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

0:07 Mark: Hey, it's episode 343, part two. Continuing on Plotinus. We've been discussing the third essay in the essential Plotinus, the Descent of the Soul. I'm sure we'll get back to number four, the good or the one. Also, number one is beauty and two is the intelligence, ideas and being. Interestingly, when I talked to you beforehand, Seth, you were saying that number three, this descent of the soul was sort of a throwaway, but Wes seems to see it as the central thing, at least worth going to in detail.

0:36 Wes: I see the fourth essay as the central thing, but Dylan was talking about the body stuff.

0:42 Mark: We didn't give the punchline to the descent one, which is section four, page 67. He's talking about individual souls want to return to the intelligible realm. But also they have a power over the realm of sense. Like sunshine does not deny its rays to what is below. So this is like what we were saying about the Timaeus, Plato and the Timaeus is describing. It's the gift. We're making the whole world minded by having souls go down into everything, not even just people. These souls are like kings who live with the High King and do not come down from the palace. Here's the quote. But there comes the point at which they come down from this state, cosmic in its dimensions, to one of individuality. They wish to be independent. They are tired, you might say, of living with someone else. Each steps down into his own individuality.

1:27 Wes: I love that line. They get tired of living with someone else. That's actually one of the best explanations that he gives of why the souls descend. Desire for individuality and independence.

1:38 Seth: I don't understand why it's even necessary to explain. I mean, you could just say like, look, this is what happens. Why it happens is something to do with the One.

1:48 Mark: He does just say later. It's just. It's a law of nature.

1:50 Seth: Yeah, but ultimately you look at the soul. The soul is not the one. That means it has a multiplicity. It's a unity and a multiplicity. Well, what are those multiplicities going to do? What are those little souls or soul chunks or individuals or whatever they're Hanging around like they're in the in soul or they're. There has to be some motion. Just by virtue of the fact that there's motion in the universe, by virtue of the one and the soul is a multiplicity. Something has to happen.

2:22 Wes: I think we could re ask this question to say, well, why are there living things? They are very difficult to explain emergent phenomena and the universe has to be fine tuned. I don't, you know, we can do an episode on the fine tuning argument eventually, but the universe has to be very fine tuned even to exist in, in its current form. But life is extremely counterintuitive. There's all sorts of reasons. You have their bundles of negative entropy. In a universe that is entropic, for instance. It's not a question that makes sense to us.

2:54 Christian: Why?

2:55 Wes: Because we just say what people like Plotinus hated, which is it's all by chance. It's all just, you know, here's some matter here, the laws of the universe and things happened at some point. There was a RNA world and then a self replicating molecule happened and then it just took off from there. So we don't answer this same question. We don't say why would we have that? We're not thinking about it theologically usually. And that's why I think it's kind of a discordant question for us.

3:23 Christian: You know, Wes, when we were finishing up part one, you were kind of talking about a paradox that Plotinus had talked about, which is that in Plato it seems like at some points the descent into the material world is a degradation of lowering. In some ways it's kind of an elevation. And I think one way of looking at that paradox is it just depends on what perspective you're looking from. Like if you're looking from the perspective of the one, anything that kind of travels away from that is going to be automatically a lowering. But if you're looking from the perspective of here we are on this degraded plane of existence, then the fact that souls are coming down and intelligence is coming down, that's the elevation for us, you know, and it's a way to travel upwards.

I think that's one way of looking at the perspective. If you're starting from the perspective of perfection, anything that gets away from that is going to be lowering. But if you're starting from this perspective of we're in this imperfect world, then anything that kind of leads us back towards that more perfect world, that's a step up. And I think that's maybe one way of resolving the paradox that Plotinus is outlining in Plato.

4:27 Wes: All right, so we have a few different explanations. One of them is to complete the realm of sense. One of them involves individuality and independence. Those are soul motives. And this idea of completing the world of sense points to another way to formulate this question, which is not why there are living things, but why is there anything concrete? If the world is partly abstraction, if the world is partly rational, why do we need concreteness at all? Why does God need to create the world? But if we want to finish off this section, section five, he talks about dissent as kind of a bad decision, but also necessary that people make.

And then it's in six that he talks about this seemingly from the perspective of the One, not from the perspective of the souls who are making the scent. I don't know if. Yeah, I've already kind of summarized Section 6 as spilling over. I don't know if anyone else wants

5:20 Dylan: to say anything about it. Well, I think Spilling over is right. I mean, the last paragraph on page 68. The excellence and the power and the goodness of the intelligible realms revealed in what is most excellent in the realm of sense. For the realms are linked together from the one self existent, the Other eternally drawn to its existence by participation, and to the extent it reproduces the intelligible by imitation.

5:47 Wes: So what I was thinking of is. He tells us what the One must not do. He starts out in six. It's not differentiated. There wouldn't be any beings if it remained shut up in itself. It sounds like potentiality. It sounds like some of what I've heard in physics about something about fields or quantum flux or something. I don't know, something that precedes being. So it would be sad if there was nothing, if the One didn't do its thing and nothing existed. So then he says, every nature must produce its next so unfold seed, like from indivisible principle into a visible effect.

So he's suggesting that what the One does is kind of its nature. It's like a growing. It's something blooming out of the seed. It must not stay this power, and as though jealous, limit its effects. It must proceed continuously until all things to the very last have within the limits of possibility come forth. All is the result of this immense power giving its gifts to the universe, unable to let any part remain without its share. This is also reminiscent of Hegel, of course, with the organic metaphor.

6:54 Dylan: This is a consequence of the notion of perfection, right? So the One has a pure potentiality. If it's going to Be perfect, has to actualize that potentiality, has to realize that potentiality completely. And so that would be the account for why it has to do that. Not just that it does so that, you know, a seed. The analogy would be a seed as potential. For the tree has all that potential inside it. But in not realizing that potential, it has failed in its perfection. And the one in this account that includes the notion of perfection is going to include the full, complete whole realization of all potential.

7:41 Christian: Yeah, I can definitely see that in this passage. Although to me that feels more Aristotelian than it does Platonic. Another way of looking at this, to me is it. It's almost kind of analogous to the Big Bang. We can't necessarily explain why the Big Bang happened. We just know that something must have happened because we're here and there's a universe here. We know there's a universe. We know that the multiplicity of things exists. So things had to leave the One. If we accept that everything started in this kind of metaphysical singularity.

8:10 Dylan: But that doesn't explain why the One would have to. Because the One isn't the universe. And being a cause, it doesn't tell you what the account is. And this section seems to. I mean, maybe there's a more satisfactory Platonic version of what I just described. Though some of the stuff I read indicated that Plotinus was also effectively taking Aristotle as just another Platonist. And so it's sort of just folding that in there. But that would account for why the One would do anything is because. Not that it has to in the sense of necessity, is that in being the One, it has to be fully realized?

8:52 Christian: No, I think that's a good insight. Definitely. Hearing you go through it made me look at this passage in a different way. And I think you're right that maybe this is Plotinus interpretation of Aristotle. As a Platonist. I definitely don't think it's something that he would have come up with if he hadn't also been exposed to Aristotle. I mean, there's no way to know that. But that's my feeling.

9:13 Seth: I struggle with part of this. The idea that in order for the One to be the One, it must be fully actualized. It implies a reliance that goes against the notion of self sufficiency that he speaks about later. But I was also confused about just the concept of potentiality in the sensible world or the intelligible realm versus him saying numerous times that all of the actualities are contained essentially within the intelligence that all the actualities are there and they're essentially putting their act, that actuality, into the sensible world. And yet, like you said Wes earlier, and like you just mentioned, Dylan, there's a potentiality in the sensible world, I guess, for those actualities to be thwarted insofar as ultimately the goal is a return to the same, a return home.

If the sensible being develops in such a path that they work towards that goal, then they're fulfilling themselves or fulfilling the purpose. And insofar as they either don't or are thwarted from it. There's your concept of evil or vice or whatever the case may be. But I don't know if it's worth trying to break it out. I just think the concepts of potentiality and actuality are not clearly spelled out here in a way that makes it clear how they work.

10:33 Wes: You know, it reminds me of Hegel a bit. We might say that there's kind of a logical necessity, in a way. We're asking why nothingness would make a transition into being. And one might try to spell out a kind of logical necessity for that nothingness of essence necessarily turning out to be potentiality and something like the one, because, remember, it's not a being. But I think we can't capture the question fully until we note that it's a bunch of different questions. Why produce beings at all? The intelligible realm, Platonic forms? Then the question is, why produce matter and corporality and the sensuous world, material beings?

Then the question is, why produce life and souls? And then we think of the cosmos itself, right, as a living thing with a soul, but also individual animal souls. And then the question is, well, why human beings who are kind of monstrosities, these weird combinations of the divine and the corporeal. And each question is a bit different, and the hardest one is about human beings, because I think, as several of you pointed out, that becomes the question of evil. Why produce a world in which evil is possible?

11:43 Christian: Yeah, I think that's very right. And you know, not even necessarily the things that we think of as evil, but just anything that's kind of weird and bizarre. You know, anything that doesn't have analog in a perfect realm. Why are there things that are just kind of strange? That all becomes a challenge at a certain point. Because if you're, if you're going back to like this perfect source, it's hard to figure out how we. We end up at wars or things like that.

12:07 Mark: So there's one little metaphysical quirk that I noticed, that maybe this gives a little more light to why we would need to spill out into actuality, which is the idea that. I think it's the root of Leibniz's notion of the identity of indiscernibles that he says at some point. I couldn't find the exact quote here in the intelligible world, right. In the. In the intelligence or the big soul. It's not that they're all a bunch of little identical souls and that they then become. What are they going to do?

12:36 Christian: Like.

12:36 Mark: Well, I'll go into this body and I'll go into this. In fact, if there are multiple things that are identical and. And we're not talking about the physical world, then they're not multiple at all. Then they're actually just one thing. And that's how we could become one with the One is because we get rid of all the difference. Everything that would make me different from you and you different. We clear that out of our heads, we detach ourselves from our bodies. And it's not then that we all have similar souls, similarly pure. We all have literally the same numerical. Numerically the same soul. That's pretty crazy that Phillips thought of this.

13:12 Wes: I like that interpretation, but it's not right directly in here, unless I'm missing

13:17 Dylan: that there's a little bit of that in the very beginning of the Good and the One where the One is essentially the activating form of all unity and all instances of unity. So to the extent that anything is a unity, all things are one thing.

13:34 Mark: That's hard to see how it's different than just participation in the. In any form. Like insofar as things are cold, then they're all one insofar that they're. I mean, that. That is true. I noticed here how he's making the Aristotelian point for something to be an entity at all is for it to be unity. That he's taking the Plotinus is taking that straight from Aristotle's metaphysics here.

13:54 Wes: Yeah. In order for something to be an entity at all, it has to be a unity. And then he gives us a taxonomy, he gives us a list of types of entities and they are more or less real, depending on their degree of unity. Right. So we get collective sets like flocks or choirs, artifacts like houses or ships, plant and animal bodies, even talks about health is dependent and on unity. And then the inner unity of quantitative continua. I'm not exactly sure what he means there if he's talking about geometrical figures or the kind of consistency of stuff like gold.

So we get a restatement of this Aristotelian principle about unity. Although for Aristotle, the unity is derivative of having an essence, of having substance, which is the principal conception of unity towards which everything else. Any other conceptions of unity are pros hen the derivative of that conception of unity that involves essence. But there's no recapitulation of that Aristotelian point of view in Plotinus, as far as I can tell. So things are one in Aristotle, by having a particular essence to which that particular is identical.

15:08 Dylan: Yeah. The soul imparts unity to all things, Plotinus.

15:12 Wes: They seem to be mainlining to this transcendent principle of oneness, even though it is not the one. Right. He wants to go through and he's going to tell us what's not the one, which turns out the soul is not the one, the intelligence is not the one, being is not the one,

15:27 Dylan: et cetera, et cetera.

15:29 Christian: And there is an interesting kind of difference from Plato here in that Plato definitely talks more about the ideal of good as being kind of the ultimate source. And this is entirely good or the one. But it's definitely much more kind of concerned with this concept of unity, this concept of oneness. I think somebody had mentioned Pythagoras, and I think it. There's definitely a real mathematical sense that he's going from here. It reminds me a little bit of one of the early episodes that I was going through for the book, which was the one on Heraclitus, the one with Eva, just talking about how for Heraclitus, everything had to partake in something in order to have number, in order to be numbered. And I think there's a real sense of that here, probably coming out of that same ancient Greek tradition saying, dylan,

16:17 Wes: you were talking about the soul, which maybe is another way of talking about essence. I don't know if that's the point you were making. And he does say the soul looks upon the One as a kind of template or archetype, and then bestows unity on things. So it's an intermediary. So I wonder if there's kind of an essence idea involved there.

16:37 Seth: Yeah. The soul's kind of an intermediary between one and what, exactly?

16:43 Wes: Well, the cosmos, for one thing, but also biological entities.

16:47 Seth: Right. And then the human soul is the intermediary between capital T, capital S, the soul and the sensible world.

16:56 Wes: The one big soul. We call it the One big Soul.

17:00 Seth: The one big soul. Where are we? I'm gonna.

17:03 Wes: We're still in one. This is where a lot of this soul talk is.

17:08 Mark: I'm pulled to from the second essay, section 12. He's talking about is there a form of individuals? No, there's no form of Socrates, there's a form of man. So what's individuality? Here's a quote. Individuality consists in this. The traits of all are not the same. One has a nose that is flat and another nose that is hooked. The two shapes of noses should be considered differentiations in the human species, quite as are the differentiations of the animal kingdom. Differences in complexion are to be appreciated in the same fashion, determinations as they are of seminal reason on the one hand, and of matter and environment on the other.

So the question is, where do variations come from? That it's not that there's just one soul, one form of human being. It ends up that there are even just the formation of the individual nose is because there are different forms of noses around. So this, this relation between the individual and. And the formal world is much more complicated that like even just your liver, there's a form of liver. Everything that has a correct form somehow has a link to the intelligible realm.

18:13 Dylan: Wouldn't that be true for any kind of unity that we would point to would have form a form for it,

18:19 Mark: but not Socrates individually. And Socrates is a unity.

18:23 Wes: He's using this phrase seminal reason. Right. Which sounds like a kind of Aristotelian conception of immanent form here. Right. Something like, you know, what we think of as DNA. But for Aristotle, the form that's doing its work to create the organism as it grows and then metabolically to sustain the organism. And of course. So he's exactly right. It's a combination of nature and nurture. What kind of nose you have? There's a blueprint to some extent, and it's an individual blueprint. It's not just the Platonic form out in the ether. And then there are material environmental contingencies, including metabolism, that produce different phenotypes. In the end, this is another way in which Aristotle is clearly integrated.

19:07 Mark: And I thought that the thing about complexion there was interesting, that this is the only time where we. Is he getting racist? So the idea is it could be that different skin tones are a matter of interaction with matter. I just don't know the fact that more melanin is needed to defend against the sun in one part of the world than in another part of the world. Is one of these sort of the correct form and the other one is being deformed by the circumstances? Or is it really just the case that the forms are indeterminate in a way? I Was thinking also of the Expanse, this sci fi show that's talking about the differences between people who have, who have adapted to Earth's gravity versus people who grew up in low gravity environments.

So they're much taller, they're much skinnier. Would Plotinus say, oh, the tall, skinny people those have been warped by their weird unusual environment, or would they just say, well, it's not that there's just a form for tallness and a form for squatness. It's that the form is flexible in such a way that it's actually supposed to interact with matter in ways that will give you a variety of phenotypes. And none of them is sort of the best one.

20:15 Wes: We'll never know what he thought about the Expanse. Oh, it is a good show. It is a good show and it is related to the good.

20:25 Mark: So even just shapes of noses that he talks about, is it really that there's one, the Platonic, the correct nose, and that people that have too big a nose or too small a nose, those are just somehow the interaction with the matter, these imperfections that are being introduced, or is there some legitimate reason for multiplicity? That's right. There in the form. There was a form of big nose, there's a form of little nose. Right. Just like this DNA.

20:49 Wes: Yeah, well, you know. Yeah, even Plato, right, as Aristotle was relating him to us, always had a second principle that tried to explain multiplicity. So there was always a, you know, a dual thing. I forget what. They sounded weird, but it was always this double thing, formality, and then variation.

21:08 Mark: And the variation is not just matter is getting in the way and screwing things up. Because that's the. It seems like, right, every soul, if it were perfect, would be exactly the same. But it's the fact that we're in these different bodies and you have too much of black bile. And that's why you have too much. You're too horny.

21:25 Seth: I don't think it works that way, Mark. If it was only possible for any individual to achieve perfection in the same way, then all our forms would have to be identical. Or you would have to say something like the souls have an identical form, but the sensible manifestation that they're thrown into has an infinite variation associated with it. But I'm not sure that there's at this stage of the game, anybody, even Plato and Aristotle, that were thinking in sophisticated categories like races and things like that, where, you know, they just had human being or man. And by the way, every society, including the Greeks, had a notion of what perfection looked like, so there's definitely an inclination towards that. And if you assume some kind of cultural bias on Plotinus part, I'm sure he probably thinks that as well.

22:16 Dylan: Part of it is, to me, is that Plotinus is. Even though there's these different levels and different realms and a degradation that you go on, there's always a constant connection. So it is still through sense. Even though sense is ultimately the source of the corruptible, it's also going to be a pathway towards the divine. It doesn't seem possible that it's going to be that any variation at all is going to be just different kinds of corruption. It's going to have to be some pathways to it. And it seems like something like what Mark was talking about you would ultimately be pointing to. There would be manifestations in the sensible realm that we're closer to are more powerful for getting you towards communion with the One. They would move you on the ladder. And other things are less so.

23:10 Christian: I'm reminded a little bit of Plato. The moment in the Symposium, he has the young student. I'm blanking on his name right now, but the one who ended up living a very dissolute life, but he crashes the party. Alcibiades, he's a general. Yes, that's right. And he comes in and there's this little passage where he's talking about Socrates and he's talking about how ugly Socrates physical form is and how beautiful his soul is and. Yeah, famously ugly. And I think if we kind of take that as shedding some light, I think probably the physical manifestations and differences probably are not as important for either a Plato or a Plotinus as, like, what's going on at the mental, at the soul level.

It's not significant that Socrates is ugly, or in some ways it's almost a good thing because it forces you to kind of look past his body. If he had this beautiful, perfect body, you might get kind of hung up on that and you wouldn't see the soul.

24:05 Mark: But the soul provides form to the matter, right? So, I mean, if that were literally, if that was all there was to it, then a beautiful soul would make a beautiful body. Clearly, there are multiple forms and things going on. The fact that a snub nose can be passed down through the generations means that there is a form for the snub nose, even if you think the snub nose is ugly. I'm just trying to get at what the relation is between forms and individual things are.

24:34 Seth: Is this any different, though, than the same problem in Plato when You start talking about forms. It's a question of, okay, well, is there a form for everything? Is there a form? Where is the cutoff point? And also you get into the question of natural kinds of. Because you have a tendency to associate forms with so called natural kinds. I don't know that Plotinus feels like he has to answer that question because this concept's generally accepted out of that Platonic tradition.

25:01 Mark: But he does answer it like, is there an idea of mud in the intelligible world? This is section 14 of number two. No. Such repulsive things point not to the intelligence, but to the soul, which, drawing upon the intelligence, takes from matter certain other things.

25:18 Seth: That clears it up.

25:19 Wes: So he gives the example of putrefaction, which is a case in which something has lost its form, its soul, but also it's losing its formal principle.

25:30 Mark: Right.

25:30 Wes: And we learned in the On Beauty essay that beauty has something to do with formality, with unity, with an organizing principle that's keeping everything together. And it's despite its multiplicity.

25:42 Mark: So the snub nose is not ugly in itself. It's that it doesn't fit on your face. It's because the overall, the way that the form is interacting with the matter

25:50 Seth: is right, because it's asymmetric.

25:54 Mark: Yes.

25:55 Seth: Literally, he's symmetry. Beauty is in symmetry.

25:58 Mark: That's at least one of the principles. He says, well, how could an individual color, if it was all about symmetry? How so? Just this, the form matter distinction that we've gone to in various aesthetics episodes, he's doesn't seem to be aware of, but it's trying to figure out, like, yes, how could there be a beautiful character? How could there be a beautiful face? How could one thing, beauty, apply to all these diverse things?

26:20 Wes: Yeah, it's a question for Platonism, but it's not really something he answers in our reading in any detail, didn't he?

26:28 Mark: Isn't that in number one? I don't know.

26:31 Wes: Well, I think we're in danger of not actually getting to the one. This chapter on the One.

26:37 Mark: Okay, all right, sorry.

26:39 Christian: Go back to where you were before.

26:40 Mark: I derailed the whole thing.

26:42 Wes: Section two. He's going to tell us that the One is not being, and he's going to give us some different arguments for that. So one of them is that, right. Each being is a multiplicity, and the one cannot be a multiplicity. So man, for instance, is rational, animal. And those things are held together by unity. And the one participation in the One in some sense helps explain that. But the principle itself cannot Be multiple in any way, cannot be composite. He tells us the intelligence can't be the one because there's something inherently. There's an inherent duality to anything intelligible because it's a thought.

Right. It's the duality of thought. Which is an interesting argument because Platonic form. I don't know that Plato thought of forms in this way. I think of Plotinus as amending the Platonic theory of forms with the thought thinking itself principle from Aristotle. So that forms in a way are thinking themselves and therefore have an inherent duality.

27:41 Dylan: Yes, that sounds right.

27:43 Wes: That's at the end of section two.

27:45 Dylan: Yeah. Duality is implied if the intelligence is both thinker and thought.

27:49 Mark: And if the intelligence contemplates some object other than itself, then certainly there exists something superior to the intelligence. I wasn't sure why that would be the case. Why the intelligence couldn't just contemplate shady things that are not as good as the intelligence.

28:04 Wes: It's inferior in the sense that it depends on it. Right. So the intelligence as a kind of entity with entities in it should be in a sense self sufficient, except insofar as it's dependent on the one. We don't want to make it dependent on thinking this or that. In the same way that Aristotle didn't want to make the unmoved mover dependent on some external object because it then it wouldn't be complete and unto itself.

28:28 Mark: Yeah, I was trying to figure out if he was disagreeing with the Daoists who point at the interpenetration of all things.

28:35 Christian: Right.

28:36 Mark: The for one thing to exist, it's sort of. Maybe this is for miracles as well.

28:39 Seth: Right.

28:39 Mark: Then it has to exist in tension in contrast to other things, in which case there is no one, there is no overall thing. Or was the daoist saying, oh, actually there is this overall, the dao or whatever that is, the formless, that is bigger than all this, the being. You might have thought that being is all there is and the biggest being. But no, just for something to be being, it means it can't be solitary, it can't be actually divine. It has to have something else sort of on its level. It has to have another being to be in contrast with.

29:09 Christian: Did you guys ever do a episode on the Perennial Philosophy?

29:13 Mark: Not per se, no.

29:15 Christian: Perennial philosophy, That's Aldous Huxley. He had done kind of a survey of world religions, world philosophies, and it's actually. It's a very Neoplatonist kind of concept. His perspective, his idea was that all These different traditions are really talking about the same thing. They're just talking about in different words, different language. I think it goes back to at least what I see as the Neoplatonist idea of, like, Plato's talking about all these different things, but he's just talking about them in different ways. I know you hated that, Mark, but it's this kind of idea that for somebody like Aldous Huxley, he's going to say that, yes, the Taoist is talking about the same thing as Plotinus, and Plotinus is talking about the same thing as Plato, and Plato's talking about the same thing as the Buddhist.

That there's a lot of differences, but the differences are superficial. And what they're really talking about at its root is this kind of oneness, this idea that there is something deeper that's unified, that's a source that everything goes back to. So that would be one way of looking at it and saying that, yes, when we talk about the Dao, what we're talking about, I think it's very early in the Dao De Ching. There's. The way that can be spoken about is not the actual way. In some sense, that might be the same idea that the One that can be contemplated is not the One.

30:29 Wes: Well, I think that's a good segue into the experience of the One. This rapturous experience that comes up, I think, in Section four is where we get our first taste of it. The One is not knowable because knowing involves loss of unity. Discursive reasoning implies multiplicity. We can get an experience of it through a presence that transcends knowledge. Then he describes this really wonderful, ineffable, rapturous vision that's beyond discourse, where we're basically in a harmonious state. And we've talked about this a little bit, but it recapitulates the moment where we originated from the One.

I think this is on page 79. But he says the One is present in everything, but it can be experienced only by those who are prepared to enter into harmony in it and become like it. And maybe this is what Dylan was thinking of bringing up harmony earlier. And it does that the harmony is achieved. And here's the quotation. By virtue of that inner power in us similar to and stemming from the One, when it is in the state in which it was when it originated from the One. So I take it to be that we're almost going back to a kind of moment of birth, our origination from the One.

That's the state that we are experiencing. We Kind of become unified with our own formative forces. It's like something merging backwards into its cause. That is the experience.

31:55 Seth: I think you're spot on in your description. I just wouldn't used birth as an analogy or a metaphor there. At least not birth in the sense of, like, coming out of the canal, you know, like.

32:05 Wes: So that state in which it was when it originated from the One. I want to get at this idea of an origination from the One now,

32:13 Seth: when it fell from the divine or the intelligible into the sensible. But that's not the same thing as, like your physical birth.

32:22 Wes: Well, it's not unrelated to physical birth that I was.

32:25 Mark: I guess life begins at conception because you got. You got formless and then you got form.

32:30 Wes: Bam.

32:31 Mark: That's the moment in which you're born.

32:33 Wes: Not getting into that argument, but no, I was speaking metaphorically, right? So they. Not as in literal.

32:39 Seth: What are you, empedoclean?

32:42 Wes: But as what a pedo. What an impedo. Also, this is more about moments, right? This is more about causal foundations to our being that exist simultaneously with us, but which we have lost. So this concept of origination, which happens over time, is an imperfect one. But the idea is that we have our origins in the One and we return to those origins. And maybe it's not right, but I like to think of this metaphorically as re. Experiencing origination, strangely enough. So we're returning to the source, but it's not just a return to some static. Another way I think of the One is this black hole with the. Because it can't be talked about. And it's got an event horizon that we can talk about. Like the discursive event horizon.

33:30 Seth: That's a pretty good one.

33:31 Wes: Yeah, thanks. That's a better one. The point I'm trying to make is it's almost like we're returning to something dynamic in this origination. But that's it. It's vague. It's still vague, right?

33:42 Seth: I think you're absolutely right to use that word return. The idea that this process of contemplation which eventually gets you into a state of communion with you, use reason and the intelligible to get above the sensible. Then you realize, well, the intelligible is not the One and being's not the One. And you figure out the soul is not the One. And then you're like, I'm not gonna be able to grasp this thing through reason or discursive faculty. So what I need to do is just let go of everything that is not my essential soul. You let go of the body, you let go of the world, you let go of desire.

And what happens is you turn inward and you turn towards the center. That becomes kind of an anchoring point. But you're right, Wes. It's not someplace you go. It's something you circle around. There's movement. You're never actually going to get there. It's just once you discover that centralized principle, it's like you get yourself into a harmonious state of. To Dylan's earlier metaphor of resonance. And then you're going to resonate above and you're going to resonate with. Well, one thing is you're going to realize all other living beings are in.

Are the same kind of resonance. So you, you resonate with yourself. You, you resonate in a non multiplicative way with other pieces of the multiplicity of the soul. And then when you see that harmonious and you're in complete resonance with all that, then you achieve this nirvana state of harmony with the One. Now, he does say in here, totally temporary. As long as you're tied to your body, you can't just stay there all the time. Because he says, for those of us who've got there, you know, why would we ever leave? And it's like, well, because you got to eat and you have children and goats bite your shoes and things like that.

It just happens.

35:38 Wes: People are making fun of your snub nose and it's distracting.

35:40 Seth: Exactly. And precisely because of the type of experience that it is. It's not something you can describe. And then you just gotta, gotta go back to it.

35:49 Christian: I think you guys are right to focus on this because I think this is the central characteristic of any kind of mystical philosophy or tradition is this idea that there are these kind of transcendent moments and there's something that lies beyond reason, beyond argument, and that there is this kind of direct communion you can achieve with the Source. And again, like you said, a temporary experience. But I think if there is something that unites mystical traditions, I think that would be it.

36:14 Wes: Most of this book is describing this wonderful experience in which we. There's comparisons to love, right? There's this innate desire to return to our beginning. Despite the fact that we're weighed down by flesh. We aspire to this higher realm and this higher form of love which is reflected. This is section nine of Thinking about. But it's reflected in vulgar form in our world. But if we want the real thing, we want real love, we have to have this experience. God is the, is the one for me. Not just someone here on Earth.

36:51 Seth: It says part of the process of this initial introspection and contemplation is that once you've. I was just about to make a Scientology joke. I won't. But once you've let go of the sensible and you've kind of cleared your thetan.

37:08 Wes: Okay.

37:09 Seth: I couldn't help myself. It's like you recognize this is when you're still at the level of the intelligible realm, so you're still subjective, if you will, that you are so much closer, not in space, but harmoniously, to the one, that you experience this rapture and this desire for that communion that has been obscured and clouded, although reflected in certain kind of ways in the sensible realm. And it's critical because he says, even if you have the ability to do this type of harmonizing, but you don't have this desire to have essentially the form of desire in you fulfilled, because you're letting go of everything. You're letting go of desire. You're letting go of subjectivity. But in the one desire is the one is desire fulfilled in that communion that you have with it.

38:06 Wes: Yeah. So this is section 11. He write. Yeah. He describes a complete loss of desire because you've attained unity. There's no disturbance. There's no anger, no emotion, no desire, no reason, no thought. And you're not even busied with the beautiful or with virtue. This is really transcendent. You're filled with the divine, but it's the sort of divinity that can't even be described in terms of concepts like the beautiful and the virtuous.

38:33 Christian: I have a question I'd just kind of like to pose to you guys. I know there was maybe a little reluctance to do Plotinus. I know you also said you haven't done a whole lot of mystical philosophers. And I also know that Mark had told me it was tough to even find anybody who wanted to talk about Plotinus. Now that you've done it, do you find value in it? Do you find value in this kind of perspective? And also, you guys have done a lot of episodes on Plato. Did this make you think about Plato differently?

38:57 Mark: So I'll just describe. I think I'm getting hung up on the thing you said near the beginning, Chris, is that Plotinus doesn't care about the details, because I came in here based largely on section two, thinking that he was speaking sort of at the level of detail that Aristotle was talking about in the Metaphysics, whereas maybe Plato and the Timaeus is being poetical and talking about the different Structures in the demiurge, like that. The Plotinus really took this stuff seriously and that unless we could on this podcast articulate these exact chains and how the mechanics of the forms, how all this stuff worked, that we would be doing some disservice.

But the more we talk about it and the more I got into the fourth essay where it just turns entirely practical, where, you know, he has the beginning of like, why the one has to be better than even the good, because the good is an adjective, is a characteristic, is a property. And we want to say the One doesn't have any properties, it is beyond all properties. But once he's made that sort of logical point, then it's all just about the practical and how you can get in with this. And so it was just a very different kind of text than I thought. And I guess it makes me.

Whereas even going into today I was thinking, oh, four essays, this is a lot. Maybe we should have two full episodes on it now, I think. No, actually, I don't want to spend any more time on this guy. Is this how the rest of you have come down on him?

40:23 Wes: I enjoyed it a lot and I wasn't, you know, I don't remember saying I was reluctant to do Plotinus. And I remember reading it at St. John's although I don't remember anything about it from St. John's except vaguely the idea of mystical experience and uniting with the One. And all of us as 18 year olds running around joking about, oh, the one. The one.

40:44 Seth: That sounds hilarious.

40:48 Wes: Yeah. That and saying everything is most dikaios. Most. Just. It's most dikaios, man.

40:56 Seth: Did you guys read it in Greek?

40:58 Wes: No. I mean, you could optionally and probably maybe some people in some of their

41:02 Dylan: preceptorials or their language classes.

41:05 Wes: Yeah. But I, you know, I'm most interested in the metaphysics of it and this idea that you need a transcendent principle of unity that can't even be described as being. I find that fascinating. And of course, I got quite obsessed in Aristotle's metaphysics with this role of unity, which is why I wanted us to do more episodes like the one on natural kinds and contemporary science, the Ellis episode, because it's so important and I felt like it is something I hadn't sufficiently thought about the importance of unity and oneness to the concept of being.

So I found that part fascinating. As far as mysticism itself, I don't have that. I'm not religious and I'm not a mystic and I don't regularly have mystical Experiences or make it a goal to have mystical experiences. I think when I told someone I was reading Plotinus, they said, well, what do you think of mysticism? And I'm like, well, I don't know. It's not a part of my life, Right. And I don't think that by reading Plotinus it suddenly becomes part of your life. It's a really interesting account of what it means to make the ascent and have this rapturous experience.

But one needs a practice, right? And I called it therapeutic in this general sense. Right? These kind of offshoots of Aristotle and Plato, which require not just reason, not just rationality, not just thinking about things, but engaging in practices that change you psychologically, such that you can have these sorts of experiences. But it hasn't become a priority to me to have that sort of experience. The need for meaning in life I get besides from relationships, I get from philosophy and literature. And I think there might be a quasi mystical component to that.

It's hard to. If you're interested in metaphysics, there might be some of that.

42:51 Seth: In closing, I'll say I agree with Wes on what are the really interesting. This idea that being is a multiplicity and that you need something other than being. I find that really interesting. It also crystallizes. I had just never thought of philosophical problematics in terms of the one and the many, or multiplicity and unity. And there's a sense in which this particular text really brings home how that's central, not because of the system as presented, but just the way in which sometimes frames the problem and the. The approach and ties it into discursive thinking really highlights.

It's like, yeah, I mean, how do we say that shit happens? How can there be things and how does stuff work? Like, how does it actually happen? And he says, at some point we don't want to think of the one as a substance. But there's definitely kind of a substance ontology floating around in here that's causing a lot of the problems that Mark mentioned. But I thought it really. It was more enjoyable to read than I had anticipated. It was a little more challenging than I'd anticipated. I think it got me thinking about things in the right way. And I would leave you with this.

Two things, Chris. One is, no, it's not going to change the way I read Plato, because I don't have a way of reading Plato that every time we read Plato, it's a completely new thing to me. I'm not smart enough to maintain any kind of systematic approach to that guy. But I would also challenge you to think about the possibility that you could read Plotinus without thinking in terms of mysticism at all. So when I read it, I understand we're talking about a communal, transcendent. You know, I think of mysticism as being something else in this sense.

I think, you know, he's talking about the potential for a form of knowledge that's not what we think of as knowledge. It's. It's something that's lived and experienced and practiced. And just like Wes said, there's that element to this. And it's not necessarily like apophatic, which even though I used that word earlier, so I see how you could want to use it that way. But I think there's other ways to go. Like you could easily merge this with some Eastern traditions and meditative practices or ascetic self denial. I mean, there's lots of different things in here.

45:20 Dylan: I myself am very sensitive and persuaded by notions of practice and ways of incorporating activities and cultivating wonder in one's life. And in a good, healthy sense of things being amazing. That said, I find I have to sort of put two hats on when I read Plotinus. On the one hand, I can kind of enjoy and appreciate how far down that path of sort of mysticism that in the end I consider kind of wacky and self involved. But I can appreciate it for that kind of goal. It's sort of full flowering. The other part of me is its disconnectedness ultimately from the world begins to pretty quickly raise up my sort of political concerns about the way in which that disconnectedness just leads to incredibly bad decision making about how we live amongst each other as a community.

Because it leads to reasons and ways of arguing and ways of justifying things that are deeply, deeply disconnected with actual experience. And I have a hard time disconnecting it from just the very evil things that it is. Saying that we're avoiding and pointing towards the good. It ends up opening the doors for talking about evil in the practical, real political realm in such a way that actually promulgates evil in that realm because it absence the decisions that we make about the world from the world itself. So I have those kind of two hats in my head on it that there's the crazy that has something inspiring about it and it's crazy.

And there's the crazy that just is deeply disturbing and dangerous. And I don't want to have anything to do with it.

47:19 Christian: That's interesting. You know, Mark, for my closing. It's funny, when you had approached me about doing the Plotinus episode, I realized that I call myself a Neoplatonist, and I always talk about Plotinus, but I had never actually read Primary Source Plotinus. So it was interesting. I was really glad to get a chance to read him, but it was funny, kind of to your point. So I really enjoyed his stuff. I really resonated with it, and I found it very lucid. But ultimately, I could have just as easily not read it because it kind of matches with the way I see the world and kind of the things that I had heard about Plotinus matched up with it.

And it is that kind of thing. Like I said, from my perspective, it's different perspectives of the same thing. So it is kind of really saying the same thing over and over from my point of view. So in that sense, it's, you know, if I was reading something that was maybe a little more different from me, a little more challenging, I might have got a little bit more out of it. It's sort of the opposite for you guys. For me, it was almost too close to how I see the world. But I really did enjoy reading it, and I also really enjoyed being on and having a chance to talk with you guys.

It's funny. I've kind of lived with your work and your episodes over the last couple years, but it's fun to actually be a part of it. So thank you for the invitation.

48:37 Wes: Thanks for coming on.

48:38 Seth: Thanks, Chris.

48:40 Wes: Thanks.

48:41 Mark: Hey. Well, people who are a little more familiar with Plotinus than we are should tell us if there's other things that we should read, if there's other Neoplatonists we should read. If there's anything else that you'd like us to read. Next time we're going to be talking about knowledge and justification. Reading is Justified True Belief Knowledge by Edmund Gettier, Alvin Goldman's what Is Justified Belief? And Linda Zagzebski's the Inescapability of Gettier Problems. Wes and I will be recording a little more on Plotinus for Close Reads. You can sign up for the public feed for that@close readsphilosophy.com or we'll also make that available to partially examined life citizens.

If you're already signed up for that, you can reach out to us@pelartialexaminedlife.com or through Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. And please, if you enjoy the podcast, consider giving us a nice rating and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to this. Thanks again, Chris, for coming on. Thanks, everybody. Good night, everybody.

49:33 Seth: Good night.

49:34 Dylan: Good night.

49:34 Wes: Good night.

49:35 Christian: Good night.