Last night I had the pleasure of chatting with Ben Watkins from Real Atheology and Tyler over on his YouTube channel The Freed Thinker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdBtlAlTCYo

I have long admired Ben’s work, and share his commitment to raising the level of discourse. And Tyler was a gracious and attentive host. I appreciate the opportunity, and look forward to whatever the future holds!

As I always say, I am a far better writer than a speaker, but I am determined to improve on that.

Ben and I are both bringing insights and ideas from the ancient Platonists to today’s philosophy of religion–he from a more mathematical, formal model of Platonism, and me from more of the historical Platonism itself.

I wanted to do a couple of things in the airtime we had. First, I wanted to introduce historical Platonism in contradistinction to Platonic models. Second, I wanted to advocate for polytheism. Finally, I wanted to put forth some reasons to think the One is better understood in terms of polytheism than of an abstract object.

Let me just touch on each of these, and address some questions I wasn’t able to at the time.

I. Models:

We talked about at least three different Platonic models: Steinhart’s atheistic formalization of reality beginning with ‘the Zero’, Lloyd Gerson’s Ur-Platonism; and whatever it is that goes by the name ‘Platonism’ nowadays, a sort of realism about abstracta. From the perspective of such constructs, no particular religious view is necessarily favored. Thus, Gerson states explicitly that Ur-Platonism is neutral on the question, and other Platonists such as from the Prometheus Trust might say that Platonism is religiously neutral by virtue of universally speaking to us as humans and of reality as reality.

In contradistinction to these, I wanted to suggest that there is a historical Platonic school of thought which, in its most mature form, was deeply and radically polytheistic. This is what I’d like to bring to the table of today’s philosophy of religion.

I believe it’s worth distinguishing the historical Platonic school of thought from models of Platonism, not to discourage modeling Platonism, but to clarify the sense in which I use the term as well as to preserve that social and philosophical identity.

II. Polytheism:

I wanted to put it out there to the community that there are serious, contemporary advocates of polytheism. It’s an unfortunate position to be in, but acknowledging other’s impressions of polytheism is not the same as conceding them. I wanted to do this as a way of inviting monotheist and atheist thinkers to dialogue on this matter, and I remain hopeful.

I provided a more classical, metaphysical exposition of polytheism, but there are many, many other articulations that I would be more than happy to discuss–such as through the data of religious experience.

Now, Tyler and Ben asked me some questions on this subject that I did not get the chance to answer or didn’t answer as fully as I perhaps should have, and I’d like to take a moment to do that here.

Gods in the Platonic Foodchain:

Ben asked me about how to understand the Gods? Do they transcend the divine mind? Or are they more like superhumans or aliens?

The bottom line for me is that a God is a source of ‘unity’. It’s a wholly simple individual whose character functions like a ‘form’ out of which others are constituted. The participants are derivatively what the God is primarily. So, we can discern different ‘sorts’ of Gods based on the location of their ‘activity’. For example, we can see unities within the cosmos (e.g. aquatic things, solar things, organic things, species, planets, etc. etc.), and so might call the sources of these unities ‘cosmic’ Gods. But, we can also see unities in supra-cosmic regions (e.g. logical things, mathematical things, etc.) and might name the sources of these unities accordingly, and so on and so forth.

But, in being able to provide ‘unity’ itself for things, rather than only stuff that is already unified, a God is distinguishing itself from derivative things by acting as the First Principle. Because it is the very ‘unity’ of things that is being given, what is happening is that they are being suspended in existence itself, and made to be what they even are. In this way, a God acts as a God, rather than as a constituent of the cosmos that is only changing things, passing along what was already around; a sort of rearranging things in a secondary causal way.

It is by ‘sourcing’ unity that a God acts as the ultimate explanation, no matter how local or particular their activity is, I would say.

Minds, souls, and the like are thus ways of having a God’s unity, and so we wouldn’t deny mentality of a God by way of deficiency, but by way of superiority: mentality images what a God is, so that it is not less than a person, but greater.

Mythic Literalism:

Tyler asked about different positions within Paganism about the status of Gods. Some pagans take a more finitist or anthropomorphic approach, thinking of Gods more or less as they are depicted in their myths.

I like to distinguish the angle of the object by the method of viewing it. If religious experience is our method, then Gods may be described experientially. If mythic depiction is our method, then Gods may be described mythically. If philosophy is our method, then Gods may be described philosophically.

These descriptions will undoubtedly differ but they needn’t be opposed.

In my own approach, I want to interpret the data in such a way as to respect each God’s divinity, and so I try not to reduce the similar to the same, and I bring an appropriately corresponding hermeneutic to the genre of myth. So, I do not think Gods are literally as they are depicted in myth (capricious, mortal, etc.). Philosophically, I see what it is to be a God as sourcing unity, and so I try to interpret experience and myth in those terms.

III. The One:

Unity is the one thing true of all things, no matter what they are: everything has to have the unity of being itself, its own one thing. Otherwise, it is nothing at all. Even Being has the unity of being what it is, and so Unity precedes even Being. It is the principle of individuation; of uniqueness, it is that which makes each thing count as one, individual thing.

But Unity cannot itself be anything in particular, otherwise, it will pull itself up by the bootstraps: the principle of things cannot be another thing.

So all things must partake of Unity, and yet there can be no Unity as such for things to partake of.

How do we resolve this?

Well, if there must be Unity, and Unity cannot be anything in particular, then Unity must be something imparticular.

That is, Unity as such is an empty variable, void of any content of its own, imparticularly designating anything that plays this role. ‘Unity’ as such is the arbitrary ‘One’ in whom all things partake. It is each of these properly named, so to speak, concrete ‘Ones’, however many there may be, and whoever they are, that ‘Unity’ signifies in the abstract.

What all things are partaking of, then, is not some abstract object called ‘unity’, but concrete characters who, in being participated like this, are suspending everything in existence itself.

Reality thus does not bottom out in one, monadic object: it bottoms out in an irreducibly ‘each’.

This is why, I think, not only is monotheism necessarily false, but that the First Principle cannot be a merely logical or abstract object, as Steinhart’s model might be taken to suggest.

In any case, thank you so much for listening to the discussion, and for reading this.

I look forward to whatever the future brings!