Michael Griffin (University of British Columbia)
Ancient Mediterranean Platonists including Porphyry, Proclus, and Damascius encourage us to act virtuously in the world mediated by the senses, even as we contemplate the mentally mediated Forms described by Plato. They also appear to claim that we cannot attend simultaneously to Forms and sense-objects; but since sense-objects distort our perceptions and motivations, we should strive to attend to Forms. This seems to invite a puzzle: how could we act virtuously in the sense-world without attending to it?
In this paper, I try to shed light on the puzzle by appealing to a parallel challenge in Theravādin Buddhist abhidharma. The ideal meditator of Buddhaghosa's Visudhimagga cultivates "seclusion" from sense-objects in order to concentrate on a single, mentally mediated "sign" (nimitta), a conceptual representation of a mental or sensory quality-particular, like a colour, beauty, or repulsiveness. The target of this exercise is to hone a single-pointed, equanimous mode of attention, which will subsequently be applied the signs that occur in the stream of phenomena that constitute ordinary sensory and cognitive experience. This attention liberates the meditator from conditioned reactions to signs in general, in part by disclosing that sensory and mental phenomena are insubstantial bundles of quality-particulars (dharmas).
Comparably, I suggest, the Platonist's focused contemplation of a Form (eidos) hones a mode of attention that is subsequently applied to sense-objects, disclosing their nature as enmattered forms, or more precisely, quality-particulars that imitate Forms. The philosopher's task is not to attend to forms and disregard sense-objects, but to attend to sense-objects as forms, which liberates her from conditioned reactions to them and facilitates virtuous action in the sense-world.
This interpretation also makes sense of several Platonists' claims that sense-objects simply are bundles of forms, and invites a closer comparison between the Neoplatonist analysis of sense-objects as enmattered forms and some modern interpretations of the abhidharma conception of dharmas as quality-particulars.