2 November 2022

The Soul and Eternity

“But it is clear from the following arguments that if soul is a body, neither perception nor thinking nor knowing nor virtue nor anything of value will exist.”

(Plotinus, Ennead IV.7.6, translated by A. H. Armstrong, Plotinus: Ennead IV, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1984, page 353.)

“The virtues, then, are required to be eternal and abiding, like the objects of geometry.  But if they are eternal and abiding they are not bodies.  That, therefore, in which they are must be of the same kind: therefore it cannot be a body.  For the whole nature of body does not abide, but flows away.”

(Plotinus, Ennead IV.7.8, translated by A. H. Armstrong, Plotinus: Ennead IV, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1984, page 365.)

 

I have been reading Ennead IV.7 which is Plotinus’s discussion ‘On the Immortality of the Soul’.  The translator, A. H. Armstrong, in the ‘Introduction’ to the Ennead, refers to it as the most scholastic of Plotinus’s writings, meaning that in this Ennead Plotinus is deeply engaged with other views about the nature of the soul that were circulating at that time.  A few comments follow:

1. In the first quote Plotinus states that nothing of value can exist if the soul is a body of some kind.  That which has value is that which is eternal.  Bodies are not eternal.  This does not mean bodies have no value; as I understand it, Plotinus means that whatever value a body has, or bodies in general have, depends on, and is derived from, their relationship to that which is eternal.

2. I think quotes like the ones above highlight how difficult it is to access Platonism for most people embedded in modernity.  The entire Ennead is on the topic of the soul, and modernity does not believe in such a thing; at most it believes in psychological tendencies grounded in, and likely reducible to, material factors.  Therefore, discussions about the meaning of these quotes are likely to veer off into restatements of the meaning by reinterpreting the discussion in psychological, therapeutic, and material terms.

3. In the second quote Plotinus compares the virtues to the objects of geometry, arguing that just as the objects of geometry are eternal, so also are the virtues.  This is a good example of how deeply Platonism was influenced by mathematics.  Mathematical objects are considered to be eternal objects and Plotinus is arguing that the virtues are similarly eternal.  Since the virtues reside in, or are dependent upon, the soul, therefore the soul must also be eternal.

4. From reading this Ennead, and other related Enneads, my understanding of the soul is that it is the presence of eternity within the ephemeral, bodily, individual.  The soul is not only that, but it is at least that.  The soul is an instantiation, through participation, of the eternality of The Good, The One, and The Beautiful.