Chapter 11 - Productive Knowledge in Proclus

Summary

Production is an essential category of Proclus’ thought. To understand human production, as the late ancient Platonists conceive of it, we need first to look at divine production and natural generation, which is ultimately due to divine causes. Divine production is the by-product of the gods’ unchanging act of thinking. Demiurgic production is a subclass of divine production producing things that become as such. Interestingly, demiurgic production resembles human production more than higher forms of divine production. Gods have only the higher forms of technai, not the human technai based on conjecture. In the logical sequence of planning, the whole precedes the part, while in actual production parts come first. This is made possible by the plurality of demiurgic causes, ordered in a hierarchical sequence. Human craftsmanship is structurally analogous to natural and divine production. It involves paradigmatic causes which are not eternal intelligible objects, but the fruit of genuine invention. Artefacts and the rational formulae (logoi) describing their function and form must be adapted to changing circumstances. While propositional and discursive, their elements are provided by reflections of Forms. New logoi presuppose creative imagination, representing non-actual situations. Knowledge of how to make artefacts involves their conditions of realisation.