Plotine in motion

Braye E. Plotinus Philosophy / Per. with fr. A.S. Gagonin. - St. Petersburg: Vladimir Dahl, 2012. - 392 p.

The released work is actually the first translation into the Russian texts of the classic of the French history of philosophy Emil Braye [1] , which makes it possible to get acquainted with the most significant area of ​​his interests - studies of the philosophy of the dam, the attention to which he demonstrated for most of his life.

First of all, before us is a wonderful example of one of the genres of French philosophical prose, something intermediate between the essay and the author’s course of lectures, growing from the last and because of this, both the experts addressed at the same time and to the relatively wide circle of interested readers, a work in which the elegance of the syllable is not external to the content, but the requirement of thought itself. Particular beauty and persuasiveness are communicated to this text by the correspondence of genre features to the vision of the subject of the study that Braye is inherent in Braye: Plotinum for him primarily acts as a thinker in movement, those who turn Plato's ideas, to the surprise of their students, into “modes, ways of existence of the mind”, and not things.

Completing his intellectual path in 1947, Braye wrote that although the source of his interest in Filon Alexandria, Chrysippus, Schelling, the dam had a fairly random character, he was grateful to such an accident, because instead of all these philosophers, the great systems of the classics of philosophy were in the center of my attention: Plato, Aristotle, Descartes or Kant, he could hardly work out his historical vision, he would have been able to develop his historical vision. Since “in its partly arrogant isolation, in their noble greatness, these philosophical systems resemble motionless guidelines that help a person decide on his own thoughts. <...> Contrary to the historical accident that associated these creations with the language, the image of the thought and the level of knowledge of their era, we still find something strong and essential in them ”(p. 282). Against:

“Stoicism, Philon and Plotinus gave me amazing examples of the gap with the past and revival. Stoicism breaks with the Platonian direction, but revives some ideas of pre -graphics. The Alexandrians refuse the materialism of the Stoics and return to Plato. Intermitement and revival complement each other. Philosophical finds are not something self-sufficient: it is always a decisive turn to the once interrupted course of thought. The rapid decline of the great philosophical systems - such a frequent argument of skeptics against philosophical thought - is balanced by their revival. There is one obvious fact: every philosopher seeks to establish his school, but schools are short -lived. They disappear not so much because of the reputation of the successors, but due to some more or less speedy aging. The ingenious intuition is reduced here to learned formulas, so the school always turns out to be something inertial. The thought comes to a dead end, and in order to re -establish herself, she needs to return to the center. When I am talking about revival, I do not thereby deny the originality of the philosopher. The revival in the true sense of the word is an update, and not a continuation of thought. The revival is fundamentally excellent from a tradition with its notorious duration ”(p. 283 - 284).

And the dam, in a series of these figures intermediate in the understanding of Braye, is important not as a completion, but as the source - he has no answers in his strength and thoroughness, but there is the beginning of a new movement, a new philosophical experience, which only at times transmits in the texts of the dam, and not its design in its unambigence. The philosophy for Braye in the framework of the “philosophy of life”, the influence of which he experienced quite and many key ideas of his teacher Bergson forever remained decisive for him, is understood as the philosophy of the philosopher, personal file , and “History of Philosophy <...> is primarily the history of spiritual initiative, and only then the history of tradition: the stop of spiritual initiative means its death” (p. 284). Here, Braye himself and the most characteristic features of his approach to the dam himself are recorded - so, he seeks to separate him from the previous neoplatonists and from the followers, showing an inattention for his time to “school philosophy”, more precisely, the inability to see the philosophizing in the framework of “authority” a special type of philosophizing. The latter is precisely indicative, since the dam itself belongs to this type - asserting that its business is to study and explain the divine Plato: Braye fixes the moment, but, contrary to his statement about attention to the philosopher, leaves him unattended, this remains for him the “specifics of the time”, what can be neglected during the interpretation, discarded by “translation”, which is all interpretation. In relation to the dam, such a technique is possible - however, because the dams and turns out to be a figure that attracts the interest of Braye, because its texts collected by Porphyry of six Ennead can be read as personal texts that refer to the philosophical figure - and not obscured by the school, here the school exists around the teacher, and not the teacher enters the school for granted.

Bergson’s impulse received by Braye is highly fruitful in the study of the dam-thanks to him, Braye shifts the focus, defining the purpose of his study as an attempt to “identify in the works of the dam is not so much a teaching as a certain lifestyle” (p. 85), setting the subject, which then fruitfully disperses in French studies of Hellenistic philosophy, which has selected a new “key” to it, which has taken the new “key”. Interpreting it through the prism of spiritual practices (as, for example, Ado will use the parallel with “spiritual exercises” by Ignatius Loyola). Distributing from a completely traditional approach to the dam that has already become his time, Braye writes:

“It is mistaken to consider the dam, first of all, as an architect of the hypostases: he borrowed the Trinity of the Um-Uch from his contemporaries-Platoniks, and they themselves brought it out by the simple interpretation of Timaus and the sixth book of the“ state ”-all this is just a school tradition. It is important here to understand how Plotin interprets such a construction, preserving behind it only those characteristics that meet its need for contemplation. And then we will see that sometimes with a dam interpretation, in the end, clear boundaries between the hypostases are erased, leaving between them a rather unity and continuity than distinction ”(p. 85 - 86).

However, if the translator in the introductory article strives to maximize the interpretation of Braye Gegelian and generally German, then Braye himself occupies a much more cautious and balanced position, noting that Hegel “already by the nature of his spirit was in the best way prepared for the dam” (p. 250) and that for its interpretation, the dam itself gives all the grounds. The point is not the choice between faithful and incorrect interpretations, according to Braye, but that the very thought of the dam is contradictory. Already in the early 1950s, preparing an English translation of his book, Braye notes: “<...> Joseph Kats <...> is certainly right when he says that the description of the uniform structure with his negative definitions is based on Platonovsky“ Parmenides ”and that there is no mysticism in Parmenida. However, the inconsistency that Katz rightly notes in the Plotinsky theory of a person (it is unclear whether the dams will be on the side of Spinoza, for which human life is just a modus, or on the side of Fichte, for which there is no point in attributing eternity to God, if a person also can not enjoy it), proves that in addition to the philosophical design of a single for the dam, there is also direct experience of experiencing a united one, which goes beyond the framework. rational structures ”(p. 231, approx. 4). And if he seeks to interpret the dam systematically, then this contradiction will need to be fixed and selected by one of the options for its resolution - Braye notes that the Hegelian interpretation can be removed from the texts of the dam, but it is not particularly interesting, more precisely, it does not allow to understand the originality of the dam, nor the nature of the influence of its thoughts - that acts in it as the main thing, which is quite typical for neoplatonists, and in it, and in it, and in it. including those who preceded the dam, while the originality of the dam Braye sees (and Ado supports him in this) in the simplicity of his gaze:

“Where Plotinus speaks of the identity of our self with all existing, he seems to be completely forgetting about the intricate architecture of the hypostases. His concept of reality becomes extremely generalized. This is no longer about the complex intelligible world, the outlines of which are given by the model of the sensual world, but about the whole existing without any difference. For example, the fourth and fifth treatises of the VI “Enneada” can be read without any attitude to Greek philosophy ”(p. 191).

Plotin is the founder of a new type of spirituality, a new religious tradition (p. 197) in the text of a new religious tradition, which is not previously found in the Greek rational tradition, neither in various religious practices and teachings of Greco-Roman Hellenism (and whose roots believes to look for in acquaintance with Indian philosophy)-this is a new understanding of the attitude of the soul and God:

“Firstly, this is a direct relationship, without the mediation of a savior or physical community: the philosopher reaches contact with a single“ one on one ”, due to his own thought. Secondly, for the emergence of this attitude, the deity does not need to be called: the one has no desire to save the soul; His good deeds are carried out by virtue of the only need for his nature, like light illumination. Finally, thirdly, as soon as so, it turns out that the one is everywhere and that there is a pure that one between me and the One. The soul acquires a single in the hidden depths of itself as a pure subject that makes it a substance, an autonomous and independent creature ”(p. 255).

And this new tradition, declared by the dam is quite clearly, although not always consistent, turns out to be the tradition of idealism - that intellectual continuity in the sense of “revival”, which “can do without formal or explicit connection with the course of thought, which it resumes,” which “has nothing to do with influence”, since it “resumes intuition, and not tradition” (p. 284).

Notes:

[1] The only text “Plotinism and Neoplatonism” previously published in Russia, which is a critical review of the work of his student Andre-Jean Festuzhier, was also translated by A.S. Gagonin. Published in the book: Festyuzher A.-J. Contemplation and contemplative life on Plato. - St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2009. - (Series: “Word of the existing”). - S. 488 - 495.