SOCRATES: Don’t we have to agree, first, that the arithmetic of the many

is one thing, and the philosophers’ arithmetic is quite another?

PROTARCHUS: How could anyone distinguish these two kinds of arithmetic?

SOCRATES: The difference is by no means small, Protarchus. First there

are those who compute sums of quite unequal units, such as two armies

or two herds of cattle, regardless whether they are tiny or huge. But then

there are the others who would not follow their example, unless it were

guaranteed that none of those infinitely many units differed in the least

from any of the others.

(Plato, Philebus 56d-e, trans. Frede)

Philosophy has become mathematics for modern thinkers, although they say that mathematics should be studied for the sake of other things.

(Aristotle, Metaphysics 992b, trans. Apostle)

The commonplace reading of this passage from the Philebus, in which Plato introduces the notion of ‘philosophical arithmetic’, stands it on its head, and asks us to believe that only the philosopher has discovered numbers at all. And yet people, Greeks included, had been doing math quite well for quite some time before Plato. When Socrates speaks of those who compute sums of unequal units, and count two armies or two herds of cattle alike as ‘two’, this is indisputably exactly what happens in mathematics as we know it. This is the discipline that works with abstract quantities, and this is emphatically not ‘philosophical’ arithmetic as Socrates describes it here. For philosophical arithmetic, by contrast, two herds of cattle and two armies will not be ‘two’ in the same way. A herd and an army are manifolds (multiplicities) formed in different ways, with different bonds among their units, grounded ultimately in the difference between the units out of which they are composed, one of cattle and one of humans. One cow and one human are both units, to be sure, and so are one herd and one army. Everything is some kind of unit; but what matters for the philosopher is what kind of unit each of these is. The philosopher will “refus[e] to proceed” with ordinary arithmetic in counting two armies and two herds of oxen, or two armies and two oxen, or two oxen and two beds, or two virtues and two poems, as simply ‘two’, “unless every unit is taken as differing in no respect from every other”—unless, in the impossible case, the units involved could be regarded as units in precisely the same respect. But they cannot, because the unities of an ox, a herd, an army, a bed, a virtue and a poem—what makes each of these things one—are inevitably and inescapably different, and this difference makes a difference to philosophical, if not to ordinary arithmetic.

This is why for the Platonists, philosophy is henology, the study of units. This is recognized by Aristotle, who states throughout his Metaphysics that this is the primary difference between himself and the Academy from which he feels himself estranged. “In saying that the One is a substance, and not that it is something else of which ‘one’ is predicated, he [Plato] spoke like the Pythagoreans,” Aristotle says in Book A (987b23), near the beginning, and near the end, in Book N, he speaks once more of all the problematic consequences which follow for thought from “positing the One as principle [archē]” (1092a7), that is, from making the concern with units that Socrates describes in the passage above from the Philebus the central concern of philosophy.

Chief among these problems, and that which motivates the entire train of thought in the Metaphysics, is that it will be difficult, in Aristotle’s judgment, for such thinkers to maintain “that the One is good”, because since absolutely everything is a ‘one’ of some kind, “every unit becomes something which is fully a good, and there will be a great abundance of goods,” (1091b25). An abundance of goods doesn’t sound like a bad problem to have. But that’s not what Aristotle means; he means rather to say that the Platonic position results in a profusion of ‘Goods’, that is, of ultimate sources or measures of value. To make unity the first principle is, in this respect, inherently to posit an abundance of ‘first principles’, and this is what Aristotle finds destructive to philosophy in Plato’s ‘philosophical arithmetic’.

For Aristotle, Plato’s system is ‘unmusical’, in the sense this term had for Greeks, which does not apply merely to ‘music’ as we use the term, but really to the entire aesthetic domain. This is the weight of Aristotle’s complaint that Speusippus’ application of Plato’s principles results in a cosmos that is “episodic”, like a bad drama (1076a4). Aristotle does not explicitly refer to the theater here, but many translators insert such a reference, since the sense of such a complaint comes from dramatic criticism, a field in which we know that Aristotle was deeply interested. We can see, moreover, from Plato’s Republic how concerned with the arts Plato himself was, and why Aristotle therefore would consider an aesthetic critique of Platonism to carry such weight. And we can see, as well, why he should turn immediately from aesthetics to politics, delivering what he sees as the mortal blow to Platonism’s “profusion of Goods”: things themselves, he says, “do not wish to be governed badly,” and hence quotes Homer, “The rule of many is not good; let one the ruler be,” (1076a5, quoting Iliad 2.204). If things had a vote, Aristotle argues, they would not vote to have their value, their Good, each in itself, or to have as many principles as the different respects in which they can be conceived. They would not wish to govern themselves or to be governed in many different ways in these different respects: they would wish to have a single governance, and to fit into a single order of things, no matter how minor a role they might play, and how little freedom or say in that governance they would have. Aristotle’s preferred model of the cosmos is thus instead like a household:

For all things are ordered in relation to one thing. It is as in a household, in which the freemen are least at liberty to act at random but all or most things are ordered, while slaves and wild animals contribute little to the common good but for the most part act at random; for such is the principle of each of these, which is their nature. I mean, for example, that all these must come together if they are to be distinguished; and this is what happens in other cases in which all the members participate in the whole. (1075a20-25, trans. Apostle)

This is emphatically not Plato’s vision, on any level, whether we are speaking of metaphysics, or of theology, or of politics. With respect to metaphysics, we have seen that Plato advocates the methodology of ‘philosophical arithmetic’, in which the uniqueness of each thing and of each kind of thing is the primary value, not what they form in any singular whole, because different units form different kinds of whole. A herd and an army are not the same kind of whole, not the same kind of unit, because they are not composed of the same kinds of units. Aristotle’s vision is sharply opposed: “For in an army goodness exists both in the order and in the general, and rather in the general; for it is not because of the order that he exists, but the order exists because of him,” (1075a15). For Plato, by contrast, we cannot expect things to have elected a single generalissimo to govern them all, and any attempt to draft everything into one Grand Army of Being is doomed to fail. We can discern the theology here from Plato’s critique of the poets in the Republic, which is motivated by the fundamental recognition that “Each of them [the Gods] is the best and the most beautiful thing possible [kallistos kai aristos ōn eis to dynaton hekastos autōn],” (Republic 381c). This is why the ‘fevered’ city, at least, in its permanent state of low-grade war, requiring total mobilization of the citizenry, cannot afford to give a great deal of latitude to poets. Aristotle, of course, in quoting Homer so pointedly, argues that his ontology will be compatible with traditional Hellenic values, whereas the Platonists, with their “profusion of Goods”, cannot help but be subversive of them. And indeed, if each God is the kallistos and the aristos, there is a sense in which They do not, and cannot have one King or one General to the exclusion of others. If the goodness proper to each God is irreducibly that God’s own way of being the best, then divine order cannot consist merely, or primarily, in subordinating every deity to some single externally imposed measure of excellence. Plato’s theology, rather, recognizes that no single poet, no single song of the Muses, has final authority over the rest, and therefore that there is no single sovereignty among the Gods, but many overlapping and differently constituted politeia, corresponding to the peculiar way in which each of Them is “the best and most beautiful”.

The metaphysically fundamental status of peculiarity or uniqueness is also why, to shift to a strictly political register, even an ideally constituted state carries within it the seeds of its own failure, on Plato’s account. The nature of the ideal state for Plato is encompassed in sorting. A perfect state would sort each individual citizen so as to find for them the perfectly suited role to play in it, which would make their talents maximally available to the state, while at the same time doing them no essential violence. It would be a bespoke state, with a role uniquely tailored to each citizen. This is Plato’s utopia.

We are accustomed to understand that there are only three roles in Plato’s ideal state, corresponding to the three parts of the soul, and that everyone would have to fit into one of these, whatever Procrustean torments would be required. But the enumeration of the parts of the soul is provisional (435c-d); specifically, the division of the soul into three parts is explicitly a lower limit, equivalent to the “three limiting notes in a musical scale—high, low, and middle,” a structure which “binds together those parts and any others there may be in between,” (443d). There are not just three notes in a scale; in fact, there are different systems of tuning altogether, the differences between which cannot be reduced to the mere presence of so-called ‘microtones’. But any such system will have extremes of some kind and a middle between them; and this is in fact all that Socrates’ analysis is committed to in any event. The analysis of the powers of the soul is thus a prime example of the kind of ‘arithmetic’ Plato teaches in the Philebus, and which he call there “a gift of the Gods to humans” (16c), in which first we assume one form for a thing,

And once we have grasped it, we must look for two, as the case would have it, or if not, for three or some other number. And we must treat every one of those further unities in the same way, until it is not only established of the original unit that it is one, many and unlimited, but also how many kinds it is. For we must not grant the form of the unlimited to the plurality before we know the exact number of every plurality that lies between the unlimited and the one. Only then is it permitted to release each kind of unity into the unlimited and let it go. (Philebus 16d-e, trans. Frede)

This is the very process which Socrates applies to the unit of the soul in the Republic, which means that its plurality is not three, period, but three plus a remainder which is in fact unlimited. It is, therefore, a problem directly analogous to that of the ‘squaring’ of a circle. The impossibility, however, of reaching the circle through a finite series of squares is exactly the problem which confronts the state, when it attempts to find a role which is the perfect fit for each unique citizen. For whether Aristotle likes it or not, things don’t fit into a single whole (whether household or army) without remainder. This also entails that any analogy between different kinds of units, such as between a city and a soul, breaks down at some point.

Let us imagine, then, life in Plato’s ideal state. Of course, there is a mistake at the outset in this undertaking, because just by virtue of the fact that it is an ideal, it could not actually be lived; any state we could live in would be some attempt to instantiate the ideal of a state. The citizens of an ideal state are ideal types of citizen, and not the kind of souls who actually exist, just like the lines and points in an ideal geometrical figure are also themselves ideal. But this poses a particular problem for the ideal of a state, the very definition of which is that it is a collective of human beings. It cannot be irrelevant for the ideal of the state, therefore, that these human beings actually have a history and a reality that exceeds being part of the whole that forms the state, whereas it is indeed not only irrelevant but incoherent to think of the lines and points in an ideal geometrical figure having some life beyond it. This is why the idea of the State is such an important idea to think about, for in doing so, one cannot avoid wrestling with problems that confront formalization itself.

Plato’s ideal state is designed around this struggle. If I am born into this state, I shall be observed intensively from my early childhood by its philosophers, who have descended back into the Cave, or been dragged, as the case may be, precisely for this purpose, their most important task—to be, in effect, the best of all possible social workers. There is no question of simply imposing a job on me. On the contrary, Socrates stresses that they are to observe the children most of all at play, in order to “see better what each of them is naturally fitted for” (537a)—to discover, rather than prescribe what I am. Under the beneficent scrutiny, then, of the greatest minds of my time, a career path is chosen for me that is supposed to be a faithful portrait of who I am and of what I apparently want, and my education begins. There is no reason, furthermore, not to extrapolate that monitoring would continue throughout life, so that if my nature seems to change, my role in the state might change as well. The wisdom applied to the state’s internal and external challenges will ensure that thrifty and timely use is made of every talent, and not a drop is wasted.

Be the state ever so well ordered, however, there are those who, having been good citizens of good cities, emerge from it nevertheless hollow within. In the Myth of Er that concludes the Republic, we learn that those who make the worst choices of their next life tend to be those who

having lived [their] previous life under an orderly constitution … had participated in virtue through habit and without philosophy. Broadly speaking, indeed, most of those who were caught out in this way were souls who had come down from heaven and who were untrained in suffering as a result,” (619c-d, trans. Grube & Reeve).

My salvation, it turns out, is something that I must attend to myself:

each of us must neglect all other subjects and be most concerned to seek out and learn those that will enable him to distinguish the good life from the bad and always to make the best choice possible in every situation. (618c)

Whatever other role I shall play in society, and whatever else I am to be trained for, I must also, it seems, train myself to be a philosopher, in an intensely private process of self-cultivation that even the most well-intentioned state, because it must, ultimately, be seeking its own good, which is not identical with my own good, however much they may inevitably overlap, because myself and the state are different units. I am not merely a part of that whole, but am a complex whole in my own right. It is not that I am a chaotic, Typhonian multitude (Phaedrus 230a), but there is something in me that exceeds any formalization of my role or type. Any portrait painted of me will capture me from only a single perspective, and this is the problem with painting, all the more so the more verisimilitude it affects—it cannot ‘do me justice’, as we say. This is the injustice Plato is concerned with when he criticizes ‘imitative’ arts in Republic Book 10. It is not the ideal, after all, which we must be concerned about doing injustice to, but rather to what we term ‘particulars’. What the painter is “deprived of” in painting solely from their own perspective is “the knowledge of each thing that is [tou ontos hekastou],” (484c). This is an instance of something that I always tell my students, and in fact anybody within earshot, namely that the most important word in Plato is hekastos, ‘each’. If you sensitize yourself to its presence, you will begin to realize just how consistent Plato is about characterizing the goal of any adequate knowledge as the knowledge of ‘peculiars’, of the idios, the unique. Again and again, knowledge is defined by him as the knowledge of each thing, not of things in the aggregate, and not of something beyond them. This is what ‘ideas’ are for: grasping ‘particulars’ in such a fashion that we always recognize in them the potential to be, or become different.

We see this as well in the Timaeus, which is especially concerned with the relationship between Being and Becoming, not in order to subordinate Becoming, but to allocate as much Being to things in process, things that come to be and pass away, as they can possibly enjoy. This is why the God (any God) is depicted there as a dēmiourgos, a craftsman, a job which was by no means necessarily held in high esteem in Plato’s own culture. Socrates is in fact criticized repeatedly by his interlocutors in the dialogues for drawing his examples from such humble professions. Nor is his culture so far down the path of extraction and exploitation as to render the analogy of ‘production’ inherently invidious yet, though this is arguable I suppose. The metaphor of an artisan, whatever its shortcomings, evidently has the value for Plato of getting the relationship between ‘forms’ and ‘particulars’ right, especially when we take into account the divine craftsman’s compassionate motives, and that the crafted item does not exist solely as the object of the creator’s intention. It is also an animal, in a relationship to the ultimate form, that of Animal, which is not that of part to whole. That is, I am not in relation to that Animal some organ or limb or specialized cell. Animals make up Animal Itself as wholes, not as parts. It is, in this respect, the ultimate State, in which alone there is no injustice. This is why, in the Myth of Er, it is suffering which, in the absence or impossibility of universal instruction in philosophy, teaches souls how to choose wisely, and which explicitly reaches beyond the limits of the human species. On the Meadow, humans and other animals are on the same footing, having learned, or failed to learn, the same ‘philosophy’, the wisdom of being an animal. No unit can be adequately understood by treating its unity as interchangeable with another’s, and the pathos of this can only truly be appreciated insofar as it is taken as literally a question of life and death, and of souls that suffer as unique and irreplaceable animals, and never merely as abstractions. The problem of mathematics is thus, for the Platonist, the problem of justice. The question with which philosophical arithmetic begins—what kind of one is this?—thus becomes the question on which a life depends: what kind of one am I?

The Platonic Definitions are works of the early Academy, the first couple of generations of Plato’s successors. In many cases they are compiled directly from the dialogues, sometimes quite artfully. A particularly interesting example is the definition of theos, a God, as “an immortal living being, self-sufficient for happiness; eternal substance, cause of the nature of goodness.”

The first part, “an immortal living being” is taken verbatim from the Phaedrus (246d), where Socrates, though characterizing it as something less than an “adequate conception” (246c), nevertheless explicitly applies it to his famous account of the Olympian Gods that immediately follows (246e & sqq.).

That a God is “self-sufficient [autarkes] for happiness” draws upon many passages in Plato, such as Rep. 381c, which states that it is “impossible for a God to wish to alter himself, but, as it appears, each of them being the fairest and best possible, abides for ever simply in his own form” (trans. Shorey), but its language is most directly echoed in Aristotle’s famous statement that one who is absolutely self-sufficient (autarkeian) “is either a beast or a God,” (Politics, 1253a29).

That a God is an “eternal substance [ousia aidios]” goes back we may say to Hesiod, whose Muses “bade me sing of the race of the blessed gods that are eternally [aien eontōn],” (Theog. 33, trans. Evelyn-White).

That the Gods are causes of the nature of goodness, finally, draws again widely from Plato’s general piety, but seems to me to most directly derive from Philebus 30d, in which the “noble properties [kala]” belonging to each (hekastois) of the Gods “have come about through the power of causality [dia tēn tēs aitias dynamin],” where the feminine aitia especially connotes causality in general, rather than a discrete cause, usually signified by the neuter aition. This element of the Definition in particular seems to foreshadow the later Proclean doctrine according to which all of the actual causality of the first principle is exercised by the Gods (Plat. Theol. 2. 9. 60. 26-8). The Good, insofar as it has a ‘nature’ (physis) or can be said to be a ‘cause’, is such and does so only as some unique, individual God, and indeed any one of Them, hence the very possibility of a general ‘definition’ of the class of Gods.

Riji, jakoli, or longkalongka (engraved pearl shell), Aboriginal artist c. 1920-1950

If we regard ‘pantheons’, primary henadic manifolds, as the paradigms for all ontologically subsequent organizations, this leads to two further reflections. (These are intelligible-intellective formations, from the perspective of systematic Platonism, but I don’t wish to concern myself with that technical aspect right now.)

First, there is the question of the universality (generality) of this organization with respect to the kinds of organization downstream from it, such as states and enterprises like corporations. For something to be the principle (archē) of a series of things involves a certain non-identity with any one of them. They can resemble the principle in different ways and degrees, but if they resemble it only to varying degrees, then properly speaking the principle is only the principle of the first of them, that is, the one which resembles it the most. But that’s not the case here. Hence, for example, a state is in some sense the primary organization for the kind of animals we are, because it is concerned, in theory, with nothing other than the welfare of its members, rather than some discrete project.

(The question of a primacy of the state based on analogy with the soul’s organization of its parts is also important, but I don’t wish to take it up again at the moment. Moreover, as we saw in a recent discussion, it seems as though the welfare of the members cashes out, in any state we can formalize, into the welfare of the state itself—which, what’s more, it may even be impossible to secure. But I direct you to the prior post for all of that.)

But it’s not clear that all human organizations derive from the state; in fact, it’s pretty evident that they don’t. There are even social organizations that resist capture by the state in any of its forms. And the pantheon organization is prior even to the difference between the state and project-oriented organizations, so must in some sense be alien to both, if it is going to effectively ground them both, so that the pantheon organization, that is, the primary cooperative of unique units, is irreducible either to a welfare-based organization or to a project-based one. This bears further thought; it concerns the impossibility of reifying a unique person as either their function in a collective project or as a project or telos in themselves. Or perhaps it is that the state reduces to a project in any case? But this seems too simple.

Second, orthogonal as it were to the first, is the question of the different pantheon organizations themselves. Just as the members of each pantheon are unique, the structure of each pantheon is unique. The Olympian organization of the Theoi, for example, is a very different kind of group, with different group dynamics, than the organization of the Devas or of the Shen. Furthermore, this difference pertains not only to the kind of collective that these diverse Gods have formed among Themselves, but also of the kinds of ways in which mortals are brought into relation with those manifolds, e.g., as heroes, prophets, rishis, seekers after immortality, and so forth, which in turn manifest the structural differences in the primordial manifolds themselves.

These structural differences determine differences in the shapes of the organizations it is possible to found on them, according to a kind of geometry, as organizations cosmogonically ground and legitimate themselves as projections of primary divine manifolds. The Olympian organization of the Hellenic pantheon, for example, is interesting for integrating a relatively large number of agents as compared to others. (It is this topological characteristic which leads to the risk of falsely interpreting it according to a rigid division of labor.) If we compare it, for example, with the Egyptian pantheon, we find that in the latter there are few myths involving more than two or three divine agents, and few narrative myths in general, which is not merely a problem of preservation, though preservation is of course a factor. Since myths, as joint divine action, are the principal structures in which divine manifolds are articulated, this affects the organizations that can be grounded by them, and we can probably trace the influence of this factor on the different social organizations of post-Mycenaean Greece, on the one hand, and the pharaonic social and political organization, on the other, which it would be unfair to reduce to mere ‘despotism’. On the contrary, there is an entire intellectual, judicial and ethical structure to distribute power in the pharaonic organization, but which has a shape conforming to the theological organization, just as the Hellenic social organization distributes power in its own, also theologically-determined form. (One may argue that we should refer rather to Hellenic social organizations, in the plural; but even ‘the Warring States’ can be conceived as a single organization from the appropriate perspective.)

The Dharmic organization based on the manifold of the Devas is more comparable to the Hellenic in its degree of articulation, perhaps somewhat less in absolute magnitude, as we see in the greater tendency to integrate deities as manifestations of one another in a strongly polycentric field, so that the number of Devas whom we see at one time as independent agents in the same kshetra is somewhat less than the Hellenic, though not by much. The Dharmic organization, however, also seemingly extends itself along other axes that may not be present in the Hellenic manifold. The social organization based on the manifold of the Shen, and manifest predominantly through Confucian social thought as well as its opponents, because opposition is inclusion, also presents significant homologies and divergences, a high degree of articulation and perhaps inclusion of some factors absent or underrepresented in the Hellenic paradigm as well.

(To be continued)

Image: A caricature of mutually destructive democratic factions in the antebellum U.S., attributed to the firm of Currier & Ives (1864)

Generally, when I speak about Plato’s Republic (in the lectures collected here—nota bene, Amazon affiliate link), I am concerned with making clear that it is not primarily a text about politics, or at least not in the simplistic sense, but rather about ‘constitution’—politeia—in a wider sense, primarily of the soul, using the constitution of a state as an analogy, grounded in the intuition that justice is a concept that can, and indeed must apply to both of these kinds of unities, to conceptualize their well-functioning integrity, the harmonious relationship among their parts. Here, though, I want to speak about the political side of this analogy, in our own, familiar sense of the ‘political’, in order to try to make certain points from those lectures more concisely. Those wishing to understand my reading in full, and to see better how my reading is grounded in the text, should consult the lectures linked above.

The city—I’ll be using the terms ‘city’ and ‘state’ indifferently to translate the term polis—the plan for which takes up the bulk of Plato’s text, could not actually exist. This is not a matter of practical constraints, but of metaphysics. It’s the form of a city, and as a form it exists right now, everywhere and nowhere—as Socrates explains, you can become a citizen of it whenever you wish, and it will inform your activity as a citizen of whatever worldly state you belong to, just as being aware of the formal or eidetic dimension of the ideas you deploy all the time in thinking and speaking informs those activities. The eidetic city is summoned at a certain point, in accord with worldly exigencies, and has a certain structured relationship to actual state forms. This comes out later in the dialogue, which circles back to shed light on the circumstances that gave rise to its inquiry, an inquiry framed by democratic crisis.

Plato begins, however, with a very different city, which is in fact Socrates’ ideal, if we are speaking about actually existing states. This is a fact one can never cease to emphasize, since popular discussions of the Republic rarely acknowledge that Socrates is fully prepared to stop right here, with his first state, which he regards as completely sufficient. Plato’s urbane brother Glaucon, however, regards it as hardly a city at all, or as a city fit only for pigs. It would be a mistake, albeit tempting, to identify this city with the way of life of contemporary and historical ‘stateless’ peoples, because while their way of life resembles in certain ways the picture Socrates paints, ‘stateless’ peoples are not frozen outside of time in a primordial way of life. Rather, as Pierre Clastres argued, those societies, far from being innocent of the state, are actively engaged in a resistance to the development of such power structures, and have carefully framed institutions accordingly. Socrates’ first city, on the contrary, has no institutions. In this ‘city’, if we can call it that, the extreme limitation of the demands placed upon resources both natural and social allows people mostly to do as they wish, and be who they are.

This state of natural and beneficent anarchy is the metaphysical baseline for the entire subsequent inquiry. It should be considered among the actually existing states, though it lies outside the sequence of state forms—aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy and tyranny—because it has no organization, and is therefore strictly speaking ‘formless’. Most importantly, it has no fixed division of labor or specialized production. The trigger for the state as such in Plato’s account is the disequilibrium created by the demand for a higher standard of living than the way of life in the first city can supply, and Socrates is not shy in how he characterizes this disequilibrium: the city that Glaucon demands, he states, is ‘fevered’, sick. Hence the series of actually existing state forms will be presented, as Cinzia Arruzza remarks, “as a description of the symptomatic progression of a disease,” (A Wolf in the City, p. 114). The eidetic city Socrates proposes is thus not so much utopian as therapeutic, nor does it cure, but only manages the disease. Glaucon’s demand forces us to get clear about exactly what a state requires to the degree that it is to produce a surplus beyond sustenance—total mobilization, that is, a complete and radical reconstitution of its citizens, no longer to be present as persons, but purely as resources. To do so means to convert inherently unique, autarchic individuals, who engage with one another in the first place intersubjectively, that is, as person to person, which the text compares to people attending a sacred festival together, into replaceable organs of a larger organism, the state whose life they shall serve. The essence of the state, the paradoxical ideal to which it must aspire, is to do this humanely. The contradiction inherent in this project is why Socrates is explicit right from the start that the state as an actual, worldly phenomenon is sick, and cannot be cured, in the same way that a mortal animal, just as mortal, is already dying. The eidetic city is the medicine for what ails the state as such, but it cannot repeal the state’s mortal condition. Again, this is a logical, and not a practical matter. As with any Idea or Form, its immediate presence would be an oxymoron, for Ideas are just about mediation. An instance is not the rule, and the rule is not an instance of itself. Rather, an idea informs instances.

The idea of the state can be stated as follows: to manage the state’s sickness, the wisest people need to study each and every citizen from birth, or even before, to discern the perfect use of their innate talents for the good of the state, and assign them to that role. Once we put it in these terms, it becomes clear that this is a project not merely limited by the resources necessary to carry it out, but in fact an impossibility comparable to ‘squaring the circle’. Indeed, we may regard it in a certain respect as belonging to the same family of problems. Even granted unlimited manpower and means, it is impossible in principle to capture unique individuals according to any schema of discrete roles without remainder, that is, without misrecognition, injustice. (And of course we shall also have to reckon with the possibility that the aptitudes of individuals may change over time.)

This is precisely where the analogy between city and soul breaks down, and with a cost. At the end of the Republic, Er’s vision of the Meadow where souls choose their next life shows that many private tragedies result from this failure of the state, for as he recounts, many of those souls who make the most catastrophic choices have just come from lives in well-run states, to whose good they have contributed, but whom the state has, despite its best efforts, failed—failed, that is, to form them into beings whole in their own right. And eventually, over enough iterations, accumulated injustice will prove calamitous to the state as well—in the worst case, a tyrant mistaken for a true king.

There is an entire mathematics of eidetic misrecognition which was apparently a problem of urgent concern in the Old Academy during Plato’s lifetime and among his successors. This is why, despite how it is presented in summary accounts, the tripartite division of the soul, and the corresponding overall division of labor in the state, is explicitly provisional in Plato’s text. We are to keep seeking more parts of the soul, and more roles in the state, as far as we can go, and only then, as the Promethean method of the Philebus requires, letting the remainder run through our fingers into the infinity of the continuum. The mathematicians of the Academy had not yet carried the formula for measuring the circle into actual trillions of non-repeating digits as we have, but they were aware of a homologous metaphysical restriction preventing capture of a unique individual through a repeatable formula, a contradiction in terms. This is the point of Plato’s Parmenides, and why the Academy espoused henology, rather than ontology. It may, moreover, be why the Academy would eventually choose skepticism over the very possibility of ontology. But this would take us deeper into metaphysics, as well as into the history of ideas, than I wish at the moment to go.

For now, the political problem, plainly stated, is the impossibility of a perfect meritocracy, and this problem generates, as its necessarily flawed solutions, the series of forms of actually existing states, each of which has its programmed failure based on the fundamental misrecognition of its citizens and the true source of their virtue, so that each state form inflicts on them some distinctive and constitutive harm. The state forms Plato recognizes are aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy and tyranny, each of which is based on a simple formula for sorting its citizens. There is no correct choice: all result eventually in the state’s collapse. Aristocracy sorts citizens by descent, timocracy by bravery, oligarchy by wealth, democracy by faction, and tyranny by force. Aristocracy is the first of the succession of forms simply because it is the most basic error, which comes first because it doesn’t presuppose any of the others. Aristocracy is what you get if you simply freeze the scheme of the eidetic state as if it were not provisional and impose it, giving up on evaluating each citizen as a unique, ‘autochthonous’ case and instead fixing a more or less arbitrary historical point of origin for them—for as Plato says elsewhere, trace anyone’s descent far enough back and you will find princes and slaves alike. This origin exerts a formative force upon the society until its spell wears off.

Noble descent does not guarantee virtue, of course, or even basic competence. Aristocracy thus gives way to timocracy, because martial valor, albeit a drastic oversimplification of what it means to be a ‘guardian’ of the state, is at least demonstrable here and now. The collapse into timocracy is thus a kind of realism. Since soldiers can be bought, though, a further recourse to realism brings about the collapse into oligarchy. Oligarchy is the first attempt to rationalize the state according to something both concrete and quantifiable, namely money, which can supposedly be exchanged for anything. Hence Heraclitus characterizes the very task of ontology as figuring out what stands in relation to things ‘as gold for goods’. But of course everything and everyone does not have its price. Oligarchy thus collapses into democracy, through an uprising of idealists, in effect. For the essence of democracy is that ideals and desires, taken not in their intelligibility, but rather as certain psychological orientations, can form factions, and thus exercise power, a power moreover that can transcend money, insofar as people decide for themselves what has value. None of the other state forms has simply disappeared, of course. There are aristocrats and timocrats and oligarchs around, and tyrants too, even though logically speaking tyranny ‘comes next’. The succession is ideal, not real.

The very nature of democracy for Plato, in fact, is to be a screen on which every possible way of life is projected. This is democracy’s essential ontological privilege in Plato’s text. I’m not going to argue this point, having already done so in the aforementioned lectures, and elsewhere. It should be obvious to any reader, however, that Plato is so intensely critical of democracy precisely because he lives in one, and has experienced at first hand the best and the worst it has to offer. He is candid that the democratic freedom to imagine and pursue ways of life according to diverse paradigms is indispensable to the very intellectual work he is doing. We could say, indeed, that democracy is the worldly expression of the very ‘profusion of Goods’ which Aristotle criticizes in Platonic henology. Plato could only really do the work he is doing in a democracy, the only place where this form of thought is both possible and needed, and hence he shows no similar degree of clinical interest in the other state forms, unlike those of his contemporaries who saw genuine value in aristocracy, or oligarchy, or even tyranny. The ‘Old Oligarch’ of Pseudo-Xenophon’s Constitution of the Athenians can affirm without irony that the wealthy are, by and large, the good; Plato certainly could not.

Plato’s problem, as a matter of realpolitik, is the tendency of democracy to collapse into tyranny, and the difficulty of preventing this collapse for long, a problem which is cultural and educational, and lies in the paradox that democracy can only reproduce itself if people can learn to desire difference and plurality itself, instead of choosing the tyranny of their own peculiar desire, of what seems good to them. We would need to teach them to value, beyond any particular value, what makes value possible. Instead, unfortunately, as Socrates describes it, educators in the democratic state become politicians of a sort, trying to curry favor with their students, seeking their approval. This is a natural extension of the basic formula of democracy, which is to try to assemble a faction for good, so as to eventually impose a tyranny of freedom—another oxymoron. The contradiction is inescapable. Eventually, a tyrant commands a large enough faction to be able to impose his will, for a while at least. In the best case, they might be an enlightened despot, like the best of the Roman or Chinese emperors, the most responsible, the least petty, the most hard working, who might even try to implement something of the eidetic state, such as in the Chinese examination system. At worst, the tyrant will simply embody the worst and most endemic impulses of the populace, seizing a precarious control descending almost immediately into paranoia and violence. Eventually, the tyrannical regime will be replaced by one of the other state forms. Tyranny is the terminus of the succession of state forms which culminate in democracy, so that there are two different senses of ‘end’ at work here: democracy is the ‘end’ in that it contains all the others virtually, while tyranny is the end because it represents the antithesis of the first form, aristocracy. Aristocracy reifies history and subordinates individuals completely to historically determined institutions, whereas the tyrant annuls history and subordinates institutions completely to the whims of an individual.

We must think of each regime projected upon the screen of the democratic imagination not only as a stage in the progressive development of the ‘disease’ of state formation, but as an organism in its own right, able to sustain itself for a given span of time, and reproduce itself to an extent, and therefore having a certain equivocal eidos. In this, they are not unlike the forms of animal species, which are in one respect forms, while in another respect the result of processes as in the later theory of evolutionary natural selection. In this latter sense, only the form of Animal Itself, of Animality as such, Animal Being, truly exists, because this is what every animal actually chooses, the final cause of Animal Being, which is simply to Live. So, while we see democracy in the Republic, like the other state forms, as inherently threatened, constantly haunted by the specters of the inimical forces which brought it about and will bring it down, the ‘Old Oligarch’, for his part, sees democracy instead as a hardy weed, quite capable of sustaining and reproducing itself, because sustaining it is not his concern. But for any way of life to sustain and reproduce itself entails that it has an eidetic dimension, and to that extent each of the state forms has a specific task for philosophers who would serve it. To work out in each case what this form of thought is would be a worthy project, and examples of one type or another are to be found through the history of political thought. In general terms, though, it seems that the regimes other than democracy will each affirm some substance specific to them, whereas the default philosophy in Plato’s environment, according to his view, as we know from the dialogues, is that flux ontology that he identifies as implicit in sophistical praxis. Substance-based ontologies inherently exclude something, whereas democracy is Protean, and inclusive in that sense, but incapable of sustaining itself on a purely relativistic basis.

Plato thus, as a democratic philosopher, does not opt for relativism, that is, for a reified flux, but instead for a radical, henologically-grounded pluralism. His concrete political solution is not to be found in the Republic, though, because it falls short of an eidetic solution, strictly speaking: it is that ‘mixed’ constitution which is only presented as a possibility in the Laws, a mixture of state forms tailored to specific cases, of the kind which was to prove quite durable in the Roman Republic, and would be revived under modernity. The form in which democracy’s fundamental value can be sustained, therefore, is not pure procedural democracy, but instead the mediated result of the multiplicity that democracy makes it possible to recognize, the stabilized form of this multiplicity. Culturally and cosmologically, this is what we call polytheism: the radical but stable multiplicity of value. (It needed no term in Plato’s day because it was not something anyone sought to destroy or needed, therefore, to defend.) Democracy is defined by the profusion of models, paradeigmata, just as the cosmos itself, as the Timaeus states, is the cult statue representing all the eternal Gods, that in and through which They are worshiped.

Polytheism has profound political implications, both in its radical, polycentric form, which grounds the divine field immediately in each divine individual and in one-to-one devotion—what the Hindu tradition terms bhakti—as well as in the mediated form of a hypostatized totality, the more-or-less structured ‘pantheons’ we see in each discrete polytheist tradition. The full extent of these implications was not manifest in antiquity, though in the Roman case, for example, we can see both a genetic and a functional relationship between the division of powers and the traditional priesthoods. Every center of power is at once supreme in its sphere, while also participating in a coordinate structure where their exercise inevitably overlaps, just as each of the Gods in the Olympian regime as Hesiod understands it has Their inalienable timē or prerogative, which does not exhaust Their nature; rather, all the timai together form the field of Their cooperative action.

The difference between this structure and that division of labor which is both the genesis and the undoing of the State as such is that the Gods cannot be reduced to the parts of a whole, but rather each is immediately the All, and this is how They see us as well. This, again, is a matter of metaphysics: if like is known by like, the Gods as unique individuals primarily know us as unique individuals primarily. The Gods thus hold space for the irreducibility of any individual to any project to which they lend themselves, and the inescapable responsibility of any such whole to its parts. For of any such aggregate, we would say along with Anaximander that “Whence things have their origin, there they must also pass away according to necessity; for they must pay penalty and be judged for their injustice, according to the ordinance of time.”

Continuing my ongoing reflections on Hephaestus (which began here and continued here and here) I wish to look at another passage from the Timaeus commentary where Proclus discusses Him. It’s perhaps his most programmatic statement on Hephaestus, and hence I probably ought to have started from here, but this series of writings was not planned; rather, it was prompted by a text brought to my attention by Antonio Vargas, whose Substack you should, of course, be following.

The text I will be examining here is Proclus’s discussion of Tim. 23e, the only passage in the dialogue which mentions Hephaestus explicitly, and which is also echoed in the Critias. The context concerns the allotment of the territory of Athens to Athena, which the Egyptian priest in the Timaeus characterizes as Athena having

“received from Gaia and Hephaestus the seed from which your [Athenian] people were to come”

while the Critias describes it in more abstract terms: Hephaestus and Athena,

“since they possessed a common nature [physis], both because she was his sister of the same father and because they had entered the same pursuits in their love of wisdom and the arts … both received this land as their portion in a single lot, because it was congenial [oikeian] to their character and was naturally suited to them in its excellence and intelligence,” (Critias 109c, trans. Clay).

We need not concern ourselves too much with Plato’s dissent from the narrative according to which Hephaestus is conceived by Hera alone. Hephaestus belongs to that generation of the Gods who fulfill the Olympian project, the vision of Zeus, and who are all His ‘children’ in that respect. The conflicts arising within that project, the expressions of dissent from Zeus’s authority, which begin, indeed, from no less a personage than that Goddess who is at once His sister, His wife and the reigning Queen of Olympus, are nothing other than an expression of the cosmogonic role that conflict plays on this plane of being, where beings are sufficiently loosely integrated as to permit them to hold conceptions of the good for themselves and for the whole which are so divergent that it is possible for them to be in open conflict. The potential for conflict on this plane is thus cosmologically speaking not a bug, but a feature, as I have discussed at length elsewhere, and need not belabor here.

More interesting is the question of Athena’s allotment being mediated through Gaia and Hephaestus. The allotment from Gaia is in one respect analytic: as a place (topos) on the Earth, a location upon Gaia’s surface, the territory of Athens must in the first place come from Her. In another sense, however, we can see this allotment as expressing the physis that the Critias speaks of as common to Athena and Hephaestus, and to which this land is ‘congenial’, oikeios, through conditions which are indeed ‘ecological’. There is an ‘eco-logic’ (oikos-logos) to the territories allotted to the Gods upon the Earth, with their different climates, natural resources and methods of exploiting them, which is undeniable, even if this logic is all too often applied by moderns in a reductionist fashion. To speak of a physis among the Gods is already to anticipate that this ‘nature’ might manifest itself in Nature.

There is, of course, another sense in which Athena receives from Hephaestus and from Gaia the ‘seed’ of the Athenian people, deriving from the myth in which the seed Hephaestus emits in desire for Athena falls upon the Earth, from which emerges Erichthonius, spiritual ancestor of the Athenian citizenry. Proclus explains (In Tim. I, 142.20) that Hephaestus belongs to the demiurgic, rather than the zoogonic series, and we can see this, not only from the association with crafts that Proclus mentions, but also from this ‘unnatural’ mode of conception. Or rather, we should say that it is ‘natural’ in a different sense, in the way that technological production orients itself toward Nature as a source of raw material. Erichthonius, like Hephaestus Himself, is not produced through the normal method of conception. But where Hephaestus’ birth from Hera was akin to that parthenogenesis occasionally observed in animals, Erichthonius is produced more like a technical object, due to the relationship of form and matter in His creation, as we shall see Proclus elaborate below.

That this mode of production, though separated from Athena as its rather distant object of specular desire, is nevertheless not alien to Her is manifest in Her mythic reception of Erichthonius once born, and expressed by the statement in the Critias that Athena and Hephaestus have as their common nature the love of wisdom and of craftsmanship, philosophia and philotechnia. Philosophy and technology are linked precisely in the power to perceive a physis in things, insight into the source of their natural growth and activity, but which is also the key to their technological application, as we saw in the pharmakon Hermes imparts to Odysseus by granting him insight into the physis of a plant (phytas), and hence into the nature of a natural being as such (discussed at length here—nota bene, Amazon affiliate link). To isolate or distill the physis, the ‘seed’ of a natural being, reveals the reproducibility of the unique individual insofar as they belong to Nature, are an instance of a species and the bearer of a form. It is thus the continuation of a movement that stirred at the very beginnings of cosmogony and an expression of the fundamental metaphysics according to which a common Being or Essence emerges originally from the manifold of absolutely unique henadic individuals.

Proclus accordingly sees a wide scope for Hephaestus’ activity: He is

“the over-all fashioner [dēmiourgos holikos] of the entire [hapasēs] bodily construction [sōmatoeidēs systasis]. He gets the Gods’ visible dwelling-places ready for them in advance, contributes everything [panta] required for the single harmony of the cosmos, provides all the creations [panta ta dēmiourgēmata] of bodily life, and uses forms to give coherence [diakosmōn kai synechōn] to the intractable [antitypon] and dense nature of matter,” (IT I, 143.2-7, trans. Tarrant).

Hephaestus is thus “said to be lame in both legs, because he is the demiurge of the final phase [tōn eschatōn] of the procession of reality—that being bodies—and because he is no longer able to advance to another stage,” and “because he is the maker of the All [to pan], which is ‘legless’, as Timaeus will say (34a5-6),” (ibid., 11-15). We grasp thus the significance of Proclus’ repeated references above to totality (pas, pan). It is in the works of Hephaestus that Being becomes a totality, becoming complete precisely in its ‘lameness’, its relative impotence to impose form without remainder upon a material which in its ‘resistance’ (antitypos, 143.6, 9), however, allows the intelligible to come forth in its own right precisely as the typos or model which has been equivocally ‘imitated’:

“That is the reason why he is also said by the theologians to be a smith, as being a worker of solid [stereos] and resistant materials, and because the heaven is brazen insofar as it is an imitation [mimēma] of the intelligible,” (ibid., 7-10).

Moreover, Proclus explains, Hephaestus “is cast from above to the earth, because he extends his creative activity through the totality [diapasēs] of sensible substance. Whether people speak of ‘natural’ or of ‘spermatic principles’ one should attribute the cause of all of them to this God,” (15-19, trans. mod.). The Stoic concept of spermatikoi logoi arises here not merely as a fortuitous echo of the imagery of the myth. Rather, the myth provides a theological derivation of the very kind of principles that natural philosophers seek, which are inherently technophoric, that is, facilitating technological exploitation of natural beings of every kind. Proclus emphasizes this by deploying the natural science characteristic of his era:

“What nature produces by sinking down into bodies is also shaped in a divine and transcendent manner by this God, setting nature in motion and using it as a tool for his own creative activity. For innate warmth is Hephaestean, introduced by him for the making of bodies,” (19-24).

The theory of ‘innate warmth’ as a law-like cause of internal motion and change in bodies of every kind would continue to be a standard placeholder for rationalizing and mechanical explanations of natural phenomena well into the modern era. There is no real gap, therefore, no insurmountable epochal gulf between Proclus’ theological understanding of Hephaestus and the philosophical struggles with technology in our own time.

Returning to the symbolism in the myth, Proclus explains that “even in the very seed there are formal principles [logoi] and a substrate, and the one comes from Hephaestus’ craft and the other from the earth,” (29-31). Logos, we must remember, is not exactly the same as eidos, ‘form’, but an application of it, a ‘formula’ or ‘recipe’, already more technical than eidetic, like the genetic code we are able to explicate and manipulate in the organism, and the existence of which Proclus already predicted, without difficulty or hesitation, based on his theological principles.

Furthermore, Proclus recognizes the essentially economic character of Hephaestean ‘ecology’: “Even the Gods in heaven ‘borrow parts from the whole as something to be given back again’ [Tim. 42e9-43a1] for the generation of mortal animals,” (143.26-8). This wisdom was already articulated in the famous fragment of Anaximander which states that

“From those <things> out of which beings have their coming-to-be, into these their passing-away comes to be according to necessity; for they must pay penalty and recompense to each other for their injustice, according to the order of time.”

Insofar as things are part of Nature, their being as wholes in and for themselves is provisional, and the natural systems in which they participate, the processes which form them, place upon them a demand which is virtually moral. Like the laws of a society, they tie the individual back to an economy which, having funded them in their material manifestation, demands repayment, a restoration of that equilibrium which the living being or discrete physical entity of any kind has transgressed through its temporary and partial autonomy.

The role of Hephaestus in establishing this political economy of corporeal beings is perhaps expressed in the esoteric etymology of His name in the Cratylus, upon which Plato does not elaborate: Hephaestus is histōra phaseos, the ‘judge/witness of light’ (407c). Histōr, which already combines the epistemic and the juridical, seeing (oida) and swearing an oath, becomes in this way, with the reiterated emphasis upon light in its very physicality, inseparable from the technical—the one who sees, and seeing discerns, is in this sense the photographer. The possibility of a purely technological ‘seeing’ is thus present from the beginning in the openness and transparency of the institutions of the polis, which derive their authority from the entangled matter of mortal bodies trapped in an unforgiving spotlight, yet immortalized thereby.

(Image courtesy of https://www.myuganda.co.ug/buganda-kingdom-in-uganda/)

When during my residency at Indic Academy I was heading the “thought center” at first known as the Center for Global Polytheist and Indigenous Traditions, later the Center for Polytheism Studies, I started a Google Group as a forum for discussions concerning the preservation and renewal of African Traditional Religions (ATRs). It never really took off and has mostly languished, but recently has seen some activity again, thanks to a few individuals doing some exciting work with practitioners of Kiganda, an indigenous tradition of Uganda. (For more about the kingdom of Buganda, check out this post from .) I’d like to share here some remarks I posted there in response to a couple of questions. First, the inquiry:

As you all may know, throughout different parts of India, different people worship different gods, speak different languages, and often have different ritual practices. Despite this, we consider the traditions of India (and I would argue those throughout Southeast Asia as well) as one “religion” because they have the same foundational principles.

While I was in Buganda (one of the Kingdom’s of Uganda), we noticed, of course, the differences between languages and whatnot, but we also noticed some ties, such as Lubaale (Devatas) whose main places of worship were in Bunyoro or the other kingdoms, and we also heard about, especially when we were in the Ssese Islands in Lake Victoria, a Lubale by the name of Kalisa being worshiped who was the Lubaale of the Buyarwanda (Rwandans). Because of that, as well as the fact that I would imagine the broader interconnectedness of tradition in the area, I wanted to ask whether people felt that there was intellectual justification for the definition of a broader Bantu (or even African) religion, based on common intellectual tradition but expressed in different forms in different regions.

Of course, from one end, the delineation of all non-Abrahamic traditions is arbitrary, but such classifications do, in the modern world, have pragmatic benefits in terms of revival efforts, provided that they have some level of intellectual standing.

This was my reply:

I agree that the ability to generalize is crucial for a host of pragmatic reasons, all the way up to a general term like “polytheism(s)”, which I have persistently defended despite—or, indeed, because of—its controversial character, and down to regional and other umbrella terms for traditions and their kindred and allies. I would observe that one of the cruel ironies of fashionable academic discourse has been a pressure exerted against generalizations, ostensibly with vaguely liberatory intentions, but which in fact has the effect of introducing theoretical roadblocks to the very sort of conceptualization that has always been necessary for historically marginalized groups to gain self-awareness and mobilize themselves against entrenched power.

That being said, we need to evaluate critically the usefulness of various generalizations. Personally, I think that leaning too much on a generalized concept of “African Religion” can be counterproductive. I use the term “African Traditional Religions”, for example, but I have resisted using the term in the singular, in part because most who use the term in the singular also have an agenda to argue that this “African Religion” is essentially monotheist. The term need not imply this, of course, but the singularity facilitates it. It is more natural, certainly, given the geographical and historical diversity of the continent, to consider ATRs as a family of religions, rather than a single one, whatever structural similarities may arguably exist among them.

Moreover, the tendency to view “Africa” as a monolith seems, in the West at any rate, to be correlated with a certain lack of curiosity in the distinct languages and cultures of the continent. At the level of generality at which we would speak of “African Religion” we ought, frankly, to be speaking of indigenous polytheist traditions globally. Therefore, I find generalizations across more limited geographical regions and language families to be more useful. These mid-range generalizations, so to speak, can indeed have important pragmatic value in the very survival of these traditions, which will require flexibility and adaptation, the ability to change in response to changing ways of life and mobility of every kind.

Another way in which academic discourses actively endanger these traditions is by enforcing rigid identity conditions upon them, which essentially demand that they remain static, unchanging museum pieces or else sacrifice any notion of continuity—and the claims to recognition and protection which might arise from such continuity. I have written extensively on this kind of academic mischief with respect to diverse traditions, including Hinduism. These traditions are more than capable of changing to adapt to any imaginable change in circumstances—indeed, it is their very flexibility and mutability that gives scholars a pretext for refusing to acknowledge their identities and continuities beyond the most rigidly defined historicist/materialist criteria. Such adaptation is clearly facilitated by the ability to think of a given tradition as part of a larger identity of traditions sharing a common region, whether defined according to modern nation states or according to ecosystems, or a common language or language family. This sense of a wider identity provides important conceptual resources for adaptation by creative borrowing from traditions seen as somehow kindred.

I think that more thought needs to be given to the suitability of a generalization on the order of “Bantu Religion”. The concept has much to recommend it as a vector for research, at a minimum. The Bantu language family is very diverse, however, and such a generalization needs to guard itself proactively from the errors that arose from the idea of “Indo-European Religion”. But to the degree that it could foster dynamic interactions between traditions that are clearly too isolated now, it may be worth the risk.

Contemporary reflections on technophany always seem to involve Prometheus, rarely Hephaestus, though technology is the latter’s explicit timē, and is embedded, moreover, in His mythic ‘birth’, inasmuch as He is produced by Hera somewhat like a technical object or artifact, without friendship or ‘mixing’ (Theogony 927), that is, without sociability, in the solitude of the artisan. (This ‘technological’ relationship to the body is perhaps symbolized as well in Hephaestus’ unintentionally autoerotic encounter with Athena.)

Hephaestus is a product, as well, of Hera’s mythic wrath at Zeus, in which we once again note the symbolism of creative divine ‘wrath’. As I have often pointed out, the passions of the Gods in myth are by no means to be taken at face value. We are hardly to think that a Goddess would be at the mercy of emotions that even a mortal with any degree of self-control could keep in check, or act on petty grudges that anyone reasonable would put aside. Rather, these passions are symbols for modes of divine production. The eventual destruction of mortal things is implicit in their coming-to-be; to simultaneously intend the being and the destruction of something in its creation is thus to create ‘wrathfully’, and so mortal being qua mortal is produced in and through divine ‘wrath’. That Hera’s wrath is occasioned by Zeus’ bringing forth of Athena, furthermore, establishes a parallel between these two projects initiated by the sovereign king and queen of Olympus respectively, as I discussed in my previous essay.

Hephaestus also has one foot, so to speak, in the mortal world, through His disability. The principal symbol of technophany in Hellenic theology is disability because technological creation ‘limps’ behind natural generation, on the one hand, but also on account of the manifold prostheses Hephaestus formulates to compensate for His ‘lameness’, so that this divine ‘disability’ is also already a supplementation, something extra beyond what is natural. Promethean technophany also makes reference to the human species’ lack of the natural endowments of other animals, which must be supplemented by technology in order to do justice to the human animal. Hephaestus is the primary theological locus of technophany, however, rather than Prometheus, for He experiences this disability in His own divine body, not to mention being a technician Himself. That Prometheus suffers cyclical bodily torments as a result of his actions—in which, moreover, Hephaestus is involved—signifies, though, nevertheless, how closely engaged He too is in the cycle of mortal production. Aphrodite, we may say, shows a similar degree of engagement in the realm of mortal bodies when She is wounded on the battlefield in the Trojan War, and when She bears a child to a mortal man, a very uncommon position for a Goddess in Hellenic theology, but appropriate to Her particular sphere of action. Aphrodite shares this distinction, moreover, with Thetis, whose arranged marriage is a key event in setting the stage for the Trojan War, and who is also extensively involved with Hephaestus in the Iliad.

All of this helps to flesh out, so to speak, the Hellenic theology of matter. (A further aspect of this theology, that which concerns the forest—hylē, which is also ‘matter’ after Aristotle—and the providence of Artemis and Pan, will have to be taken up separately.) In connection with this we note as well the fall that Hephaestus suffers, again a product of Hera’s wrath, which again signifies thus the phase of material production, as it inaugurates the period of Hephaestus’ tutelage in craftwork. The lack of control implicit in His fall, like Persephone’s abduction, another point at which the divine touches the corporeal, expresses that element of the incalculable, or even the unintelligible, which this stage in the procession of being demands for its fullness of expression. Hence Persephone’s abduction is not a matter of violence such as would not occur even among minimally moral humans, much less Gods, but of the production of the mortal soul, which experiences itself thus as ‘thrown’ or raptured (harpazomai) into embodiment. Were the myth different, and involved a consensual marriage rather than an abduction, the conditions of mortal being would be different as well: we would remember choosing to come to birth, and experience agency throughout our mortal existence. Similarly, the loss of control experienced by Hephaestus when cast from Olympus by His mother is no more a loss or lack of agency than it is a mere familial drama, but rather expresses that encounter with the incalculable and unpredictable, the mystery of materials, that is inherent in technological experimentation, and which the myth conceives as essential, and not merely a product of the insufficiency of mortal technicians.

This theme is perhaps taken up again in the return of Hephaestus to Olympus in the company of Dionysus, the God through whom especially loss of control and loss of identity are encompassed in the Olympian project. In this alliance between Hephaestus and Dionysus, we see perhaps the Hellenic rejoinder to the concern expressed already in Zhuangzi that engagement with technology, even such as it was in his day, might result in a ‘machine heart’, a contamination of the human by the technological. In the Hellenic imagery, we see instead a humane alliance of the ‘unnatural’, of Hephaestian prosthesis, on the one hand, and Dionysian theatricality on the other. Dionysus also lends to Hephaestus His mount, the donkey, which Dionysus rode into battle against the Giants, the Gigantomachy being a prime mythological locus for the Olympian project’s reckoning with matter.

The Giant of Giants, of course, is Typhon, who is linked to Hephaestus as well in that the Theogony’s account of Zeus’s combat with Typhon is also where Hephaestus is first mentioned in the poem. Typhon has been cast down and struck by Zeus’ lightning, and the poet recounts that

A great part of huge earth was scorched by the terrible vapor and melted as tin melts when heated by men’s art in channelled crucibles; or as iron, which is hardest of all things, is shortened by glowing fire in mountain glens and melts in the divine earth through the strength of Hephaestus. Even so, then, the earth melted in the glow of the blazing fire. (861-7, trans. Evelyn-White)

The phenomenon of melting iron brings us back to the issue from which I began my study of Hephaestus, namely the idea of ‘smoothing’, in which the solid and discrete becomes a flow (on which see also here). The same phenomenon, let us note, occurs with respect to language in Hesiod’s account of the Typhonic babble:

And there were voices in all his dreadful heads which uttered every kind of sound unspeakable; for at one time they made sounds such that the gods understood, but at another, the noise of a bull bellowing aloud in proud ungovernable fury; and at another, the sound of a lion, relentless of heart; and at another, sounds like whelps, wonderful to hear; and again, at another, he would hiss, so that the high mountains re-echoed. (829-35, trans. Evelyn-White)

Typhon’s ‘barbaric’ foreignness of speech, from the indiscriminate bar bar of foreign languages to the uncomprehending Greek ear, thus reveals a pure matter or flux of language, like the flow of molten iron relative to either the mineral in its native terrestrial context or to the crafted artifact, and establishes therefore on the linguistic plane the first technological appropriation of material.

Antonio Vargas also spoke recently about Typhon in a course he has been teaching on Marinus’s Life of Proclus (here). The occasion of his remarks is Marinus’s indirect characterization of Christian hegemony as Typhonic. With characteristic insight, Antonio recognizes a systemic bond between Typhon and monotheism as such, similar to my own remarks on Typhon in Polytheism in Greek Philosophy (Amazon affiliate link), of which he was not previously aware (mentioned already by Oluwaseyi Bello). As Antonio explains, “Defeating Typhon means including chaos in the world and bounding it—and that inclusion is what makes the cosmos one.”

Typhon is thus a certain manner in which we become aware of the world’s unity. The typhonic world is the one world of catastrophe, of the dreaded asteroid impact, of that which reduces all of our cultural works to so many of Heidegger’s broken tools. Christianity was indeed just such a disaster, inseparable moreover from the universality it imposed. Despite an initial claim to legitimacy based on Venusian natural law—see my argument in The Way of Being (Amazon affiliate link)—the Roman Empire had made the world one, it turned out, just to break it. The Typhonic nature of imperial totalization was thus unmasked by Christianity, magma seeping through the fissures of that monotheist ‘carapace’ to which Milbank aspires (Beyond Secular Order, p. 17) through which the ‘local enchantments’ of paganism might subsist, the inevitable leaks in any ‘Noah’s ark’ ecology, the inescapable reference failure of ninety-nine names or more lacking any real, ‘barbarous’ alterity. How different indeed is that reversibility inherent in the practice of ‘naming’ in Egyptian hymns, where any God who is stated to be the ‘name of’ another always turns the tables and claims that other, reciprocally, as Their own. The gulf between this positive polycentricity and the Typhonic unity of the broken world demonstrates why the absolute totality of Gods cannot form a pantheon, much less be incorporated into any single body or vehicle—this is the importance, the indispensability of the idea of polytheism.

I am fundamentally cultus-oriented, and so just as I saw the issue of a God’s identity across distinct planes of activity—such as the intellective and the hypercosmic ‘Zeuses’, who have contradictory mythos—through the lens of the cultic reality of worshipers’ ability to recognize their God in a cultic context that contradicts their own in certain respects, so too, I think that I have more sympathy for Antonio’s position on this issue through reflecting upon the converse cultic reality, namely the freedom of worshipers not to acknowledge a contradictory cultus of their God as directed to the same God as theirs, or at least not in a univocal sense.

These two cultic realities are, after all, complementary aspects of the basic polytheist attitude. Even in the former case, worshipers are free to focalize the other manifestations of their God’s activity—for example, to see their own as ontologically prior in some fashion, and hence render the identity of the God in the two cults equivocal.

Historically, we can see that the myth Proclus reads as pertaining to ‘hypercosmic’ Zeus comes from Homer and Hesiod, particularly the former’s account of the division of the Kronian sovereignty among the three brothers, and this is the mythos we associate—broadly speaking correctly, though it is also certainly misleading to treat it as truly universal—with His ‘mainstream’ cult, whereas Proclus’ ‘intellective’ Zeus is conceived chiefly through the Orphic mythos, as well as of course Plato’s Timaeus.

The distinction between ‘intellective’ and ‘hypercosmic’ Zeus in Proclus, therefore, can also be seen through the historical lens as the distinction between the Orphic and the ‘mainstream’ cult, with the expressions of the latter being more public and popular, and of the former more private (including written works with restricted circulation) and esoteric. The former, furthermore, represents—albeit always partially and aspirationally—the ideal of a ‘pan-Hellenic’ Zeus, which is appropriately posited on an ontological plane below the more idiosyncratic.

I also think I am coming to understand better Antonio’s practice of distinguishing between the henad and the God (e.g., here). I have been resistant to making much of such a distinction, because it has typically been used by modern authors, in their ignorance of the structural imperatives of the system itself, to subordinate actual Gods to henads conceived as more sublime, and to subordinate all of Them ultimately to a reified ‘One Itself’, so that the henads are considered to be mere ‘events’ of beings participating the One.

This tendency, to which Antonio is however far too perspicuous to fall prey, comes from the two common vices of modern readers of the tradition, namely the monotheist reification of the One, on the one hand, and the privileging of the subjective experience of the participant over the principle, which is thus reduced to the event of the participant, on the other. Of the former tendency, there is no need to speak further. The latter tendency, which comes in what I would consider more and less respectable forms—the less respectable psychologistic, the more respectable phenomenological—is in any case not to be confused with Antonio’s position either. Antonio’s distinction between henad and God is rather a correctly ontological version of the ‘evental’ reading, which I think we could also associate to some degree with Reiner Schürmann’s reading of the Platonic first principle, with its deep and interesting resonance with Heidegger. Let me offer my own version of the case for it.

In a certain respect, the most idiosyncratic experience of the God is the most ontologically elevated—not insofar as it is psychological, however, but simply in its peculiarity, inasmuch as this expresses the higher principle, that of unity/individuation, and this is what gives license to the individual practitioner, or a given community of worshipers, not to acknowledge another’s experience of their God as substitutable for their own salva veritate. And this is how I think it can be legitimate to say, as I read Antonio, that the God is the henad plus the whole series of participants, and that differences between participants in respects of the formal difference of divine activities, differences such that the participating beings are formed by their experience in incommensurably different ways, therefore do not pertain to the same divine unity. In a sense, that is, the reversion gives form to what is prior to it.

The idea, as I understand it, is not that there is a henad corresponding to each unreconciled disparity of theophany, but to render dynamic and fluid the entire process in which the henad is posited. We should not think that the result is an atomized multiplicity of irreconcilable participations, however. On the contrary, in most cases, as I pointed out previously, just as individual worshipers will form communities with one another above and beyond the differences in their experience of their God, so too will these worshipers and interpretive communities seek to incorporate on their own terms, and from their own perspective, all of the other ways of experiencing and understanding their God. The henad is totalizing, but the totality is always and irreducibly perspectival.

This affirmation of indigenous Gods, the demand that Their cultus be maintained, is significant. For it is not a political concession to the sentiments of the local population, for whom, frankly, Plato’s text shows little concern. It cannot be understood as in any way a pragmatic gesture, but only, I believe, as a matter of piety, which the context demonstrates as well—it is not taken up in the context of relations with the indigenous inhabitants, but in the context of the arrangements for worship. In this respect, many will be surprised—though not readers of my own work, of course—that there is here no implication at all that the Gods of the indigenous peoples would simply be the same Gods as the Greeks’, merely with different names. The Gods are not like Ideas. They are living immortal beings with autonomous agency, and a paramount importance in the cosmos in Their own right, not as representations of ‘archetypes’, a concept that does not exist in Platonism.

As strange as this may seem in light of the picture of Plato and Platonism that moderns typically have, even many who would hardly think of themselves as uninformed, Plato does not reduce the Gods to any other kind of being. On the contrary, avoiding such reductionism is a major concern of his. We see this in general in Socrates’ concern in the Phaedo to avoid reductionistic explanations of anything, which is what leads to his ‘safe’ positing of forms, the point of which is not to tame the manifold of particulars, but rather to ensure that we do not eliminate the f-ness of an f. This concern shows itself with respect to the Gods specifically in Socrates’ admonitions in the Philebus and the Cratylus against speaking of the Gods as anything other than Themselves. Trying to know what Aphrodite is, is far less important than knowing Her as Aphrodite, and if the former were to jeopardize or encumber the latter in any way, it is that undertaking which will be abandoned, without compunction.

The Athenian stranger’s injuction in the Laws is also interesting in light of contemporary concerns about cultural appropriation. Rather provocatively, from our present-day viewpoint, Plato does not see the Gods of the indigenous people as belonging to them, in a sense that would make it inappropriate for foreigners to worship Them or require the sanction of the indigenous people, except to the degree that this is implied by worshiping Them “as they were in earlier generations.” Instead, Plato sees the situation in terms of the obligation upon those living in this land to continue, as best they can, the worship of those Gods who had revealed Themselves to the prior inhabitants, however they may have been displaced. The relationship to these Gods is thus universal, while the Gods Themselves sacrifice none of Their peculiarity, none of Their uniqueness. Plato’s lack of evident concern for justice with respect to the indigenous people may well make us uncomfortable, but it is the responsibility to sustain the native theophanies that is preeminent to him, rather than a responsibility to the natives themselves. The relationship to the indigenous Gods is like the relationship to the natural environment, a non-human cosmopolitics irreducible to ‘culture’ as a property of mortals—which applies as well, of course, to the Hellenic Gods, and any claim that Their worship would belong to some race of humans rather than as a universal relationship which is also, at the same time, intensely local.

Antonio helpfully responds to my own gestures toward a Kantian or Quinean approach to sense data with his own expressions of support for a position more like McDowell’s, as would be expected from the manner in which our discussion has evolved. Contemporary philosophical debates are rarely without far older counterparts in the tradition, if we are sufficiently sensitive to draw them out through our interpretations. Hence it is no mere coincidence, for example, that Speusippus, Plato’s first successor, was himself a holist with respect to meaning, like Quine, whereas Aristotle tended more toward the view that Antonio characterizes as “that our perceptions are conceptual through and through.” Of course, it’s not as though I would exactly disagree with this latter view. Rather, it’s the issue of the pluralism of fundamental values, what Aristotle criticizes as the Platonists’ “profusion of goods” (Metaphysics 1091b25), including the basic organizing principles of the cosmos, which leads both myself and, I think, Speusippus as well to a more ‘holist’ position.

This may seem a bit confusing; why should holism, the idea that to really know anything we need to know everything, essentially an immediate one-to-one correspondence of each unit with the totality, be at odds with the idea that our perceptions are always already fully conceptualized? The issue is that when someone like McDowell, or before him Hegel or Aristotle, puts forward this position, it generally comes with the tacit condition that there is just one adequate conceptualization of each thing and of everything. To resist this move, therefore, is not really about setting “a conceptual scheme … against raw sense data,” as Antonio characterizes it, so much as the plurality of conceptual schemes which is enabled by recognizing some space between things and their conceptualization. And when I speak of ‘conceptualization’, I don’t just mean the imposition of concepts upon experience by human knowers, from which anybody would reasonably allow that things themselves have some ‘space’, but even that which is carried on already in the formal strivings of beings themselves, especially living beings of all kinds. Things are more, I would say, even than their self-formulations.

It’s on account of the possibility of ‘thought’ that is truly alien to our own that I believe we must recognize a fundamental negativity of the conceptual—not to separate it from ‘sense data’, but in order to recognize that it is necessarily in constant negotiation with it. Being and thinking are one, as Parmenides said, but they are one as a continuum, a flexible and infinitely divisible, even dialogical space that extends both between and within all units; this is the importance of the ‘intelligible-intellective’ or ‘noetico-noeric’ in the thought of Platonists like Proclus. In this way units acquire dimension.

Hence “reason and the divine” are neither simply one, nor simply separate, and this underscores how very close are Antonio’s position and my own in many ways, as noted by the ever-astute Oluwaseyi Bello. We both seek a “via media between these two options”. I would hold it true, though, in a certain respect, that “No amount of rational inquiry alone can connect us to a God,” but this is chiefly on account of the word ‘alone’. Reason and what decenters it are always present together, and so no inquiry connecting us to a God—for that matter, no inquiry that results in a successful mundane judgment either—will have been accomplished by ‘reason’ alone. By the same token, we should not say that the “traditions and symbols handed down” by the Gods are merely “contingent”, as Antonio often does here. Reason can articulate the synthēmata, and therefore need not view any of them as ‘contingent’: the hermeneutical exegesis of sacred texts and rites, an exercise of reason carried out in all traditions in one fashion or another, never allows itself to rest at deeming any token of the God as merely ‘contingent’.

In the same way, it’s not that “universal principles such as the World, the Sun, Life, Beauty, Reason,” are not Gods themselves in a certain sense. But the Godhood of such a principle will be precisely as a “unique divinity”, and therefore not as a universal per se. Hence I see a certain equivocation when Antonio states that “the philosopher can know them as such,” that is, as Gods, “without relying on any tradition or name.” Because after all, the philosopher speaks a language. I speak, e.g., of the Sun, and not of Shams (شمس). These are translatable, but precisely on account of that translatability, they are not simply one; so to reach the divinity of either, that is, its ultimate unity, we must take them in precisely that fashion which does not abstract from anything in the tradition which has brought it forth—its divinity per se cannot lie just in what is successfully translated, but must also, by definition, embrace all of its ‘contingencies’.

This is not the divinity Antonio seeks, however; hence he specifies that “we must not conflate our logos of the Sun with the divine Nous that constitutes the Sun … When I speak of a universal structure embodied by the Sun, I mean the Nous.” The divinity of which he wishes to speak, therefore, is precisely the telos of successful translation, the end achieved in every successful communication. This telos, though, never exhausts the potential of all the components—subjective, material, conceptual—of the scene of communication. The end is achieved, but never eliminated; it remains in order to structure and organize the situation as a demiurgic unmoved mover, as intellective activity as such.

It would be helpful, I think, in this regard to return to my example of the ‘thoughtful extraterrestrial’. Antonio asks “Do these galactic intelligences truly challenge the uniqueness of this principle? Perhaps they only reveal that this principle is the origin of a system far more complex than we imagined—one that manifests itself through a multitude of stars, not just one.” I would agree with this; but then one must recognize as well that the noetic principle, ‘unique’ after its fashion, is also by its very nature an expansive and divisible continuum.

Some of the ancients may not have thought of ‘the Sun’ as something that could be plural. Indeed, there is a sense in which it is not, as we recognize by the definite article. But then, as I pointed out, the definiteness of ‘the’ Sun, in that very same sense, though not with the same reference, is available to our thoughtful extraterrestrial as well, for whom our Sun, though, is merely a particular sun and not ‘the’ Sun which is their own, and for us the case is exactly symmetrical. This is not a bug, but rather language working just as it is supposed to, including relativity. ‘The Sun’ is in this respect both definite and relative or general in its reference—like ‘the God’.

The noetic continuum, moreover, can expand in other directions as well. Let us imagine that our thoughtful extraterrestrial is someone akin to our cephalopods, but living in an ocean beneath a thick crust of ice on a planet to the life of which no star makes any contribution aside from its gravity, where the metabolic processes are driven instead by hot vents in the ocean floor caused by seismic forces or radioactive decay. A more alien form of life could scarcely be imagined, and yet intelligence is obviously possible there, and hence the same noetic structure as such—that is, qua noetic—as embodied in the dispositions of Sun, stars and planets that are such crucial elements of the Platonic account, even though these entities are unseen to our cephalopod philosopher and would have a much different significance for them even were they to learn of them.

It’s in no way a matter, as people often seem to think, of new data about the cosmos undermining ancient cosmologies, as though their concepts are somehow brittle compared to our own. In fact one might consider the situation quite the opposite. Plato already spoke insightfully of those whose idea of ‘higher’ studies is to “lean their head back and study ornaments on a ceiling” (Rep. 529a), and such are the results delivered by our scientific instruments if we are inadequate to the task of interpreting them. The ancients were, if anything, more capable of imagining radical difference and incorporating it into their world than many of our contemporaries, and our modern anthropocentrism, hardly the product of scientific progress, but rather of regressive sentiment, would undoubtedly have appeared crude to them. So I am pretty certain that Socrates would have relished the opportunity to dialogue with a cephalopod, and neither would have to check their difference, their incommensurability, at the door.

I spoke of the continuum that extends and expands within every unit as well as between them, and this brings me to another issue. I think that Antonio leans too heavily on the notion that one Zeus and another are different Gods. I don’t believe that Proclus would wish us to interpret him as though intellective and hypercosmic Zeus, e.g., are merely homonymous. Rather, when Proclus speaks of a “twofold [dittos] Zeus” (PT VI. 8. 35.7) in the two orders, he is literally stating that Zeus, in the singular, is twofold, not that these are two Gods who merely share a name. I suppose that this could be seen as a case of ‘half full/half empty’, how the identity of Zeus might not be evident to a reader without a fundamental pistis of Him, a knowledge of Zeus by acquaintance, in Russell’s terms, rather than description, and who would expect, therefore, that it is only by elements of Zeus’ description that we would participate Him, and which would thus be the sole content of that participation. But Zeus is not just what He is, but also, and primarily, who.

This is where I believe that people with experience of a continuous polytheist tradition are in a better position to understand the ancients. In Hinduism, for example, under the umbrella of a single Deva, such as Shiva, coexist cults so different as to demand a polycentric disposition akin to that which applies to cults of other Devas, so that as a practical matter, one treats these virtually as cults of a different Shiva, but this doesn’t lead to the kinds of inferences such statements would suggest to those raised in obligate monotheist culture, where we are taught to expect such differences either to be politely ignored (as in the case of folk Catholicism with its innumerable bespoke local cults), forcibly integrated, or else allowed to disintegrate the sense of an integral Godhead. Henadic individuality, however, entails that insofar as there are activities of Zeus resulting in intellectually inconsistent properties—such as being the sole demiurge or sharing this role with His brothers Poseidon and Hades—this is because Zeus Himself is beyond the intellect, and determines it rather than being determined by it. Zeus can be ‘twofold’ (or more) without failing to be a unit, a henad, because henads form series, it’s what They do. And precisely because it is the series of Zeus, we can grasp it from any of its points, and regard that one as the privileged manifestation of Zeus Himself.

This goes again to the issue of continually referring to the traditional names of the Gods as ‘contingent’. These names are ‘contingent’ only within a historicist worldview which was founded upon a reactive posture toward these traditions, disintegrating them at every point of difference. This posture can then be inherited so that all of these names and rites can seem like nothing more than an obstacle to ‘primal’ experience. Names, however, lend themselves to reason, and are not opposed to it, though reason does not exhaust them, either. Analogously, the henad lends Herself to having a name, but She is not constrained by that—instead, it is a gift She gives freely. For Proclus, the names “through which we call upon the Gods and by which they are praised,” that is, none other than the very supposedly ‘contingent’ cultic names, “have been revealed by the Gods Themselves, cause reversion back to Them and, to the extent that there is something luminous in them, lead to human understanding,” (In Crat. 31.30-32.3). Antonio argues that “proper names do not correspond one-to-one with Gods,” as if to distance the name from the God, but he also quotes Proclus (In Crat. 33.7-9) that among the Gods, naming and intellectual insight are united, and that only in our case is the insight one thing, and the name another. But this means that the proper name is present with the God in the highest way possible for things which are, nevertheless, distinguishable. Proclus is clearly sympathetic with those who hold that “names exist among the Gods themselves, even among those allotted the highest order,” (In Crat. 29.25-8); for when he states that “Not every class of the Gods is nameable” (32.18), he simply means that the God as such is distinct from Their name, as a matter of basic logic, for as he states, “it was necessary that the procession of the intelligibles terminate at this order” (24-5)—that is, there needs to be a class of highest referents for the highest referential terms.

Nous is a hypostasis, a product, an effect of the Gods, Their way of being, which, moreover, because They are Gods, is also the Way of Being (NB: Amazon affiliate link). The distinction between hypostases is necessary to honor the hypostatic economy, and understanding the different kinds of unity is needed in order to appreciate the comprehensive system they form. Polycentricity does not eliminate this hypostatic structure. The best philosophers I have known, even those who had no religion in the strict sense, have I believe attained through noēsis a certain divine participation. But I can recognize this form of purely philosophical salvation while also understanding it to be both ontologically distinct from devotion, and also ontologically subordinate to it, as when Krishna states to Arjuna that “I am the basis of brahman” (Bhagavad Gita 14.27), or when Parmenides’ Goddess maps out the road of Being to Her kouros. Noēsis, as the God’s ‘self-realization’, in Oluwaseyi’s apt description, is at once the God thinking Herself, and also thought thinking itself, and we need to hold onto both of these moments.

The hypostatic emergence of being from unity is indeed its telos, its goal as thinking, the will of thinking to be something itself. This ‘something’ is divine, and for Damascius, indeed, Being as such is even a henad. I discuss this doctrine at some length at the end of my recent book Polytheism in Greek Philosophy (affiliate link to independent bookseller site Bookshop.org; also available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.). I think that Damascius’ idea here is extremely important, and it’s going to continue to guide me. I see Damascius and Proclus as always in fundamental harmony, with Damascius probing where he finds inherent tension in the system they share. The transition from the henadic to the ontic is such a tension. Similar to his other major theoretical intervention, his affirmation of an absolutely negative first principle beyond unity (the so-called ‘Ineffable’), Damascius’ reconceptualization of the status of Being can also be seen in a certain respect as a reaction to monotheism. Whereas the Ineffable provides a negative bulwark against monotheist appropriation of the Platonic first principle, the idea of the henadic character of Being Itself is an attempt to occupy the very space of monotheism positively, but with something that does not endanger the fabric of polytheism. As such, it must be understood, not as any sort of concession to monotheism, but as an advance beyond it, not a unity presupposed, but a unity constructed.

Antonio says,

The idea that the cosmos is “smooth” is the idea that these chains of conditioning ultimately presuppose a very different kind of perceptible thing — one not conditioned by other things that appear and disappear, but conditioned entirely by what is always present.

On the one hand, this is indeed “a very different kind of perceptible thing”, so different that it could be considered in another respect as imperceptible, so ‘smoothed’ as to pass through the portals of sensation without causing any of that ‘roughening’ of perception that Russian Formalists saw as essential to literature, an idea without a story, a kind of perceptual teleportation in which the transcendental is intuited with no pertinent instance of sensation, only the pattern of a specific Hephaestian technical project. Such projects are not essentially narrative in character, in contradistinction from Zeus’ demiurgy. (Zeus is perhaps the most purely narrative of the dēmiourgoi, if Poseidon’s demiurgy is more phenomenological and Hades’ more therapeutic.)

On the other hand, there is a continuity with perceptible things implied by the metaphor of ‘smoothness’. For here, the ideal is formed as the limit case of that same unconscious process Leibniz speaks of by which the sounds of innumerable wavelets are ‘smoothed’ by us into the direct perception of a unified noise of the sea, in which the mediating cognitions have been dissolved into the continuum of a smooth intuition. Thus the akron, the furthest, is brought near without losing its distance. Hence that continuity Antonio notes with reference to prop. 112 of the Elements of Theology, that “the primary elements of each and every order are configured according to the orders that are prior to them,” has a certain latent corollary to the effect that the prior adjacent order is also always conceivable as some ‘lower’ phenomenon taken to its extreme, as when the ideal is perceived as really present and even tangible in its ‘smoothness’. Such transmutation from the ‘lower’ to the ‘higher’ is always by means of some technē, and so belongs to Hephaestus’ domain. There are many such technai within the ‘organism’, a term which indeed refers, as Antonio alludes, to the presence in such a being of such articulated functions. Hence through Hephaestus, we may indeed see “technology … at the center of the system,” as Antonio remarks. We could perhaps, from this viewpoint, identify reversion (epistrophē) itself, the ‘turning’ of beings toward their principles, with this smoothing formation of a continuum, a ‘plane of immanence’, to borrow terminology from Deleuze and Guattari. When Antonio says that “Cosmology is not the investigation of this thing here, but of the necessary shape of appearance itself,” this is cosmology as metal made to flow.

Antonio also helpfully points out two further symbols of ‘smoothness’ in Hephaestus’ theology, that of Okeanos, not only or even primarily on account of water’s elemental smoothness, but rather as “God of the horizon”, another kind of akron; and the smoothness of Dionysian inebriation, which is Hephaestus’ direct route back to Olympus, for as he says, it provides the “conditions […] allow[ing] us … to be formed directly by insights that burst forth from presence.”

He also brings up a fascinating anomaly, namely that ghosts lack phrēn and nous whereas Hephaestus’ automata have them. But perhaps this is just in the apparition, for surely Hades’ ‘beneficent sophistry’ (Cratylus 403e) requires nous, and so that part of the spirit would be engrossed and unavailable to the necromantic inquiry?

Hephaestus and the Theophany of the Technical

1. The smooth surface

Plato speaks of the “smoothness” (leios) of the fire within the eyes (Timaeus 45b), and earlier of the smoothness of the demiurgically formed cosmos itself, which the demiurge has “made round and perfectly smooth, for the sake of many considerations [charin],” (33b). Smoothness, therefore, despite its concrete character, is a metaphysical property as well for Plato, which connects the experience of sensation with the object which is opportunely, providentially formed so as to be experienced by sentient animals. In yet another application of the tireless axiom that like is known by like, the smooth is known by the smooth, and this, like every application of this maxim, also offers a view of what knowledge itself is. The importance of this moment of sentient experience is shown by the fact that as a result, the cosmos itself “has no need of eyes” (33c), for the innumerable living beings sense things for themselves, and their sensation is cosmic sensation, the cosmos sensing itself in a ‘smooth’ continuity of perceiving and being-perceived, of activity and passivity. Hence, as Proclus explains,

[T]here is, it seems, a single point to which these words about smoothness urge us: to show that the universe [to pan] has no organs for acquiring knowledge, nor any need for parts adapted for motion. Neither does it do [poioun] anything else, nor undergo [paschon] anything, but rather does and undergoes in itself and by itself (Tim. 33c) … Therefore the account concerning the smoothness of the world’s body stands as a middle term between what is said about its volume [ogkos] and what is said about its soul. For the proximate limit of its body is smoothness, but the transcendent limit of the world is soul; and prior to this [limit there is] intellect, for this is the boundary of the soul itself. But even prior to intellect is the single divinity [i.e., divine property] which is all [hē mia theotēs hē pan], bringing together [synechousa] the plurality. (In Tim. 2.79f, trans. Baltzly, mod.)

Smoothness is a property that mediates between the corporeal and the psychical, and is, moreover, a corporeal expression of higher principles of integration. The ‘universe’, literally the All, to pan, has by definition no exterior, no Other, and so its perception is necessarily self-perception, and not only that perception of living beings by one another, but also the total self-knowledge of each God—“the one divinity which is all”, the unique nature of the God (-tēs endings function like ‘-ness’ in English) as a kind of ‘smoothing’ of all things into one texture or pattern. Such is the God as the Animal Itself, expressing the unity of the animal comprising all animals, the animal as such. Every animal is a perspective on all things, and in this respect is all things for itself. Note that the perception spoken of here is not perception of the absolute exterior of the disordered visible (30a), but perception as demiurgically ‘smoothed’ into a surface of reflection, a reciprocal surface which Merleau-Ponty made a central concept in his own phenomenology as the ‘touching-touched’. For Proclus, interpreting the Timaeus, this double status of the body in perception can be thought in the objective property of ‘smoothness’. But why should the smooth play this role, and not the rough, or any other objective physical property? Smoothness is intelligible for Proclus as receptivity; it is receptivity become corporeal. This intelligible ‘smoothness’ is expressed especially in the mirror, as a surface permitting a ‘reflective’ continuity of the subject and object of experience. Moreover, as Proclus relates, this conception of smoothness also provides a form of cosmological orientation:

[S]moothness signifies the receptivity of the highest points [akra] through which the universe is capable of receiving the illuminations from Intellect and Soul, in just the way that mirrors receive reflections in virtue of their own smoothness. But long ago the theologians also accepted the mirror as a symbol of the receptivity of the universe to intellectual fulfilment (apoplērōsin). For this reason they say that Hephaestus made a mirror for Dionysus. When he looked into it and saw his own image, he proceeded to the universal divisible creation … Hence the universe is a corporeal thing of this kind since its exterior is smooth, and in as much as this is so it is connate with its own intellect and with the Demiurge. Because of this, the poets also found the Demiurge at the summit of the highest point [ep’akras … koryphēs] of the cosmos, such was the receptivity allotted by him to the cosmos for participation in intelligible causes. (Ibid, 2.80, trans. Baltzly, mod.)

The ‘receptivity’ of the All to the Intellect, which allows it to be ‘filled’, to become a plērōma, that is, to become a totality in the first place, comes about as a function of its highest points (ta akra). Smoothness, Proclus explains, signifies the receptivity of the highest points, the virtual continuity of the extremes within the cosmos, the cosmic sublime, with its ideality, its intellective exterior. It is inseparable, therefore, from the relativity of extreme distance, the ‘smoothness’ that results from the blurring of infinitesimal components into a continuum, as when the craggy mountain, from an extreme distance, appears smooth. ‘Height’ is a purely relative determination, for as Philolaus himself said, “in the lower (regions) the lowest part (for the upper regions) is like the highest and similarly for the rest. For both (the higher and the lower) have the same relationship to the middle, except that their positions are reversed,” (frag. B17, trans. Huffman). The ‘highest’ is thus also, inherently, the lowest, from another, reciprocal perspective. And so the ‘smooth’ is both the ideal, and the material which is worked upon, the continuum as substrate, which, as the ‘unlimited’ of the Promethean method in the Philebus, is an integral element of every craft or technology, bringing us back, once again, to Hephaestus, and his Bacchic mirror.

There is a convergence here of three concepts, coordinates to situate the conception of matter in the particular sense in which Hephaestus, as demiurge, operates upon it. First, there is the idea of distance. Matter is no given substance, but instead what recedes constantly before our attempt to determine the whatness of some substance, and of any substance in general. In being thus constitutively out of our reach, distanced from us by a gap we cannot bridge, because the bridge will be some form, and hence not matter after all, matter resembles the distance of the ideal, as expressed cosmologically in the distance from us of the ‘sphere’ of the primum mobile, the sphere of the ‘fixed’ stars which are fixed purely by our distance from them, a relativity it was not beyond the ancients to grasp, however incomprehensible it was to medieval Christians. Aithēr, the substance of this furthest extremity, is nothing that we could possess, nothing that could be perceived except from afar. And yet it has its phenomenological properties, which bring us to the second aspect of the shape we are trying to discern, the shape of a certain Hephaestean theophany, which is smoothness. With distance comes smoothness, at once an absence of detail, of phenomenal or apparent properties and also a property in itself, a primary property of distance, and hence of eminence from a given perspective. The smooth thus confronts the percipient from the opposing position implied by their own standpoint. And this brings us to the third aspect of the theophany: the smooth surface is reflective, it is a mirror, and something which yields to being formed. Matter, thus, is a mirror. It reflects my form as a kind of default, because it does not sustain any other intrinsic to itself, other than this smoothness, this yielding. In this respect, we can understand something about the relationship between Hephaestus and Hades: if Hades is the demiurge of images, Hephaestus is the demiurge of reflections, as a subset of images, in one respect, but with the added element of being grounded in the relation to a subject immediately present, so that there is no artist intervening. The reflection is thus an apt symbol for that subject’s own project or work. The difference between Hephaestus and Hades here is very slender. Hence, we note that when Plato speaks of the ‘mirror’ by virtue of which one would be the ‘craftsman of all things’ at Republic 596d, able thus to “make all implements … all plants and animals, including himself, and thereto earth and heaven and the Gods and all things in heaven and in Hades under the earth” (596c, trans. Shorey), they are characterized also as “a most marvelous sophist”, just as Hades is described in the Cratylus (403e) as the “perfect sophist” who binds with the greatest desire (403c). Hades is the senior demiurge here, as the son of Kronos, and so it is the element of desire in the specular relationship which falls under His purview, whereas it is the mirror itself, as the technology of all technologies, with which Hephaestus is concerned.

2. Hephaestus and Athena

Our understanding of Hephaestus’ relationship with Athena is too easily obscured by its anthropomorphic pathos. But its awkwardness is apt in symbolizing the conditions of the plane of being on which these Gods both operate. Hephaestus and Athena alike are Gods of this world, of the material plane, a plane on which distance is painful and slow to bridge as we limp along, making any distance seem greater, indeed, than it is. Hephaestus, in effect, bears the burden of this inherent difficulty insofar as His sphere of activity is materiality itself, and the domain of the technical images of purposes and intentions, the painstaking effort to fashion something in response to a need or lack. This is why He limps, and why His semen does not reach Athena, but ends up instead upon the Earth, which is the ultimate object of any earthly desire, Their lack of contact the symbol of any erotic connection considered in its purely material aspect. Hephaestus, in some sense Aphrodite’s husband, though cultic practice seems to have acknowledged Ares instead, is thus the image of material desire in itself.

The kinship of Hephaestus and Athena is evident in the parallel negations of a partner in Their conceptions. Hesiod explicitly positions Hera’s conception of Hephaestus as a response to Zeus’ conception of Athena. But whereas She conceives alone, in total novelty, Zeus conceives in a manner reminiscent of His father Kronos, by taking His partner Metis back into Himself. Metis, however, is Herself a hidden bond between the two alien children, as the Homeric Hymn to Hephaestus begins by praising Him as klytomētis, ‘famed for mētis,’ that is, for that particular kind of wisdom for which Athena is famous as well, a wisdom oriented, above all, to practice. Athena’s domain of practice, however, is the social, and Her inventions are civilizing, whereas Hephaestus’ domain is the technical itself, and it is He whom we can imagine tinkering for its own sake. We still experience these realms of technology in itself and its social application as separated by a gap difficult to cross, and yet they are undoubtedly both grounded in the same earth upon which we take our stand and by which we test our projects. The author of the Homeric Hymn is focused upon this gap, speaking almost immediately of Athena Herself: “With bright-eyed Athena He taught men glorious crafts throughout the world, men who before used to dwell in caves in the mountains like wild beasts,” (trans. Evelyn-White). The Hymn closes the gap not only by alluding to the crafts that Athena has taught to humans, but to the socializing and civilizing value of crafts as such, which is reflected in the very terminology—they are aglaa erga, ‘shining works’, playing on the double sense of ‘shining’ as both a property of the highly reflective, smooth surfaces of worked metal objects, and as the social and intersubjective property of fame, this social dimension being emphasized over and above the pure object character of the ‘works’ in order to bridge the gap between these Gods, which appears to be the entire purpose of this Hymn, as it states that humans, “now that they have learned crafts through Hephaestus the famed worker [klytotechnēs], easily they live a peaceful life in their own houses the whole year round.” Having traced the two branches, as it were, of Metis’ providential action, Her ‘fame’ or klytos, through the shining works of Her daughter, on the one hand, and the famous technai of this one who is in no direct sense Her child at all, but the event of whose conception is in reaction to Her own mysterious reproduction. The incorporation of Metis by Zeus is Kronian, an intellective appropriation of Her, but differs from Kronos’ ingestion of His children in that according to Hesiod Metis continues to have Her say within Zeus: She indicates or points out (phrassaito) good and evil to Him, so that He has substituted a principle partially independent of Him for His own moral judgments. His ingestion of Metis therefore is not an act of selfishness, but a way of rendering His own authority more transparent. The echo of His act in Hera’s conception of Hephaestus underscores this: His act evokes technophany, calling forth that reason peculiarly accessible to mortals. Judging good and evil will never be as easy as applying a technical formula, but it has a technophanic echo, so to speak, in the emergence of Hephaestus, which comes about through Hera’s own executive authority as the mistress of the Olympian household. Technology and justice therefore will, as a factual matter, advance together in the world, even if progress in the two spheres has no essential bond. It is not a question of belief in a specifically emancipatory technological project, of which ancient Greek thinkers show no evidence, but simply that motion in the one echoes in the other.

We would tend to expect that such impetus would come from the technological, and not from the ethical side. But it is Athena’s birth that brings about Hephaestus’, and Athena’s beauty that brings forth His limping eros. And indeed, we see that the ancients did not pursue technological development beyond the point that would have demanded of them social transformations, whether a more extractive relationship to the natural world, or giving up enslaved labor—that is, whether these changes would have been objectively bad or good. And so it seems that Athena was in fact expected to lead Hephaestus, and not the reverse. This cannot be said to be the case today, where we are accustomed to think of technological advancement as something that will proceed apace and according to its own internal impulsion, only to be slowed down or diverted by material obstacles or by social factors that would appear to be extrinsic. Acceleration is inherent to the idea of technology for us, whereas the Greeks were struck instead by technology’s handicap relative to both wisdom and to biological production, both of which it lags behind.

3. The self-moving machines

This is not to say, however, that the ancient Greeks were unaware of technology’s vast potential. Homer, after all, can imagine Hephaestus producing robots at a time when Greek technology was still incapable of producing anything impressive as a practical matter, having fallen well back from the achievements of Minoan craft remembered in the figure of Daedalus. So it was not the pressure of technological advancement that called forth the imagination to envision its further exploits, but on the contrary a vision a priori of technological possibility. We see this in myth in the narrow field of warfare, of course, in which miraculous weaponry brings immediate and demonstrable results, but the Greeks were not so warlike as to overvalue this dimension over personal combat prowess. Where the technological imagination truly takes wing, it seems, is, paradoxically, beneath the sea. When Hephaestus was hurled from the heavens He states that

Eurynome and Thetis caught me and held me, Eurynome, daughter of Okeanos, whose stream bends back in a circle. With them I worked nine years as a smith, and wrought many intricate things; pins that bend back, curved clasps, cups, necklaces, working there in the hollow of the cave, and the stream of Okeanos around us went on forever with its foam and its murmur. No other among the Gods or among mortal men knew about us except Eurynome and Thetis. (Iliad 18.398-405, trans. Lattimore)

The hiddenness of Hephaestus in this episode, as if a virtual fugitive God, is emphasized by the other aspect of occultation, being hidden in a cave in the sea—doubly hidden, that is, because one does not suspect a pocket of air and even of fire beneath the sea. In order to discover such technological possibilities, therefore, one would have to make a perilous dive into an environment teeming with life, but not of our own kind. Dionysus famously leads Hephaestus back to Olympus, as though it is Bacchic ecstasy that will discover this potential. Dionysus can thus be said to close the circle of Hephaestus’ technophanic descent and return, joining Bacchic ecstasy and soteriology with technological innovation. And there are, indeed, technai of ecstasy. From another side, we recall that Prometheus brings divine fire to the mortal world in a narthex, that is, effectively in a thyrsus, so that the God who imparts technological innovation is also, in some respect, a Bacchant. Of the idea of a methodical progress in technology, however, we see virtually no indication. The punishment of Prometheus, with its sense of a grinding temporality, perhaps suggests it, and Hephaestus, in other myths Prometheus’ collaborator, plays a role in His punishment. This suggests the tendency in Hellenic culture, at least its aristocratic side, to see an enslavement in the crafts, antithetical to freedom, and into which spontaneity, creativity and progress seem hardly to enter. The craftsman is not his own master: hence, in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Hephaestus complains that He acts against His will, so that He even hates His craft (45), at which He toils unprofitably (44) and yet nevertheless efficiently (57)—a reflection, it seems, of the harsh, “new” power exercised by Zeus (35). Zeus is a ‘young’ God, and in Aeschylus’ eyes His reign accordingly displays traits we associate with the grim aspects of modernity. Technology is already here associated with the instrumentalization of persons by authority which commands, and constrains them like the craftsman constrains their raw materials. This is in sharp contrast to Hesiod, who sees Zeus’ sovereignty based instead on persuasion. And it is also in sharp contrast to the pride embodied in Athena’s civilizing works, and which the bond between Her and Hephaestus, complicated as it may be, attests. The moment of discovery—heuresis, marked by the cry eurēka—is ennobled, while the labor of application or the fruitless tinkering limps behind.

In Homer, however, there is a vision of purely technological possibility which is more optimistic and empowering, centering on Hephaestus’ creation of automata, self-moving machines, which in the interpretation of Platonists like Proclus are simply self-moving beings as such, considered purely in their materiality. The mechanical automata of Hephaestus in the Iliad, or the self-guided ships of the Phaeacians in the Odyssey, may thus be taken as the symbols of self-moving biological organisms considered as machines, in very much the manner than modern science does. These automata therefore provide theophanic ground in principle for this reduction, for considering living beings as if they were machines. It is appropriate, therefore, to consider closely what is said concerning these automata. At Iliad 18.370-7, when Thetis comes to visit Him at His house, itself a symbol of the physical cosmos inasmuch as it is “decked with stars”, Hephaestus is in the process of creating twenty self-moving tripods, which are to “enter the gathering of the Gods at His wish and again return to His house, a wonder to behold,” (trans. Murray). The automata thus can stand in for Hephaestus at the divine assembly (agōn), which suggests that they can experience a theophany of this kind themselves in some genuine sense, insofar as they will be capable of imparting to Hephaestus what happens there. This is, then, a form of what occurs in Socrates’ palinode from the Phaedrus, where souls behold from a distance such gatherings of the Gods. For the automata to partake of this as well can be understood to indicate, on the one hand, that the effects of theophany are ‘understood’ even on the most corporeal plane, by the very machinic aspect of the organism, and on the other hand, that even an artificial organism, at the furthest reaches of excellence in design, could in principle experience theophany, at least at the God’s direction, for it seems that they do not have a will of their own, though their motility extends even to some kind of power of thought. The ability to think motion as self-directed, and yet at the same time not expressing an autonomous will, is clearly one of the problems posed by the text.

More evidence of the power of thought possessed by Hephaestus’ automata is provided at 18.468-73, where again in accord with His will, they are nevertheless able to independently adjust the force with which they blow on the fire; as D. Kalligeropoulos and S. Vasileiado remark, they are “adaptive,” so that “a single person would give the initial command, and the machines would operate on their own, regulating their operation according to the conditions and the needs of work,” a model of “automatic production”. Indeed, the automata can even support Hephaestus in His own, ‘limping’ embodiment. Here, appropriately, the poet dwells most upon their sentience: Hephaestus

went forth halting; but there moved swiftly to support their lord [anakti] attendants [amphipoloi] wrought of gold in the semblance of living maids [zōēisi neēnisin eoikuiai]. In them is understanding [noös] in their hearts [meta phresin], and in them speech [audē] and strength, and from the immortal Gods they know [isasin] works [erga]. These busily moved to support their lord. (18.416-421, trans. Murray, mod.)

We see in the first place that these automata resemble humans more closely. Not only are they made in the likeness of living beings, they have been given a semblance of gender, and recognize Hephaestus as their lord, which is emphasized through repetition. And this is not merely an appearance of recognition, because the text is careful to say that they possess both phrēn, a ‘heart’ in the sense of a seat of cognition, especially emotional, and within it, nous, Homer’s most unambiguous term for ‘mind’, as well as speech. Even the ‘strength’, sthenos, that they are accorded seems to have for the poet a sense of living voluntary might, and not mere inanimate force. They have this activity through the metaphysically prior action of the Gods, generically; specifically from Hephaestus, of course, but there is the suggestion in “from the immortal Gods” that this fulfills a project that the Gods intend collectively in some sense, even if it is Hephaestus who actually has undertaken it.

The automata made by Hephaestus are an extension of His own embodiment, like the ‘staff’ (skēptron) upon which He leans. That He should have this further degree of embodiment is the corollary of His disability, which is similarly uncommon among the Gods. With embodiment comes disability; indeed, for superior beings, our kind of embodiment, with its inherent privations, is in itself disability. In supporting their ‘lord’, the automata also embody a virtuous possibility for human technology. Thus we see in the Odyssey that exceptional mortals, in a well-organized, just society, a virtual utopia, namely the Phaeacians, are also capable of implementing such technology. For the Phaeacian ships, too, possess phrēn (8.556), and they know (isasi) the thoughts (noēmata) and hearts (phrenas) of men (559). They know much else, as well: “they know the cities and rich fields of all peoples, and most swiftly do they cross over the gulf of the sea, hidden in mist and cloud, nor ever have they fear of harm or ruin,” (560-3, trans. Murray). The Phaeacian ships have an encyclopedic knowledge, again conceived well in advance of any practical achievement of the kind, that enables them to do what humans do, only better—for example, to chart their course without need to see where they are going. And even though they possess a cognitive faculty of broadly the same kind as humans, they are able to deploy their wide-ranging knowledge dispassionately, unhindered in its application by mortal attachment, and the fear that breeds in our own ‘hearts’. The Phaeacians possess other automata, as well: watchdogs of gold and silver fashioned by Hephaestus Himself (7.91-3), and golden torchbearers (7.100-102). Their special bond with Hephaestus is evident, as well, from their bard Demodocus singing about Hephaestus’ cleverness in trapping Aphrodite and Ares (8.266-366).

The Phaeacians’ uncommon technological mastery is directly connected to features of their social organization. Hence, for one thing, they have foregone investment in warfare: they “care not for bow or quiver, but for masts and oars of ships, and for the shapely ships,” (6.270-1). They have also empowered women in their society, “for Athena has given” to the Phaeacian women “knowledge [epistasthai] of works surpassingly beautiful, and worthy hearts [phrenas esthlas]” (7.110-1). The Phaeacians also have a degree of intimacy with the Gods uncommon for mortals. We may note that ‘talking’ statues were a rare, but far from unknown aspect of many cults, technology rendering more explicit the implicit responsiveness possessed by the Gods in every cult, but a work that as such falls under the purview of Hephaestus. Hephaestus thus symbolizes, in the work peculiar to Him, something broader in the relationship of the Gods to humans. Perhaps the Phaeacians’ technological marvels have been gifted to them as a result of their piety, rather than being purely the result of their own ingenuity, but it seems unimportant to choose between these options. For it is clear that, motivated by piety, the Phaeacians have removed everything from their society which would be an obstacle to the fullest exercise of human talent and creativity, and this is also associated with technological achievements beyond the capacity of other societies. We see from this that justice and technophany, the domains of Athena and of Hephaestus respectively, have an inherent bond, and furthermore that the perfection of automata, living machines, is a kind of criterion for its enactment. Machine life is the supreme technological accomplishment, and demands a just social order for its successful implementation.

This also impacts my understanding of the affirmation in Plato’s Timaeus of the singularity of the cosmos. Why does Timaeus go to such trouble to emphasize that the world-order he is describing, the ‘universe’—literally what ‘turns as one’—is one? His argument turns on the idea that the final state of the cosmos as perfected by the demiurge is not dualistic, that is, there is not at the end of the process of giving order to things a reified matter to which a different order might have been given, only a dreamlike ‘receptacle’. The account thus avoids reifying ‘matter’ as such. Prior to the demiurge’s work, there is that ‘disorderly motion’ which, as Proclus describes it, is illuminated by all the other Gods (IT I, 387), on the one hand. There are undoubtedly many other possible demiurgic organizations here, but they are also prior to ‘possibility’. Then, on the other, there is the ‘receptacle’ which, like a nurse, receives the infant cosmos, so that we see all the time phenomenal things being nourished in their formal character. But a nurse is not a mother, nor is the receptacle ‘matter’, but rather the manifestation of this process of ‘information’, of the demiurge’s work in its processual character.

The cosmos is an only child, and the relationship between it and its divine ‘father’ is one-to-one, not many-to-one, in either direction. The indefinitely many eternal Gods of whom it is the agalma—or cult image, if you will (Tim. 37c)—and who illuminate it beyond the possibility of order, are not as such its many parents, nor are Their many world-orders its siblings. This is also why, “having discovered the father of all things, it is impossible to proclaim him to all” (28c), because the cosmogonic process is internal to the participation of a God, and therefore does not have the universality of discourse. For this very reason, Timaeus’ cosmogony is merely ‘probable’ or ‘likely’ (eikos). The possibility of other world orders lies here, in theoretical discourse, but is therefore covered in the singularity of the account, which applies to any possible demiurge, and not to any peculiarly. Timaeus’ cosmogony is not a revelation, but something we can kick around, argue about, and rework as necessary. This is not to say that such inquiry is not divine in its own fashion, and hence Timaeus rightly invokes the Gods before beginning his account, but we don’t work with this account in the way we work with a myth, for example, where we do not argue with the text, but instead interpret it. We may hold Plato’s Timaeus in a certain awe, like Socrates has for the person of Parmenides, and so we may similarly feel it more prudent to say we don’t understand it in some respect than simply that it is wrong, but dialogue is nevertheless essential to it—it is, after all, a work of philosophy.

The cosmos formed by one demiurge thus is one, though it is at the same time an idol of indefinitely many Gods. Here, then, there is a relationship between one thing and an indefinite prior multiplicity, which in turn is mirrored in the indefinite posterior multiplicity of the materials of which the agalma is constructed, like the wood from which the carver draws forth the image of a God. There is not, again, a plurality of worlds, for the order of the world is one. The statue carved by the artisan is no longer the potential multiplicity which could instead have been made into a ladle. This is also how we must address the awkwardness modern readers feel at the idea that there is, according to Plato, ‘one world’ when in fact we see many stars with many worlds around them. But that is not the relevant sense of ‘world’. The ‘world’ in Plato’s sense, the kosmos, is the order perceived by us from wherever we are. Whether ourselves or some thoughtful extraterrestrial, we form, through our inquiries, ‘the’ world, which is aspirationally one, though in fact terms like ‘center’, ‘up’ or ‘down’, like ‘here’, are systematically vague precisely in order that ‘the world’ may be one. As Antonio correctly points out, “When someone appeals to their perception of the Sun as a single thing, they are not just gesturing toward confused bodily sensations. They are also relying on the presence of the same structuring essence within themselves as knowers and structuring the luminous body they are pointing to.” However, this logos or intellective formula also permits someone on another planet to refer to ‘the Sun’ even with respect to another star. The logos of a sun, which is always also the Sun for someone, permits all sorts of partial identities, for such is the nature of logoi. This lesser, intellectual form of unity is a condition of the translatability of one world-view or ‘conceptual scheme’ into another, which is at least one possible answer to the criticisms leveled against “the very idea of a conceptual scheme” by Donald Davidson in his famous 1973 article.

The looseness, so to speak, of logoi as designators forms a counterpart therefore to the contingency and physicality of names to which Antonio refers. The “nameless divine Sun” of which he legitimately speaks, though, is not only prior to any name taken in its “physicality”, but also prior therefore to those “structural features” to which he refers. It’s arguable, moreover, that there is a dimension of any divine name which transcends its physicality. The name as present in the intelligible intellect, for example, from which according to Proclus divine names emerge, is essentially the paradigm for the cosmos, and hence while embodied in “contingent sounds and images”, is irreducible to them. Intellective structures and concepts, too, are more than any of their given instances—which is the point, after all, of the entire doctrine of ‘forms’—but their very nature is to lend themselves to dialectical and dialogical explication, and hence to compromise their transcendence, as is evident from their translatability. So while it is true that a person referring to the Sun is not referring to mere bodily sensations with their Protean character, their conceptual reference to the Sun is also not free of ambiguity, because any concept necessarily picks out a type, and lacks unique reference. Proper names, on the contrary, in their unique designation, are what pick out the nameless as such. Re designates the “nameless divine Sun”, as does Surya; but the relationship of that ‘nameless’ divinity to Their name is not structured like that of the solar concept relative to the languages where it is present as soleil or taiyang, a declension of one to many, and hence always a partial non-identity, but rather a one-to-one relationship informing the cosmos in its totality.

On a different, though not altogether unrelated matter, I’d like to share a very interesting Twitter post from my friend and colleague Āṅgīrasaśreṣṭha, who has long been one of my most fruitful interlocutors among students of the Indic traditions. In the last several years, he has become a very insightful reader of the Platonic tradition. It has been deeply gratifying to me to have been able to introduce my friends in the Indic traditions to an understanding of Platonism which I believe makes comparative work between the Indic and Hellenic traditions far richer than has been the case with comparisons that are predictably self-serving on the Western side, whereas the Indian side has been too trusting, as much of the veracity of the West’s self-understanding as of its good intentions. My interactions with Āṅgīrasaśreṣṭha have also confirmed my belief that those who are already adept readers of traditions such as his will tend to understand better what the ancient Platonists were trying to do than those coming at them from a Western academic perspective.

In this short thread (https://x.com/GhorAngirasa/status/1931984170659762428), Āṅgīrasaśreṣṭha articulates a reading of the Śaiva-siddhānta similar to that I’ve previously encountered in posts on Twitter from Premavardhanam, for example here or here, who also has a Substack himself now that I warmly recommend. Āṅgīrasaśreṣṭha speaks of attempting to articulate a concept of “‘categorical’/ʻuniversal’ Śivatvam,” or Śiva-ness, “as an analogue of the One,” which while functioning as a principle, also “neither is, nor is one” in the formulation from the Parmenides (141e). He reasons thus along the following lines:

1. Every sentient is a Śiva (a Cidghana, a unique unit of consciousness) and therefore has an inseparable Cicchakti (individuality), which is but its Śivatvam/Śiva-ness.

2. Imagine a set consisting of every sentient’s Śivatvam. One may therefore speak of a universal Śivatvam, for discussion’s sake.

3. In the Siddhānta, universals are denied—there is no universal separate from the individuals which partake in it.

4. “The One/Śivatvam neither is”—Śivatvam as universal does not exist, separate from individual instances or Śivatvam.

5. “Nor is Śivatvam one”—There is no universal Śivatvam that is ‘one’—i.e. a unique entity—as it cannot partake in itself.

6. Therefore, Śivatvam is an infinite class of members, one for each sentient.

I find this line of thought fascinating, and would like to share some thoughts, while of course making no pretense of being able to comment on the underlying tradition itself. In general terms, however, one might think that in a certain respect it is a category mistake to attempt to identify Śiva with the Platonic first principle. But I see this rather as an example of what, in theory, happens within the perspective of any God and, by extension, in Their participant. The One is distributed, without remainder, into each God, and so it is appropriate to apply to each God the negations of the first hypothesis of the Parmenides with respect to the ontic quality of Their ‘X-ness’, i.e., the ‘Hera-ness’ of Hera, which is like the unity of the One, which is only a separable property in the second hypothesis, which has the form, in effect, of ‘Hera is Hera’ or ‘Hera has Hera-ness’.

When the argument turns to the participants, to the many sentient beings who are each “a Śiva”, we may think that is only possible within the soteriological framework of Śaiva-siddhānta. However, this too is implicit in the relationship with any God, even if it is articulated to vastly differing degrees in diverse traditions. If we think of ‘the One’ as the conception of a principle as such, from which has been stripped anything that would be particular to a given ontology, any particular account of the composition of reality, then we may say that the effort to see the world from the perspective, so to speak, of one’s Ishtadeva results in an ontology necessarily deviating to some determinate degree from the zero point represented by the notion of ‘the One’. This deviation may be conceived as the non-zero value of the property distributed by participating the God, like Śivatvam or ‘Hera-ness’. By participating ‘Hera-ness’, perceiving the universe from Hera’s unique perspective, I become in a sense ‘a Hera’, insofar as ‘Hera-ness’ becomes my sufficient ontological determination. Hera is all things from Her unique perspective, and so I have a unique location in Being, an address, so to speak, within Her, in whom I exist sub specie aeternitatis. In this sense, we may say that henadology provides a soteriology inherent in any God simply qua God.

Har Har Mahadev!

@philoantonio

Philosopher, Teacher, Student of Astrology

By Antonio Vargas

Antonio’s remarks are in Portuguese, but the machine translation by YouTube is quite sufficient, I suppose especially if one is familiar with his work. Antonio is consistently one of the most insightful commentators on Platonic philosophy, displaying a depth of understanding far beyond so many who have received their laurels from the academy in the form of tenured posts, Festschrifts, and cadres of devoted students hanging on their every word. He is one of those for whom, like myself, the effort to think with, and not merely about the ancient philosophers is not so much a choice as an existential demand.

The question he addresses, moreover, is one which always comes up sooner or later in discussions of polytheism, namely that of the domains shared by multiple Gods, and the implications of this phenomenon. Since it seems one can never have said the last word on this topic, I decided to formulate a reply at length, instead of confining myself to a comment on Antonio’s page, or to a thread somewhere.

The ‘problem’ of many Gods sharing a single domain seems to trouble contemporary polytheists and commentators on polytheism rather more than it did the ancients. This is certainly, in part, because the many Gods were first and foremost a fact for the ancients, even if much was not understood about Them, whereas for moderns They are a dubious hypothesis, the understanding of which is accordingly demanded in advance (even if a similar demand is not made of the monotheist ‘God’). As a result, we may note that when the ancients did take up this issue, their solutions were not especially confident at first. As I discuss at length in my recent book, Polytheism in Greek Philosophy (nota bene, Amazon affiliate link) the earlier Greek philosophers are chiefly concerned, not with the nature of the Gods as such, but with expanding the scope of divine participation to include the grasp of principles or archai, things which are divine in a certain sense, but are not Gods.

For Plato and Aristotle, similarly to the Presocratics, there is much about the Gods which philosophers take as given in order to explore what mortals have a better shot at understanding. Among the things taken for granted in this fashion was the open-ended multiplicity of the Gods: “And as soul thus controls and indwells in all things everywhere that are moved, must we not necessarily affirm that it controls Heaven also? … One soul, is it, or several [pleious]? I will answer for you—several,” (Laws 896e, trans. Bury). With respect to the multiplicity of ‘pantheons’ of Gods (a term which did not yet exist), we note that Plato, unlike Herodotus, does not ‘translate’ the names of foreign Gods into Greek ones. (Herodotus himself had in any case been quite unclear and even contradictory on the subject.) The only case in Plato’s works where we find a foreign God identified with a Greek one, the case of Egyptian Neith and Greek Athena, is reported in the Timaeus as a matter of testimony by the Egyptians of Saïs, rather than as a matter of his own deduction or some kind of positing a priori. I have discussed at length elsewhere the importance Socrates attaches in the Philebus and the Cratylus to the names of the Gods, and the significance of this for how conceptualization is to approach Them.

The first thinkers to treat polytheism, and particularly the multiplicity of national pantheons, as a problem, in effect, during the Hellenistic and early Imperial period, had only simplistic solutions, based on the analogy of the translatability of different names assigned to the same mundane objects in different languages. This was the theoretical resource most ready to hand, but it was always, I would argue, implicitly understood to be less than satisfactory as an account of the Gods, who were not, by any means, mundane objects, nor mere ideas; and the difference between common nouns and proper names with respect to translatability was, as we can see from Socrates, already understood. I would argue that when Middle Platonists such as Plutarch, for whom the encounter with foreign religions has become a more pressing issue for thought, retreat from this discipline and embrace in principle the ‘translational’ paradigm, in which there are different names for the same God in different languages as there are different names for a hammer, they do so not without discomfort. Plutarch is quite aware of the difficulties that present themselves in such an account, so that while he states that the Gods of the nations are the same with different names, he nevertheless does not pursue an aggressive policy of such ‘translation’, but rather sticks most of the time to elucidating, e.g., Egyptian religion for his Greek readers without really attempting to reduce the vast difference between these cultures to a mere matter of reception. It would take further and harder thought by subsequent generations of philosophers to devise a theoretical structure truly adequate to this difference, which would come with the restoration of Platonism to a fundamentally henological, rather than eidetic account of multiplicity, in the new Plotinian synthesis. Plotinus’ student Porphyry was seemingly hesitant to pursue this synthesis in its full radicality, but it was embraced enthusiastically by Iamblichus and the subsequent Platonic successors, and resulted in the expansive doctrine of divine ‘henads’ for which this blog is named. When Porphyry, at once genuinely wondering, but also perhaps with a maieutic intention, explicitly poses the question of ‘translation’ in theurgic contexts to Iamblichus in book VII (4-5) of On the Mysteries, Iamblichus replies firmly and unequivocally that translation has its limits, as had been elevated to the status of a rule in the Chaldean Oracles: “Do not alter the foreign names” (frag. 150)—in other words, when in doubt, which can only be most of the time where Gods are involved, do not translate. This applies to proper names, as well as to common nouns depending on how close they are to the divine, and hence how much stands to be lost in translation. (This is what we typically do in any case, of course: we don’t translate proper names, and when a concept seems too semantically rich for straightforward translation, we tend to leave it untranslated as well, as we can see from the lists that circulate of ‘untranslatable’ words from diverse languages.)

Where the question of divine multiplicity seems especially troubling to moderns, however, and probably distinctly more so than it was for the ancients, is with respect to the relationship of the Gods to things most tangible in their singularity, such as the sun and other heavenly bodies, or to natural forces, things that are typically reckoned to have a certain close relationship to the divine, but which, on the other hand, also share a concreteness with mundane objects referred to by common nouns, the translation of which is regarded as unproblematic. The tangibility of such objects has additional weight for us today because of our default materialism, which is not to say that there were not materialists in antiquity as well. The materialism of antiquity was not the same as ours, however. And there was also a longstanding tradition of interrogating the materialist position that we have allowed to lapse, having elevated our own brand of materialism to a status of not merely epistemic, but moral authority. For us, this is what it means to be a sober, responsible and trustworthy thinker. For ancient philosophers, but even, I think, for ordinary people, things were rather different. Far from being the ultimate adjudicator of any conflicting claims, even when perceptions of physical objects were granted epistemic authority, they lacked the ability to resolve conflicts concerning the status of those objects, because their reception came necessarily through human bodies inscrutable in their own complexity, and in a flow of time that introduced further unresolvable complications. So the singularity of physical objects was no kind of foundation. Here, it is ourselves who can be charged with a naïve ‘faith’ that the problematic status of certain objects is resolvable in principle. (Merleau-Ponty spoke aptly of ‘perceptual faith’ as an element to be reckoned with in any phenomenology.)

How is the unity of something like our Sun secured? We all see the Sun, it shines on one and all. It may be regarded as a visible animal upon which many perspectives are available without its unity being destroyed as a result. The unity of an animal is in general supplied by its soul, which makes it not only an object, but also a subject; not only the focal point of my perspective on it but the source of its own, so that the Sun looks at me, too. If the Sun is an animal, it ought, indeed, have a name; and it could have many names, since it has the freedom that any physical object has with respect to names. For in virtue of its very physicality, no physical object is inseparable from its name.

This is the converse of the epistemic authority we grant to such objects to have a say, so to speak, beyond any intellectual determinations. This is what the ‘Giants’ of whom the Eleatic Stranger speaks in the Sophist are appealing to when they lay their hands on something and say, emphatically, ‘This’. It is a security that both grounds, and also ungrounds, and this is not a bug, but a feature, for it allows perception its critical weight relative to conceptions.

This grants to an animal such as the Sun an inherent anonymity—this is, I think, what Antonio means in speaking of ‘nameless Gods’. So when I address the Sun as Re, and another addresses Them as Helios, what exactly is the issue? Ostensibly, it is because there is so much that is true of Re that is not true of Helios and vice versa. Nor, we must remember, is this solely an issue between pantheons, but also within them, because there are diverse ways in which Egyptians and Greeks, even among themselves, can address the Sun. Helios and Apollo are the Sun in different respects, as is Re and any of the many Goddesses referred to as the ‘Eye of Re’. Egyptians even refer to the visible disc of the Sun as distinct from any divinity. (This is that ‘Aten’ that Akhenaten made his sole divinity, and tried to impose on others.) And so internal to these very world-orders or kosmoi, there is a lack of closure between an object of perception, even one so omnipresent, and any names or properties we might attribute to it, and the diverse webs of association in which it features through them. In fact, far from introducing confusion into the supposedly unproblematic singularity of the perceptual object, these webs or nets are what specify these objects, what allow us any purchase on them in the flux of time and reception. And so it is not the case that the Sun is one, and we have made Them many by calling Them ‘Re’ and ‘Helios’ and other things, but rather that each of these is a path along which the inherent multiplicity of the Sun is resolved.

The conception of the Sun that we consider to be normative is impoverished, and was arrived at through a process of winnowing down the rich conception from which we began. Hence when Heraclitus states that the Sun is the width of a human foot, he is not expressing some original, naïve perception, but proposing a new, artificial one—he is producing the field of ‘raw’ perceptual data, which never existed on its own, for there is no creature who is not already in a relationship with the Sun far more complex than this. What we think of as the ‘natural’ Sun beyond all merely ‘cultural’ ties is the Sun which is the width of a human foot. This is why the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro believed it indispensible to invert this relationship of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, and speak of a ‘multinaturalism’ rather than ‘multiculturalism’, in order to do justice to the real plurality of ontologies that precede—not only historically, but metaphysically—the formation of this denuded ‘nature’ with its one-foot-wide Sun.

Perhaps it was this vivid sense of just how problematic any supposedly unproblematic being turns out to be when examined that led Plato’s Academy, at a certain point, to adopt Skepticism, in the Hippocratic spirit of ‘doing no harm’. Clearly it was preferable for them that our lights carve out illumination in piecemeal fashion than that everything be flooded in a distorting light from concepts that fail to recognize their limitations.