Plotinus, The Enneads

I’ve been very satisfied with the progress I’ve made on my reading list thanks to this blog, if only because I finally finished Brothers Karamazov. Alas, this post documents a rare failure: I gave up on Plotinus’ inscrutable Enneads. It came in waves. When I got my copy, I set out to read it in its entirety. Then I noticed that the allegedly abridged version was still over 600 pages in 8-point font. Somewhat disillusioned, I persisted and got through the first two books. (“Ennead” comes from the Greek word for “nine,” and stands for the fact that the treatise is made up of six books, each of which has nine chapters or sections.) It was incredibly dense, but I resigned myself to not understanding all of it, and I still managed to get a good deal out of it.

Then, slowly, my will faltered more and more. The third book took over a week, and by the time I began the fourth, I had started to Google which sections I could skim, and then which sections I could skip altogether. Even getting through those sections was difficult, though, and in the middle of book four, I admitted defeat.

Plotinus is an incredibly challenging read for two reasons. The first is his style. My best approximation is that he reads like Heidegger if Heidegger had been translated from a dead language. He has the same penchant for inventing terminology (“All-Soul,” “Real-Existent,” and other doubly capitalized, hyphenated words) that describes esoteric concepts and is never properly defined to begin with. The second is the translation. Penguin Classics went with a translation by Stephen MacKenna, who translated Plotinus in the early twentieth century. Translations from that long ago are usually difficult enough without the added burden of translating someone as inscrutable as Plotinus. Though his translation is highly praised (George Steiner called it one of the great achievements in translation of the twentieth century), it may be better read for culture than understanding.

Despite all this, Plotinus is worth reading. If nothing else, his influence is considerable: his thought allowed Augustine to reconcile important ideas about God and he thereby exerted a profound influence on modern Christian theology. Dillon, the editor, points out that Plotinus’ notion of the “we” prefigured Freud’s “ego,” but this feels tacked on, like when they said Epictetus prefigured modern neuropsychology.)

Soul

Let’s begin where Plotinus does: with the soul. As a neo-Platonist, Plotinus derives much of his philosophy from close readings and interpolations of Plato’s dialogues, especially the Timaeus, but this is not to say that he keeps his distance from other philosophers. Often, he reads quite like a Stoic, which seems to be popular in late Antiquity, and in his descriptions of the Soul, he sounds awfully Aristotelian: the soul and the body are connected, but like the “axe-form on iron” – things happen to the iron of the axe, not to the form it takes. “The permeating soul might remain entirely untouched by what affects the body – as light goes always free of all its floods.”

What is the business of the soul then? Plotinus gives us a roadmap. There is, at bottom, the ‘Ours,’ the basic couplement of soul and body. Through sensations, we are able to discern impressions (a Stoic concept), which “are already Intelligibles” that need to be unlocked, in some sense, by the soul. Once the soul has translated these impressions into Intelligibles, they become connected to Ideal-Forms; from knowledge of Ideal-Forms, we have what gives us the “peculiar” We, so called, I think, because it, like the Ours, is a couplement of body and soul. (It is interesting to note that “We” has also been translated as “personality.”) To reiterate:

Ours –> Sensations –> Impressions –> Intelligibles –> Ideal-Forms –> We

The first three are the domain of our body – that is, our five ordinary senses – and the final three, of our soul. Says Plotinus: “Thus assuredly Sense-Perception, Discursive-Reasoning, and all our ordinary mentation are foreign to the Soul: for sensation is a receiving – whether of an Ideal-Form or of a bodily affection – and reasoning and all ordinary mental action deal with sensation.”

Trinity

The Soul, then, is our connection to the world of Intelligibles, of Ideal-Forms. If the Soul is the means by which the animate turns impressions into Intelligibles, where does it come from?

There is, primally, the One, what all Forms are, in their essence. If it helps, we can relate the One to God, although Plotinus would probably spit at us for doing so. Everything is the One, because the One is what all things, material and immaterial, come from. However, those “things” are not created by some action of the One, for action would imply change and the One is incapable of change (like Republicans, hey-o!). Rather, everything is an “emanation” from the one, a byproduct necessitated by the very existence of the One.

The primary emanation of the One is the Intellect, which is the locus of the spectrum of all Forms; all things are united in the One, but each also has an identity. The Intellect maintains something of a “catalog” of Forms, allowing for the possibility of “equality”: thus, we can say that something is both three-dimensional and solid because the two distinct concepts are connected by this Intellect identifying each with each. Without the Intellect, predication is impossible. The Intellect (here’s where it gets really screwy) is in eternal contemplation of the One, analogous to Plato’s Demiurge.

The Intellect, being an emanation of the One and hence “the same as” the One (again, it is helpful to think of the Christian Trinity, where the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct and yet the same), must also have an emanation. That emanation we identify as the Soul. Everything, from animals to plants, has a soul, because everything is an emanation from the One, but the highest action of the Soul is in contemplation of the Intellect, which is the only way that the One can even remotely be reached. Only people are capable of Intellection.

I should take a moment to say that I don’t know how accurate all of that was. It was pieced together from the text, the introduction, and the extraordinarily helpful Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. If anyone has read Plotinus (doubtful) and can correct or verify any of that, it would be most appreciated. 

That is Plotinus’ triad, the sum of his mystical beliefs and the foundation upon which the rest of his philosophy is built. It is difficult not to see echoes of this in the Christian Trinity, but I’ll save that discussion for a future post on Augustine.

Ethics and Aesthetics 

Having explained the foundation of his theory, Plotinus moves on to its applications. One remarkable feature of the Enneads is the way that Plotinus is able to knit together far-flung areas of philosophy, such as ethics and aesthetics as we will soon see, with his abstract metaphysics. 

For example, order is of great importance because it is a reflection of the Intellectual-Principle in the material world. Everything that we consider ordered possesses order only through imitation of the original Order, and by contemplating ordered things, we are actually contemplating the Intellectual-Principle and drawing ourselves closer to the One. It is important, then, for us to direct our Souls toward contemplation of the Intellectual-Principle: we must view something that is beautiful as "not some one shape of beauty but the All-Beauty, the Absolute Beauty; and the truths of philosophy must be implanted in him to lead him to faith in that which, unknowing it, he possesses within himself." (We possess the knowledge within ourselves because we are all emanations of the One.)

So, we've concluded that order is an “inner idea stamped upon the mass of exterior matter.” This means that there are certain things we must seek out: virtue, for example. Virtue, both moral and civic, is important to Plotinus because it brings “bound and measure to our desires and to our entire sensibility.” That which is bounded -- the One is infinitely bounded and unified -- is always, by definition, preferable to the boundless. Virtue, then, is a way of aligning our Souls with Intellection. Beauty is the same: "He must be led to the Beauty that manifests itself through these forms [tone, rhythm, design; in essence, through worldly things]; he must be shown that what ravished him was no other than the Harmony of the Intellectual world and the Beauty in that sphere." 

The Nature of Evil

If order, limit, and bound are characteristics of the One and hence of the Good, it is not surprising that evil is defined as “Undetermination-Absolute, some Absolute Formlessness…the kind whose place is below all the patterns, forms, shapes, measurements, and limits.” Included in this limitlessness is matter, which is also inherently evil. (This is a Gnostic idea, although Plotinus hated the Gnostics for reasons I couldn't figure out.) 

He explains: “The bodily Kind, in that it partakes of Matter, is an evil thing. What form is in bodies is an untrue form: they are without life: by their own natural disorderly movement they make away with each other; they are hindrances to the Soul in its proper Act; in their ceaseless flux they are always slipping away from Being.” That last bit sounds an awful lot like entropy. Can you tell us more, Plotinus?

“The Measurelessness is evil primarily; whatever, either by resemblance or participation, exists in the state of unmeasured, is evil secondarily.” I think we get the idea. Simplicity is good, complexity is evil. Fastidiousness is good, changeability is evil. I always like to bring this back to Othello: Iago’s formlessness, Othello’s Classical heroism. We can also recall in Kafka’s The Castle, K. is a land-surveyor, in charge of delimiting boundaries. This all works out very nicely. We are to align our Souls with Intellect and not with our bodies because bodies are matter and matter is evil.

If we are not concerned with matter, then we need not fear evil. This is a Stoic argument. But Plotinus goes a step further. If we are not distressed by the possibility of evil, then why be distressed by actual evil? “What then, we ask, if he had died without witnessing the wrong [one's daughters and daughters-in-law dragged away to captivity]? Could he have quitted the world in the calm conviction that nothing of all this could happen? He must be very shallow. Can he fail to see that it is possible for such calamities to overtake his household, and does he cease to be a happy man for the knowledge of what may occur? In the knowledge of the possibility he may be at ease; as, too, when the evil has come about.” This fits in nicely with the classical argument for courage: we should not be cowardly because cowardice is fear of something that has not yet happened. If we are brave then we will not fear what has not yet happened; if we do not fear evil that has not yet happened, we will also not fear that has happened.

The Evil of Nature

A discussion of evil leads easily into the question of theodicy. Evil, as we have seen, is not the caused by the One, as if it had engendered it in some way: the One, to reiterate, does not “act” in any sense of the word. Evil, instead, arises by necessity, as a byproduct of the nature of the One: just as the Intellect and the Soul emanate from the One, so too does evil come about because the emanation is not limitless (if it were, it would be evil). Think of this as a flashlight. A flashlight illuminates the area around it, but it is not the intention of the flashlight to create darkness or even to leave darkness as it is. Rather, the flashlight is limited in its capacity; light can only stretch so far. This is pretty standard reasoning when it comes to theodicy, and I don’t think it originated from Plotinus.

In his own words: “We are like people ignorant of painting who complain that the colours are not beautiful everywhere in the picture: but the Artist has laid on the appropriate tint to every spot… Again, we are censuring a drama because the persons are not all heroes.” Evil arises not through carelessness on the part of the One, but through necessity.

This necessity is interesting to me, particularly because of the sense of coexistence and unity inherent in it. Here’s Plotinus again: “All things, as they rise from a unity [the One], come back to unity by a sheer need of nature; differences unfold themselves, contraries are produced, but all is drawn into one organized system by the unity at the source.”

Eternity

Plotinus draws an interesting distinction between time and eternity. The usual notion of eternity is infinite linear time (or at least that’s how I always thought of it), but he distinguishes it in a different way: “We know it as a Life changelessly motionless and ever holding the Universal content in actual presence; not this now and now that other, but always all." That is, eternity is not infinite time, but all of time at the same instant, in the same place. Time is an imperfect image of the Real Being, eternity, and so in imitating eternity, it produces a discursive level of being (not my phrasing), where one thing follows another. Cause and effect are illusory because in the Real Being, there is no “this now and now that other.” This should make us think of two things: the distinction between the third and fourth dimensions (I like to reference this video), and the Tralfamadorians in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. 

Also, we can (Plotinus does not) equate eternity with repose: since one thing does not follow another, there is rest.

Free Will

 

“Again, if all our action is determined by a natural process, how can the distinction be maintained between behaviour in accordance with nature and behaviour in conflict with it? And what becomes of blasphemy against the divine? The blasphemer is made what he is: a dramatist has written a part insulting and maligning himself and given it to an actor to play.”

Plotinus raises the question of free will – if someone deity has predetermined the actions of every person at every time, how can a blasphemer be held accountable for his insolence? He answers himself, to a degree, later on: “The act of the libertine is not done by Providence or in accordance with Providence; neither is the action of the good done by Providence – it is done by the man – but it is done in accordance with Providence, for it is an act consonant with the Reason-Principle. Thus a patient following his treatment is himself an agent and yet is acting in accordance with the doctor’s method inspired by the art concerned with the causes of health and sickness: what one does against the laws of health is one’s act, but an act conflicting with the Providence of medicine.”

Nature, in the sense of that which is preordained, perhaps does not exist, then, as something inalterable, but as a prescription like that of a doctor. Many philosophers repeat the adage that God (or the gods) don’t subject us to more than we can bear, so if perhaps things seem unbearable at times, it is only because we have wandered off the path that is consonant with nature.

That which is done in accordance with the good – that is, with eyes toward the Intellectual-Principle – can only ever be consonant with the flow of nature, and that which is not is never so. This is a way of reconciling free will with predestination. The path is determined, but we are free to wander: there are limitless options from which we may choose, but there is only one correct way, that of the good. Just as a doctor may prescribe a drug with the knowledge that his patient will toss the script away, so too is predestination compatible with the “act of the libertine.”

Stray Observations

• In case all of the above was too straightforward, here’s one of my favorite impenetrable sentences from the book: “When the Intellect is in upward orientation that (lower part of it) which contains (or, corresponds to) the life of the Soul, is, so to speak, flung down again…” Can you imagine what that looks like in Greek?
• There’s a nice analogy of a musician that I chose not to discuss because it’s very similar to a lot of what’s already been said in previous posts, but I’ll quote it here. “When the lyre fails him, [the musician] will change it, or will give up lyre and lyring, as having another craft now, one that needs no lyre, and then he will let it rest unregarded at this side while he sings on without an instrument. But it was not idly that the instrument was given him in the beginning: he has found it useful until now, many a time."
• “Feelings are not states; they are action upon experience, action accompanied by judgement.” State would imply something fixed: the state of the weather currently is “rainy,” and it must be rainy until a different state replaces it. Calling it action gives agency to the individual rather than some inherent quality of being. As Iago says, “’Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus."
• If anyone out there has been inspired to read Plotinus, I’d give the Loeb Library editions a go. They’re expensive, but the translation is much more recent, which may help.

Bhagavad-Gita

Until the final few seasons, House was one of the better shows on television. Despite a frustratingly familiar story arc (“Wow, I can’t believe House solved the case with only five minutes left in the episode”), the writers managed to keep the medical side interesting and the characters complex and challenging; even House’s disdain for religion, though frequently hackneyed (faith is inferior to reason: so brave), served as an interesting counterpoint to his mantra, “Everybody lies.”

In the episode “Humpty Dumpty,” House’s boss, Dr. Cuddy, asks her young handyman to go up on her roof even though he has been complaining of asthma problems. When he does, he ends up falling off her roof and into House’s care. Cuddy naturally feels guilt and personal responsibility, which House tactfully attributes to narcissism: “You can't believe everything is your fault,” he says, “unless you also believe you're all powerful.” It may be uncouth, but it's also an interesting thought: ultimately, the handyman made the choice to go up on the roof; even though Cuddy shouldn't have pressured him, it was his decision and therefore not entirely her fault. 

The bulk of the Bhagavad-Gita is a speech given by the Indian god Krishna to the fearless young warrior Arjuna who, before the start of the major battle recounted in the Mahabharata, is suddenly overwhelmed by a moral dilemma: is it not wrong to kill his enemies – some of whom are his friends and family – even in the midst of war? Krishna takes this as his starting point in explaining that one must not be concerned with the fruits of action – its effects and consequences – because only when one is free from the notion that events are caused by one’s actions rather than by the natural course of the universe will he achieve enlightenment.

The Divided Warrior

  

The Bhagavad-Gita gives us one of our earliest looks at true hesitation and paralyzing indecision, something that was conspicuously absent in much of Greek and Latin literature. Whereas the Iliad is fueled by Achilles’ rage, the driving force here is an interior conflict. In the Iliad and the Odyssey, a hesitating warrior dawdles but a moment and requires only the smallest of nudges – usually an appeal to the gods – to be coaxed back into action. (If anyone knows of examples where this isn’t the case, I’d be interested to hear them.) Arjuna, on the other hand, requires much more – around a hundred pages worth of coaxing.

We’ve all been in Arjuna’s shoes, though perhaps the situation wasn't as extreme. “The flaw of pity blights my very being; conflicting sacred duties confound my reason.” Pity is a flaw, a blemish, and yet it is as dear to him as his warrior duty; he does not know what to follow. In his indecision, he muses, “It is better in this world to beg for scraps of food than to eat meals smeared with the blood of elders I killed at the height of their power while their goals were still desires.” He adds, “We don’t know which weight is worse to bear– our conquering them or their conquering us.”

At the core of his hesitation is the impenetrability of the future. What will come of his actions should he take them? Will the world be a better place if he does his duty, or should he follow his heart’s urgings toward compassion? How is one to act when there is no objective metric to determine the best course of action?

The Fruits of Labor

“All undertakings are marred by a flaw, as fire is obscured by smoke.”

Seeing his favorite warrior in such pain, Krishna begins his speech. “Don’t yield to impotence!” he says. “A man cannot escape the force of action by abstaining from actions; he does not attain success just by renunciation.” Let us take this line in two parts. First, action, not one's personal action but action in a universal sense, possesses a force. In this way, it can be thought of as the movement of time, the so-called “arrow of time.” Abstaining from action is not the same as not acting. The latter is impossible if we identify action with an inexorable force. It is interesting to note that Krishna identifies himself with this force, the force that will eventually destroy all people and all worlds, almost like entropy.

In the second part, we must distinguish between renunciation and relinquishment. Renunciation is the giving up of something based on one’s desire; it is equivalent to saying, “I do not wish to participate, and so I will not.” It is selfish and counterproductive, like a child throwing a tantrum by holding his breath; though he tries to not participate by renouncing air, he will find that it is to no avail. Relinquishment, on the other hand, is like saying, “I see the pointlessness of the endeavor, and so I will not put any stock in it, though I will still participate.” Krishna calls this giving up the fruits of one’s actions. “Be intent on action,” he urges, “not on the fruits of action.” Since we must act – since acting is an inevitable certainty – then let us do so. If, however, we hope for any particular outcome of those actions, we are being misled. Here is Krishna again: “A man who sees inaction in action and action in inaction has understanding among men.” That is, be the person who is detached from the fruits of his actions and also recognizes that choosing inaction is in itself an action.

Why must we avoid the fruits of action? Here is where Krishna starts sounding a lot like the Stoics. “Contacts with matter make us feel heat and cold, pleasure and pain.” Emotional feeling here is equated with physical feeling; all comes from contact with matter. “It is the senses that engage in sense objects… Brooding about sensuous objects makes attachment to them grow; from attachment desire arises, from desire anger is born. From anger comes confusion; from confusion memory lapses; from broken memory understanding is lost; from loss of understanding, he is ruined.” And if you give a mouse a cookie…

           

This is a long chain of conditionals that Krishna confronts us with, and though the wording is Eastern-flavored, it is ultimately the same old story: the things of this world will destroy us if we let them. The only answer is to find a way to resist participation in them. Which brings me to a point that I’ve thought about often when reading this, or Epictetus, or Plotinus, or any of these philosophers. It seems like the conclusion of all their advice, of their so-called “practical philosophy,” is that the world must be renounced (or relinquished, whatever) in order to live in the world. But isn’t that a lot like saying the only way to win is not to play? The insight remains, but it’s not very helpful, is it? It is as if you and a friend were cornered by a serial killer, and you ask your friend what you should do, and he says, “Don’t get cornered by a dude with a chainsaw.” It’s true, he’s right, but it’s highly impractical. The distinction Krishna draws between renunciation and relinquishment helps a little, but to detach oneself from the world can’t be the only thing to do when you live in the world. I just feel like all these philosophers were the kids who took the ball away and went home when they started losing the game.

Duty

We’ve seen a lot of talk about duty in the past; every story of war and battle emphasizes it. Here, however, it has a slightly different interpretation.

Duty in the Bhagavad-Gita acquires a more universalist bent than in the Greeks or the Romans. Barbara Stoler Miller writes in her introduction, “By performing his [Arjuna’s] warrior duty with absolute devotion to Krishna, he can unite with Krishna’s cosmic purpose.” Duty, then, begets purpose. It is assigned to us by nature in the sense that it provides order in a disordered world, and so to go against duty is to go against the cosmic flow. Duty is controlled, ordered; “freedom lies,” Miller tells us, “not in the renunciation of the world, but in disciplined action.” The true way is not anarchic; we should not cast off our shackles, but have enough discipline (defined as skill in action) to perform our duty under any conditions. Krishna tells us this in his own words: “Truly free is the sage who controls his senses, mind, and understanding, who focuses on freedom and dispels desire, fear, and anger."

We could talk about Kafka now, but since his entire oeuvre is basically about blindly doing one’s duty, let's not and say we did.

Lightness and Weight

My favorite book – which I haven’t read since high school and should probably reread if I’m going to continue referring to it this way – is The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, and a lot of his ideas have echoes in the Gita. I should revise that and say that echoes is not the right word, but complements. At the crucial moment in Kundera’s book, the narrator interrupts the action to discuss a German phrase, “Einmal ist keinmal”: once is not once, that which can happen only once might as well have never happened at all, the logic being that without an objective way of judging which course of action is the correct one, we can only reasonably be paralyzed at all times by indecision. The ultimate lightness of our actions in the scheme of the universe runs counter to the importance, the weight, that they exert on our own lives. And if once is all we get to do things right, we might as well get nothing.

Krishna gives almost an exact opposite reading of the situation. Where Kundera sees no objective scale, Krishna sees only objectivity. Duty is the way to free oneself from the burden of not knowing, since not knowing springs from a sense of disorder and duty brings us closer to (some form of) cosmic, universal order. Moreover, there is nothing light about our actions. Kundera sees lightness since our actions make such a small dent on the universe, but to Krishna, the dent should not matter at all; it should not factor into our considerations. Worry over the dent is counterproductive because we should free ourselves from the notion of cause and effect, that our actions have consequences which are ours and for which we are responsible. “The practice of true duty,” the introduction tells us, “does not arise from personal passion but is part of a larger order that demands detachment.”

Perhaps the wisdom that we are to take away from this is that the path we choose does not matter so much as that we are on a path. One of my favorite passages from the book makes it clear why: “All undertakings are marred by a flaw, as fire is obscured by smoke.”


Stray Observations

• Miller, opens the Gita with a quote from TS Eliot's Four Quartets: “This is the use of memory: / For liberation–not less of love but expanding / Of love beyond desire, and so liberation / From the future as well as the past.”
• There is an emphasis on honest and false feeling. Honest feeling is characterized by involuntary reactions, like the "bristling" of hair on one's arm. A man has no control over goosebumps or the like, and so to convey, for example, Arjuna's true inner conflict, he tells Krishna that his hair is bristling. These opposites, real and feigned emotion, can be contrasted with the other opposites that abound in the text: freedom and control, action and inaction, past and future (cf. the Eliot quote above), and cause and effect. 
• Speaking of the translator, I should say a few words about why I chose this translation. One of my Indian students saw me reading this book and told me that it wasn't one of the better translations. Miller seems quite capable; she has impressive credentials, and the blurbs on the back came from some big names. What was important to me, though, was that this edition included a short essay on Thoreau and his reactions to the Gita. Though I haven't specifically mentioned it, the essay was worth the read and certainly colored a lot of what I talked about.
• All this talk about action and inaction makes me think of the art critic Harold Rosenberg talking about Jackson Pollock. The exact quote escapes me, but he saw in Pollock's work the emphasis on action (hence the term "action painting"). Paint drips as he walks about the canvas, creating a visual documentation of his steps and missteps. He goes on to say that action always tends toward perfection, the setting right of what has gone wrong. Action painting, then, can be seen as a record of one's attempts at order. All of this goes nicely with Krishna's speech.
• Let's repeat that quote I like a third time: “All undertakings are marred by a flaw, as fire is obscured by smoke.” Melville, through the narrator Ishmael, makes a similar statement in Moby-Dick, calling the novel a draft of a draft of a draft. Perfection can never be achieved, only approached, and even then only very obliquely. He goes on to mention the cathedral at Cologne, and how it sits unfinished to this day (though I think it's finished now, but let's not let that detract from Melville's point). Even after hundreds of years and generations of workers, the testament of man's devotion to God was not complete. For more on cathedral-building, check out Raymond Carver's short story "Cathedral."