Ep. 343: Plotinus the Neo-Platonist (Part One)

0:08 Mark: To the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set out to do philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 343 is something like, what is our metaphysical relationship to the good and the beautiful? And we read selections from Plotinus's Enneads, originally collected around 270 CE, but here presented as the first four essays of the Essential Plotinus by translator Elmer O' Brien in 1964. For more information about this book and the podcast, see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer loving filth for filth's sake in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:39 Seth: This is Seth Soul, imprisoned in Seth body and exiled from the divine in Austin, Texas.

0:45 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, a fugitive from the divine, hiding out in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:50 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, living in borrowed being in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:55 Christian: And I'm Christian Ami, and I am existing in one of God's dreams.

0:59 Mark: Oh, that's nice. Welcome back, Chris.

1:03 Christian: Thank you.

1:04 Mark: This has long been on our list and we had a guess for it and we didn't have a guess for it, and it just kept getting pushed down. And I think Wes poo pooed it a lot.

1:13 Wes: No, I didn't.

1:14 Mark: You did. You did. You said, this is not necessary. It will be redundant of other things.

1:19 Wes: I never said that.

1:21 Mark: I'm saying there's a reason why we didn't do that.

1:23 Wes: You gotta send me evidence. I don't know. I guess I forgot. I just. I think I said it wasn't a high priority, which would have been wrong. I can see myself saying that. And that was wrong. I apologize for that.

1:34 Christian: I've kind of noticed that Mark always blames you for whatever it is.

1:39 Wes: Yeah, I have actually very little control over the episode schedule.

1:44 Christian: Before we start the conversation, can I do a commercial?

1:47 Mark: Yes.

1:48 Christian: In addition to being today's featured guest, I'm also the editor for the Partially Examined Life book, which is now available on Amazon. It's also, if you go to your local bookstore, library and pester them enough, they should be able to order copies. I can actually confirm that works. And I would really, really encourage you out there. If you are a fan of the podcast, which I assume you are because you're listening, or even if you hate the podcast, which would be odd for you to be hearing this, go get a copy of the book because it's a really good book.

We have 18 episodes. They're from all across the podcast history. It's really a range, everything from Ancient Greek. We have a couple of the Ancient Chinese philosophers. We've got some modern American philosophers, including some underrepresented philosophers under the black American philosophy tradition, which I don't think we get enough of. And then also special bonus, something that you are not going to get anywhere else. There are childhood pictures of many of the hosts of this podcast, although not Seth, because Seth did not share any childhood pictures.

But if you want to see what Mark and Wes and Dylan looked like in childhood, this is probably your only chance to do that. And if that's not incentive enough, I don't know what is.

3:02 Seth: Yeah, I don't have any pictures of my childhood because I sprang full grown from the head of Athena.

3:07 Christian: Yes. As all true philosophers should.

3:10 Mark: All right, so let's hear some commercials for Plotinus. I know that he was very historically important, but he also did not even see himself as innovating. He just thought he was a Platonist. Interestingly, though, he also saw Aristotle as a Platonist. So we see some stuff informed by a recent Aristotle's metaphysics discussion spilling in here that there's some discussion of, like, oh, there's Plato versus Empedocles versus Heraclitus. But for the most part, it's just, this is my system. This is the way it is. This is what has been inherited from the Platonic tradition. But I guess Plotinus is seen as the first of the Neoplatonists, a name given much later.

3:46 Christian: Yeah, the thing that fascinates me about Plotinus is that from our point of view in history, we look and we think, oh, Plato and then Plotinus. And we think of them as being close together. But it was actually 600 years after Plato, the ancient Greek society had been replaced. It was now the Roman Empire. And all that time for 600 years, people had a basic way of looking at Plato, which was really Aristotle's way of looking at Plato. And my perception of how Aristotle looked at it was he was like, well, Plato, of course, great man, intelligent innovator, but he got a lot of things wrong.

His arguments don't really make sense. And luckily I'm here to fix that. And my system is the perfection of all the kind of things that Plato started to look at but didn't really do all that great at. That was kind of the point of view, I think, for a lot of people, for Plato. And they primarily saw it that way. And they saw Plato is doing kind of imperfect version of what Aristotle was doing. Plotinus comes along 600 years later, and like you said, he doesn't even necessarily recognize that it's A different view on Plato.

4:46 Dylan: It's just.

4:46 Christian: It's very natural to him to see Plato this way. I think what he's basically saying is it's not really that Plato is making these bad arguments because he doesn't know any better. He's making arguments that don't exactly work because he wants you to think a little deeper. And what Plotinus thinks that Plato's thinking about, which I agree with, actually, is that he thinks that everything that Plato is talking about is really a. About another level of reality, a deeper level of reality, and that we're living in kind of a degraded, debased version of that reality.

And because of that, we can hint at things in the real reality, but we can't entirely summarize them. We can't completely bring them into our reality because our reality is not pure enough to hold them. So part of the reason that all of Plato's arguments are a little bit bad at a certain level is because they're part of an imperfect world and they're meant to make you think of a perfect world. When you get to a point where something doesn't quite fit, you're not supposed to say, oh, this is just a mistake. You're supposed to think, oh, what would the world be like where this was actually true?

When I kind of discovered Neoplatonism, it really made a lot of sense to me, because that was how I read Plato as well.

5:52 Dylan: I think you're right that the characterization of Plotinus as looking to a more perfect world or a perfect existence, or both, and ours is a reflection, imperfect one seems like a sort of consistent riff on the allegory of the cave and the notion of the forms and stuff like that. And I certainly see that part reflected in Plato. And that question of form is exactly one of the prime things that Aristotle is addressing himself. In that respect, I get how Plotinus is ending up where he's at, and he has a kind of. I go back and forth between a charming and a infuriating, irritating kind of earnestness about there being another world that is reflected.

I'm looking forward to going through the discussion about it. I will confess at the outset I find myself completely nonplussed about the maybe the way it is. I could follow the presentation, and I get it, the very basis of the conclusions about there being a formally perfect world. Then ours is a debased one, and our senses are the corrupt rendition of that. I find a hard pill to swallow and a hard point of view to really understand, even if it is sort of consistent.

7:21 Christian: It does seem to be something where people either resonate with it or they don't.

7:25 Dylan: Sure.

7:25 Christian: And I think one of the things about it is it's very opposite to sort of the modern analytical tradition that we're kind of more used to. And a lot of it is that, at least for me, when I'm reading Plotinus, it's clear to me that the details don't really matter to him. And I think that's what's frustrating in him. For people who are more used to kind of a more rigorous approach to philosophy. What Plotinus is saying is, well, if you need arguments, I'll give you some arguments. But because he doesn't believe this argument is ever going to fully capture things, he's a little bit more casual about the details.

And I think you contrast to somebody like Aristotle, who's really trying to get things right, you know, or some of the more modern philosophers, people who are really sitting down and working out all the details, and the details are really important to them. I think they're not really important to Plotinus. I think he thinks that they're not really important to Plato.

8:13 Mark: I think. I disagree. I think he's pretty careful that he's trying to capture the system. I mean, Plato was pretty systematic in like the Timaeus and things. But then there's always this question, is Plato giving just myths? What is he actually saying? Especially in the Phaedo. But at least according to the person writing the introduction to the book, o', Brien, Plotinus was trying to take what Plato said at face value and give a very consistent system. Based on this, we read four essays. The first was on Beauty. The second was called the Intelligence, the Ideas and Being.

And that one in particular, I thought was very careful about trying to distinguish these levels that will be sort of familiar both from the Timaeus. And we actually read one other Neoplatonist, Ficino, but he was from the Renaissance. Right. 1470, something way, way later, but still had these similar ideas. Plotinus was not a Christian and he

9:06 Wes: was a translator of Plotinus. And explicitly an expositor of Plotinus.

9:11 Mark: Yep. And these ideas of there being something that stands in for God, which is just called the One here and then it's not just that. And then down to mortal things, and try to look up toward God, there's like a few distinct steps in between. And even though we can't literally know anything about the One, because it's beyond all categorization, we have to use negative theology. We can say what the One is.

9:36 Wes: Not.

9:36 Mark: But we can't say what the One is, but the intelligence, capital I, the soul, capital S. The soul of the world. These other intermediate things, the human soul, we can actually say quite a lot about those things. And we need to use reason to get us up most of the way before we then have to use intellectual intuition or something like that to gaze the last bit to the actual divine. But we have to use dialectic. We have to use reason. We have to be very precise, actually lay out a system to get almost up there.

10:07 Seth: Yeah.

10:08 Wes: I'm not even sure. Does he call it intellectual intuition? I don't know.

10:12 Mark: He calls it intuition.

10:13 Wes: At some point it seems like it's something beyond even intellectual intuition, because we normally think of intellectual intuition as the thing that gives us access to the forms which are in the realm of the intelligible, which he seems to identify with the intelligence. Right. The intelligence caps is just the realm of Platonic forms. So we do have some access to that. We don't normally think of intellectual intuition as discursive per se, although it supports discursive reasoning. But the One is something that is even beyond the forms and is beyond being.

I thought this was the most important. Obviously the fourth one that we read, the Good or the One, seems to me to be the meatiest and most important of what we read. And it takes an idea that's there, of course, in Parmenides and Plato to some extent, but also in Aristotle, the significance of unity for being, and takes that into really interesting metaphysical territory to this idea that there must be a principle which transcends being, the principle of oneness. The One cannot even be an entity. So I find that part highly interesting.

11:25 Seth: I would agree with that. And I wanted to just harken back a little bit. If I'm understanding the history correctly. This is an exceptionally influential text. Basically kicked off hundreds of years of medieval scholasticism. He says at one point, and again, this is probably in the translation, but transcendental communion, as this unity with the One is achieved through transcendental communion, which should sound familiar, I guess, to Catholics. So given his historical importance, I would think we should be cautious of, like, if it doesn't exactly ring to our modern ear the way we might wish it to do. He clearly was hitting on a nerve. He did something that people found really important.

12:08 Christian: I think, to Seth's point, Plotinus was very important, and he continues to be more important, more alive, I think, in the religious tradition. I think I'm probably kind of more connected with that than you guys. But in Religious circles. I mean, this is a live philosophy. Usually we consider it as having kind of passed into Christianity through Augustine, who had studied kind of Neoplatonism before he became a Christian, and then was very influential as an early theologian. The other thing I wanted to kind of say that also goes along with what Seth was saying is that the things I was saying about Plotinus not caring so much about the details, which I understand Marx pushback on that, but for me, that's not a bad thing.

So it may have sounded like a criticism, but that's what I like about Plotinus, because I think he's looking at things that are a little bit more important. I do think, to Mark's point, that he is trying to kind of create a ladder up to this higher level of thought. And he's definitely taking inspiration from this idea of Plato that you can get out of the cave, that your intellect can lead you up. But I think he also can give you something that's close, something that is outlining something that he thinks is real and valuable, but it's not going to be that pure thing.

You know, he can talk about the One, but you're not really going to understand and apprehend the One. We're in a debased reality. We're not pure intellect. We are kind of in this corruptible mortal world. And because of that, we can get close to apprehending some of these things, but we can't really get all the way there. And I think Plotinus understands that, or at least it's something that he accepts as a baseline.

13:37 Dylan: You brought up the ladder, and that that section is referred to a couple times. That whole description, in fact, connects indirectly to the Symposium, as far as I'm concerned, and the ladder of love and the discussion of finding the source of all the connections. Even though we're living in a debased world of our senses, it's still the case that we can get the first pull, the first inspiration, the first rung of the ladder through beauty of physical form. Which is straight out of the Symposium.

14:07 Christian: Yeah, No, I think that's a real connection. Something that's always stood out for me in Plato that I think you really find highlighted in Plotinus is. I mean, we always talk about problem of evil. But I think in a lot of ways, Plato and Plotinus are talking about the problem of good, meaning that it's really hard to explain how there can be real good in the world. It's easy to explain evil as a corruption of things that are better. But when we see something that's really, truly, transcendently beautiful, or when somebody truly, truly does a really good and selfless act, or when somebody is really, truly loving. It's hard to explain where something like that can come from, because it does seem like it's something that transcends or is higher than the ordinary world that we interact with on a day to day basis.

14:50 Mark: I want to retract my use of the term intuition for how we get to the One, because I was searching through my notes and I don't actually see that. In fact, he says this is the first. I think maybe one of you can remember something else. I don't feel like we've read an explicitly mystical text than what we see certainly in the last half of this last essay. About the One in the first essay, as Dylan was saying, is sort of just regurgitating the symposium in a lot of ways about beauty, that that's a way to climb the ladder. But we don't get to climb all the way just by moving our eyes from the material to the intelligible.

Like, that's great. But again, the One is beyond even the intelligible. It is beyond ideation. We're going to have the same metaphysical problem. In fact, if it truly is just singular and we're saying it is everything, how could that even coexist with a plurality? Even the statement of the very metaphysical point is sort of beyond our understanding. We can't understand how there could be unity, yet also multiplicity. You know, he has this very interesting story about how the One sort of serves like a form, like every other thing that is an individual, it is a unity.

It's getting that unity from the form of oneness. But it also has to be beyond any sort of form. It serves as a template for other things, but it doesn't seek toward anything. And the way that we realize this, because the One is everything, is we have to close our eyes, shut out anything that would distract and see the inner core of ourselves that we are revolving around. We don't see the One, but we are one with it.

16:27 Wes: Uses that term, yes, to grab or to have an experience, not say, grasp, because that's not the right word. We can't have knowledge of the One, we can only be unified with it. In some sense. It's an experience involving unity with the One, which is also a return, in a way, to the unity of the Self. He uses this metaphor of concentric circles where the center of our circle coincides with the center of the One. And that coincidence in A way that identification, that merger, is the kind of experience that gives us access to the One, as opposed to discursive knowledge, which would involve representation and all the rest of that baggage. Who needs that when you can just merge right in?

17:15 Dylan: The physical analogy is like a resonance in that you have some kind of motion that then causes an adjacent thing to partake of the same motion. A tuning fork. You hit a tuning fork and you put it on a string. If it's the right string, the string will start vibrating. It doesn't even have to be touching it. It can be touching it through the air, so it's then vibrating at the same frequency.

17:39 Wes: I think that's your metaphor.

17:41 Dylan: It's my metaphor.

17:42 Mark: Plotinus loves metaphors, though.

17:44 Wes: It's a good metaphor, but I just.

17:46 Seth: No, it's a great metaphor. And Plotinus is kind of a douchebag for calling Empedocles too poetic, because he certainly is poetic himself. But the introduction and the. I guess it was the translator, the editor of the version we read makes clear that there's very strong direct line from Pythagoras to Plotinus and that the notion of harmony, mystical transcendence, harmony of spheres, harmony of music, all that stuff is very much in line with the Pythagorean strains of thought and influences that are clearly here. And in fact, if you're trying to talk to somebody about what kind of semi transcendent or apophatic kind of experience would be, and you were trying to use a metaphor, you get a lot better results using music as a metaphor than a lot of other things.

18:39 Wes: I do want to say, though, he does have a pretty detailed psychology to all of this. So we're getting these high floating metaphors, but we are getting ideas about what would happen psychologically or what the therapeutic method, let's call it a therapeutic method, would be for getting to the One. So, for instance, in section eight of that fourth essay that we read for today, he'll suggest that we can get to the One by eliminating inner difference within ourselves. The One doesn't contain any difference, so we are present to it when we no longer contain any difference, which means in a way just emptying ourselves of multiplicity, including multiplicity of thought, which you can kind of imagine.

Even though Plotinus doesn't talk about meditation, you could think of that as something that's reachable through some practice like meditation. And that's when this concentric circles metaphor comes into greater effect because he gives us a further metaphor of kind of dancing around. Well, first of all, we move around this center that we're always aspiring to. Even though we've fallen into the realm of the material, we're always aspiring to this center of the One. And it remains a center whether we look or not. But when we do look, we have this sense of completion and dance around it.

And I want to also say it is our formative principle. So it's important to remember that when we do make this return to the One, we are returning, in a sense, to our foundation as beings. It's transcendental in the sense of transcending, even being. So it's a being, transcending, formative principle that we're reuniting with.

20:22 Mark: Return to the source. It's so cool that we just did Zhuangzi. That's like, you know, the independent studies have come up with the same ideas.

20:29 Christian: I really resonate with your talking about the concentric circles. The metaphor I always use, and I'm sure it's not original, but I can't tell you the source of it. But the metaphor I always use for the Neoplatonic worldview is that you have the One kind of at the center of, like, a solar system. It's really like the sun, you know, which of course, is also the metaphor that Plato uses in the cave. But then you can imagine kind of the forms orbiting closely around the One. And then other ideas are orbiting a little further. And then our world is somewhere pretty distant.

But again, we can kind of translate ourselves closer to the center through some of the methods that Wes was talking about. And again, like in the cave, the One is important because it's the source of all light, metaphorically, as in terms of all goodness, all truth, all love, anything. And anytime that we are loving or truthful or whatever it is, we're reflecting that source. So in some ways, we can talk about what we were talking about before kind of traveling back to the Source. And I think that is one way Plotinus looks at it. But we can also look at it as we're reflecting the Source, that we're channeling it into the world that we live in.

21:36 Mark: So this is where the whole metaphysical question of how this Source works, how it creates anything, ultimately, I don't think it makes any sense. But the One can't have blueprints in it. It can't have the forms in it, because it's the One. It doesn't have parts, it doesn't have ideas. It doesn't change. It just emits like rays from this everlasting source to the intelligence and the Intelligence is what actually has the forms in it. You know, if you were like, what does Plato mean by the forms? What are these things? Is there a form for mud? Plotinus actually answers all these questions that it's sort of like there's a big mind.

So what you might have thought was the mind of God. Well, the one can't have thoughts, the one can't reflect on anything but the intelligence. The vestibule to the one can. The creation would have to flow through the intelligence. It's actually the intelligence that is in turn controlling the soul, capital S, which is the world soul, which that in turn is overseeing the individual souls of things.

22:40 Wes: He's just taken this hodgepodge of Platonic ideas from the Timaeus, the world soul and then individual human souls, the Phaedrus. And he's put it together into a kind of system. It's really not there in this form in Plato. And the other thing he's done is he's kind of grafted on Aristotelian ideas. So the intelligence in some ways looks a little bit like the Unmoved mover. Remember Aristotle's complaint? How are all these static forms going to cause anything in the world? There is a little bit of dynamism in this world of the intelligence, including it sounds like thought as an activity.

I think that's why he wants to call it the intelligence, this realm of the forms. Forms are actually in a way self grasping, self thinking entities on analogy to Aristotle's thought thinking itself in the Unmoved Mover. He just doesn't think the ultimate principle is going to be where Aristotle thinks it is in the Unmoved Mover. It's got to be something beyond that.

23:35 Christian: What Mark's pointing to that. I think that's the biggest challenge to the Neoplatonic worldview. And it's really problem of evil in another form. Because if the One is absolutely good and perfect and self sufficient, it's really hard to explain how anything else exists at all. Even the forms themselves are kind of a lesser copy of the One. And it really is hard in that worldview to explain, like why would there be lesser copies? And then definitely why would there be a world where bad things happen and things like that?

24:03 Wes: Yeah, he'll say at a certain point the One is supposed to not need anything. And this is something of course that shows up in theological tradition again and again afterwards and descriptions of a Christian God. But in the end he's going to say something like the One can't really fulfill its potentiality Unless it unfolds its gifts into a corporeal world, which, by the way, also has a lot of parallels in Christian theology. There's some sense in which creation is a necessary part of the being of the One. It can't just hang out on its own forever, even though it's perfect and it doesn't need anything beyond itself. So it's paradox.

24:44 Mark: There couldn't be a moment where creation started because it has as its nature that it's always already creating.

24:49 Seth: I think what Wes said is interesting and challenging. There are other places where we see this type of situation where you say creation is a necessary part of its constitution or whatever. And already in just this short track from Plotinus, that language I think he would balk at. And it's more of what you get in book four, which talks about the concept of circularity and return. So because beings can only be fulfilled, I don't know if it's all beings, but human beings, beings with a soul can only be fulfilled in a union or communion with the One, which is a return, because just like your soul got stuck in your body when you were born, and it's going to get plucked out and return to capital T, capital S soul when you die.

It's like this movement, like the One had a big bang, right? And it's a movement of everything, sort of back towards the One. The challenge then is how is it a simple unity without multiplicity? And that's why to me, the whole thing comes down to how do you have multiplicity in a unity?

25:56 Wes: He will call it a cause. Right. Which, you know, it sounds like we could use the same trick that Aristotle used, which is to say he could be an unmoved mover. Although Plotinus doesn't think the unmoved mover of Aristotle is actually simple. Because even if thought is just thinking itself, he still thinks there's a duality there. And he doesn't like that.

26:15 Seth: No, you're absolutely right.

26:16 Wes: There's a. You know, as a final cause, potentially as the good, which I think he is, identifying the One with, it could magnetically induce multiplicity around it, even though as a magnetic pole, it's simple. But then you might want to say, well, if it's causal, even if it's final causality, if it's magnetic, let's say, in some way, if it's producing desire in us, doesn't that imply complexity? That's problematic, but it's less paradoxical than the fact that the One is formless and indeterminate, something that Aristotle Hated that idea. There's nothing can be formless and indeterminate, and yet it is the cause of form and determinacy.

It's not a being, but it's the cause of being. All that. What are you talking about? How do I draw this causal line between a non entity and entity? So I still think it's ontologically fascinating. Do we need a principle of unity that transcends being? Just going back to this whole idea of the paradox of the One not needing the world and yet unfolding into it. I think that's at the end of the third book that we read the third essay, where he basically says it must unfold into souls, into visible effects, it must unfold its powers, and that everything in the world participates it in the sense that it participates in the good.

I think it's worth emphasizing this relationship between the kind of identity between the good and the one where for Aristotle, the good turned into the unmoved mover. For Plotinus, it turns into the one.

27:39 Christian: Wes, you had said something a couple minutes ago that I wanted to give just a little bit of pushback on, which is you had talked about Plotinus putting together a hodgepodge of Plato's ideas and systems. And I can definitely understand why it looks like that, and maybe there's an argument for it, but I think what we really have to understand is from the Neoplatonic point of view, or from Plotinus point of view, Plato is always talking about the same thing. He's just choosing different metaphors to talk about it with. And sometimes the things he's talking about sound very different, but it's because he has very different audiences that he's talking to.

So one day Plato's talking to a group of politicians, so he talks about the Republic. Another day he's talking to a group of artists, so he's talking about the stuff in the Symposium. Another day he's talking to a lawyer, so he's talking about legal systems and so forth. But really, ultimately, I think from the Neoplatonic point of view, Plato's really always telling the same story over and over again. It's just he's choosing different metaphors each time based on his audience. So for Plotinus, I don't think he feels like he's putting together a hodgepodge of ideas.

He's just borrowing from different metaphors, but illuminating the same thing.

28:43 Wes: You know, I meant to say he's taking different ideas and systematizing them. And then the question is, to what extent is that system already there? In Plato. And maybe, as you're suggesting, in more or less implicit form, so that Plotinus is just exposing the system that's already there. I don't know the answer to that question, but I can say that his presentation of it, he's making connections between different parts of Plato that I hadn't seen there in Plato.

29:07 Dylan: Plotinus certainly thinks that he's doing that connecting the dots, and would consider himself completely faithful to Plato to the extent that involves an interpretation of Plato. And whether he's correct on that, that's a different question. It seems like Plotinus would also deny that he's saying anything different than Plato, even if calling him a Neoplatonist, you might say, well, he must be adding some things to it or not.

29:32 Wes: And he is, of course, responding to other traditions that come out of Plato, including Aristotle and the Stoics. And he's critical of them, and he's critical of some of their interpretations of Plato and other expositors of Plato. So he is involved in pushing back on people who have given other interpretations or other elaborations.

29:52 Mark: Even in Aristotle's metaphysics. As we read, Aristotle's characterization of Plato included all this stuff that was sort of part of the oral teaching. That was not just what we're getting out of the dialogues. And it seemed like it was taken even at the time, as a much more coherent whole. I know I would be much less excited about having read a dozen plus Plato dialogues for this podcast if they were all just saying the same thing with different metaphors. That seems as such an impoverished way of taking in this wonderful thinker.

30:20 Christian: Yeah, that's what kind of defines if you're a Neoplatonist or not. If you are a Neoplatonist, then it makes sense to you that that's the way things are. And it makes sense to you that that's the way you take Plato. And then you do think that Plotinus is talking about what Plato was talking about. But if you reject that, then I think you're just not a Neoplatonist. You're somebody who takes a different point of view on Plato, so it will

30:42 Dylan: be where Aristotle might be pushing back on it. And the kind of thing that when I read Plotinus and when I read Plato, I have to find myself wondering about how much advice you should take with a grain of salt or not is the question of the necessity of fallenness and perfection that we are a reflection of. So in Plato, that comes in from the idea you have forms, because you have to have forms as the source for all variation, the fact that you have form is the source for which everything, in its multiplicity and its deviation. You don't necessarily get straight from that the notion of corruption, and Aristotle makes generation and corruption, that would be the translation of it, or the notion of variation amongst a form as being just another way of being, and sort of solves the unifying principle for organic beings through potentiality rather than through form.

So I guess it's just sort of there in Plotinus, this notion that somehow metaphysically, we have to have a notion of perfection out of which we generate everything else. And guess the unifying story is that everything else, in being less than perfect, now we get down to everything else is fallen from it. Everything else is a corrupt version. In some ways, all sense, the entire sense world, is debased and evil. To me, it's worth unfolding a little bit about both what the impetus or what I guess the metaphysical need for that is.

32:17 Wes: Should we get into the descent of the soul, the third one, that maybe

32:21 Dylan: that's the place for it.

32:22 Mark: Yeah, to start on that, you had referred to that, Wes, in the context of why does the One become many? And I don't think that Descent of the Soul article actually gets also all the way up to the One. It's just that at the level of the forms of the abstract, the soul itself, whether you're talking about the individual souls or the world soul, are both sort of intermediate entities. They could persist, just hang out in the world of the forms. So this is part of a different way of asking why is there evil? Right. Is why would they deign to become embodied?

When he just says, following what he reads in Plato, that being embodied is just so evil, there's no upside to it, seemingly is. Why would you do it? And I think, Wes, that's what you had said before, is that. Well, it's almost like reverse Hegel. For Hegel's system, you don't become actualized until a thing knows itself, until it ascends to absolute knowledge. Here, for something to know itself, it has to go down from mere potentiality and actualize itself as a thing in the material world, as grubby as that is.

33:24 Wes: Yes, there are places where he makes the One sound like something like Aristotelian potentiality and calls it dynamic, which I assume is Dunamis. But in any case, the way he starts out this essay. So he asked the question, why did the soul descend into the body? And then he kind of snipes at Heraclitus and Empedocles and then he says something interesting, which is that Plato was kind of conflicted on the issue. Plato does hold the body in low esteem and says, the soul is enchained in the body and the body is like a prison. And the Phaedrus does tell us.

He gives us a story about why the soul loses its wings and comes down into bodies, including because people have been judged negatively for the way they've lived in past lives, I guess. But then he pivots to the Timaeus and he says, but the Timaeus says in a way. Well, I think it's. The way it's put is you don't complete things until you put the realm of the intelligible into the realm of sense.

34:23 Mark: It's like the intelligible is gifting form to matter.

34:26 Dylan: The question that I have in this kind of articulation is it doesn't seem to involve actual cause, but seems to involve. Well, if I start from the fact that there's a perfect world out of which this corrupt world, I guess the insight is that, well, it must be a corrupt, evil world, because it's obvious. And so then we're going to talk about how it must be a reflection from something perfect. And now we're going to come up with some kind of story for the Descent of the Soul that tries to articulate, well, why on earth would this happen? And it must be because it's somehow part of its actualization. That process needs to be an unfolding of the One, ultimately is an unfolding of the One. But it strikes me as an interesting point of view. To start with, maybe it's just variation that then turns into the moral judgment of. Variation is equal to evil because we don't have unity or eternality.

35:18 Wes: Are you asking the question of why materiality and the bodily are considered evil?

35:23 Dylan: Well, that would be one version of the question.

35:24 Wes: I think the basic idea is, right, our physicality, our desires, lead us to do a lot of evil things beyond the fact that our embodiment makes us susceptible to all sorts of ailments, including, finally, death. There's the problem of desire.

35:40 Dylan: And we're basically taking the notion of pain as being the indicator.

35:45 Wes: It's not just the element of pain. It just makes it possible, right, for people to be spiritually deformed of poor character in a way that, for instance, if you compare us to animals, for the most part, animals aren't even capable of having bad character. You can't even say that, asshole. My cat, you know, my selfish cat. My cat is Very selfish, but I could never call her an asshole. She's not of poor character. She's exactly as a cat should be. But human beings can be not as they should be. And that seems to have something to do with the conflict between this spiritual or rational part, if you want to call it that, and the physical.

36:23 Christian: Maybe this is the destination, not the question. But in the Platonic worldview, the one where the ideal of good, if you're talking about actual Plato, that's the standard for everything that's most good and anything that deviates from that is less good. So the further you get away from it, the less good it is. So it's built into the system basically, that you have a top point and everything else is below that. Everything else is a deficiency. We were talking a little bit about Aristotle. I think that's really the difference is that famous picture, of course, of Plato pointing up and Aristotle pointing down.

And for Aristotle, I think there's much more of a sense of we can reach ideals in the physical world. And that the physical world isn't necessarily bad. It's just some things are not reaching their potential and other things are. For Plotinus, and if you accept his read of Plato, the material world is corrupt, basically, because it's not the one. That's how we know it's corrupt.

37:12 Wes: I think before we break, I want to re emphasize that this section one of the Descent of the Soul suggests that Plato is ambivalent. On the one hand, he has a low opinion of the body. But the very last paragraph is worth reading because it invokes the Timaeus. Yet treating of the sense world and the Timaeus, he praises it and calls it a blessed God and contends the soul was given it by the goodness of the demiurge, so that the sum of things might be possessed of intelligence, which without the soul it could not be. The soul of each of us is dispatched hither for the same reason.

If the realm of sense is to be complete, it is necessary that it contain as many kinds of living beings as does the intelligible realm, which sounds like a concept of plenitude is at work, or the great chain of being. That's a little bit different from an argument that will come up later on in this book, which is more about not what the realm of sense needs, but what the one is disposed to do, which is to overflow and share its gifts.

38:11 Mark: That seems like a good place to wrap up part one. Let us proceed more on this. Obviously we have a lot more to say about the introduction of evil. Why should we even have matter at all, let alone why should the soul descend into it? If everything comes out of the one, how does that work? Please come back. If you're a partially examined life supporter, you can probably get that right now. Part 2 at partiallyexaminedlife.com support. If not, just see you next week. Bye bye, everybody.