This chapter shows that the entire intelligible world in Plotinus has a personal nature. Every real being is a person, not an abstract concept or a dead thing. Moreover, those real beings don’t exist in separation, and they are not autonomous individuals, but form a unified, living whole, an organism or, as Plotinus calls it, a city with a soul. The Forms are sacred statues of the gods, which can be seen through their sensible images. In the end, Plotinus coins a neologism to describe this peculiar vision of reality: παμπρόσοωπόν τι, “being-all-faces”. This grand vision gives a deeper meaning to all the earlier metaphors of statues, reflected images, and faces that I have been elucidating in the book. In a deep unity of the intelligible world, to know and love one’s own face or to know and love the face of another is to contemplate all the other faces that participate in the living city that is reality.

This chapter discusses noetic contemplation proper, that is, seeing Intellect as he sees himself by virtue of our vertical participation. We see the entire intelligible world, consisting of the Forms, and we see the unfolding of the Great Kinds, the highest of the Forms in it. Our contemplation of Intellect has an unfolding character, although this doesn’t mean that we see Intellect as being in time. Plotinus shows the limitations of our individual perspective on this and other cosmic principles in contemplation. We see both the unity and the multiplicity of Intellect but in a way that transcends dialectical, discursive, and conceptual thinking. Contemplation doesn’t abolish our ability to think discursively but rather enriches that ability. Dialectical search for the truth is harmonised with a direct, intuitive vision of Intellect. On the one hand, the vision is expressed through dialectic and, on the other, dialectic leads us to and strengthens our intuitive, noetic experience of reality. Philosophy and contemplation become two sides of the same life.

This chapter discusses the first level of noetic contemplation. Both psychic and noetic level are subdivided into two levels, which could be termed contemplation “from below” and “from within” a given macrocosmic level. The first stage of noetic contemplation is looking at Intellect “from below”, that is, from the level of the World Soul and by our faculty of reason. We Intellect “as another” and in a partial way (seeing particular Forms). It is only when we ascend from that phase to noetic contemplation proper that we see, so to speak, our own face or we see the seer, which is our own intellect participating horizontally in Intellect. We also see the Forms through sensible things when we look at the world. Instead of rejecting the sensible, we embrace it, seeing the sensible things better, because now we are seeing them in and through their noetic archetypes. The whole world is within us, but the difference between the seer and the seen is overcome, and we see that we are the world.

Historically, most intelligence theories include the personal intelligences that encompass apprehension of one’s own experience, the ability to understand and manage people, and insight into the states of other people. Intrapersonal intelligence enables an individual to cultivate self-awareness, which operates during transitions at three progressive levels. Self-knowledge is produced by reflective thinking and is the basis for growth and development. The capacity for self-assessment follows and evaluates strengths and weaknesses during a transition. This supports self-development, which turns awareness into action. Interpersonal intelligence enables an individual to empathize with others, manage relationships in mutually beneficial ways, give and receive feedback, and build collaborative relationships that develop and ultimately lead others. The personal intelligences are investigated through retrospective interviews with twenty-four elite performers in three domains (business, sports, and music) who successfully and repeatedly transitioned to higher positions within their field.

The first chapter begins the project of weaving together the commentaries of Proclus and Olympiodorus, and argues that both commentators attempt nothing less than a transfiguration of the human soul and its reorientation toward the desiderative longing characteristic of the contemplative life, the consequence of which is their student’s ascent through the hierarchy of virtues that Neoplatonic pedagogy coordinates with the reading of particular Platonic dialogues. The Alcibiades I, with the commentator’s direction, is the doorway through which an initiate must pass, enduring a cleansing that shepherds him toward the sanctum of the real. The Neoplatonic analysis of the dialogue’s thematic structure is also adumbrated: Socrates proposes that Alcibiades change how he lives only to undermine what he wants and finally concludes that Alcibiades is misguided about both because he assumes a mistaken conception of who he is. This progression is itself framed on both sides by eros.

This introduction frames the entire project, the purpose of which is to excavate a sense of erotic striving from the Neoplatonic commentaries on the Platonic Alcibiades I and to argue that its arousal is the beginning of the philosophical life. Proclus and Olympiodorus, inheritors of the commentary tradition that begins with Iamblichus and traces its roots even further back to Plotinus, insisted that their students read the Alcibiades I first of all of Plato’s dialogues because of its emphasis on self-knowledge. They themselves, modelling what they witnessed in Plato, awakened their own students to what it is to be human and directed them accordingly. Self-knowledge, which by the end of the dialogue becomes identification of self with soul, is, in the hands of the commentators, the beginning of psychoerotic metamorphosis, a conversion of initiation that, when properly channelled, seeks wisdom as its sole desideratum.

In the second chapter, the role of the dialogue’s Proem is treated in detail. Socrates’ first words are not those of concepts but of courtship, and Alcibiades’ pending metamorphosis is begun by means of love. The Neoplatonic reading of the dialogue’s opening section is not just a reflection on Socrates’ pederastic obsession with a beautiful young man and his attempt to seduce him away from his other lovers; it is a prolonged meditation on the nature of love and its ultimate expression in the philosophical life. Far from being a playful preface without philosophical substance, the Proem is an introduction to this introductory dialogue, an isagogic first step in a lengthy rite of philosophical transformation that begins with erotic initiation. The Neoplatonic student finds that Socrates nurtures the seeds of erotic contemplativity in Alcibiades prior to his formal questions and arguments.

The purpose of the Protreptic section – the subject of this chapter – is to ensure that Alcibiades will not abandon his newly manifest sense of self and its correlative longing sparked in the previous section; it is to continue his transformation so that he might actively seek the desiderata to which he has been awakened. Revealed to himself imbued with a yearning for desiderata he is unable to comprehend much less pursue, the young man remains hesitant. Socrates challenges Alcibiades with the story about the King of Persia and the kings of Sparta in order to argue it is peculiar to Athenians to pursue wisdom. The Neoplatonic student’s interpretation for the entirety of this middle section of the dialogue is framed accordingly: attempting to intensify the young man’s newly awakened eros, Socrates replaces honour with wisdom as the ultimate goal for which philosophical initiates must strive.

This chapter picks up on the puzzle raised in the previous chapter and attempts in detail to vindicate the unity of the dialogue as a Platonic vehicle for critical engagment by the reader. Focussing on the Charmides section, it lays out and discusses a series of key themes and contrasts which, it is argued, both prepare the reader for Socrates’ discussion with Critias to come and are illuminated on subsequent reading by that discussion. It argues that the way these themes and contrasts are presented is designed to induce readers into occupying a stance of enquiry that orients us towards critical engagement with the Critias section. The chapter ends with an analysis of how the final section of the dialogue, in which Charmides reappears, plays a role in sustaining this critical stance on the reader’s part.

This chapter analyses in detail the major part of Socrates’ long and complex discussion with Critias about the nature of temperance. Central to the discussion is Critias’ proposal that temperance is knowing oneself. It is argued that this discussion brings out several important ways in which Socrates and Critias differ from one another. One is in their respective attitudes towards interpretation: while Socrates is negligent of interpreting the words of others, Critias shows a keen interest in the interpretation of texts. A second difference is in the pair’s conception of self-knowledge. It is argued that Critias’ conception is based on what I call a social authority model, while Socrates’ is based on what I call a reflective model. It is shown that, despite the heavily aporetic nature of the discussion, a substantive conception of temperance can be gleaned from critical engagement with that discussion.

This chapter develops in detail a conception of temperance, based on a critical engagement with the dialogue’s resources, which I dub temperance as self-realisation. I explore how this conception is modelled in the dialogue, with particular reference to Socrates’ own procedure as depicted therein. The model enables us to address questions of Socrates’ own relation to temperance, and of how temperance can be regarded as of benefit on this conception. Emphasis is placed on the exercise of temperance as a continuous process and to that extent on self-realisation as something that is necessarily imperfectible. However, it is argued that this makes sense both of the status of temperance as a branch of practical knowledge and of its ability to characterise a whole life.

I begin my interpretation of the text by situating the idea of recognition in Hegel’s account of “self-consciousness.” I argue that what is distinctive of self-consciousness is not that it is apperceptive (all forms of consciousness are apperceptive in a significant sense for Hegel), but rather that it has a specific “double-object” structure. Just as the implicit aim of any shape of consciousness is to achieve knowledge of its object, so the implicit aim of self-consciousness is to achieve knowledge of its (ultimate) object, namely itself. Instead of depending on the idea of a quasi-natural “desire for recognition,” recognition provides a novel instance of this double-object structure, which it shares with desire. I show that recognizing and being recognized by others are sources of a distinctive kind of self-knowledge, but they are not necessary for the achievement of (mere) self-consciousness. My account also shows why recognition is necessarily reciprocal, since a relation of recognition between subjects has the “double-object” structure characteristic of self-consciousness only when both individuals relate to one another in the specific mode of recognition. I conclude by demonstrating how acts of recognizing give rise to forms of sociality.

Adam Kelly has persuasively argued that Wallace’s oeuvre should be understood through the prism of New Sincerity, which is to say a late- or post-postmodernist quest to balance cynicism with a return to what Wallace called “single-entendre principles.” While the new sincerity paradigm is not without its critics, sincerity is indisputably central to Wallace’s ethical system, and its personal and authorial challenges provide some of the most compelling moments in his writing. The apparent sincerity of his authorial voice has been one of his most appealing attributes, and Wallace himself commented frequently on the fraught dynamic between author and reader, simultaneously predicated on sincerity and manipulation. This chapter traces the role of sincerity as, on the one hand, a sort of artistic telos for Wallace and, on the other, an endlessly thorny problem that springs up in every facet of contemporary life. The chapter goes on to highlight Wallace’s influence in contemporary fiction, highlighting Karl Ove Knausgaard as an author who explores similar questions.