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CHAPTER SIX THE CONTINUUM OF COGNITION A sharp dichotomy and dualism between sense and intellect, as two different cognitive faculties apprehending two different kinds of objects, is conventionally regarded as perhaps the most fundamental feature of Platonic thought, elaborated in Neoplatonism and adopted by Dionysius.1 But this is in fact a misunderstanding not only of Dionysius but of the entire Platonic tradition. A more careful examination reveals that in this tradition sense and intellect, with discursive reason as a mean between them, constitute a continuum of modes of cognition, articulated by the degrees of unity in which they apprehend reality. Thus Dionysius groups irrational animals, humans, and angels together as participants in Wisdom, i.e. cognition or consciousness in general , and then hierarchically subdivides Wisdom into intellection, discursive reason, and sense perception, loosely correlated with angels, human souls, and animals, respectively. The correlation is loose because, in Dionysius as in Plotinus, the human soul can, so to speak, move up and down the scale: although its proper cognitive activity is discursive reason, it also, obviously, engages in sense perception, and according to Dionysius it can ascend to the level of angelic intellection and beyond. This very elasticity on the part of the soul indicates that the different modes of cognition are a continuum of levels in what is fundamentally the same activity. In turn, Neoplatonic and Dionysian “mysticism,” the passage beyond being and intellect, is the extension and completion of this continuum. In Plato, the Parmenidean principle that to be is to be intelligible develops into an identification between levels of cognitive apprehension and levels of reality. Forms are real beings precisely in that they are what is perfectly intelligible; sensibles are less than really real in that they exhibit intelligible natures which they themselves are not, and hence are not beings but multiple, differentiated appearances of unitary forms.2 But therefore, for Plato, the ascent of the soul from sense to intellect, illustrated by the chariot flight in the Phaedrus, the emergence from the cave in the Republic, the 83 84 THEOPHANY separation of soul from body in the Phaedo, is not a passage from one “world” or set of objects to another. It is rather, as Plato’s references to “shadows,” “puppets,” and other “images” indicate, a passage from appearance to reality, and consists in a progressive unification of the content of consciousness, as the soul passes from the many different sensible presentations of a form to the one intelligible reality: “Man must understand what is said according to form, going from many sense-perceptions to a one gathered together by reasoning ” (Phaedrus 249b6–c2). And because this ascent is a deepening communion of consciousness with reality, Plato expresses the soul’s intellectual apprehension of the forms not only by the metaphor of vision but also by metaphors of sexual union and of eating, the soul’s uniting with being and taking it into itself (Phaedrus 247e2–6; Republic 490a8–b7). Aristotle’s theory of knowledge can be seen as an extended reflection on such an understanding of consciousness as a communion of the soul with reality. Most basically, to be aware of something is to have it present to or in oneself. The things that I see or hear, the ideas that I think, are in me, as the content of my consciousness. Hence Aristotle argues that all cognition is an identity of some kind between subject and object. In the case of sense perception, the identity is not absolute but only qualitative (On the Soul II.5, 418a3–7): to sense a thing is to receive into oneself the sensible forms or qualities of the thing, without the matter (On the Soul II.12, 424a17–18). In the case of intellectual consciousness, however, the object itself is pure form or idea without matter, and therefore the identity between thought and its object is complete: “[I]n the case of objects which involve no matter, what thinks and what is thought are identical; for speculative knowledge and its object are identical ” (On the Soul III.4, 430a3–5; cf. Metaphysics XII.9, 1075a2–4). Intellect is thus strictly identical with its intelligible object, having that idea as its content and hence as what the intellect itself is in that act of thinking. Plotinus takes up this Aristotelian understanding of consciousness into the Platonic doctrine of being as form to arrive at the identity of being and consciousness which is a hallmark of his philosophy. If being...

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