The Enneads by Plotinus

Author:Plotinus
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Philosophy, History & Surveys, Ancient & Classical, Essays
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2005-06-30T05:26:55+00:00

18. There remains still something to be said on the question whether the Soul uses deliberate reason29 before its descent and again when it has left the body.

Reasoning is for this sphere; it is the act of the Soul fallen into perplexity, distracted with cares, diminished in strength: the need of deliberation goes with the less self-sufficing intelligence; craftsmen faced by a difficulty stop to consider; where there is no problem, their art works on by its own forthright power.

But if souls in the Supreme operate without reasoning, how can they be called reasoning souls?

One answer might be that they have the power of deliberating to happy issue, should occasion arise: but all is met by defining the particular kind of reasoning intended: we may represent to ourselves a reasoning that flows uninterruptedly from the Intellectual-Principle in them, an inherent state, an enduring activity, an assertion that is real; in this way they would be users of reason even when in that over-world. We certainly cannot think of them, it seems to me, as employing words when, though they may occupy bodies in the heavenly region, they are essentially in the Intellectual: and very surely the deliberation of doubt and difficulty which they practise here must be unknown to them There; all their act must fall into place by sheer force of their nature; there can be no question of commanding or of talking counsel; they will know, each, what is to be communicated from another, by present consciousness. Even in our own case here, eyes often know what is not spoken; and There the whole body (the heaven) is pure, and every being is, as it were, an eye, nothing is concealed or sophisticated, there is no need of speech, everything is seen and known. As for the Celestials (the Daimones) and souls in the air, they may well use speech; for all such are simply Animate-Beings.

19. Are we to think of the indivisible phase of the Soul and the divided as making one thing in a coalescence; or is the indivisible in a place of its own and under conditions of its own, the divisible being a sequent upon it, a separate part of it, as distinct as the reasoning phase is from the unreasoning?

The answer to this question will emerge when we make plain the nature and function to be attributed to each.

The indivisible phase is mentioned (in the passage of Plato)30 without further qualification; but not so the divisible; ‘that soul’ we read ‘which becomes divisible in bodies’ – and even this last is presented as becoming partible, not as being so once for all.

‘In bodies’: we must, then, satisfy ourselves as to what form of soul is required to produce life in the corporeal, and what there must be of soul present throughout such a body, such a completed organism.

Now, every sensitive power – by the fact of being sensitive throughout – tends to become a thing of parts: present at every distinct point of sensitiveness, it may be thought of as divided.

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