Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 087 - A God is My Co-Pilot - the Life and Works of Plotinus.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of Kings College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, A God is My Co-Pilot, The Life and Works of Plotinus. We seem to expect that a great life should have a great ending. Hence the fascination of famous last words, deathbed remarks that show wit or insight, or simply sum up the personality of the one who utters them. The best ones are probably apocryphal, like the one attributed to Oscar Wilde, Either That Wallpaper Goes or I Do, and Goethe's supposed dying request for More Light. But apparently the great physicist Richard Feynman really did say, I'd hate to die twice, it's so boring. As in so much else, the ancients set a high standard for the rest of history with their last words. It's hard to see past Julius Caesar's Et tu, Brute, for the top entry in this competition, but Socrates's We Owe a Cock to Asclepius should get an honorable mention. And then there's the dying remark of the greatest philosopher of late antiquity, Plotinus. He said to a friend who was sitting with him, Try to bring back the God in us to the God in the universe. As if that wasn't good enough, a snake appeared and wriggled out through a hole in the wall, just as Plotinus shuffled off his mortal coil. The year of his death was 270 AD, and the place was Campania, a region in Italy to the south of Rome. Plotinus had come to Rome to open a philosophical school. Whether he meant to or not, he also opened a new chapter in the history of philosophy. A good case can be made for seeing Plotinus as the most influential Western philosopher of all time, apart from Plato and Aristotle themselves. The case would go like this. Plotinus is recognized as the founder of the tradition we call Neoplatonism. He fused together the doctrines he claimed to find in Plato with many of Aristotle's ideas along with a healthy dose of Stoicism. The resulting mixture proved appealing, to put it mildly. It would be embraced by pagans and also Christians of Byzantium and Western Europe, by Christians, Jews, and Muslims who lived in the Islamic world and wrote in Syriac, in Arabic, in Persian, in Hebrew. Within decades of Plotinus' death, Augustine drank deeply from the Neoplatonic stream. A millennium after Plotinus lived, Thomas Aquinas would do the same. Neoplatonism would become, if anything, even more dominant in the Renaissance, finally being chased away from center stage in the early modern period. Western philosophy began about two and a half thousand years ago with the prezecratics, and for about half that time, from the 3rd to the 15th centuries AD, philosophy was, to a significant extent, dominated by Neoplatonism. The achievement is so significant that it remains impressive even once we register a few caveats. For one thing, Plotinus never set out to create a new philosophical system. As I've said before, he and other late ancient Platonists called themselves just that, Platonists, not Neoplatonists, a term devised by modern scholars and originally used in a rather dismissive fashion. We should also recognize that the new Platonism of Plotinus was not as new as is sometimes thought. Having covered the previous centuries of philosophy without any gaps, we know that thinkers in those centuries, especially the so-called middle Platonists, anticipated Plotinus's ideas to a great extent. So much so that, as I've also mentioned before, Plotinus's detractors accused him of plagiarizing from the earlier Platonist Numenius. For these reasons, the Platonists who came after Plotinus did not see him as representing a break with the earlier tradition any more than Plotinus saw himself this way. Neoplatonists, like Iamblichus and Proclus, respected Plotinus deeply, but they saw him as only one particularly significant link in a chain of Platonist authorities. When they mention him by name, it is often to criticize him. Finally, we should bear in mind that, especially in the medieval period, Neoplatonism could travel without the original texts of Plotinus in tow. Most Latin medieval thinkers had no access to his writings. In Arabic, his texts were only partially available in a translation that was incorrectly ascribed to Aristotle. We ourselves are more fortunate. We can read everything Plotinus wrote. For this, we must thank Plotinus's student Porphyry, who produced an edition of the writings. He gave the individual treatises titles, which they had lacked before, and called the entire thing Ennieds, meaning nines. This is because he had grouped the treatises into six sets of nine. Porphyry was as much a sucker for numbers and their deeper symbolism as the next Platonist, so naturally, the possibility of arranging his master's philosophy in this format was irresistible. In fact, he cheated a bit to get the 6x9 result, taking longer works and splitting them up into several treatises, in one case dividing a treatise in the middle of a sentence. The most striking example is a lengthy work by Plotinus known nowadays by the German nickname Großschrift, which sounds like it means disgusting treatise, but actually just means big treatise. Porphyry not only divided it into four separate pieces, but he separated them and put them out of order in various sections of the Ennieds. The moral of this story is, if one of your students offers to edit your collected writings, ask to see the planned table of contents first. Still, we should, as I say, be grateful to Porphyry not only because he preserved Plotinus's writings for posterity, but also because he wrote a kind of introduction which was attached to the editions and was transmitted in manuscripts of the Ennieds. This introduction combined a biography of Plotinus with an explanation of how the Ennieds were put together, along with a few tributes to Plotinus by contemporaries. This so-called life of Plotinus is absolutely packed with memorable anecdotes and fascinating windows into the activities of Plotinus's school, and in its way is as invaluable a document for the birth of Neoplatonism as any of Plotinus's own treatises. In writing the Life, Porphyry has two great themes. First, Plotinus was a really wonderful guy. Second, Porphyry is a pretty wonderful guy too. Porphyry rarely misses a chance to let the Life reflect well on himself. The scholar Gillian Clark has remarked that the phrase I, Porphyry recurs in the Life so often that it is unintentionally comic. In particular, Porphyry wants to leave the reader with the strong impression that he, Porphyry, is Plotinus's most cherished and important disciple. For instance, he lets it drop that Plotinus's best works were those written after he, Porphyry, joined the school, and that some of these were written in direct response to probing questions raised by him, Porphyry. He has some competition here from another disciple of Plotinus named Amelius. This might explain why Porphyry starts the Life with the following anecdote. Amelius wanted to have Plotinus sit for a painted or sculpted portrait. Plotinus said, Amelius responded by inviting a painter to attend sessions at the school until he'd memorized Plotinus's face, and with further input from Amelius, a portrait was made anyway. It's a good story, and one which highlights Plotinus's consistency in adhering to Platonist principles. Also, it just happens to put Amelius in a slightly bad light. You can imagine Porphyry watching the whole thing unfold thinking, oh man, if I ever write a biography of our master Plotinus, I'm definitely starting with this. He also mentions that a set of copies of Plotinus's works prepared by Amelius produced complaints, though Porphyry does excuse Amelius by saying that Plotinus's way of writing was just rather unusual, which is true enough, as anyone who has read him in Greek can attest. Compounding this difficulty, as he, Porphyry, tells us, was the fact that Plotinus had bad eyesight and therefore never read over what he had written. Again, the story evokes a slightly otherworldly Platonist sage, more acute in mind than in sensation, while incidentally excusing Porphyry for any deficiencies in his own addition. But perhaps I'm putting Porphyry himself in an unfairly bad light. He does have nice things to say about Amelius, too, and my hunch is that their relationship was more one of friendly competition than serious rivalry. For instance, we know Plotinus was said to have plagiarized from Numenius because Porphyry quotes from Amelius's refutation of this accusation. Porphyry even tells a story that puts him in a worse light than Amelius. When he first came to Plotinus's school, he still adhered to doctrines he'd learned from his previous teacher, Longinus. Porphyry and Longinus were convinced that the Platonic forms are outside the divine intellect, beheld as a kind of external blueprint in accordance with which God makes the world. Plotinus assigned to Amelius the task of converting Porphyry to the school's doctrine. As we'll see, this was that the forms are rather ideas in a divine mind. After an exchange of written arguments with Amelius, Porphyry finally gave in and converted to Plotinus's teaching on the matter. Porphyry's life of Plotinus already raises several key themes of Plotinus's philosophy. For instance, in his writings, Plotinus frequently seems torn about the value of the physical world. As a Platonist, his fundamental ethical teaching is to turn away from the things of the body and pursue the life of the mind, which, for him, discovering one's true self. The point is made by numerous anecdotes, including the story about the painting. Elsewhere in the life, Porphyry tells how Plotinus was able to continue contemplating intelligible things, even while having a conversation. Other anecdotes connect this spiritual perfection of Plotinus to late ancient religious beliefs. In one, a magician hostile to Plotinus tries to cast a curse on him, but Plotinus's soul is so powerful that the spell rebounds and afflicts the magician instead. In another, Plotinus is invited by a friend to a summoning of his guardian's spirit. When the spirit appears, the priest announces that Plotinus's guardian is no mere minor demon, as expected, but a full-blown god. The god, however, disappears because the friend is frightened or jealous, and strangles the ritual birds he is holding. From these stories, we get a strong sense of Plotinus as an otherworldly figure who barely deigns to notice his own body who dwells more with the gods than with the rest of us. Yet, Porphyry tells us that Plotinus was a man of this world as well as the divine world. He attracted students from all over the Mediterranean. Porphyry was from Tyre in modern-day Lebanon, and other students came from Egypt, like Plotinus himself, from Arabia, from Palestine. In Rome, Plotinus moved in aristocratic circles, and was entrusted with guardianship over orphans from among the elite. Even the emperor Gallienus was a fan, and through his good offices, Plotinus hatched a plan to found a new city called Platonopolis, which would be ruled in accordance with Plato's proposed legal system. This doesn't sound like a man with no time for the physical world around him. Some of Porphyry's more picturesque anecdotes would lead to the same conclusion. For instance, when he, Porphyry, fell into a bout of suicidal depression, Plotinus recommended that he should go abroad to a better climate, and this indeed cured him. On another occasion, Plotinus was told of a theft in a rich household. He had all the slaves lined up, eyeballed them, and picked out the culprit on sight. I can't resist mentioning that a very similar scene occurs in Buster Keaton's wonderful film Sherlock Jr. Well, maybe I could have resisted, I don't know, because I didn't try. Plotinus was clearly much better than I am at resisting temptation. He was abstemious and refused to consume animal products, even in medicines. But he obviously had the ability to pay heed to the welfare of the people around him, and even went out of his way to do so, as with the scheme for Platonopolis. Some interpreters have felt that Plotinus' philosophy gives us little or no reason to strive for practical virtue. His way of life shows, however, that it gave him reason enough. Still, there's no doubt that Plotinus devoted his life to philosophy. We learn one startling detail about Plotinus' childhood from Porphyry, that he still wanted to be breastfed at the age of eight. But mostly, the life story concerns his philosophical development. He was from Egypt, and came to Alexandria in search of a teacher. There, he met Ammonius Sacchus, about whom we unfortunately know very little. If you're keeping count, this is the second of the three Ammonioi I mentioned back in the Plutarch episode. Even Plotinus' decision to join a military expedition led by the Emperor Gordian is explained by Porphyry as stemming from Plotinus' desire to travel east, where he might encounter the wisdom of Persia and India. Whether he learned anything there that actually influenced his thought is an interesting question. The most careful examination I've seen suggests, somewhat disappointingly, that there is no strong evidence of influence on Plotinus from Indian philosophy. Plotinus had influences enough to deal with, of course. As I said, he brought together themes not only from Plato, but also the Stoics and Aristotle. Porphyry tells us that Aristotle's metaphysics is distilled in the Enneads, and that the works of Alexander of Aphrodisias were read in Plotinus' school. But, obviously, Plotinus' main inheritance was from the Platonist tradition. Like the so-called Middle Platonists, Plotinus especially favoured certain dialogues, and certain passages in those dialogues. For him, the crucial texts were metaphysically rich dialogues like the Parmenides, the Timaeus, and the middle part of the Republic. Certain bits of the Philebus and Theaetetus also made a big impression. By contrast, one could read the whole Enneads without being reminded of so-called Socratic dialogues like the Euthyphro. Still, Plato was read carefully in Plotinus' circle, and a handful of treatises in the Enneads are little more than direct commentaries on a passage from Plato. On the basis of his favourite Platonic passages, and the interpretations of Plato that came to him from earlier Platonists like Numenius, Plotinus devised the system that would remain the core of pagan Neoplatonism for generations to come. This system takes the form of a hierarchy, in which a highest principle gives rise to a second principle, which in turn gives rise to a third. All three of these principles transcend the physical world, yet Plotinus describes them with vivid analogies drawn from the physical world. They are like shining lights, overflowing fountains, burning flames, or, in one fantastic passage, a sphere with many faces. At the top, we have a first cause, which is more or less familiar from the middle Platonists. This source of all things is the One, which is identified with the Good. It is comparable to a brilliant light, which gives rise to a secondary light like a ray shines out of the Sun. This secondary principle is called by Plotinus, nous, or intellect. I mentioned just before that Porphyry at first was unconvinced by Plotinus' central insight about the intellect, namely that it should be identified with the forms, which are its own ideas. This intellect is very like Aristotle's God, a pure mind that does nothing but think, albeit that this intellect is not the first cause, but secondary to the One. After the intellect comes soul, the principle of life and order for the physical cosmos. Its function is to bring images of the forms into matter, which results in the making of physical things. Customarily, nature, or the physical world, is treated as the fourth rung in Plotinus' metaphysical ladder, giving us the sequence One Intellect-Soul-Nature. But in fact, Plotinus is reluctant to concede genuine being or existence to the things in the material or natural world. At one point, he tells us that everything matter says is a lie, and as this suggests, bodies are for him more illusion than reality. Hence, his remark to Aemilius that his own body is only an image of his true self. He would disagree with Hamlet, who was frustrated that his too-too-solid flesh refused to melt and resolve into a dew. For Plotinus, our bodies are only seemingly solid, since they are in continual flux, making a constant retreat into non-being. At this level of reality, or apparent reality, Plotinus is a Heraclitian. So, to a considerable extent, Plotinus' metaphysical picture consists only of one intellect and soul. As we'll see, though, he does have the difficulty of explaining why we have matter to receive the fleeting images of the forms that yield bodies. The consequences of all this are momentous, and not only for metaphysics. For example, in epistemology. Even the sketch of the system I've just given shows that for Plotinus, genuine knowledge must involve access to the intellect and its forms, rather than pertaining to the bodily world. Or, in aesthetics, all order and beauty in our realm is a mere shadow of the true order and beauty in that realm of forms. Or, in ethics, it would seem that the attention we pay to the physical world is misguided, quite literally much ado about nothing, to continue the Shakespearean theme. What we ought to do is concern ourselves with the sources of value that transcend our image world, the forms in nous, and ultimately the good itself, from which all things have emanated. It is also by turning away from our material world that we can hope to discover our true selves, since we are not our bodies, but our souls. Indeed, we are only the highest, thinking part of our souls, the part that is furthest removed from the bodies. Now, you can see why some have thought Plotinus would be unable to give us any reasons for a practical virtue. Why wasn't the time he spent caring for orphans and planning cities just wasted, since it was a distraction from the really crucial task of contemplating the higher realities? Indeed, why even write the Enneads themselves, which are after all a way for Plotinus to reach out to the students and other readers around him, instead of reaching for the stars of his otherworldly heaven? This is a puzzle I'm going to defer solving for a couple of weeks, because first I want to look at the even more fundamental puzzles that arise at the top of Plotinus's hierarchy. What was Plotinus's justification for positing a single, utterly simple principle as the source of all things? How, if at all, can we conceive of such an entity? How should we understand it to relate to the other principles that come after it? These are perhaps the most difficult and elusive aspects of Plotinus's thought. Does he have a persuasive account to give regarding these highest levels of his system? There's only one way to find out, and that's by joining me next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. you