“Can there be question as to whether the gods have voluntary action? Or are we to take it that while we may well inquire in the case of men with their combination of powerlessness and hesitating power, the gods must be declared omnipotent, not merely some things but all lying at their nod? Or is power entire, freedom of action in all things, to be reserved to one alone…?” (Plotinus, Enneads VI.8.1, MacKenna tr., p. 595).
Plotinus in his treatise “On Free Will and the Will of the One” makes arguments that are unprecedented in the previous history of Greek philosophy. The treatise seems to show some (perhaps indirect) influence from the voluntaristic theology of Philo of Alexandria, as well as from Stoic theories of assent and of the so-called hegemonikon, a sort of ruling master faculty in humans that begins to approximate modern notions of a strongly unitary “mind”. It is noteworthy that free will and omnipotence are mentioned together from the outset.
It is especially common for writings on this subject to go through many twists and turns, since there are obvious appearances pointing in conflicting directions. Plotinus ends up advocating a fairly extreme position on these matters, but he is a serious enough thinker to feel the need to deal with conflicting evidence.
“The very notion of power must be scrutinized lest in this ascription we be really setting up an antithesis of power (potency) and Act, and identifying power with Act not yet achieved” (ibid).
Here he is implicitly responding to Aristotle. Given that he in general both shifts the meaning of Aristotelian potentiality back in the direction of Platonic power and emphasizes the unlimited power of the One unconstrained by any actuality, it is interesting that he recognizes there is an issue with “identifying power with Act not yet achieved”.
“To begin with, what must be intended when we assert that something is in our power; what is the conception here?” (ibid).
Aristotle had implicitly introduced the consideration of what is “in our power” in discussing moral responsibility for “willing” and “unwillling” actions. This became the basis of a key distinction in Stoic ethics: Epictetus says that only what is in our power is good or evil.
Plotinus writes, “A cardinal question is where we are to place the freedom of action ascribed to us…. But if rage or desire implied freedom we must allow freedom to animals, infants, maniacs, the distraught, the victims of malpractice producing uncontrollable delusions. And if freedom turns on calculation with desire, does this include faulty calculation? Sound calculation, no doubt, and sound desire; but then comes the question whether the appetite stirs the calculation or the calculation stirs the appetite…. Further, every emotion is preceded by some meager reasoning; how then can a compelling imagination, an appetite drawing us where it will, be supposed to leave us masters in the ensuing act?” (VI.8.2, p. 596).
Here he clearly recognizes that meaningful freedom must be something more subtle than just arbitrarily doing what we want. No emotion is completely devoid of reason, but he recognizes that we are often driven mainly by imagination and appetite. This will not qualify as free.
“We may be reminded that the Living Form and the Soul know what they do. But if this knowledge is by perception it does not help us toward the freedom of the act; perception gives awareness, not mastery” (p. 597).
He uses the term “knowledge” loosely here, but recognizes that mere awareness is superficial.
“We have traced self-disposal to will, will to reasoning and, next step, to right reasoning; perhaps to right reasoning we must add knowledge, for however sound opinion and act may be, they do not yield true freedom when the adoption of the right course is the result of hazard or of some presentment from the fancy with no knowledge of the foundation of that rightness” (VI.8.3, p. 597).
Up to this point he has mentioned will, but not given an account of it. The account comes a bit later in the text. But it is clear that he sees will as intimately involved with reason and intellect, as well as being a free power to choose. There is implicit tension between these two aspects, which will affect many later thinkers as well.
“Self-disposal, to us, belongs to those who, through the activities of the Intellectual-Principle, live above the states of the body” (ibid).
Now we come to what seems to be the main point of his solution. Pure intellect and what he calls the separated soul are by definition exempt from the passions and imagination that sway us embodied humans this way and that. But he maintains that we have an intimate connection to the separated soul, and that through this connection, freedom can be ours as well.
“Effort is free once it is toward a fully recognized good; the involuntary is, precisely, motion away from a good and toward the enforced, towards something not recognized as a good” (VI.8.4, p. 598).
He remains close enough to Plato and Aristotle to want to also tie freedom to the good, which Plato says all beings desire.
“[B]ut an undivided Principle, a simplex Activity, where there can be no difference of potentiality and act, must be free; there can be no thought of ‘action according to nature’, in the sense of any distinction between the being and its efficiency, there where being and act are identical…. In a principle, act and essence must be free” (ibid).
Here he takes a more radical step, guided by abstract thinking about what “must” be true about Principles. This kind of approach is not completely absent in Plato and Aristotle, but plays a much more central role in Plotinus. He seems to be saying that when we orient ourselves by the separated soul, we are no longer governed by a nature at all.
“If freedom is to be allowed to the soul in its Act, it certainly cannot be allowed in regard to issue, for we are not master of events: if in regard to fine conduct and all inspired by the Intellectual-Principle, that may very well be freedom; but is the freedom ours?” (VI.8.5, p. 598).
If events do not turn out as we had wished, our effective action in the world will not count as having been “free”. He recognizes also that it does not follow automatically that because pure intellect is free, we are free.
“If thus virtue whose manifestation requires action becomes inevitably a collaborator under compulsion, how can it have untrammeled self-disposal? Should we, perhaps, distinguish between compulsion in the act and freedom in the preceding will and reasoning? But in setting freedom in these preceding functions, we imply that virtue has a freedom and self-disposal apart from all act; then we must state what is the reality of the self-disposal attributed to virtue as a state or disposition” (p. 599).
This is indeed the path that he will follow.
“Virtue does not follow upon occurrences as a saver of the imperilled; at its discretion it sacrifices a man; it may decree the jettison of life, means, children, country even; it looks to its own high aim and not to the self-regarding of anything lower. Thus our freedom of act, our self-disposal, must be referred not to the doing, not to the external thing but to the inner activity, to the Intellection, to virtue’s own vision” (VI.8.6, p. 599).
It sounds as though he thinks virtue inheres in the separated soul.
He seems to want to say that virtue is completely independent of any necessity — not only of external compulsion, but also of any constraint by universals. I think Kant sometimes goes too far with the analogy between a “should” and formal necessity; what Plotinus says here suggests he wants to go too far in the opposite direction, effectively denying any real substance to a “should”. Of course he would object to this latter conclusion, since he clearly wants to tie freedom to the good, but it seems to me that it follows anyway. His stance seems to imply that good is whatever a “good” will wills. This is opposite in spirit to Plato’s Euthyphro. Either it is circular, or it implies a kind of voluntarism.
“This makes it all the more evident that the unembodied is the free; to this our self-disposal is to be referred; herein lies our will which remains free and self-disposing in spite of any orders which it may necessarily utter to meet the external. All then that issues from will and is the effect of will is our free action, whether the will is directed outwards or remains unattached; all that will adopts and brings, unimpeded, into existence is in the highest degree at our free disposal.”
Now he has turned things around so that all willing is free. This depends on a new assumption that seems to locate the will in the separated soul, which does make sense if we accept what he has said. The claim seems to be that we can say that the will of the separated soul chooses which “orders” to give in unconditional freedom, in spite of the fact that the content of all particular orders is conditioned by external factors.
“The contemplating Intellect, the first or highest, has self-disposal to the point that its operation is utterly independent; it turns wholly upon itself; at rest in its good it is without need, complete, and may be said to live to its will; there the will is intellection: it is called will because it expresses the Intellectual-Principle in the willing phase and besides, what we know as will imitates this operation taking place within the Intellectual-Principle” (p. 600).
He goes on to argue at length that since pure intellect is free, the One must be so to an even higher degree. Many have seen a strong element of necessity in his view of the procession of everything else from the One. Plotinus seems elsewhere to say that if we look bottom-up, there appears to be necessity, but here he claims that from a top-down perspective, the One is absolutely free, and beings inherit a portion of that freedom through the operations of procession. By means of the separated soul, he claims that we participate in this.
Others might question whether we humans really have access to such a top-down perspective. Basically no one — even the later Greek neoplatonists — has fully embraced Plotinus’ notion of the separated soul. But many later monotheists found the sort of conclusions that he reached attractive nonetheless, and sought alternate grounds for embracing them. For example, although the scholastic “intellectual soul” is embodied rather than separated, like Plotinus’ separated soul it has many very “strong” attributes that do not come from Aristotle.
The Postmodern Peripatetic 