Is Plotinus a Platonist?

Transcription

1 Is Plotinus a Platonist? Professor John P. Anton, University of South Florida I I t has been noted that Plotinus has repeatedly, as we shall see, acknowledged his indebtedness to Plato. A question still remains: is Plotinus a Platonist? To begin with, we need to clarify what is meant by Platonist and whether Plato himself was the originator of this type of thinker. If so, we need to know whether Plotinus understood by Platonism a basic doctrine initiated by Plato and later on adopted by various thinker, namely the theory of Forms.1 If we accept this doctrine as basic and central, then to call someone a Platonist requires that we show that this thinker has accepted the theory of Forms without reservations. If that cannot be shown to be the case although other features of Plato s thought have been accepted and even further developed, what then is it that makes one a Platonist? Given these questions, we may ask What is it that makes Plotinus a Platonist? Stated in another way, the question is: What can be said about Plotinus attachment to Platonism? Plato died in 347 BCE and Plotinus was born in 204 CE. By adding the years that passed for Plotinus reach maturity the time that separates our two philosophers amounts to just about six centuries. The chain of events that took place during this long interval is a very complex story. Some scholars call it Greco-Roman, while others prefer the term Hellenistic. It is difficult to think of all the radical changes, political, military, cultural, religious, historical in the Mediterranean scene, especially the philosophical ideas and scientific developments. The variety and impact of changes on the affairs of the people, whether as groups or as individuals defies label. To speak of a Hellenistic age with reference to what has been called Hellenistic philosophy in contrast to Classical 1 Gilbert Ryle, Plato, in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (New York, 1967, VI, 320). Ryle argues that the Platonism identified as the theory of from has a lesser place in the Dialogues than has been often claimed by various interpreters. 6

2 philosophy hardly discloses their differences and discontinuities in the diverse modes of thought that emerged with the changes. As labels they are merely convenient terms, and the same goes for Neoplatonism as a subspecies of Hellenistic philosophy, a term intellectual historians in the nineteenth century proposed to cover the period that commenced with Plotinus. But does the latter term suggest that we are dealing with a special type of Platonism? I ask the question because like many others had once thought that Plotinus was a true Platonist but avoided the issue of what it meant to call someone a true Platonist.2 If the criterion is to ascertain whether it means someone who extends and builds on Plato s philosophy, then all we can say is that one is philosophizing in the Platonic tradition. In that case we are dealing perhaps with an original philosopher. If such is the case of Plotinus, even the term Neoplatonist does not him justice. I will try to show that in a serious sense Plotinus is not a Platonist and this despite Plotinus insistence that he is but a follower as well as an interpreter of Plato. Plotinus, just as Plato did, responded to the problems of his own times and was influenced by the then current doctrines. Their respective quests flourished in two different worlds, and so did the views they sought to establish. Conflating their ways of responding to their worlds minimizes the discontinuities that separate them as philosophers. Plotinus fascination with the contemplative ideal is neither Plato s main concern nor is it Aristotle s. Actually it was rooted in the Egyptian soil and culture.3 2 Thus in my Plotinus Conception of the Functions of the Artists, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Fall 1967, p E. Bré hier observes: There arose, especially in Egyptian soil, a new type of contemplative, as different from the philosopher of the Hellenic tradition as from the practitioners of religions. A work such as that of Plotinus is unintelligible if one attempts to connect it directly with the Greek tradition, no less than if one sees it as part of the religion of the mysteries. The Philosophy of Plotinus, tr. J. Thomas (University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 3. Further down, Bré hier also notes that Plotinus was devoted to Greek philosophy with his whole heart and mind. But the problems which he posed were such as Greek philosophy had never considered. They were, properly speaking, religious problems. Hence his effort to adapt Greek philosophy to points of view which were foreign to it, resulting in a profound transformation of Hellenism and a constraint imposed on Greek philosophy to make it say what it was perhaps not capable of saying (p. 19). 7

3 II Plato is the only Platonist, if we want to be precise. After Plato a great variety of thinkers who profited from the study of his dialogues, imitated them, even produced works they then peddled under his name. Many pseudo-platonica had re-worked Plato s themes, sometimes extending them beyond recognition. More importantly, these imitations tried to revitalize classical themes to the point of producing extravagant reformulations of Platonic doctrines. Stating it somewhat differently, the temptation to platonize hardly ever ceased, whether as interpretations of Plato or as pseudo-platonica. This temptation to platonize perhaps makes Whitehead s dictum at least mildly understandable, to wit, that after Plato all philosophy may be read as footnotes to Plato. If we were to take the dictum literally, the list should include Aristotle, Epicurus and the Stoics, aside from the middle and later Academy. But to stay with the so-called Neoplatonists we are tempted to ask: What sort of footnotes to Plato do they make? Particularly, what kind of footnotes do Plotinus Enneads project? To ask the question differently, how does Whitehead s dictum make sense in Plotinus case? By calling him either a Platonic or Neoplatonic footnote, the result would be to scale him down to an intellectual imitator, if not to an operatic singer of a philosophical opus. Trying to prove Whitehead right is hardly rewarding. There are more substantive issues to consider. If Plotinus is in some sense a neo-platonising thinker, he is one who chooses and picks significant topics from Plato s dialogues and even borrows, although to a lesser degree, from other Greek thinkers to put them to new and different uses. What Plotinus did is quite understandable. By the time we come to the third century CE, we enter a world radically different from the one Plato addressed and sought to understand. In fact the period in which Plotinus lived was so different that one should even hesitate to call it Hellenistic. Scholars with an abundance of good will and prone to seeing unsuspected continuities, have called this period the last flowering of Hellenic culture. 4 The facts, however, suggest differently, but that is another story. It is best to return to Plato and Plotinus. 4 Dillon, J. and L. Gerson, eds. Neoplatonic Philosophy, (Hackett 2004), p. ix. 8

4 III I will try to make the point why Plotinus is not a Platonist clear despite the fact that he was signally indebted to Plato s dialogues for thematic material and exegetic technique. To say that Plotinus is not a Platonist is by no means original, as O Meara and others have noted. Porphyry, Plotinus own devoted late companion, had insisted that the master s interpretation of Plato was hardly orthodox. 5 Nor had Longinus, Porphyry s teacher in Athens, accepted Plotinus approach, insisting that Plotinus had plagiarized Numenius. Leaving aside the old quarrels about the correct interpretation of Plato of this or that passage in the dialogues, my view is that Plotinus made Plato peripheral to his own philosophy, a move that justifies my saying that he was not a Platonist. A most serious consequence of Plotinus stance is his novel casting of the role and function of philosophia. I will try to support my position by bringing up three fundamental items: Political Theory, Cosmology, and the recasting of the role of Nous, all comprising a radical outlook on the principles on which Plotinus built his metaphysics of hypostatic being. Plotinus ethics of escape to contemplation leaves hardly any room for political eros. As one interpreter has put it, Plotinus is Plato diminished, and in effect a Plato without politics. 6 A native of Lycopolis (city of light or city of the wolf?) in Egypt, moved to Alexandria, where he learned from Ammonius Sakkas how to become a spiritual traveler, then to Rome, the Eternal City as capitol of a vast empire that could not be a polis to foreigners even to its own plebs. The empire was not destined to become a polis. Plotinus knew it. His vision of a Platonopolis remained a philosopher s dream; still he cherished the hope for a Platonic polis. But his disciples, friends and interlocutors bore little resemblance to Socrates companions in or out of the dialogues. Anyway, the Roman Council voted down his proposal to build the Platonopolis somewhere nearby in Campania. Did the pax romana ever made Plotinus and other like him citizens? Unlike 5 D. J. O Meara, Plotinus, (Oxford, 1995), p W. Theiler, Plotin zwischen Platon und Stoa in Les Sources de Plotin, Entretiens sur l antiquité classique 5 (Geneva, 1960), 67. 9

5 Plato, this gifted metoikos from Egypt had no city of his own to cherish and protect from corruption. His philosophic quest wavered between the vastness of the empire and the closed circle of his intimate friends, leaving him with but one thing on which to exercise his ethics, though not his politics: his own soul. His was a soul cast in a mold different from Plato s conception of the human psychē, a soul suited to seek peace and truth in transcendent speculations, not the polis. Given his circumstances, one can understand why Plotinus did not work out a political theory, aside from the prospect of proposing a way of life that could challenge the institutions that Rome stood for as the protector of her ideals. But Plotinus way of life was never viewed as a threat to the status quo, although it ruined the estate and possessions of the Senator Rogatianus who had so detached himself from the things of this world what he had given up his wealth, dismissed his servants, and renounced his titles.7 But Plotinus had great affection for poor Rogatianus. In the absence of a viable political theory, Plotinus had no choice but to redesign the nature and functions of the virtues, now recast to fit novel ethical ends in the service of the contemplative life in preparation for the union with the One. Plato, when writing the Republic, was highly critical of his own polis, his and Socrates polis, Athens. Plotinus never visited Athens; no doubt it was too late to find there the climate of culture in which Plato lived when the quest for the just citizen filled the entire text of the Republic. Plotinus had no such political world of his own to consider, to criticize, and to perchance to reform. All that was left for him to do was the expanding of ethics, in fact a view of ethics that had already become divorced from political life. Dominic J. O Mera correctly notes, as I see it, that His [Plotinus] is an ethic of escape from the world. In this respect, we might conclude, Plotinus is not faithful to Plato, who is concerned with improving our present lives, elaborating for this purpose a political philosophy in the Republic ēand in the Laws.8 7 Zethus, in his Life of Plotinus, Op. cit

6 Platonism may be called a special way of life, but it was a political way of life in a polis for the polis and the politai. As such, the polis may be regarded as a cosmos to be explored, understood and improved by way of reason and dialectic. This way of life was not what Plotinus considered adequate to the human endowment and purpose. He read Plato mainly to understand his thinking on the psychē but his aim was to widen the orbit of the Hellenic polis and lift the contemplative above the limits Plato had envisaged and beyond what Aristotle had understood as νόησις νοήσεως. The Plotinian polis, if a polis at all, now supplanted as the totality of the hypostases, had to become accessible to the newly transformed powers of a different conception of the human soul. This new soul, once unencumbered by limits and measure, has a destiny of its own: to reach out to the One, alone, leaving behind the burden of the body, all for the identity with the One, even for a brief moment, union with Unity itself, beyond plurality, even beyond reason itself. IV Plotinus was not a Platonist, being neither a politēs nor a critic of the diverse types of constitution as with Plato s Socrates in the Republic. He remained a visionary of an unrealizable and impractical Platonopolis, with hardly any place for it even between the Plato s Republic and Augustine s City of God. He could only use Plato to borrow a ladder to climb above Beauty, above all Forms, including the Form of the Good, and finally touch the One, ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας, ἐπέκεινα τοῦ νοός. Paradoxically enough, Plotinus never kicked the ladder of love. He had no choice in the case of the ascent but to accept the ladder as the means to slide down to his bodily existence. The idealization of the climbing process leads us beyond the Republic, even beyond the ἀναβαθμοί, the lovable steps on the erotic ladder of the Symposium. The reader is quickly alerted to a miscast similarity between the ascent to Beauty in the Symposium and Plotinus ascent to the One, the supreme hypostasis, the One beyond Beauty. There is no Diotima in the Enneads. Plotinus is not casting his own self in the mold of Socrates. Nor is the inevitable descent, the return from the One, comparable to the return to the Cave. For Plotinus, Plato s Cave is an allegory of another allegory, the latter picturing a new Odyssey and a new, spectacular cosmic nostos. 11

7 Nor is Plotinus a Platonist when his new dialectic and reconstituted Eros leave behind both the Republic and the Symposium to enter the world of the Timaeus only to transform what was left of the Pythagorean cosmos into the infinite domain of the One. Here, once again, Plotinus is not a Platonist. He becomes himself: original and restless path-finder, responding to a world that was no longer bearing the defining properties of the Hellenic way of life. A new conception of the human psychē was steadily emerging along with the commingling of the many winds of doctrine from the East and the West, the South and the North. This new type of psychē, articulated without the lucidity of the philosophical language of the Greek thinkers, demanded a recasting of the tasks of reason. It has been described as representing the last stand of enlightened Hellenic Paganism against the onslaught of Eastern religious thought. 9 This is more flattery than well earned compliment. This novel conception of the human psychē, not especially suited to the old political nature of humankind, to speak with Aristotle, allowed a powerful redesigning of the functions and uses of the virtues. Plotinus recast them to suit novel ethical ends and particularly the highest end of the transcendent vision and union with the One. The distant echo of the quest of excellence in Plato s Republic, tied to defining the just citizen, proved replaceable with a set of different assignations in the service of a mystical teleology. The virtues, although Greek in sound and appearance, are not the excellences Socrates and his companions sought to inculcate in the future guardians through a vigorous educational program to purge the politeia of its blemishes. The radical redesigning of the virtues to serve the ideal of the contemplative life makes Plotinus ethical theory more suited to being a prelude to the coming surge of the religious conduct than as a new way to prevent the downswing of the then current political morality. The student who is interested in Plotinus theory of virtues could do no better than to place it in the context of his ontic hypostases as axiological hierarchies. The special case of sophia provides the pivotal point, so central to the soul s journey. The new meaning this virtue shifted to being an instrument for understanding the goal of the return 9 Robert M. Helm, Platonopolis Revisited, in Neoplatonism and Contemporary Thought, vol. II. R. Baine Harris, ed. Albany, (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002), p

8 to the One. It also redefined philosophia as the love of a new wisdom whose mission is to sustain the desire for the great ascent. With Plotinus, sophia must perform radically new tasks, beyond what Plato and Aristotle, and definitely beyond what the Stoics expected. In due course, it will become the wisdom of a conception of philosophy in the service of theology after the emerging religious culture will have won the day. Once again, Plotinus is not a Platonist. Rather, he is at once original and a spokesman for the cultural developments that have in the making through the rising of various dynamic axiological elements coming together in the blending of East and West. V The place of honor that the grades of Beauty in the Symposium or the realms of becoming and being in the Divided Line of the Republic occupied, Plotinus granted to the hypostatic emanations of the One, the ultimate source of all being and all values. As such, the One, understood as being beyond being, epekeina tēs ousias, outshines even Plato s ultimate Good. This One emanates and sustains the cosmic hierarchies, being the sole demiurgic power and progenitor of all with the exception of evil. I would like to conclude this brief paper on what I think constitutes Plotinus major departure away from the Hellenic conception of Intelligence and its place in human affairs. It is hardly surprising that Plotinus altered the doctrines he extracted from Plato s Parmenides and the Timaeus, whether Plato had endorsed them or not. The pertinence of what two strangers, one from Elea and another from Locroi, said in these dialogues respectively but not Socrates became paramount in Plotinus design of his speculative cosmology. As many scholars have noted, a critical issue, though not the only one, is the way Plotinus assigned to the Platonic Forms a new status to accord with the principle of the second hypostasis.10 Briefly put, Plato has Timaeus narrate a likely mythos, one that Socrates did not say he took at its face value. Plato, the author, refrained from granting it 10 Bré hier aptly notes the following: In Plotinus we no longer behold the Demiurge of the Timaeus, which brings about the creation of the sensible world according to an ideal model. There is no longer the dialectical construction of Ideas whose principles are found in the Philebus and the Sophist, any more than there is the geometrical construction of the elements in the Timaeus, both of which bring in ideal operations which hinder, arrest, and retard contemplation. Ibid. p

9 more than a prominent place in that dialogue. But in elevating the story from mythos to truth, Plotinus turned the mythos into a goldmine. The crucial issue, seen from Plato s stance, is the place of the Forms in the cosmos. Plato never put the Forms in the Nous of the demiourgos. As this divine craftsman decides to create the entities that will fill the cosmos, he needs perfect models. The Forms in their absolute separateness are not to be disturbed. The demiourgos will work only with the best attainable images of the Forms. This is what Timaeus narrates, not Socrates.11 But Plotinus, working with a religious tradition that goes back to Philo and others, placed the Forms in the divine Nous, the first emanation of the One, where both perfect plurality and perfect unity converge. This move was decisively non-hellenic. The Timaeus was not just interpreted; it was used beyond its original setting. This conception of Nous as the host of the Forms, the Intelligibles, Porphyry was quick to detect but he was soon advised to retract.12 Nevertheless by so doing, Plotinus brought forth a new and different assignment to what was steadily acquiring a prominent place in the history of intellectual culture: philosophia as contemplative metaphysics.13 By starting a new type of speculative philosophia, Plotinus made the final step beyond the classical tradition of sophia. Paul Shorey called him the first and greatest of the Neoplatonists. 14 Whatever term one prefers to use it should be treated as a suggestive or figurative expression. To say more is to mislabel the place of Plotinus in the 11 As F. M. Cornford writes, Timaeus speaks dogmatically but without any appeal to authority, and we regard his doctrine simply as Plato s own. Plato s Cosmology (London, 1937), p. 3. He quotes Wilamowitz, Platon I, p. 591, who also held this to be the case. So did Plotinus who then altered the independence of the Forms granting them residence in the Divine Intellect, clearly a non-platonic stance. 12 Life of Plotinus 18. Enn. V. 5 That the Intelligibles are not outside the Intellectual Principle and VI. 7 How the multiple of Ideas exist. 13 J. H. Randall, Jr. credits Plotinus with a third and new type of metaphysics, the other two being Plato s and Aristotle s. As a new type, Plotinus own reaches back to Plato s quest for the Whole and transforms it into the search for the Absolute, the true Being, beyond all plurality and appearances. This version of metaphysics becomes the prototype of rational theology by centering its quest on the divine as the only Real. See his Nature and Historical Experience (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), pp. 124ff. 14 Paul Shorey, Platonism Old and Modern, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1938), p

10 history of philosophy. Negatively stated, we can at least try to keep matters straight by insisting that regardless of family resemblances, Plotinus was not a Platonist. 15