Plotinus's Metaphysics of Creative (Self-)Contemplation

In my previous post I introduced the idea of Mathematical Neo-Platonism (MNP), where a transcendent source -- analogous to the One/Good in historical Neo-Platonism -- is seen as generating the Platonic reality of mathematics which in turn generates the physical universe in which we find ourselves. This MNP is a long-term project I am working on, and I hope to write more about it in the future. But since MNP obviously harks back to historical Neo-Platonism, especially the system of Plotinus, I want to say more about the latter in this post, where I give some historical background to my proposal for MNP. I also want to discuss Plotinus because his system is highly interesting in itself and deserves much wider recognition as being the true birthplace of Absolute Idealism in Western philosophy.

Plotinus (c. 204/5-270)

Plotinus's relation to Plato
In the Plotinian system, as laid down in Plotinus's only work, the Enneads, all of reality flows from a first and self-causing principle, called both "the One" and "the Good", which produces all remaining levels of reality (Intellect, Soul and Nature) through a process commonly called "emanation" (though it is important to note that Plotinus himself uses this term only rarely). The One and the other levels of reality are called "Hypostases" by Plotinus. The Plotinian system, though essentially syncretic in that it combines different ideas from Platonism, Aristotelianism and Stoicism, was intended by Plotinus as a faithful rendering and development of Plato's 'real philosophy' as expressed not only in the Platonic dialogues but also in Plato's letters and especially his oral teachings in the Academy (as recollected by some of Plato's students, notably Aristotle). Thus Plotinus himself would have strongly objected to the label "Neo-Platonist". He saw himself simply as a Platonist, a follower of Plato first and foremost. However, it is commonly agreed that Plotinus, in his attempt to develop systematically the Platonic philosophy, in fact developed an original system of his own.

Nevertheless, in order to understand Neoplatonism, it is convenient to start with Plato and see how Plotinus went from there. As every student of philosophy learns, Plato distinguished two realms in reality: on the one hand the spatiotemporal realm of physical reality, where everything is in constant flux and nothing truly 'is', and on the other hand the non-spatiotemporal realm of true being, i.e. the Ideas or Forms that give intelligible order to the physical flux. Physical objects were said to "participate" in the Forms, where "participation" (methexis) was understood by Plato as the relation in which an image stands to its archetype. Thus, as Plato said, the spatiotemporal flux is "a moving image of Eternity", i.e. a spatiotemporal image of the Forms beyond space and time. It remains unclear, however, exactly how Plato thought about the way in which physical objects come to participate in the Forms. In the Timaeus Plato invokes a divine craftsman, the Demiurge, who created the physical world by using the Forms as paradigms in giving shape to unformed matter. But it is doubtful whether Plato intended this creation story to be taken literally or merely as a philosophically useful myth to indicate a higher but ineffable truth. Such a use of myth and simile is after all common in Plato's dialogues.

Further unclarities in Plato
It also remains unclear in Plato where both the realm of Forms and the spatiotemporal realm 'come from', i.e. what their ontological origin or basis is. Without the structuring influence of the Forms the spatiotemporal realm would be pure chaos, nothing but unordered matter, but why this unordered matter should exist at all is, as far as we known, nowhere explained by Plato. The same holds for the realm of Forms. Here it is important to keep in mind that Plato's Demiurge was not an all-creating God: the Forms and unordered matter were given beforehand, not created by the Demiurge. It is true that Plato, with the famous analogy of the sun, suggests that the Forms are somehow subordinated to a highest Form called "the Good". Thus in the Republic he writes:

Plato in Raphael's painting
"The School of Athens"

"What the Good itself is in the intelligible realm, in relation to understanding and intelligible things, the sun is in the visible realm, in relation to sight and visible things." (508c)

But it is unclear whether this relation between the Good and the other Forms is meant primarily in an epistemological sense, with the Good merely making possible our knowledge of the Forms (and thereby of physical objects as well), or whether this relation is also meant in an ontological sense, such that the Good is the ultimate source of the being of the Forms. The narrowly epistemological interpretation is suggested by Plato's explicit focus, in the analogy of the sun, on the epistemological activities of understanding and sight. The more broadly ontological interpretation is partly suggested by Plato's comparison of the Good with the sun, which after all is the precondition for the existence of life on Earth; so likewise the Good may be the precondition for the existence of the Forms.

The ontological interpretation is also suggested by Plato's description in the Republic of the Good as "beyond being" (509b), since this could be interpreted as meaning that the Good is the source of being as such and 'is' therefore prior to being (though "being" here means the intelligible being of the Forms, not the existence of unordered matter, since the latter, according to Plato, lacks true being). This ontological interpretation of Plato's notion of "the Good beyond being" is controversial, however, because this notion could also be interpreted in a narrowly epistemological fashion, such that the Good in imparting knowability on the other Forms remains itself unknowable, much like the sun light that makes objects visible cannot itself be seen (it is visible only as reflected by those objects). As thus unknowable, the Good would not itself be part of the intelligible being of the other Forms and would in that sense be "beyond being", but not in the ontological sense of being their origin.

Plotinus's transformation of Platonism
It was in the light of these unclarities in Plato that Plotinus attempted to systematize Platonism. He did so by basically making two moves. Firstly, Plotinus choose decisively for the ontological interpretation of Plato's "Good beyond being" as referring to the self-causing cause of all reality. Much of Plotinus's originality and importance for philosophy today lies in how he conceived this self-causing capacity of the Good or (to use Plotinus's own term) the One, as this supplies us with a very interesting and still relevant answer to Leibniz's famous question why there is something rather than nothing (I will return to this below). Secondly, Plotinus systematized Platonism by breaking radically with Plato's dualism: instead of seeing the intelligible realm of Forms and the spatiotemporal realm of the physical flux as two separate ontological domains, Plotinus sees them both as produced by the One and indeed as both existing in the One. In the Plotinian scheme, the One produces ('emanates') the Platonic realm of Forms, which Plotinus identified with the Aristotelian notion of the Divine Intellect. The Intellect in turn emanates Soul, which finally emanates the material world of Nature.

But this should not be understood as meaning that each later Hypostasis exists somehow outside of the earlier Hypostasis that produced it. Rather, Plotinus makes it quite clear that each later Hypothesis exists only inside the preceding Hypostasis: thus Nature exists inside Soul, which in turn exists inside Intellect, which finally exists inside the One (cf. Wallis 1995: 51). In this way Plotinus could say that "all things belong to It [i.e. the One, PS] and are in It" (Enneads, V.4.2). Thus Plotinus transformed Platonism in a thoroughgoing monism where only the One or the Good really exists and all other levels of reality are somehow produced inside the One as the Hen Kai Pan (All-In-One). How and why does this production occur, according to Plotinus?

The productive power of the One
For all his revolutionary innovations in philosophy (and there are many, a we will see), Plotinus was still, of course, a child of his time. This is particularly clear in his explanation of emanation as a necessary consequence of the One's supreme perfection and goodness. It was a commonly shared assumption in Greek antiquity that perfection is necessarily productive of something beyond itself, something that reflects that perfection, such that perfection automatically produces an external image of itself (cf. Remes 2008: 43). For Plotinus, the authority of this assumption was guaranteed by the fact that it can also be found in his hero, Plato, who in the Timaeus (29e) describes the creator of the physical world, the Demiurge, as a naturally good being and therefore as wishing that the world resembles his own goodness as much as possible. In later scholastic philosophy (which, through Augustine, was strongly influenced by Neoplatonism), this productive power of perfection was known as the principle that bonum est diffusivum sui (goodness is self-diffusing).

In the philosophy of Plotinus, this principle was expressed in such a way that the One produces a sequence of external images: first the Intellect, which -- qua image of the One's perfection -- is itself also productive, namely, of a second image called "Soul", which finally produces a third image, namely, the material world of Nature. This, then, is what "emanation" means for Plotinus: the 'overflowing' of perfection into an external image, or rather a series of such images. In this way Plotinus greatly expanded on Plato's conception of participation as the relation in which an image stands to its archetype. One possible misunderstanding, however, should be avoided here: Plotinus's claim that perfection produces an external image of itself should not be understood as meaning that this image exists independent or outside of its source. For, as we noted above, Plotinus conceived of the lower Hypostases as somehow existing inside the higher Hypostases, ultimately inside the One as Hen Kai Pan. Thus the sequence of images produced by the One should rather be seen as a sequence internal to the One; they constitute an internal unfolding of the One's self-intuition (more about that below). As I will argue below, however, this account of emanation in terms of self-awareness stands much closer to the original core of Plotinus's system than his more traditional account in terms of productive perfection.

Tensions in the Plotinian system
Note that the Plotinian sequence of Hypostases is also a gradual falling way from the One's perfection, as each image is somewhat less perfect than its archetype, until finally, at the lowest level of Nature, we encounter the pure chaos of unordered matter, which Plotinus identities with absolute evil. But how can this be? How can what is perfect generate something that is less perfect and, indeed, ultimately evil? To explain this, Plotinus invoked a second principle (besides the first one that perfection necessarily produces), namely, the principle that the product is always less than its producer. Thus, for Plotinus, in the act of production something of the producer's power is inevitably dissipated and the resulting product is therefore invariably of lesser quality. So whereas the One is a perfectly simply unity, its products are increasingly less unified and more and more 'infected' by plurality, since, for Plotinus, unity is more perfect than plurality. 

This second principle, that the product is less than its producer, was really Plotinus's own invention; it cannot be found in earlier philosophers. It is commonly agreed that it is one of the weakest points in the Plotinian system. The principle is really a mere ad hoc expediency, needed to explain the obvious imperfections of the physical universe in which we live, notably the presence of suffering and evil. Apart from facilitating that explanation, the principle is not given any independent motivation by Plotinus (cf. Armstrong 1962: 32; Wallis 1995: 60). This second principle is all the more problematic in light of the fact that it is obviously at odds with the assumed supreme perfection of the One, which Plotinus also theorizes as omnipotence, the power to create everything possible. Indeed, Plotinus sees the power of the One as implying a principle of plenitude: all that can be created will be created (cf. Lovejoy 1964: 62; Wallis 1995: 64). But if the One is supremely perfect and omnipotent, how then could it be limited in its ability to create an image of itself? After all, there 'is' nothing outside the One by which its creative power could be limited, simply because the One is the self-causing All-In-One. So not only is the second principle ad hoc, it is also inconsistent with Plotinus's basic assumption that the One is supremely perfect, omnipotent and creator of all.

A further reason to be dissatisfied with the Plotinian system is the fact that Plotinus (like all later Neoplatonists) does not spell out any clear mechanism by which emanation occurs. True, the first principle (that perfection necessarily produces) explains to a certain extent why the One generates something beyond itself, but how this generation occurs remains shrouded in mystery. Here Plotinus offers no more than emanative/radiative metaphors taken from the physical world, like light and heat radiating from the sun, or the diffusion of cold from snow or scent from something scented (cf. Armstrong 1962: 31; Wallis 1995: 41-42). Relying on such metaphors Plotinus speaks of the One as a "generative radiance" (Enneads, VI.7.36.20). Of course, for Plotinus the legitimacy of this 'radiative' conception of the One rested firmly on the authority of Plato's analogy between the Good and the sun. But can such a merely metaphorical approach to the One's productive activity be truly satisfying from a philosophical point of view? Plotinus does insist that we must purify such metaphors from their material limitations before applying them to the One and the other Hypostases (with the exception of the material world of Nature, where emanation does take that crudely physical form). But this leaves unaltered the fact that Plotinus's entire explanation of how emanation occurs remains metaphorical and therefore offers no true understanding. This is especially so because the emanative metaphors refer to processes in time and space, whereas the One and its productive activity are essentially non-spatiotemporal (indeed, time and space only emerge on the lower levels of Soul and Nature). So the notions of emanation and radiation are actually very unsuited to clarify what is going on when the One produces its sequence of self-images (cf. Corrigan 2005: 28).

The hidden core of the Plotinian system
I suspect that these problems in the Plotinian system have a much deeper source, which has to do with how Plotinus conceives of the productive power of the One. As we have seen, when Plotinus explains the One's productive power in terms of perfection, he is voicing an idea that was quite common in Greek antiquity (i.e. "everything that is perfect produces something else"). However, there is a strange lack of overlap between this notion of productive perfection and Plotinus's explanation of the One's self-causation in terms of self-awareness -- terms that are surprisingly close to what the German Absolute Idealists Fichte, Schelling and Hegel would say almost two millennia later. It seems to me that it is here, in his ideas about the One as a self-causing self-awareness, that Plotinus's true originality and importance lies.

I would like to venture the hypothesis that Plotinus himself did not fully understand the true significance of this discovery, that the One is self-producing through self-awareness, and that he therefore 'fell back' on the traditional idea of perfection in order to explain the One's production of the other Hypostases. That is to say: if Plotinus had stuck consistently to his innovative conception of the One as self-causing self-awareness, he would also have explained the One's production of the other Hypostases as following from that primordial self-awareness. Such an idealist explanation of the Hypostases would also be more in line with Plotinus's insistence that the sequence of Intellect-Soul-Nature is really a sequence of images produced by the One and -- note! -- within the One qua all-encompassing totality. For doesn't this imply that the sequence of Hypostases is really just an internal unfolding of the One's self-awareness, such that each Hypostasis is a determinate stage in that unfolding? I suspect that that is the essential core of the Plotinian system -- a core that more or less remained hidden, however, under the traditional Greek notion of productive perfection.

It is easy to appreciate that Plotinus's true originality lies in his conception of the One as self-causing self-awareness. His claim that there must be a self-causing cause of reality was totally new in classical Greek and Hellenistic philosophy, as was his explanation of that primordial self-causation in terms of self-awareness. It is true that Plotinus's conception of the One in terms of self-awareness owes a lot to Aristotle's conception of the Unmoved Mover as the Divine Intellect whose activity consists solely in self-contemplation, to the extent even that Aristotle defines God as a "self-thinking thought" or "thought thinking thought". But for Aristotle this did not mean that God was self-causing, nor did it mean that the Unmoved Mover was, through this self-contemplation, the efficient cause of the rest of reality. In fact, for Aristotle the Unmoved Mover was merely the final cause of reality, the telos towards which everything strived. It was therefore a truly revolutionary move when Plotinus radicalized the Aristotelian notion of a divine self-awareness by transforming it into the self-causing cause of reality as such.

This originality is also apparent from Plotinus's break away from Plato's ontological dualism. For it was precisely Plotinus's conception of the One as the self-causing cause of reality that allowed his radical monism, i.e. his reduction of all of reality to a single, all-encompassing principle. Finally, the fact that Plotinus conceptualized this self-causing principle in terms of self-awareness is also what underlies another aspect of the Plotinian system that is commonly regarded as highly innovative, namely, his doctrine of creative contemplation, where each Hypostasis (i.e. each image) is produced through the contemplative activity of the preceding Hypostasis (cf. Deck 1991: 19; Gatti 1996: 26). For it is the One's self-awareness which ultimately drives this process of creation through contemplation. Thus I think we are justified in seeing Plotinus's conception of the One as self-causing self-awareness as the original core of his system. Let us therefore take a closer look at this remarkable doctrine.

Escher's Self-portrait in a spherical mirror

The One as self-causing self-awareness
The remarkable fact is that Plotinus was the very first philosopher who spoke of God (or rather, in Plotinian terms, the One) as being "self-caused" (aition heautou): "the extraordinary phrase "self-caused" [...] appears here for the first time in the history of philosophy so far as we know" (Gerson 2011: 34). Equally revolutionary, as Gerson notes, was Plotinus's description of the One as "making itself from nothing" (Enneads, VI.8.39.7.54). These were revolutionary claims in the context of Greek philosophy, where the existence of reality had always been taken for granted as something unproblematic, something that needed no explanation. Hence, as we already noted, neither Plato's Demiurge nor Aristotle's Unmoved Mover presents us with an all-creating God. This no doubt had to do with the fact that the ancient Greeks simply had no conception of absolute nothingness and therefore could not imagine that the universe might not have existed. Thus Leibniz's famous question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" could not have occurred to them. But somehow this changed with Plotinus. He was the first philosopher to realize that not only the things in reality require explanation, but also reality itself. In that way Plotinus was remarkably modern. In a sense he anticipated Leibniz's rationalist Principle of Sufficient Reason, which obligates us to explain everything. As Leibniz noted, this principle forces us to ultimately postulate self-explaining principles, because otherwise the Principle of Sufficient Reason would commit us to an infinite regress of explanations. Plotinus was the very first philosopher to recognize that fact, as witnessed by his revolutionary claim that the One is self-causing.

Plotinus's description of the One as "making itself from nothing", however, should not be understood in temporal terms, as if at first there was nothing and then a moment later the One suddenly created itself. In time, obviously, such self-causation is impossible. We should remember here that the One, according to Plotinus, essentially exists outside of time and space, with the latter only emerging in the lower Hypostases of Soul and Nature. So in that sense Plotinus's idea of divine self-creation is not as absurd as it might initially seem. Still, everything turns on Plotinus's ability to give a credible account of how this self-creation could occur. As already indicated, it is also in this respect that Plotinus's thought was highly innovative, since his account of the One's self-causation through self-awareness was completely original -- similar insights were only to re-emerge in the Absolute Idealisms of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel! Here especially Fichte's notion of the self-positing Self, i.e. the Self that produces itself by being self-aware, should be mentioned as particularly close to Plotinus's conception of the One: "The One [...] made itself by an act of looking at itself. This act of looking at itself is, in a way, its being." (Enneads, VI.8.16.19-21) 

The comparison with Fichte's notion of self-positing is all the more apt because both Fichte and Plotinus stress the immediate, intuitive nature of the self-causing self-awareness. To stress this immediacy Plotinus compares it to a "self-touching" rather than explicit self-knowledge (cf. Enneads, V.3.110.40-43). The self-awareness of the One is, at its deepest level, not mediated by concepts nor by the subject-object duality that characterizes discursive knowledge. It is a form of self-awareness where the subject is immediately aware of itself as its own object, and indeed where the subject is nothing but this immediate self-awareness. Plotinus says this quite explicitly: "It will have only a kind of simple intuition directed to itself. But since It is in no way distant or different from Itself, what can this intuitive regard of Itself be other than Itself?" (Enneads, VI.7.38-39) Some of Plotinus's most beautiful passages are about this special nature of the One's self-awareness, which is of course not surprising since this concerns the very heart -- the ontological core -- of the Plotinian system. Here are some examples:

"His essential being is His self-directed activity; and this is one with Himself. So He gives Himself being, for his activity continually accompanies Him. If, now, His activity does not become but always is, and is a kind of wakefulness which is not other than the one who is awake, being an eternal wakening of super-intellection (hypernoêsis), then He is as He waked Himself to be." (VI.8.16)

"It is, at the same time, the beloved, love as such, and love of itself, for it is beautiful only in and for itself... In it, being and its desire for itself are one... It is itself that which it loves; which is to say, it brings itself into existence." (VI.8.5.1-8, 16, 14).

"He is borne, so to speak, to His own interior as if in love of the clear light which is Himself, and He is what He loves. That is, He gives Himself being, since He is a self-dwelling activity." (VI.8.16)

"Its thinking of Itself is Itself, and exists by a kind of immediate self-intuition, in everlasting rest..." (V.4.2)

Conclusion: A Metaphysics of Creative (Self-)Contemplation
As I noted above, Plotinus lacked a proper explanation of exactly how the emanative process takes place, i.e. how the One generates the other Hypostases as a sequence of images. In this regard he basically went no further than the metaphors based on radiative processes in physical reality, such as light radiated by the sun or scent diffused by something scented. Given the spatiotemporal nature of these metaphors, they are thoroughly unsuited to make intelligible exactly how the One generates reality. I have ventured the hypothesis that this is so because Plotinus himself did not yet fully understand the consequences of the revolution he had brought about in philosophy, namely, his conception of the One as self-causing self-awareness, which anticipated Absolute Idealism. Since the One, according to Plotinus, basically is this self-causing self-awareness, Plotinus should have explained the 'emanative' process as following from that self-awareness. That would have been the only consistent position. But that is not what he did. To explain the productive power of the One, Plotinus harked back to traditional Greek philosophy and employed the ancient idea of productive perfection ("everything that is perfect produces something else"). One could say that Plotinus in this regard remained too much of a Platonist, remaining caught in the Platonic analogy of the sun, which is the central source of Plotinus's conception of the One as a "generative radiance". In this way Plotinus actually fell behind his own discovery, the self-causing capacity of self-awareness.

It is important to note that the traditional idea of productive perfection figures in no way in Plotinus's account of how the One causes itself through self-awareness. One could say that the One's perfection (which includes self-sufficiency and omnipotence) follows from the One's self-causation through self-awareness. But that perfection is in no way needed to explain how that self-causation is possible, for here the notion of immediate self-awareness suffices. Hence it seems plausible that Plotinus's notion of productive perfection is indeed just a left-over from the Greek tradition and not essential to Plotinus's own original contribution, i.e. his insight in the self-causing capacity of divine self-awareness. This is also clear when we look at what the Hypostases are supposed to be according to Plotinus, namely, images: the One produces as its image the Intellect, which in turn produces as its image the Soul, which finally produces Nature as its image. Isn't it clear, if we take into account that the One is self-causing self-awareness, that this entire sequence of images is nothing but the unfolding of that primordial self-awareness? Especially if we remember that Plotinus conceived of the lower Hypostases as somehow existing inside the higher Hypostases, and ultimately inside the One as Hen Kai Pan. Thus the sequence of images produced by the One should be seen as a sequence internal to the One, an internal unfolding of the One's self-contemplation.

References
-Armstrong, A.H. (1962), Plotinus. New York: Collier Books.
-Corrigan, Kevin (2005), Reading Plotinus: A Practical Introduction to Neoplatonism. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press.
-Deck, John N. (1991), Nature, Contemplation, and the One: A Study in the Philosophy of Plotinus. Burdett: Larson Publications.
-Gatti, M.L. (1996), "Plotinus: The Platonic Tradition and the foundation of Neoplatonism", in: Lloyd P. Gerson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
-Gerson, Lloyd (2011), "Goodness, Unity, and Creation in the Platonic Tradition", in: John F. Wippel (ed.), The Ultimate Why Question: Why Is There Anything at All Rather than Nothing Whatsoever?, pp. 29-42. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press.
-Lovejoy, Arthur O. (1964), The Great Chain of Being. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
-Remes, Pauliina (2008), Neoplatonism. Stocksfield: Acumen.
-Wallis, R.T. (1995), Neoplatonism. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co.

The vanishing mediator in ancient dialectic: Aristotle on middle term and topos

The term “vanishing mediator” was first coined by the literary critic and Marxist-Lacanian theoretician Frederick Jameson and then adopted and greatly expanded by Slavoj Žižek who also employed the term in a Marxist-Lacanian context. Thanks to the popularity of Žižek the term “vanishing mediator” then became salonfähig in postmodern and Lacanian circles. What is generally overlooked, therefore, is the fact that the concept (if not the term) of the vanishing mediator is much older, dating back to the beginnings of Western philosophy – to the logic of Aristotle, at least. The same holds, of course, for the philosophical (i.e. dialectical) problematic of mediation in general, which derives from the mediating role of the middle term in Aristotle’s syllogisms. The middle term (meson) is the mediator, first, between the two premises and, second, between the premises and the conclusion. Thus in the following syllogism:

“Every human is mortal
Socrates is a human
Therefore Socrates is mortal”

the term “human” is the middle term mediating between “Socrates” and “mortal” (each of which Aristotle calls an “extreme”, akron). The middle term allowes the extremes to be linked in the conclusion. Note that the middle term itself does not appear in the conclusion. It is in fact common knowledge in Aristotelian syllogistics that middle terms never appear in the conclusions they make possible by mediating between the premises: middle terms disappear once they have fulfilled their mediating function. Hence the fact that the middle term is traditionally also known as the “silent term”. It is clear that this is the classic paradigm of what became known as the vanishing mediator. From Aristotle the thematic of the mediating middle term then found its way in Hegel’s and Marx’s dialectics of mediation. Thus in Hegel the vanishing role of the middle term returns in his notion of “mediated immediacy”, which is the synthesis of opposites between which the mediator has disappeared. There is no doubt that the Marxist thinker Jameson drew on this paradigm when he coined the term “vanishing mediator”, applying the dialectical notion of the middle term in a Lacanian context.

Middle terms and topoi as reminders of original sacrifice
Why is this important, apart from the need to correct a one-sideness in the current Žižekian use of the term “vanishing mediator”? It is important because it greatly enhances our insight into the intersubjective nature of the vanishing mediator. It reinforces the insight that the vanishing mediator should first and foremost be understood in the context of dialogical interaction, as the medium making such interaction possible. Why? Because Aristotelian syllogistics was originally developed in the context of Socratic and Platonic dialogue. The middle term was the conceptual medium that allowed the participants in dialogue to resolve their conflict. The middle term makes consensus possible and thereafter disappears from the agreed upon conclusion. This intersubjective nature of the vanishing mediator becomes especially clear in the thematic of Aristotle’s notion of topos (place), which points to an older, oral tradition of collective memory embodied in ‘common’ places. As I will argue below, Aristotle saw the topoi as sources of middle terms that resolve intersubjective dispute. The disappearance of the middle term in the course of the syllogism thus mirrors a more fundamental vanishing mediator, marked by the burial place of the original sacrificial victim (or victims) whose murder was the original foundation of the community (as elaborated by theorists like Freud and Girad – see below). These burial places were the original common places (topoi koinoi) on which collective memory – and hence the role of middle terms in public disputes – was based.

Middle terms in Aristotle’s logic
First, however, I will clarify the dialogical origin of the middle term by taking a closer look at the development of Aristotelian syllogistics. Aristotle’s work on logic consists of six books, collectively known as The Organon. Of these six books, three are about syllogistic logic proper:

(1) Topics, dealing with the dialectical syllogism, i.e. the syllogism as it is used in intersubjective discussion;
(2) Posterior Analytics, dealing with the apodictically certain syllogism, starting from self-evident premises;
(3) Prior Analytics, dealing with the syllogism in general and the different figures of the syllogism.

It is an established philological fact that chronologically the Topics came first. In the epilogue to the Topics Aristotle writes that this is the first book on logic instead of mere rhetoric (so not just his first book about logic, but the very first in Greek philosophy up till then). This is remarkable, since Aristotle starts the Topics by stating a much more practical, less theoretical aim, namely, to develop a rhetorical method for resolving disputes with a clear distinction between the roles of questioner and respondent. This was in fact the formal setting for Socratic dialogue, the use of intersubjective discussion as a privileged road to philosophic education and truth, as practiced in Plato’s Academy and later in the Lyceum of Aristotle himself. Aristotle speaks of “mental gymnastics” in this regard (101a 28). Somehow, then, this practical enterprise issued in the much more formal and theoretical result of syllogistic logic. It is clear then that Aristotle discovered syllogistic logic in the context of Socratic and Platonic dialogue (see Kapp 1965).

Kapp: “Wir wissen aus gewissen Abschnitten in den späteren Schriften Platons, dass in Wirklichkeit Platon der Erfinder des Begriffs der geistigen Gymnastik war, und dass er deren Praxis in seine Schule, die ursprüngliche “Akademie”, einführte, als Pflichtfach zur Vorbereitung zukünftigen Philosophen. Was Aristoteles zum Besten seiner eigenen Schule dieser erzieherischen Praxis hinzufügte, war eine systematische Einführung: die Topik. So kam es, [...] dass der usprüngliche Gegenstand der Logik der “dialektische Syllogismus” war, der Syllogismus, der sich im Gespräch entwickelt.” (1965: 23)

A detail from Raphael's School of Athens

As the vanishing mediator making resolution of intersubjective dispute possible, the middle term must – more than the other terms involved in the dispute – express or symbolize shared knowledge or belief, since it forms the conceptual bridge between the different (terms used by the) disputants. In Aristotle, however, this privileged social nature of the middle term is not so obvious. This is due to the fact that Aristotle (like Plato before him) thought and worked in the transition from oral to literary culture in ancient Greece. With Socrates, who didn’t write books, philosophy was still a basically oral and social affair, taking place in dialogue. This focus on dialogue was obviously crucial to Plato as well, the only and crucial difference being that Plato also wrote dialogues. In contrast to oral culture, which is basically intersubjective, the writing and reading of books promotes a more individualistic mode of thought, the self-sufficient engagement of a thinker with his own private thoughts as these are reflected or stimulated by words on a page. Thus Plato could define thinking as “the silent conversation of the soul with itself (Theaetetus 189e4-190a7). Aristotle took this transition from oral to literary culture a step further, dropping even the literary form of dialogue in favour of scientific discourse. As as result, the privileged intersubjective nature of the middle term gradually disappeared from sight in Aristotelian thought. This is especially clear in the Topics, which – as we have seen – starts out as a practical guide for dialogical dispute but which concludes by presenting syllogistics as a more or less formal logic of which the validity is independent from the intersubjective context of dialogue. This loss of the intersubjective context also becomes clear in Aristotle’s treatment of the topoi as sources of middle terms.

Topoi as collective meta-beliefs
It is of course to the topoi that the Topics owes its title. Yet precisely what Aristotle meant by a topos (place, location) is not so clear and has been a matter of dispute for centuries. Although he lists around a hundred of topoi in the Topics, he nowhere provides something approaching a definition (he is a bit – but not much – clearer in the Rhetoric). What is clear is that most Aristotelian topoi are general rules or instructions saying that a conclusion of a certain form can be derived from premises of a certain form (which is in line with the original practical intention of the Topics as a guide for dialogical dispute). As such the topoi are means for finding the proper middle term that will decide a given dispute (see Slomkowski 1997). For example, if a speaker aims to convince his audience of the proposition that “monkeys cannot laugh”, a typical Aristotelian topos would be the advice to determine whether the contrary (i.e. the ability to cry) can be said of monkeys. Aristotle: “For having shown that the thing in question will not admit of the contrary of the accident asserted, we shall have shown that the accident neither belongs nor can possibly belong”. (Topics, book II, chapter 7) This topos would then enable the following syllogism:

Monkeys cannot cry.
If something cannot cry, it cannot laugh either.
Hence, monkeys cannot laugh.

The above topos thus leads to the middle term “cannot cry” as the conceptual bridge between “monkeys” and “cannot laugh”. If succesful, the notion of crying appeals to beliefs common to the speaker and his opponent and audience, beliefs to the effect that monkeys do not cry and hence do not laugh either (although it may look as if they do). It is this commonality of the beliefs connected to the middle term that makes the latter succesful in enabling a syllogism that will convince all the disputants. Thus the topoi are sources of common beliefs that can be used to bring dialogical disputes to a satisfying conclusion. As such, the topoi could be defined as collective meta-beliefs or abstract schemes of common knowledge, pointing to the appropriate collective first-order beliefs and corresponding middle terms.

The spatiality of topoi
Undoubtedly, this analysis of the topoi as collective meta-beliefs will make them even more mysterious. What is the psychological and epistemological nature of these meta-beliefs? How do they differ from the first-order beliefs to which they point? Aristotle does not answer these questions. He merely lists the topoi without explaining what a topos is. But we can achieve some clarity here by focusing on a related problem, namely:  Why does Aristotle call these meta-beliefs “topoi” (places, locations)? What is the spatial nature – in any – of the collective meta-beliefs? This question has deluded scholars for a long time. It is now generally accepted, however, that Aristotle’s use of “topos” is derived from an older tradition, the ancient art of memory known as the method of loci (also called “the memory palace” and “the mental walk”). This link to an older tradition is in line with the fact that “topos” is not defined in the Topics. Apparently Aristotle assumed familiarity with the term among his readers. As Robin Smith – one of the first to sysematically develop this view – writes in the commentary to his authoritative translation of the Topics: “Now, there is good evidence that Aristotle’s dialectical method drew on mnemonic systems in use during his time. These systems appear to have been based on the memorization of a series of images of actual locations (e.g. houses along a street) in a fixed order; items to be memorized were then superimposed on these images, making it possible to recall them”. (Smith in Aristotle 1997: xxvii)

The memory palace
In this technique the subject memorizes the layout of for example a building (or village or landscape), associating different items of information to the different locations in the building, such that the items of information can be easily retrieved from memory by making a ‘mental walk’ through the building. The building, which can be either reall or imaginary, is then the topos (place) utilized in memory retrieval. This technique is still in use and its efficiency has been confirmed by psychologistst and neuroscientists. Many winners of memory contests claim to use this technique in order to recall historical facts, faces, names, numbers etc. A famous example is provided by the Greek poet Simonides (c. 556 BC-468 BC) who was lucky enough to walk out of a banquet just before the building collapsed: the ravaged bodies of the dead were unrecognizable, but Simonides could remember all the faces by remembering the seating arrangements at the banquet. Thus he put to use the mnemonic technique he normally used when reciting long poems.

In the Topics Aristotle clearly alludes to this technique: “For just as in the art of remembering, the mere mention of the places instantly makes us recall the things, so these will make us more apt at deductions (Topics 163b28–32; Aristotle also alludes to this technique in On the soul 427b18–20, On Memory 452a12–16, and On Dreams 458b20–22). However, although his term “topos” derived from this older mnemonic technique, it is clear that the spatial aspects of this technique were all but gone in Aristotle’s treatment of the topoi. In the Topics he merely lists many more or less abstract logical suggestions (such as the one cited above) listed under general headings like “from contraries”, “from similarities”, “from more and less” etc. This loss of the spatial aspect of the topoi in Aristotle is most probably due to the fact, mentioned above, that his thought toke place in the transtion from oral to literary culture. The method of loci is typical of oral culture, where the absence of writing forced people to commit huge amounts of information to memory. Instead of reading a book to retrieve information, they ‘read’ a real or imagined spatial structure like a landscape as a code for the information they needed (and this notion of reading a landscape for example is reminiscent of Derrida’s notion of archi-writing). For Aristotle, then, who wrote and read books, the spatial aspects of memorization became less and less relevant.

Topoi as ‘burial places’: Girard and Freud on original sacrifice
For a proper understanding of the vanishing mediator, it is nevertheless important to keep the originally spatial and social nature of the topoi in mind. Above I defined the Aristotelian topos as a source of shared beliefs connected to middle terms capable of functioning as vanishing mediators in syllogisms, bringing dialogical disputes to a close. I referred to the topoi as collective meta-beliefs or schemes of common knowledge. Taking the originally spatial nature of the topoi in account, it becomes clear that the original topoi – as these functioned in oral culture in general and intersubjective discussion in particular – must have been real historical places with special (and possibly mythical) significance for the community in question. In short: the first commonplaces must have been real common places (topoi koinoi). The mere mention of such a common place triggered in the audience a host of shared beliefs capable of bridging the conceptual gap between the disputants.

Why do some places function as such common places, associated with the collective meta- beliefs of a community? This is something I want to investigate further, but for now I want to suggest that this is where the broader psychoanalytical meaning of the notion of vanishing mediator comes to the fore. The original common places where the ‘burial places’ of the sacrificed vanishing mediator. Following thinkers like Freud and René Girard, we can see communities as founded on sacrifice. To begin with Girard: according to his theory, the beginnings of human society are based on the religious transformation of mimetic violence into the collective sacrifice of a scapegoat. Before the beginning of humanity, according to Girard, hominids copied one another’s violence in a frenzy of mimetic retaliation that can best be described as the violence of all against all. At some point, instead of being directed at everyone in general and no one in particular, this violence became focused on a specific victim, who was marked out by some kind of distinctiveness or weakness. In the collective murder of this victim, or scapegoat, the violence of all against all was brought to a halt as the first community was united by its murder of the victim. In Girard's theory, this distinction between the victim and the community stands at the origin community.

A similar theory has been proposed by Freud. In Totem and Taboo (1913), he proposed that human societies were initially organized much like those of great apes, with one dominant male (the primal father) monopolizing the females. Freud suggested that eventually the displaced sons of the primal father banded together and killed their oppressive patriarch – however, this act proved deeply traumatic. According to Freud, remorse over the deed produced the first sensation of guilt, and the primal father became internalized as the prohibiting super-ego. The guilty males, united by their murder of the patriarch, formed the first community. The primal father is later manifested in the omnipotent figure of “God the father”, in the deified kings of ancient civilizations, and in the charismatic patriarchal leaders of more recent history.

    Etruscan mural of human sacrifice