I’ve been using terms like “original”, “Deep Real”, “Neoplatonism” in ways that I’m sure many readers here find obscure, if not objectionable. When I talk about Neoplatonism or about Aristotle, I’m really talking about the classical tradition, which is Neoplatonic through and through. I thought it might be helpful to excerpt from a post entitled “Originality vs. Novelty” in February 2020 that might explain what I think has been lost in our loss of this tradition. First I quote from Iain McGilchrist—
[George] Steiner’s mot , that ‘originality is antithetical to novelty’ … puts its finger on a huge problem for the willed, self-conscious nature of modernist art, and art since modernism. For there is no polarity between the tradition and originality. In fact originality as an artist (as opposed to as a celebrity or a showman) can only exist within a tradition, not for the facile reason that it must have something by ‘contrast’ with which to be original, but because the roots of any work of art have to be intuitive, implicit, still coming out of the body and the imagination, not starting in (though they may perhaps later avail themselves of) individualistic cerebral striving.
…There’s a fear that without novelty there is only banality; but the pay-off is that it is precisely the striving for novelty that leads to banality. We confuse novelty with newness. No one ever decided not to fall in love because it’s been done before, or because its expressions are banal. They are both as old as the hills and completely fresh in every case of genuine love. Spiritual texts present the same problem, that they can use only banalities, which mean something totally different from the inside of the experience. Language makes the uncommon common. It can never create experience of something we do not know–only release something in us that is already there.
It is there in the originary depths of the soul, depths which have dimensions in all of us that have yet to be awakened.
I go on to comment and quote from another post about Florentine Neoplatonism’s influence on the great Renaissance artists:
The Renaissance Neoplatonists, particularly the Florentine artists influenced by Ficino, came to understand that the mind of God was not something that you ascend to by escaping from matter, but rather something that you find embedded in matter. There is a shift at this time in the imagination of the the task for both philosophy and art. The goal was no longer to ascend up the Great Chain of Being to a realm of pure intelligence outside time and space, but rather to uncover the presence of the Divine Intelligence incarnated but lying undisclosed, i.e., unseen, in the created world.
The artist's gift is to render what he saw in its translucency translucent to us, if we have the eyes to see it. The goal is to see what's there, but what is there is far more than what we are usually aware of in ordinary states of consciousness. The artist assumed at this time the status of more than a craftsman but of a creative, visionary genius because in inspired states of mind he saw what others mostly did not, and through his craft was able to render a likeness through which we can see what he saw.
The quality of genius in great art was measured by its inspired, disclosive power, which was to reveal the inner life of a thing in its translucency, i.e., the goodness and beauty that lies opaquely hidden or at best filtered in the world around us. In other words, great art discloses the immanence of the Divine Mind in creation, but this isn't possible unless the artist's mind is somehow suffused with the creative energies that flow from a visionary encounter with that Mind. The greatness of all great art is commensurate with its disclosive power and its ability to help us who encounter it to see or recognize something that before was not visible to us or seen as through a fuzzy lens. Originality was primarily about revealing the 'origin' of the subject in the Divine Mind.
So, in case you need to be hit over the head with it, what I call the Deep Real was what the Florentine Neoplatonists thought was the mind of God that provided the infrastructure for all of material reality. The ‘Divine Mind’ should not be understood as an intellectual abstraction, but rather as the source of all genuine, dynamic, human creativity and flourishing. Because humans are created in the image and likeness of the Divine, they possess in the microcosm what is correlative in the macrocosm. Like knows like.
I go on:
In other words, the encounter with the Divine Mind awakens what is already in us, which is the innate but nascent image and likeness in us of the Divine Mind. "Innate" does not mean realized. It is like a seed. But its germination and cultivation is not just an individual project; it is a cultural one.
The scope of possibility in such a task is largely enabled–or thwarted– by the constraints of one's culture. Some cultures provide richer soil for such a a seed to grow and develop; others provide rather poor soil. One might ask why the genius of Beethoven or Mozart was recognized and appreciated in their lifetimes, and why no such geniuses with such creative scope and depth of soul have emerged in the last one hundred years. Theirs was a culture in which such genius could ripen; ours is not.
We are a culture that accepts novelty as a poor substitute for originality. True originality requires a return to the origins. We have lost any sense of the origins because our culture has all but sealed us off from it. Sealed off from it as we are, we have come to believe that there is no such thing. Who among us draws from the origins in a way that has anything like the vitality of the Romantics or the great Renaissance artists?
I know that what I write here often taxes the limits of what the typical educated American can endure,1 but I sincerely believe that I’m laying out a a way of eventually moving out of the de facto nihilism that is the current condition of our cultural and political discourse. I should clarify that it is not “I'“ who am doing this, but others far more learned and profound than I who are not getting the attention they deserve. My task is to make their work more accessible. But for many readers it requires a suspension of their prejudices that our premodern ancestors have nothing to tell us about the nature of the Real because anything they thought and believed then has been obsoletized by science.
Postscript. After reading the Buckley biography, I pulled out Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981) and just finished a read through yesterday when I saw on my phone that “What’s Left of Philosophy” has just done a podcast on the book. Huh. What a coincidence.
This podcast is great fun for anybody who has an interest in philosophy because there’s a raw, personal quality about it. They’re all intense, high-spirited, often funny, young (30s-ish?) academics with Frankfurt-Schoolish, Marxist inclinations who are remarkably candid and honest about dealing with their own intellectual development in the context of contemporary intellectual culture. They are not shy about calling out what is for them its pervasive nonsense. They are very philosophically literate, but like all of us they haven’t read everything, and their method is to read books that most of them are unfamiliar with and then to discuss what’s interesting and what’s nonsense. They really liked MacIntyre’s book.
The core of MacIntyre’s argument is that either Nietzsche is right that all contemporary moral discourse is rationally incoherent nonsense or Aristotle must be right if coherence is a possibility. The podcasters embraced MacIntyre’s critique of the current incoherence, and even if they couldn’t quite bring themselves to embrace Aristotle, saw very little in After Virtue that was nonsense. They were impressed, as any intellectually honest reader should be.
Now I’ve been meaning to reread this book for a while because of the way it helps to develop my “Rescuing Aristotle” theme, which in almost all respects it does—and I’ll have more to say about that in future posts. What encouraged me about this particular podcast was how it demonstrates that young, left-leaning intellectuals like these are open to the arguments that MacIntyre—himself a former Marxist who converted to Catholicism three years after writing After Virtue—is making.
It’s not only reactionaries like J.D. Vance who are drawn to Catholicism. The “tradition” that it represents is more complex and rich than whatever Vance sees in it—or most secular liberals do. But like David Bentley Hart, MacIntyre is not making a religious or theological argument, but a philsophical one, i.e., an argument that reasonable people of good will can accept as plausible. These four podcasters are exactly that, reasonable people of good will, and while they may never ever want to convert to Catholicism, they must surely see that it’s the only contemporary institutional preserver of the great classical metaphysical tradition. The universities no longer do that.
MacIntyre contends, as I do, that the restoration of the classical metaphyscial tradition is the only thing that can restore the moral coherence that is necessary to resist the nihilism that is currently threatening to end the human project. I’m not saying that the Church is the only answer, but it’s got to be part of it because it brings resources to this endeavor that simply are unavailable elsewhere, certainly not from Protestantism or from Marxism, which are both fatally constrained, each in their different ways, by their rejection of the classical tradition.
Let me close with this quote from a book about MacIntyre that points to the historical irony of this moment when democracy is in crisis:
Nourished by the confrontation with the sacred, democracy drew from it a sort of sacredness of contamination that uncontestably raised it above profane things. Turned towards “the exit of man from the state of adolescence,” a fundamental seriousness inhabited democracy. This made it a vocation, a ministry, an object of unconditional devotion. Tending towards the achievement of autonomy, democracy gained the dimensions of a global project, embracing the entire human condition and appearing to be sufficient for everything. During the ardor of the struggle for it, how great was its cause! Yet how ungrateful and prosaic it is in the aftermath of its victory! How drab politics is now that we are metaphysically emancipated! It is this collapse of the Enlightenment militant in the midst of the Enlightenment triumphant that is reshaping the face of democracy. It is this collapse that is calling religions into the public sphere and, in so doing, changing them.
Quoted in Emile Perreau-Saussine, Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography (2022), pp. 153-54.
For the Rachel Maddows of the world, democracy still retains this sacred, religious quality, but clearly, without the metaphysical foundations in the classical tradition that provided its infrastructure, it is a religion that is failing and must fail. Democracy and that classical tradition are profoundly interdependent.
1. Otherwise, I’d have millions of subscribers, right?
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