On Providence

"My last choice is a book by Proclus, On Providence (translated by Carlos Steel). As I said before, Proclus was a fifth-century philosopher. We have many of his works, including substantial commentaries on Plato’s Republic , Timaeus and Parmenides . His Elements of Theology is an attempt to lay out the whole of Neoplatonic metaphysics, in an axiomatic form, modelled on Euclid’s Elements . This is well worth looking at (and there is a wonderful translation and commentary by E. R. Dodds), but it is quite hard, so I have decided instead to recommend On Providence . This is one of three short works Proclus wrote, all of which deal with questions about the problems of evil, providence and freedom. By ‘providence’, he means divine influence over the world for the good. Not really. Proclus has a very non-anthropomorphic idea of divinity. The highest divinity is the ultimate first principle, the One. This has the role of Plato’s Form of the Good. There were lesser types of divinity below this ultimate first principle. Divine beings do not engage in anything analogous to human action, so it is misleading to describe them as helping us. Nevertheless, they have an influence over everything that happens, and this is an influence for the good. Everything in the cosmos is in some way ordered to the good, because everything is governed by these divine principles, and ultimately everything is derived from the first principle, which is the One or the Good. If that’s so, then this raises questions as to how we can make sense of human freedom, or of human evil. Like Porphyry’s treatise on vegetarianism, On Providence is written in the form of a letter. Proclus addresses someone called ‘Theodore the Engineer’, who had a very mechanistic view of the universe. Theodore basically seems to have thought everything in the cosmos works mechanistically, like clockwork, and ‘everything’ here includes human beings. On this view, there is no human free will, and humans cannot rightly be praised or blamed for anything they do. This is the view Proclus sets out to refute. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Proclus argues that if we are to understand what is wrong with Theodore’s view, we have to distinguish rational souls from physical bodies, and relatedly, we have to distinguish between Providence and Fate. The Stoics had regarded ‘Fate’ and ‘Providence’ as two names for the same thing. Proclus disagrees. He argues that Fate and Providence represent different kinds of causal influence. Fate is a kind of causal nexus that governs physical things. If everything were fated, then there would be no free will. We would all be pushed and pulled about mechanistically. But Proclus thinks that human souls are not physical things. They can be caused to be the way they are by Providence, without this undermining free will. So Proclus thinks there are two different kinds of causality, one appropriate to physical things and another to rational souls or intellects. Being fully determined by the former kind of causality would be in tension with being free, but being fully determined by the latter kind of causality is compatible with being free. Another question Proclus discusses concerns divine knowledge of what will happen. If there is an all-knowing god, then that god knows what’s going to happen in the future. How, then, can we be free to act in one way or another? Proclus argues that divine knowledge of the future is compatible with human free agency: I can still count as acting freely even if what I will do is already infallibly known by some divine being. Yes. A kind of compatibilism. But the interesting extra dimension is that, for Proclus, if everything we did was subject to physical causes, then we wouldn’t have the right kind of control over what we do. So his version of compatibilism depends on making this distinction between different kinds of causation. Yes, it is a kind of dualism. The way in which it’s different from certain more familiar, modern versions of dualism is that the spiritual and the physical are not two distinct substances. For Proclus, everything that is physical ultimately depends on and comes from things that are spiritual, or immaterial. Modern philosophers worry about how these two different kinds of things could interact. That worry does not arise for the Neoplatonists, since in their view the physical stuff only exists in the first place because it is in some way derived from the non-physical higher beings. It’s not like doing a crossword puzzle; it’s more like a great imaginative adventure. Ultimately, I’m interested in questions about free will and responsibility, the nature of human reason and the limits of understanding, self-knowledge, self-determination, and so on. For me, thinking about the Neoplatonists is a way of thinking about these questions. I don’t study the Neoplatonists because I believe they have the right answers. But I do think that engaging with these rather alien thinkers can help us to better understand ourselves. This is partly because we come to understand ourselves better when we see our own assumptions against the backdrop of alternative possibilities, but also because many of the concepts we employ in philosophy today have grown out of earlier discussions in the history of philosophy, and the Neoplatonists had a crucial influence on some of these earlier discussions. We can better understand our own use of these concepts if we know their history."