Enneads IV 3: Problems of the Soul (1)
Aug. 23rd, 2022 08:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sdiPhew, this chapter took me a month! To be honest, it isn't really any more difficult that the rest of Plotinus' work has been (though that's not to say it's easy, just that it's the usual difficultly level): it's simply very lengthy, and my mind has not been strong with allergy season. Consequently, I took a slightly different tack with my summary of the chapter, by treating it like a Q&A session, which helped me to break summarizing it up into more manageable chunks. (This isn't so odd as it sounds: Plotinus' essays came out of discussions he held with his students, and so his writing lends itself to the format.)
For a little bit of sightseeing (and to make a lengthy summary a little lengthier), Plotinus ably interprets Hesiod's myth of Prometheus and Pandora (Works and Days, lines 42–105) in §14.IV 3: Problems of the Soul (1)
Where does the soul reside? [§1–3]
The Soul entire—not the soul of any body in particular—is a Divine Idea, and thereby resides strictly in the Ideal.
But the Soul is divided into parts: not like we might divide a bottle of wine among cups, as the Soul is not a thing of quantity, but rather the parts are a continuum of specializations of the whole, like how the life in one's finger is a specialization of the life in one's whole. The Soul entire is like the mind of the body—detatched from the physical thing, in a sense—while it's various constituents together animate the body but still all function together as a whole.
How is it that One be simultaneously Many? [§4–5]
The Soul entire is the expression of everything that is in the Mind of God, but individual souls are the expression of specific ideas. Socrates, we might say, is the expression of Socrates-ness: this Socrates-ness may have many relations to Idea entire—being a partial expression of human-ness and philosopher-ness and pest-ness and so on—but we must say that these higher Ideas encompass the Idea of Socrates-ness. The expression of one entails the expression of the other. So the individual isn't completely divided from the whole: it stands intermediate between pure unity and pure division.
How is it that the Soul produced a body—the Cosmos—but that individual souls merely inhabit bodies? [§6–8]
This is in regards to a difference in scale. In the same way that the Sun is massive enough to fuse and produce light but the other planets are not, some souls are nearer to the Source—that is, less differentiated—and therefore possess greater expressive potency while others are more distant—that is, more differentiated—and possess lesser potency.
How does the incorporeal Soul descend to matter? [§9–17]
Souls do not act upon bodies as a craftsman creates by art, that is to say, by design; rather it is their natural expression to do so, and they are driven by a sort of instinct or urge to do it—it is an innate capacity that they must do because they contain it. All must descend through the heavenly spheres in this process, colored thereby as they invest themselves with bodies; some souls retain a memory of the world above and draw back from impulse, descending only lightly and taking on ephemeral bodies that they might not linger here too long; while other souls are so caught up in instinct that they descend so forcefully into the lowest and heaviest of corporeal forms, too forgetful to even attempt to return upwards. So to some degree, every soul is responsible for it's condition, though we would do well to remember that a great deal of happenstance is also involved in the fine details, and that it is not right to, say, blame a person for being born into a condition of poverty.
Do disembodied souls think? [§18]
No. Thinking is what embodied souls do, groping about in their perplexity, swathed in matter and unable to see far. Souls themselves know, instantly and intuitively: nothing is hidden from them.
Are the incorporeal and corporeal phases of Soul the same, or is the latter posterior to the former? [§19]
The cannot be the same, since the former is indivisible, while the latter is divided amongst bodies. So they are distinct, but certainly they can mix to a greater or lesser degree.
How does the soul inhabit a body? [§20–23]
We should be careful of terminology. We say "inhabit" out of convenience and analogy, but souls are incorporeal and don't exist in space. It is perhaps better to say that a soul "illuminates" a body as light passes through air: the air itself is transparent and not affected by the light, but things in the illuminated space are lit, while things without are unlit. So the body and it's varied organs and senses, are all illuminated as a group by a soul, and reflect its light according to their peculiar natures.
Where does a soul go after death? [§24]
Souls naturally gravitate to things like itself. If this world and its attachments remain appropriate to a soul, then it will return here; but if not it will be drawn somewhere more appropriate to it. But where is that? Who can say? The space available to souls is vast and diverse. We can only say that Providence is just, and that those who seek, find.
Do the souls of the dead remember their lives? [§25–32]
Memory implies something learned or experienced, and so memory must only be possible where there are state changes and time. This means that the higher phase of the Soul, which is eternal, has no memory, only knowledge. So the things fundamental to the Soul—that divine Idea that the Soul uniquely expresses—are not remembered but are known, fundamentally contained within it's Being.
The lower phase of the Soul, acting in concert with its body, may certainly be said to have memory, indeed it has memory of not only its bodily experiences but also a dim recollection of its existence in the higher phase. The memory of both the higher Soul and the body are in tension: the better one remembers the body, the more forgetful one is of Soul; and the better one remembers the Soul, the more forgetful one is of the body.
Therefore we might say that holiest people are the most forgetful: those souls who remember their lives are those likely to return to them, but those that do not have found their way to the Ideal.
gratitude, for
Date: 2022-08-23 06:46 pm (UTC)Thanks for your work here, and for making such intelligible introductions to sage wisdom.
Re: gratitude, for
Date: 2022-08-23 06:55 pm (UTC)