Enneads II 5: On Potentiality and Actuality

[sdi]

II 5: On Potentiality and Actuality

Matter is potential: it has no actuality of itself. It serves only to give rise to actuality in the Ideas presented to it. But the Matter itself does not actualize: the actualization is in the fusion of Matter and Idea.

But we have said that there is no Matter in the empyrean, and so there is no potential there: everything is actual.

I had made an offhand comment a while back to boccaderlupo, that I have the impression that souls enter the material world specifically in order to change: that is, that the divine part of one is essentially static, and that if it wishes to become something else it must enter the world of change in order to do so.

This vague notion dovetails nicely with what Plotinus is saying: there is no potentiality in the empyrean, everything there is actuality. Plotinus doesn't say so himself, but I suspect this is why there is a material world at all, and why we are here in it: if a soul wishes to explore some potential—that is, be other than it already is—the only way to do so is to first create that potential in the lower worlds, become that potential in actuality, and then raise back up into the upper worlds. But this is fraught: the material world has bonds of karma, and in order to set up one's desired patterns of potential, one necessarily must generate lots—certainly many lifetimes' worth!—of "bad" karma, meaning that one "gets stuck" here in the material until those bonds are resolved. If you clear your karma, you get to leave materiality behind and go home.

But this is just saying the same thing, of resolving the potential into actuality. If you clear the karma, you've turned the potential into actuality, and there's no reason for you to be in the material any more, having accomplished the original goal.

If that's all right, what we label karma (and, indeed, "evil") is simply our lack of perspective enforced by time. With an angel's eyes, we see that there was purpose behind it all. And not just the purpose of the gods: but our own purposes also. I think it also explains why some people are so hellbent on making a mess of their own lives and the lives of people around them: they are busily setting up the karmic bonds they need in order to actualize their desired potential. (Similarly, people who are heaven-bent (?) on cleaning up their own lives and the lives of others are busily tearing down those karmic bonds and getting ready to move on.)

As a corollary, I suspect that the more sophisticated of an actuality that one desires, the more karma it takes to get there. In a sense we should not envy those hypothetical blessed souls who spend less time in incarnation: if we are here longer, it is precisely because we are striving for a more complex end.

Comments

[boccaderlupo]

Definitely something worth reflecting on. I need to go back and read the Enneads again more closely, however, but I think Plotinus has this idea that the soul (or at least a part of soul) remains undescended into the material, and is therefore (at least partially) immutable.

[sdi]

He does, and in fact he devotes a couple of sections of this very short tractate to exactly that topic! The soul resides strictly in the empyrean, and while it joins in part with the body, it doesn't shed its timelessness or divinity to do so. It more just wears a body like a vehicle or clothing, I think?

So when I say things like "becoming" and "do" and so on, these should be understood to reflect my admittedly weak understanding of how timelessness and time interact and also the limitations of English itself. It's like how people refer to Neoplatonism as a sequence of "emanations" or "creations" even though, properly speaking, the empyrean is eternal and unchanging and thus no "creative acts" take place: rather it's more of an ontological ordering of "containment" or "prior existence" or the like...

[boccaderlupo]

Indeed...that's one of the "issues" with emanation, I suspect: how to get from the immutable realm "above" to the mutable realm of Becoming of our everyday. A heaven of a calculus, that...

[sdi]

It's one of the issues I've been most interested to read about. I see that III 7 is intriguingly titled, "On Eternity and Time..."

[sdi]

A note to myself for when I revise these notes: I think that maybe individual souls contain vast capacities in potential, which only get activated as they're developed in life. If a soul is dissatisfied with it's set of activations, it descends into the world to clear the slate and reset and try to develop new activations. Naturally, this is a fraught process, since there's so much chance involved when you get into the world... but we put our trust in Providence and hope that we come out of it again close to what we set out for.