 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and your 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, Simplicity Itself – Plotinus on the One and Intellect. Here's a trivia question you won't hear at any pub quiz night. What do armies, houses, sunflowers, and giraffes have in common? Things painted by Van Gogh, perhaps? No, he inexplicably failed to capture the noble giraffe in any of his artworks, and I don't believe he was particularly keen on armies either. The right answer is that all these things are mentioned at the beginning of Plotinus's treatise on the One, which was placed at the very end of the Enneads by his student and editor Porphyry. Actually, he doesn't mention sunflowers or giraffes by name, speaking instead generally of plants and animals, but I think we all know at least which animal he had in mind. He mentions these things because of something else they have in common – they are all one. Without unity, an army would just be a bunch of people standing around with an alarming amount of weaponry. And nothing can be a giraffe without being one giraffe. Indeed, to qualify as a thing of any kind is to be one thing. Unity is a condition of being. On the other hand, not everything possesses unity to the same degree. Though you might say that each army is one army, just as much as each sunflower is one sunflower, armies clearly have less unity than sunflowers. Like all plants and animals, the bodies of sunflowers and giraffes are animated by an internal principle of life. This explains their ability to nourish themselves, to turn towards the sun, or lope gracefully towards tasty acacia leaves. By contrast, things like armies and houses have unity imposed upon them by generals or house builders. Aristotle would say that such things have their unity accidentally and from outside, whereas living organisms have an innate, essential unity. Plotinus would agree, and infer a general metaphysical principle. The more unity something has, the more reality it has, and vice versa. An army is less of a being than a sunflower, even if it is considerably more dangerous than a sunflower. Plotinus points out in this same passage that good conditions like health and beauty are also cases of unity. What is health, other than the cooperative ordering of the body's parts, while illness is the result of these parts coming into conflict with one another? What is beauty but a kind of harmony, and what is harmony but a kind of unity? The same is true even for the human soul, at least according to Plato. It has parts, and the virtuous soul is the soul that achieves harmony and unity through the unchallenged mastery of its rational part. Or, consider, finally, the entire cosmos. Arguably, science has now exposed the physical universe as something of a chaotic mess, though some think that there is a divine plan behind the apparent chaos. But in antiquity, almost everyone, with the notable exception of the Epicureans, considered the universe to be well ordered and unified. Plato compared it to a single animal, and Aristotle finished his inquiry into how God moves the heavens by quoting Homer, The rule of many is not good. Let there be one ruler. These considerations lead Plotinus to an inescapable conclusion. If we are looking for the source of all things, we should be looking for a source of unity that is itself maximally one. It will also be the source of goodness, beauty, harmony, and order. It will be that from which all else derives and towards which all things strive to return in whatever way they can. Plotinus calls it the one or the good. Long-time listeners will know, however, that these ideas do not derive from Plotinus the way all things are meant to derive from the one. Looking back as far as Parmenides, we have the idea of reducing reality to a principle of unity. Plato introduces a form of the good in the Republic, and makes it the source of intelligibility and value for all other forms. We then come even closer to Plotinus's conception in the old academy and middle Platonists who try various ways of putting a principle of unity at the top of their metaphysical systems. Plotinus recognizes all these intellectual debts, especially the ones to Parmenides and Plato. It is telling, though, that he does not begin this treatise on the one by surveying previous opinions, as Aristotle might have done. Instead, he starts with armies and houses, sunflowers and giraffes. Similarly, he says in another treatise on the topic of the one, that we should start our inquiry not with the ultimate principle, but by thinking about ourselves. This is part of what distinguishes Plotinus from his predecessors among the so-called middle Platonists, at least as far as we can tell given how incompletely we know them. Plotinus does offer detailed expositions of Platonic dialogues, and he does occasionally save time by assuming the truth of Platonic metaphysics so he can focus on the finer points. But his natural mode is dialectical. He probes problems, seeking to persuade and carry the reader with him, not just to lay out preconceived doctrine. And so here, with the one, he asks us to begin by reflecting on familiar things and on ourselves, and tries to show us that we must keep on pushing with our inquiry until we find an utterly unified first principle. Of course, such a principle would be incorporeal. Bodies have many parts and also change over time, so they are multiple in at least two ways. The soul is immaterial, and thus has a higher kind of unity, but it too has parts, as Plato already established by pointing to the all-too-familiar phenomenon of inward psychic conflict. The soul also changes over time. Even the soul's thinking involves change, as it passes from one idea to the next. But here's another thought. Couldn't the first principle be a mind? Not the human soul, perhaps, but an immaterial intellect that would grasp its knowledge all at once and never do anything else. The suggestion was certainly an option for Plotinus. After all, Aristotle's God is precisely this, a pure intellect that always thinks upon itself. More recently, Platonists like Philo of Alexandria had understood Platonic forms to be ideas in the mind of God, the cause of all things. Plotinus thinks this proposal is on the right track. He agrees that forms are ideas in a divine mind or intellect, in Greek nous. He just doesn't think that this intellect is the first principle, because it falls short of total unity. It's here that we start to see just how radical is Plotinus' understanding of the One. So radical, in fact, that it's not clear that he, or anyone else, can understand the One. After all, the forms were always supposed to be the objects that ground all our knowledge. They just are what is knowable, what is intelligible. To make them ideas in a divine intellect, but then say that the One is beyond that intellect, seems to imply that the One cannot be known. For the most part, Plotinus accepts this conclusion. Occasionally, he will try to push the boundaries of what language and philosophy can offer, but his usual line is that the One is ineffable, that is, beyond anything we can say or think. To say or think anything about it would be to turn it into a multiplicity. For instance, although Plotinus treats this principle as both the One and the Good, if I say something like, the One is good, then I seem to be applying a property to something that has the property. So I'd have two things, the One and its goodness, which are at least conceptually distinct. But the whole point of the One is that it is beyond all multiplicity. There remains the possibility that the One is accessible to us, but not through language or thought. If we are to reach the One, it would seem that we could only do so by achieving complete unity with it. Porphyry tells us in the biography of his master that Plotinus managed to do this only four times during their time together. In Plotinus' writings, there are allusions to these experiences which one can only call mystical. Perhaps the most evocative is the last sentence of one treatise where Plotinus has asked how we are to reach this origin of all things. He answers his own question with the words, a filet panta, take away everything. But the prospect of henosis or unification with the One does not play a central role in the Enneads, and tends, in my opinion, to loom larger than it should in discussions of his philosophy. His more important philosophical claim, and more important legacy for later thinkers, is his insistence on the One's transcendence above intellect and the forms. This result is paradoxical. Remember, we were looking for ever more intense examples of unity because we observed that unity is correlated with reality, intelligibility, and order. But we've ended up by positing a principle beyond intelligibility and order. More paradoxically still, the One is in a sense even beyond reality. Plotinus understands intellect to be the paradigm of being and the forms as the manifold expression of all the sorts of being that there are. The form of giraffe is just what it is to be a giraffe, and the form of sunflower is the being of sunflowers. Thus, Plotinus chooses, as one of his favorite lines from Plato, a remark Socrates makes about the form of the good in the Republic. The good is said to be, Beyond being in majesty and power. Plotinus takes Plato to mean that the good or one is in fact not a form, after all, but transcendent above the realm of forms and thus beyond being. The extremes to which Plotinus has led us are apt to make us wonder whether we should have followed him this far. Perhaps we should have stopped with intellect and its forms, as Philo of Alexandria did. But that would be to overlook Plotinus's subtle analysis of how intellect falls short of absolute unity. For one thing, even if it is thinking about all the forms at once without ever passing from one form to another, it will still be thinking about many forms. Indeed, there are presumably an indefinitely large number of forms, a result that will follow quickly if we accept that there are forms of numbers. So, intellect displays an indefinite multiplicity because of the objects of its thought. Plotinus also points out that if the forms are internal to the intellect, it will be thinking about itself when it thinks about them. It is, then, both that which is thinking and that which is being thought. As both subject and object of thought, it has a kind of duality that the truly first principle must lack. Plotinus sums up these findings by calling the intellect a hen pola, a one many. It has a very impressive degree of unity, being not only immaterial but unchanging and identical with the objects of its own thought. Indeed, it is the most unified thing that can be conceived. But the very fact that it can be conceived, and that it conceives itself, shows us that it is not utterly one and is thus not first. If you still wanted to resist this conclusion, you might offer the following alternative. What if the forms were not inside the intellect, as Plotinus is claiming, but distinct from it? Then it could be a simple mind that looks to forms that are safely outside it, where they would not compromise its oneness. Plato actually says in the Timaeus that God looks to the forms when designing the world, and some Platonists had taken this to mean that the forms are independent of the divine mind. In fact, as we saw briefly last time, this was the view Porphyry held when he turned up at Plotinus' school. He had been taught it from his earlier instructor, a man named Longinus, who was better known for his linguistic and textual expertise than his philosophical sophistication. Porphyry stuck to Longinus' position tenaciously and gave in to Plotinus' view only after a debate with his fellow student Amelius. We are not told what the decisive point in this debate may have been, but in his writings, Plotinus offers a powerful reason to think that intellect is identical with its objects rather than looking to forms as a kind of external blueprint. His argument looks similar to one given by Sextus Empiricus, a rare borrowing from the sceptical tradition. The argument begins from the point that whatever grasps an external object has only a representation of that object. For instance, when we see a giraffe cantering across the savannah, the giraffe is not actually in our eye or our eyesight. Rather, we are getting a visual image of the giraffe. But when images are involved, there is always a risk of error. A further principle is needed to provide some kind of guarantee, to come along and ratify that the image is accurate. Thus reason frequently corrects the images offered to it by sensation, judging perhaps that that shimmering object just behind the giraffe is not a pool of water as it seems to be, but rather a mirage. It is no problem that sensation works like this, but at the level of intellect, it would be a disaster. After all, intellect was supposed to be the paradigmatic case of knowledge, so how could it need yet a further principle to tell it that its intellect is true? We are in danger of an infinite regress with each kind of cognition needing another kind of cognition to reassure it that it is really getting things right. By insisting that the forms are inside the intellect, Plotinus avoids this problem. Intellect knows that its knowledge is knowledge because what it knows is nothing other than itself. Now, doing philosophy is like taking care of small children. No sooner have you solved one problem than the next problem is looming into view, and we wouldn't have it any other way. In this case, Plotinus's success in proving the multiplicity of intellect leaves us with the puzzle of how the one could possibly have produced something of this sort. The one is supposedly the source of all things, but if it is utterly and completely one, how does it generate something multiple? Later authors, wondering about this aspect of Neoplatonism, invoke the so-called ex uno unum principle, from one thing you only get one thing. And although Plotinus doesn't explicitly endorse a principle along these lines, he clearly sees it as an important challenge to explain how multiplicity can arise from unity. Unlike Neil Armstrong, he doesn't try to accomplish this giant leap in just one step. Instead, the production of nous from the one is a two-stage process. First, the simple one allows an equally simple second principle to go forth from itself. This second principle, which will become the intellect, then turns back upon its source like a child looking towards its father. In an almost tragic turn of events, it finds that it cannot grasp its father, that would compromise the one's transcendence. Instead, it does the next best thing, grasping itself, and making itself an image of the one. As it does so, it generates the forms as its own ideas in a single act of intellection that imitates the total simplicity of the one. The puzzling thing here, if there's only one puzzling thing, is why this should give rise to the forms. Plotinus says at one point, the one is all things and no one of them, which I take to mean that the one has the power to generate everything that comes after it, though it remains distinct from everything it generates. Only once intellect begins to think about itself does it become clear what these things will be. One might further wonder why it is that we get just the forms that emerge and not some other forms. Why is there a form of giraffe and no form of unicorn? Perhaps our questions are simply wrongheaded though. Intellect knows whatever there is to know, and this does not include unicorn because there's no such thing as a unicorn. This is a matter of necessity. It's not as if it is deciding to think about giraffe but giving unicorn a miss, even though it could have thought about that too. At this level of the Plutinian universe, everything that happens is inevitable. That, of course, brings us to yet another problem. Even if we accept this rather mysterious story about how intellect is produced by the one, we might be reluctant to accept the idea that it proceeds from the one necessarily. As I mentioned last time, Plotinus uses a variety of metaphors to describe the way intellect cascades forth from the one. The one is like an overflowing fountain or a shining light. He uses the same language of emanation to speak of the production of soul, subsequently many philosophers and theologians will complain that this makes the divine principles automatic causes. If the one gives rise to intellect necessarily, then it is like fire, mindlessly giving off heat. If you conceive of the first principle as a generous god, freely giving a gratuitous gift when he creates the universe, Plotinus's conception is bound to be disappointing. In fact, doubly so. Not only does the one cause its effects necessarily, but it causes most of its effects indirectly. Strictly speaking, it gives rise only to the inchoate subject of thought that will become intellect when it generates the forms within itself. Soul is then produced by intellect, not the one, and the one has only a very distant and mediated relationship to the physical universe. This looks to be a far cry from the voluntary creation of all things envisioned in the Bible and Quran. And yet, Plotinus devoted an ambitious treatise to the freedom of the first principle. He begins, of course, from the nature of human freedom, asking what it means for something to be, as the Stoics like to put it, up to us. He answers that our actions are up to us when we are masters of ourselves, rather than being pulled this way and that by external forces. Of course, he considers the desires and needs that derive from bodily existence to be forces external to our souls. The One, by contrast, has no such competing demands on its attention, and is influenced by nothing outside itself. Strictly speaking, we cannot say that it masters itself, because that would introduce the same kind of duality as would arise if it were to think about itself, but we can still say that it is free, in the negative sense that nothing is exercising compulsion upon it. Ironically, then, Plotinus's conception of freedom does not look that far from what we find in the Stoics, despite their materialism, and, in fact, among philosophers nowadays, with similar inclinations. For him, freedom is simply the power to do what one wishes, without hindrance or compulsion exercised by anything else. Again, strictly speaking, we cannot say that the One wishes to do anything, but this treatise is notable for Plotinus's willingness to speak more positively about the One than usual, often adding the caveat hoyon, so to speak, or as if. Thus, we can say that the One is free because it is as if it can act by doing whatever it wants, so to speak. We souls, existing at a much lower level of Plotinus's scheme, can only strive towards the same kind of untrammeled freedom of action. We achieve this above all by, what else, doing philosophy. Indeed, although Plotinus is perhaps most famous for his ideas about the One, he devotes much more attention to the soul, investigating its powers, the dangers of its relation to the body, and its relationship to the higher principles of intellect and the One. Plotinus optimistically, and controversially, suggests that our true selves are always in touch with the intellect and its forms, whether we know it or not. As long as you don't lose touch with the podcast, you'll find out why next time, as we look at Plotinus on soul, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.