Notes on the Esoteric Plato

 

November 14, 2022

These are notes that I found on my outdated but useful AlphaSmart word processor. The reading and notes are a response to the Secret History of Western Esotericism podcast (SHWEP), which I began listening to in the autumn of 2020. Therefore, the notes were written after that, and likely in 2021. I will reproduce the text here—as an artifact—with only a few grammatical corrections and expansions for clarity. The latter are indicated in brackets.

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Listening to the SHWEP has prompted me to return to Plato’s texts after many years. Actually, the detailed discussions on the podcast have inspired me to read Platonic texts I had never read before (i.e., the Parmenides and the Timaeus). I have been struck by how holistic Plato is when it comes to bridging the gap between rational and extra-rational modes of knowing, let us [call them]. [What follows will be] overly schematic in order to highlight some points I find significant.

From the perspective of intellectual history (that is, from the perspective of what might be presented in a course with “intellectual history” in the title), Plato comes across as the father of rational philosophizing in the traditions stemming from the Greeks. A nod is given to the pre-Socratics. I take it that this is roughly how Plato appears in the analytical cannon, at least as a necessary link in the chain leading to Aristotelian logic. I do not think that this is entirely inaccurate.

Nevertheless, I have been struck by all the ways that Plato describes extra-rational inspiration impinging upon the person, and therefore impacting discursive philosophy itself. In fact, he seems to be always trying to integrate the extra-rational into the latter, as if making it an essential moment of the whole.

Lokilech, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons

"Diagram of the sheep's liver found near Piacenza with Etruscan inscriptions"—Wikipedia article on the Haruspex 

For example, long passages in the Timaeus are concerned with what we might call the relationship between human consciousness and the body. For all the talk of Aristotle being the naturalist, these passages of Plato’s would not be wholly out of place in Aristotle’s De Anima.

At any rate, Plato [describes] how the higher, rational part of the soul communicates with the lower parts, which are more connected to the organism.

Interestingly (and this is very much in keeping with divinatory [practice] across the Near East [and Mediterranean worlds]), the liver figures as the mediator between the higher and lower parts of the soul, and is the site of divination.

Plato says that it is the lower soul which receives divine inspiration, as evidenced by the fact that sleeping, mad, intoxicated, etc., people are more likely to be oracular. In other words, inspiration of this sort corresponds to a paralysis of the rational functions. He seems to [say] that, in a certain sense, this kind of knowledge is actually higher, but to be of any use, it [must] be dealt with by the rational intellect. It is the sober man who can interpret an oracle, not the intoxicated one who delivers the oracle.

This whole scheme preserves a kind of hierarchy where the rational soul must be in charge. But [the rational soul] is dependent on the inspirations that are received in the lower soul and sent up via the liver.

Now, the talk about divination parallels Plato’s passages on poets. In fact, he often pairs these two concepts (divination and poetry). At least one scholar (I will have to look for this article), argues that—in the corpus as a whole—Plato refers to divination as often as he does poetry. However, because of the preoccupations of humanistic scholars, Plato’s views on poetry have been treated at length, whereas the subject of divination has barely been broached. This is the result of modern prejudices. Clearly, people in literature departments have been very interested in what Plato has to say about poetry and poets.

[The article is Plato and Divination by Peter T. Struck. The abstract states: “Plato uses the idea of divinatory knowledge as a metaphorical descriptor for a variety of kinds of daytime, waking knowing. What unites these examples is that they all include discussion of a kind of knowing that cannot account for itself, and that is tentative, imagistic and non-discursive. These metaphorical uses can further be illuminated by his more detailed discussion of divinatory knowledge itself in Timeaus.”]

But the conception is much the same. It is well known that Plato is concerned about the tendency of poets to distort the truth. [Whether there is a systematic “Platonic poetics is another question, see Stephen Halliwell.] He does not, however, say that they are always wrong. At least in the Timaeus and other texts I have looked at over the past few months, he says that poets often do hit upon the truth, but, like oracles, they do not know where it comes from. They are deficient in that they cannot account for the truths through discursive argumentation. Put another way, in order to fully deploy the truths brought out by poets or oracles, discursive reason is needed.

It is notable how often this happens in real time in the dialogues. Sometimes Socrates says, “I divine that,” or something else indicating that he has been suddenly inspired. He cannot immediately account for the knowledge. He then says, roughly, “Now let’s put this idea to the test through rational discourse.” It is reason that determines whether the inspiration is true or useful (hence the hierarchy is preserved, if we can say that there is a kind of map of human faculties in Plato), but without the extra-rational inspiration, reason would not have had an object on which to operate.