Steve Watson

Thoughts on Beginning Reading E. Moore’s ‘Neoplatonism’ in the IEP

It’s remarkable the amount of incoherence there is in this merely speculative cosmology. One that struck me in the first paragraphs is that the Neoplatonists do not succeed in supporting the consistency of their claims that ‘The One’ (το ‘εν) is absolutely united and singular and perfect and also that it is the creator of this imperfect world. Plotinus wants to say that Reality is nothing but the expression of the contemplations of the One and that imperfections arise just as they do when our own souls attempt to express perfect ideas. In the latter case, however, we know that the imperfections arise from corruptions by the world; there is no such world to corrupt the expression of the One. The term ‘expression’ is itself misleading for there is no (ex-) ‘outside’ to receive the effect of the One’s contemplations. Reality, here is just another part of the One’s consciousness – no more external than a dream – and therefore just as perfect as all the rest of the One, ex hypothesi.

But more than that, how is it possible for this simple unity to have any parts at all? Isn’t any such differentiation of its Being an imperfection and a plurality? How can the One have thoughts or contemplations? What is there to contemplate? What can contemplations be done with? Consider a piece of undifferentiated putty: it does not feel or think; nor does it dream. No more can the One.

And consider the idea that the One – or let us just say God – was the creator of a real external world. How could God make the world imperfect? He could not so desire it and if he did not desire it, it would not be so. This is basic Problem of Evil stuff. But even if he might desire imperfections. He would have the problem of being unable to choose to do so. It seems very plausible that the world can only be perfect in one way. (I suppose that there might be ways in which different worlds might be equally perfect, but it seems unlikely. If everything in the world were just 10% larger then that world would be effectively identical with this world in terms of perfections. That’s a sort of Quine-Duhem observation.) If that were the case and there were an infinite number of ways to make that world imperfect, then God would have to select one of those ways to spoil the world. How could God make this decision? How could one of those imperfections rise in His contemplation to the point of selection? How can God be random and uncaused, and how can he act without it being random and uncaused?

The Neoplatonic gesture at a solution to this is to imagine that the fundamental point of departure for the creation of the world comes with the duality of the first manifestations – νους and ψυχη – but that’s no solution at all. A better solution might be a Dualist or Pluralist solution in which several gods act against each other. Against this possibility is the series of arguments that seem to indicate that if there is a God it is solo. But maybe those arguments aren’t as good or univalent as they are supposed to be. I have in mind a critique of the First Cause argument for God. We accept that everything has a cause and that therefore there is a cause for everything and therefore, unless we want an infinite regress we have to have a First Cause, which is God. But it’s not at all unusual for a single event to have two causes: for example, the fire is a result of the dry paper and the match being applied. The fire would not eventuate without both events which are both therefore causes. The argument to First Cause doesn’t require that the First Cause be alone, only that there is at least one cause operating. Perhaps, however, there are many causes all at the First level. What then? Well, to start with, we have a way of introducing plurality to the world and who knows what might follow from that.