Abstract
A richly woven connection between the contemplation of appearances and the act of judgment lies dormant in the Western philosophical tradition. Hannah Arendt has brought to our attention the pre-platonic sense of theōria as the viewing of an appearing action or imitation of action such as tragic drama by perspectivally situated spectators. The dramatic ritual would provide a forum for the practice of the spectators’ judgment, a practice echoed in the function of the chorus within the drama. As is well known, Plato gave quite a different sense to the word theōria,retaining the semantic component of visibility as the vehicle for a philosophical metaphor connected with other metaphors of vision such as idea and eidos. Two faces emerge from the meaning of theōria in Plato’s own use: a mystical and a dialectical aspect.1 The mystical aspect exerted a far more profound influence on Neoplatonism, which could be said to begin already in Aristotle’s conception of nous as thought thinking itself and which secures a firm place in Plotinus’s mystical fusion of Platonic ascent and Aristotelian teleology.2 In Plotinus the dialectical aspect of theōria disappears and has no further significant influence upon the Neoplatonist tradition before Leibniz.3 Plato himself had objected to the judgmental nature of theōria in the pre-platonic sense because that earlier meaning had made theōria the source of doxa,meaning both fame and opinion. The development of Neoplatonism from Plotinus to Leibniz had left this pre-platonic meaning dormant. Typically in the Neoplatonism which had ignored the dialectical aspect of Plato’s thought, and particularly in the monastic tradition, contemplation requires solitude.4
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Bibliography
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The following translations were consulted or quoted (sometimes with slight alterations)
Allison, Henry. The Kant-Eberhard Controversy: an English translation together with supplementary materials and a historical-analytic introduction of Immanuel Kant’s On as Discovery According to Which Any New Critique of Pure Reason Has Been Made Superfluous by an Earlier One. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.
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Kleist, E.E. (2000). Introduction: A Phenomenological Approach. In: Judging Appearances. Phaenomenologica, vol 156. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3931-1_1
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