Neoplatonic Virtue: Divine Knowledge and the Lame Horse | Reading Proclus’ On Providence

Neoplatonic Virtue: Divine Knowledge and the Lame Horse | Reading Proclus’ On Providence

This session spends ninety minutes on a single paragraph — ¶32 of Proclus’ On Providence — and arrives at some of the deepest philosophical territory in the series.

The paragraph completes the account of the fifth kind of knowledge: when the soul comes entirely to rest, bringing to a stop not only external bodily motions but internal ones (the succession of thoughts, the movement from idea to idea), it becomes a god as far as that is possible, and knows as the gods know — in an ineffable manner, each thing according to its proper one. The session begins with the Chaldean Oracles as the source of the “flower of intellect” image, reading the relevant fragment: extend an empty intellect toward the intelligible, for if you try to grasp it as a specific thing you miss it entirely.

The central problem: what does it mean to know things “according to their proper one”? The gods do not know things eternally (the way intellect knows universals) or temporally (the way we know particulars in time), but super-eternally — which means knowing each thing through the unity that is most properly its own, rather than through the universal form it instantiates. This opens the lame horse problem: intellect knows Horse, but the lame horse’s lameness is invisible to intellect, since it contributes nothing to being a horse. Only the one can know the lame horse’s lameness — because only the one can know why this horse had to be lame, what specific chain of divine value required this specific existence at this specific moment.

This leads to the question of individuality and theodicy: how many true individuals are there in a Proclean universe? Not as many as there are bodies. The session works through the distinction between the strictly individual (the henads themselves), the secondarily individual (immortal souls, which are indestructible and unrepeatable), and what merely appears to be individual (specific bodies, which are replaceable). The ethical consequences — for animal rights, for genocide, for the value of unique places and cultures — are explored, and the right level of individuation turns out to be the soul as the unique agent of one specific power of one specific god.

Part of an ongoing graduate reading group working through Proclus’ On Providence.

Transcript