people studying in the academy? And what do they reveal to us about what this idea of Platonism is?

[00:04:56]And lastly, do we have fidelity in those texts to Plato? Do the inheritors of Plato and Pltonism represent his thought or do they represent some other kind of trajectory of what became middle platonism in in a general way? So we have two questions here. One, does Plato express a coherent set of ideas, a coherent set of phil philosophical notions in the texts that we have that survive? So is there a Pltonism? And put it even more spicily is was Plato a platonists? That's a good question to ask. And so we have that question and then we have this other secondary question of what do the earliest footnotes to Plato look like? What are these earliest people who studied under Plato? What are they doing and what does their thought look like? So this seminar is going to wrestle with I hope these kinds of questions. This is going to be us taking a look at the closest people around Plato and the echoes of their thought and the echoes of Plato's thought reaching all the way into the Roman imperial period knocking on the door of uh what we might call neoplatonism.

[00:06:08]So this brings us to the uninteresting named middle platonism the world of middle platonism and we see here a fragment of Pho of Alexandria uh here on the on the screen. But why why why why be interested in in middle platonism?

[00:06:24]Well, it's a very gerine topic for what we do here at esoterica. And I would suggest and I would forward that it's also just germanine for doing the history of philosophy. If we're going to be doing the history of philosophy, we should do it as Peter Adamson has. We should do it with as few gaps or no gaps as possible. But there's even a more specific reason why middle platonism matters for the kind of stuff that we do here at esoterica. It's because this material has been one pretty systematically underststudied and therefore has a kind of esoteric element. In fact, we're going to get immediately into some of those esoteric elements today. And secondly, middle platonism has had a overwhelmingly powerful impact on the development of religion and especially the development of what we would call esoteric religion.

[00:07:13]And while neoplatanism is most strongly associated for instance with the development of the western mystical tradition and the eastern mystical tradition that is to say the Greek eastern mystical tradition it was middle platonism that most directly influenced the development of things like hermeticism ofnosticism of early Christianity and people like origin the development of henistic astrology and magic the metaphysics the mechanics of how all of that worked in the mind of all of those Greek magical papy The machinery of that in so far as it has an intellectual foundation that machinery is middle platonism ditto with people like Zosimus and things like the development of alchemy but also again things like the calaldian oracles.

[00:07:57]recall we have a kind of weird causality temporality when it comes to the development of mysticism and other kinds of ideas where in some ways we say neoplatanism sort of backwards of backwards influenced all of this earlier material and of course middle neoplatanism doesn't even emerge until the 3rd century and most of the material that we are interested in herenosticism hermeticism Christianity that's all being influenced by middle platonism so if you care about the development and I imagine most of us do around here about the development of Christianity, development of esoteric Judaism, the development of of of to some degree of uh of Islam, but certainly magic and alchemy and astrology and these sort of things, those are all born out of the world of middle platonism. So this also explains to me at least to some degree why this field is so badly underststudied. I think it's badly underststudied precisely because of the kind of things that we are interested in. It's so associated with this sort of what what Dylan calls the Platonic underground, the world of the hermetica, the world of the Kodian oracles, the world of astrology and alchemy where they're just as concerned about the nature of the don as they are other kinds of philosophical problems. And if they're interested in these questions of things like the demon, well, I think that's gerine for the study of something like magic stud certainly certainly for also for the study of something like astrology. And those are going to be the kind of topics that we're going to see developing in the later middle platonists. So I think it's actually this connection with again what Dylan calls the Platonic underworld that this material doesn't get the attention that it deserves. And of course being that it doesn't get the attention that it deserves is all the more reason why we would turn to it and study it here at esoterica. So this is another justification right so the two basically are we should be doing the history of philosophy honestly and completely the middle platonist should be just as part of that as the early platonist or the neoplatonist and two it's especially gerine for the kind of stuff that we do here at esoterica.

[00:10:10]So let's think about the intellectual context of Plato. What is Plato trying to do? And what I'm going to forward to you is that Plato's mind like all great minds is trying to solve a problem that we inherit philosophical problems from our ancestors. And we're always trying to solve problems. Whether it's Linets or Aristotle or Thomas Aquinus, we're handed a bowl full of paradoxes and we're trying to work them out. in all of philosophy at some level trying to negotiate with these kinds of problems.

[00:10:43]And the problem that I see being inherited by Plato, the problem that militates Platonism, the emergence of Plleonism as we know it is a debate between two philosophers in the region in the generations prior to Plato. And that is the debate between the iliatics represented primarily by people like Parmmenities and Heracitis. And as you'll famously remember, it is Heracitis that makes the argument that all things are flux. All things flow.

[00:11:12]Pontare all things flow. And therefore, exact knowledge of anything becomes impossible. If things are constantly in a state of flux, which if we look around and look at anything in the world, everything does seem to be in a constant state of flux. You can't step into the same river twice because it's not the same river and you're not the same person. So this generates a problem, an epistemological problem. If things are constantly changing, how can anything be known? How can anything be knowable if nothing can be the object of analysis?

[00:11:44]Because as soon as you analyze a thing, it's already become something else. All right? So this creates a bit of a nightmare and certainly it's backed up by the senses. The senses seem to observe a world that is in fact constantly changing. On the other side of the fence, we have Perminities. And of course, Parmminities in his incredibly important uh book on truth and opinion, he claims that a divine goddess has revealed to him the nature of reality and that a reality is in fact a being.

[00:12:16]Full stop. Reality is simply being. And of being, there is no change. Because if it were change, it would no longer be being. It would be something else. And being therefore is not subject to alteration and it is not subject to temporal succession or time. Being simply is what is is. And the appearance that we have, our opinions that we get primarily from our sense data, those are just wrong. We are experiencing a constant delusion. Change is an illusion. And what is really real is that we are in being and being is static. Now the upshot of this is that we can know things. We can derive all kinds of things or at least a limited number of things for which we can be sure. We can be analytically sure and it is in fact we think of Parminades as a person who invents or I would actually say it is revealed to him the nature of metaphysics. Parmmenities is our first true metaphysician certainly our first true analytic metaphysician. And you can actually formulate his arguments in in an analytical form in a formal form as I've done on an episode on parminities.

[00:13:22]But this seems to completely contradict the data we get from our senses. We don't experience a world of unchanged.

[00:13:29]We don't experience a world that is static. We experience a world that is constantly changing. So this produces a trifecta of problems. One of the problems is a metaphysical problem which is true. Are things constantly changing or are they not? The second is an epistemological question. If things are changing, what can be known about them if anything? And if they're not, does the knowledge that there is being simplicator, is this trivial or not? So there's an epistemological question. And finally, there's an axiological question. What are we to do with this in terms of values? Right? How are we to live our lives? How do we live our lives? How is it that we live our lives if being is all there is and everything I'm experiencing around me is a kind of persistent delusion? And secondly, how do I become an ethical person if if if fundamentally at some level if I take a loan out from you, right? I take a loan out from you and you come back and ask me to pay it back and I say, "Oh, no, no, I'm not paying it back." You're like, "Why not?" Well, because, you know, you're not the same person and I'm not interested in, you know, paying this back. So, you can see why there are metaphysical, epistemological, and axiological problems that come around with the question around Heracitis and the question around Parmminities. Plato in a many ways unlike Socrates, Socrates does not care about these problems. For Socrates, the question is how to find the truth in a is a in a religious sense of duty and one does it through a process of asking questions. And you live it's for him it's a question of how to live a good life. Plato more directly inherits this problem from the from Heracitis and Parmminities. And his solution at least the apparent solution that we all tell ourselves is the solution that he gives is that he posits two worlds. He posits a world of being right and in the world of being it is unchanging and static. The world of being is unchanging and static. And therefore true things can be known about it. And in fact for Plato truth is only possible because of the realm of being.

[00:15:35]And yet there is also a parallel world, right? Our singular unified world in a very strange sense of becoming where things are constantly changing and where sense data is bombarding us and we are seeing things change but nothing can be known about this world rather right we are the human being is the nexus of these two worlds. We are imshed in the world of becoming in the physical shape of our body and the hool that is our body and the senses that we we ga the data we gather from our senses. But also we are a soul and our soul can remember the forms that existed before we were born into a physical body. And as we remember the forms we can see that things in the sensible world in the world of hool in the world of matter they participate in the forms. And in so far as they participate in the forms, we can know or we can approach some knowledge of what is going on in this world. So this is Plato's famous solution for how to square the circle.

[00:16:39]And of course he dumps out a metaphysics, he dumps out an epistemology, right? The epistemology of remembering uh and he dumps out an oxiology in terms of how to live a good life. And this I would argue is fundamentally the solution of way the way Plato squares a circle between per H per paracitis and Pminities.

[00:16:59]But if you think about this even for a moment, there's a lingering question.

[00:17:05]Where did the forms come from? Where did the things that populate the realm of being, where did those forms come from?

[00:17:12]And if they're eternal, what do we can say about their eternality? Where did souls come from? Why are souls, at least human souls, imshed in hool and matter and not the forms? How did we get here?

[00:17:25]Where does matter come from? Was it eternally here? Right? And so we have questions that emerge about first principles here. Plato's giving us a really elegant solution to a problem, but in some sense, he's kicking the can down the road because he's not giving us a first principle story about where this comes from. And then he does in his in his book the tameus he does give us a story. Now the term he uses for the story is an icos logos a likely narrative a likely story. He never calls it a myth but he calls it a likely story and also he puts it in the mouth of someone else. So this this question and we can rehearse the Tomus at some length. But in this um in the in the in the likely story of the Tmus what we have is a kind of primeval demiurge whose emergence is never clear to us. We don't know where the demiurge comes from. We see the demiurge look toward the forms and attempt to in his goodness or its goodness their goodness. I don't know what gender the the demiurge has.

[00:18:28]It attempts to impress those forms into matter into matter. And as the as the demiurge presses them into matter, there's an imperfect fit. The forms are perfect. Matter is imperfect. The forms don't change. Matter is changeable. And therefore, the world that we get is in some sense a shadow of the perfection of the forms. And in that we ultimately generate the the world of the soul. We generate individual souls. And ultimately through a kind of metaphysics of geometry, we begin to build the universe out of just a series of triangles. and building up we get the platonic solids and ultimately that leads to the world of sensibilia.

[00:19:08]Now there are tons of problems about the tameus and one of them is should this story be taken literally and we know as we'll get into middle platonism some people took it literally and some people took it figuratively. Aristotle for instance insisted that it should be taken literally that Plato literally believed this was what happened.

[00:19:32]There's problems with that. We know that Aristotle was in the academy for 30 years, so he does know what he's talking about. He's also not a terribly reliable narrator because he's a rival to the academy at this point. So, is he telling the truth or is he at some level attempting to undermine Plato as taking a metaphorical story ser literally when it was never meant to be taken like that. Secondly, we have other questions like when does this happen in time? You know, is it the fact that the that the demiurge is creating something in time or is this an eternal process that's always been happening? A lot hinges on that philosophically, whether the whether the demiurge is acting eternally or in time. A great deal of the questions can emerge if you've ever read the Tmas, which I would certainly hope that you do in the course of the of this of this seminar because so much is going to hinge on uh on the one's reading of the Tmus.

[00:20:28]A further question is is it the case that the documents that we have from Plato even represent his authentic thought? Do the dialogues which we all love and cherish, are they actually representative of what he thought? And now we get into the thorniest of all questions and thank the gods.

[00:20:52]But I'm dealing with it now at the very beginning of the seminar because I don't want to deal with it later. I'm going to get it out of the way and we'll say what we need to say about it and move on.

[00:21:00]Click will continue to haunt us the entire time of this seminar is the question of course of what is called the agraa dogmata the unwritten doctrines of Plato. This is without any doubt the thorniest topic in Plato studies. I'm going to give you a version of it that I think is reasonable. Your mileage may vary. It will certainly vary. Everyone seems to have a strong opinion about the agrapha dogmata. That phrase by the way comes from Aristotle, right? He will he Aristotle Aristotle is going to comment in the physics and metaphysics about ideas that we don't see really apparently in Plato's dialogues and he's going to say these are the agraphas the so-called agrapha dogmata the unwritten uh doctrines of Plato.

[00:21:53]So, what are our sources for this? And just to be clear, I'm not going to wade into the waters of the two being in Milano school versus uh other people that are have all kinds of beliefs about this. I'm going to say the consensus around the unwritten doctrines, as much as there is a consensus around it, is going to look mostly like what I'm going to present. I mean, every single thing I'm going to present here could be challenged and would be challenged by Plato scholars. And so I'm giving a kind of gestalt of what we think the the unwritten doctrines were, if they were at all. So what are our sources for the unwritten uh doctrines? The first is the famous seventh letter of Plato. This seventh letter is disputed. Some people think that it's authentic. Some people think that it's not. So I don't know. I tend to believe it's authentic. and styometric analys of it analysis of it also seems to confirm that it is in fact uh platonic. It certainly sounds a lot the a lot like the way Plato writes. So the famous seventh letter we'll come back to the seventh letter in just a minute. The next of course is the famous report of Aristoenus which is also only preserved in Aristotle. So we have this what second third hand again Aristotle is hostile to the academy but this is the famous report of Aristoenus where at the end of his life Plato is going to give a public lecture on the good and people show up hoping to hear a lecture on how to live a good life and Plato lectures for hours on geometry.

[00:23:20]So what is this right with math and geometry seem to be playing a big role in this as we'll see in just a minute but this seems to be congruent with the kind of things that Aristotle and other documents say as well. Further we have what I call the contentions of Aristotle. Aristotle seems to know a doctrine about the fundamental nature of reality that we do not find expressed in the dialogues. And again I don't think he's making it up. I think that he's arguing with it precisely because it's the position that Plato took. And therefore we can again with some degree of hesitancy say that Aristotle is representing Plato at least to some degree accurately in order to argue with him. So we have the contentions found in especially uh the physics and the metaphysics of of Aristotle.

[00:24:09]We also have Plato's own critique of writing. You'll know from many documents in Plato that Plato at some level thinks that writing is bad for us and that truth cannot be written down. That there's something about the nature of truth that cannot be captured in writing and that one attempts to do it one fails and perhaps even perverts the truth and therefore there are the famous warning of thath that it will destroy memory it will destroy experience that experience will be brought under the bus and therefore there are Plato's own critiques of writing. There's also what the Tubigan school calls the doctrine of the reserve. The reserve is where in the dialogues Plato will introduce what seemingly is a crucially important metaphysical uh uh docu doctrine and then pass it over without explaining it.

[00:24:55]It seems as if Plato is flagging to his students in the dialogues, oh yeah, we talked about this in class, right? Or we talked about this over in the academy or we talked about this at, you know, over lunch or something. So it seems like Plato is flagging the viewer that something important is happening and letting them know it's not in the book.

[00:25:15]So this is what is called the doctrine of the reserve.

[00:25:19]Um the other ele elements of this is one that Plato himself even refers to the dialogues as the scodia padia the entertainments. He refers to them as entertainments as at some level they're kind of a teaching tool that's meant to be entertaining sort of like eduta edutainment maybe we've been doing edutainment since all the way back in the days of Plato but there's a kind of discounting of the dialogues by Plato himself he's saying these are for public consumption but they're not the real thing the real teachings are something else so we have this docus idea that they are spuda pada so maybe they're not exactly Again, what Plato really believed and really taught in the academy. And lastly, among many other things we can talk about is that the trajectory of the academy and we'll be begin talking about the old academy in our next lecture. The trajectory of the old academy is not in the direction of the forms. Spucipus, we learn from Aristotle. Spucipus is the next scolark after uh Plato dies. Spucis just rejects the doctrine of the forms. Just rejects it. he just doesn't have any he he thinks it's either useless or redundant.

[00:26:32]He weirdly enough agrees with Aristotle about this. And so there's a clearly something going on in the trajectory of the academy. And then again, if we think Plato's actual teachings are putting wind in the sales of the the trajectory, the intellectual trajectory of the academy, then it doesn't look like the stuff that we see in the republic. It doesn't look like even the stuff that we see in the permenities. It must have been something different. And if and as we get to Spucus next time, you'll see that it is radically unlike the Plato that all of us have come to know and love. It's a very very very different Plato. But just to give you some sense of what I mean here, if we look at the seventh letter, this is a very interesting argument and I'm cleaning this argument up a bunch. If you go read the seventh letter and you especially look at it in Greek, it is tortured. It is not clear what Plato is talking about. What I want to give to you is what I think is a good reconstruction of what the argument is there. But what he's arguing for is that he's talking about the um he's talking about the tyrant in Syracuse and he says the tyrant of Syracuse has written a document has claimed to written a document on metaphysics that claims or on being that is better than the teaching of of Plato. And Plato says if he's written on metaphysics he can't be better than me because any written document about metaphysics is inherent right it's inherently wrong. Why?

[00:27:58]If you want to know what a thing is, a thing is in its essence. If you want to know what a thing is in itself, the essence of a thing really pure metaphysics, metaphysical knowing, there are five things that one has to know about it or have knowledge of in order to know what that thing is. That is to say, if you want to cogn have have uh what we might not call justified true belief or to know it in Greek and the word here is noon, right? You have to have knowledge of what is cognizable and true. You need to know the name of a thing. So you need to know you need to be able to isolate it out from every other thing in the world by knowing its specific name. You need to have its logos, right? An account of it. That is to say, a kind of definition of it. You need to have a definition of it that is precise enough to capture what that thing is, but not so not broad enough that it would capture anything else. It needs to precisely define what that thing is. When these two things are combined, right, this becomes known as its quality.

[00:28:54]So the name of it plus its plus its uh logos becomes its pon its quality. And when you do that you do that through discursive analysis. So when I want to know what a book is I do discursive analysis of it. I can know its name. I can call it a book. This is different than a scroll. It's different than u I don't know a roll. It's different than something else. I can get a name for it.

[00:29:15]I can define it by saying it's a it's pieces of bound paper uh which there's a cover or something. Right? You can debate about this of course to no end.

[00:29:23]And we know that the academics did that tells me it's pouon it's quality and we get all of that through sense perception right and also when I get sense perception of it I can see it so that brings us up to what Plato calls knowledge epistem so I have justified true belief about a book when I arrive at those four things right justified true belief at that point but Plato says that to achieve the gain knowledge of the essence of epistem to on a knowledge of the being the pure being of the book.

[00:29:58]This transcends discursive analysis and it transcends sensible analysis because no amount of talking will ever exhaustively give me the being of the book and no amount of looking at it, sensing it, feeling it, hearing it will ever give me the essence of the book.

[00:30:14]Rather the only way to do that is to have a direct app perception of bookness. Right? to have the what he calls the fifth and he never names it.

[00:30:23]He just calls it the fifth and this direct app perception of the book only is given to me in flashes. It's the kind of thing that I only get in sort of a bolt of gnostic bliss. But that bolt of gnostic bliss, you can throw as much words at it as you want. You can throw as much sensibility at it as you want, but you will never get the toon, the essence of the book, no matter how much you write about it, nor how much you sense it because the essence is beyond discursive analysis and beyond sensible analysis. And therefore, any metaphysics that can be written down, any metaphysics that can be taught isn't metaphysics. And I know that people out there being like that sounds like Dowoism kind of. It does, right? And it has that the Dao that can be taught is not the Dao. The being taught is not the being. You cannot write it down. And anyone who claims to have written it down, you can know they're wrong just by virtue of them having written it down.

[00:31:22]So this is the argument as much as we understand it from the from the uh from the seventh letter. Now again, think about what Plato is doing in the republic or in the permenities. He's trying to talk about essences. And so the question is is there something esoteric happening in the Platonic teachings? Is there something uh dissimulative happening where there's a kind of popular metaphysics that Plato is giving the hoy paloy? But the truth of the matter is really to know the being of something there has to be sort of this fifth essence this fifth way of knowing that is at some level one might call mystical for lack of a better words. What's happening here? How do we line up with clearly Plato doing metaphysics in the permenities especially and in the um and in other documents like the republic although again in the fadris recall he will say things like the only really way to get to truth is how through the mana only through the mana only through the mania of love or through the prophetic mana that's how we really get to the truth but again western philosophy has greatly ghettoized those thoughts why because we want Plato to be our logical guy. We don't want him to be a weird mystic.

[00:32:34]Certainly not advocating knowledge through mysticism in the seventh letter or or direct a perception we might say in the seventh letter much less in the fadas or the mania. So the seventh letter is telling us if it's accurate and we put that into dialogue when dialogue with the fadris we have a coherent belief that says true knowledge of metaphysics is only had through some kind of profound alter state of consciousness that is not discursive and is not sensible. Right?

[00:33:07]But Aristotle is going to make all of this very uncomfortable for us because that's what Aristotle likes to do. He likes to take everything that it seems to be obvious and make it very strange.

[00:33:19]Aristotle gives us what seems to have been Plato's fundamental metaphysics.

[00:33:25]What we might call his fundamental ontology or we might call what they called Plato's first principles. Now again, can we trust this? I don't know.

[00:33:35]Aristotle was notoriously hostile to the academy, but he was there for 30 years.

[00:33:41]So, and also later on when people come to defend Plato against Aristotle, never to my knowledge they say, "Oh, Aristotle, you misunderstood Plato or you're you're making stuff up or Plato never taught that." They go white knuckle it. They are defending the doctrine that's laid out by Aristotle as Platonic, as the teaching of Plato in a way that seems like they agree that this is in fact what Plato taught. So let's unpack this what might be an element of the uh the agrapha dogmata of Plato.

[00:34:14]The main thing you'll notice here is that this the theory of the forms which we all take to be the the the doctrine of the the mature Plato certainly the Plato of the Republic although certainly comes into question by the later Plato uh the Plato of the Pmenities which many people think by the way is you know in that text you know folks may know this that in the early dialogues Socrates ends everything in in an aporeia there's no settled answer in the middle dialogues we think we're hearing the teachings at least the popular teachings of Plato in the in the middle dialogues in the mouth of Socrates. So now Socrates famously uh or rather shockingly knows stuff and of course Socrates's claim to fame was that he didn't. But now in the middle dialogues like the Republic, he certainly knows stuff and he's arguing with people about the nature of justice. In the later dialogues, the interlocutor is tripping up Socrates and most famously we have this in the Perminities where perminities comes and talks to Socrates who is very young at this in this dialogue. permitted is quite old and he drills I mean drills Socrates of is there a form of hair and dirt and mud you know this is famous and he just really shatters the theory of the forms so there is a dimmunition there's a there is a sense in which the forms are not doing the heavy lifting that they were doing for instance in the republic but rather we have two more primitive metaphysical principles the first principle that we have uh and I should say that these are all mathematical in character. The overwhelming consensus is that Plato toward the end of his career or maybe always maybe in the esoteric teachings the unwritten doctrines is always in this position is that he has become a Pythagorean that his positions begin to look like again the fragmented stuff that we have. But the but platonism and Pythagoreanism absolutely cannot be separated in what might be the agraphmata and certainly by later uh by later middle platonists. So if you hear a lot of Pythagoreanism here, it's because Plato probably was beginning to embrace or always embraced a form of Pythagoreanism here. And in that way, we might conclude that there is no such thing as Platonism. There's just Plato's peculiar version of Pythagoreanism.

[00:36:25]I know that's kind of like a mic drop moment, but there is might not be Platonism there. You know, there is no Platonism. There is only Pythagoreanism.

[00:36:33]That seems to be perhaps an argument that can be made. But in this Pyth Pythagoreanized version of Plato or Plato being a good Pythagorean, everything begins with two principles.

[00:36:46]The first is the one, right? The one is the first principle. And then accompanying the one in a sort of primitive onlogical state is what is usually referred to as the indefinite diad. What Aristotle what Aristotle claims Plato called the great and the small. And the one is a kind of active limiting principle. It it acts to put a limit on what is otherwise limitless the aeron. And this this this this one actively limits the the the the indefinitess of the diad. It imposes right limits per on the aperon. And this by limiting the principle of the of the aperon it provides one with solidity like things can come out of it. And it is the principle which by which things are become individuated. So individuation is the process of the of the one limiting the great and the small. The diad on the other hand the indefinite diad is responsible for extensibility that is to say variation uh magnitudes and change. The indefinite diad represents the world of becoming.

[00:37:57]One might say it is the thing that is constantly sort of vibrating in in terms of the great and the small. It is always it is those polarizing seaonging between the great and the small and it generates magnitudes. It generates extension. It generates the world that we might recognize. What we have is the one imposing form imposing limit per indefinite diet. And this produces the tension between unitary beings that are individuated and the fact that those individuated entities exist in a world of magnitudes. Right? I am smaller than so and so. I am larger than so and so. I am older than so and so. I am in this place and now I'm in this place. These two principles, the one in the indefinite diad generate the conditions upon which individuation can occur but also change. again solving that great debate between Pythagoras or rather solving solving that great debate between perminities and Heraclitus.

[00:38:59]Further out of this relationship of the of the of the limiter the one and the indefinite diab there is a extension of what is called primal mathematicals. The first thing that emerges in this imposition of the one on the indefinite diad are the primal mathematicals. Now this the primal mathematicals are sometimes referred to as formal numbers.

[00:39:23]Formal numbers are oneness, tweness, threeness, fourness, fitness etc. Now you cannot add oneness to oneness to get tuness. Tuness is an individually discrete metaphysical entity. You cannot add and get this from Aristotle. The the ma the formal numbers are not addable in the way that the mathematical numbers aren't addable. the the mathematical arith arithmetic numbers. But it is the case that any given instantiation of a one which is added to another one to produce two is only able to do that in so far as it participates in some way in the oneness of the formal numbers. So mathematical numbers are derivative of formal numbers. So we have at first generated the mathematicals and from the number from this numericality from these mathematicals the formal ones give rise to the the regular ones that we all use to do arithmetic and this is where geometry emerges from oneness emerges a point from tweness emerges a line right and again this is all bound up in uklitian stuff where you cannot say that a line is simply infinitely compressed point because that's not thinkable but rather the position here is oneness generates a point, twice generates lines, threenness generates planes, and fourness generates solids.

[00:40:47]You'll remember this again from the Taeus. It never quite says that, but you can easily see why in the Tameus you might come to such a position.

[00:40:56]And of course, you add 1 plus 2 plus 3+ 4, right? And you end up with the decad the tetricus in Pythagoreanism. The one I'm showing you on the screen right now is from Yakobma. And you can see how this is going to directly influence western esotericism. Very clearly influencing western esotericism.

[00:41:17]The container of these of these numericals of these mathematicals the container of this is referred to as a topos. It's some kind of place. And generally speaking we think that that topos that place is the world soul. The world soul is just the name for the place in which the ma the primal mathematicals are generated. So that's just the world soul is just that place.

[00:41:42]The human soul of course is a microcosm of that world soul. We'll talk about war in a minute. But what happens is that world soul and impresses form upon primeval matter which has always been there and from that emerges the cosmos.

[00:41:58]So world soul and the demiurge of Taeus are the same entity. The world soul and the demiurge of Tameus are just the exact same entity according to uh according to Aristotle.

[00:42:10]What's interesting about this is that Aristotle contends that the Tameus is a rubbish story because the Tameus seems to contend that um this happened at one point in time. And of course, Aristotle famously rejects the idea that there is a a creation. For Aristotle, the world is eternal. And what's interesting is that Aristotle's cosmic eternalism will be later applied to the demiurge story by almost all Platonists, all Platonists. And therefore, we will have an aristotilianized eternalized version of the TMA story because if you read the Ta story, it reads very much like a kind of creation from nothing. And that's the reason why early Christians preserved it in the Latin West because it looks so much like the Genesis creation story.

[00:42:55]The Christians read it as creation from nothing. Aristotle read it or Aristotle said that's precisely why it's nonsense.

[00:43:02]But how did it get saved? Platonist applied Arisatilian eternalism to the Taeus and said it's eternally happening.

[00:43:09]So the the bizarre history of how this stuff is going to go. So plonists use the opponent of the timus to save the timus. So this is the way things will emerge in uh in this text. And if you know your gnostic mythology right the gnostic mythology leans on the tameus story also making it very much a moment in time as much as you know time. We can apply concepts like time to this. The human being according to this theory is a microcosm of the macrocosm. So again, we're already beginning to see how doctrines like microcosm macrocosm mirroring that we're going to see predominate in hermeticism and ultimately in western esotericism. These ideas are already to be found in oo already back in these sort of agra uh these unwritten agra these unwritten doctrines of of Plato. But in the unwritten doctrines, unlike the divided line that we have in in in the republic, this tends to result in the human soul being again the nexus of the world of being and the world of becoming in the form of matter. And we then get again a kind of layered knowledge of the world from direct apprehension which is noose.

[00:44:22]And again, think back to the seventh letter. And if you really want to know something according to the seventh letter, you can only have it through direct apprehension. Here this is referred to as noose discursive knowledge which is epistime uh belief or opinion. I like the translation belief better of doxa. And then of course sense perception in the form ofis. Sois being most down the line in terms of what we get from the senses and therefore the least reliable all the way up through belief doxa s discursive knowledge in the form of a pistime and eventually direct perception in noose exactly again what the seventh letter says. So the seventh letter is agreeing right with the the grapha dogmata it seems to be agreeing with what Aristotle says Plato believed. So again, this is where we get weird weird stuff because none of this really agrees with what we see in the in the in the uh official dialogues. None of this totally agrees with the permenities. None of it totally agrees with the republic. None of it really agrees with a lot of that material.

[00:45:27]So now again, we can all also dump out axiology out of this. Remember this not just an epistemological problem. It's not just a metaphysical problem. It is an axiological problem. And what is the axiology? What does Plato famously say via Socrates that philosophy is? It's preparation for death. The physical body is going to die. And therefore the task of what one needs to do is one needs to learn the fundamental nature of reality.

[00:45:56]And this gives us the logical result of how we do that. We do it through diarasis. Diarasis is a method of division. You divide things into into their appropriate uh into their appropriate name again their appropriate kind of quality and is by separating things out you eventually learn what things are through this process of division the dearasis one can ultimately come to know the truth. This is in some sense a a logical development of the alinkus. Again the alinkus in Socrates's mouth was either x or y but not both.

[00:46:33]Right? We have the same thing usually applied by Socrates for figuring out how to live a good life. We have that same mechanism being applied to metaphysics.

[00:46:42]So we have at some level the the logical mirror of the cosmic process of division by which the cosmic order the cosmos was um generated I suppose. And of course this also has axiological results in the form of udimonia. What is a good life? A good life is dividing between extremes.

[00:47:07]It is dividing between the correct balance of extremes. It is limiting the great and the small. You don't want to have too little of this and too much of that. By limiting the great and the small, you sail through the middle and ultimately you can have a good life. And now I know what everyone is thinking right now. That sounds exactly like Aristotle. That sounds like the Nick ethics all day long. that it is about moderating between extremes. It is surprising to you, should it be surprising to you that Aristotle is arriving at a position about axiology informed by the secret teachings of Plato? Of course not. Because what was he? He was a student of Plato for 30 years. The ax the axiology of Aristotle is directly the result of the axiology of Plato. Again, if we accept this as the so-called hidden documents or hidden doctrines or esoteric doctrines, secret doctrines or whatever of Plato, we should not expect the tree, the apple to fall far from the tree. And the reason for that is very easy is very is again very easy to understand. It's because Aristotle is probably just expressing orthodox platonism. And surprise surprise when we get to Specipus and Pomon and Zenocrity and other people from the academy they have the exact same axiological theory. We should not say that Aristotle's theories of ethics right was this. We should simply say this was what Plato taught in the academy and Aristotle simply took it over. He gets the credit for it mostly because those hidden document those hidden doctrines remain very much hidden to us. But again, we're left with more mysteries than not here, right? Again, I mentioned the famous lecture on the good that when asked about the good life, what did Plato do? He gave a lecture on the mathematics. He gave a lecture on geometry, which sounds weird at first, and it is weird, but it's only weird if you don't think about it in terms of this metaphysical first principles of the imposition of the one on the indefinite diad. The mathematics underwrites the axiology. The mathematicals underwrite the cosmology.

[00:49:21]The mathematicals underwrite the epistemology, the metaphysics, the ontology and the axiology. And so unsurprisingly, we have this very late, admittedly quite late statement that uh famously hell was hung above the academy that let let no one enter that does not know geometry. No, let no geometers in the academy. Why? Because the universe is geometrical. Geometry is the universe. At some level, if you don't understand geometry, you're not going to do well in the Platonic Academy because that just is what they're doing. This is this is clearly a Pythagorean uh development inside of the academy only recognizable if you look at it through the lens of what were allegedly these um these unwritten doctrines of Plato.

[00:50:15]But as we come to the end today, if it is the case that that um that all of European philosophy consists of series of of of footnotes Plato, we must ask what are those footnotes and what are they footnotes to? Are they footnotes to the permenities and the republic? Or are they footnotes to something much much more mysterious? And if they are, then it could be the case that all the footnotes that we have are footnotes to Plato meant for the Hoy Paloy, the exoteric teachings of Plato. We've all accepted them as the Platonism when in fact the actual Platonism was an esoteric doctrine, and we've all been writing footnotes to the exoteric doctrines of Plato. And we do know that the later Platonists, the middle platonists do prioritize certain documents to be read. The Tameus, of course, the Tameus, the Republic, obviously. The Fedrris. Ah, yeah. The Fedrris, the Mania, the The Theotus, the Fedo, what happens to us when we die, the Filibus and the laws. The laws are late Plato and they read a lot like that seventh letter. Of course, also the Parmmenities would be taken up especially by the Neopyagoreans as the royal document of ontology. So again the when we get to Numinius and people like the neopyagorans of this period they will adopt the pi Pythagoras as their or rather the perminities as their core document their statement of ontology.

[00:51:47]Regardless of all of this, Plato died in 347 B.CE. Plato dies and it seems like by consensus, we don't have any evidence of a vote. The nephew of Plato via his uh sister Potone is elected to helm the academy Spucus and it would break ultimately with Aristotle. Aristotle would take his toys and go home. He would eventually be he was actually in Macedon when the when when Plato died.

[00:52:14]Macedonia and ultimately he's going to form a rival school and that will be the lysum and he will be arguing viciously against the inheritors of Plato in the form of the academy and we can even see it in this famous mosaic of the academy.

[00:52:29]See we here we have in the middle we have Plato looking down right demiurge style on this celestial sphere. He's lecturing about the celestial sphere looking down upon it. Plato and he's seated also by the way right so Plato is seated looking down at the celestial fe sphere as a demiurge himself we have over here on the left most scholars believe these are the eventual inheritors of the academy also seated here is probably socipus will be the inheritor of the of the academy but look who's over here skullking in the corner this is very likely Aristotle with his back turned to Plato looking over his should looking over his shoulder, still influenced by Plato, but now having turned his back on the academy with one foot literally kind of out the door. This is very famous uh um uh fresco, a mosaic found at Pompei.

[00:53:25]There's actually two versions of it, but I think this tells us almost everything we need to know about what the ancients thought about the early academy. Plato, one foot, I mean, Aristotle, one foot out the door, still holding his role of book. Plato here or Aristotle rather Plato here lecturing demiurgically about the nature of the sphere and his loyal disciples here Spucipus and maybe Zenocrates right discussing the lecture and it is to them we turn next it is to that period the old academy one of the least understood periods in the history of philosophy but again the direct period in which we know Plato these are the living heirs of Plato they sat at his feet and learned from him and And it is to those footnotes, those earliest footnotes to Plato that we must turn now. We must turn to Spicipus. We must turn to Xenocrates and we must turn to Pomon. And we must turn to what kind of institution the academy was. And once we get the old academy under our belt, it is then we can dive straight in to Antiocus of Ascalon because it will be Antiocus of Ascalon who will be the most will be the first character to say in some sense, I am a Platonist and these are the doctrines of Platonism, fight me, bro. Antiocus of will be our first Platonic dogmatist. But as we'll notice at the very beginning of the academy, there is a wild range of positions available. But they all share one thing in common. They all see themselves as defending Plato. They are the defenders of Plato. Not the defenders of Platonism, but the intellectual inheritors and defenders, that's the word they use, of Plato. And it is to those defenders, to the earliest defenders, to the old academy that we will turn to in the next lecture.