intelligibles
Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘intelligible’ carries two distinct yet interrelated charges. In the Neoplatonic and hesychast traditions represented by the Philokalia translations, the intelligible (noēton) names a determinate order of created reality — that which has a rational origin, can be grasped by the intellect, and stands between the purely sensory and the absolutely divine. Maximos the Confessor insists with rigorous dialectical precision that God transcends intelligibility altogether: created beings are ‘termed intelligible because each of them has an origin that can be known rationally,’ but God cannot be so termed, since He neither functions as an intellective subject nor submits to apprehension as an intelligible object. The intelligible thus marks the ceiling of creaturely cognition rather than the summit of being. Plotinus, by contrast, locates the highest knowing precisely in the intelligible realm, where knower and known achieve identity. Derrida’s différance, in an entirely different register, explicitly resists both the sensible and the intelligible as founding philosophical opposition, locating its operation in an order that ‘resists and transports’ that binary. Hillman appropriates ‘intelligible’ phenomenologically — the invisible made intelligible through form — in the service of imaginal perception. These deployments reveal a persistent tension: whether intelligibility is the highest achievement of finite mind or merely its outermost boundary before the ineffable.
God is not to be conceived as either an intellect or an intelligible being, and that He is beyond both intellection and intelligibility. Intellection and intelligibility appertain by nature to what is sequent to God.
Maximos argues that God transcends the dyad of intellect and intelligible entirely, reserving intelligibility as a property of created, not divine, being.
, The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995thesis
Created beings are termed intelligible because each of them has an origin that can be known rationally. But God cannot be termed intelligible, while from our apprehension of intelligible beings we can do no more than believe that He exists.
The intelligible is defined as that which possesses a rationally knowable origin, a category that applies to creatures but categorically excludes God.
, The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995thesis
Since apprehension is intellective, and what is apprehended is intelligible, what is apprehended is, so to speak, the nourishment and substance of that which apprehends.
The intelligible is construed as ontologically prior and nutritive with respect to the intellect that apprehends it, establishing a hierarchical relation between object and faculty.
, The Philokalia, Volume 2, 1981thesis
Created beings are termed intelligible because each of them has an origin that can be known rationally. But God cannot be termed intelligible, while from our apprehension of intelligible beings we can do no more than believe that He exists.
This parallel passage in Volume 2 confirms Maximos’s consistent doctrine that intelligibility is a marker of creaturely rationality, not of divine essence.
, The Philokalia, Volume 2, 1981thesis
An intellective being is a subject, and so the capacity of apprehending some intelligible object is necessarily associated with it. And an intelligible being necessarily either is a subject or exists in a subject.
Maximos provides a formal ontological analysis showing that intellection mediates between two poles, neither of which possesses absolute simplicity, as God does.
, The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995thesis
When intellection is given form through its apprehension of intelligible objects, it ceases to be single and becomes many intellections; for it is marked by the form of each intelligible object that it apprehends.
The apprehension of intelligible objects diversifies and multiplies the intellect, so that transcendence of the intelligible realm is required for the intellect’s unitive rest in the Logos.
, The Philokalia, Volume 2, 1981supporting
The knowledge of intelligible realities pertains to the intellect alone. The intellect cannot devote itself to intelligible realities unless you sunder its attachment to the senses and to sensible things.
Access to the intelligible order requires deliberate detachment from sensory attraction, positioning the intelligible as the proper domain of a purified intellect.
, The Philokalia, Volume 2, 1981supporting
Though the intellect, while living in matter, beholds intelligible beauty but dimly, yet intelligible blessings are such that even a slight emanation from that overflowing beauty… can impel the intellect to soar beyond all that is outside the intelligible realm.
Intelligible beauty, even partially glimpsed, exercises a gravitational pull on the intellect sufficient to draw it beyond the entire sensory world.
, The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting
He tasted it and forsook the enjoyment of intelligible things. So it was that the just Judge judged him unworthy of what he had rejected — the contemplation of God and of created beings.
Adam’s turn toward sensory beauty is interpreted as an abandonment of the intelligible realm, with the loss of contemplative capacity as its theological consequence.
, The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting
Neither can it belong to intelligibility, to the ideality which is not fortuitously affiliated with the objectivity of theōrein or understanding. Here, therefore, we must let ourselves refer to an order that resists the opposition… between the sensible and the intelligible.
Derrida positions différance as belonging to neither sensible nor intelligible orders, actively subverting the foundational philosophical opposition that the concept of intelligibility anchors.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
A revelation of the invisible in an intelligible form leads us to the astrologer. How can the invisible and unbelievable planetary tra
Hillman uses ‘intelligible form’ to denote the phenomenal vehicle through which invisible psychic realities become perceptible, locating intelligibility at the interface of image and meaning.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
In the Intellectual-Principle Itself, there is complete identity of Knower and Known… there, no distinction exists between Being and Knowing.
Plotinus identifies the Intellectual-Principle as the site where the intelligible and the intellective coincide, a position against which Maximos’s apophatic denial of divine intelligibility is explicitly framed.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
Reason, moreover, as Plato says here and elsewhere, cannot be present in anything apart from soul… the unchanging movement of its thought is symbolised, or even visibly embodied, in the circular revolutions of the heavenly gods.
The Timaeus commentary grounds the intelligible order in divine Reason immanent within soul, providing the Platonic cosmological background against which later apophatic treatments of intelligibility react.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997aside