Plotinus, the reader

Finally, in this introductory overview, I will say a few words about Plotinus, the reader, for in reading Plotinus we enter into his own reading—that is, his reflec- tion upon all those earlier influences, which though long dead, continue to live in his words. What sort of reader was Plotinus? An answer to this question will help us to read him with greater care and attention.

In his Life of Plotinus, Porphyry says:

In writing he is concise and full of thought. He puts things shortly and abounds more in ideas than in words; he generally expresses himself in a tone of rapt inspiration, and states what he himself really feels about the matter and not what has been handed down by tradition. His writings, however, are full of concealed Stoic and Peripatetic doctrines. Aristotle’s Metaphysics, in particular, is concentrated in them. He had a complete knowledge of geome- try, arithmetic, mechanics, optics and music, but was not disposed to apply himself to detailed research in these subjects. In the meetings of the school he used to have the commentaries read, perhaps of Severus, perhaps of Cronius or Numenius or Gaius or Atticus, and among the Peripatetics of Aspasius, Alexander, Adrastus, and others that were available. But he did not just speak

straight out of these books but took a distinctive personal line in his consid- eration [idios . . . kai exêllagmenos en têi theoriai] and brought the mind of Ammonius to bear on the investigations in hand. He quickly absorbed what was read, and would give the sense of some profound subject of study in a few words and pass on. (14, 1–18; trans. A. H. Armstrong)

This passage reveals, as Armstrong has observed, how scholarly and professional a philosopher Plotinus was and how he worked (Loeb I, 40–1). Severus, Gaius, and Atticus were Middle Platonist commentators on Plato of the second century A.D. Albinus, a pupil of Gaius, is the most important of the Middle Platonist phi- losophers. Atticus was the chief representative of the anti-Aristotelian Platonist group. Cronius and Numenius are usually classed as Neo-Pythagoreans, but here they are naturally included among the Platonists. What distinguishes Middle Pla- tonists from Neo-Pythagoreans is more a matter of convention than substance. Numenius was of major importance, and Plotinus was even accused of plagiariz- ing him (Life, 17). Aspasius and Adrastus were second-century A.D. commenta- tors upon Aristotle, and Alexander of Aphrodisias, head of the Peripatetic School of Athens at the beginning of the third century, was the most influential of all the Aristotelian commentators. The “mind of Ammonius” indicates the influence of Plotinus’ teacher Ammonius Saccas, about whom we know little or nothing, but his mind must have been powerful, for Plotinus was clearly a profound, precise, but transformative reader and thinker. He quickly sums up his reading and moves on, taking a distinctive personal line. He is not a commentator but a philosopher. I suggest then that Plotinus is not the sort of thinker or reader in whose writings one can always discern simple one-on-one correspondences. His thought is many- layered in that his transformative readings form a varied and condensed back- ground to the very way he thinks. They are full of Aristotelian, Stoic, and Peripa- tetic, as well as Platonic problems, puzzles, hints, and allusions but in such a way that you would not notice this at first if you were not aware of it.

This is a major part of the difficulty in reading Plotinus. Just like his intelligi- ble world, the whole of his philosophy often seems implicit in each and every sen- tence. Or again, his use of words (substance [ousia], for instance) itself seems multilayered, as though all of the word’s current and past meanings are in process of being transformed. Intellect can mean the divine intellect, the intellect of soul, or our individual intellects, and only the context discloses which meaning is ap- propriate. Reading and writing in the Enneads, therefore, are part of a richly var- ied but subtle and often hidden dialogue.

When one first reads Plotinus, his writings may look like straightforward trea- tises, even monologues. Before long, however, one becomes aware of an internal dialogue, questioning and answering itself. Other voices enter in major and minor keys, often subliminally, and only such indications as “and we shall reply to someone who held that view” reveal the presence of hidden interlocutors (e.g., II, 9 [33] 3). What sort of dialogue is this? Even contemporary scholars have dis-

agreed. The great Italian translator of Plotinus, V. Cilento, thought that Plotinus’ writings were like Cynic diatribes (i.e., one-half of a Platonic dialogue) (1967, 29–41), whereas the contemporary French scholar Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé thinks their dialectical character reflects actual conversations in the school (Por-

phyre: La vie de Plotin, Paris, I, 1980, 231 ff.). I am decidedly in favour of the

latter view, but you shall have to judge for yourself. By way of introduction I shall say only this: Plotinus’ philosophy is inherently dialectical; it invariably in- volves a “we.” That is to say, it is a conversation between friends. Other voices also intrude on that immediate conversation, and sometimes Plotinus adapts some- thing of what they have to say as is own. Ways of speaking that may be “auda- cious,” for instance, may nonetheless provide a means of getting at the truth (cf. VI, 8 [39] 7, 11 ff.; VI, 9 [9] 10, 13). The rather violent sophist, Thrasymachus, with Glaukon and Adeimantus, from Plato’s Republic, makes no dramatic appear- ance. But Plato’s view that discourse always has to be tested (as in the famous phrase of the Seventh Letter, “each of them being refuted in well-meaning refuta- tions in a process of questioning and answering without envy” [344 b], or at each stage of Diotima’s ladder of ascent in the Symposium; see Appendix A, 1 below) is fundamental to Plotinus’ notion of philosophical conversation.

In the last of his works presented in this book, V, 8 (31), Plotinus emphasizes that the approach to union with intellect and the One involves thorough prepara- tion, critical discernment, and transformation. To understand in this sense is not to look at an object from outside or to observe spectacular effects but to become completely different,

and one must, in coming to learn about the god, remain within an imprint of him and exercise discrimination in seeking him [i.e., the god] to determine what he is entering into; and when he has learned in good faith that he is en- tering into the most blessed thing, he must already give himself to what is within and become, instead of one who sees, already an object of vision of another who contemplates him shining out with such thoughts as come from there. (V, 8 [31] 11, 13–19)

51

Plotinus’ Anthropology

Text: Ennead I, 1 (53): What Is the Living Creature and