Henry Corbin and the Destiny of Neoplatonism
摘要
Henry Corbin (1903–1978) understood himself as a Platonist, but for most of his career his engagement with the ancient Greek Platonists was cursory and mediated through other historical thinkers and contemporary scholars. But near the end of his life, he engaged Platonism (especially Neoplatonism) more directly and to great effect. The first part of this chapter surveys how Platonism appears in Corbin’s major works, and how it did and could have furnished him with sources for his own account of the divine double. Corbin’s appeals to Proclus (412–485) in the 1950s anticipate his most significant engagement with Neoplatonism, in his final years. The second part of this chapter will examine his writings from 1976 until his death in 1978. It focuses first on a talk he gave on the Theology of Aristotle, in which Plotinus is singled out as the premier witness to the imaginal realm; and then on three late essays—“The Paradox of Monotheism” (1976), “Apophatic Theology as an Antidote to Nihilism” (1977), and “The Necessity of Angelology” (1978)—which would eventually be collected and published posthumously in 1981 as The Paradox of Monotheism. In this collection, Corbin takes up the conflict between exoteric monotheism and esoteric “theomonism,” and their resolution in an integral ontology of the One and the Many; the entangled themes of angelology and apophasis; and creatively constellates the whole as an “antidote” to the ills of modernity, which otherwise lead to a kind of paralytic nihilism. Plotinus and Proclus come to stand for “the general destiny of Neoplatonism,” and that destiny is to rescue humanity and the whole cosmos. Corbin’s late turn to Neoplatonism, therefore, is a case study in how Platonism serves as a perennial source, or resource, for the revivification of modern thought.