Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 089 - On the Horizon - Plotinus on the Soul.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, On the Horizon – Plotinus on the Soul. Wouldn't it be fun to invite an assortment of ancient philosophers to a screening of The Wizard of Oz? Just picture the scene. The Stoics would be muttering critically about the Tin Man's deplorable desire to get in touch with his emotions, and pointing out that if the scarecrow wants to be clever, he should wish for a heart and not a brain. Aristotle would be sitting at the back, taking notes on the winged monkeys for his zoological writings. Galen and the anatomists of Alexandria would tap their toes as the cowardly lion launches into their favorite tune, If I Only Had the Nerve. Thales would feel vindicated by the fact that the heroes win the day by using a bucket of water. Meanwhile, the Pythagoreans would be trying to get everyone to be quiet. And Plotinus? I think his favorite scene would come at the end, when Dorothy says, and I quote, If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard, because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with. Dorothy's observation might well remind Plotinus of something he says in one of his own treatises, one might be unaware that one has something, holding on to it more powerfully than if one did know. He is describing the way that the human soul relates to the things it has seen in the intelligible realm, the realm of the forms. Following Plato, he believes that the soul is eternal and has seen the wondrous beauty and truth of this realm before it came to be in a body. Yet the embodied soul retains a memory of these realities, and Plotinus here suggests that the deeply buried memory of the forms is possessed more intensely than anything the soul is consciously aware of. Thanks to your soul's relationship to a body, it is aware of an almost unceasing stream of sensory phenomena, the whirlwind of colors, motions, and sounds that reach it through the eyes and the ears. It's easy for the soul to be distracted by these fleeting impressions. In its most debased condition, the soul may become so confused as actually to identify itself with the body, but Plotinus believes that even people in this condition have within them the power to remember what they have seen in the world of the intellect. In fact, on this score, Plotinus is more optimistic than almost any other late ancient Platonist. Not only does he believe that we can find traces of the intelligible within ourselves, he is convinced that we never depart completely from the intelligible world. The soul remains in part undescended, in other words, still actively contemplating the forms even while it is ensconced in a material body. He knows that this idea is controversial and even paradoxical, at one point introducing it with the phrase, if we may dare to present our own opinion. After all, as later Platonists like Iamblichus and Proclus pointed out, it's hard to see how it could be that I am even now engaging in an intellectual vision of the forms without my being aware of it. But Plotinus is, among other things, a pioneer in the philosophy of awareness. For him, the soul's challenge is not to achieve union, or contact, with the intelligible forms. Rather, the soul needs to realize that it is already always in contact with those forms. Characteristically, he offers an analogy drawn from everyday experience, when you are concentrating on reading a book, you are not aware that you are reading. Nor does the brave man fighting in battle consciously think that he is being courageous. The surprisingly Platonian, Wizard of Oz, incidentally makes the same point. The cowardly lion does not realize he is brave, nor is the tin man aware of his own compassion. Plotinus showed his own compassion by writing the Enneads. They are many things, a running engagement on themes and passages in Plato and later thinkers, a conversation with imaginary opponents and his own students, technical treatises suffused with powerful and even poetic imagery. But above all, they constitute an act of charity on Plotinus's part. He has already identified with his true intellectual self. Porphyry tells us that he could continue to commune with intellect even during a conversation. So he already has his heart's desire and stands to gain nothing personally from straining his bad eyesight to write the treatises collected as the Enneads. Much as the One and the Intellect spontaneously give rise to the good things that come after them, Plotinus wrote anyway, as an exhortation for his students and readers. The soul is the only part of Plotinus's universe that could need such an exhortation. The One, of course, reigns in its supreme and silent singularity. The Intellect permanently thinks about the forms that are its ideas. Below the soul there is the mindless indefiniteness of matter, something we'll discuss next time. But the soul, uniquely, is torn between two possibilities. As Plotinus says, it is on the horizon of the bodily and the intelligible. The point of philosophy is to turn our attention upwards, away from our bodies, and towards the immaterial causes that are more real than any body. Plotinus wants to wake us up, to tell us that there's no place like home, and that we have never left it. Of course, Plotinus was well aware of philosophical rivals who denied the reality of forms or a world of intellect, who even denied the immateriality of the soul itself. He finds it hard to take the Epicureans seriously, so his main opponents here are the Stoics. Despite being cleverer than any scarecrow, they were convinced that they, or their souls, were nothing but material objects. Plotinus is happy to set up Stoic materialism as a straw man to be knocked down, and also directs his fire at Aristotle's claim that the soul is the form of the body. Against such views, Plotinus argues in a variety of ways for soul's independence as an incorporeal substance. As so often, he focuses on unity. The body has separate parts, whereas the soul does not. For one thing, the soul can grasp immaterial objects of thought, and Plotinus fails to see how something with separate parts could grasp something that has no parts. He draws a similar conclusion from the soul's awareness of what is happening in the body. After all, it is not as if we have one soul in our finger to perceive things that happen to the finger, and another soul in some other part of the body. Rather, the soul is a unified locus of awareness for the entire body. He dismisses Stoic attempts to explain this via some kind of chain reaction of physical signals through the body to a so-called ruling faculty seated in the heart. If that were the case, there would be only an indirect perception of what happens in the finger, whereas Plotinus wants to insist that the soul is wholly and immediately aware of each bodily experience. On the other hand, when he gives his own theory of perception, he insists that the soul cannot actually be affected by anything that happens in the body. Rather, the single soul makes a discrimination or judgment on the basis of material events that happen in the sense organs. Rather ironically, given Plotinus' scorn for Stoic materialism, the philosopher who comes closest to anticipating his ideas about the self is probably the Stoic Epictetus. Stoics had long held that the rational part of each person stands in judgment over the impressions of sense experience, and in Stoic ethics, especially in Epictetus, who had lived only a few generations before Plotinus, we find the idea that the true self is the reasoning aspect of the person and that wisdom consists in valuing this true self rather than apparent bodily goods like wealth, food, pleasurable experience, or even physical health. Plotinus endorses these Stoic ideas but draws more radical conclusions. In the treatise that Porphyry placed at the very beginning of the Enneads, Plotinus asks who we are, thus tackling the question of the self more directly than any philosopher had done before. As we would by now expect, he concludes that our true self is the higher aspect of soul that engages in Intellection, and not the self of bodily experience. In a remarkable final paragraph, though, Plotinus wonders who it is that is inquiring into the identity of the self. Is that really us? There is a paradox lurking here. If the real me is the me who is always contemplating the forms, then whose attention needs to be turned to the forms? Apparently not my own attention, since I am really only my intellectual self. Whether the lower incidental part of me knows it or not. As always in Plotinus, the solution lies in unity. I should be trying not just to figure out which part of me is the real me, but to make all of me into a single self-aware being. That means continuing to have bodily experiences, but to recognize these experiences for the incidental, fleeting, valueless things that they are, and also to understand how they relate to my higher self. So, Plotinus can also say that my self is that which becomes aware of both its higher and its lower nature. The goal is to integrate and unify these two aspects, by doing some philosophy and thus obeying the Delphic command, Know thyself. Does this mean that the soul has no nature of its own, by which it is distinguished from both body and intellect? Or is it nothing but a center of attention that can look up or down? For all his talk of soul as existing on a horizon, Plotinus does think that some activities exist properly at the level of soul. Above all, the activity of discursive reasoning, in Greek dionoia. He sharply distinguishes this kind of thinking from the Intellect or noesis that we find in the case of Intellect or noose. Whereas noose grasps all possible objects of knowledge all at once, it is characteristic of soul to think first about one thing, then about something else. Those of us who find it hard to think about even one thing at a time may find this impressive enough, but for Plotinus the soul's reasoning activity is a mere image of the perfect thinking of intellect. Still, we shouldn't be too discouraged. Soul is still thinking about the same things as Intellect, albeit in a more laborious and partial way. We can thus consider the soul's discursive thought to be a kind of unfolding or piecemeal spelling out of the undivided complete knowledge possessed by Intellect. The fact that soul re-enacts the activity of Intellect in a lesser, more divided way has far-reaching consequences in Plotinus' philosophy. For one thing, it allows him to give a novel theory of time, and to explain how time relates to eternity. As so often in late ancient Platonism, the touchstone text here is Plato's Timaeus. There, we learn that time comes about along with the orderly motions of the heavens in the physical cosmos, whereas eternity is appropriate to immaterial beings like the forms and divine craftsmen. Plato also has Timaeus say that time is the moving image of eternity. With his distinction between the all-at-once activity of Intellect and the one-thing-after-another activity of soul, Plotinus is able to explain Plato's remarks as follows. Eternity is, as he says, the life of Intellect. It is simply a name for the way that forms are all simultaneously and permanently grasped in the Intellect's contemplation. Time is, correspondingly, the life of soul. Since we are souls, we have an intimate experience of time as we go through our sequential thought processes. To say that our thinking is discursive is, indeed, just to say that it happens in time. As I said, we think at one time about one thing, and then at another time about something else. Suppose you are following a philosophical argument. You consider each premise in turn, and then see that a conclusion follows from these premises. Or consider the more homely example of listening to this podcast. You aren't thinking about the ideas I'm trying to explain all at once, but one idea after another. First, you pondered the Wizard of Oz. Then, you contemplated the undescended soul. And now, you're wondering what to have for dinner, because you've stopped paying attention. Because this kind of thinking is an image or unfolding of the Intellect's comprehension, Plotinus can say that Plato was right, time is indeed an image of eternity. So, for Plotinus, eternity is not simply unending time. On this new theory, if you pledge to love someone forever, you aren't strictly speaking pledging to love them eternally. You're only promising to love them at every moment in the future. Plotinian eternity, by contrast, doesn't mean at every moment, whether past, present, or future. It means timelessness. Plotinus's theory itself achieved a kind of timelessness, being embraced by many generations of philosophers in Neoplatonism and beyond. Christian thinkers like Boethius and Aquinas, will gladly agree that God is beyond time and has his knowledge all at once. Though Plotinus's idea of eternity was thus very influential, the way he tries to convey the idea can be puzzling. Though he will say that the notions of before and after do not apply to the eternal Intellect, he still applies words like always to it, and at one point even says that it always was and always will be. This sounds like he is using temporal concepts for eternity after all, though he does immediately warn us that the words he is using are misleading. A further problem is that he thinks the soul and physical universe must be everlasting, that is, infinite in past and future time. He thinks this will make them the best possible image of eternity. But it's hard to see why that should be so. If eternity really means the absence of duration, why should infinite duration be a more faithful image of eternity than temporary duration? Indeed, how could any kind of duration be an image of something that totally lacks duration? And there's yet another puzzle here regarding souls' relationship to Intellect. He keeps telling us that as souls our goal is to realize our connection to Intellect, but insofar as we are consciously thinking like the Intellect, our thinking is eternal and timeless. How then does it get lost and regained? Perhaps for this reason, Plotinus actually de-emphasizes the Platonic theory of recollection. Plato's idea that when the soul grasps forms, it remembers something it used to have but has temporarily forgotten doesn't fit very well with Plotinus' claim that an intellectual grasp of forms must be timeless. This brings us to a further consequence of Plotinus' contrast between Intellect and soul. Since Intellect is the realm of forms, it must be recognized as an ultimate cause of the physical universe. But it does not relate to the universe directly. Rather, it uses the soul like an assistant, which is responsible for putting images of the forms into material bodies. To understand how this works, we need to think about two closely connected contrasts that are central in Plotinus' system—internal and external activity, and precession and reversion. Plotinus illustrates the first contrast with the example of fire. A flame has its essential internal activity of burning and being hot, but it also has an external activity, the influence it has on other things, by warming them up. In just the same way, the soul has an internal and an external activity. Internally, it engages in its special kind of discursive thinking about the forms. But externally, it bestows these very same forms on physical objects insofar as it is able. Plotinus does not understand these two activities as being intention, as if the soul would be distracted from thinking about giraffes by the task of actually making physical giraffes. Rather, the external activity is an automatic result of the internal activity, and the result will always be weaker, just as fire causes a warmth that is weaker than its own heat. That brings us on to precession and reversion. Given the theory of double activity, each level in Plotinus' system is automatically going to give forth some kind of effect. In Neoplatonic jargon, this automatic causation is called precession. Even the one, despite its transcendence, seems to obey this model. It remains simple and inviolate in itself, which is a kind of internal activity, but it also emanates an external effect which becomes intellect. When we were looking at that process last time, we said that intellect generates the forms when it turns back towards its source. This moment of turning back is reversion. Everything in Plotinus' system reverts back to its cause, apart from the one itself, since it has no cause. Soul looks to its intellectual father, just as intellect looks to the one. If precession is leaving home, reversion is coming back and asking mom to do your laundry. But inevitably, we wind up doing the laundry ourselves, and not as well either. We mix the dark and the light fabrics. Intellect doesn't quite get back to the one, and has to perform an activity of its own, internally contemplating the many forms, and externally giving rise to soul. Similarly, the soul reverts on noose, and the result is its internal discursive thinking and its external, processive ordering of the physical universe. In both cases, the activities fall short of the higher perfection found at the level of the causes, and give rise to a lower external effect. Now, when Plotinus talks about the soul ordering the physical universe, he doesn't primarily have in mind souls like yours or mine. Our souls are partial, or individual, and relate specifically to one body. Again, following Plato's Timaeus, Plotinus believes that the entire cosmos has a single soul, the so-called world soul. It is this soul that is responsible for arranging things that seem to have no soul, or barely any soul, things like plants and rocks. But Plotinus insists that even rocks are animated by the world soul, observing that this is why minerals grow within the earth. The world soul, in combination with the many partial souls present in humans and animals, ensures that the forms in intellect are represented at the level of bodies. The details of this process are somewhat obscure. One of the thornier problems in Plotinus is whether individual humans, or any other kind of individual, exists at the level of noose. In other words, does the intellect contain a form of Socrates, and another form of Buster Keaton, or only the form of man, which is imitated by many images in this world? Plotinus wrote a whole treatise on this question, but his considered opinion remains difficult to nail down. What is more certain is that when the forms get their physical images, the result is far inferior to the original. The form of man is indivisible, eternal, and perfect, whereas even Buster Keaton was nothing of the sort, never mind the rest of us. This can in part be explained by the fact that the things we see in our world are mere images, made by a soul instead of being grasped through perfect intellectual contemplation. But this can't be a full explanation. Plotinus believes that the world soul too is a sort of divinity, and that it exercises providence in arranging the universe. So how does it come about that the cosmos is so rife with evil, with suffering and ugliness? The Wicked Witch of the West put it best, what a world, what a world. Plotinus rose to this challenge with an explanation of evil so powerful that it will echo down through later antiquity and medieval times. So it matters a lot whether you join me next time as I look at Plotinus on evil on the history of philosophy, without any gaps.