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.