Reading Notes: Plotinus 1:2:5

Welcome back to the Plotinus read-through! 

Today we're going to look at Ennead 1, Tractate 2, Chapter 5. You can read along here. The previous post in this series is here.


In this chapter, Plotinus is going to continue to discuss purification. And this, if I may be forgiven the vulgarity, is where shit gets real.

So we come to the scope of the purification: that understood, the nature of Likeness becomes clear. Likeness to what Principle? Identity with what God?

The question is substantially this: how far does purification dispel the two orders of passion- anger, desire and the like, with grief and its kin- and in what degree the disengagement from the body is possible.

Our goal in Purification is to totally liberate ourselves from the passions. The passions, now, are all the involuntary movements of the soul by the body. Some are fiery, like anger and lust, others watery, like grief and sorrow. We seek, on this account, to transcend all of them.

As a note to myself, I feel certain that all of this can be profitably compared with the notion of "separating yang from yin" in the internal alchemy and meditative methods of the Quan Zhen (Complete Reality) school of Chinese Taoism. That comparison is going to have to wait until I can get the rest of my library out of storage, though!

Let's go on and see just how far, for Plotinus, this all goes.

Disengagement means simply that the soul withdraws to its own place.

That sounds simple enough. Plotinus now describes what it looks like in practice, and this is important enough that I'm going to break it up into sections.
 

• It will hold itself above all passions and affections.

• Necessary pleasures and all the activity of the senses it will employ only for medicament and assuagement lets its work be impeded.

• Pain it may combat, but, failing the cure, it will bear meekly and ease it by refusing assent to it.

• All passionate action it will check: the suppression will be complete if that is possible, but at worst the Soul will never itself take fire but will keep the involuntary and uncontrolled outside its own precincts and rare and weak at that.

• The Soul has nothing to dread, though no doubt the involuntary has some power here too: fear therefore must cease, except insofar as it is purely monitory.

• What desire there may be can never be for the vile; even the food and drink necessary for restoration will lie outside of the Soul's attention, and not less the sexual appetite;

• or if such desire there must be, it will turn upon the actual needs of nature and be entirely under control; or if any uncontrolled motion takes place, it will reach no further than the imagination, be no more than a fleeting fancy.

Are you following all of this?

The follower of Plotinus is entirely unmoved by any of the ordinary affairs of human life. He eats and drinks only to calm his body. He is unmoved by fear, grief, or desire. He is either unaffected by pain or, if this is impossible, he refuses to allow it to have any power over him. He indulges his sexual desires only insofar as they pass fleetingly through his imagination. He is entirely free from "uncontrolled motion," but instead is a man entirely self-possessed:

The Soul itself will be inviolately free and will be working to set the irrational part of the nature above all attack, or if that may not be, then at least to preserve it from violent assault, so that any wound it takes may be slight and be healed at once by virtue of the Soul's presence, just as a man living next door to a Sage would profit by the neighbourhood, either in becoming wise and good himself or, for sheer shame, never venturing any act which the nobler mind would disapprove.
 

Nor is it correct, though, to see this as a constant battle between the Intellect and the passions. Instead,

There will be no battling in the Soul: the mere intervention of Reason is enough: the lower nature will stand in such awe of Reason that for any slightest movement it has made it will grieve, and censure its own weakness, in not having kept low and still in the presence of its lord.