Neoplatonic Virtue: Three Causes of Every Action | Reading Proclus’ On Providence

Neoplatonic Virtue: Three Causes of Every Action | Reading Proclus’ On Providence

After eight sessions of setup, this class finally reaches Part Two of Proclus’ On Providence — the actual solutions to the problems Theodore raised in his letter. We work through paragraphs 33–38, covering the first two of Theodore’s arguments for determinism.

Theodore’s first argument is a charge of bad faith: people credit themselves for their successes but blame fate for their failures, which supposedly reveals that no one really believes in free will. Proclus concedes the observation but rejects the inference — the masses reason this way out of an irrational self-love, and self-deceived people are no guide to reality. Wise people, by contrast, recognize three causes in every action: the God who makes it good (providence), the cosmic revolution that fits it into the whole (fate), and their own choice. All three are present in every action, success and failure alike. The masses aren’t wrong to invoke these causes — only wrong to invoke one at a time, and to ignore providence entirely.

This raises the session’s central question, driven hard by Yitzchok: if fate makes the action happen and providence makes it good, what does choice actually do? Proclus’ answer is that choice does not create the event but makes it ours — it confers the moral quality, the praiseworthiness or blameworthiness, and includes us in the causal chain. But does that leave choice as a merely internal, attitudinal thing, with no real power over outcomes? The discussion arrives at a satisfying formulation: there is an empirical level at which our choices genuinely change what happens, and a formal or symbolic level at which the fated pattern is fixed. Free will operates by modulating how the fixed pattern is empirically realized — the person fated to “lose their home” might lose it to fire, to estrangement, or to a change of heart.

Theodore’s second argument is from divination: our universal desire to know the future proves nothing is up to us. Proclus reverses it — if everything were necessary, foreknowledge would be useless, so our natural and non-vain concern for the future actually proves that foreknowledge helps us cooperate with or decline what is coming. The session ends with the parallel argument from prayer and ritual, and the two kinds of divination: divine inspiration and human art.

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

Transcript