Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 090 - A Decorated Corpse – Plotinus on Matter and Evil.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, A Decorated Corpse – Plotinus on Matter and Evil. Are you a pessimistic sort of person? When you look at a glass that has been filled to the halfway point with water, do you think, water? Is that the best they can offer me? When life gives you lemons, do you make lemonade, but then refuse to drink it, realizing you would have preferred the water after all? Among the seven dwarfs in Snow White, do you most identify with Grumpy? Most of the dwarfs seem to have no sophisticated views about the world, contenting themselves with sneezing or sleeping. Let's face it, Dopey more or less sets the tone. Happy is an exception, but he is clearly deluding himself. At least Grumpy has the courage to face the world as it is. It's a world of wicked stepmothers, of poisonous apples with worms in them. Grumpy knows that life can be a nightmare, and that Prince Charming is not coming to wake us up. The undeniable fact that the world around us is full of suffering and evil has always presented a challenge to philosophers of a more optimistic bent. In contemporary philosophy, it is most familiar in the form of the so-called problem of evil. Actually, there are several problems of evil, only two of which really feature in philosophy nowadays. The more dramatic of the two is called the logical problem of evil, and claims that there is a straightforward contradiction between the existence of evil and the existence of a perfectly good, all-powerful, and all-knowing God. The thought is that a God who was perfectly good would want to avoid any evil that he knew about and could avoid, but the God we're considering knows everything, and can do anything, so there can't be any evil that escapes his notice or his power. Yet, we see that there is evil. Thus, God, at least as described, doesn't exist. Since the God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam seems to fit the description—perfectly good, omniscient, and omnipotent—the logical problem of evil accuses adherents of these faiths of a rather fundamental error. They believe both that God exists and that evil exists, but this is impossible. I tend to think that philosophers of religion have succeeded in answering this version of the problem of evil. Remember, the problem is supposedly that there is no possible way that such a God and evil could coexist. But this seems wrong. God might well have reasons for tolerating the existence of evil, despite his perfect goodness. The standard reason offered is that if God wanted to give us free will, he might allow evil to exist as a consequence of this freedom. That doesn't end the debate, of course, because we might think that God, being all-knowing and all-powerful, could find a way to create free creatures without evil ever resulting. Here, the debate gets slightly complex, but suffice to say that with the logical version of the problem, the burden lies on the anti-theist to show that the theist's beliefs are actually contradictory, or impossible—quite a high standard to reach. Thus, the popularity of a second version, the so-called evidential problem of evil. On this version, we admit that God theoretically might allow evil to exist, but we say that the amount and type of evil we actually see in the world makes it very unlikely that there is a perfect God. The evidence at our disposal seems to include pointless evils that a perfect God would have eliminated. Here, the burden of argument between theist and anti-theist is much more evenly distributed. Of course, one could devote a whole podcast to these issues—perhaps someday I will—but for the moment I want to concentrate on a third problem of evil. This, at least in my view, is the version that was of interest to Plotinus and the centuries of philosophers who followed in his wake. I would call it the metaphysical problem of evil. It goes like this. Plotinus, and many a thinker after him, believed that all things derive from a first principle which is perfectly good. Indeed, he called his first principle not only the one, but also the good. But how can anything evil derive from something that is purely good? This would be like if the form of horse caused some things not to be horses, or if water made things dry. So, Plotinus' problem of evil is really a problem about causation. We need to explain how evil effects can arise from good causes. Actually, even that's not quite right. Plotinus isn't exclusively, or for that matter mostly, concerned with moral evil. The Greek word he uses, kakon, means bad in a broader sense, and for Plotinus it describes any defective state, such as illness or deformity. In fact, his most common example of something bad is not intentional evil, but ugliness. So, what he really wants to explain is how there can be anything bad in a world derived from good causes. His basic answer, paradoxical though it may seem, is that this cannot happen, and so there is nothing bad in the world. This is in part because the causes of Plotinus' universe are not merely abstract causes, like Plato's forms seem to be. They are benevolent, providential gods. One of his most powerful treatises, split into two by porphyry and placed at the beginning of the third Ennead along with a briefer work on fate, is devoted to the subject of providence. Here, Plotinus develops the optimistic worldviews of the Stoics, insisting that misfortunes and evils are beneficial and good when seen from the wider divine perspective. For instance, in one rather chilling passage, Plotinus speculates that men who rape women will be reincarnated as women who are themselves raped. On the other hand, he rejects the Stoic conviction that all events are determined by an irresistible divine providence. When I was discussing Stoic determinism back in episode 63, I mentioned that Plotinus says that determinism makes humans like stones that have been set rolling. Plotinus thinks that this mistake goes hand in hand with another Stoic error, namely their understanding of humans as entirely material beings. For Plotinus, our ability to transcend determination by physical causes is due to the immateriality of our souls. Since they cannot be affected by mere bodies, we are guaranteed independence and self-determination, so long, that is, as we do not fall under the sway of our bodies, succumbing to the lure of pleasure and bodily needs. Freedom, for Plotinus, means identifying ourselves with our immaterial and ultimately our intellectual selves. This may seem rather puzzling, insofar as Plotinus seems to be telling us that we will be free if, and only if, we make this choice and no other choice. But for Plotinus, freedom is not about being able to choose between one thing and another. After all, as we saw two episodes ago, he considers the one to be free, even though the one necessarily and eternally causes its effects without selecting this from a menu of options. Rather, for Plotinus, an action is up to us if we are the cause determining the action. This can never happen to the one since no cause can affect it. We, by contrast, can be enslaved by the body, but only if we let it enslave us. Of course, these Stoic-flavored meditations on providence and self-determination do little to persuade us that evil does not exist. At best, they show merely that evils are woven into the fabric of a cosmic tapestry that is, on the whole, good. But Plotinus has a more decisive card to play. Of course, he does admit that bad things happen, but there is no such thing as badness. Strictly speaking, it has no being. Rather, badness, or if you prefer evil, is always a mere lack or deficiency which is found within something that has some degree of goodness. To put it another way, badness is when something fails to be as good as it ought to be. But something that was not good in any way at all simply could not exist. The giraffe may be sick and cantankerous, and these are deficiencies. A healthy, playfully cooperative giraffe would be better, but the giraffe still has its life, its ability to move, to see. These capacities, however impaired they may be, remain good, and if they were all stripped away, there would be no giraffe. And likewise for any case of imperfection you care to name, including the central example of moral evil. When the evil queen tries to poison Snow White, this is a failure of her rationality or self-control. But without her crafty mind and her basic ability to act, she could do nothing, evil or otherwise. Indeed, as Plotinus points out, evils are most dangerous precisely when they are combined with perfections or goods, like great intelligence or strength. The more that goods are eliminated, the less potent the bad becomes. And when good is entirely eliminated, the bad is eliminated along with it. Evils are, then, the holes in the Swiss cheese of the universe. They are not things in their own right that the divine causes have brought into being. No, they are precisely cases where the divine causes have not brought something into being, or rather, brought less into being than we might have hoped. Thus, there is no accusation to place at the doorstep of the gods. They have not made evils because evils are not the sort of thing that can be made. This is, I would say, a breathtakingly clever and original solution to the metaphysical problem of evil. It was recognized as such by many subsequent philosophers, notably St. Augustine. He adopted the Plutinian theory of evil and passed it on to the medieval tradition where it became a standard part of the argumentation used to absolve God of responsibility for evil. Still, one might feel that Plotinus's theory is itself lacking something. Even if we grant that evils are not beings in their own right, but mere deficiencies, isn't there still a puzzle as to why the effects of perfect causes should be imperfect and deficient at all? Plotinus would admit that there is, but he has a final card to play, an explanation for why the images of forms we find in this world are not as perfect as the forms themselves. In a way, the answer is obvious. Since deficiency is found not in the intelligible world but only in the material world, the culprit must be matter. Our sick giraffe is like a wobbly table made by an expert carpenter working with poor quality wood. This idea that matter is somehow incapable of receiving form perfectly has a certain plausibility. It's clear that a material object will differ from an intelligible paradigm in some ways. Even the best giraffe or table in our world will have parts, will occupy space, and be subject to change over time. None of these things apply to the form of giraffe or the form of table, and for Plotinus they already constitute a falling away from perfection. Remember that he sees a close connection between unity and goodness, so for him, just having parts and changing from one moment to the next is already a way of being worse than the form. Still, we might think it possible for each material object to be the best possible material version of its form. All giraffes would be equally healthy and elegant, all tables equally well-made, all humans equally virtuous. Why doesn't this happen? It looks like Plotinus's theory needs matter to be resistant to perfection, somehow recalcitrant and prone to undermining unity and proportion. That would be hard to understand from the perspective of someone like Aristotle who thinks of matter as nothing but potentiality for form. For an Aristotelian, the whole point of matter is to become perfected in various ways. But Plotinus rejects this rather positive idea of matter and goes so far as to describe matter as a sort of non-being. This is the core of his solution because it shows why matter is intimately involved with badness, which was, as we saw, also a kind of non-being. It also explains why a material universe must involve failures to receive form and being. Plotinus insists that matter cannot, as Aristotle claimed, be actualized or perfected. Rather, it remains inert and unaffected, even as higher causes try to give it form. The result is a radical rethinking of the physical world around us. Bodies may seem to us solid and real, but they are only a conjunction of matter, which is in itself nothing at all, with incorporeal images that are weak imitations of the forms. Our worldly experience is of these mere images, flickering through the darkness of matter without actually turning the matter into anything real. Plotinus compares the images to reflections in a mirror, or ghosts, and, in a wonderful turn of phrase, describes matter as a decorated corpse. The images are often beautiful, because they are, after all, imitations of the perfect forms in the intellect, but Plotinus compares the situation to a prisoner who has been bound in chains of gold. Thus, Plotinus' theory is often summarized as the claim that matter and evil are the same thing, but it would be more accurate to say that matter is the principle of evils. In itself, matter is nothing at all, whereas any given case of badness or evil is a specific deficiency that results when the death, darkness, and indeterminacy of matter undermines the reception of a specific form in a specific body. All this seems to be aimed at explaining natural evils, like illness and deformation, rather than the evil found within us humans. In fact, you might suppose that Plotinus will have a hard time explaining that. If humans are really immaterial souls, how can they be subject to the deficiency and imperfection caused by matter? The answer is indirectly. Matter is still the cause of human weakness, because, as we've seen, for a soul, weakness is nothing but turning towards bodies and away from its true intelligible home. This might look rather inadequate. Does Plotinus really have nothing to say about human evil and goodness, apart from telling us to stop paying attention to bodies? Remember that this is the man who took care of orphans and tried to found a city governed by Platonic theories of justice, so events in our world were clearly not a matter of indifference to him. And he can, I think, explain how and why humans can be practically virtuous in terms of the theory of matter and evil we've been discussing. Even though matter can never be redeemed by the imitations of form that appear in it, it's obviously better for form to be imitated as fully as possible. So, just as it's preferable that a giraffe be healthy rather than sick, it's preferable that we act virtuously rather than viciously. Indeed, the wise man's virtuous actions will be a natural result of his wisdom. Because the wise man grasps the form of justice, for instance, he will almost automatically seek to instantiate justice in the material realm. There still lurks a paradox here in that wise people would really prefer to spend all their time contemplating the intelligible forms, but Plotinus's view is that our embodied condition just doesn't allow that. In one of my favorite passages in the Enneads, he says that a man who fights bravely in a war is like Hippocrates healing a sick person. Hippocrates would prefer that the patient weren't ill in the first place, and the brave man would likewise prefer that his city didn't need to be defended, but given that there is illness, that the city is besieged by the enemy, the appropriate action follows naturally from the brave man's virtue or the doctor's skill. But we can't give Plotinus's theory of evil a clean bill of health just yet. He's done all this work to explain how matter undermines the reception of goodness and seduces the soul away from its true calling, but now we seem forced to ask, where did matter come from? After all, if the chain of emanated principles had gone from the one to intellect, then to soul, and then just stopped, we wouldn't have all these problems. Of course, the question of where matter comes from is a slightly odd one, given that matter is non-being. Rather than saying that some cause brought about all this nothingness, Plotinus might, and sometimes does, just compare it to the way light must eventually give out, leaving darkness where the power of the light source can no longer reach. But he also suggests that matter should somehow derive from higher principles. His considered view on this is a matter of debate. Some interpreters think that for Plotinus, matter is the product of soul, simply the last in the chain of direct emanations. On this reading, the soul is too weak to originate anything with a causal power of its own, so it makes inert, dead matter instead. Another possibility is that matter emerges from the intellect itself. But whatever the mechanism, it's clear what Plotinus absolutely wants to avoid, the idea that matter is an independent, evil principle that would counterbalance the first principle Plotinus calls the one or the good. We already saw that Plutarch was tempted by this sort of dualist theory, which posits an evil principle that undermines all the good work done by the gods in our world. But when Plotinus thinks about dualism, he has in mind another opponent, the Gnostics. They were a religious sect with an elaborate, moralizing cosmological theory that could well be compared to that of Plotinus himself. We are fortunate in knowing a good deal about them, thanks especially to 20th century discoveries of manuscripts in Egypt. These texts, preserved in the Coptic language, tell us that the physical universe is the product of an ignorant and erring divinity, and that only an elite few souls are chosen to escape from cycles of rebirth in the prison of bodies. We know that works by Gnostic authors were read in the circle of Plotinus, and Porphyry actually entitled one of the treatises in the Enneads, Against the Gnostics. A second title given to this treatise by Porphyry is revealing, Against those who say that the maker of the universe and the universe are evil. On this score, Porphyry understood well the teachings of his master. Plotinus may have made matter the source of evil, but he was adamantly opposed to the idea that the physical cosmos as a whole is evil, or that it would be better if it did not exist. His praise of the divine providence that governs this cosmos was just as passionate as his insistence that we should identify ourselves with the highest intellectual part of our souls. His conviction that we do have such a part, and that all of us do, not only an elect few, as the Gnostics claimed, is another sign of Plotinus' deep optimism. He saw the physical world as imperfect in its parts, but perfect as a whole, as a danger to souls, but a danger that souls can defeat. So it is no surprise that he devoted several treatises to the arrangement of the physical universe, which will be well worth our attention in a final episode on Plotinus, so I'm optimistic that you'll choose to join me and an expert on those treatises, James Wilberding, for a discussion of Plotinus on nature. That will be the next episode, but I'm afraid you'll need to wait before hearing it. As last year I am going to be taking a month off during the summer. Not only do I need to write some more episodes, but I'm also going to be moving to a new position as professor of philosophy at the LMU in Munich. I will be continuing the podcast as normal from there, and still in English. For now, I'd like to thank Neoplatonism expert and podcast editor extraordinaire Faye Edwards for her help this year, as well as Stefan Hagel, whose music has continued to feature at the start and end of each episode. I'm also very grateful to the many scholars who have appeared as interview guests, and above all to you for listening. For now, I'll say auf wiedersehen until I return in one month from Munich, mit der Geschichte der Philosophie, One Lücken.