Q53: Based on the readings available to you from The Essential Plotinus, discuss the relationship between One, Nous, soul, and matter.

53. Based on the readings available to you from The Essential Plotinus, discuss the relationship between One, Nous, soul, and matter.

[AT note: Outline from Chris Tweedt 2011, but I added numbers.  Below, I give an alternative outline based on Kenny on Plotinus.]

Preface: From highest to lowest ontologically is One, Nous, Soul, then matter. Each one necessarily emanates the next lowest (iff there is one). I will address each one, discussing its relationship to the others. In the end, it should be clear what their relationships are.

Analogy

            Intelligence/Being : Artist

            Soul : Artist’s idea

            Matter : Raw material

            Ensouled thing : product

1.     One/Good

a.     Highest: causes of unity are higher than the things they cause to be unified.

b.     One ≠ Being

                                               i.     Being are composite. One is unified

                                             ii.     Being includes all (diverse) beings. One does not. (75,76)

                                            iii.     Being/Intelligence thinks itself, so there’s a duality. Not for One. (76, 82)

c.     One ≠ all things

                                               i.     If it were, it would be all things together or individually. If together, it’d be posterior. If individually, it wouldn’t be their source. So, it’s prior. If prior, not identical. (173)

                                             ii.     If identical with all things, there would be no diversity. But there is. (173)

           

2.     Nous/Being

a.     Second-highest

                                               i.     Necessarily emanates from the One. (98, 99)

1.     “What is perfect becomes productive.”

2.     “It begets necessarily because it is perfect…”

                                             ii.     The One only produces the greatest things that are less than it. (98)

b.     Nous = Being

                                               i.     The act of Being/Intelligence is pure act, so undistinguishable acts. (53)

                                             ii.     Interdependence: Intelligence gives existence to Being by thinking it. Being, by being an object of thought, gives Intelligence its thinking and so existence. (95)

c.     Nous = All intelligences

                                               i.     As a genus is to a species (51)

                                             ii.     It knows them and it only knows itself (it is pure act). (50)

d.     Function

                                               i.     To itself: intellection (65)

3.     Soul

a.     Third-highest

                                               i.     Intelligence produces Soul just as One produces Intelligence. (98)

b.     Soul ≠ Being/Nous

                                               i.     Soul is potentially combined with matter. Being/Nous is pure act.

c.     Soul ≠ One

                                               i.     Soul gives things qualities it is itself not. One does not. (74)

                                             ii.     Soul is not unified because it has many diverse faculties. (74)

d.     Soul = All souls

                                               i.     As a genus to a species (65)

                                             ii.     They all have the same essence (65)

                                            iii.     Analogy: Soul : sunlight :: individual souls : rays (131)

e.     Soul ≠ a particular soul

                                               i.     An individual soul is like the sunlight marked off (131) by either:

1.     Being embodied (134, 143) or

2.     Having mental operations carried over from previous embodiments. (134, 143)

f.      Functions (65)

                                               i.     To Intelligence: intellection

                                             ii.     To itself: preservation

                                            iii.     To matter: administration

4.     Matter

a.     Souls unite with matter.

b.     Why would soul unite with this?

                                               i.     Soul contains all possible grades of souls. Matter is necessary to make some souls less noble. (65,68)

                                             ii.     Souls want independence from Soul. (66)

                                            iii.     Souls want to govern. (67)

c.     Nature of the uniting

                                               i.     A soul isn’t put into a body. A body is put into Soul. (150)

                                             ii.     The soul isn’t contained in a body. The soul does the containing. (148)

                                            iii.     Sensation and memory are in the soul. The soul uses body for sensing. (154, 155)

[AT note: I thought that Anthony Kenny had quick and helpful guide to Plotinus (in An Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy, pp. 106-7).  His explanation follows the upward path (as opposed to, e.g. Copleston and the outline above), i.e. from matter to One, and is helpful for understanding why each higher level is necessary for the one below it.  It also relates Plotinus to Aristotle, Plato, and Parmenides.  So here is an outline of Kenny’s outline.]

1.     Matter

a.     “Plotinus takes as his starting point Platonic and Aristotelian arguments […].  The ultimate substratum of change, Aristotle had argued, must be something which, of itself, possesses none of the properties of the changeable bodies we see and handle.

b.     But a matter which possess no material properties, Plotinus argued, is inconceivable, like the Unbeing of Parmenides.

c.     We must dispense, therefore, with Aristotelian matter; we are left with Aristotelian forms.  The most important of these was the soul […]”

2.     Soul

a.     “It is natural for us to think that there are as many souls as there are individual people.  But here Plotinus appeals to another Aristotelian thesis: the principle that forms are individuated by matter. […]

b.     So we conclude that there is only one single soul.”

c.     Soul (transcendent, incorporeal) is not bodies (individual, corruptible, composite).  Rather: body is in soul (“by depending on it for its organization and continued existence”).

d.     So soul governs and orders the world of bodies.

e.     “But the wisdom which it exercises in the governance of the world is not native to it: it must come from outside.  It cannot come from the material world, since that is what it shapes; it must come from something which is by nature lnked to the Ideas which are the models or patterns for intelligent activity.  This can only be the World-Mind […]

3.     World-Mind (Nous)

a.     Nous “both constitutes and is constituted by the Ideas, which are the objects of its thought.

b.     In all thinking, Plotinus continues, there must be a distinction between the thinker and what he is thinking of […].  Moreover, the Ideas which are the objects of Mind are many in number.  In more than one way, then, Mind contains multiplicity and is therefore composite.  Like many other ancient philosophers, Plotinus accepted as a principle that whatever was composite must depend on something more simple.  And thus we reach, at the end of our journey upward from formless matter, the one and only One.”

4.     One

a.     “We cannot, strictly, utter any true sentences about the One, because the use of a subject distinct from a predicate would imply division and plurality.  In a way which remains mysterious, The One is identical with the Platonic Idea of the Good.  As The One, it is the basis of all reality; as The Good, it is the standard of all value; but it is itself beyond being and beyond goodness.”