Plotinus’ theory of creation in context (III, 8, 7, 1–15)

The first long sentence of III, 8, 7, 1–15 summarizes the results of the argument thus far. What is striking in this conclusion is how Plotinus thinks his way so sim- ply and freely through a problem that had troubled the whole course of earlier phi- losophy but in ways that suggest solutions at once unfamiliar yet illuminating of puzzles in Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Epicurean, and Middle Platonic thought. Plato had represented the world as being made in time by a deliberating, although divine, craftsman (in the Timaeus). Yet as Diotima tells Socrates in the Sympo-

sium, and elsewhere in the dialogues, it is clear that if the gods are wise, they do

not need to deliberate in this way.46 _{Aristotle rejected Plato’s model of a labouring}

craftsman. Nature has no need either of deliberation or of birth-pangs to produce. Moreover, if the world has no beginning but is eternal, then it cannot be “made.” At the same time, however, as we indicated above, the divine intellect not only

44. Cf. EN II, 6, 1106 b 36–1107 a 2: “Virtue then is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean in relation to us, defined by a rational principle [logos], and by that principle by which the person of practical wisdom [ho phronimos] would define it.”

45. This covers the span of Aristotle’s analysis in EN II–X. On the role of the person of practical wisdom, the phronimos or spoudaios, see H. H. Joachim, 1951, 104.

46. Symposium 204 a 1–2: “No god philosophizes or desires to become wise, for gods are wise.”

moves things “by being loved,” but some form of intellect, divine or human (and at least coextensive with sophia, or contemplative wisdom), is said to “make” eve- rything, including health, and the unmoved mover apparently embraces the whole cosmos. But how? Again, for the Stoics, the divine productive logos works from within matter and not upon matter, but how an articulated intelligible order arises out of matter is unclear. On the other side are the Epicureans who poke fun at the idea of a manual labouring god producing a botched world full of imperfections and evil. One has only to think of Voltaire’s antiteleological remark to catch the force of Epicurean criticism: how clever of God to put holes just where the cat’s eyes would be! Finally, among the Middle Platonists, we encounter a complex debate about the making of the world, some holding that it must have a beginning on Plato’s account and others holding that the world is eternally coming to be as the result of a combination of independent, unmade causes (e.g., the world-soul, matter, god).

For Plotinus, the world is made neither in time nor by deliberation, toil, tools, anthropomorphic divine figures or with apocalyptic sound effects. Everything (in- cluding even matter) timelessly and silently comes to be out of the omnipresent creative contemplation of nature, the whole soul, and intellect, and we can see in ordinary action and speech, as well as in all forms of generation, the sort of long- ing for fullness, vision, birth, and care for offspring characteristic of the genera- tion of soul from intellect and of intellect from the One.47 _{The Platonic epistemo-}

logical and existential model of (a) procreation upon the beautiful,48 _{(b) the pain}

of giving birth (with the help of a midwife in the Theaetetus or of a guide in the

Symposium),49 _{and (c) caring for and educating or testing the offspring can be re-}

tained and developed within this nondeliberative model of causality (cf. 7, 18– 21), for everything is creatively contemplative in its own way from successful forms of artistic and natural generation to their failures and perversions (4, 7, 21– 7). In successful forms “making . . . is to fill everything with contemplation” (21– 2). To make something new involves not just bringing a form into being, as Plo- tinus says, but to bring a new contemplative orientation to the world: that is, in being filled, to fill everything with contemplation. This is a remarkable statement. In terms of a modern subjective-objective epistemological dichotomy, what Plot- inus appears to suggest here is simply absurd. Creativity not only changes the way

47. For the generation of matter, see III, 4 (15) 1. For other related passages see chap- ter 1.10.

48. Cf. Symposium 206 c: “All human beings . . . are pregnant in body and soul, and when they come to the right age, our nature desires to give birth. But it cannot give birth in the ugly, but it can in the beautiful.”

49. Theaetetus 150 b–c: “My art of midwifery . . . differs . . . in that its concern is with men’s souls giving birth. And this is the greatest feature of my art, that it can test by every means whether the thinking of a young man gives birth to an image that is false or one that is fertile and true”; Symposium 210 a 6: “if the one leading him leads correctly.”

we look at the universe; it intensively fills the universe in a new way. Heidegger speaks in his little essay “On the Origin of the Artwork” about the world emerg- ing dynamically as if for the first time with the appearance of the artwork. When the temple is built at Delphi, for instance, the strife and dynamic interaction be- tween earth and sky so created call out the essential activity of the world in a new way; or in Heidegger’s always curious language “die Welt weltet” (“the world worlds”). If Heidegger’s language looks absurd, Plotinus seems to go even fur- ther. Since the world is timelessly, silently, and eternally being made by living, self-giving vision, any form of genuine creativity actually makes the whole of things more what they are. Conversely, failures or evil emerge as a swerving- away from (paraphora) or deformation of what is contemplated. To use an image that Plotinus elsewhere borrows from Plato’s Seventh Letter,50 _{the soul’s eye, slips}

away from the substantial reality it wants to see and turns only to the flux of qualities and quantities, thereby making something less than what it really is or could be. Or again, if ugliness is a deprivation of form, as Plotinus argues else- where, the soul not only makes a category-mistake or fails to capture the fuller vi- sion but in fact misforms its products so that instead of opening pathways for thought it extinguishes being in non-being. Ugliness and evil, for Plotinus, are not just absence of form but a negativity that tends to annihilate form (on evil see 4.13 below). The Epicureans had supposed a random swerve of atoms falling through the void that led to the formation of an imperfect universe. The physical universe for Plotinus is imperfect, but it is not the botched product of some inferior divinity or inexplicable randomness, for regular whole-formation is a product of intelligi- ble contemplation, while failure and ugliness are deviations from, or simple ab- sence of capacity for, the complex and dynamic world of contemplative form.

3.18.1. Creative contemplation and finality

At the same time as Plotinus develops the Platonic side of this question, his theory of productive contemplation is also a radical development of Aristotle’s theory of finality. For Aristotle, nature works from within to produce the regular whole- formation of organisms, and just as “art does not deliberate,” neither does nature (cf. Physics II, 8, 199 b 28; Ennead IV, 8 [6] 8, 13–16). The various forms of movement, instinct, and desire in the universe, on Aristotle’s account, are expres- sions of this finality and ultimately of the causality of substance as the purest form of self-reflexive energy. In III, 8, Plotinus produces a new philosophical way of thinking through this problem in Aristotle. This is not an attempt to reconcile the thought of Plato and Aristotle (at least on the evidence of III, 8, 7). Porphyry is reported to have written two treatises on this problem of reconciliation, and it is true that reconciling Plato and Aristotle was a favourite Neoplatonic preoccupa-

50. See II 6 (17) 1, 42–44; Seventh Letter 343 c 1: “the soul seeks to know . . . not the quality but the what . . .”

tion.51 _{But Plotinus does not even begin to make such an attempt: he is more in-}

terested in following out a train of thought that seems simply evident to him, as 7, 14–15 indicates. So a puzzle in Plato and Aristotle leads here to a rethinking of Aristotle’s notions of contemplation, activity, and finality. Plotinus does not abol- ish Aristotle’s distinction between the theoretical, practical, and productive sci- ences but shows how the practical and productive are grounded in, and flow as consequences from, the theoretical. Nor does Plotinus develop a sort of “real effi- cient causality” or only an archetypal formal causality.52 _{Creative contemplation}

worksand unfolds from within the natural formsof things astheirconstitutive outpouringandimmanentfinality.PlotinussuggeststheinnerlinkwithAristote- lianphilosophyasaliving,open-endedformofon-goingthoughtbyemphasizing thewordtelos,goal,threetimesinthischapterandbyfurtherdrawingouratten- tiontothequestionoffinalitywiththeclassic-sounding Aristotelianteleological formula(atwhichhe,ofcourse,looksdifferentlythanAristotle, asweshallsee) abouttheepistemicnecessitypropertointellect:“itwasnecessary,sincethefirst principleswereengaged incontemplation,forallotherthingstolongforthisif, asmustbethe case,the originativeprinciple foreverything isthe goal”(7, 16– 18).53