Platonic Concepts pt. 8 - The Descent into Time
The Soul
My dear boffins,
It’s that time of the week again when I come to knock on your door not as a raging, polemical maniac, but to share with you my distilled pearls of wisdom. I may be slowly losing my sanity at the hands of stress-induced parasympathetic deregulation, but right now, we are all going to take a few deep breaths and collect our thoughts. Both you and I.
Well…
Mostly I…
We will allow our minds to drift into another world —a world of inquiry and wonder.
As frustrating as embodiment may be, it is undeniably, at the same time, exquisitely beautiful and immensely rich. It is full of experience.
Detailed.
Agonizing.
Conscious.
Exciting.
And of course, deeply personal.
We started this journey a few posts back from the silence and necessity of unity —The One, the ground and precondition of All.
We pondered the causal presences of All as primordial unities in their own right, before all thought. The eternal Gods.
Then we saw the ontological emergence of structured awareness, of Intelligibility, eternal Nous, where EVERYTHING is known, where EVERYTHING coheres, all at once.
And finally, we touched upon the Forms, the eternal contents of Intelligibility. All existing together, contemplated simultaneously by the Nous.
It’s a wondrous, unified realm of Being, where everything feels kinda ‘stuck together’ eternally woven in pure actuality.
But that’s not how life is for you, is it?
THE MATTER OF FACT
You woke up groggy this morning.
You gazed upon your own form in the mirror.
Yes, you must cut down on Taco Bell. The cheese melts are extremely comforting but ultimately are doing you no favors.
You got that gut-wrenching hit of morning anxiety twisting your insides. You made it in the shower with your legs shaking as the body prepared for the pure fuckery of the day ahead.
The invasive thoughts induced by fascist Twitter posts.
The depressing news cycle.
The crackhead at the gas station asking you for some change.
Your troubled relationship.
One thing after another until the day you finally plop over with a “Ah, fuck!”.
Not necessarily in that order and not all connected at all times. But one thing is for sure: you do not exist in a primordial, eternal state of steady vibration of your true, inherent nature.
THE FACT OF MATTER
This morning you got into your beloved Honda Accord.
You put the key in the ignition, gave it a turn, the motor started.
You didn’t call it back from the park where it was enjoying chasing the squirrels.
It was there, where you parked it the night before.
You drove yourself to Starbucks and got yourself a Chicken Jalapeno wrap and a matcha latte.
But you were careless and you dropped your wrap as it was being handed to you at the window.
Splat!
That’s $5…gone.
It would have been nice if it could have put itself together gotten up, sanitized itself and offered itself to you once more. But that did not happen. It just lay there, like bird shit on your windscreen.
As you can see from the above, although I pray that your life is far more enjoyable than a succession of failures —chances are it’s not.
But despair not!
Because even all that, down to the crackhead asking you for money while staring deep inside your eyes in the most uncomfortable of ways, is an opportunity to philosophize.
WHAT IS IT LEGOLAS? WHAT DO YOUR ELVEN EYES SEE?
From everything I just narrated, we can clearly see the following:
You do NOT dwell in Eternity like the Nous
Your life is NOT perfect like the Forms
Your life and your personal experiences are a succession of states and events
Matter, even structured matter or even still matter that be set in motion by some mechanical or external means, is by nature rather inert and meaningless.
Fun stuff.
Necessity —again?
So as we can see, despite the supposed transcendental origins and causes of life, life itself does seem to exhibit a bit of a gap between that pure ontological sphere of the One, The Henads, The Nous and the Forms.
But undeniably, we are here.
We are born, we grow up, we age, we die.
We sit here as thought after thought enters our awareness, dropping out of our awareness only to resurface again in succession of an interceding chain of other thoughts.
There seems to be an inherent tendency for life as we know it to play out in successive moments and events, never fully perfect, but nonetheless undeniably real, never quite repeating in the exact same way.
It seems as if it is perpetually in motion, not just spatially but also ordinally.
1, 2, 3…
THE SPLATTERED BODY OF A CHICKEN JALAPENO WRAP
As we mourn our beloved breakfast item, we cannot help but notice that its ‘life’ although able to be parsed in successive moments, it was always dependent on us to give it structure, but even then, you’d hardly be able to make the claim that it had much of a life to begin with —except for when the chicken it contained was alive.
Despite its clearly defined structure, it was and continued to be rather inert.
The same goes for your beloved Honda Accord.
It did not take itself for a ride around downtown LA during the night and barely made it by itself to pick you up hungover at your doorstep in the morning. It did not, in other words, present an autonomy of will and motion.
But you do.
So did the chicken what went into the Jalapeno Wrap. God rest its…soul.
Meow!
If reality ended at Nous, everything would be perfect but frozen. The Forms would shine eternally inside the Nous. Like the words of a dictionary that coheres internally but you would not call it the English Language. The language requires users, speakers. It is sequential.
Subject - Verb - Object
It
Requires
A
Succession
Of
Terms
Each one at a time.
Think of all the musical notation on a sheet of music. In its entirety is has a coherent theme. But until one plays each note at a time, there is no music.
Now if reality ended at matter, like our Chicken Jalapeno Wrap, everything would be blind and inert. Dust, colliding meaninglessly.
But you are neither frozen nor dust. You are alive —yes, I know, begrudgingly. But you move. You remember. You anticipate.
So now inevitably and by necessity we require yet another principle to bridge the pristine, undisturbed eternality of the Gods and the One but also it must at the same time account for the animation of both you and the chicken.
A principle that translates harmony into melody, structure into drama.
That principle is Soul.
The Bridge
In the Proclean system, the Soul is a necessary bridge. Coming after the Nous, it looks up towards it in contemplation. And from that contemplation it draws intelligibility.
But Soul also looks AFTER itself in succession, to the inanimate matter of things and thus breathes life into what would otherwise lay splattered on the tarmac of a Starbucks parking lot.
It is the hinge of reality.
Without Soul, Nous never touches time.
Without Soul, matter never stirs.
This is why Plato called soul the “self-moving principle.”
To move itself means more than locomotion. It means the origin of action, the power of life itself.
Soul and Time
Soul does not merely endure time—it generates it.
Nous sees everything all at once like we’ve said.
EVERYTHING AND ANYTHING can be understood.
There is no before or after.
So by necessity of its own self-animation Soul cannot do what the Nous does. It must unfold because it lives in succession. One thing, one thought, one step, one moment after the other.
That unfolding is what we call “time.”
Think of a musician again.
The score exists all at once, silent on the page. But to play it, he must move note by note, moment by moment. The performance itself is time.
As the Soul contemplates the Nous and processes its contents one at a time, it plays Nous into time.
Soul is performance.
Soul is succession.
Soul is the rhythm of becoming.
What Soul Is—and Is Not
So is Soul a ‘self’ ?
Well, no.
Soul is not a persona. It is not a ‘character’ contained in a physical system of parts. It is not a body and it does not ‘live’ in the brain.
The brain is matter—physical, extended in space. By itself, it has no reason to be alive. Molecules don’t explain life. The brain manifests soul, but it does not ground it.
What we can call a ‘self’, a field of individual quirks and memories is something that tends to arise within the brain and the soul as a consequence of their interaction with matter, the senses generated by the interplay of bodily receptors and the interpretation of their receptions. Think of any notion of self as ripples on the surface of a much deeper body of water. The ripples happen because the water moves.
The essence of soul is self-motion. Soul moves itself and therefore it has the capacity to move others.
Like when you took an inert Chicken Jalapeno Wrap from its stationary position and dropped it. Or when you turned your car on.
In a way you could say that motion is the nature of the Soul. And that motion is so inherent in it can you cannot strip it away.
OK then…is Soul time?
No, it is not time. Time is the result of Soul’s unfolding mode of being. Time happens because Soul moves itself and moves other things.
Time is the child of soul. Soul generates time by unfolding Nous into succession. Time without soul would be meaningless duration. Soul gives time rhythm, direction, purpose. Thoughts, feelings, concepts, matter. Everything.
Soul is the indestructible Mover. It is Immortal because it is movement itself. In a world that manifests in motion, the Mover cannot die.
Strip away the One and there is no unity.
Strip away Nous and there is no intelligibility.
Strip away Soul and there is no life.
Soul cannot be philosophically denied, because you are living right now. You are not frozen, not inert—you are unfolding. That unfolding is your soul at work.
The Cosmic Soul and Your Soul
It’s tempting to think of ‘your soul’ as a ghost inside your chest, some private inner spark locked away from the world. But that is not how the ancients understood it.
Your soul is not ‘sealed off’. It participates in the World-Soul, the principle that animates the entire Cosmos itself.
The World-Soul is why the Heavens move, why the stars wheel in their exact courses, why the Cosmos is not a corpse but a living god.
Plato tells us in the Timaeus (more on that later) that the Demiurge (more on that later as well) did not give soul to the cosmos alone. From the same living mixture he extended portions of soul into each of us, so that the part would mirror the whole.
That is why your soul is a microcosm. It is the same principle, refracted through you.
As the cosmos lives, you live.
As the cosmos contemplates Nous, so you contemplate.
As the cosmos unfolds in time, so do you.
When you feel time passing in your own life —when childhood slides into maturity, when years accumulate and cannot be reversed —that is soul at work in you, mirroring the temporal rhythm of the cosmos.
But soul is also at work when you resist things. When you act freely. When you initiate or consciously terminate. Because it is only Soul that interrupts the inertia of matter and gives it direction.
When you contemplate truth, turning thought upon thought, always one after another in sequence, that again is soul. For soul looks upward to eternal Nous, but it can never grasp all at once what Nous holds at once—it must step through the dance of time.
There is no absolute line between the cosmic and the individual, the same principle breathes in both.
Wait, this does not feel like a ‘psyche’ but more like ‘change’ and ‘movement’. What does that have to do with me?
You’d be right to fall into this trap at this point.
But you’d also be wrong.
Change is a byproduct of Soul. Change happens because there is Soul. That motion is not passive, like a piece of matter getting pushed around, or when it crumbles or decays through the effect of the weather for instance.
This motion inherent in change is active.
Your body does not just change. In the meantime you are also choosing, initiating, remembering, feeling, anticipating.
Remember that Soul Moves Itself.
It has an ‘interiority’ (from within) vibe about it.
Makes zero sense, doesn’t it?
Well let me make it more unclear.
We have seen how Nous is eternal, outside of time.
On the opposite end, our body is temporal. Caught in the flow of becoming.
Soul, stands between these two, stretching them in both directions.
When Soul moves towards Nous, it aspires, it remembers, and it contemplates truth.
When Soul moves towards the body, it animates, organizes and EXPERIENCES change.
So it’s a little more nuanced than saying that psyche is ‘just motion’.
It is the very possibility of living a temporal existence while aiming at eternity.
Without soul, you’d either be a splattered Chicken Jalapeno on the tarmac of a Starbucks parking lot or a timeless God.
Instead, you are both.
Yes, it’s that time again.
Like that good-for-nothing narcissist who once came to disturb your peace, only to leave you a nervous wreck and proceed to repeat the recipe with some other unsuspecting poor bastard somewhere else, I have to leave you again.
But I will return. And we will talk about Soul some more. Until then, remember me.
Cradling the splattered body of my beloved chicken jalapeno wrap like Mary in the Pietà