Traveling soul

Certain persons in philosophy of history are sort of hinge figures. After them, philosophy gets a completely different flavour and direction and their influence can be seen long after their actual lives. Plotinus is one of such hinge figures, whose effect will be felt in several different strands of philosophical history - in Christian, Islamic and Jewish philosophy.

The starting point of Plotinus’ thinking lied in another hinge figure, Plato. In his earliest treatise Plotinus began with quite a Platonic question: what makes things beautiful? Plotinus tried to avoid the notion that the experience of beauty would have something to do with the mere material constituents of a thing or their structure. Thus, symmetry of parts of a thing could not be the only beautiful aspect in things, because firstly, some beautiful things, like coloured surfaces, have no separable parts. Furthermore, a symmetrical thing made out of ugly parts would not be beautiful.

If beauty lies then not in the material parts or their structure, Plotinus said, it must be found somewhere else, for instance, in a divine force, which configures material parts into something beautiful. In case of such simple things as colours, this divine force occurred in Plotinus’ opinion in a concrete natural phenomenon of light, which made things visible to everyone.

Just like Plato, Plotinus thought that true beauty was not to be found in material things, but more in actions of human beings. Indeed, a beautiful action, Plotinus said, is beautiful just when it is done independently of material considerations. In consequence, a person is more beautiful, depending on how well she has managed to purify herself from all bodily influences.

Yet, even human activities and personality behind them are not the highest example of beauty for Plotinus. High above them lies what makes even beautiful personalities beautiful - that is, the mystical source of all that is good and beautiful. Like all talents, seeing this source of beauty requires practice, and ordinary human beings would probably not understand why it is called beautiful - indeed, they couldn’t even understand why an action of a person can be beautiful. It is just this purification of oneself from material influences - making oneself beautiful - which makes one resemble the divine source of goodness and thus able to view the source.

Because the true beauty of human things lied in Plotinus’ opinion not in matter, it is just to be expected that he would hold the essence of humanity to be found in something else than body. This something else was that which made human being alive, which gave it the power to perceive and the ability to think. This something could not be material, since no matter as such was alive - matter couldn’t even shape itself into different forms without an external force, so how could it move itself? Furthermore, mere material body could not perceive anything - perception required not just copying likenesses of things, but also combining various features perceived into a single unity, which was impossible to matter that was always divisible and never a true unity. Finally, thinking was especially something mere matter couldn’t achieve, since many things we think, such as beauty as such, were not material.

Even if this something - soul - wasn’t just matter, one might suppose that it still is something connected to matter. Thus, Plotinus considered the Pythagorean idea of soul as harmony and the Aristotelian idea of soul as an internal activity of living, perceiving and thinking humans and found them both wanting. Harmony as such could not be soul, because soul was more of an instigator and creator of harmony. Then again, it could not be just a peculiar activity in a body, because then sleep would instantly kill a human being.

If matter and all things pertaining to it were divisible and thus destructible, soul, on the contrary, was for early Plotinus indivisible and indestructible. Indeed, as the source of all life, soul could never truly be dead. Plotinus even described soul as divine and hence immortal. An individual soul had had a desire to control things and it had thus attached itself to a body, but still some aspect of this soul remained unattached to body.

In a quite Platonian manner, Plotinus divided the realm of existence into two different parts. First was the unchanging, immaterial world, in which everything depended on a unifying principle, which in turn depended on nothing else. Second was the ever-changing, material world. In the world of change, things also appeared to depend on other things, for instance, human beings depended on their parents, who had produced them.

Plotinus noted that many philosophers had tried to find the ultimate things, on which all the beings of the world of change depended on, but they had often hit on incorrect candidates. Epicurean atoms could not be behind it all, because Epicurean idea of random movements of atoms would mean that future could not be predicted - something Plotinus was convinced we surely could do. Furthermore, if all was just movement of lifeless atoms, we couldn’t be said to even live, let alone decide things for ourselves. For the latter reason, Plotinus wouldn’t also accept that the faith of all things in the material world would be decided by a world soul, using individuals as mere puppets of its great plan.

Since predictability of future events and especially the possibility to read them from e.g. movements of stars was something Plotinus accepted, one might think that he would have endorsed the idea of stars determining the events of the material world. Indeed, he did think that stars were at least signs of certain cosmological influences - season and climate had their say on how things in the world went. Yet, if one wanted to accept the idea of personal choices - and Plotinus surely wanted - he could not accept that stars, or indeed any causal factors, would completely determine the actions of human beings. Instead, Plotinus said, the human soul - this immaterial aspect of human life - was in part free to decide what to do. Indeed, like we have seen, the better a soul, the more independent it was of material influences.

Soul then lied somewhere between the world of change and the eternal world, and it was Plotinus’s next task to determine its exact position in relation to them. His suggestion was to describe it in terms of divisibility/multiplicity and indivisibility/unity. Material things were, Plotinus said, inherently divisible and multiple - nothing intrinsic kept a mere lump of matter together. Eternal world, on the other hand, depended on something indivisible and inherently unified, which could not be divided in any sense.

Soul lied in a sense between these two extremes. Yet, it wasn’t the only thing to do so. One could also say that a colour like whiteness was a unity - whiteness is whiteness, whether it is in snow or sugar. Still, despite this unity of being the same colour wherever it occurred, whiteness did not make white things into a unity, but snow and sugar remained different substances. Soul was also in a sense both multiple and unified, but it differed in Plotinus’ eyes from colours in that soul actually unified things in which it dwelled to a peculiar combination. This could be seen in the aforementioned ability of soul to unify perceptions occurring in different parts of the body into a coherent whole.

Although soul was higher than material world, Plotinus also thought that it wasn’t the highest possible thing. While souls had a tendency to meddle with the material world, there had to be something completely immaterial, which could be seen as the source of the souls. This source Plotinus called nous or intellect - it should be some type of thinking. In a quite Aristotelian manner, Plotinus said that this intellect could not be dependent on something beyond itself and could not thus think of something foreign to itself. Thus, it had to think just itself.

Plotinus did not mean that intellect could not think anything other than itself. Instead, this intellect contained in itself, like a seed, kernel or essence of everything that existed. The restriction to intellect itself, excluded only certain non-essential or imperfect features of things from the purview of intellect. Hence, it could think of stable characteristics of the world, such a geometric shapes, but not any haphazard event, and activity of soul in so far as it was harmonious and not ruled by bodily impulses, but not its disturbance by these impulses. In other words, intellect thought in Plotinus’ view the ideal prototypes of worldly things and souls. Thus, he at least in his early phase concluded, intellect could not think of individuals. Intellect didn’t so much create these prototypes by thinking them, but they were more like eternally contained in a state of intellect knowing them. Furthermore, the prototypes were prototypes of actual world and actual souls and not of any possible and non-actual world or souls.

Plotinus quite quickly came to the conclusion that the travel of soul from that immaterial world of ideal prototypes to material and less than ideal world was not just negative. Indeed, it was in a sense just a necessary process, in which ideal prototypes of the ideal world became materialised. Many souls, such as the world soul governing the movement of the whole world and the souls regulating the movement of stars, ruled their portion of the matter with complete freedom and thus their contact with matter could not break their contact with the ideal prototypes - they could think these without any effort. Human souls were in a more lowly state, because they had isolated themselves from the communion with other souls and the ideal prototypes and required then more effort to return back to their origin. Yet, this cycle of apparent fall and gradual rising was also a necessary process. Souls could learn to see even the material world as an image of the ideal world, while the experience of the uglier parts of the material world would make them appreciate the ideal prototypes even more.

Although the ideal world - or better, the intellectual process of thinking various prototypes of embodied world - was more fundamental than the material world and souls governing it, it still wasn’t the ultimate source of everything in Plotinus’ view. Thinking is still dependent, Plotinus said, because there can be no thinking without something to think. This first source of everything would then be no thinking, but at least in this phase of Plotinus’ development, pure awareness containing potentially everything, which thinking contained actually. This pure awareness or potentiality was still not completely passive, but it had a tendency to produce something, and what it produced was the act of thinking itself, which formed the ideal world of prototypes. Since only at the stage of thinking itself we can speak of things existing, the primordial pure awareness cannot be described even as existing, but only as a source of all existence.

The primordial source of everything was thus a unity without any multiplicity, while everything derived from it was also in a sense a multiplicity. Intellect thinking itself contained already many ideal prototypes in itself, while souls became pluralised in their contact with the material universe. Interestingly, Plotinus said that these many souls formed still in a sense a unity. Indeed, one could say that all individual souls were only one soul taking on different shapes, just like one seed divides into various parts of a plant and one science develops into different branches. This did not mean that all souls would e.g. have the exact same feelings, although one could experience their underlying unity, for instance, in a feeling of compassion towards other living things.

Quite quickly Plotinus started emphasising how utterly removed the original unity was from everything else, which in addition to unity always contained some multiplicity. Indeed, while existing things usually were unities made out of something multiple or at least one out of many existent things, the original unity could not be called existent. Indeed, this unity defied all description: you couldn’t measure it in any sense or place it in space or time, you couldn’t say it was good for something, because it existed for sake of nothing else and was thus beyond mere goodness, and even words like “one” were just inadequate pointers toward it.

Despite is seeming transcendence, the original unity was in Plotinus’ opinion always quite close to everyone, because it in fact was the original unity making everything what it was.The trick in getting closer to the unity was not to try to view the unity as something differing from oneself. Indeed, Plotinus advised one to return to oneself and to free oneself from all external disturbances in order to get to a state of mind in which one was completely one with itself. In this divine state of self-peace, a human being found the soul underlying all souls and in a sort of analogy experienced how great the even more undisturbed and non-multiple original unity was.

At this stage the basic levels of Plotinus’s metaphysics were clear. Above everything corporeal lies, firstly, soul, which governs the material world and the movement of bodies, combining them into a unified cosmos. Soul is already divine, because of its power over matter. Still, soul experiences everything in time, and in a sense, it is just energy flowing from a higher plane of existence to the temporal world.

This higher plane is the timeless intellect, which thinks itself eternally. In this self-thinking, intellect does at the same time many different acts. It recognises itself as an active thinker and as a passive object of thinking; it separates these two aspects, but also identifies them as aspects of same intellect; it sees itself as active, because it thinks, but still as peaceful, because it never changes to something else; it counts the number of different aspects of itself and knows their distinct qualities.

Intellect has then many sides and is therefore dependent on the highest plane of existence, the primordial unity. Plotinus had become increasingly confident that the unity was not conscious of anything, not even of itself, because such consciousness would imply multiplicity.. Although the primordial unity might be said to contain potentially everything that exists in itself, it is not the sum of everything, but everything in general and intellect in particular is more like generated out of the unity. Still, the unity has not created intellect in the Christian sense of the word, because as the ultimate perfection it has no need to do anything. Intellect is then again like uncontrollable flowing of the energy of unity, just like soul was flowing of the energy of intellect.

Plotinus tried to express this necessary flowing of unity into an intellect in a more detailed manner. This flowing of energy of unity is like an act of unity becoming conscious of and thinking itself. In other words, one could say that intellect is the original unity, when it has started to think itself. One just has to remember that temporal phrases are here inappropriate. Act of self-thinking is more like an eternal manifestation of the original unity or a state of awareness of an original power.

This aware or conscious state then, in a sense, shapes its original power into various forms or different possible existents. Although intellect is not a complete unity without any multiplicity, it still resembles the unity in necessarily dissipating its own energy to a further level of existence. The power that this eternal thinking of possibilities holds is then manifested in world soul’s temporal power over embodied existents.

The world soul produces finally all the individual souls, and while the world soul is non-spatial, individual souls can exist in space. Following Aristotle, Plotinus said that in addition to humans also animals and plants are souls, that is, living entities controlling material bodies. In animals, souls attain a level of awareness, but human beings reflect even the higher echelons of existence. That is, a human being can on occasion rise completely above its bodily frame and just think all the same perfect thoughts as the self-thinking intellect does. Finally, every human being is not just thinking, but also the object of such a perfect thinking or one modification of the primordial power.

One important element of Plotinus’ cosmology was still left untouched, namely, matter. Or actually, Plotinus said, there are two types of matter. In the intellectual level there is multiplicity of different thoughts, such as thinking, being thought, being same, being different, being multiple and being of some kind. In general, the intellectual level should contain several perfect prototypes of the corporeal world. All of these prototypes could then be seen as modifications of one matter. This intellectual matter is not, Plotinus clarified, the primordial unity, but something in the intellectual level under this unity - while original unity should be beyond everything, intellectual matter is more like something which intellect uses in producing its various thoughts. Intellectual matter is also something dependent on the original unity - it is the inexplicable capacity to differentiate various thoughts and is in a sense generated in the eternal act of self-thinking. In one intriguing passage Plotinus suggested that this intellectual matter might be nothing else than the soul, which looked upon intellect and was molded into different shapes by its activity.

Just like the existence of many thoughts required Plotinus to suppose an intellectual matter, similarly the perpetual change of corporeal things required the supposition of another type of matter, of which corporeal things were modifications. Since this corporeal matter was a basis, from which corporeal things were formed, it itself could not be a corporeal thing. Indeed, it had no distinguishing characteristics, not even shape nor size. Just like intellectual matter, corporeal matter is also just an endless capacity to form different things - here, different corporeal things. Plotinus noted that one could not really think of corporeal matter, because there was nothing to think about it - one could just picture everything determined taken away from a corporeal thing, and still something hazy would be left behind. In fact, the essence of corporeal matter was to be just such a lack of all characteristics and limits, which doesn’t even really exist, except in comparison with the intellectual prototypes which shape the matter into various forms.

The main points of Plotinus’ worldview were thus in place, but some points were still unclear. For instance, how could world soul at the same time be non-spatial and still cause movement of the whole material world? To this problem Plotinus suggested that the movement caused by the world soul - the circular movement of world around its center - was in a sense no movement at all, since it continuously returned to its point of origin. Indeed, it was the attempt of the material world to emulate the ability of the world soul to be everywhere at the same time - this does not mean that world would have intentions of emulating the soul, but more like it had to do so by its nature. Just like world soul, also souls governing stars caused their bodies to rotate around their centre point. Still, this was not true of all souls, since e.g. human souls were also moved by external impulses.

Just like there was a downward flow of energy starting from the primordial unity and leading through intellect to soul, Plotinus thought this flow continued within the level of soul - reasoning soul guiding humans at their best gave energy to perceiving soul common to animals, which in turn gave energy to the lowest type of soul, present even in plants, which controlled processes of nutrition and reproduction. And, Plotinus continued, this flow of energy did not end there, because plants finally gave energy to the inorganic objects of Earth.

This downward flow of energy, Plotinus said, was embodied as a concrete shape in the phenomenon familiar from the life story of Socrates, that is, in the idea of being from a higher level of existence guiding one’s life. The higher the person herself in the hierarchy of existence, the higher also this spiritual guide. True philosophers would be guided by their acquaintance with intelligence or even with the primordial unity.

Part of the Platonic legacy of Plotinus’ philosophy was the idea that we could journey through different levels of this hierarchy in several lives. If a person was guided by sensual desires, she would be born as an animal or even as a mere plant in next life. Then again, people practicing good life and acquainting themselves with the higher forms of existence could become souls guiding stars or even become completely unified with the harmonious community of souls forming the world soul.

Even though death does then hold a possibility of a person moving to a higher state of existence, Plotinus was far from suggesting that people should take their lives. Indeed, he insisted, if a soul is to truly become disentangled from bodily needs, the separation of soul and body should happen naturally.

Plotinus was also interested of the place of sensible qualities in his hierarchical system - what made, say, warmth of fire different from all the prototypical characteristics of the intellectual level? His suggestion was that there are actually many different types of qualities. The lowest type are the mere effects of things on other things, such as the sensation of warmth we get when we go close to a fire. Such qualities are ephemeral and vanish as soon as the arbitrary interaction stops. These accidental qualities are then based on more substantial properties of things, namely, their activities by which they cause such ephemeral qualities - for instance, warmth as an activity of fire, which produces the sensation of warmth. These activities are not accidental, but instead belong to the very essence of things, that is, they make the thing what it is. These activities, in their turn, are then just embodiment of the prototypical characteristics of the intellectual level, which should also be then described as activities.

Plotinus did not add just prototypes of substantial properties to the intellectual level of the hierarchy. In his engagement with the souls, he had become certain that all individual souls must have an intellectual prototype. This was a novel idea compared to the usual Platonic doctrine that only species, like humans in general, had ideal prototypes. Plotinus was convinced that different persons had so diverse and still so beautiful capacities and characteristics that these couldn’t be explained just by the difference in their matter, which could explain only decadent characteristics falling short of the prototype. Thus, all souls had to have ideal prototypes, Plotinus concluded. To the objection that intellectual world would then be populated by innumerably many new entities Plotinus answered, firstly, that all the multiple prototypes were contained in the single self-thinking intellect, just like we’ve seen intellect containing prototypes of various characteristics in one act. Furthermore, Plotinus noted that time of the physical cosmos moved around in a circle and thus there would be only a finite number of types of personalities arising time and again in the course of the cycles.

The inclusion of prototypes of human souls in intellect suggested the problem whether such marks of good living in a society like just behaviour toward fellow citizens and moderate following of one’s superiors could be characteristics of the self-thinking intellect. A simple answer would seem to be that such characteristics could not belong to intellect, which did not live in any society. Problem was that Plato had seemingly said that such characteristics made humans move toward higher echelons of existence and become like gods. Plotinus’ solution was that Plato had spoken of characteristics similar to these virtues of society, but of a higher nature - for instance, harmonious justice within society was analogical to harmony within human soul, so that while wise people were meant to rule other classes, soul and wisdom were meant to rule bodily impulses. These higher virtues were essentially virtues of an individual and could be followed without the society of other persons - they were habits for purging oneself of everything chaining oneself to the material world. By becoming less held back by corporeal needs, the more one resembled self-thinking intellect. Yet, a certain gap always remained, since souls always had a tendency to fall toward matter and they thus had to resist the demands of the body, while intellect was eternally in possession of perfection.

The road toward this perfection could thus be described anew. Humans were usually not forced to start their journey towards intellect from a completely clean slate, because their experiences were of some use in ascending. People who appreciated music knew already harmonies, and now they had to just hear harmonies in an intellectual level. Similarly, lovers had to learn to see beauty also somewhere beyond physical level. But the best equipped for the journey was a person acquainted with philosophy, because she was already on her way to higher echelons. All she had to do was to learn mathematics and Platonic dialectics, which give human being a map away from sensuousness and a map within world of ideas.

The role of dialectics appears to be especially important for Plotinus. For him, it is not just logic or methodology of reasoning, but more like an ontological study of the basic concepts and their ideal prototypes - it is a study by which one knows what truly exists and what is really good - and furthermore, also a study of the intellect as a thinker of these categories. It even implies that some mysterious unity lies behind the intellect. With the aid of mathematics, it can describe the general contours of physical world, and when applied to human affairs, it can be used to show how we should live. Thus, dialectics implicitly contains all the parts of philosophy in itself, Plotinus said.

Soul thus had a road away from the level of separate personalities to an intellectual level where souls are intrinsically connected. A next problem to be explained was then how all the separate souls could also form a unity and how such a unity could appear in the form of distinct souls.