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Interpreting Plotinus
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Methods of Interpretation
It seems inevitable that the interpretation of an ancient philosopher constantly vacillates between a purely philological explanation of texts and of their historical background, on the one hand, and a philosophical evaluation and discussion of ideas and thoughts, on the other. In an ideal situation, both approaches would be integrated into one comprehensive interpretation that combines philological accuracy with philosophical depth. Such an approach would not only discuss the meaning of terms, phrases, and metaphors, and place the texts in their historical context, but it would also confront the ancient ideas with modern philosophical views and developments. This situation, however, is seldom, if ever, attained. Although both approaches influence each other and profit from each other's results in many ways, they tend to remain behind each other as far as the latest and most specialized developments are concerned. While discussing the ideas of his ancient predecessor, the modern philosop her rarely returns to the original texts, and if he does, he may often find himself unable to grasp the exact meaning of the material. The modern philosopher thus risks discussing and criticizing what he thinks is the essence of ancient philosophy, without penetrating into the real meaning of the texts themselves. On the other hand, the philologist rarely attempts a critical discussion of the texts in the light of the latest philosophical and scientific developments. He may be an excellent student of ancient philosophy, but this does not necessarily make him a specialist in modern thought.
Strangely enough, the discrepancy between a philological and a philosophical approach has not always been viewed as an obstacle. In the eighteenth century, for example, Immanuel Kant maintained that the Platonic Ideas represented ‘archetypes of the things themselves, rather than just keys to possible experiences, like the categories’. He admitted, however, that he had not based this statement on a close examination of the texts themselves.1 Similarly, when the twentieth-century philosopher, K. Popper, argued that Plato introduced a ‘third world’ of Forms or Ideas, differing both from the bodily world, and from the world of the mind (the ‘ideas in the mind’), he expressly added that he did not want to ‘argue about Plato’, or about the question whether he was justified in attributing such a ‘pluralism’ to Plato.2 What Plato originally wrote appears insignificant, as philosophers emphasize only what is commonly thought to be the philosophy of Plato, and display little interest in putting these common opinions to the test of the texts themselves. But philologists, on their part, are not always willing to bridge the gap between a philological and a philosophical approach either. In the late 1920's, for example, the eminent classicist H. Leisegang, was sharply opposed to ‘philosophical interpretation and modernization’ of Plato. According to Leisegang, only philological research was worthy to be called rein wissenschaftlich.3 While Leisegang's point of view may be considered extreme, in most cases the interpretation of ancient texts in the light of contemporary philosophy is seen to lie beyond the scope of the specialist in classical philology.
Platonic thought in particular has become the victim of the discrepancy between the philologist's attitude and that of the modern philosopher. Platonism has had an enormous influence on the history of Western thought, to the extent that Whitehead's aphorism terms the whole of Western philosophy as a mere footnote to Plato. Especially after the Middle Ages, however, ‘Platonism’, as it existed in the minds of the philosophers, drifted further and further away from the ancient texts. Typical philosophical discussion treated not the Platonic dialogues themselves, but a set of popular, oversimplified ideas, which were believed to be the main tenets of Platonic thought. What philosophers knew or thought they knew about Plato was that he had been a ‘dualist’ who outlined the separation of the soul from the body, and who postulated a transcendent world of Forms or Ideas beyond the world of human experience and perception.
The truth is, of course, that the Platonic dialogues do not simply present to us a fixed set of doctrines, ready to be either accepted or rejected. Plato's works, like those of every truly great philosopher, are the account of a never-ending quest for a deeper insight into the essence of man, and into the relation between man and the world around him. No one has understood better than Plato himself that true philosophy does not offer final solutions, but constantly puts its own theories to the test. Yet post-Medieval philosophy has not always recognized the subtleties of Plato's work. Popper finds support for his statements in some isolated quotations from the Phaedo and the Republic, but did he ever thoroughly study, for example, Plato's Parmenides? Immanuel Kant may have been more aware of the particular character of Platonic philosophy. Nevertheless, he believed that he could ‘understand Plato better than Plato understood himself’, and that from the different, and sometimes even contradictory thoughts that Plato expressed on a given subject, he could, without much difficulty, construct what Plato really meant to say about his Ideas.4
At the present day, there is no longer any real excuse for the student of philosophy to cling to worn-out opinions about Plato's metaphysics. Extensive scholarly research has made the works of Plato accessible to all who are interested in his thought. In the case of Plotinus, the third-century thinker who claimed that his philosophy contained nothing that was not already prefigured in the works of ‘the divine Plato’, the situation is slightly different. His works were translated from the Greek into Latin, as early as the fifteenth century, by the Florentine humanist, Marsilio Ficino. The subsequent influence that Plotinus's works have had on Western thought is probably as profound as that of the Platonic dialogues. Unlike Plato, however, Plotinus is not a regular focus of study for twentieth-century philosophers, who are in the habit of simply identifying what they consider to be Platonism with Plato himself.5 On the whole, a more or less extensive knowledge of the Plotinian corpus still seems limited to the classicists and to those students of philosophy who have specialized in later Greek thought. And even in this specialized field, the great flow of publications about Plotinus and his works began only a few decades ago. A complete critical edition that meets the requirements of present-day classical scholarship was not available until the early 1970's. Modern translations of the Plotinian corpus that are both reliable and readable are few in number,6 as are commentaries on the separate treatises.7
Thus, the non-specialist has rather stereotyped views of Plotinus. The general assessment of Plotinus's philosophy is that it is mainly concerned with dividing the world into different realms or degrees of being, currently referred to as the Plotinian hypostases, a term which after Plotinus's death gained a life of its own. There is, furthermore, the image of Plotinus as a mystical and strongly intuitive thinker, an image that has been overemphasized especially under the influence of the writings of the French philosopher H. Bergson. Although these ideas are not without some foundation, they are one-sided, as they lay a heavy claim on a relatively small number of pungent and picturesque passages at the expense of the more speculative and abstract expositions that are at least as important.
This is not to say that Plotinus was a pure rationalist. Hegel wanted to characterize Plotinian philosophy as ‘intellectualism’ and as an imperfect pre-stage of his own Idealismus,8 and V. Cilento has called Plotinus's work the summa of ancient thought,9 a term that suggests a resemblance between the Enneads and the philosophical compendia of the Scholastic period. Yet Plotinus was not a philosopher who, without any restriction, put his trust in the force of reason and in logical arguments. The essence of his philosophy cannot be exclusively explained and understood by means of a purely rational and intellectual analysis, but must also be felt and experienced. In more than one passage Plotinus has given testimony to this personal experience. As the prolific Plotinus scholar, A.H. Armstrong, has pointed out,10 Plotinus even takes a pointed anti-intellectual stance in those passages where he stresses the inadequacy and deficiency of reason and intellectual speculation with respect to the ultimate goal of philosophy, the intimate contact with the final cause of all that exists.
However, to look upon Plotinus as a mystic rather than as a philosopher is to misread him. Even less does Plotinus's thought present the tenets of a religion.10 First of all, the exact meaning of terms such as ‘religion’ and ‘mysticism’ themselves is a problematic aspect in interpreting Plotinus. According to V. Cilento, a twofold problem lies at the base of Plotinian thought, concerning both the destiny of the individual human being, and the structure of the whole of reality. For Cilento, the first problem is a religious and mystical one, the second a philosophical and rational one.11 Yet Cilento's definitions are not the most appropriate ones with which to distinguish between Plotinian philosophy and Plotinian mysticism. A more useful approach is to differentiate between the philosopher's personal experience and his general statements abo ut the world and its phenomena. The personal experience can, to a certain extent, be communicated to the reader but cannot be criticized on purely logical and rational grounds. The description of the principles that determine the structure of the world, however, can be subject to such a critical analysis. The former could perhaps be called mystical12 (‘religious’ seems to be a far less adequate expression13) to denote its non-rational and pre-eminently individual character, while the latter could then be referred to as Plotinus's philosophy in the strict sense.
Another important distinction is that between the two ways through which Plotinus wants his reader to gain insight in the basic structure of reality and in the deepest nature of man. One way Plotinus calls an ‘ascent’ or ‘way up’, and the other could accordingly be called a ‘descent’ or ‘way down’. Here we are dealing with two complementary aspects of one method, both of which deserve to be called philosophical, rather than religious or mystical. The way down starts with basic notions in their purest form (axioms, first principles), and derives the world of human experience from these ‘with the force of logic’, as Plotinus says. In contrast, when following the way up, Plotinus wants to make this logical construct plausible by taking as his starting-point what man can apprehend and know most directly, that is, man himself. From this direct knowledge, Plotinus subsequently induces the basic principles th at govern the structure of the whole of reality, thereby transcending the scope of man's individual and immediate world of experience. Yet as a speculative method which can be rationally analysed and communicated to others, this ‘way up’ is expressly marked off from the unique moments of inspiration, when ‘one leaves all learning behind’ and ‘suddenly catches sight without seeing how’.14
The philosophy of Plotinus is not a practical philosophy. According to Plotinus, true virtue is not to be found in action, but in contemplation. The Plotinian sage, instead of losing himself in the troubles of everyday life, concentrates on the interior of his own mind. In his desire to get into close contact with the ultimate ground of all things, he attempts to receive a glimpse of the ineffable, as he seeks to go beyond the powers of the mind. The language in which Plotinus describes his ideal of the spiritual, contemplative life often has what might be called a religious or mystical colouring. The roots of Plotinian metaphysics (rather than Plotinian mysticism), however, do not lie in a religious longing for a higher, better world beyond the one in which we live. Plotinus's starting-point, Cilento says, is a feeling of anxiety and discomfort about the human soul, which, after its fall into the realm of the senses, is doomed to live a miserable life among evils of every kin d. But it is quite clear that Plotinus's vision of man and his place in the cosmos has little to do with a Gnostic pessimism, according to which man is a stranger in an alien and hostile world during his earthly life. Nor, it should be added, is Plotinus adhering to any kind of dualism that distinguishes sharply between a realm of the mind and a realm of the body, between a spiritual and a material world, as if he were striving for the first as the true and only reality and renounced the second as illusory and superficial. The picture of the world that Plotinus depicts in his treatises is that of one universe only, of a reality that is one and continuous despite its numerous aspects and dimensions. Moreover, Plotinus depicts a harmonious and beautiful world, that should be admired, rather than despised, because it has been realized in the best possible way.15
Some historians of philosophy have argued that for all of the assertions that Plotinus makes, he adduces few or no arguments or proofs. F. Brentano expressed this opinion some sixty-five years ago,16 and the idea lives on in a recent textbook on the history of Western philosophy.17 This prejudice, however, springs from a misunderstanding of the exact nature of metaphysics. In covering the whole of reality, metaphysics necessarily moves around, so to speak, in a closed system, and cannot hope to ‘prove’ its vision of this reality by means of any external criterion. By what arguments, it could also be asked, does Plato actually prove the irrefutable and exclusive rightness of his philosophy of Ideas? And does Aristotle, in book Lambda of his Metaphysics, give absolute proof of the existence of a ‘prime mover’? Or, in relation to post-classical thought, what kind of criterion would enable us to accept or reject definitively the way in which Kant analyses the functioning of human thought and its relation to the world which it takes as its object? Demanding such external evidence naturally leads one into an impasse. Instead, every metaphysical system should be judged by its inner consistency, the logic of its arguments, and the extent to which it fulfils its claim to explain the basic structure of thought and reality. In this respect, Plotinus does not yield to any of the great philosophers. In the Enneads, he presents a picture of the world that, in its ambition to account for the whole of reality, no doubt competes with the other great philosophical systems in the history of Western thought.
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Plotinus and the History of Greek Philosophy
Some sixty years ago, E. Bréhier, in his monograph on Plotinian philosophy, depicted Plotinus as, in some respects, standing closer to certain strands of oriental thought than to the Greek philosophical tradition.18 Since then, however, a great flow of literature on the sources of Plotinus has convincingly demonstrated that the philosophy of this remarkable thinker exists as one firmly grounded in the history of ancient Greek thought.19 A glance over Modes of Knowledge and the Transcendental corroborates this debt. We hear Plotinus speak about the ‘pure mind’ (nous akratos), a term already used in the fifth century B.C. by Anaxagoras. Plotinus qualifies this pure mind as ‘thinking itself’ and as ‘separable’, which recalls both book Lambda of Aristotle's Metaphysics and the passage on the ‘separable mind’ in Aristotle's treatise On the Soul.20 Additionally, in a number of terms and expressions, one can easily detect a Stoic origin.21 And above all, the treatise contains a host of quotations and reminiscences of the Platonic dialogues. The philosophical discussions of Plotinus's own time have equally left their traces in his Modes of Knowledge and the Transcendental. The first chapter echoes ideas of the sceptical philosopher Sextus Empiricus,22 and several researchers have related elements in Plotinus's description of the nature of the mind to ideas expressed in the commentaries on Aristotle written by Alexander of Aphrodisias.23
Progress in scientific research, however, tends to swing from one extreme to the other, and research on the historical backgrounds of Plotinian thought is no exception. In the present state of affairs, Plotinus, instead of being viewed as one of the giants in the history of ancient philosophy, second perhaps only to Plato and Aristotle, seems to be regarded as a rather traditional and somewhat eclectic thinker whose writings merely reiterate and summarize the main tenets of a variety of philosophical schools. Thus the question is bound to arise whether there is any originality in the ideas expressed in the Enneads.24
The answer to this question depends, to a large extent, on the approach that one chooses to study Plotinus. Once it has been established that Plotinus builds upon the philosophical tradition of the great Greek thinkers, it may hardly be surprising that the language of the Enneads in many respects reflects that same tradition. Also, we can safely say that Plotinus was not an angry young man, eager to sweep away his philosophical heritage.25 He had no compulsion to reinvent the wheel, when he found at hand a host of perfectly suitable terms and metaphors with which to express his own ideas. Plotinus may even have been somewhat naive in this respect, as his famous attack in the treatise Against the Gnostics (Enn. 2.9 [33]) shows. After having made frequent use of Gnostic metaphors and imagery to present the theme of the ‘descent’ and the ‘conversion’ of the soul in the earlier trea tises (metaphors that often originated in the Platonic dialogues, but were incorporated in Gnostic mythology and religion), Plotinus apparently felt the need to oppose those who took his figurative language too literally, linking it with Gnostic religious and cosmological speculations.26
The great distance in time that separates us from both Plotinus and his predecessors is likely to strengthen the impression that the resemblances between Plotinus and previous thinkers outweigh the differences. Yet, while Plotinus used the language of his predecessors, he clearly appropriated their ideas in order to form his own unique philosophical thought. Plotinus did not merely deliver a series of commentaries on the works of Plato, the philosopher for whom he had such a high esteem, nor did he write textbooks on Aristotle, Posidonius, or any other thinker whose ideas we find echoed in the Enneads.27 Although many of the themes and doctrines in the Enneads may refer back to earlier thinkers,28 it is clearly impossible to reconstruct the whole of Plotinian thought from these sources alone. The Plotinian scholar consequently must rely on one of two appro aches. Either he has to admit that ideas that are perhaps already present in an embryonic form in earlier writers, were waiting for Plotinus to be fully explored and integrated in a coherent and overall vision on the world and its phenomena. Conversely, he has to interpret Plotinus's predecessors in an anachronistic way, looking at them from a Plotinian point of view and giving their ideas a meaning and scope that in reality they did not have before Plotinus gave them a place in his own philosophical system.29
Particularly when attempts are made to derive the main tenets of Plotinus's thought from older philosophical systems about which we are rather poorly informed, there is a danger that the analysis becomes a mere stock-taking of conventional philosophical topics and schemes. W. Theiler, who considered Plotinus to be largely influenced by the Stoic-Platonic thinker Posidonius (first century B.C.), probably overrated this influence. Theiler apparently felt the limitations of a historical approach, which may only hope to reconstruct Posidonian doctrine from the traces that it has left in the works of Plotinus, when he wrote that in a more philosophical discussion of Plotinus, the name of Posidonius could perhaps be missed. Nevertheless these limitations did not prevent Theiler from reproaching Plotinus for a ‘carelessness in the use of the word logos’, a crucial term in Plotinian metaphysics. Plotinus, Theiler claimed, would jump rather unsystematically from Posidonian to non-Posidonian meanings of this term, instead of developing and applying his own concept of logos, a concept which, from a philosophical point of view, is not so incoherent and loose as Theiler thought.30 Similarly, in his voluminous work on the ‘origin of the metaphysics of the mind’, H. Krämer has tried to show that Plotinus's philosophy of the mind is largely determined by ideas developed by the immediate successors of Plato in the Old Academy, and in (Neo‑) Pythagorean circles. As impressive as the abundance of historical material presented in Krämer's book may be, Plotinus's philosophy of the mind inevitably appears in it in a rather fragmented form, as a collection of doxai, of opinions each to be connected with some of the rare testimonies that we possess about the ideas of these early philosophers.31
From a philosophical point of view, therefore, a more balanced and fruitful approach is to analyse the ideas advanced in the Enneads in relation to those earlier thinkers whose works are for the greater part still extant, or of whose doctrines we at least have a more or less complete overview. Such a juxtaposition offers us the opportunity to compare philosophical methods, attitudes, and arguments, rather than mere terminologies and collections of statements on separate subjects. Here again, however, it would be misleading to view the historical interpretation of the Enneads as the chief key to understanding of Plotinian thought. Plotinus often supports his views by referring to the great thinkers of the past, and especially by quoting from the works of the ‘divine Plato’. Yet he does so less as an interpreter and commentator than as an independent and original thinker. Statements such as, ‘We are to put forward what our views are, and try to reduce them to Plato's opinion’, and ‘We should attempt to show that the opinions that we have received from the most excellent philosophers agree, or at least do not disagree, with the argument that we are now putting forward’32 are often quoted as indications for Plotinus's dependence on his forerunners. But Plotinus does not aim to give unbiased and detailed reports of what other thinkers had already said about a certain topic. He gives his predecessors credit for having anticipated his own views — ‘in a veiled form’ as he significantly says — and even claims that the essence of what he is expounding has been common to a variety of earlier thinkers, such as Empedocles and Anaxagoras, Parmenides and Heraclitus, Plato and Aristotle.33 Yet Plotinus is simultaneously reshaping the old texts towards his own profound elaboration of the philosophical idea in question, rather than merely repeating and explaining their contents. The great classical philosophers, and Plato above all, taught Plotinus how to think, but they did not simply spell out what he should think.34