Neoplatonic Virtue: The Casting Vote and the Mixing Bowl | Reading Proclus’ On Providence

Neoplatonic Virtue: The Casting Vote and the Mixing Bowl | Reading Proclus’ On Providence

This session covers paragraphs 39–46 of Proclus’ On Providence, completing the response to the argument from divination and then answering Theodore’s third argument — that a single vital force permeates the universe, so that our reason is only that one life differentiated by the organ it happens to inhabit.

The divination argument closes with a striking image: human choice as a casting vote among conflicting cosmic causes. When all the divine and demonic causes speak in one voice, theurgy is powerless and foreknowledge merely informs. But when the causes disagree — some bringing corruption, others a cure — our free choice can tip the balance, dissolving harmful influences by aligning with beneficial ones. This gives Proclus a stronger sense of freedom than the Stoics or even Plotinus: freedom that reaches into external events, not just interior detachment. And the disagreement of causes turns out to be structural — as causes descend the scale of procession they become more particular and come into conflict (which is how Proclus reads the battles of the gods in Homer). There is no single absolute fate.

The refutation of the “one vital force” theory turns on self-reflection. Sense perception is inseparable from its organ and cannot turn back on itself — sight cannot see itself. Rational-intellectual life can know itself, and whatever reverts upon itself is not a body. Mathematics is the proof: its exactness and necessity could never be abstracted from the vague, affection-laden reports of the senses, since a cause is always superior to its effects (Hume’s problem of induction, unless you have Forms). A rich excursus follows on the Timaeus mixing bowl and the Chaldean life-giving goddess, from whose two series — the psychic and the fatal — soul and fate descend, and on why Plato “concealed the truth” by calling the source of souls an inanimate bowl.

Along the way: why the senses are “only playing” and the perceptible world is lighter than it looks; the frog’s eye as a mere mosquito-detector; the German Idealist division between those capable of intellectual self-intuition and those trapped in determinism; and the irony that the powerful are carried by fate while the philosopher is free. The session ends with the intermezzo against hedonism — the good is not the pleasurable, “not even if all cattle vote for it.”

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

Transcript