Plotinus on Self: The Philosophy of the 'We'

by Pauliina Remes

Overview

Plotinus, the founder of the Neoplatonic school of philosophy, conceptualises two different notions of self (or 'us'): the corporeal and the rational. Personality and imperfection mark the former, while goodness and a striving for understanding mark the latter. In this text, Dr Remes grounds the two selfhoods in deep-seated Platonic ontological commitments, following their manifestations, interrelations and sometimes uneasy coexistence in philosophical psychology, emotional therapy and ethics. Plotinus' interest lies in what it means for a human being to be a temporal and a corporeal thing, yet capable of abstract and impartial reasoning, of self-government and perhaps even invulnerability. The book argues that this involves a philosophically problematic rupture within humanity which is, however, alleviated by the psychological similarities and points of contact between the two aspects of the self. The purpose of life is the cultivation of the latter aspect, the true self.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521867290
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	09/13/2007
Pages:	298
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.83(d)

About the Author

Pauliina Remes is a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Helsinki.

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Cambridge University Press
9780521867290 - Plotinus on Self - The Philosophy of the ‘We’ - by Pauliina Remes
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Introduction

   Who am I? This question continues to trouble us. The somewhat cryptic three-word sentence breaks up into various queries: What kind of being am I? What essential features do I share with animals or with other human beings? What differentiates me from them? What or who is this thing now sitting or writing this introduction, thinking these thoughts? Why do I often experience myself as a single subject of experience, or believe myself to be an autonomous agent capable of causing changes in the world, but at others feel a divided and inconsistent creature, or a powerless slave of circumstances? Do those experiences reveal anything about my true nature? What in the midst of all this is particular only to me, as this one individual, this person with these thoughts, likings and personal characteristics?

   For a long time, the notion of self was considered to be accompanied by ontological commitments that scholars with a physicalist and scientific world-view could hardly entertain.¹ But there is still no escape from these questions. Even though they may ultimately lead to different kinds of inquiries about, for instance, the essential nature of human beings, personal identity, rational agency, etc., and even if many of these issues would be bestapproached from a third-person rather than a first-person perspective, they still have one aspect in common: they are all, broadly speaking, reflexive.² They are all questions that the inquirer asks about his or her own nature. Similarly, there is a special group of relations that one may or may not conceptualise, but that are reflexive in nature. For example self-awareness, self-knowledge, self-evaluation or self-determination are directed back to the subject or person who initiates the relation. This is a book about the philosophy of the self in this general sense, and in particular, a book about the ways in which a highly influential late antique philosopher, Plotinus, posed and answered reflexive questions.

   Not all reflexive questions are interesting for the philosophy of the self. Self-questions and self-relations form normative hierarchies. Consider, for instance, the following exchange: ‘Why am I wearing these shoes? Because it is raining today.’ This short monologue, despite its reflexive turn, does not constitute a true self-relation in my sense of the term, because it does not throw any light on the broad question as to who or what I am. Had the answer been: ‘Because I have a shoe fetish, and choosing the right shoes for each day is almost compulsive behaviour to me,’ we would already be nearer to a meaningful self-relation. Issues about the self are only partly descriptive. They are purely descriptive, perhaps, only in so far as we attempt to describe the most basic forms of self-relations, like the pronoun ‘I’ in linguistic communication and its immunity to misidentification, or a bodily self-awareness that enables us to move, coordinate and protect ourselves, or a primitive experiential self-referentiality that can also be called self-acquaintance or self-familiarity, that is, the strange feature of consciousness as something revealing itself to itself.³ More often than not, however, the philosophy of the self carries with it strong views about what is or is not understood as valuable in the flesh-and-blood human being. The emphasis is on those aspects of our nature that enable us to live a good and meaningful human life.

   The identification of the self is thus tied to judgements about value. Crucial is what one believes to express oneself best, be that cognition, desire, moral choices or personality.⁴ An Aristotelian, for example, may think that since the composite of soul and body is unified and the true agent that acts in the world, it would be quite appropriate to say that the whole person is the proper object of self-inquiry. For Thomas Nagel, the self is the person with whom one identifies among all personalities of the world. The Kantian tradition stresses the subject of experience, the self as a pure identity-pole. For the phenomenologist, the self may be a feature or function of the structures of experience, or the agent of truth: namely, that which exercises rational thought, yet is deeply bodily at the same time. Various thinkers from medieval philosophers to certain theorists of psychoanalysis have treated the subject as primarily ‘will’ or ‘desire’. For Socrates and Charles Taylor, as for many others, the self is first and foremost one’s deep intellectual and moral commitments. The last view opens up an importantly different approach to selfhood, sometimes discussed under the heading ‘the narrative self’ or ‘the hermeneutical self’. The self is not treated as a given but as something evolving or narrated in time, under constant reinterpretation and construction.⁵

   In the context of ancient philosophy, the dual – the descriptive and the normative – approach to selfhood is excellently brought out by Anthony Long’s phrasing ‘What to make of oneself?’⁶ What is of interest is not only what or who one is, but what or who one wishes to be and become. In addition to the questions about the self’s nature, as well as the epistemological worries about how to reach some reliable views on it, ancient philosophy places a particularly strong emphasis on self-shaping, on self-improvement and on the normative issues involved.⁷True self becomes equivalent with ideal self, and selfhood thus not a mere given but a gradual process towards correct self-identification. Moreover, the process of self-constitution is understood teleogically, as fulfilment of moral and especially intellectual ends for which human beings exist. In Plotinus’ theory, too, only one aspect of human nature strictly speaking merits the name ‘self’, and philosophical development is progress towards recognising this aspect rightly. This yields a selfhood in another sense of the word, a self as a process towards the ideal end.

   Analogically to the contemporary caution about the notion of self, it is possible to talk about ancient philosophy of the self only by bearing in mind certain qualifications. The English term ‘self’ is used as a translation for a variety of expressions in the languages of ancient philosophy, Greek and Latin. Greek, like most languages, allows reflexive talk about ‘himself’ autos heautou. Much more argumentation is needed to show that there is something like ‘the self’, ‘selfhood’, or ‘ipseity’ in the ancient conceptual apparatus. This would seem to be the case, however, with for example Aristotle’s conception of the friend as another self (heteros autos, allos autos).⁸With the singular masculine article ho, ho autos usually means ‘the same’, whereas in the other order autos ho Sokrates, for instance, signifies ‘Socrates himself’, suggesting a tempting connection between self and sameness or identity.⁹ With its meanings of, on the one hand, ‘humanity’ or even ‘ideal/rational man’, and, on the other, ‘the man’ or ‘the fellow’, anthropos (with the simple meaning ‘human being’) suggests sometimes ‘self’ or ‘person’ rather than species membership.¹⁰ In Plotinus, as we will see, the plural hemeis (‘we’, ‘us’) strives to distinguish our truest nature or self from the whole human being.¹¹ In addition to this conceptual variety, there was no established topic of anything like the ‘philosophy of the self’, and no works entitled, for instance, On self and person. Nor was there agreement about what kind of terminology or ontology would explain human nature, subjectivity and agency best.

   Importantly, the human mind was not, at least primarily, conceived as standing apart from the world in its private solitude. Its relation with the world was believed to be, rather, somewhat straightforward: the world was perceivable and intelligible, and the human mind capable of perceiving it, and, with hard work, of understanding its basic structures.¹² Most, if not all, thoughts or states of the soul were not conceived as autonomous in the sense of being self-standing or independent of external circumstances.¹³ Human perception and cognition were seen as either involving or recapitulating the objective structures of the world, or, as in Platonism, the immaterial and eternal paradigms that make the sensible world such as it is. This given relation to the world that all human souls share may be expressed by Plotinus’ choice of the plural ‘we’ (hemeis) in place of the modern singular ‘I’ in posing the central question: ‘Who are we?’ For him, as for most ancient philosophers, each consciousness grasps, ideally, the very same world. Not only is the structure of consciousness the same in every mind, they also share objects and, as we shall see, the normative telos of human existence.

   Regardless, however, of these cautions, ancient philosophers, too, were preoccupied with questions that forced the issue of self upon them. For example, the Delphic and Socratic exhortation to know oneself (to gignoskein auton heauton; gnothi seauton!)¹⁴ makes one wonder what the object of that kind of knowledge is. The originally Socratic and Platonic demand to care for oneself (epimeleia heautou) similarly raises the question what is the ‘oneself’ or self that ought to be the cared for. The ethically and therapeutically central idea of controlling oneself (e.g., archein heautou, enkrateia) has again the same structure and draws attention to the paradoxical nature of these self-relations: how can the same entity be both that which controls and that which is controlled, that which knows and that which is known? All these issues concern the self and its relation to itself, and despite the often shared nature of the inquiry and the methods used in self-development, they are and – if any progress is to be expected – must be motivated by and for the subject himself.

   Through a long development in which the Stoics play a central role, it is finally in late antiquity that these issues become more explicit. Central figures include, among others, the late Stoic emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius, Plotinus, and the Christian philosopher Augustine.¹⁷ For Plotinus, to live a good and worthy life, to gain autonomy as an agent, and to acquire knowledge are all tied to self-identification and self-realisation, that is, to the understanding of what and who one really is. Moreover, Plotinus articulates this chiefly in terms of a turn inwards (epistrophe pros heauton), towards the inquirer himself, incorporating Stoic ideas about examination of one’s inner life and motivations into his own ontology and psychology. His philosophy incorporates much ancient thought, and yet it is a step in a new direction. Although Plotinus understood himself as a follower and disciple of Plato,¹⁸ and although many of his views about the self are either explicit or implicit in Plato – for instance self-transformation as intellectual transformation, or the distinction between a given and an achieved selfhood – he does go further than his master. As we shall see, Plotinus’ views are sometimes simply more radical than Plato’s, and the Aristotelian and Hellenistic developments in many areas of philosophy allow him to rewrite Platonism in several ways. In the five hundred years between the two thinkers, the understanding of the temporal and material organisation of the world as well as of human beings – their bodily nature, agency and self-relations – all went through significant developments. In Plotinus, the interest of both Plato and Aristotle in the soul-body composite and in human nature as essentially rational evolves into an explicit conceptualisation of two different dimensions of selfhood, the bodily and the rational or reflective.¹⁹

   Furthermore, the Neoplatonic understanding of the structures and hierarchies of metaphysics as simultaneously internal to the soul leads to a considerable strengthening of the Stoic methodology of turning inwards as a method capable of providing peace of mind, security and ultimately knowledge.²⁰ The inward turn gives a new spin to Plotinus’ thought. It initiates a process which no longer seeks to grasp the self primarily in objective terms, but which will ultimately lead to an understanding of the self as an inner realm distinct from the world, a space where the person can turn and examine himself. The inward turn recurs several times in this study – indeed, it can be said to be one of the common threads. I will explicate, among other things, the ontology and psychology behind it, the kind of life and choices that make the turn possible, as well as the experience and the realm that open in the inwardly directed gaze. The novelty to have a long aftermath is that Plotinus’ psychology, together with the methodology of inward turn, leaves more room for a selfhood and an inner realm that belong only to one person, that are his own. On issues concerning the inner nature of the self, he precedes such figures as Saint Augustine, René Descartes or John Locke.²¹ For Plotinus, however, the inner realm is still only partially private. If the turn is accomplished with success, the inward turn will ultimately reveal objective realities and infallible knowledge. This transitional position in the development of ideas and concepts that would become central to the Western way of thinking makes Plotinus significant from the point of view of the history of philosophy.

   The approach chosen in this study is not, however, one of history of ideas. This is a study of the thought of one thinker, and of what he has to offer for philosophical discourse on the self. I will show that Plotinus draws attention to several crucial aspects of selfhood – some that had not been at the centre of study in the philosophical schools before him, and many in which we remain interested still. He is puzzled, for example, by what it is for a human being to be a temporal thing, with a history, a future and a changing nature. He attempts to accommodate this aspect with an intuition that there must be a subject of change, someone or something to whom a particular stream of consciousness belongs, whose history and future are at issue, and from whose position and perspective they have meaning. He is adamant in trying to capture that part of us which he believes to be rational, self-determined and invulnerable, and which he identifies as the innermost self. He strives to understand what it is for experiences and thoughts to be ‘mine’. As a late antique thinker he offers us fresh, foreign, and sometimes also unattractive stances, especially towards questions of a normative nature. Even his more radical views belong to a theory that has internal motivation and systematicity.

   Since the topic of the self is infested with muddled terminology, a note on the terms to be used is in order. It has hopefully already become evident that when I talk about the ‘self’, the term itself need not commit us to any specific theory about the self’s ontological nature. Despite Plotinus’ belief that the self has an ontological basis, in this study the term itself is not equivalent to soul substance or anything of the sort. From my point of view, even those who say that there are no such things as selves and that the whole concept is actually misleading, have something to offer for the philosophy of the self in the sense that I use the term. They must be able to give an account of reflexive human capacities and functions such as self-consciousness and self-knowledge. They must explain – or explain away – the so-called sense of self, the sense that we are some kind of unified mental presence distinct from our experiences.²² They must have some answers to the kind of questions posed at the very beginning of this study. Even if they would deny self-relations the kind of special nature they have often been given in the history of philosophy, this denial takes a form of an inquiry into the nature of that which inquires. As Plotinus asks himself after an inquiry into the nature of living beings (Ⅰ.1.13), what is it that carried out this investigation?

   Though not conceptually independent from issues of ontology and philosophical psychology, talk of the self nevertheless adds something distinct and otherwise unobtainable to the discussion – a normative or hortative dimension, something indicating that these seemingly disinterested inquiries do have something to do with us. This is also why philosophical psychology and philosophy of the self are not coextensive. On the one hand, not all questions interesting from the point of view of philosophical psychology – e.g., the details of the functioning of the sense of taste Aristotle discusses in the De anima – need to be crucial for the philosophy of the self. On the other hand, questions about the self include metaphysical and ethical issues not necessarily of psychological interest.

   It may still be asked whether the kind of inquiry proposed might fit under other inquiries, whether it could well be reduced to some other kind of approach. Why not talk simply of a philosophy of, say, human beings? If only human beings have the kind of self-relations and self-concern the author is interested in, and if the inquiry happens as much – or more – by examining other human beings as it happens by inquiring into oneself, would it not be enough to inquire into philosophical anthropology? This proposal carries weight, and it is certainly the case that drawing a definite line between the philosophy of the self and other branches of philosophy is a hopeless task. This book, too, will include parts that would easily go under the headings of anthropology, metaphysics, philosophical psychology or philosophy of the emotions. Moreover, since the ancient philosophers themselves often talk about human beings (anthropos) when posing reflexive questions, there are even stronger reasons to take the suggestion seriously.

   There are, however, compelling reasons not to opt for it. First, even though ancient philosophers understood human beings as special, it is not clear that taking humanity as the starting point has any claim to be the self-evident and unquestioned basis of inquiry. Some self-relations, like bodily self-awareness, are not exclusive to human beings. From what we can judge on the basis of their behaviour, animals share this feature with human beings, although in a non-conceptualised way, and infants present a similar case. Self-relations form an interesting group, reaching from non-conceptual all the way to conceptualised and rational relations that are no longer merely reflexive but reflective. The second-order reflecting of self-relations is, undoubtedly, a peculiarity of human species, which is why the study of human beings is so much closer to the philosophy of the self than study of, say, other mammals. Second, and more pertinent to the context of this study, the way in which Plotinus poses the question is not the third-personal ‘What are human beings?’, but the first-personal and reflexive ‘Who are we?’ (tines de hemeis; Ⅵ.4.14.16). He separates this query from the topic of, for instance, the essence and functions of the soul that can be inspected from a third-personal and objective stance (cf. Ⅰ.1.13). Again, the issue is something not distinct but nonetheless over and above the issues of ontology and of philosophical psychology. Plotinus’ terminology includes, further, the above-mentioned inward turn, as well as a recurring use of the reflexive pronoun heauton (oneself) and the third-person pronoun autos (he, but also emphatic ‘himself’). In this he may well be on the right track: Many contemporary scholars agree that there is something special about the reflexive ‘I’. For instance, Richard Sorabji has recently pointed out that this ‘I’ with its correct identification is action-, emotion- and intention-guiding, and as such necessary for us. Even if, for the most part,²⁵ only humans or human souls have the properties and abilities under inspection, self-questions and -relations form a group of their own.

   Those scholars who are broadly sympathetic to this kind of approach have sometimes chosen to talk about ‘person’ rather than ‘self’. In my terminology, ‘person’ is a worldly thing, associated both with body, responsibility, action as well as with personality, whereas ‘self’, as we have seen, can be both a broader and a narrower notion.²⁶ Unlike ‘person’ which is at times given a quite specific meaning – like, for instance, a legally responsible agent or someone with a distinct personality – ‘self’ can be approached from a variety of directions. It can denote the whole person with body, personal properties and a particular history, but also, say, the mere subject of experience and thought, a pure ego-pole that episodes of thought or experience refer back to. To what one assigns the name ‘self’ is a matter of philosophical taste, as well as approach. Since there are no definite or agreed rules about the use of the notion ‘self’, even the same philosopher may, and very likely will, identify the self differently from different points of view. The subject of cognition or of self-consciousness may be understood as a different thing – or as the same thing but under a different description – from the morally or legally responsible agent.

   The variety of possible approaches has recently been expressed as different dimensions of selfhood, which, according to one interpretation, can be classified into three main categories, the bodily, the relational or cultural, and the reflective.²⁷ Plotinus, too, recognises that there are different ways one can approach the issue: ‘“we” is used in two senses, either including the beast or of that which is above it’ (Ⅰ.1.10.5–6; for beast, cf. Pl. Resp. 588c). The ‘beast’ refers to the non-rational behavioural motivations closely connected with the functions and needs of the body, whereas reason is what is above it. The relational dimension of humanity gets little attention from Plotinus, and we have thereby a two-dimensional discussion of selfhood. The self can be understood either as incorporating both dimensions or as pointing to, for reasons which will become clear in the course of this book, just the rational part of our soul. At first sight, it would seem to be the case that, in Plotinus scholarship, the English term ‘person’ suits the composite, the embodied self,²⁸ rather than the entity ‘above’ it, and I will at times refer to the former as a person, although there will be some difficulties with this use as well.

   In any case, Plotinus’ philosophy of the self is only secondarily about those beings we mostly think of as persons.²⁹ Particular embodied selfhood gets deserved attention, but the main interest lies in the ultimate structures of subjectivity and free agency rather than in embodied personhood or personality. For Plotinus, these structures are properties not merely of human beings but visible as aspects of the hierarchical metaphysics in which human beings partake. This makes them, although structurally reflexive and first-personal, shared and universal. Sometimes, however, it seems that he wants to emphasise a special feature of the structures, that there is such a thing as ‘my subjectivity’ or the subjectivity of one single person that is his or her own. For this emphatic point I will sometimes use ‘I’, to separate it from self or selfhood which is ‘ours’, that is, a recurring phenomenon or structure shared by all subjects.

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© Cambridge University Press

Table of Contents

Introduction; Part I. The Endowed Structures of Selfhood: 1. Two lives, two identities: the ontological and anthropological setting; 2. The conscious centre; 3. The rational self and its knowledge of itself; Part II. Constructing the Self: Between the World and the Ideal: 4. Sculpting your self: self-control, self-determination and self-constitution; 5. Action and other people: the self as a citizen of two communities; 6. Losing the limits of the self?; Conclusion.