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Surprise and Fear as Conditions of Psychic Change and Progress in Proclus

par Tresnie, Corentin
Référence The Passions in the Platonic Tradition, Patristics and Late Antiquity (19-20 avril 2021: Montréal [Online])
Publication Non publié, 2021-04-19

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Résumé :

In his Commentaries, Proclus (Neoplatonic philosopher, 5th century A.D.) describes the ways in which a teacher can awake the desire for knowledge and philosophy in a given soul, and help this soul to make cognitive and moral progress. He considers such an intervention to be a case of providence, analogous to both the action of divine Pronoia and the care of one's personal daemon. As the soul to be thus educated is still unaware of the merits of rational thought, the teacher needs to use the emotions of his student to stimulate him; he might even want to generate desirable emotions in his soul. In this paper, I will focus on two interrelated emotions: surprise and fear. According to Proclus, they are the natural state of the soul of any young person. For lack of enough experience, we tend to be overly impressed by any external stimulus, which hinders us to properly articulate rational thoughts. A long process of preliminary education (paideia) of the irrational soul is thus necessary as a preparation for rational thinking. But even when it comes to the education of the rational soul, they are instrumental to generate astonishment, which is the starting point of philosophical discovery, but also one of the preconditions for being able to learn at all and for entering a state of sumpatheia with the good order or things. Moreover, surprise is necessary to compensate for some side effects of pride, another affective state very important for the learning process. Fear, on the other hand, is to be understood as awe rather than anxiety, as it is meant to induce one's soul to accept the daemonic care of the teacher. To summarize, I claim that in Proclus' theory, fear and surprise are both the initial irrational state to be overcome, and a mean for inducing someone to think rationally and to turn towards the divine Good