Wisdom 3

22 November 2023

Wisdom 3

Plotinus on Wisdom

“For, as was said in old times, self-control, and courage and every virtue, is a purification, and so is even wisdom itself.  This is why the mysteries are right when they say riddlingly that the man who has not been purified will lie in mud when he goes to Hades, because the impure is fond of mud by reason of its badness (Phaedo 69C1-6); just as pigs with their unclean bodies, like that sort of thing.  For what can true self-control be except not keeping company with bodily pleasures, but avoiding them as impure and belonging to something impure?  Courage, too, is not being afraid of death.  And death is the separation of the body and soul; and a man does not fear this if he welcomes the prospect of being alone.  Again, greatness of soul is despising the things here; and wisdom is an intellectual activity [noetic activity – my addition] which turns away from the things below and leads the soul to those above.”

(Plotinus,  Ennead I.6.6, On Beauty, translated by A. H. Armstrong, Plotinus: Porphyry on Plotinus, Ennead I, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1966, pages 249-2251, ISBN: 9780674994843)

1.  This quote from Plotinus makes the same connection between wisdom and asceticism that is found in Phaedo, which Plotinus alludes to.  As I mentioned in the previous post, the Ascetic Ideal means to refrain from using sensory experience as the guide for how we should live our lives.  Plotinus expresses this as ‘not keeping company with bodily pleasures.’

2.  Plotinus emphasizes the impurity of bodily pleasures.  I think the emphasis in Phaedo is slightly different in that both pleasures and pains are determined to be poor guides for a philosophical life.  I’m not saying there is any inconsistency between the two, but there is an interesting shift in emphasis that I find helpful.  This may be due to the different circumstances of Phaedo and Ennead I.6.  Phaedo records the last hours of the life of Socrates and wants to offer his students as complete a picture as possible.  Plotinus is communicating to his students who are more likely to be distracted by pleasures in their ordinary lives, hence the emphasis on their impurity.

3.  It is interesting that Plotinus suggests that ‘a man does not fear death if he welcomes the prospect of being alone.’  Solitude is, I think, more often referenced in Plotinus than in Plato; but this is just an impression.  I think this impression is highlighted by the closing of the last Ennead.  In the Armstrong translation it reads:

“This is the life of gods and of godlike and blessed men, deliverance from the things of this world, a life which takes no delight in the things of this world, escape in solitude to the solitary.”

(Plotinus, Ennead VI.9.11, translated by A. H. Armstrong, Plotinus: Ennead VI.6-9, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1988, page 345, ISBN: 9780674995154)

In a footnote Armstrong writes, “These last words, in the common translation ‘flight of the alone to the Alone’, are the only words of Plotinus at all generally known and remembered.  He uses the ‘alone to the alone’ formula elsewhere in the Enneads when speaking of our encounter with the Good (I.6.7/8; VI.7.34.7).” 

(Ibid, page 344)

4.  It is helpful to not overinterpret, or take too literally the Plotinian emphasis on the Alone or the Solitary.  The connection this teaching has with the One and the Good is that the One is self-sufficient because it has no antecedent cause(s).  The Alone to which Plotinus refers is found in the life of an ascetic even when that ascetic is in the midst of community; as was true of Plotinus. 

On the other hand, the Ascetic does tend to limit social contacts to those which are essential and genuinely nourish the spiritual journey.

5.  I find it uplifting to see the consistency of the Ascetic Ideal in Platonism.  Socrates lived from 470 to 399 BCE, and Plotinus lived from 204 to 270 CE.  That’s about 700 years.  It is remarkable how the teachings of Platonism maintained their purity over all those centuries, and how they have continued to do so to the present day.