Plotinus 1:2:3

[readoldthings]

Welcome back to the Plotinus read through!

One of the issues with taking any kind of break with this stuff is that of diving back in. The Platonic way of thinking is quite simply not the same as the modern. Learning to think as Plotinus and his predecessesors and successors do is challenging, and the tendency is to slip back into more familiar mental habits. I've found that I had to re-read my own earlier posts in this series in order to write this, and I kept saying, "Wow, that's a good point... I have no memory of writing it."

With that said, let's dive right back in. The preceding post in this series can be read here. You can follow along here.

We come now to that other mode of Likeness which, we read, is the fruit of the loftier virtues: discussing this we shall penetrate more deeply into the essence of the Civic Virtue and be able to define the nature of the higher kind whose existence we shall establish beyond doubt.

And so we are going to learn more about attaining Likeness with the divinity. There are, we are going to discover, two types of virtues, one of which is higher than the civic virtues of Courage, Justice, Prudence, and Temperance, we discussed previously.

Let's read on.

To Plato, unmistakably, there are two distinct orders of virtue, and the civic does not suffice for Likeness: "Likeness to God," he says, "is a flight from this world's ways and things": in dealing with the qualities of good citizenship he does not use the simple term Virtue but adds the distinguishing word civic: and elsewhere he declares all the virtues without exception to be purifications.

The civic virtues, it seems, are too bound up in the things of this world to lead to total Likeness.

But in what sense can we call the virtues purifications, and how does purification issue in Likeness?

A fine question.

As the Soul is evil by being interfused with the body, and by coming to share the body's states and to think the body's thoughts, so it would be good, it would be possessed of virtue, if it threw off the body's moods and devoted itself to its own Act- the state of Intellection and Wisdom- never allowed the passions of the body to affect it- the virtue of Sophrosyne- knew no fear at the parting from the body- the virtue of Fortitude- and if reason and the Intellectual-Principle ruled- in which state is Righteousness. Such a disposition in the Soul, become thus intellective and immune to passion, it would not be wrong to call Likeness to God; for the Divine, too, is pure and the Divine-Act is such that Likeness to it is Wisdom.

Okay, now we're getting into the meat of it.

As Plotinus told us at the beginning of this tractate, our first problem is that evil exists in this world, and therefore we must escape. Evil is rooted in matter, and not in soul, but our soul becomes evil by being intertwined with the body. Stuck here, we share the bodies urges and passions, and think the body's thoughts.

In order to become good and to attain virtue, the soul needs to rid itself of the thoughts and moods that are rooted in the body, and attend to its own proper acts.

And what is that proper act?

"Intellection and Wisdom."

Now, that word "Intellection" is an important one. It means the action of the Intellect. The word that is being rendered in English as "Intellect" is Nous, which is not translatable. The Intellectual, or Noetic, world is the world of Forms. The Forms, as we've seen already, are the eternal causal principles of the cosmos. Moreover, the Forms are always plural-- we can talk about this Form or that Form, but in practice, in the Intellectual Level, there is no separation. (And this is that much more true of the Gods, who have their existence at a level even higher than that of the Forms.) Intellection, thus, is a kind of automatic knowledge in which there is no distinction between the knower and the known.

As for "Wisdom," what he means by it depends upon what Greek word Plotinus is actually using. Often enough, that word is "dianoia," which means "through nous," and thus again refers to the Intellectual level of being.

He then adds that the soul free of the body's influence would possess the virtue of Sophrosyne or Temperance, in which it would be unmoved by the passions of the body. It would also possess Courage, by being unafraid to be parted from the body, and Justice ("Righteousness"), by being ruled by the highest part of itself-- the Nous.

This condition, Plotinus tells us, would make the Soul like unto God, because the divine is Intellective and immune to passion.

I may have missed something, but I'm not clear on where the second order of virtues we were promised comes in. Or is it simply that the virtues, when they condition a man to be a good citizen, are civic virtues, but when they condition his soul to Likeness with God, are something higher?

But would not this make virtue a state of the Divine also?

No: the Divine has no states; the state is in the Soul. The Act of Intellection in the Soul is not the same as in the Divine: of things in the Supreme, Soul grasps some after a mode of its own, some not at all.

One of the ideas we see in Platonic thinkers, that is found in later Christian theology also (though not its Protestant deviation), is that of Divine Simplicity. For Plotinus, there are no states, or changes in the condition, of God. "Divine wrath" is a metaphor whereby we humans can understand what naturally happens to us when we turn away from the Gods, but the Gods themselves don't literally get mad and huff about and fling thunderbolts. They don't have passions and do not need anything.

As for Intellection, I think it's right to say that Soul grasps the Intellectual World-- as it were-- from below, while the Gods grasp it from above. As we said before, the Gods don't need to be virtuous, because there is nothing for the virtues to save them from. They have nothing to fear, and so don't need courage, for example. But we could fear-- which is a bodily state, since it is our body that is harmed if what we are afraid of comes to pass. Courage allows us to become more like the Gods, who naturally know no fear, and thus to overcome the moods and thoughts of the body. Thus, there are two orders of virtue: Civic virtue, which makes us more useful citizens, and Virtue as purification.

This leads to a bit of a dilemma:

Then yet again, the one word Intellection covers two distinct Acts?

Rather there is primal Intellection and there is Intellection deriving from the Primal and of other scope.

And now Plotinus gives us one of the most interesting images we've had so far:

As speech is the echo of the thought in the Soul, so thought in the Soul is an echo from elsewhere: that is to say, as the uttered thought is an image of the soul-thought, so the soul-thought images a thought above itself and is the interpreter of the higher sphere.Virtue, in the same way, is a thing of the Soul: it does not belong to the Intellectual-Principle or to the Transcendence.

Speech is an echo of thought in the physical world. But thought itself, an action of the Soul, is also an echo of something higher. Intellection, as we said before, is automatic-- no separation between the knower and known, and thus no separation between, say, the parts of a sentence, or of a thought-act. Virtue is a thing of the Soul. It is thus an unfoldment of a simpler Something which is of the Intellectual World.

So: By the practice of the Virtues we purify ourselves, and shake off the power of the body. But the Virtues themselves aren't of the Intellectual world, or the Divine which is beyond it; instead they are like ladders, which unite our soul to its own highest principle, and that which is beyond.