Henadology and Ontology, or the Gods and the Forms: Proclus’s Binary and Erotic Metaphysics

Abstract

This article intends to show Proclus’s complex metaphysical project: both a metaphysics of unity and a metaphysics of being, which implies a distinction between henadology and ontology, respectively. This distinction seriously questions the reductive modern characterization regarding western metaphysics as exclusively a metaphysics of being. Proclus’s henadology presents a way to think about the necessity of metaphysics beyond modern postulates about the overcoming or the death of it. This is a metaphysics whose orientation is a radical non-dual monism, resulting in an equally radical positive appreciation of the world, the body, the imagination and the emotions. Moreover, this article pretends to present the actual revaluation of Proclus’s thought, one of the most notable and acknowledged of the (neo)platonic philosophers of antiquity as well as influent in byzantine, medieval, and renaissance posterity up to German idealist philosophy.