Necesidad del Tratamiento de Agua
ANEXO 4: CONTAMINANTES COMUNES Y SUS FUENTES POTENCIALES
Fabulae et symbola verum et demonstrant et tegunt, produnt et tacent.282
Plotinus describes himself, not as an innovative thinker or the founder of any philosophical system, but as an exegete of ‘the ancients’. He tells his readers: ‘Our doctrines are not novel, nor are they modern: they were said long ago, but not open- ly. Our present doctrines are explanations of those older ones, and the words of Plato himself show that they are ancient.’283 It is widely agreed that Plotinus was in- deed engaged in exegesis of a philosophic textual tradition owing its greatest debt to the Platonic dialogues,284and his work, while usually described as ‘Neoplatonist’, is better described simply as ‘Platonist’. Plotinus would not have understood the term ‘Neoplatonist’, and saw himself as a philosopher in the same tradition as Plato.285
But a further aspect of Plotinus’ express view of his philosophical project, en- capsulated in the quotation above, is that his doctrines are not presented as ‘Platon- ist’ doctrines; they are presented as explanations of ancient λόγοι, stemming from a deeper tradition of which Plato is himself a part, rather than an originator. In other words, Plato is seen as a strong exemplar of the philosophy of the ancients, and by showing that one is in agreement with Plato, one can show that one is in agreement with that philosophy.
An aspect of the problem of ineffability not yet touched upon is the problem of transmission; how might a textual or other tradition discuss, teach, or otherwise transmit knowledge of the unthinkable, the unsayable? One possible answer to this
282Casel 1919, 91, on Plutarch.
283V.1[10]8.10-12, translation based on Hadot 1993, 17-18.
284See e.g. Charrue 1978, 17-41; Fowden 1982, 38; Dillon 1992; Hadot 1993, 17-18.
285E.g. Charrue 1978, 16 and n. 7; Blumenthal 1996, 82. For a recent critique of the terms ‘Middle-’
and ‘Neoplatonist’, see Athanassiadi 2006, 23-6.
question is suggested by the structures of Platonist philosophy: since the Forms are eternal truths, access to the Forms (and, for Plotinus, access to nous, the location of the Forms) guarantees the philosophic seeker an atemporal, unchanging reservoir of truth upon which he may draw through personal philosophic anagôgê.286 This method of accessing the truth is insisted upon by Plotinus, and much in the Enneads may be read as detailed instructions for attaining to this type of knowledge;287 the texts of Plato and other great philosophers would then be the textual concomitant of this philosophic truth. But texts transmit knowledge; what tradition can transmit that which transcends knowledge and speech?
A tempting answer is: The Neoplatonist tradition. Sara Rappe sees the attempt at a textual incorporation of the ineffable as a central dynamic of Late Platonist writ- ing.288 Reading Plotinus, we find that he gives a similar answer to this question; he constructs just such an ‘unwritten’ textual tradition as Rappe sees in late Platon- ism, but he locates this tradition in the Hellenic past. Plotinus sometimes finds the unwritable truth of transcendence embedded, or culturally located, in very concrete historical instances, textual and otherwise: in Platonic dialogues, of course, and in the riddling phrases of Presocratic philosophers, but also in myths, religious ritu- als, and oracles. This tradition is conceived by Plotinus as a perennial wisdom with immemorial origins. As we might expect from the Platonist premise noted above, that philosophic wisdom is eternal and unchanging; paradoxically, however, he lo- cates it simultaneously within history, and thus in the world of body and of change, and most interestingly for the present inquiry, defines it esoterically. The ‘truth’ of the one’s ineffability is not explained by the great tradition; it is hidden within that tradition.
286See e.g. V.8[31]4.36-7; V.8[31]5.5-9; cf. Hadot 1993, 40; Eon 1970, 260-1. Access to truth through
nous is discussed 215 ff. below.
287See Rist 1964b, 87-112 for an interpretation of this process in Plotinus.
288’It would not be an exaggeration to say that Neoplatonism conceives itself as a tradition that is
forced to allude to something like the principle of ineffability as the final authority for its exegetical authenticity. Absurd as this may seem at first glance, what the Neoplatonists attempt at all costs is no less than a textual incorporation of the ineffable.’ (Rappe 2000, 119-20).
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The conception of tradition held by Plotinus is thus very important for under- standing his approach to philosophic silence; Plotinian exegesis is often explicitly presented as a process of unveiling the hidden. It is important to keep in mind that there are two concepts of ‘tradition’ at work in scholarly studies of Plotinus: on the one hand, the concept of Neoplatonism, or simply of Platonism, constructions which rightly refer us to the Platonists’ use of Platonic materials as dogmatic texts for exege- sis, and on the other, the traditions constructed by the Platonists themselves. When we pay attention to these conceptions of tradition, we find that the Platonists tend not to define themselves as such; in fact, while Plotinus ardently defends his own agreement with the philosophy of Plato, he never defines himself as a ‘Platonist’, many scholarly assertions to the contrary notwithstanding.289
The purpose of the present chapter is to present the evidence which survives for construction of tradition, and of self-definition in terms of that tradition, in earlier Platonism, with a view to contextualising Plotinus’ own self-definition and esoter- ic hermeneutics. Plotinus’ ideas about his tradition have often escaped notice or been underplayed in scholarly literature, perhaps partly because they operate in the background of his work, and he rarely feels the need to state them explicitly; this, however, ought to alert us to their fundamental importance to his thought, as basic assumptions lying behind his use of the philosophical tradition, rather than cause us to discount these assumptions as unimportant to his philosophy. By examining the Middle Platonists we can flesh out Plotinus’ own ideas of the perennial tradition to which he feels he belongs and bring them to the foreground.
Philosophic Lineage and Perennial Wisdom in Platonism
To this end, a brief overview of certain aspects of post-Hellenistic philosophical culture is in order, followed by an outline of the Platonist perennialism which rose to prominence in the first and second centuriesCE, which will elucidate many state- ments found in the Enneads concerning the nature of the true philosophical tradition and its esoteric character.
Hairesis and the Exegetic Turn in Post-Hellenistic Philosophy. To begin with, we may note the formalisation of philosophical allegiance, beginning in the Hel- lenistic period, which became a structural norm of philosophy as a practice and as a genre thereafter.290 One was, for the most part, not simply a philosopher; one was a philosopher of a given school. This is not to say that writings and discourses of philosophers ceased to differ widely, or that these schools represented monolithic orthodoxies;291 the point here is one of philosophic identity. This identity was de- fined most usually in our period as αἵρεσις. This term, meaning ‘lineage’ or ‘school of thought’, implies both the transmission of a certain intellectual content and cor- responding loyalties and antipathies vis à vis competing schools.292 In the late an- tique period αἵρεσις also seems increasingly to betoken a concern with what may (somewhat inexactly) be called ‘orthodoxy’;293it is used by Plotinus only in a context where his version of philosophic truth is threatened by what is seen as a perversion of the true tradition.294
A second broad development in philosophy, related to the rise of self-definition by lineage, arose later, in the post-Hellenistic period: it might be called the ‘exegetic turn’, whereby philosophers increasingly sought to situate their search for truth in terms of a canon of privileged texts, rather than in the κανών, or criterion for true
290D.L. 1.17-21; the term αἵρεσις occurs more than forty times in this work, as do διαδοχή and its
cognates, showing the degree of importance attached to school-lineage. S.E. P. 1.1-17. On the rise of ‘schoolcraft’ in post-Hellenistic philosophy generally see Glucker 1978, 166-206; Hadot 1979; Sedley 1989, 97; Boys-Stones 2001, 130-1; Trapp 2007, 13. For a good general discussion with special reference to Epicureanism, see Sedley 1989 passim.
291Cf. Rist 1964b, 57. See Lim 1995, esp. 31-69 on disputation, dialectic and competition between
Platonist philosophers.
292See Glucker 1978, 166-206 for a detailed discussion of this term, the related terms σχολή and δια-
τριβή, and their Latin equivalents. The latter terms refer to institutions (ibid. 159), while αἵρεσις refers to a school of thought in the broad sense; it is the most apt ancient term for what is meant by the modern ‘Neoplatonism’.
293See Athanassiadi 2006, 19-22 on αἵρεσις generally, and ibid. 21-22 for the increasing use of hairesis
in the late antique to indicate perverse or wrong choice of allegiance.
294The term appears in Plotinus with the meaning under discussion only in his attack on the Gnostics
(II.9[33]6.6. and 15.4; see further 146 below). In Porphyry’s Life the Christians and others (clearly Gnostics, judging from the texts which Porphyry says they read) in Plotinus’ circle are αἱρετικοὶ δὲ ἐκ τῆς παλαιᾶς φιλοσοφίας(16.2; see Athanassiadi 2006, 129-30); the term, however, can still mean simply ‘school of thought’ in the neutral sense in Porphyry (Glucker 1978, 187).
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knowledge, which had been the main locus for the siting of truth claims in Hel- lenistic philosophy.295 De Haas proposes, in this regard, a division of the history of late ancient philosophy into two periods, the first (from the beginning of the post- Hellenistic period until about Plotinus’ time) a period of ‘establishing the universal truth’ and the second (from the time of Plotinus’ successors until the Arab conquest) of ‘exploring the universal truth.’296 This is a useful generalisation, and with the obvious297and less obvious exceptions298to the rule, provides a fairly apt overview of broader developments in philosophical culture in the Roman Empire. Epicurus might have claimed to have learned nothing from his teachers, or Zeno and Arce- silaus have berated each other for lack of originality,299 but for a Stoic, Epicurean, or Platonist to have made similar claims seems to have been unthinkable from the post-Hellenistic period onward. As Armstrong observes,300 the authority of philo- sophic founders commonly did not extend to the tradition as a whole; one could and did disagree vociferously even with one’s immediate teachers, but never with the canonic authors themselves.
An important phenomenon involving both school allegiance and the exegetic ap- proach in post-Hellenistic and later philosophy is the movement toward ‘harmon- isation’ of various schools or thinkers under the aegis of one’s chosen allegiance. This took many forms. We see it already in speculations preserved by Cicero as to
295See generally Athanassiadi-Fowden 1981, 149; Hadot 1987b, 14-23; Armstrong 1990c, 414; De Haas
2003, 253-4; Van Nuffelen 2011, 2-3. On the κανών, see Sedley and Brunschwig 2003, 157.
2962003, 242-3.
297An obvious and prominent exception to this model is the Sceptical Academy, and perhaps this
is an exception which proves the rule, insofar as the Sceptics’ rejection of any universal truth as a basic methodological principle was an approach which fell dramatically out of favour from the first centuryCEonwards.
298One possible objection to this generalisation is based on an argumentum e silentio, but still in my
view worth noting; namely, that authors of this period who did pursue a more aporetic or inconclu- sive approach to philosophic reasoning, or who did not base their arguments on the authoritative philosophers of the past, would have ipso facto been unlikely to have achieved much recognition, and were hence unlikely to have been copied in the manuscript tradition, precisely because of the rise of the exegetical approach and the increasing school ‘orthodoxy’ of mainstream philosophic cul- ture. The example of Galen stands out as a notable exception and our sole surviving exemplar of a second-century philosopher who made strong claims to originality (see Trapp 2007, 17-18), but his works were primarily medical, and so their survival is congruent with this conjecture, which should be understood as applying to philosophy strictly understood.
299Cic. Acad. Pri. II.16.1-4; cf. Plut. Colot. p. 1121 F. 3001990c, 425.
the fundamental unity of all the ‘Socratic schools’, who differ ‘more in terminolo- gy than in ideas’,301 and it seems to have been a main component of Antiochus of Ascalon’s philosophical project.302 The position of Aristotle vis à vis Plato was the most outstanding issue in need of harmonisation for the Platonists,303 and was a hotly contested issue at all times; the anti-Peripatetic second-century Platonist Atti- cus wrote an Against Those Who Undertake to Interpret Plato’s Doctrines Through Those of Aristotle,304 and Numenius, writing at roughly the same time, sees Aristotle’s work as an entirely separate tradition from Plato;305 on the other side, Antiochus of Ascalon is reported by Cicero to have defended the essential unity of the Academy and Peripatos,306 and Porphyry explicitly embraces Aristotle as a Platonist.307 The fifth-century Hierocles of Alexandria seems to have believed that mischievous later philosophers actually bastardised (νοθεῦσαι) the works of Plato to make it seem as though he and Aristotle had disagreed, when in fact they, like other philosophers in- cluding Ammonius Saccas, Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Plutarch of Athens, were all part of a single divine tradition.308 The matter seems to have been ultimate- ly resolved in unanimous favour of Aristotle’s inclusion in the canon,309 although observers continued to question the appropriateness of this harmonisation well into late antiquity.310
Perennial Wisdom in Platonism. Against this historical background of school loyalty and exegesis, which constituted the doxographical structure of post-Hellenistic philosophic debate, the powerful idea of a perennial tradition of truth arose. It has
301Ac. II.15.12-20. . . Peripateticos et Academicos, nominibus differentis, re congruentis, aquibus Stoici ipsi
verbis magis quam sententiis dissenserunt (13-15).
302Cic. N.D. I.16; see Dillon 1977, 52-106; Boys-Stones 2001, 128; Trapp 2007, 16. 303See in general Hadot 1993, 17-18; Karamanolis 2006.
304Πρὸς τοὺς διὰ τῶν ᾿Αριστοτέλους τὰ Πλάτωνος ὑπισκνουμένους. Fragments of this work are
preserved in Eusebius; see Des Places 1977, 8-9.
305Fr. 24.67-70. See Karamanolis 2006, 127-149. 306Acad. post. 15ff; Fin. 5.7.
307See Edwards 2000, xxxi-ii.
308Ap. Phot. Bibl. cod. 214, 173a18-18-40.
309Edwards 2000, lii describes it as a late antique Platonist ‘dogma’, and himself considers Aristotle
a Platonist (ibid. xi).
310Writing in the sixth century, Elias attacks Iamblichus for suppressing the differences between Plato
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been widely noted that certain currents of philosophy in the Roman Empire increas- ingly theorised, from about the first centuryCE, that an ancient tradition of truth had existed, traceable back to the earliest times.311 Van Nuffelen rightly argues that the first appearance of this idea should be pushed back to the first centuryBCE on the basis of evidence from Varro and others,312 but the work of earlier scholars tracing the widespread rise of perennialism is right to date it to around the latter half of the first century CE,313 which accords well with the concurrent rise of the exegetic ap- proach, which led to a natural turning of the philosophic gaze toward the past as a repository of truth.314
While Platonism was an exegetical movement and the product of an exegetical age, ‘perennialism’, as I wish to define it, was more than simply an exegetical ap- proach to a hallowed tradition.315 The idea in its most basic form, that knowledge of the truth is as old as humankind or even eternal, has been seen as arising in later Stoicism,316the thought of Posidonius of Rhodes having exerted special influence in this regard.317 The claim for a wisdom as old as mankind might at any rate make sense in terms of Stoic cosmology, where innate logos serves as a constant source of truth inherent in the structure of the universe. The Platonic Forms serve an analo- gous function for followers of Plato, as mentioned above; perhaps this ideological framework was one factor which led to the widespread adoption of perennialism as a common, or even a characteristic, trait of Platonism from about the first centuryCE onward.
311E.g. De Haas 2003, 251: ‘. . . The vexed issue of the criterion of truth was surpassed by the growing
belief in a universal truth from which all human wisdom had drawn since times immemorial. . . . From the first century AD onwards most philosophers came to treat the history of philosophy as a series of attempts at unfolding and exploring this single truth.’ Cf. Festugière 1981, I, 20-6; Hadot 1987b, 23 ff.; Whittaker 1987, 120-1; O’Meara 1989, 13.
312Van Nuffelen 2011, 27-45. 313See n. 311 above.
314Cf. Frede 1997, 220; 229-30.
315See Dörrie 1987, 16-32; Armstrong 1990c on the role of tradition and text in Platonism generally. 316See Frede 1994, 5193-4. The idea of an ancient wisdom may of course be pushed back considerably
further in Greek intellectual history (e.g. Boys-Stones 2001, 3-17, who begins his account of the rise of the idea of a ‘primitive truth’ with the Hesiodic and early Orphic accounts of the lost golden age).
We do not find a perennialist stance in every Middle Platonist; we have little reason to suspect such an approach in Atticus, for example,318and Alcinoüs presents himself as expounding Plato, and makes no attempt to situate Plato within a larger tradition. Proclus refers to these thinkers as the ‘literalists’.319On the other hand, we find in Plutarch an extensive use of the themes of perennialism (identified below), and there is no doubt that he believed in an ancient wisdom and saw his own work as a continuation of it.320 Maximus of Tyre, generally considered a Platonising sophist, shows a classicising respect for Homer and the very ancient Hellenic tradition which amounts at times to a ‘scriptural’ approach to these texts.321
We may place Numenius and Celsus in the category of fully fledged Platonist perennialists:322 they theorise an immemorial tradition of truth of which Plato forms a part, they read this tradition as innately authoritative, and their conception of tra- dition involves further characteristic elements of Platonist perennialism, to which we now turn.
The ‘Ancients’ and the Ancient Sages. Perennialism as we find it developed in some Middle Platonists and Plotinus is more than the basic idea of an ancient tradition of wisdom, and contains ideological, hermeneutic, and rhetorical characteristics which mark it more especially as Platonist. Ideologically, Platonist perennialism situates the tradition that we call Platonism as part of a chain of transmission of what might
318The surviving fragments of Atticus’ Against Those Who Undertake to Interpret Plato’s Doctrines
Through Those of Aristotle goes against the trend in harmonisation, and show a concern with the dialectical issues without reference to a chain of authorities.
319Proclus (in Tim. III.234.15 ff; cf. III.247.13 ff., I.284.13 ff.) refers to such authors as Alcinoüs and
Atticus as ‘following Plato to the letter’ (ἕπεσθαι τῇ λέξει κρίναντες). Noted by Whittaker 1987, 120 .
320See Van Nuffelen 2011, 55-65. See ibid. 65 n. 102 for further Plutarchian references to the ancient
wisdom.
321See Oration 26.2-3: Plato’s status as a great philosopher is predicated upon his understanding of
the ‘philosophy of Homer’. Chapter Five of Malcolm Heath’s forthcoming Ancient Philosophic Poetics discusses Maximus’ harmonisation of Homer and Plato.
322On elements of perennialism in Numenius see Armstrong 1990c, 425-6; Frede 1994, 5194;
Van Nuffelen 2011, 72-8. Celsus’ lost treatise, ὁ ἀληθὴς λόγος, is the earliest known Platonist peren- nialist text according to the full definition outlined in this chapter (cf. Hadot 1987b, 24; Frede 1994, 5184; 5194).
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be called, following Boys-Stones, ‘strong authority’,323or following the second cen- tury Platonist Celsus, ‘the true account’ (ὁ ἀληθὴς λόγος).324 While privileging Pla- to’s position in this transmission as pre-eminent, Platonist perennialism sees Plato