Synopsis of the theory of souls

In order to approach Plotinus’ views on man and the human soul it will be helpful to have a synopsis of his general theory of souls. According to Plotinus’ orthodox view one must distinguish between at least four kinds of soul.

There is (1) a transcendent soul which is not the soul of any particular thing, either individuals or the cosmos, and is said to remain in the intelligible realm. Although this soul is, presumably, ontologically posterior to the Intellect, it is in fact not clear how they differ as regards internal properties: both are wholly engaged in pure thinking. But the different terms do suggest a difference in function. Plotinus normally chooses to talk about soul when he is concerned with the generation of the sensible from the intelligible, whereas the term “Intellect” is reserved to refer to the life in the intelligible as contained in itself. For clarity I shall write “Soul” with a capital S when I want to refer to this transcendent soul.

There is (2) the World-Soul which is responsible for the life of the visible cosmos. The usual doctrine is that the World-Soul rules the cosmos without descending into it as its body. Often, however, Plotinus distinguishes between two levels of the World- Soul, a higher level, which is the one just mentioned, and a lower, immanent level. Even if this lower level is on any account closely tied with the higher World-Soul by being its direct ontological descendant, it is for various reasons convenient to discuss them under separate headings.

The merest glance at a list of the treatises of the Enneads, or at an index verborum, is sufficient to show that Plotinus took a great interest in sense-perception. Three treatises deal specifically with questions relating to perception, and remarks of varying lengths about perception are to be found throughout the Enneads. A philosophically-minded person who bothers to look at some of these passages is bound to find statements and arguments that evoke his curiosity.

Nevertheless, very little has been written about Plotinus' views on perception; none of the classic Plotinian studies, for example, discusses them in any detail. Presumably the main reason for this is that among Plotinian scholars there has been a strong tendency to focus on those aspects of Plotinus' philosophy that are of theological or religious interest; hence, other subjects have tended to receive less attention than they deserve. In any event I shall deal, in the present work, with the subject of sense-perception in Plotinus. In what follows I shall give some account of the nature of this undertaking.

The Enneads are held to be unusually difficult to read, even among philosophical works. Indeed it takes considerable effort to acquire sufficient feeling for Plotinus' thought, so as not to be lost most of the time. One – and perhaps the most important – reason for this is the nature of the composition of the Enneads: they are a collection of treatises intended for circulation in Plotinus' school and not for publication.

Perceptions as acts

The notion of act (energeia) is an Aristotelian borrowing, which Plotinus, like Aristotle, uses in various contexts. As a first approach to Plotinus’ notion of energeia in connection with perception, it will be instructive to compare his views with those of Aristotle. But first, a remark about terminology: The term energeia in Aristotle has been translated variously as “act”, “activity”, “actuality”, “actualization”, and “realization”. As will become clear, I think that so far as Plotinus is concerned, his notion of energeia is best captured by “act” or “activity”, though “actualization” may sometimes be appropriate. But since we are concerned with finding what it means for him to say that something is energeia, and since a choice between the different English words listed above may prejudge the question at issue, I will use the Greek term to begin with.

Several commentators have remarked that Plotinus’ description of perceptions as energeiai shows that he thinks of perception as something active, where “active” is contrasted with “passive” in the sense according to which things are said to be passive when they are “mere recipients” or do not contribute anything of their own. Now, I think that this interpretation of Plotinus is quite right and that the point is an important one. However, it seems to me that it is far from self-evident that this is what the term energeia suggests, especially if we consider its Aristotelian origin. According to Aristotle and, as we shall see, Plotinus as well, the notion of energeia is correlated with that of dynamis (potency).

It is widely held that according to Plotinus perception never reaches to the external things themselves, that perception is always of something in the percipient rather than in the external world. There are two main reasons for this view: (a) Despite Plotinus’ whole-hearted expressions of realism about perception in IV.6.1 and elsewhere, it has seemed to his interpreters that his doctrine about the mediation of sensory affections precludes such realism, (b) In an important passage on perception, I.1.7, Plotinus says things that have been understood as an explicit denial of realism. Hence, some interpreters have seen this passage as Plotinus’ recognition of a logical consequence of his own position. To this we may add another passage, V.5.1, which in my opinion causes equally severe difficulties for a realist.

It goes without saying that if these interpreters are right, Plotinus is guilty of a serious inconsistency. Moreover, this inconsistency would neither be the hidden, implicit sort of inconsistency which is laid bare only after a scrutiny of the texts and their implications, nor would it be the sort of inconsistency that is likely to arise from an author's uncertainty or ambivalence about a subtle issue. Rather, we would be faced with a patent contradiction. This is, perhaps, a possible situation but not a very probable one. As a matter of principle one should adopt such an interpretation only if there is no alternative. I think that in fact the views of Zeller and Blumenthal are seriously misguided in ways which I will soon explain.

It is a remarkable fact about vision that the things we see are at a distance from the organs through which we see them. Everyone who gives some thought to the phenomenon of vision is bound to speculate about this fact. It is evident that somehow the eye must be brought into contact with the object, but it is not at all apparent how this contact is established. The ancient Greek thinkers did not fail to apply their imagination and acumen to this matter. We have records of speculation on the subject from the times of Alcmaeon of Croton onwards. Our records suggest that this came to be a subject that every thinker felt obliged to have views about.

The Greek thinkers did not arrive at a solution in terms of light-reflection and light-waves such as that which we now accept, although some of them, Plotinus among others, approached it in some respects. One should not infer from their failure to find the correct solution that all their theories were nothing but idle speculation, that insofar as they hit upon some true insights this was more due to chance and luck than a careful study of the facts. In a way, the opposite is true. If we compare the Pre-Socratics’ doctrines about visual transmission with those debated in the first centuries AD, we can notice considerable progress and increasing sophistication. And although systematic experiments are lacking, many good observations were made. The thinkers of the second and third centuries whose discussions on this subject have come down to us – Alexander of Aphrodisias, Galen and Plotinus – all show considerable skill in testing the various theories against known observations.

The most striking feature of Plotinus’ philosophy, and of Neoplatonism generally, is its hierarchical picture of reality. This is also the feature that is most baffling for modern readers. In Plotinus’ philosophy we come across a hierarchy of three so-called “hypostases” that are called “the One”, “Intellect” and “Soul”, followed by matter at the bottom. Similar ideas characterize the writings of the other Neoplatonists. We are told that reality is somehow constituted by this hierarchy, an idea which we presumably find quite puzzling. If we look for arguments for it as such, we do not find any: it seems to be taken for granted. And if we encounter something that looks like an argument for some part of the hierarchy, we feel that it invariably presupposes the general picture.

As a first step towards approaching the Neoplatonic hierarchy, let us consider the ideas of a principle and of a hierarchy of principles. Let us suppose that there is a need to explain in general terms some phenomenon that is taken to be a fact of common experience. This may lead to the supposition of a level of entities or properties or forces, that are taken to be “behind” or “above” the ordinary phenomena, such that by supposing these entities, properties or forces to be there, an explanation has been given of the ordinary phenomenon that needed explanation. At this point we have already divided reality into two levels, the level of ordinary experience and a “more basic” level.

Plotinus' views concerning the unity of the senses, and the inferences which he draws from them, constitute what is perhaps the most original aspect of his theory of perception. I want to claim that Plotinus’ position on this issue is the result of a historical dialogue and represents the sort of statement that one might expect a dualist to make after the floor has been held for some time by the Stoics and Peripatetics. In order to set Plotinus’ views in a proper context, we shall, before we turn to them, consider what some of his predecessors had to say about this subject.

The views of Plotinus’ predecessors on the unity of the Senses

In the Theaetetus at 184 D ff. Plato distinguishes the senses from one another by reference to the differences in their objects: sight has proper objects that cannot be perceived through any other sense, so does hearing, and so does each of the other senses. But above the special senses he posits a central faculty of perception. With this faculty “we apprehend the black and the white through the eyes, and objects of other kinds through the other senses” (184 D). Here, we need not go into the details of Plato's analysis of the function of this central faculty, interesting as they are in themselves. It suffices to point out that Plato's introduction of a central faculty is prompted by observations about the unity of consciousness in perception: “It would be very strange,” he says, “if there should be many senses sitting in us as in wooden horses, and all these things should not converge in some single nature” (184 D).

In the previous chapter we saw, in connection with Plotinus’ sympatheia theory, that vision involves the affection of the eye by the object of vision. It is Plotinus’ view that such affection of the sense-organs occurs in sense-perception quite generally. In the present chapter I consider the nature of this affection. In the first section I briefly discuss Plotinus’ word for affection, pathos, and its appearance in earlier Greek theories of perception. In the second section I consider the passages in the Enneads that are most informative concerning the nature and role of affection in Plotinus’ theory. This enterprise will reveal significant points about Plotinus’ views on sensory affection, points which, however, are subject to radically different interpretations. In the third section I consider in detail one such interpretation, or rather one family of interpretations that share an important common element. I will show that this type of interpretation, in which sensory affections are regarded as physical changes in the sense-organs, runs into serious difficulties when confronted with other aspects of Plotinus’ views on perception. In the fourth and last section, I propose a different line of interpretation which seems to me to conform better to the textual evidence, when everything is considered.

Throughout this chapter, the focus is on sensory affection in vision. The reason for this emphasis is that Plotinus himself, like most philosophers of perception, focuses on vision: it is evident that when he talks about sense-perception generally, without specifying a particular s'ense, vision is as a rule the case that he is thinking of, though he evidently thinks of his theory as applying to the other senses as well.

The Byzantine Empire, or the Byzantinisation of the Roman Empire, began with the conversion to Christianity of Constantine and his foundation of Constantinople on the site of the ancient Greek city of Byzantium. At once the main elements of Byzantine political thought are gathered together in one sentence. For Byzantine civilisation was an amalgam of three ingredients: Greek, Roman and Christian. Its political theory derived from the first two of those ingredients, which were tempered to accommodate the third. Its originators and its first apologists were the first Christian Emperor, Constantine, and the first historian of the Christian Church, Eusebius of Caesarea. The sincerity of Constantine's conversion has often been questioned, but his own writings leave little room for doubt that he saw himself as the servant and representative on earth of the Christian God. None of the Christians in his empire thought otherwise. The majority of his subjects were still pagan. They were shocked and offended that their emperor had seen fit to embrace a minority religion. But their pagan theorists, such as Themistius, were able to mitigate the shock by appealing to the Hellenistic theories of kingship. Here was common ground where pagan and Christian could meet on the subject of monarchy.

Themistius regarded earthly monarchy as a copy of the kingship of Zeus, the supreme emperor (basileus). The kingdom of this world would be a reflection, a replica of that higher model. The king must possess and display a whole catalogue of virtues. Such notions can be traced back to the political theorists of Greek antiquity.

Only the briefest of notes is either appropriate or necessary by way of conclusion to a book of this kind. Yet there are questions which will naturally be asked and which it is necessary to consider even if they cannot be completely or definitively answered. There are questions, already touched on in the Introduction, as to method and approach – questions which may perhaps be encapsulated in the question whether these pages have reflected any significant change or development in the histriography of the subject. It can perhaps be claimed that there is evidence of such a shift, both in the range of the evidence considered and in at least some of the perspectives in which it has been analysed. One illustration of both points may be found in the thoroughness with which ecclesiological concepts have been considered, whether in the Carolingian and post-Carolingian period or in the context of fifteenth-century conciliarism–the latter in particular a case in which earlier historians would have taken a more narrowly ‘political’ view of the material. Again–a not unrelated point–it is surely the case that the evidence of canon law has taken a much more prominent place here than would have been the case even in the early decades of this century. This is not to say that the canonists were neglected in earlier account: Carlyle, for example, drew extensively on canonistic sources, and devoted the greater part of his second volume to ‘the political theory of the canon law’ from the ninth to the thirteenth century.

The epoch of the earliest Crusades, of vigorous new development in urban life, in bureaucratic methods of government and in higher education in the schools, some of which were shortly to become the earliest universities, has many claims to be viewed as a period of renaissance or renewal, a period in which learning revived with important consequences for European systems of law, for scholastic philosophy and for the importation of new knowledge from Greek and Arabic sources. C.H. Haskins in his classic study, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, emphasised the influence of Rome, the ancient Rome of rulers and lawyers as well as of philosophers and writers. The revival of jurisprudence occurred in conjunction with the full recovery of the corpus of Roman law in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries and then touched other bodies of law as well, the canon law of the church first and then feudal and local customs and the new law of the English royal court. The Roman tradition of rulership and law grew stronger in the twelfth century; Frederick Barbarossa restored the ideal of Empire and inserted his Roncaglian decrees into the Corpus iuris civilis while on the other hand one of his victims, Arnold of Brescia, promoted the Roman Senate as an instrument of popular rule. Above all, there was much sharp comment on new developments, as in Gerhoh of Reichersberg's Letter to Pope Adrian on the Novelties of the Day.

We tend to think of the Middle Ages as a communal or even collectivist epoch, in which there was a sense of ‘the real personality of the group’, ‘absorption of the individual by the community’, in which – to go back to Burckhardt –‘man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation – only through some general category’, A quite recent study of medieval social language assumes the existence of a ‘'ommunitarian’ ethos. The distinction between modern individualism and medieval collectivism goes back, through Tönnies and Durkheim, to Romanticism and the Enlightenment. The pioneer of the study of medieval political thought, Otto von Gierke (1841–1921), believed that, in towns, gilds and other ‘chosen groups’, individuals submitted willingly to communal norms and identified themselves morally with the group, in the tradition of Germanic Genossenschaft (fellowship). But now the picture is changing. A variety of social structures and of attitudes to the individual is beginning to emerge. ‘The idea of a fixed society, neatly parcelled into categories by rigid, impassable barriers, is parfaitement inexacte. Chronicles composed by monks and friars, who believed men ought to value community, and works by officials anxious to promote civic harmony, cannot be taken at face value. The actual evidence produced by Gierke turns out, on inspection, to be slender indeed: phrases such as ‘the consent and will of the city’ no more prove the existence of a collectivist attitude than do modern phrases such as ‘the spirit of the Labour (or Conservative) party’ or ‘the will of the electorate’.

Knowledge of Roman law was transmitted to later ages through two main bodies of material, first the so-called barbarian codes, collections of materials made by Gothic and Burgundian kings at the beginning of the sixth century for application to their Roman subjects, and secondly, the Corpus luris of the Emperor Justinian, enacted in the 530s. Very few texts survived except by incorporation in these collections, and they did not become known until the sixteenth century or later. The legal material in the sixth-century collections is the product of a thousand years of legal development, and is in various forms, partly legislation and partly discussion by legal experts. It is concerned with private law, governing the relations between private individuals, rather than public law, governing the organs of the state, which was relatively undeveloped until the Byzantine period.

Technically Roman law reached its peak in the first two centuries AD, known as the classical period, but the seeds of the classical law can already be discerned in the tribal law of the small city state of the fifth century BC. On the establishment of the Republic in 509 BC, the law was a set of unwritten customary rules regarded as part of the way of life of the Roman people. Its application was confined to Roman citizens (ius civile, law for cives, citizens). In matters of doubt, the interpretation of the pontiffs, a body of patrician aristocrats, was decisive both as to the law and to the ritual forms for enforcing it.

Between the eleventh century and the fourteenth the economy of Latin Christendom underwent fundamental and rapid transformations. There is, it is true, scholarly debate as to the direction and pace of economic development; but some points are clear enough. The population increased threefold, urban centres attracted an increasingly mobile populace and there was a massive minting of money. At a time when feudal society still flourished, there was a concomitant development of the basic structures of pre-industrial society, most of which had taken shape by 1300, so that many towns were to retain their essential appearance until the nineteenth century. While feudal tenure was still widespread, especially in France, England and the Empire, it appears that in England, by 1300, such tenures were becoming more like private property, transferred by sale as well as, more traditionally, by inheritance. What was formerly seen by historians as the area of ‘classic feudalism’ has shrunk somewhat, for regional studies in France and the Low Countries have shown that even by the mid-eleventh century allodial holdings, independent of vassalage, constituted the principal form of property. Allods meant that real estate was more mobile than an extensively feudalised society would permit. More generally, the commercial revolution of this period produced a market economy centred on towns; and the agriculture which was still the main activity of medieval men and women became organised for that economy. The desire for new land and for the more efficient exploitation of the land led to massive reclamation projects, to the assessment of property by reference to rental income instead of service and produce, and to the increasing importance of bankers and credit transactions.