Proclean Special Relativity

Or "How to better understand the Chain of Being"

The Proclean chain of being is usually thought about in spatial terms, and for good reason. It helps consider how these principles are simultaneous in eternity, and helps in delineating their relationships. However, I have found that thinking about it temporally, at least in terms of “space-time” as an analogy, can really help us see a dimension of their nature that can be lost with a purely spatial view.

The basic problem with the spatial perspective on the Neoplatonic chain of being, particularly the Proclean, is that we don’t get to see each hypostasis in its encompassing of all things. But this changes with the quasi-temporal view, especially when you see how it is helped by Proclus’ saying that the Gods are the most “ancient” of things, which is as much an ontological as temporal perspective. If we see the relationship between each hypostasis and monad as a quasi-temporal moment in the ontological unfolding of all things, we can see that each hypostastic moment is itself the totality of all things according to a measure, and an ontology. This is just like here in time. Every moment of time is itself a moment in time for the whole universe at once. The ordering peculiar to these moments can be different due to Special Relativity, but the moment itself is a moment for the whole universe from any of these frames of reference. Applying this principle to henology gives you the logic Proclus lays out[1] in Prop 117 where he says that “Every god is a measure of things existent” and Prop 120 where he says that “Every god embraces in his substance the function of exercising providence towards the universe… ” It is not each God to one section of the universe, but each God to the whole Universe, and more. Each God unifies an ontology, an ontology that unifies all things. Idealisms, monisms, materialisms, etc, are related not by spatial delimitations of each other, but as moments in a development of the Cosmos, each unified and made actual by Gods.

How does it change the way we do philosophy? Well, we can start to appreciate Proclus’ relevance for us today when we do not see him as a distant ancestor of the drive in recent centuries to find the right ontology, to circumscribe being, to “complete the system of German idealism” (lol), or “escape Hegel” or “oppose materialism”. Instead, we see in Proclus a drive to relate independent ontologies, some of which have equivalents in these seemingly alternative ontologies. There is no “ultimate collection” of these ontologies, no ultimate “meta-ontology”, for this simply repeats the reductionism on a higher scale. However, we can see in each ontology the various ways in which each thing can be counted, and organized, into a coherent totality, and see in their failures the transition into new compossible ontologies proceeding from them or preceding them in logic, and see that there is no limit to the possibilities of this meta-organization. We can see in the Marxian materialisms a true onto-logic that does not need Spinoza’s Monism to be false but as the sign of a God “downstream” from the limits in the “resolution” of Spinoza’s God’s activity. The use of “God” here is not accidental. Polytheism is the way Proclus grounds this multiplicity of total measures. In the priority of “the One” as a principle of individuality, we have the possibility of multiple ultimate and total individuals, and differing ontologies of the all is one way he parses their multiplicity.

The other way is immediate encounter, or what we will call “henosis”. In encountering the individual God, we are raptured into the immediate unity that their “ontology” gestures to, and in so doing, we are ourselves unified. This is the only way to “ascend” the Chain of Being: to encounter each God in their totality. The movement between two measures of the totality is not like the movement between two parts of a totality. There is no formal escape from that which encompasses all. There is no escape from one configuration of the all from within the configuration. One has to already transcend it, and this transcendence is in the individuality of the subject transcending. One has to be all one is, all at once, to transcend what is all there is qua parts and be united to the whole, and in so doing, “see” all that comes before. It is always “sudden”, insofar as there is no gradual quantitative accumulation of the endless to get to its end. You must “see the point”, not “add the numbers”. This is why mystics seem to say there is no “gaining” what their Gods give. We prepare ourselves, but the Gods are the ultimate causes of henosis, they are the ones who give the vision. They put us together to see what they are by being who we are. It is not a vision of an entity, but a becoming of what to know who, where the former vanishes into the latter.

I hope I have communicated. It’s hard describing these things from a “mystical” point of view. I am not a mystic, and I don’t frequently have visions and such. But I do have moments of intellectual realization where everything falls into place and it is less “knowing” and more “becoming” what I am seeing. In those moments, it all “makes sense” and I forget my problems. There are no details, just life. I wish it was all like that, but apparently that is not likely to be. But this is not a philosophy for me to escape my problems, I have anime for that (hehehe). This is instead something for the world, for the world of the religious, where the mere presence of difference is not grounds for unnecessary violence, and is not considered violence in itself, where differing Gods doing differing things and different visions of the world do not have to lead to war. We could see Proclus’ chain of Being perhaps in light of more “modern” developments, where the transition between ontologies can be like the transition between physical reference frames: not hierarchical, but polycentric. Maybe there is not only one special centre of Being. There are instead the many special centres, the many as such. This is the most radical import of having “the One” as a first principle, for it is “a principle of pure multiplicity”[2], since if it is to operate, it must not be an entity of its own, leaving each thing to simply be itself and seek its peculiar good, on every possible scale of “good”.

What does this look like for a Proclean like me? It looks like paying attention to the possibility of plural ordering cultural totalities within Proclus’ system itself[3], which is rooted absolutely in the first principle, but also present in the notion of an “intelligible-and-intellectual” space of the Gods, where indeed any number of world orders can emerge insofar as what is here is simply the Gods present to each other without any hierarchical ordering. It is the “space”, the “place”, or “scene” (I would like to thank Butler for this term “scene”) produced from a group of Gods in common. Even within this definite multiplicity, a large number of differing relationships between these Gods can emerge. But what one might perhaps miss is that this multiplicity of Gods is not a container for the Gods since they produce this space. The fact that, for Proclus’ Hellenic Theology, it is Ouranos that is the principal God here (based on Hesiod’s myth), does not change this fact. But how does one reconcile Ouranos’ centrality here with the commonality of the Gods? I am not acquainted with a solution written by someone else (or by Proclus), but I would say that – and this is me more explicitly developing my own metaphysics here – to a large extent, subsequent Gods have a say in what comes before them in a “hierarchy”. The “pantheon space” that is the “intelligible-and-intellectual” (or “intelligible-intellective”) is, in Proclus’ system, very defined by Zeus being the Demiurge. Zeus has chosen his Pan-World Order, and thus, has chosen what will be its conditions for existence, including the preceding Gods. As this is a cooperative project (the Gods are ultimately uncoerced), this is also a choice for all Gods before and after Zeus in this system. But how can this be? How can one God be so constitutive on the intelligible-intellective? What is the metaphysics here?

To begin to understand this, we have to sort of the implication of Unity being prior to Being, or more concretely, the unities of things, or the unity or each thing, being prior to the being of each thing. The pure unities of things, the Henads, as prior to the being of the thing means being prior to all enabling conditions for the Being and its consequences, and thus being constitutive of them also. In our quasi-temporality example, the unity of that hypostatic “moment” is prior to the hypostatic moment itself, and is thus constitutive of not just the moment in distinction from other moments, but of all its enabling conditions (i.e. of all the prior hypostases) and all it will enable or produce (the subsequent hypostases). In being prior to the hypostasis, it produces the hypostasis, while also producing all things insofar as it enables that hypostasis. Apply this consistently to all Gods and it means all Gods will the existence all the other Gods’ manifestations in relation to their own. They all consent. This means each hypostasis is a window into all others, into the total universe and all its configurations. Given the endless reach of the first principle, they have a say in closer and even the most distant hypostases. This is the structuring causation of the Henads, whereas they order things among themselves by producing hypostases and “local” structures that still hold together all others. This is why “it is impossible to clearly demarcate world-orders, there are no sharp borders between cultural territories, only a shading of one into another through gray areas of ambiguous determination and dual citizenship.”[4] We have here a situation very much like our physical universe, which is supposed to be an image of the metaphysical. We have, in each cosmological ordering, what we might grasp using a “metaphor of signal and noise”[5], where “signal” corresponds to this or that intelligible order given by demiurges and, the “noise” is the remainder of this organization, that which is not assimilated but still contained in the overall system by the very fact of its presence as noise:

“This ‘disorder’, unless it is arbitrarily reified, resulting in a dualism that falls short in explanatory power, can only be the other order(s), or taxeis. The cosmogonic activities of the other pantheons, their kosmoi, thus, are like the waves that crash upon Leibniz’s shore, which sound to the ear of the psyche as an undifferentiated roar. Hence Proclus says of the ‘disorderly motion’ of the Timaeus that it “is illuminated by all the orders of the Gods prior to the demiurge” (In Tim. I, 387), that is, prior to the demiurge qua demiurge, though not qua God. Since this includes the primary henadic manifold, the order as members of which Gods are Gods, it is necessarily wider than any single pantheon. Hence it is the ‘confused’ totality of them all, which forms the background noise of each singular pantheon. This is the ultimate ‘stuff’ or ‘matter’ of cosmic formation, but this ‘prime matter’ is pure relativity itself.”[6]

This “matter” is a part of the system, insofar as it is a necessary part of the provisional dualism of form and matter, centre and periphery. It is how all other cosmoi and “foreign” Gods come to be in any particular organization of things. This “disorder” or “matter” has levels, as Matthew Vanderkwaak brilliantly expounds, and here, we may perhaps see the difference between the “matter” the Demiurge works with and the “matter” corresponding to the Pantheon as such:

“Proceeding from the Intelligible Father, matter is the totally unlimited and unformed receptivity that emerges from the relation between the power and existence of each God. This matter is the possibility of being; it is a universal receptivity, potentially all. In the next moment, being receives a multiplicity of henads, and matter becomes a receptacle of formal traces, which provide everything the demiurge needs to make the world. Then, as the demiurge takes up the intelligible receptacle and imparts an order, we get the first corporeal matter, which is corporeal now because it has begun to receive form. At this stage, matter is relative to wholes, but it still embodies the necessity in universal demiurgy for what must follow, for ‘whole’ implies ‘part.’ And finally, there is the material of each individual body, the receptivity implied in the activity of each form, the final moment of necessity and the final substrate which is brought to completion in the birth and death of living beings in time.”[7] (emphasis mine)

With the emergence of “Being” (the “Intelligible Father”), which is the singularity of each God as the object of self-reflection, we have the pure possibility of relativity. This is his “matter”. It is always already “consumed” in his infinity of self-knowledge, but this is only an “epistrophic” view, whereas we are considering a protological establishment. In the production of the intelligible-intellective scene, we have this “relativity” now as relativity of alternative ordering of beings, expressed only as the most common elements in those orderings insofar as “these formal traces are also the next qualities to emerge in the 2nd Parmenidean hypothesis, ‘motion/rest’ (κινεῖσθαι/ἑστάναι) and ‘identity/difference’ (αὐτὸ/ἕτερον).”[8]

Being’s logic of form and “matter” is that of pure centre and periphery. The intelligible-intellective logic of “form” and “matter”, on the other hand, is that of the very notion of ordering the centre and periphery, which requires a coming together of so many possible centres, and thus many Gods. But the intelligible-intellective cannot enclose itself. It is essentially an open space, an indefinite space, with Gods who consent to being closely associated with each other but cannot exclude the presence of other Gods who also consent to be “in the background”, so to speak, of this organization. It is itself an expression of polycentricity, where it is all the Gods, not in each God per se, but in each community of Gods; and this compresence of Gods must, from its perspective, have multiple actual demiurgic orders. And here I must be more precise. Zeus is not the only Demiurge in Proclus’ system. He is the prime Demiurge, the first and the one who “sets the tone”, so to speak, for the world orderings that other Demiurges will do in his “Olympian project” (to borrow Butler’s term). What I mean by “multiple actual demiurgic orders” is multiple prime demiurges and their subsequents. From the perspective of the prime demiurges, they are mutually exclusive, but there is no such restriction for the intelligible-intellective.

This decisive exclusiveness of the Prime Demiurge (or Prime order of Demiurges) is consequential for his enabling Gods as well, since they all consent. Basically, we can see Ouranos, in this particular manifestation, as intimately consenting to be a prior enabling God for Zeus. This means other manifestations of Ouranos might have differing demiurges, and even other Gods in his place with other Gods as demiurges, but this being the same pantheon in some sense, the same intelligible-intellective manifold. All of this can be thought about using the centre-periphery, signal/noise logic. That is, insofar as the intelligible triads can be thought as establishing each God as a possible singularity to itself, and producing a singularity that can produce a relationship, we can think of Gods in terms analogous to how we think of the universe today, as a centreless, or more accurately, polycentric, and irreducible, multiplicity. A “chain of being” can then be rethought as a question of “resolution” within this endlessly Deity-produced “space” or “scene” or “scenes”, where “movement” through these scenes and pantheons is through each God, rather than an independent space that totalizes them into a “super pantheon”.

The result of this rethinking (or thinking through) of Proclus is that instead of the rigid pseudo-porphyrian tree it is caricatured as, we can see (at least the Proclean) “chain of being” as a relation of totalities, each unified by Gods for which “movement” between them is an existential unification of self. But more importantly, we can see it as a movement in an ultimately centreless/polycentric “chaos” of Deity-produced Being, where “higher” means “more comprehensive” or “wider” and yet also as a quasi-temporal “priority” of totalized moments, in which one can start from anywhere, anywhen, and most importantly, with any who, in order to pragmatically receive (and weave) that ontological story, that mythical being, in which their salvation and self-unity consists. Funny enough, it is by “zooming out” in our physical universe that we have perhaps an image of the imageless beginning of the Big Bang. Back to metaphysics, there is no solely privileged “point of view” on Being. Here, even the Platonic can be relativized, a paradoxical saying the unsayable, for not all can or will use the languages of Hellenic philosophy to grasp the infinite. But insofar as we can use its categories, we can say that in the Proclean at least, we have “thinned” out its categories enough that its highest formal ontological “space” (the intelligible-intellective) can simply be thought of as referring to any formal organization of all things in which a definite number of Gods produces a “scene” of their emergence, a “pantheon”. We have here, no need for what we may call “theological xenophobia”, for the system is provisional and its integrity always includes the possibility of “new” Gods present, a reworking of its “internal logic”, its interior weaving of story and myth; for its “interior” is the totality, and the “background”, the possibility of “more”, is a part of that “interior” as a potentiality[9]. What is prior to this Deity-produced scene is simply to consider the Gods in themselves, each as that “big bang” of Being from unity. What is prior is to see them as who they are, each as all.

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[1] Proclus, The Elements of Theology, trans. E. R. Dodds (Oxford University Press, 1971).

[2] Edward P. Butler, The Way of Being: Polytheism and the Western Knowledge System (Notion Press, 2023). p. 90

[3] “The notion of cultures existing in parallel, not reducible to some underlying unity, may never have quite occurred to Proclus; but it is an implication we are entitled to draw from the structural exigencies of the system he crafted. In crafting that system, Proclus was not guided by a notion of culture such as we have today, which could only have come about through the ebb and flow of universalism and relativism. The unity of the national pantheons as such is therefore tantamount to a structural unconscious in the system. What did guide Proclus, and issued in the systematic structure in question, was an overriding concern with the individuality and uniqueness of each deity, which was reflected at once in the way his system casts the dominant Platonic concern with unity, and in his eclectic personal practice, which was not bound by the limits of the Hellenic national pantheon upon which he nevertheless exerts such extraordinary effort in the Platonic Theology, but instead by the particular deities, of whatever national origin, to whom he felt a peculiar affinity.” - Edward Butler, “The Metaphysics of Polytheism in Proclus” (New School University, 2003). p. 158-159

[4] Butler. p. 148

[5] Butler. p. 321

[6] Edward P. Butler, “The Nature of the Gods (VI): Mundanity,” Polytheist.Com (blog), August 15, 2016, http://polytheist.com/noeseis/2016/08/15/the-nature-of-the-gods-vi-mundanity/.

[7] Matthew Vanderkwaak, “‘A Shrine for the Everlasting Gods’: Matter and the Gods in Proclus,” Dionysius 37, no. December (2019): 87–113.

[8] Vanderkwaak. p. 107

[9] A question to consider perhaps is the “Ship of Theseus”, but for Pantheons. How many Gods need to change for it to be a different Pantheon? My preliminary answer is that the question itself is flawed, since Gods are not parts of a pantheon like limited parts of a larger whole. It does seem though, that there is something about the Pantheon itself that has its own uniqueness analogous to the God themself.