Transferences of the Subject

Here we have an important chapter in the emergence of the modern notion of “the Subject” as a mental entity.

The doctoral dissertation of Jean-Baptiste Brenet — supervised by Alain de Libera, and published as Transferts du sujet: La noetique d’Averroes selon Jean de Jandun (2003), is on John of Jandun’s reading of the noetics of Averroes.

John of Jandun was declared a heretic and excommunicated, but this was due to his support for his friend Marsilius of Padua’s work Defensor Pacis. That work uses a combination of theological and Aristotelian arguments to contest the pope’s and the Church’s authority over civil government. Marsilius reportedly also made the radical early claim that democracy is the best form of government. Like John, he is typically labeled as an “Averroist”.

Nineteenth-century scholar Ernest Renan wrote that “Few authors have been more cited and afterward more forgotten than John of Jandun” (quoted on back cover of Brenet’s book, my translation). Brenet, however, finds Renan and the great 20th-century Thomist Etienne Gilson to be extremely prejudiced in their accounts of so-called Latin Averroism.

The mid-20th century Thomist scholar F. Van Steenberghen wrote that John of Jandun was the first true Latin Averroist. Thirteenth-century figures like Siger of Brabant only defended a few key theses of Averroes. Brenet agrees that there was no real Latin Averroism in the 13th century, but he sharply challenges Renan’s and Gilson’s characterization of the “Averroism” that did emerge in the 14th century. They declared it completely lacking in philosophical substance, and claimed it was held together only by sheer dogmatism. Brenet’s book provides abundant evidence to refute this.

By Brenet’s account, John of Jandun sees himself first and foremost as a serious commentator on Aristotle. His works are full of references to Averroes, but his actual positions on issues by no means simply follow Averroes. Like many of the scholastics, he writes as a thoughtful philosopher examining questions that others have discussed. His original arguments about active sense are but one example. Conversely Averroes, known to the Latins as “the” Commentator, substantially influenced many writers whom no one would call “Averroist”. At one point during the nominalist controversy of the 14th century, it is reported that the pope explicitly directed European universities to continue teaching Aristotle using the commentaries of Averroes.

John of Jandun endorses the originally anti-Averroist slogan “this human thinks”. He accepts a variant of the scholastic “intellectual soul”. On a key question like the so-called material intellect’s relation to the human, he follows Siger of Brabant’s original theory that intellect is an “intrinsic motor”, a concept that has no precedent in Averroes.

I plan to devote a few posts to some of the details in Brenet’s book. For more context, see Aristotelian Subjectivity Revisited; “This Human Understands”; “This Human”, Again; Averroes as Read by de Libera; Averroes to Eckhart?; Desire, Image, Intellect.

Next in this series: “Intellect” and the Body

Flasch on Eckhart

“What is essential is the ability of the soul to give itself a form, to shape itself. It does not stand there fixed, like a tree; it knowingly and willingly throws itself upon others, it becomes what it takes up” (Flasch, Meister Eckhart, pp. 35-36; see Eckhart as Philosopher: Background for introduction).

“The eye, opened and cast on the wood, is, within itself, over there with the wood” (p. 44).

With this example taken from visual perception, Eckhart illustrates the essence of the Aristotelian theories of perception and intellect that, according to Flasch, are at the core of Eckhart’s thought. At the heart of both perception and intellectual knowing, Aristotle posits a kind of fusion of what modern people call subject and object.

Also central to Eckhart’s thought is the neoplatonizing medieval notion of “intellectual soul”, which fuses together the separate Aristotelian notions of intellect and soul, emphasizing their status as an operational whole. For the many medieval writers who attribute such a strong unity to the operational whole of soul and intellect, all the unique attributes of Aristotelian intellect may then also be said of the human soul, though it is far from clear that Aristotle himself would agree with this.

Eckhart also upholds a unitary interpretation of the “substantial form” of hylomorphic unities, which aims to be a completely univocal kind of form. Elsewhere, Flasch notes that this late and specialized version of the more general (and not entirely univocal) notion of form in Aristotle is already present in Averroes’ Long Commentary on the Metaphysics. Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas used it to argue against the sharp soul-body dualism defended by some medieval Augustinians. Substantial form poses a stronger unity in the forms of things than I want to claim for a reading of Aristotle, but that seems to be a relatively separate issue that does not greatly affect Eckhart’s argument here.

“[L]ike the seeing eye that casts a glance at the wood and becomes one with the wood, man, through active performance, through seeing and loving, becomes that which he sees and loves in the mind…. We retroactively separate eye and wood from the eye-wood unity. Is the wood-eye union the truer reality? Or is it merely an image, or simply a thought? Seeing things clearly in this regard, according to Eckhart, is the necessary precondition for understanding everything he says — not study of the Bible or dogmatic theology. First and foremost, we need to occupy ourselves with understanding this unity. It is our daily life. It is not a thing of nature, but rather the having of natural things” (p. 38).

We become that which we contemplate and love, that toward which we direct our attention. For Eckhart, the intellectual soul is not just a theoretical construct, but a part of everyday experience and of the basic ways of human being. Where the modern “subject” is usually considered to stand aloof from its objects, Aristotelian soul and intellect actively find or develop their content in and by means of what modern people would call their objects. Though we may marvel at it, this kind of fusion is not a mystical ecstasy, but part of the normal working of everyday life. It is not passivity, but a kind of fused activity. It seems to be this fusion at the heart of human experience that for Eckhart involves the divine giving birth to itself.

Eckhart uses philosophical senses of logos (word, speech, discourse, relation, ratio; what distinguishes the human from other animals) to explain its religious sense associated with Incarnation. We might say he uses logos as a name and descriptor for the intellectual soul’s fused active relationality.

“Why is ‘Word’ the keyword? It signifies relation. The Word unifies the speaker and the spoken content” (p. 36).

“‘Word’ in its essence refers to the intellect; the one who speaks and that which is spoken occur in the Word. The Word has a relational character; it unifies within itself those that are separate as natural things…. Eckhart conceives of man as Word, not primarily as a thing of nature” (p. 37).

It seems that for Eckhart, the Biblical Word and the Incarnation refer to the fused activity of the intellectual soul.

“[R]eason conceives of itself as an image identical to its exemplar, which is within it in eidetic fashion, that is, as actual intellectual being, uncreated and uncreatable” (p. 43).

As in Plotinus, for Eckhart the intellectual soul has a direct link with the divine, and may be said to contain metaphysical realities within itself.

“The unity of reflective self-consciousness and ethical orientation follows from this. The way reason — always in the qualified sense — is, it has nothing in common with anything else” (ibid).

“Eckhart does not say: ‘Until now, you have misunderstood Christianity.’ He says: ‘You have misunderstood yourselves, and as long as you persist in this error, you cannot provide Christianity with the intellectual and ethical form which is possible today, in 1300′” (p. 44).

Eckhart makes the astonishing claim that Aristotle, the Old Testament, and the New Testament all teach the same thing. According to Flasch, he even says that the Bible contains all natural philosophy. A first clue to what such sayings mean is that he says he will explain the Bible using nothing but the natural reasons of the philosophers. He will not appeal to revelation to justify what he says. This is not entirely atypical among medieval theologians. Flasch notes that even Anselm of Canterbury, a rather cautious thinker who precedes the main development of Latin scholastic philosophy, considered it a theological best practice to minimize the use of conversation-ending appeals to revelation.

“What previous readings of Eckhart often lack are linguistic discipline, semantic specification, and a philological basis: the way we have labeled and interpreted Eckhart and the categories into which we attempt to squeeze him even today were created at a time when his Latin works were still unknown. And yet they far outnumber his German works, and their tradition is more secure” (p. 46).

Flasch highlights Eckhart’s systematic use of the qualifier “insofar as”, an Aristotelian device that picks out and distinguishes one sense of something that may be considered in several ways. This he combines with a radical notion of what he calls primary determinations. These include the traditional four “transcendentals” Being, Oneness, Truth, and Goodness, as well as Idea, Wisdom, Love, and Justice. In a rather Platonic way, Eckhart will say things like “Insofar as we are just, Justice itself operates through us.”

“If something is, the primary determination is completely present within it. Then not only is the primary determination’s product or its similarity within us; the primary determination itself is present…. Everything that the primary determination itself effects, it effects not toward the outside, but rather into itself. Being has no outside. Again, those imaginative ideas taken from the working methods of craftsmen are problematic. The effecting of the primary determinations is not a producing…. Their effecting consists of making what has been established resemble them, of making what has been established into a being. Eckhart teaches elementary concepts of reciprocity…. Someone who has not learned from the prologues that the active pulls the passive toward itself, that is, that it makes it active, cannot interpret Eckhart’s birth cycle in the proper Eckhartian sense” (p. 80).

“Being, Oneness, and Goodness are active primary determinations, not abstractions. Thus, one has to say that this is God. As Aristotle saw the being of green in the being of the tree, so Eckhart sees the being of things in Being itself” (p. 82).

“I must not speak of Being or of ens in general in the same way that I can speak of this or that individual being…. In substance, they are in each other. This is what pious people mean when they say the world is created. This needs to be explained. Otherwise, the imagining thinking, that is, thinking that creates mental images, edges forward and makes us believe that the creation of the world consisted of God externalizing things from within himself” (pp. 82-83).

“In Eckhart’s time, the concept of pantheism… did not exist. Eckhart removed the issue… by differentiating… between primary determination and individual thing, but he made it clear that Being was not distinguished in the way that individual things were differentiated” (p. 83).

“This theology is short and clear. And it argues philosophically. It easily solves all or almost all questions that can be asked about God, and it does so in the light of natural reason…. There is nothing here of the abyss, nothing of the blinding darkness of Dionysius…. Moses says that God created the world in six days, but he said this for simple people; we know that Being is directly present in self-positing. People say that God created the world, but we know that Being continually posits itself anew in the present” (ibid).

“Placing his Biblical interpretation… before the doctrine of primary determinations — that means contradicting Eckhart” (p. 85).

“[T]ruth, Eckhart says, belongs to the intellect; it indicates relation or includes it within itself. Then follows a strange sentence […]: ‘A relation, however, has its entire being from the soul and as such is a real category, just as time, although it has all its being from the soul, is nonetheless a subspecies of quantity, that is, of a real category'” (p. 89).

“This sentence is strange for several reasons. It shifts from the statement ‘I am the Truth’ to a general theory of relations. Truth, Eckhart says, either is a relation or includes a relation, but a relation stems entirely from the soul and as such is an actual ‘predicament’. Every philosopher admitted that there existed relations purely of thought…. But no one who argued for real relations claimed that they were entirely derived from the soul” (ibid).

This is in Eckhart’s Parisian Questions. Here he rejects the argument of Aquinas that being comes before life and knowing, saying, “I, however, believe the exact opposite” (quoted, p. 91). Eckhart indeed explicitly puts knowing before being.

“[H]e reminds us in good Aristotelian fashion that mathematical objects cannot be considered according to intent or good, and that something that has being is identical [sic] to the good. Good and evil exist in the things themselves, but true and false only in the soul” (p. 91).

“Eckhart successfully describes the special status of the image. It still has, so to speak, a foot in the world of natural things; it consists of wood or stone or canvas; it has an efficient cause and often also an aim. But as an image, it does not have being; rather, it is the relation to the thing it represents…. Insofar as it is knowledge, it belongs to a different world. In questions such as this one, philosophical analysis has to be detached from the imagination” (p. 92).

“Properties are not beings; only their substance has being” (ibid).

“The intellect must not be a specific physical nature if it is to be able to comprehend all physical natures. The knower is the living negation of the known” (p. 93).

Eckhart makes the implicit “negativity” of Aristotelian intellect explicit, and applies it also to the soul.

“Our intellect is nothing, and our intellectual knowledge is not being…. This means that we are talking about the intellect as the actual having of universal objects, and about perception as the grasping of perceivable things. Not about the eye as a sensory organ, not about the equipment of the soul with the faculty of knowledge. Eckhart has transformed the question of an angel’s knowing and being into a general negative theory of sensory and intellectual recognition and claims. The intellect as such and also perception as such are neither here nor now, and insofar as they are neither, they are nothing, but insofar as they are natural faculties of the soul, they are something” (pp. 95-96).

“Here, in what appears to be an excessively dry critique of the Aristotelian ontology of the schools of the time, Eckhart lays the foundation of his thinking. He is looking for the special condition of the intellectual being, its nonmateriality, its energeia-like unity of knower and knowledge” (p. 99).

“Thus, intellectual knowledge is being God’s form or becoming God’s form, since God also is intellectual knowledge and is not being” (p. 100).

In different contexts, Eckhart says both that God is being and that God is not being.

“In summary, the first Parisian questions seem to be concerned with God and angels, but they are actually exercises in the search for intellectual being. They lead us to the edges of ontology, which cannot grasp image and knowledge. Its consequence is that we imagine God and the soul as thing-like. But that way is best forgotten” (p. 101).

“[W]isdom is infinite. Within it, everything always continues. Where it actually is, it is continually re-created. It is not born once and for all; its eternity is perpetual becoming” (p. 103).

Eckhart clarifies that creation is not meant as an occurrence in time.

“Eckhart, we must remember, permitted everyone so inclined to call God being. Now he proposes to say ‘Being’ (esse) and ‘Justice’ (iusticia) instead of ‘God'” (p. 104).

“God is Being. This tenet remains. But since Heidegger, the sentence has had a different ring to it from what Eckhart intended it to mean” (ibid).

“The human mind is the eagle that ascends to the origins of things” (ibid).

“What Eckhart calls Being is the productivity of the primordial mind, which produces images of ideas that the human intellect grasps as the immanent origin of the experiential things. Being is defined through the intellect, not through presence, not as a whole of facticity” (ibid).

“Being” taken in a positive sense especially means “intelligible being”.

“Primordial mind” is intellect outside of space and time. In this regard, Eckhart is closer to Augustine’s strong emphasis on eternity than to Hegel’s valorization of becoming.

“The philosopher, like the lover, does not look for the origin from which something developed, that is, its efficient cause, nor for what it is good for, that is, its purpose. Analyzing efficient and final causes is indispensable for investigation into natural things, but Eckhart is searching for the pure form as the true Being. He construes the divine life and the life of the deified man, the homo divinus, as a disclosure of form outside efficient and final causes…. [P]hilosophy was the eagle-like ascent to the realm of the grounds of being, the return to living substances that have their purposes within themselves, the elimination of thing-oriented ways of thinking, and the path to a proper life…. The proper human life is the aimless settling into the perpetually new Wisdom that is also Justice and Godhead” (p. 105).

Flasch points out numerous Platonic-sounding phrases in Eckhart, like the “pure form as the true being” above.

That efficient causality has no role in first philosophy is how I read Aristotle. But the neoplatonic commentator Ammonius (a student of Proclus, and teacher of Simplicius, Philoponus, and Damascius) argues that the first cause is also an efficient cause, and not only “that for the sake of which”, as Aristotle says. Most medieval writers (certainly Aquinas) follow Ammonius on this, and assume that the first cause is an efficient cause. Eckhart is an important exception.

Eckhart’s negative conclusion about “final causes” applies to external ends of a utilitarian sort, but ignores Aristotle’s emphasis on entelechy, which involves precisely an end that is intrinsic to a being’s being what it is. I want to say that we are our ends, as confirmed by our actions. In Eckhart as in many medieval writers, the later construct of univocal “substantial form” takes over most of the large role that Aristotle assigns to entelechy. It is admittedly hard to see entelechy as completely independent of time, which I think is what leads Hegel to reverse the traditional order and make eternity dependent on becoming.

“Eckhart’s God sheds the regalia of otherworldly imperial honors and endorses man as his own kind” (ibid).

Eckhart develops a theology that clearly rules out what Brandom rightly decries as the “command-obedience model” of normativity. As in Plotinus, a human’s connection to the Good instead involves an intimate sharing, and even a kind of reciprocity.

“The active above attracts the initially passive below. The below becomes the eagle that flies up to the hidden grounds of the world. It is our reifying contemplation that does not recognize the coincidental dynamic in the process between the above and the below” (ibid).

The active above works as an attractor. This is important. Though Eckhart doesn’t seem to explicitly talk about the teleology that Kant called “internal” and that on my reading is the mode of operation of the first cause in Aristotle, he nonetheless seems to come to a similar conclusion. For both Eckhart and Aristotle, the “below” is attracted to the “above”. But Eckhart is closer to Plotinus and the monotheistic mainstream in his insistence that the First is a source as well as an end.

“Eckhart declares… that he intends to proceed as a philosopher, and he adheres to this stated method. He aims to answer all or almost all questions about God with philosophical arguments, and in clear and simple terms…. This aspiration appears so impracticable, so immoderate that some Eckhart scholars have felt the need to understate it in order to present Eckhart in a better light. But Eckhart asserted this claim sharply and clearly. We can choose to reject it, but we should refrain from reinterpreting and changing it” (p. 109).

“The intellect is supernature. Plato’s intellectual world will become Leibniz’s ‘realm of grace'” (p. 111).

“Every reader of Eckhart has to fight his own imagination, which presents justice to him like an additional property of a person that is dependent on the person” (ibid).

“Eckhart’s God is Being and Unity, Justice and Wisdom. He is the all-encompassing attraction or love…. God is the original formal act, the primus actus formalis…; he discloses the having of form.” (ibid).

Again we have attraction, rather than a making, a push, or a command.

“The primary determinations attract to themselves everything that follows” (p. 112).

And again we have attraction. By this description, Eckhart’s primary determinations are after all what Aristotle would call ends that are sought for themselves, and not for the sake of something else.

“What matters in the context of moral actions is the intention, not the external act…. This justice is before and outside external actions” (ibid).

Eckhart is not the only medieval philosopher to say something like this. Peter Abelard similarly emphasizes the importance of intentions in ethics.

“Justice, in Eckhart’s writings, becomes the life of the mind. Thus, the just man finds peace in works and does not expect rewards; his ethical actions have value in themselves” (p. 113).

One of the charges against Eckhart was that he denied the importance of external works and ritual observances. But the context was implicitly things done for the sake of something else. That, I presume, is what Eckhart meant. But ethical actions have value in themselves. They have their end in themselves. They are not done for the sake of something else. And, he says according to Flasch, the just man finds peace in works. Whatever may be said about his relation to orthodoxy, Eckhart is on firm Platonic and Aristotelian ground here.

“Eckhart does everything he can not to construe God’s relation to the world as having developed arbitrarily, although there are people who imagine that this is precisely what proves the freedom of a personal God” (p. 119).

Like Albert the Great as previously discussed by Flasch, Eckhart puts intellect decisively ahead of will in his theology. To my layman’s eye Aquinas seems to formally maintain the same, but to make more concessions to voluntarism.

“Only thinking overcomes the false imagination to which many people succumb: they imagine God and the world as separate and relate the two as efficient cause and effect” (p. 121).

So there is someone else besides Aristotle who agrees that the first cause is not an efficient cause.

“[I]n divinis, that is, in the nature of God, but also in the homo divinus, in grace and salvation, there is no place for the category of causality, only the category of the ideational ground of reason, of ratio, which shows itself as disclosure of form. Aquinas described grace in man as the presence of God as efficient cause…. Eckhart’s philosophical reform consisted also of silencing the voice of efficient causality. Only grounds of an ideational-formal kind are at once wholly immanent and wholly transcendent…. They make possible the qualified concept of the living that has its telos within itself, just as Aristotle conceptualized it in the twelfth book of his Metaphysics” (p. 122).

Aha, now we even get living with a telos within itself, and a reference to book Lambda. Previously we saw him exclude external “final causes”, while remaining silent about the “internal” kind that are of far greater interest. But here the internal kind seems to be affirmed.

Eckhart’s first commentary on Genesis “rests on the combination of the Neoplatonizing metaphysics of Being and Oneness with the doctrine of intellect as presented by Anaxagoras, Aristotle, and Averroes and as corresponding with Augustine’s theory of mens. Eckhart’s anthropology, like his philosophical theology, is also a theory of intellect. This becomes especially clear when Eckhart speaks of man as God’s image. The Platonizing metaphysics of Being joins the philosophy of intellect and produces an ethics. Eckhart’s ethics presents the concept of the homo divinus” (ibid; see also The Goal of Human Life; Properly Human, More Than Human?).

“Eckhart writes that the reader should take the Biblical narrative as parable. He is supposed to let go of the narrative as events and facts” (p. 125).

“If someone says that God commands, then his commanding is to be interpreted in the light of his intellectual nature: his is not an external commanding. He is not ordering about. His ordering consists in providing things with their form” (p. 127).

Those who have understanding do not need to be commanded to be good. Commands are for those who lack understanding.

“The intellect is the root of freedom…. The goal of acting freely is to become a deified man, homo divinus. Within the deified man, the just man and justice are one. For him, the Good itself is the goal and in itself is its own reward. He does not look for external reward. Punishments, too, are intrinsic to acting. The good life consists of a consequent inner orientation, of inner being, not of doing. Action implements the way to being and life. God does not order any external act” (pp. 128-129).

In his commentary on the Book of Wisdom, Eckhart “continues his battle against the advancement of reified ideas, as though Being were a retrospective abstraction of many things or as though it were added to things in the form of a property. It is a rejection not so much of the representation of things in the imagination as of their dominance within philosophical thought” (p. 132).

“Eckhart recommends substituting primary determinations’ names for one another as a method. We may as well say Being instead of ‘God’ or Oneness or Justice or Wisdom. This was not uncommon among philosophers; Plato said ‘the idea of the Good’ instead of ‘God’ when he was not referring to the gods of popular religion; Aristotle, ‘the prime unmoved mover’, Avicenna, ‘the necessary being’, Aquinas , ‘being that exists by itself'” (p. 135).

“As we have seen, other primary determinations, such as Oneness, Wisdom, and Justice, are supposedly uncreatable. If God is called the esse, it is also uncreatable. Different meanings of ‘esse’ are operating here. Readers of Eckhart have to learn how to handle the flexibility of the concept” (p. 136).

“‘Many,’ Eckhart says, imagine creation as an effecting, as it were, toward the outside” (p. 137).

“Eckhart also rejects the idea that man should act well in order to receive earthly and heavenly rewards. The ethical good is an intrinsic value, not a means to an end” (p. 192).

“The sermons criticize the theology of the time, not just the wrong kinds of living. They correct the dominance of the imagination of stable, ontologically autonomous things, which hinders man from understanding himself and God and from grasping that his ‘neighbor’ lives beyond the ocean, too” (p. 198).

“The humble man compels God so that God must give himself according to his nature, and indeed must give himself wholly, for he is indivisible. God must: that is the message. His grace is not a random selection of blessed individuals out of a mass of sinners. God must; this motif appears again and again, not in the sense of an external compulsion, but rather from his nature, which he follows freely. Thus, he gives me everything that he gave Jesus, without exception; he gives the soul the power to birth; and thus it births itself and all things” (p. 200).

Peter Abelard, who was interested in safeguarding divine goodness, had argued more generally that God can only do what he does. Albert the Great had argued for the possibility of purely natural beatitude.

“Someone who speaks of God but does not talk about his oneness with the ground of the soul is not speaking of the true God. The ground of the soul has nothing in common with anything; it is not like anything else and is thus like God” (p. 201).

Here again we have Eckhart’s version of the intellectual soul. The “ground of the soul” would presumably be intellect, since it is described in the same terms.

“The soul exists more in Justice than in the human body” (p. 210).

The human soul carries intellect and the One within it, Eckhart might affirm with Plotinus. Plotinus is the only other writer I can think of who has as exalted a view of the soul as Eckhart.

“One does not learn the correct understanding of the world from the Bible; one must have developed this understanding in order not to read the Bible mindlessly” (p. 212).

“‘Reason’ needs to be conceptualized differently than a ‘power’. It is by no means a sort of mental hand that grasps something and thereby comprehends it” (p. 213).

The Reason he wants to call upon is about the interpretation of form.

“The truly wise life consists not in contemplative joy, but rather in the directing of external action to the best thing that love demands (p. 222).

Here we see how he does make a place for external action.

“The just man exists in Justice. No vision or intuition tells us this is possible, but only the philosophical analysis of the concrete’s containedness within the universal (abstractum) — with a realism of universals taken for granted” (p. 229).

Realism about universals here seems to acquire both a distinctive ethical dimension, and something like a neoplatonic “procession” from the universals in the soul that I have not encountered before in discussions of realism and nominalism.

“In pre-nominalist fashion, Eckhart takes it for granted that Justice (Truth, Wisdom, Goodness) is the common and real determinant shared by all just men and then proceeds by eliminating the idea of making regarding the activity of Justice (Truth, Wisdom, Goodness)” (p. 227).

Eliminating the idea of making in thinking about the activity of justice makes sense as part of a program of de-emphasizing efficient causes and accidents in favor of substance and internal telos, such as it now seems Eckhart supported.

The Self in Plotinus

Besides standing at a half-way point between Plato and Aristotle and later articulations of monotheistic theology, Plotinus occupies a special place in the history of subjectivity. In a 2016 document “Power, Subject, Sovereignty”, prepared for her confirmation as a director of research at the Centre National de la Rechereche Scientifique, Gwenaëlle Aubry treats her extensive work on Plotinus as the connecting theme of her philosophical investigations. I’m still waiting for the 2nd edition of her Aristotle book to arrive, and wanted in the meantime to extend my coverage of her work on subjectivity in Plotinus.

For the Routledge Handbook of Neoplatonism (2014), Aubry wrote an outstanding more introductory article that was translated to English as “Metaphysics of soul and self in Plotinus”.

“One of the great singularities of the philosophy of Plotinus consists in thinking of the self for its own sake and, in particular, in producing a concept of it different from that of soul. This philosophical breakthrough is inseparable from the discovery of immediate reflexivity, that is, the subject’s ability to apprehend itself independently of its relation to an object or to another subject. In Plotinus, however, this reflexivity occurs only in an interrogative form” (p. 310).

“In other words, it does not, as in Descartes, assume the form of an intuition by means of which the subject, grasping itself as consciousness, would, at the same time, have an evident revelation of its essence….[W]e will see how Plotinus, although he seems to think of the self by means of the connected notions of soul and human being, but also of individual or even of consciousness, ceaselessly produces and renews a gap between them and the self” (ibid).

Plotinus was the first to assert a kind of immediate reflexivity, and indeed arguably the first to speak of generalized consciousness in something like a modern sense, independent of particular contents. But this reflexivity remains associated with a sort of Socratic questioning, and does not degenerate into the dogmatic intuition of a present self that we find in Descartes.

“The self properly so called, which Plotinus refers to as the hēmeis (“we”), is distinct both from the essential or separated soul and from the soul linked to the body. Situated rather than defined, it cannot be substantified. To use Plotinian terminology, the hēmeis is neither god nor animal, but rather the power to become either one. These two possible and exclusive identifications depend on the orientation it gives to its consciousness. Consciousness therefore does not appear, as it will in Descartes, as a revelation of identity, but as a means of identification” (ibid).

“Another singular aspect of the philosophy of Plotinus is that it affirms the existence of a
separated soul, which remains in the Intellect and alien to both the powers and the passions of the body. This doctrine was to be rejected by the later Neoplatonists, particularly Iamblichus and Proclus…, but it occupies a fundamental place in Plotinian thought” (p. 311).

The “separated soul” is a unique doctrine of Plotinus that seems to have indirectly influenced the more unified scholastic notion of an “intellectual soul”. Later, Aubry refers to it as an “intellective soul”. By means of it Plotinus gives us an especially close connection to the divine.

“[I]f the Plotinian subject grasps itself only in an interrogative form, that is, not as something obvious but as something strange, it is because it undergoes the experience of several modes of relation to itself” (ibid).

“[S]trictly speaking, the intellective soul cannot be counted among the parts of the soul, and yet, it is indeed ours (hēmeteron); in fact, he continues, “it is ours without being ours … It is ours when we use it; it is not ours when we do not use it” (pp. 311-312).

Here Plotinus remains faithful to Aristotle in maintaining that intellect is not a proper part of the soul, and yet can still be said to be “ours”.

“Like the total Intellect, and each of the intellects of which it is composed, the higher soul is characterized by intuitive thought, that is, by the simultaneous, inarticulated and non-propositional grasp of a complex content – comparable to a glance that embraces all the features of a face in a single vision” (p. 312).

This is precisely the kind of originary intellectual intuition that Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel would deny. As Kant would say, this kind of unitary vision could only be a result of synthesis. But for Plotinus, unitary intellectual intuition is the starting point of all thought, which Aristotelian “thinking things through” only weakly imitates. Nonetheless, he retains a partial faithfulness to Aristotle in maintaining that this does not include a putatively full intuition of self.

“The soul’s forgetfulness of the Intellect is also a forgetting of its own intellective origin –
an origin that nevertheless has not come and gone, nor does it belong to a mythic past,
but that remains in a state of unperceived presence. This forgetfulness is characteristic of
pre-philosophical consciousness. Unaware of its dignity, soul is fascinated by externality:
the body, the sensible. Narcissistic, it prefers its reflection to itself, ignorant of the fact that
without it, this reflection, which is merely the effect of its power, could not subsist” (ibid).

For Plotinus, we remain potentially in touch with the separate intellective soul. All that is required to experience it is that we choose to turn ourselves toward it, but Plotinus says many people never make this choice, and instead remain ensnared in what Aubry calls narcissism.

“[T]his essential self constituted by the separated soul must indeed be distinguished from the hēmeis and from what we may call the biographical subject, that is, the bearer of a history, a memory, and the form of consciousness that is linked to them” (ibid).

“Like memory and individual history, consciousness disappears in the Intellect. More precisely, it gives way to a feeling of presence in which the duality between subject and object is abolished. In this state, Plotinus writes, we are ‘only potentially ourselves’ (Enn[eads].IV.4[28].2.5–8). We merge with that which we contemplate” (p. 313).

Here we really do have a “metaphysics of presence”.

“This state in which the subject no longer experiences itself as such, but in its unity
with being and with the others, is nevertheless designated by Plotinus as the site of its
greatest proximity to itself, at the same time as it is genuine self-knowledge: “Being in this
way, we are more than anything conscious of ourselves (hautois synetoi), and we acquire
knowledge of ourselves as we make ourselves one” (Enn. V.8.[31].11.31–3)” (ibid).

The subject experiences itself “in its unity with being and with the others”. Here we can see a precedent for the nonprivate interiority that distinguishes Augustine’s thought from that of Descartes and Locke. Clearly we have here a non-empirical notion of self.

“Still, the question arises of what the subject, thus identified with the intellective soul and unburdened of all biographical content, then grasps of itself. At this essential level, can we still speak of identity? Of individuality?” (ibid).

“The paradox of the Plotinian personal self is thus illuminated: if, for Plotinus, one is never
more oneself than when one is no longer conscious of oneself, this is because the subject identified with its essential soul is not abolished in the universal. Rather, it is identified with the very source of its individuality, that is, with the singular viewpoint of its intellect upon the total Intellect, as well as with the logos that bears the power of its own becoming” (ibid).

“Indeed, the notion of a separated soul orients Plotinian ethics, which has no other goal than to transform this constant but ordinarily unperceived presence into a conscious presence. Far from being immediate or mechanical, this transformation is given as a demanding, normed itinerary, whose various stages correspond to various degrees of virtue…. This ethical itinerary, and we shall return to this point, is inseparably a trajectory of consciousness, which gradually turns away from the body to orient itself towards the separated soul” (ibid).

Once again, here is a real “metaphysics of presence”.

“In truth, then, the Plotinian beyond is very close: to reach it, it is enough to make oneself deaf to the tumult of the body, to release oneself from narcissistic fascination. For Plotinus, Odysseus represents the anti-Narcissus: he is the one who was able to resist the spells of the sensible, the charms of Circe and of Calypso (Enn. I.6[1].8.18–20). Yet the Plotinian Odyssey is a return to something that is always-already-there, which is the locus in us of a divine autarky, lucidity and happiness” (p. 314).

Again, for Plotinus the divine is very near.

“[S]trictly speaking, for Plotinus the soul does not descend. What descends, or mixes with the body to animate it, is the power, the dynamis, that emanates from the separated soul” (ibid).

Here we have a profound difference from Aristotle. In Aristotle, soul is strictly emergent. Souls don’t pre-exist and there is no “descent” at all, only an upward movement.

“In its confrontation with the body and with temporality, noēsis [pure thought] is transformed into dianoia [thinking things through]. This is the moment by which the soul is truly constituted qua soul, in its difference from the Intellect” (ibid).

Plotinus has the unprecedented idea that soul is constituted as a “procession” from Intellect.

The pre-existent “separate” soul lives eternally in unitary intuition. For Plotinus, ordinary human “thinking things through” is the result of the extension, folding, and division of originary intuition into time. This “descent” is necessary in order for anything to be manifested, and therefore not to be equated with anything like Biblical original sin.

“The descent can be considered as a fall or a fault only when dianoia and the consciousness linked to it, forgetful of the separated soul, are completely oriented towards the body” (ibid).

For Plotinus, we are “fallen” beings not by virtue of our embodiment, but only insofar as we are individually lost in the soul’s narcissistic pursuit of its own reflection.

“As early as chapter 2 of Enn. IV.8[6], Plotinus states a principle: ‘It is not a bad thing for the soul to provide the body with the power of good and being, since it is not true that all providence applied to lower reality prevents this providential agent from remaining in what is best’ (2.24–5)” (ibid).

Soul in Plotinus is not just something that descends. It is the very agent of providence. But it is capable of being waylaid or losing its way.

“[T]he World Soul [as distinct from soul in general] does not “descend”. What is “sent” into the world is not it, but its “lowest power” (dynamis). Yet it is precisely because the World Soul does not descend that it is able to govern the universe, to set it in order into a cosmos, a beautiful totality. This point of doctrine is explicitly formulated elsewhere, for instance at Enn. IV.3[27].6.21: “The souls that incline toward the intelligible world have a greater power”; or else Enn. II.9[33].2, where one reads that the World Soul governs “simply by looking at what is before it, thanks to its wonderful power. The more it devotes itself to contemplation, the more it is beautiful and powerful” (15–16)” (p. 315).

Unlike Aristotle and the scholastics, Plotinus also speaks of a Soul of the World that is distinct from individual souls.

“This description of the mode of governance of the World Soul is nothing other than an application of the Plotinian model of causality. This states that from every being in act (energeiai) there necessarily emanates an active, productive power (dynamis), which in turn is the cause of a new being and a new act” (ibid).

This sheds light on how the descent of the soul is not inherently a fall. It is part of the larger cosmic process of procession (known via the Latin translations of Avicenna as “emanation”), which is what in Plotinus takes the place of creation. Plotinus seems to claim that when we turn toward the separated soul, from us too will proceed or emanate a productive power, capable anew of spontaneously carrying forward our engagement with the world in all its complexity. This spontaneous engagement, freed from narcissistic pursuit of our own reflection, is for Plotinus strictly more capable than a narcissistically involved engagement.

It is not worldly engagement as such but narcissistic attachment to worldly things that corresponds to the Fall.

“For the individual soul as for the World Soul, however, Plotinus emphasizes that it is this power, this dynamis, and not the soul itself, that descends and is mixed with the body. This is why the Aristotelian definition of the soul as first entelechy of the body must be opposed by the assertion that the soul is itself in act, already entelekheia, without the body, and that only for this reason there can be a body. Thus, the synamphoteron, that is, the living body, is not a mixture of body and soul, but only of the body and the power emanated from the soul” (ibid).

Again we see the dramatic difference between Aristotle’s modest experience-oriented and biologically grounded emergent notion of soul, and the grand metaphysical or divine pre-existent intellective soul posited by Plotinus.

“If the higher soul does not descend, if only its emanated dynamis is mixed with the body, how should we understand Plotinus’ words that the soul ‘leaps’ towards its own body? The answer is that this motion is what constitutes the soul qua soul, in its difference from the Intellect, or again that by which noēsis is modified into dianoia. Indeed, dianoia is the result of the encounter of intellective thought with time. It deploys the immediacy and totality of intuition into successive moments, to respond to the demands of the body, of action, and of a life diffracted by temporality (Enn. III.7[45].11). Thus, it must be considered “the sign of a diminishment of the Intellect” (Enn. IV.3[27].18.1–7)” (ibid).

Here we have a major source for all the arguments about whether intellect should be conceived as originally immediately intuitive or as originally discursive. Many people read Aristotle as if his notion of intellect were the intuitive one that Plotinus articulates explicitly. I think Aristotle is closer to Kant and Hegel’s position that intellect is inherently discursive, and that unifying intuitions only come about as the result of processes of synthesis.

“This movement seems to attest an oscillation between two conceptions of the subject: the reflexive subject and the subject of attribution (the logical or ontological substrate). What in fact appears, however, is that once again the reflexive subject – the hēmeis – does not allow itself to be reduced to the subject of attribution…. In this irreducibility of the hēmeis to the various levels of the soul, we may see an effect of Plotinus’ discovery of the difference between subject-consciousness and subject-substrate” (p. 317).

Here indeed we have the root of modern notions of “the subject” as consciousness. This same gap that Aubry speaks of is what leads Augustine to deny that the soul, spirit, or mind is to be identified with a subject as substrate.

“Consciousness is therefore not so much constitutive of identity as it is a condition for identification. We are not what we are aware of: quite the contrary, we become what we become aware of. If the reflexive question ends up in the acknowledgement of a duality, becoming aware, for its part, is equivalent to the choice of an identity” (p. 320).

For Plotinus, consciousness in itself is not a foundation for personal identity, as it is in Descartes and Locke. Instead, Aubry locates the basis of individuality for Plotinus in the “separated” soul.

The idea that we make a sort of primordial choice of what kind of being we are is unprecedented.

“[T]he constant activity within us of the separated soul is the necessary condition for such everyday cognitive operations as judgment…. It is in the latter — identical to the pure ousia, that is, the separated soul — that the foundation of individuality resides, together with the most intense life and an unalterable happiness” (p. 321).

The suggestion that the separated soul is involved in judgment is new to me, and intriguing. This makes it seem not so “separated” after all.

“Plotinus, for his part, is able to conceive both the permanent, impersonal subject and the
ethical subject defined as what makes the choice of its identity” (ibid).

Simple Substance?

I tremendously admire Leibniz, but have always been very puzzled by his notion of “substance”. Clearly it is different from that of Aristotle, which I still ought to develop more carefully, based on the hints in my various comments on Aristotle’s very distinctive approaches to “dialectic” and “being”. (See also Form, Substance.)

Leibniz compounds a criterion of simplicity — much emphasized in the neoplatonic and scholastic traditions — with his own very original notion of the complete concept of a thing, which is supposed to notionally encompass every possible detail of its description. He also emphasizes that every substance is “active”. Leibniz’ famous monads are identified by him with substances.

A substance is supposed to be simple. He explicitly says this means it has no parts. In part, he seems to have posited substances as a sort of spiritual atoms, with the idea that it is these that fundamentally make up the universe. The true atoms, Leibniz says, are fundamentally spiritual rather than material, though he also had great interest in science, and wanted to vindicate both mathematical and Aristotelian physics. Leibniz’ notion of spiritual atoms seems to combine traditional attributes of the scholastic “intellectual soul” (which, unlike anything in Aristotle, was explicitly said by its advocates to be a simple substance) with something like Berkeley’s thesis that what can truly be said to exist are just minds.

On the other hand, a substance is supposed to be the real correlate of a “complete” concept. The complete concept of a thing for Leibniz comprises absolutely everything that is, was, or will be true of the thing. This is related to his idea that predicates truly asserted of a grammatical subject must be somehow “contained” within the subject. Leibniz also famously claimed that all apparent interaction between substances is only an appearance. The details of apparent interaction are to be explained by the details contained within the complete concept of each thing. This is also related to his notions of pre-established harmony and possible worlds, according to which God implicitly coordinates all the details of all the complete concepts of things in a world, and makes judgments of what is good at the level of the infinite detail of entire worlds. One of Kant’s early writings was a defense of real interaction against Leibniz.

Finally, every monad is said by Leibniz to contain both a complete microcosm of the world as expressed from its distinctive point of view, and an infinite series of monads-within-monads within it. Every monad has or is a different point of view from every other, but they all reflect each other.

At least in most of his writings, Leibniz accordingly wanted to reduce all notions of relation to explanations in terms of substances. In late correspondence with the Jesuit theologian Bartholomew Des Bosses, he sketched an alternate view that accepted the reality of relations. But generally, Leibniz made the logically valid argument that it is far simpler to explain the universe in terms of each substance’s unique relation to God, rather than in terms of infinities of infinities of relations between relations. For Leibniz all those infinities of infinities are still present, but only in the mind of God, and in reflection in the interior of each monad.

Leibniz’ logically simpler account of relations seems like an extravagant theological fancy, but however we may regard that, and however much we may ultimately sympathize with Kant over Leibniz on the reality of interaction and relations, Leibniz had very advanced intuitions of logical-mathematical structure, and he is fundamentally right that from a formal point of view, extensional properties of things can all be interpreted in an “intensional” way. Intension in logic refers to internal content of a concept, and to necessary and sufficient conditions that constitute its formal definition. This is independent of whatever views we may have about minds. (See also Form as a Unique Thing.)

So, there is much of interest here, but I don’t see how these ultra-rich notional descriptions can be true of what are also supposed to be logical atoms with no parts. In general, I don’t see how having a rich description could be compatible with being logically atomic. I think the notion of logical atomicity is only arrived at through abstraction, and doesn’t apply to real things.

Ethos

Our ethical development, or what Aristotle would call our ethos — our piece of Hegelian Spirit, as it were — builds on our emotional development. A relatively harmonious emotional constitution will be naturally open to the influence of ethical development grounded in mutual recognition.

It seems to me that this is already enough for a fully rich account of a human being. If we have ethos, then things like will, ego, intellectual soul, and mind-as-container seem superfluous.