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Revisioning Cambridge Platonism: Sources and LegacyPlotinus in Verses: The Epic of Emanation in Henry More’s Psychozoia

Revisioning Cambridge Platonism: Sources and Legacy: Plotinus in Verses: The Epic of Emanation in... [In the collection of poems entitled Psychodia Platonica (‘The Platonic Song of the Soul’, 1642; 1647), and in particular in the poem entitled Psychozoia (‘The Life of the Soul’), Henry More laid the groundwork for his life-long inquiry into the nature of the human self. He provided a poetic commentary of Plotinus’s Enneads in which three ontological dimensions – the life of nature, animal perception and the intellect – created an allegorical background against which one could articulate a systematic analysis of the individual human self in its relationships with God and created reality. Psychozoia ended with a conversion, in which the soul of a Platonic pilgrim (Mnemon) was released from its condition of ‘autaesthesia’ (the kind of self-consciousness that fails to disengage from selfishness) so that it was finally able to reach a state of ‘anautoaesthesia’ (the awareness that true happiness can only lie in surrendering one’s will to the One, i.e., God). Significantly, More characterized this crucial shift from self-perception to the annihilation of the individual self as a motion towards ‘self-senslessnesse’ and ‘self-deadnesse’. Regardless of its aesthetic merits, More’s poem dramatizes key philosophical notions, while bringing to the fore the prodigious effervescence of his linguistic skills. In this sense, Psychozoia remains an important document to understand the evolution of More’s thought.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

Revisioning Cambridge Platonism: Sources and LegacyPlotinus in Verses: The Epic of Emanation in Henry More’s Psychozoia

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Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Copyright
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
ISBN
978-3-030-22199-7
Pages
65 –87
DOI
10.1007/978-3-030-22200-0_5
Publisher site
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Abstract

[In the collection of poems entitled Psychodia Platonica (‘The Platonic Song of the Soul’, 1642; 1647), and in particular in the poem entitled Psychozoia (‘The Life of the Soul’), Henry More laid the groundwork for his life-long inquiry into the nature of the human self. He provided a poetic commentary of Plotinus’s Enneads in which three ontological dimensions – the life of nature, animal perception and the intellect – created an allegorical background against which one could articulate a systematic analysis of the individual human self in its relationships with God and created reality. Psychozoia ended with a conversion, in which the soul of a Platonic pilgrim (Mnemon) was released from its condition of ‘autaesthesia’ (the kind of self-consciousness that fails to disengage from selfishness) so that it was finally able to reach a state of ‘anautoaesthesia’ (the awareness that true happiness can only lie in surrendering one’s will to the One, i.e., God). Significantly, More characterized this crucial shift from self-perception to the annihilation of the individual self as a motion towards ‘self-senslessnesse’ and ‘self-deadnesse’. Regardless of its aesthetic merits, More’s poem dramatizes key philosophical notions, while bringing to the fore the prodigious effervescence of his linguistic skills. In this sense, Psychozoia remains an important document to understand the evolution of More’s thought.]

Published: Jan 2, 2020

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