Intellect and language

How does this apply to intellect? Is not the way Plotinus speaks about intellect and the One ultimately the failure of rational thinking and an abandonment of the philosophical foundations of earlier thought in favour of religious irrationality? I have argued above that Plotinus’ language about the One (as also about matter’s indeterminacy) is a highly innovative, inherently philosophical way of speaking about relations in a nondeterminate universe of discourse. Such a language is, of course, not that of discursive reason, for it appears to break the principle of non- contradiction and opens a universe of discourse to its broadest possible extent to include maxima and minima as well as the barest possibilities. But it is a reason-

able language. What then of intellect? The remarkable description beginning at

III, 8, 11, 22 is not unique:

It has, therefore, given a trace of itself upon intellect to intellect to have in seeing, so that in intellect there is desire, and intellect is always desiring and always attaining what it desires . . .

Here, as earlier in chapter 9, 32–9 (“life in outward passage”), the unchanging character of eternal life seems fundamentally compromised by the introduction of transition, duration, and so forth, so that the very coherence of Plotinus’ descrip- tions is seriously threatened. But Plotinus’ thought seems to be impaled upon both horns of the same dilemma: if the introduction of discursive language into a non- discursive universe undermines coherence from one side, the very idea of nondis- cursive thought has been regarded as utterly incoherent on the other side (by

Lloyd, for example).90 _{So let us briefly look at the major aspects of this problem}

and suggest a means of thinking it through coherently along the lines we have de- veloped above.

3.22.6.1. Propositional versus non-propositional language

A. H. Armstrong has raised some important questions that have helped to define the parameters of the problem: on the one hand, Armstrong points out that Plo- tinus never seems enthusiastic about discursive reason, though he admits its ne- cessity and place in the hierarchy of mental activities (Armstrong-Ravindra, 1982, 79); on the other hand, Armstrong observes that Plotinus’ accounts of the intelli- gible world or of the indefinite life of pre-intellect “are not fully consistent or coherent.” Plotinus “is not always successful in confining his descriptions . . . within the limits imposed by the concept of non-durational eternity” (1971, 74). T. Szlezák holds a similar view that Intellect can be termed needy of the One only by a mental abstraction. So Plotinus’ attempts to bring intelligible matter into the conceptual world of Plato’s dialogues lead both to unanswered problems in the

Enneads (e.g., can intelligible matter be undetermined without being potential?)

and to contradictions in Plotinus’ interpretation of Plato (1979, 82–5). But it is A. C. Lloyd who has set the baseline for the problem. Intellect is a nondiscursive transcendent Reality, but we, the describers, are necessarily discursive. Intellect’s nondiscursive thought, then, is simple, nonpropositional, nonselfconscious, de- scribed in terms of contact, but fundamentally incoherent for us discursive think- ers (1969–70, 261–75). Partly against Lloyd, Sorabji has argued that while non- discursive thought might involve no chronological transition from object to object, and while it clearly excludes concepts taken in isolation, it is nonetheless complex and can be propositional in the sense that (a) the route by which we at- tain to nondiscursive thought is through discovering the definitions of things in terms of genus and difference, and (b) intellect seems to involve a contemplation of these definitions arranged into a unified network (1983, 152–163).91

3.22.6.2. Discursive reason and understanding in Plato and Plotinus

Plotinus’ approach to this problem is very much in the spirit of Plato. Dianoia, or discursive reasoning, is propositional; noêsis, thinking or understanding, is non- propositional; but both are complex in different ways. We should not make the mistake, according to both thinkers, of thinking that any of our representations (propositions, myths, images, names, etc.) are “the real thing” (i.e., the “what” x is). Representations, explanations, plausible accounts, cogent scientific theories can blind us to reality if we take them uncritically as the absolute truth, but they can also open us up to reality if we are prepared to shatter them and see through

90. A. C. Lloyd, 1955–6, 1969–70.

91. Compare also on this question K. Wurm, 1973; A. Smith, 1981; K. Corrigan, 1987a; J. Bussanich, 1988, 103–4; and M. Alfino, 1988.

them. This does not necessarily downgrade the level of discursive reason; it just means that reason is not the same as understanding or as the truth of the thing in question. As Plotinus accurately puts it, we should not confuse our explanations of why things are so with their being so. This does not mean that we are wrong, only that noêsis and dianoia are different, and thus our explanations are always

provisional (i.e., in terms of Plato’s Seventh Letter, always subject to “being re-

futed through well-meaning refutations” [344 b]). Another way of putting this might be to say that we can determine whether someone really understands x (i.e., knows x) by getting him to give an account of some sort of what he says he un- derstands, but in terms of the Theaetetus we might still want to say that epistêmê, science or understanding, is not simply a sort of linear addition, or justified belief (if we can translate orthê doxa into contemporary analytic terms), plus an account. No, it is actually understanding.

Plainly too there should be no reason why understanding cannot be complex yet simple too. I can see and think a face all at once, with everything distinctly within it and perfectly articulated. To borrow Plotinus’ example, it is as if all the intellectual acts of the soul are all together, for “since its object of contemplation is richly varied [poikilos], its act of thinking too is richly varied and multiple, and there are many acts of intelligence, as there are many acts of perception of a face when the eyes and the nose and the other features are all seen at once” (IV, 4 [28] 1, 20 ff.). Nor should there be any reason why I should not be able to represent the profoundly complex unities that seem to haunt us in a host of different ways, not just in arguments or propositions that are only meaningful to one or two de- partments on campus, but in as many ways as people are human—as Plato, for example, makes story, example, prayer, myth, and argument fundamental parts of philosophical dialectic. This may be a controversial view of Plato’s dialectic, but for Plotinus there is simply no question: mythos and logos are both essential to dialectical thinking. Again there is no reason not to develop different forms of representation for entirely new landscapes where determinate forms of thinking are in fact inadequate. These new representative languages finally will be inade- quate also, but their very strangeness—their ability to provoke under-thought (hy-

ponoia, cf. 10, 28: shall we under-think it to be the nothing?)—may by that very

token be more appropriate to the question at issue than more linear forms of rep- resentative enquiry.

This view of Plotinus’ developing new ways of speaking about the One is also true of intellect in this perspective. First, if thought essentially involves movement at rest and an intelligible “interval,” and if no organism is really intelligible with- out some understanding of the termini of its being, then Plotinus is committed to representing the unity of opposites in intellect dynamically, just as Aristotle indi- catesinthe De Animathattheremaybe other modes of transition from power/ potencytoactthanphysicalmovementorqualification(cf.I,1[53]13). So Plotinus

represents such unity in movement as vivid, provocative oxymora (e.g., VI, 7 [38] 13: the “abiding wandering” of intellect [menousan . . . planên]). What is inap- propriate for a determinate propositional world of concepts and things can be a useful linguistic tool for expressing the possibilities, potentialities, and the waking up to differences in an indeterminate universe.

Second, if intellect is pervaded dynamically by the One’s dynamis (as in VI, 7 [38] 13), and if the One is the purest extension comprising everything from po- tency to power, then the phrase dynamis tôn pantôn (power for all things) in- cludes the potency of other things (even if this is untranslateable, although Plot- inus gets as close as he can to making it explicit in III, 8, 11, 1 ff.). The term

dynamis includes both passive and active aspects in Aristotle’s usage and is de-

veloped from Plato (Republic 509 b 8–10, of the overwhelming power of the Good; Sophist 247 e3–4). We can compare the use of the phrase dynamis pantôn elsewhere in the Enneads (e.g., V, 4 [7] 2, 36–38; VI, 9 [9] 5, 35–38; 6, 7–8; V, 1 [10] 7, 9–11; VI, 8 [39] 9, 45). In this perspective, passive and active are neces- sary correlatives in the life of intellect: for example, in a remarkable first-person account, Plotinus says: “Often I have woken up out of the body into myself . . . and activated the best life and come to identity with the divine; and having been

set firm in it [passive: hidrytheis], I have come to that activity above every other

intelligible object setting myself [active: hidrysas] . . . then when I come down to reasoning from intellect, I am puzzled” (IV, 8 [6] 1, ff.). Here too in intellect (a) the language of desire92_{; (b) precise nuances of voice, mood, and tense in the}

derivation and articulation of intellect’s nature (as we have seen in section 3.19.6); (c) the precise use of the future tense especially93_{; (d) the language of}

“more and less”94_{; as well as (e) gradational unities (III, 8, 10, 20 ff.: “That is also}

whytheascentiseverywhere to a one . . .”)—all of these different linguistic forms are just as appropriate a representational language as more determinate proposi- tional forms might be in their own universes of discourse. Indeed, we have to go somewhat beyond this. For if the power of the Good is that by which we see our- selves and others and are also seen, such reflexive power cannot be represented as a determinate proposition, axiom, or anything else. Yet it is also the most intimate and fundamental practical good in every activity but one that can be glimpsed only in the self-reflexive activity itself. This aspect of dialectic (and it is surely Platonic to its roots) Plotinus seems to have in mind at the end of chapter 10 and

92. Cf. V, 3 (49) 17, 15–38; III, 8 (30) 11, 22 ff.; V, 5 (32) 12, 15.

93. Fromtheperspectiveofpowerbefore theactualizationofdeterminatethings,every- thing must be future-tense. Cf. V, 2 (11) 1, 1–3: “all things . . . are not yet there but they will be”; III, 8 (30) 10, 7–10: “but each knows, as it were, where they will let their streams flow to”; VI, 7 (38) 16, 20–21; VI, 6 (34) 10, 4.

throughout chapter 11 (e.g., 10, 34–5: “by bringing together into one view its greatness from the things that exist after it but through it”).95

Jean Trouillard, therefore, rightly pointed out that Plotinian thought is “ori- ented to the future” (1961, 132) since from the perspective of such power the en- tirely new is always susceptible of jumping into full existence or, as Plotinus in- timates, even of walking into language.96 _{In this sense, Plotinus is the major}

developer (on the basis of Plato, Aristotle, Alexander of Aphrodisias, the Skep- tics, and others) of significant new forms of discourse, reasonable and appropriate in their own domains, though not discursively reasonable if discursive reason is supposed to deal with a world of determinate things and the binary opposition of truth and falsity.