Enneads I i: What is Man? (Revision)

[sdi]

I re-read this essay while I was trying to sort out Plotinus' conception of the soul. I am actually pretty satisfied with my original summary of Enneads I i "What is the Living Being, and What is Man?" I just have a few additional comments to make from reading it again.

The "fusion" referred to here either is, or is facilitated by, the "lower soul." I believe that the "lower soul" is what Porphyry calls the "pneumatic vehicle," what Synesius simply calls the "imagination," and what we moderns would call the "mind:" it is your personality, your imaginative and thinking capacity. In other systems, the soul lives around a fixed star (which is some god or other); as the soul descends from its star through the spheres of the fixed planets, the "lower soul" accretes around the soul in seven layers, giving it a personality. Finally, by the time it reaches the earth, it is dense enough for a body to stick to it. This is instructive, but to Plotinus, the soul doesn't descend at all: it remains, perfect and pure, and it is merely that its attention is directed here to earth rather than the soul itself. Porphyry agrees with Plotinus, but Iamblichus and Proclus vehemently disagree, and consider the soul to descend to earth properly, losing its divinity. It seems to me that the soul descending is a Babylonian model, while a pristine soul is a Greek model; while both Porphyry and Iamblichus were Syrian (and thus perhaps more of an eastern mindset), Porphyry became even more Greek than the Greeks were, and so I think the different models reflect a cultural difference in temperament. (Certainly the notion of original sin seems more eastern to me, and this fits a "soul descending" model.)

A few weeks back, over on Ecosophia there was some question (see #17, #25, #27, #38, #45, #75, #92, #177) of what Plotinus considered a god. My take from reading the Enneads through the first time was that the all gods are souls: the Intellect is the "father of the gods"—more like "heaven" than "god"—and the One is indescribable in any terms whatsoever. There was disagreement, however, especially from Christian Platonists. There's merit to their arguments: Plotinus himself calls the Intellect "the God" (MacKenna translates as "the Divinity") in §8, and Porphyry (?) seems to poetically refer to the Intellect as God, so clearly my understanding doesn't match theirs. Maybe this is all just pointless bickering over terminology—"a rose by any other name would smell as sweet"—and as long as we understand the concept... but then, the soul-gods are well beyond comprehension to me, and I mostly just spend my time with angels, so I guess I just have a long way to go.

Plotinus notes in §13 that you are not merely your body, or your soul, but the Intellect, too.