Free Will in Plotinus

“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 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).