Plotinus on the Appearance of Time and the World of Sense

A Pantomime

Deepa Majumdar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138265028
• eBook ISBN: 9781317079682
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ancient History

Plotinus (c.205-70) was a Neoplatonist philosopher, his work posthumously published by Porphyry and divided into six books, nine tractates each, called the Enneads. In this book Majumdar makes a valuable addition to the literature on his work, especially Ennead III.7(45)11-13 - in particular explaining Plotinus' cosmology using the genus-species model of soul, coordinating the literature on the appearance of time and the cosmos with that on the larger issue of Plotinian "emanation" and examining the role of tolma and the restless nature of soul in this conjoint appearance. This book investigates Plotinian "emanation," its laws of poiesis (contemplative making ) and the roles of nature, matter, logos, (rational formative principle) and contemplation and highlights the subtler details of Plotinus' cosmology by disentangling conceptual issues about the nature of soul and self ("we") and their impact on the process of generation of time and the cosmos.

Chapter 1

Introduction

In the tumult of our times – amidst the rational exchange and ruthless haste evident in the aura of measure governing us and the proliferation of clocks reminding us of such measure – time and the visible cosmos are denigrated to lowly tools. So great is the discord, it nearly cleaves the pairs of opposites, whipping their contrariety to a deafening roar and wrenching them apart. The chaos of the one is magnified even as it is tethered by the subjective order of the other. Thus the cacophony of the market is escalated by the very instrumental order that regulates it – the commotion of the former nearly sundered from the incoherence of the latter. In such a world, the dissonance of the outer drowns the silence of the inner and expresses itself through the arrhythmic schedules and artificial seasonality of a people exhausted by their externalization. Where the light of the objective is placed in the outer and the inner unquestioningly held mired in subjectivity, where few can afford the inward turn, how can the experience of time be deemed worthy or objective? The temporal regimes of science and business convince us that the time of physics is the only true and objective time – an antinomy to inner time, which must be aligned to the former and resurrected from subjectivity. Its high exchange value has so distended the dominion of the world of sense that even time – which has no sensible form – has become an analogy for the sensible object. Indeed, our intoxication with forms of matter is so keen, that the cosmos no longer seems immersed in time. Instead, time is reified to the near tangible flow of manicured moments we grasp fecklessly, more with our senses than intellect. Ever better clocks and watches demarcate this time with meticulous precision and subject us entirely to the discipline of the time of physics.

Yet, beneath the scurrying moments of this discordant and objectified universe, there flows that constant contemplation, transporting us unremittingly to the One. No human artifice can thwart this flow, which pulsates with a quietude that averts our attention from the outer, to the idealistic inner roots of time. Amidst the richness of a growing silence, we align the time of physics to the truer rhythm of discursive thought and experience the auspicious seasonality of an ideal time that mandates a right moment for every activity of soul – until we realize the evanescence of time. As the silence deepens, we reach that crowning moment when the universe becomes our corpus mysticum. The opacity dims, we leave behind the clamor and dust of time, awaken to the eternal forms, then discard the apparel of the two hypostases – Intellect and soul – and stand unmasked before the One, which dissolves us in its light.

In this appetitive age, when the unalloyed mystical is shrouded by its antinomy and a cynical nihilism threatens the inviolability of a universal moral ground, we posit, in its stead, as sources of authority – not just forms of matter – but also, anthropomorphic regimes of time. Yet, this very exaltation is at once also a desecration, for our ecocidal tendencies have long been aimed, not only at the earth and its environment, but also at time. Like the earth, time too appears haggard – a pitiless alacrity reduces it to the atomized debris of a temporal wasteland. Clearly, the time and universe of our experience, which have long ceased to be mantic, stand in dire need of roots that are idealistic. More than anyone else, it is perhaps Plotinus (ca. 204–270 A.D.)¹ – the philosopher of Lycopolis,² said to be father of both western mysticism and the Greek philosophical movement known as Neoplatonism³ – who gives us such roots in his portrayal of the appearance of time (chronos) and the world of sense (kosmos aisthêtos) in the Enneads.⁴ Plotinus infuses idealism by making time and the cosmos adumbrations of ideal transcendental paradigms and by conceiving them as terminal progeny,⁵ appearing at the end of a procession that derives all the way from Plotinus’ first principle and highest ideal – the One (to Hen) or the Good (to Agathon), a term coined by Plato in the Republic.

At once anterior to multiplicity, finite being, and life and yet the source of all life and being, the One is also the telos of the epistrophic yearning of the ascending self. The One and the two lower principles irradiated from it – Intellect (nous)⁶ and soul (psuchê) – are the three hypostases⁷ or enduring metaphysical foundations of the generated worlds, described by Schürmann as the three punctuations of reality.⁸ Intellect and soul are verities, permeated by the five all-pervading primary genera – substance, movement, rest, sameness and otherness (VI.2(43).8.). The procession from the One continues downwards below these real beings and now it is primarily through the hypostasis soul that Intellect generates the denizens of the realm of becoming. Although this latter genesis abides by the central motifs of emanative poiesis, it brings with it a conceptual hiatus. Making is no longer a simple twofold process of overflow of activity (energeia) from the perfected prior and derivation of form by return in contemplation to the prior. Plotinus adds a few definitive milestones – a tolmatic impetus stirs soul into a motion that dislodges time from its noetic rest; the species levels of soul are now implicated, as also the self qua “we”; “we” construct time as an image of eternity; and the World Soul grows insubstantially diluted as it bequeaths logoi on to formless matter, to form the ensemble of ensouled bodies that constitutes the cosmos.

In the seventh tractate of Ennead III, given the title “On Eternity and Time” (Peri Aiônos kai Chronou) – which in Porphyry’s chronology of his master’s works, is the last among the treatises from Plotinus’ middle period, written in his prime⁹ – Plotinus critically inspects the cardinal texts on eternity and time in Greek classical philosophy in addition to presenting his own philosophy.¹⁰ These include Plato’s distinction between time and eternity in the Timaeus (37C–39A), Parmenides’ case for a timeless being underlying Plato’s distinction (B8.1–22), and Aristotle’s thoughts on the nature of time in the Physics (4.10–14).¹¹ As Armstrong notes, this treatise is based firmly on our own experience of time and eternity here below and to take experience, reason, and tradition into account was characteristic of Plotinus.¹²

In Chapter 11 of Ennead III.7(45), beginning with the idealistic roots of time, Plotinus first uses the poietic tools somewhat characteristic of the procession from the One, to depict the logically simultaneous appearance of time and the world of sense – and then defines time as an intimate aspect of soul – as the “life of soul in a movement of passage from one way of life to another” (III.7(45).11).¹³ Inspired by Plato’s definition of time as the “moving image of eternity” in the Timaeus (37D–38B), Ennead III.7(45)11–13, in turn, is a meditation on this definition and thus the inception for Plotinus’ thoughts on eternity and time, leading to his own profound contribution to the philosophy of eternity and time in the western tradition. Plotinus enriches Plato’s definition by silhouetting this “moving image” as a homonymous icon of eternity,¹⁴ propaedeutic to two ways of life – time is the life of soul in movement, in homonymous imitation of eternity, the unextended life of Intellect at rest. As Armstrong observes, Plotinus’ thesis in Ennead III.7(45) is one of two major discussions of time in the extant works of ancient philosophers – the other being that by Aristotle (Physics IV.10–14. 217b–224a). Armstrong notes further that although Plotinus confronts the Stoic (Zeno’s and Chrysippus’) and Epicurean views of time (Chapters 7–10), his main concern is with the philosophical view already prevalent in the early Academy – that time is linked closely with the movement of the heavens and with Aristotle’s view that time is the number or measure of motion.¹⁵

Perhaps Plotinus’ deepest contribution to the philosophy of time is not so much his critically modified vision of Plato’s view as his inference that time is evanescent – an opaque iconostasis to be left behind in the soaring flight of the self. Although this indirect insight is the highest possible – arising as it does from a mystical summit – Plotinus devotes only portions of III.7(45) to the abolition of time (Chapters 12 and 13) – and even this is non-mystical, hypothetical and inferential.¹⁶ In Chapters 11–13 of III.7 (45), it is mainly the more prosaic nature of time that Plotinus seeks to understand: a nature that lies between the two extremes of mystical evanescence and the subjective experience of time by the historical self.¹⁷ This belies Plotinus’ customary predilection for essentials over peripherals. Yet, the fact that he probes more this pedestrian aspect of time is to be expected, for Plotinian time is patently immanent. Once it appears as the life of soul from its noetic fore-life, time is immanence incarnate – whenever transcended, it grows ephemeral.¹⁸

Plotinus affirms time and the world of sense, even as he demotes them to the realm of becoming. Thus, as Armstrong notes, Plotinus’ view of time is positive. Time is not the devourer, as often in Greek thought, but rather that which enables generated beings to attain fullness of life and perfection. The temporal-material world, though almost at the nadir of existence, is a noble and necessary part of the whole – the best possible image of the eternal intelligible.¹⁹ Drawing from Plato’s Timaeus, the universe for Plotinus is comparable with a living being – it is an organized whole, with intelligence and soul.²⁰ Like Plato, Plotinus demotes this visible world of sense to an ensemble of images – each an adumbration of its noetic form – reflected in the mirror of matter, as “phantoms in a phantom” (III.6(26).7). This makes the universe somewhat different from time, for the transcendental paradigm which time imitates is not its noetic form – and of course time has none – but eternity, which is intelligible through participation in Intellect.²¹ Moreover, the universe is corporeal, unlike time and nature (phusis) and the product and icon of the true, et...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• The Hermeneutic Scene
• Chapter 2 Truth, Method, and Originality
• Chapter 3 Heritage and Legacy
• The Architectonic Scene
• Chapter 4 Edifice of Soul
• Chapter 5 Levels of Self
• Chapter 6 The Logic of Poiesis
• Chapter 7 Demiurge, Nature, and Matter
• The Cosmological Scene
• Chapter 8 The Making of the World of Sense in the Enneads
• Chapter 9 Conjoint Appearance of Time and the World of Sense (III.7(45).11)
• Chapter 10 The Nature and Role of the Self (“We”) in III.7(45).11
• Chapter 11 Tolma, Polupragmatic Nature – Historical Roots and the Noetic Level
• Chapter 12 Tolma, Polupragmatic Nature, Unquiet Power, and the Descent of Soul in III.7(45).11
• Chapter 13 Pantomime
• Select Bibliography
• Index