Authors: Brian Hines
This is how Plotinus views earthly existence. Most of us are deeply engrossed in striking the best deal we can here, trying to squeeze as much happiness as possible out of the dry sponge of materiality while the wisest thing to do would be to simply stop the madness and get off the merry-go-round of action and reaction, cause and effect, incarnation and reincarnation. The best choice we could ever make, he says, is to cease making choices. In the stillness of spirit, or intellect, lies the only freedom we will ever know.
And if reason itself makes another desire, we must understand how; but if it puts a stop to the desire and stands still and this is where what is in our power is, this will not be in action, but will stand still in Intellect.
[VI-
8
-2]
Plotinus says we must understand how our reason, that calculating machine inside our heads, comes up with the never-ending stream of desires that spur us into action so those desires can be fulfilled. From where do all our passions, our urges, our dreams, our earthly yearnings arise? Most of us assume that they are seeds freshly planted by our conscious intention with the planting being guided by a mixture of rational and irrational (is love reasonable?) calculations.
However, these seeds of future actions actually are the harvest of previous incarnations. In other words, providence implants in us the desire, so to speak, for a desire. We are aware of what we long for but are blind to what produced that longing.
Providence is a sort of hypnotist that plants a suggestion in a person’s unconscious mind: “You will have a desire to go to this particular place at this particular time.” When the destined moment arrives an impulse enters his conscious awareness: “I’ve got to go there now.” And whatever providence has in store for him comes to be, and he fondly considers that he has guided his life in a certain direction.
For the universal bears heavily upon the particular, and the law
[of providence]
does not derive from outside the strength for its accomplishment, but is given to be in those themselves who are subject to it, and they bear it about with them…. It makes itself a sort of weight in them and implants a longing, a birth pang of desire to come there where the law within them as it were calls them to come.
[IV-3-13]
So what’s the wisest way to live? A person should, it seems, strive for a sort of Taoist simplicity, a naturalness in which at every moment he does the only thing to be done. If providence is guiding his course, then he can trust that it will implant a longing to meet his date with destiny. And if he is so fortunate as to have united his soul with spirit, or the One, then the unfailing intelligence behind all other intelligences will free him of the compulsion to choose.
Surely, when we ascend to this and become this alone and let the rest go, what can we say of it except that we are more than free and more than independent?
[VI-8-15]
R
IGHT NOW
I’m struggling to figure out what to write about reason. Given the subject, I’m trying to be reasonable in how I go about this. I’ve been staring out the window, scratching my chin, pondering the different ways I could start off this chapter. I’ve sorted through my collection of Plotinus quotations about reason and have made a few abortive attempts to compose some initial paragraphs, but haven’t been happy with what I’ve come up with so far.
Maybe this beginning will work. Maybe it won’t. There’s no way I can be sure. For the moment I’ve just got fragments of ideas running through my mind, lots of disconnected thoughts darting this way and that. Sometimes they meet up to form a coherent cluster of meaning; sometimes they remain isolated roguish renegades, unwilling or unable to arrange themselves into a structure that makes sense.
Reasoning is challenging, that’s for sure.
Yet many writers and certainly almost all mathematicians would agree with Plotinus and Plato that reasoning is a searching for what already exists. From this perspective, everything—all that is, all that has been, and all that could possibly be—exists all at once within the spiritual world.
Also, knowledge is a kind of longing for the absent, and like the discovery made by a seeker.
[V-3-10]
Mathematicians generally believe that mathematics isn’t so much created as discovered. That is, a mathematical truth already exists in the Platonic World of Forms and the faculty of reason within the human mind is able to manifest that truth. Few writers claim to reveal such universal verities. But this writer shares with mathematicians a feeling that the craft is more about revealing than creating.
If the revealing isn’t of reality, at least it is of what will be. This chapter will be finished in a few days. What I’m trying to do right here and right now is fit together the pieces of a puzzle that is already assembled in some future corner of the space-time continuum. I’m ignorant of what destiny is about to unfold but, says Plotinus, the ruling principle of the universe is not.
Then if it
[the ruling principle]
knows future events—and it would be absurd to say that it did not—why will it not know how they will turn out?
[IV-4-12]
Reason, as we’ve already learned, is only for those who lack intelligence. Intelligence is knowing; reason is an attempt to know. Hence, those who are reduced to reasoning are crying out to their rationality, “Please help me. I don’t understand.” To repeat an earlier quotation:
Just as in the crafts reasoning occurs when the craftsmen are in perplexity, but, when there is no difficulty, the craft dominates and does its work.
[IV-3-18]
When the soul left the spiritual world and distanced itself from the One, it embraced multiplicity. Now we have lots of thoughts about lots of things, not to mention all the thoughts about our thinking about things. Our reason is endlessly occupied in trying to reconstruct the seamless intuitive understanding of reality that we enjoyed in the spiritual world.
The soul experiences its falling away from being one and is not altogether one when it has reasoned knowledge of anything; for reasoned knowledge is a rational process, and a rational process is many.
[VI-9-4]
Reason is a tool for manipulating manyness. Rationality is the tape and glue with which we try to assemble a satisfying conceptual representation of reality. Scientists and philosophers can argue all they want about how well reason describes the world but to Plotinus this really isn’t the point. Since ultimate reality is the One, any attempt to know this final truth that involves the many is doomed to failure. How can One be realized by dividing it into two or more?
Reason thus eventually is an obstacle for a soul desiring to return to the One, since reasoning necessarily involves the manipulation of multiple thoughts. In contrast, knowledge of the spiritual world is immediate and intuitive.
This wisdom is not constructed out of theorems; it is complete, and it is a unity…. It is enough for one to posit it as holding the first place: it does not derive from anything else, nor is it in anything else.
[V-8-5]
1
So it is nonsensical to try to construct an argument that purportedly proves the existence of God. The First is the foundation of creation, the spring from which all else flows. It cannot be proven as a geometric theorem can since the supporting proof is an emanation from the One. This would be like me trying to prove that consciousness is the source of my thought by thinking, “I am conscious.” The problem is that I could also think, “I am not conscious,” just as atheists are able to find rational arguments that supposedly prove the non-existence of God.
If consciousness exists separate from my thoughts, I can never know this by thinking, regardless of the content of those thoughts. In fact, my divided thinking will prevent me from experiencing my undivided consciousness. Similarly, it isn’t possible to fathom the One so long as we are aware of anything other than the One. For then we know two or more, not one.
Simply put, a thought of a thing is not that thing.
For in general thought, if it is of the Good, is worse than it…. But being clear of thought it is purely what it is, not hindered by the presence of thought from being pure and one.
[VI-7-40]
Here Plotinus illustrates the absurdity of ascribing thinking to the One. If there truly is an ultimate reality that we call the Good (or One), then a thought of the Good cannot be equal to the Good itself. This would be like me thinking “I’m Brian,” and having that thought be more me than I am. But, Plotinus says, if a thought of the Good isn’t the same as the Good itself, then the Good exists separate from any thought of it.
This is why any attempt to describe or think about the One ultimately doesn’t help in knowing the One. In fact, since thoughts are always worse than the Good, in a sense our thinking about spirituality detracts from our actually being spiritual. For the goal of the mystic philosopher is to purify his or her consciousness of all rational thought and physical sensation, thereby making the soul fit to return to the simple unity of the One.
What we truly long for isn’t ephemeral knowledge of the ever-changing creation, but the eternal wisdom ever-present in the creator. However useful reason may be in helping us to understand and live comfortably in this physical world, it is terribly restricted in its ability to convey any wisdom of the spiritual world. Virtually useless, in fact.
Consider the case of the eminent theologian Thomas Aquinas. When he was urged to complete his great work, the
Summa Theologica,
he replied: “I can do no more; such things have been revealed to me that all I have written seems as straw, and I now await the end of my life.”
2
God is limitless love. Such love can only find its endpoint, its highest manifestation, in the union of the lover and the beloved. For Plotinus, this is the return of the soul to the One in which a drop of the divine emanation purifies itself of materiality and merges back into the Ocean from which it came. The spiritual path thus entails moving from manyness to oneness, a direction completely opposed to the divisions made by reason.
So we also possess the forms in two ways: in our soul, in a manner of speaking unfolded and separated, in Intellect all together.
[I-1-8]
The forms of the spiritual world are perceived all together via an intuitive intelligence far removed from the divisions of reason, all those separate thoughts that we vainly hope will one day coalesce into a satisfying explanation of life.
Such coalescing will never happen. When someone responds to a broken silence with, “You interrupted my train of thought,” they are speaking truly. Generally that train keeps on rolling down the track of each person’s consciousness almost all of his or her waking hours, spewing out thick plumes of ideas and prodigious sparks of inspiration, a noisy rolling mental thunder that, strangely, never makes much progress in spite of all its frenzied motion.
After this they must grasp that there is an Intellect other than that which is called reasoning and reckoning, and that reasonings are already in a kind of separation and motion.
[VI-9-5]
Reason would be a wonderful vehicle if it could get us to our final destination: lasting wisdom and well-being. But the danger, says Plotinus, is that we mistake the movement of all those thoughts in our heads for actual progress. Pierre Hadot says that ratiocination “is only a preliminary exercise, a support and a springboard. Knowledge, for Plotinus, is always experience, or rather it is an inner metamorphosis.”
3
This raising up of ourselves to the spiritual world means leaving behind rationality. Reasoning generally is considered to be the height of humanness, a sign that we have evolved beyond our irrational animal heritage. But Plotinus teaches that reason is a characteristic acquired in the course of the soul’s devolution, not evolution. Having lost the intuitive intelligence we enjoyed before our souls took on the company of physical bodies, we’re reduced to trying to reason out the mysteries of the cosmos.
All of our mental machinations testify to how little we know about reality, not how much. Someone wealthy doesn’t have to dig for gold and someone wise doesn’t have to dig for truth.
And then too there is no rationality there
[in the spiritual world]
: for here perhaps man is rational but in that world there is the man before reasoning.
[VI-7-9]
In addition to the fact that reason is all about searching rather than finding, the
Enneads
warn of another downside to reasoning. We rationally pursue irrational ends. As we’ve already seen, Plotinus holds that the only goal in life that really makes sense is to strive to attain a state where there is no more striving, to return to the One. Any other desire is irrational in that it will not lead either to the greatest well-being, or the ultimate truth.
The soul’s natural longing for the One gets thrown off course by its unnatural connection with matter and by the senses, which connect it with material things. Like a compass that fails to point toward Earth’s true north because it is attracted to a local magnetic field, all too often the soul mistakes lesser goods that are near at hand for the genuine Good.
And the needs of the body and the passions make us have continually different opinions.
[IV-4-17]
One of the meanings of “rationalize” is to offer a reasonable but specious explanation of one’s behavior. People can conjure up a good reason for anything they want to do. Humans are able to concoct logical justifications for mass murder, slavery, rape, adultery, environmental despoliation, religious persecution, and a host of other destructive behaviors. In addition, those who commit atrocities often are eminently rational in the manner with which they go about their maliciousness. The horror of the Holocaust was magnified, not diminished, by the efficient organization of the death camps.
So Plotinus urges us to pay close attention to who is taking center stage in that mental talk fest inside our heads. Which voice speaks the loudest when we’re trying to determine our priorities in life, or decide on the best course of action to achieve some goal? Is it the highest self (pure soul) or one of the passions that is attracted to some ephemeral material delight rather than permanent spiritual bliss? If a person is confused about what he should do, it is a sign that what Plotinus calls his best part is in danger of being out-shouted by some disreputable aspects of his self.
But is it actually our best part which has different opinions? No, perplexity and variety of opinions belong to the gathering [of our various parts and passions]: from our best part the right account of the matter is given to the common gathering, and is weak because it is in the mixture, not by its own nature.
But it is as if in the great clamor of an assembly the best of the advisers does not prevail when he speaks, but the worse of those who clamor and shout.
[IV-4-17]
Deep down each of us knows exactly what should be done. But we allow ourselves to be talked out of that silent soul intuition by our noisy mental rationalizations. That immediate intuitive sense of “Yes, this is right” or “No, this is wrong” is much more likely to reflect true spiritual intelligence than a long drawn-out course of reasoning in which the worse parts of ourselves have the opportunity to dominate the weaker but wiser best parts.
It’s an amazing thing, this late classical Greek understanding of the limitations of reason. Clearly the Greek philosophers, including Plotinus, possessed marvelous intellects and unsurpassed reasoning powers. So for the Greek philosophical experience to culminate in a conclusion that reason is ineffectual in knowing the highest realities is akin to Einstein saying, “Mathematics is a farce,” or Mozart cautioning, “Don’t listen to music.”
A divided consciousness thinks divided thoughts; a unified soul intuits a unified intelligence. The goal of the mystic philosopher is to pass beyond a preoccupation with counting shadows on the cave wall, the role of reason. Truth is realized by turning toward spirit, the sun of reality.