Conclusion

Abstract

What is there to learn from the late-antique philosophers? Each of the preceding chapters has its own answer to that question, but their authors are at least united in supposing that there is something to be learnt. Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus and the rest were not mere fantasists, as little worth studying — except by psychologists or historians — as Nostradamus or the prophecies of Mother Shipton. Neither were they merely ‘academics’, dedicated to a life of abstract scholarship or analytic argument. They thought — like almost all philosophers till recently — that philosophy made a difference, and that it demanded more than analytical skills and a good memory (though it did demand those too). Philosophers were expected to live differently, with an eye to other values than the everyday, bourgeois or romantic. They were also — or equivalently — supposed not to take too much for granted, and to remind themselves that ordinary life is but a ‘dream and a delirium’ (as Marcus Aurelius put it). Our ordinary lives are structured by false values and false opinions, full of pets and pests, merely apparent goods like wealth and reputation, paranoid or schizophrenic delusions. Escape from this delirium was through a wakening of Reason, an attempt to see things straight, supported by argument and a careful testing of hypotheses.