Philosophy in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds: A History of Philosophy without any gaps, Volume 2 by Peter Adamson

Author:Peter Adamson [Adamson, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: azw
ISBN: 9780198728023
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-07-20T16:00:00+00:00

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On the Horizon

Plotinus on the Soul

Wouldn’t it be fun to invite an assortment of ancient philosophers to a screening of the Wizard of Oz? Just picture the scene. The Stoics would be muttering critically about the Tin Man’s deplorable desire to get in touch with his emotions, and pointing out that if the Scarecrow wants to be clever, he should wish for a heart and not a brain. Aristotle would be sitting at the back, taking notes on the winged monkeys for his zoological writings. Galen and the anatomists of Alexandria would tap their toes as the Cowardly Lion launched into their favorite tune, “If I Only Had the Nerve.” Thales would feel vindicated by the fact that the heroes win the day by using a bucket of water. Meanwhile the Pythagoreans would be trying to get everyone to be quiet. And Plotinus? I think his favorite scene would come at the end, when Dorothy says: “If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with.”

Dorothy’s observation might well remind Plotinus of something he says in one of his own treatises: “One might be unaware that one has something, holding onto it more powerfully than if one did know” (4.4.4). He is describing the way that the human soul relates to the things it has seen in the intelligible realm, the realm of the Forms. Following Plato, he believes that the soul is eternal and has seen the wondrous beauty and truth of this realm before it came to be in a body. 1 Yet the embodied soul retains a memory of these realities, and Plotinus here suggests that the deeply buried memory of the Forms is possessed more intensely than the soul’s conscious experiences. Thanks to your soul’s relationship to a body, it is aware of an almost unceasing stream of sensory phenomena—the whirlwind of colors, motions, and sounds that reach it through the eyes and the ears. It’s easy for the soul to be distracted by these fleeting impressions. In its most debased condition, the soul may become so confused as actually to identify itself with the body. But Plotinus believes that even people in this condition have within them the power to remember what they have seen in the world of the intellect.

On this score Plotinus is more optimistic than almost any other late ancient Platonist. Not only does he believe that we can find traces of the intelligible within ourselves; he is convinced that we never depart completely from the intelligible world. The soul remains in part “undescended,” in other words, still actively contemplating the Forms even while it is ensconced in a material body. He knows this idea is controversial and even paradoxical, at one point introducing it with the phrase, “if we may dare to present our own opinion” (4.8.8). After all, as later Platonists like Iamblichus and Proclus pointed out, it’s

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