Plotinus describes matter as “evil itself” (I.8.8.37-44; I.8.13.7-14) and as source of evil in the soul (I.8.14). However, those two apparently straightforward statements lead at once to paradox when we learn that matter is nonetheless derived from the One, through the mediation of soul (III.9.3.7-16; III.4.1). And that paradox is only heightened by Plotinus's repeated claim that matter, “primary evil”and “evil per se” (I.8.3.35-40), is also “non-being” (II.4.16.3; II.5.4-5; III.6.7.1-19).

Various attempts have been made to eliminate one or other element in the paradox. Thus Schwyzer claims that matter exists independently of soul and of the One. Rist allows that matter is a product of the soul, but claims that the soul's production of matter is itself an evil act; from which it should follow that at least one evil act is performed by the soul, independently of the presence of matter. While Pistorius claims that matter, according to Plotinus, simply does not exist at all.

None of those interpretations can survive close confrontation with the text of Plotinus. And, conceptually, none of them does justice to the intricacies of Plotinus's thinking.

My own conclusion will be that a production of the non-being that is matter through the agency of one of the lower manifestations of soul is essential to Plotinus's explanation of evil in the world and of evil in the soul. It is true that, here as elsewhere, Plotinus's arguments are highly elliptical, and rely for their cogency on concepts and categories that are alien to modern ways of thinking and that have often only a tenuous relation to the writings of Plato and of Aristotle that are quoted, tacitly or explicitly, in their support.

In the treatise devoted to eternity and time (III.7) Plotinus begins by reflecting on his own style of philosophizing. These reflections are one of the most important sources for understanding Plotinus's method in general, but it is worth considering them closely in the context of this particular treatise and its topic, for an understanding of Plotinus's approach will help us to follow and better evaluate the general direction of his argument. Plotinus presents us with six aspects. We begin our enquiry (1) with the general notions and presuppositions which will have formed in us a concept of time and of eternity. For Plotinus himself one important and central element of this is the linking of eternity with the unchanging and transcendent intelligible world and time with the physical world of becoming. Clearly Plato lies partly behind this. But what influences may have been at work in the formation of this preliminary concept are of no significance at this stage. Now (2) when we look at our ideas more closely we become more and more puzzled as objections and difficulties arise.

In this essay I shall address some philosophical issues that have to do with the relationship between cognition and its objects in Plotinus. This involves inquiring into the connection between Plotinus's epistemology and psychology, on the one hand, and his ontology, on the other. Interesting questions arise with respect to Plotinus's views both as regards the relation between sense perception and the sensible object and that of thinking and the intelligible object. One set of questions concerns realism versus idealism and subjectivism: Is there in general an essential connection between cognition and object in Plotinus such that the mode of cognition in some sense determines the object? This would imply idealism of some sort. One may also ask whether the immediate object of cognition is always something belonging to the subject of cognition as opposed to something extra-mental. Such a subjectivist position would place the extra-mental beyond the direct reach of cognition and might involve radical skepticism about it. Or is Plotinus neither an idealist nor a subjectivist and objects appear to be such and such because they are such as they appear independently of the mode of apprehension? Different stories may of course have to be told about intelligibles and sensibles with respect to these questions. So I shall in fact argue. Still it is interesting to inquire whether there are any common principles underlying Plotinus's views on both sensibles and intelligibles in this regard. This too I shall take up here.

Of the three first principles (archai) or hypostases, One, Intellect, and Soul, the One or Good is the most difficult to conceive and the most central to understanding Plotinian philosophy. It is everything and nothing, everywhere and nowhere. The One is the source (archê) of all beings and, as the Good, the goal (telos) of all aspirations, human and non-human. As the indemonstrable first principle of everything, as transcendent infinite being, and as the supreme object of love, the One is the center of a vibrant conception of reality many of whose facets resist philosophical analysis. Efforts to understand or to define the nature of the One, Plotinus believes, are doomed to be inadequate. We speak about it, but in reality these efforts only amount to “making signs to ourselves about it”; it is not possible for anyone to say what it is (V.3.13.7, 14.1-7). Despite this insistence on the ineffability of the first principle Plotinus talks about it constantly, making radical claims about its universal role in the structure of reality. Only by reflecting on the internal logic of his metaphysics can we recognize the multi-faceted nature of this unitary principle.

TALKING ABOUT THE ONE

Three interrelated factors motivate Plotinus's philosophy of the One: tradition, reason, and experience. Since the influence of his predecessors, especially Plato and Aristotle, on Plotinus is discussed in Chapter 1, here we will examine the contributions made by rational argument and personal experience toward articulating the metaphysics of the One.

An explicit distinction between essence and existence is first attributed to the Arabic philosophers Al Farabi (c. 870-950) and Avicenna (c. 980-1037). The nature or essence of any finite being can be conceived separately from its existence that appears to be a perfection “superadded” or accidental to its nature. Pierre Hadot has traced the roots of this distinction even further back to Boethius, and later Neoplatonism, and in the latter case to two principal sources: (1) the distinction between absolute being and determinate being (respectively being-infinitive, to einai, and being-participle, to on) found in the anonymous Commentary on the Parmenides (ascribed to Porphyry) and in Marius Victorinus. And (2) the late Neoplatonic distinction (of Proclus, Damascius and Victorinus) between pre-existence (huparxis) and substance (ousia), that is, between pure being in its simplicity prior to all things and substance as the determinate subject taken together with all its accidents. I shall argue here that the roots of this distinction are also to be found in Plotinus.

Readers of the Companion who have arrived at this chapter should be well aware of the fact that Plotinus was a Platonist. One might add that in spite of the fact that he has always been regarded as the founder of Neoplatonism, he himself would not have known what the Greek equivalent of that word might have meant, since all the Platonists of late antiquity regarded themselves as Platonists tout simple, and their philosophy as the exposition of the underlying truths of Plato's philosophy which Plato himself sometimes omitted to make explicit. The degree of self-deception involved in this selfconcept is perhaps nowhere clearer than in their discussions of soul and intellect. That is so because, while their conception of soul (psuchê) was fundamentally Platonic and dualist, their explanation of its operations owed much more to Aristotle and other post-Platonic philosophers than it did to Plato himself.

For Plotinus the dualism was as clear, if not as clear-cut. Though he was aware of materialistic theories of the nature of the soul, such as those of the Stoics, he was hostile to them and would have had little time for the great volume of modern discussion which goes under labels like materialism, physicalism, or functionalism. That is equally true for those theories which, under headings like epiphenomenalism and supervenience, allow for other than fully materialist explanations of what Plotinus would have seen as the most important functions of the soul and intellect - the thinking functions of mind.

Plotinus's highest metaphysical principle, the One or Good, is ineffable (V.3.13.1; cf. V.3.14.1-8; V.5.6.11-13; VI.9.5.31-2). Indeed, Plotinus is hesitant to attribute “good,” “is” (VI7.38.1-2), or even “one” (VI.9.5.30-3) to it. If the heart of his philosophical enterprise is to make meaningful statements about this principle, and furthermore our understanding of all else is informed by it, we may well ask why, in the light of this apparent despair of language, he would continue in his quest (his work extends to nine hundred and seventy-four pages of Oxford text).

Of course, in saying that the One is ineffable, Plotinus has already made a statement, albeit negative, about the One. So at least this negative statement is permissible. Further examination of the possibilities of negative language offers more fruitful ways out of the closure apparently imposed by the stricture of ineffability. Before we consider further the question of the One's ineffability, it will be useful to examine the uses that Plotinus makes of negation. Plotinus uses negation to avoid confusion of an incorporeal reality accessible only to the mind or spirit with a corporeal reality perceived by our senses.

Until comparatively recently, Conrad's late novels have suffered from critical neglect and undervaluation. In the 1950s, Douglas Hewitt, Thomas C. Moser, and Albert J. Guerard argued that Conrad's late novels represented a decline after the achievement of the novels of his 'major' period – Lord Jim, Nostromo, and The Secret Agent. These critics established the paradigm within which most subsequent Conrad criticism has operated. There were some dissenting voices: M. C. Bradbrook, Paul Wiley, and Walter F. Wright, for example, argued that there was no decline, and that Conrad's later novels were to be praised as novels of moral affirmation. Over the last twenty years, a third approach has gradually emerged: this bases its positive evaluation of the late fiction not on its supposed moral affirmation but rather on increased attentiveness to its new modes and techniques. This was first adumbrated in an essay by Morton Dauwen Zabel and developed further by John Palmer, Robert Secor, and Gary Geddes. Geddes, for example, argued that the critics of the 1950s misunderstood Conrad's fictional aims through their 'predilection for fictional modes and techniques that were no longer of paramount importance to Conrad' (Conrad's Later Novels, p. 1).

For Conrad the publication of what is now regarded as his consummate achievement in the art of fiction turned out to be a strangely uneasy event. Despite the usual family illnesses and financial problems, the first draft had been written in the remarkably short time of nine months, February to October 1906, and without the usual outcries of compositional anguish. But as he reached the stage of serialization, October 1906 to January 1907, and then of revision for book-publication, when he added 28,000 words to the original draft during May to July 1907, he suddenly seemed to lose confidence – though less perhaps in the novel itself than in the thought of the reception that awaited it.

Our main evidence for this is his correspondence, which whenever it touches on the work-in-progress acquires a strangely defensive note. On 12 September 1906, he wrote to John Galsworthy, to whom he had sent part of the manuscript: 'In such a tale one is likely to be misunderstood. After all you must not take it too seriously.' The whole thing is superficial and is but a tale’ (Letters III, p. 354.

If we take 'Modernism' to mean certain fundamental and more or less shared characteristics of those writers, thinkers, and artists of the period 1900-30, in Britain, Europe, America, and elsewhere, who are now (subjectively and from our own stance in history) seen as the most 'new' or responsive or influential of that time, it seems inevitable that Conrad should figure in that grouping.

In terms of dating there is little doubt about this. The period of his major creativity is from 'Heart of Darkness' (1899) to at least Under Western Eyes (1911) and possibly beyond, to Victory (1915) and The Shadow-Line (1917). During that period there also appeared Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Einstein's theory of relativity (1905), William James's Pragmatism (1907), and Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious (1912). In 1907, the year of The Secret Agent , Picasso‘s Les Demoiselles d‘Avignon revolutionized modern painting, and saw the birth of Cubism (hailed by Apollinaire in 1913). In 1908, Schönberg composed his first complex atonal pieces, and changed the course of modern music; Proust, in 1913, published the first volumes of A la recherche du temps perdu , which in its own way changed the tonality of modern fiction (and was at once read and admired by Conrad). In 1912, the year of Conrad‘s dream-like narrative of the double self, ‘The Secret Sharer’,Mann published Death in Venice , perhaps the most resonant, and certainly the most Nietzschean, of Modernism‘s characteristic studies of self-division. In 1914, Conrad‘s Chancecame out at the same time as Gide‘s Les Caves du Vatican(an author whom Conrad knew and, with reservations, admired). Rilke‘s New Poems, in 1907-8, and his prose work, Make Laurids Brigge, in 1910, were milestones in the development of Symbolism and in the exploration of the growing alienation of the creative sensibility from the contemporary world.

If it is true, as Conrad once wrote, that 'A man's real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men' (UWE, p. 14), then the real life of Joseph Conrad is manifest throughout modern and contemporary literature, and has become a living part of our cultural self-awareness. His works have been translated into more than forty languages, from Albanian and Yiddish to Korean and Swahili. Conrad is one of the defining founders of literary Modernism, and his influence has been acknowledged by writers as different from him, and from each other, as Andre Gide, Ralph Ellison, Graham Greene, Jorge Luis Borges, V. S. Naipaul, William S. Burroughs, and Italo Calvino, to name only a few. Some of his works have been taken as models for the development of new literary genres. The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes were among the first studies of spies who cannot come in from the cold, Nostromo is the first panoramic epic of South American colonialism, and 'Heart of Darkness' is frequently invoked as a cultural token signifying the 'horror' at the heart of modern Western civilization. The life and works of Conrad have inspired films, journeys, sculptures, comic books, Conrad societies and journals, and well over one thousand academic books and articles.

Conrad's most succinct and compelling statement about the interdependence of the artist's and of humanity's concerns is contained in a letter to The New York Times of 2 August 1901: 'The only legitimate basis of creative work lies in the courageous recognition of all the irreconcilable antagonisms that make our life so enigmatic, so burdensome, so fascinating, so dangerous – so full of hope' (Letters, II, pp. 348-9). All his major fictions present, explore, and are constructed out of antagonisms that are never finally resolved. These famously include: egoism and altruism, emotion and reason, solidarity and isolation, moral corruption and redemption, heroism and contingency, loyalty and betrayal, idealism and scepticism, piety and scorn, and fidelity to a code composed of 'a few very simple ideas' and 'truth to one's own sensations' (PR, p. xix). Conrad's recognition, in the same letter, of a ceaseless 'struggle of contradictions' springs from an inclusive vision of man's fate, and because for him, as for Flaubert, 'the whole of the truth lies in the presentation', his vision sponsors a restless search for a correlative form (Letters, II, p. 200).

Although his fascination with 'the novel' as a form of art has been well documented by Ford Madox Ford and others, Conrad seldom used the term to refer to his own longer works. In their subtitles, he described six of his novels as 'tales' and one as a 'story', thus emphasizing the older and larger category of narrative fiction. In his letters also, he preferred not to distinguish between short fiction and novels, referring to both forms as 'stories'. This blurring of generic boundaries reflects the organic evolution of many of his works. For example, Nostromo, which he was still calling a 'story' after writing 560 manuscript pages, actually began as a short story before it became a 'long short story', and then a 'long story' or 'novel'. Indeed, any overview of Conrad's creative process would reveal an essentially Darwinian approach to writing fiction in that his art forms are continually being modified by the pressures of their 'environment'. Perhaps for this reason, he often exploited comparisons with elemental or natural forces to describe his working methods: ‘I am letting myself go with the Nigger. He grows and grows’, ‘The Typhoon is still blowing’, ‘Verloc’ – a little earlier called ‘this beast’ – ‘is extending’, ‘Razumov will grow into a short book before I am done with him’, and so on (Letters, I, p. 312; II, p. 307; III, p. 318; IV, p. 76). Of all Conrad‘s stories and novels, only ‘The Lagoon’, an early work of some 6,000 words, conforms to guidelines on length set in advance of composition.

Conradian narrative is not only exceptionally sophisticated and varied but also remarkably productive thematically. In common with all major writers, Conrad's fictional content is inextricable from narrative presentation. To make this point is not to regard the concept of content as unimportant. It is to stress that the rhetorical persuasiveness, ideological tension, dramatic intensity, and continuing interest and relevance of Conrad's fictional vision depend upon and are indeed generated and shaped by diverse and original narrative techniques. It follows that a discussion of Conradian narrative is a substantial critical venture. This treatment will focus on a selection of particularly important constituent aspects of Conrad's narrative strategies. Progressing chronologically, it ranges over most of Conrad's major works and concludes with a consideration of the thematic significance of Conradian narrative.

Even though the dramatic intensity and thematic suggestiveness of Conradian narrative can vary considerably from work to work, there is no direct or obvious correlation between narrative success and date of composition in Conrad‘s fiction. Although the artistic quality of the fiction subsequent to Under Western Eyes generally deteriorates, texts such as Victory, ‘The Tale’, and The Shadow-Line are notable exceptions. More importantly, Conradian narrative matured very rapidly. In Almayer‘s Folly, Conrad‘s first novel, the narrative presents not just the main action revealing Almayer‘s inglorious situation and futile dreams, but also a covert plot centred on Abdullah‘s schemes to eliminate Almayer as a trading rival. While supporting the main plot‘s characterization of Almayer, this covert plot also, as we are more likely to discover on a second rather than a first reading, precipitates its outcome (Watts, A Preface to Conrad, p. 119).

Conrad's earliest sense of himself, as a six-year-old child in 1863, was typically multiple, as 'Pole, Catholic, Gentleman' (Baines, Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography, p. 14). In 1874, he was an adolescent thought by some to be 'betraying' his country in his desire to escape Poland for a freer life as a seaman in France. By 1878 he had joined the British Merchant Service, though still officially a Russian subject and unable to speak English. Nicknamed 'Polish Joe' by other crew members, he was about to discover sustaining social and corporate ideals under the Red Ensign. By 1904, nine years after publishing his first novel, he produced the most radically experimental English novel of the early Modernist period, the monumental Nostromo. At his death in Canterbury in August 1924 he was already a legend in his own lifetime.

Surprised though the Polish-born ‘Joseph Conrad’ may have been to become a published English author in 1895 at the age of thirty-seven, it should come as no surprise, given the extraordinarily varied and cosmopolitan influences at work on him, that he should turn out to be the novelist of paradox and riddle. The logic connecting the various diverse phases of his life often appeared so mysterious to Conrad himself that he would repeatedly speak and write about it in terms of a dream-like ‘affair’.

'It must not be supposed that Mr. Conrad makes attack upon colonisation, expansion, even upon Imperialism', The Manchester Guardian's reviewer assured contemporary readers of 'Heart of Darkness' (Sherry, ed., Conrad: The Critical Heritage, p. 135). In December 1902, in Academy and Literature, Edward Garnett noted the novella's subversiveness, as 'a page torn from the life of the Dark Continent - a page which has been hitherto carefully blurred and kept away from European eyes' (Ibid., p. 133). Conrad's fiction continues to excite such antithetical responses. Within the past thirty years in particular, the political aspects of his work have been a central focus of Conrad studies, and while Garnett's views have generally prevailed, these two early opinions frame an on-going discussion that continues to be shaped by multiple points of view.

The arguments range widely, in fact, from those who view Conrad as committed to a conservative, ‘English view’ of imperialism to those who see him as sceptical of the whole enterprise and a champion of anti-colonial revolts (Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology, p. 135, and Hawkins, ‘Thesychology of colonialism’, p. 86). The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe‘s accusation that Conrad was ‘a bloody racist’ is countered by the contention of Ezekiel Mphahlele, a South African writer, that Conrad was one of the few ‘outstanding white novelists who portray competently characters belonging to cultural groups outside their own’ (The African Image, p. 125).

Any reading of Lord Jim that aspires to be comprehensive must come to terms with the novel's title-character. To borrow Emerson's words, he incarnates the 'plain old Adam, the simple genuine self against the whole world', a notoriously unequal struggle with a foreordained outcome. Conrad's earlier Malay novels, the 'Lingard Trilogy' of Almayer's Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, and the unfinished 'The Rescuer', similarly focus on individuals living in exile from their culture and blindly in pursuit of an unhappy fate. But while the early novels describe the failure of unsympathetic protagonists (and Lingard, too, in his naivete and braggadocio is distanced from the reader), Lord Jim is famously ambiguous. A technical tour de force, it painstakingly dissects and then reassembles the activities and consciousness of a young man, who in his failings and virtues appears to be 'one of us'. Because of a multiplicity of virtuoso narrative techniques that sometimes alienate the reader, Jim, however, is both at the novel's centre and on its periphery. He is thus always present either as a massively constructed figure in the foreground, in the manner of the memorable characters of Dickens or George Eliot, or as a hovering evoked presence in the background.