Text: Ennead III, 8 (30): On Nature and Contemplation and the One
3.21. The problem of substance in the Enneads
Does Plotinus then simply project Aristotle’s view of physical substance onto the intelligible plane and thus create an abstract, universal intellect while rejecting particularity?77 “And, to put this in a different way, intellect is not an intellect of
some one particular, but it is also all” (8, 40–41). The answer clearly is no: intel- lect is both individual and all. Plotinus emphasizes this in many places. For in- stance:
For just as any particular life does not cease to be life, so neither does an in- tellect of a particular kind cease to be intellect: since the intellect appropriate to any particular living being does not on the other hand cease to be the intel- lect of all, of man also, for instance, granted that each, whichever one you take, is all things, but perhaps in different ways. For it is actually one thing, but has the power to be all. (VI, 7 [38] 9, 29–35)
On the understanding of this passage, even things in this world (like human be- ings and horses, as we saw above) do not stop being everything just because they have determinate specific characteristics that look at first sight incompatible with intelligent life.
But this problem of intellect’s substance is one of the most important in the
Enneads, and despite the compression of Plotinus’ sketch here, we cannot skip
over it as quickly as he does because we really do not know what he is talking about at this stage. How can we even begin to conceive the necessity of such “with-ness” and “everything-ness”? We can employ such formulaic phrases as “there is no human being without all human beings,” and we can undoubtedly mean them (even from a genetic point of view), but it is still difficult to see what we really do mean. We might even say with Plotinus that there is no one thing without all things, but a logical atomist might well disagree, and we have anyway lost the comforting certitude in an exponentially expanding information world that any so-called synoptic view of a totality is anything more than self-deception. But the problem is also reflected in elements of Plotinus’ own thought. He himself seems to have a double-sided view of what we might call “Forms of individuals”; that is, of what Forms precisely intellect holds: you, me, dogs, cats, identical twins, clones?78 Some passages seem in favour of such Forms (e.g., V, 7 [18]; IV,
77. For very different views of this whole question see K. Wurm, 1973; T. A. Szlezák, 1979; A. C. Lloyd, 1990; K. Corrigan, 1996a, 298–395.
78. On forms of individuals see J. M. Rist, 1963; H. J. Blumenthal, 1966; A. H. Arm- strong, 1977.
3 [27] 5; 12, 1–5), but others against (e.g., V, 9 [5] 12; VI, 5 [23] 8), though in the wake of emendations of some of the texts recent consensus is in their favour. The problem at root for Plotinus is that determining what makes for authentic indi- viduality is no simple task. Much of what we do is determined by appearance, convention, even self-deception. Consequently, Plotinus’ notion of the self is enormously complex and subtle, so subtle in fact that even whether he has a genu- ine notion of the self at all has been questioned. Perhaps, it has been suggested, the only “self” is the One.79 But this is surely unwarranted by the text.
What prompts Plotinus to think of substance as holistic in this way? And how does intelligible substance include individuals? As we have seen above in the case of soul, so also with intellect here. If substance is a one-many and every part of its content directly characterizes its substantial nature (e.g., even our intellects in a way), then we appear to be committed to a very different way of speaking about substances than we use to speak of apparently solid things in the physical world. For unlike the quantitative unities of the physical world, each substance bears a perhaps implicit but necessary internal relation to every other substance. This for Plotinus is what calling substance “one in number” really means (VI, 5 [23] 1, 1– 4; cf. Categories 3 b 12; 4a 10–11). Of all things that have real existence, he says, “since they are not produced by composition [ek syntheseôs], the existence of each is in that which it is, numerically one, which is there from the beginning” (IV, 3 [27] 8, 25–30). The intelligible unity of all substances is guaranteed from the beginning, therefore, but this does not obliterate the individual: “the intellects are not dissolved into unity because they are not corporeally divided, but each re- mains distinct in otherness, having the same essential being” (IV, 3 [27] 5, 2–9). Whether this is true or not, it could be argued that it makes sense, for if substance is a one-many and one in number and if each of the many in substance directly characterizes this nature, then the many substantial individuals cannot be obliter- ated, for otherwise they could not be features of substance. On the other hand, this way of thinking has some rather strange consequences. I cannot simply abstract a particular feature of substance (rationality, for example, or a definition of “you” said according to your soul) and say without falsifying the reality of the situation that this is substance, because this is to exclude it from the rest of substance by turning it into a particular set of qualities. In other words, to say that substance is an individual form is a profoundly misleading way of putting it, for as soon as I think I understand what intellect or the soul as a one-many means, I appear to be committed to an organized one-many, from which I cannot separate out the one without losing the many.
79. Compare G. J. P. O’Daly, 1973, and for a strong monistic view of Plotinus L. Sweeney, 1983, 190; 1992b, 381–424; cf. E. Bréhier, 1958, 173–79.
3.21.1. Intelligible substance and III, 8, 8, 40 ff.
This is the root of Plotinus’ final sketch in III, 8, 8. If substance in the strict sense is an organizing principle and an organized one-many, then it cannot without ab- surdity be said to occur by chance; nor can it be composed from all its content (syntheton ek pantôn) because then either the whole will be substance and not the parts (which is logically impossible since each feature of substance is by defini- tion the whole but without obliteration of its own identity) or the whole will be “a heap of things that have just happened to be brought together, waiting around to become an intellect composed of all things,” which would contradict its very na- ture. Consequently, intellect, the organizing principle, must be an organic whole before we even think, name, or abstract pieces out of it. But, in fact, we cannot even abstract pieces out of it (except the images we make of it) because, as Plot- inus concludes the chapter, “there was no composition out of pieces.”
3.21.2. The problem of substance and individual form
Three corollaries of this are important for our understanding of the Enneads as a whole. First, in the light of this analysis, it becomes clearer why Plotinus should sometimes indicate that the “species,” or “individual form,” views of substance, which are favourite candidates for substance in modern Aristotelian scholarship, are not adequate representations of its meaning. To say that the “last difference” or the “individual form” is substance comes perilously close to contradicting one- self, if one understands that each and every part is substance and yet one refers
only to a particular form or specific difference. Individual forms only make sense
in the context of all forms, for substance must by definition be the interconnect- edness of a totality organized by a unifying principle. To limit this to one individ- ual form is absurd, and to suppose an abstract universal nature unifying all forms is to contradict the direct concreteness of what is meant by substance. If we sim- ply back off from the issue, then the principles will perhaps be indifferent for us or admit of randomness (cf. II, 4 [12] 2, 9–10), which would seem to contradict the whole enterprise anyway.
This, at any rate, is why Plotinus can sometimes deny the substantiality of par- ticular things or assert that ousia (substance) cannot simply be taken as an indi- vidual (atomon) (VI, 2 [43] 22, 11–13) or as a particular form (VI, 3 [44] 2, 9– 19). It is also why in VI, 4–5 [22–23] being appears as a single comprehensive subject unified implicitly by the presence of the One (cf. VI, 5 [23] 1, 14–21) and present simultaneously everywhere. This does not mean that substance is a uni- versal, common nature or a single undifferentiated unity, for it is present every- where “as a whole.” Substance is a single subject in the sense that it includes all subjects in their own way as itself. So when Plotinus says that form and substance cannot be “of” something, if they are to be substance, he does not mean to do away with individual forms as some scholars have supposed (e.g., Lloyd, 1990,
103; 86 ff.), but rather to save those forms by providing an intelligible foundation even for a logic that may appear to dehydrate them utterly of their living colour (the great logical treatises, VI, 1–3 [42–44], should be read with this in mind).
3.21.3. Intelligible substance: Plotinus and Aristotle
The second corollary is that Plotinus’ notion of substance in III, 8 and elsewhere is not driven by an urge to extirpate the Aristotelian view but rather to think through the problem of substance somewhat further than Aristotle managed to but with some agreement on fundamental Aristotelian principles. In this process, of course, Plotinus turns out to have a very different view of the question. If con- templative vision is the real ground of the practical and productive sciences, so much so that it is alive even in our actions, however dimly, as a form of finality, then there is no need to suppose external principles at work such as the Gnostic fallen Sophia or evil Archons (Ruling principles) dominating an evil world. In- stead, as Plotinus will make explicit in V, 8, 5, “a wisdom [sophia] everywhere guides making”; “a physical wisdom” (i.e., of nature), he calls it, “no longer com- posed of theorems” (i.e., discursive objects of contemplation abstracted from their full intelligible context), “but a single whole not compounded from many into one” (cf. III, 8, 8, 41, 45, 48), “but rather loosened up [i.e., analyzed] from one into multiplicity.” If this is so, then the intelligible characteristics of substance must be capable of applying both to separate substance in intellect proper and to the separable, but presently nonseparate, form (i.e., soul and her content—the
logoi) present to the physical compound as its substance.80 Yes, perceptible sub-
stance for Plotinus is, strictly speaking, a “shadow of being” in that, as Plato puts it in the Seventh Letter and as Aristotle further develops it in the early chapters of
Metaphysics VII, one moves from the “what” of the thing to its quality or likeness
alone. Such substance appears to be only qualities in matter, from this perspective, or composed out of “non-substances” (cf. VI, 3 [44] 8).81 But this is to look at
“substance” from a constituent, material viewpoint (i.e., what it is composed out
of) and not to see it from the perspective of the contemplative logos that already makes it a whole. If we can see such a view of substance implicitly developed in III, 8, and following, it is not because Plotinus’ Platonism prompts him “in myste- rious ways” but rather because he believes that the logic of the problem and the logic of Aristotle’s own position on contemplation, theoretical wisdom, and sub- stance require this critical development in order to show the primary intelligible application to the sphere of being of what are derivative usages, for Plotinus, in Aristotle’s natural philosophy, biology, psychology, and even metaphysics. This
80. Cf. III, 8, 8, 46: “and if something comes from it, it is not diminished, neither that which is from it because it too is everything . . . ”)
innovative thinking is not a trivialization of Aristotelian philosophy but a genuine critical development.
3.21.4. The need for an organizing principle (III, 8, 9–11)
The third corollary of Plotinus’ view of substance is the need for a transcendent organizing principle for the immanent unity and multiplicity of such an organic life, a need that concerns Plotinus from here forward in chapters 9–11. Of course, intellect is capable of organizing itself, but such multiplicity, no matter how uni- fied, could never account entirely for its own unity. For Aristotle, every organism has two sources of organization: its own form, within its local and broader envi- ronments, and the unmoved mover. But if the unmoved mover is an organism, the same logic should apply to it. For Plotinus, while intellect in one way is complete in itself, it is never complete in relation to the One. Even the ground of its own substance is something of which it stands in need. Intellect in a sense has to go in search of its own substance (at least when we come to speak about intellect’s rela- tion to the One).
Because intellect is of this kind, we need something “beyond it” (9, 1–2). It is typical of Plotinus to cite Plato’s Republic in this way, where Socrates puzzles Glaukon with the statement that the idea of the Good is beyond being (and intel- lect). However, even modern scholars are by no means in agreement on what Plato means in this passage. Being is what is knowable, yet it would seem that if the Good is a form, it must in some sense be knowable. Plotinus’ indirect quota- tion here tends to provoke thought rather than settle a complex issue. Perhaps we could look to other passages in Plato for help in interpreting what it means to be “beyond” intellect. In the Timaeus, the demiurge is said to be difficult to discover and impossible to communicate to everybody (28 c). The Parmenides states that there is no name for the “one” (142 c). And the Seventh Letter (of particular im- portance for Plotinus, and rightly accepted at the time as genuine) is clear that there can be no written work on the subject of dialectical enquiry since it “cannot be expressed in words as other studies can, but instead from a lot of get-together around the subject itself and living with it [ek pollês synousias gignomenês peri to
pragma auto kai to syzên], suddenly as a light struck from a leaping fire, [it(?)—
there is no expressed subject] comes to be in the soul and already itself nourishes itself” (341 c 5–d 2).
This passage is very close to the spirit of Plotinus, and it shows vividly some- thing that Plotinus himself must have known very well: there is no easy way to read Plato. At this point several crucial questions emerge. (1) Does Plotinus cite Plato simply to back up his argument (from authority) or to point out the path of his thinking to his colleagues and students or even to offer a kind of in-depth meditation upon the meaning and difficulty of other texts as he follows out his own train of thought? Probably a little of all three, but if this is so it does not make our task easier because we should simultaneously have to make intelligent
decisions about many other extremely difficult texts in order to read Plotinus in- telligently. Yet none are more vexed or more crucial than Republic VI–VII. (2) If the One is unspeakable, how can we speak about it? Plotinus spends a good deal of time in the Enneads talking about the unspeakable, so it is important to deter- mine how he understands this to be possible. (3) A version of the same question applies to intellect. If intellect is timeless and nondurational, how can Plotinus in- troduce durational language into his descriptions of it? Is intellectual thinking (noêsis) propositional, or should propositions only be the province of discursive reasoning (dianoia)? This is a pressing problem for any reader of III, 8, 9–11, for nowhere else in the Enneads do we have quite such strange statements as “intel- lect is always desiring and always attaining” (11, 23–24), or in the image of the fountainhead, each of the rivers in unity with its origin (i.e., the One) “already . . . knows, as it were, where they will let their streams flow to” (10, 9–10). If the idea is strange that intellect, a nontemporal being, has a history “endlessly exploring the rich and varied life that is itself” (Armstrong 1971, 73), then the idea that something in intellect knows how it will develop into an actualized intellect is even weirder.
The most important of these three interrelated questions is the second; that is, how are we to speak about the unspeakable One? I shall take up this question first and summarize how I situate it in relation to the Enneads in general. This will provide some reference points on a difficult but crucial matter that has been al- most entirely misunderstood in modern times until very recently. I shall then take up the question of propositional language and intellect as part of the broader ques- tion of the One before going on to apply this to chapters 9–11. This will help us to get a clearer idea of how Plotinus implicitly reads such vexed passages as Plato’s
Republic VI–VII and to determine whether his approach to Plato makes sense
even in the context of modern thinking.