Language, knowledge, soul and self
One of the particularities of Neoplatonic philosophy is its conception of the soul and its relationship to what there is, to metaphysics. Both living and cognitive capacities are explained through the soul’s intimate relationship with the essence of reality. For the Neoplatonists, the soul is, as it were, a window to the entire cosmos and metaphysical realm, through its likeness and natural connection to them. Combining, as can be noted in several chapters of this volume, Platonic and Aristotelian influences, the Neoplatonic soul functions both as a principle of different living functions and that of powers of cognition, being an intermediary in between the higher and perfect ontological realities and the sensible and bodily realm. According to Plotinus, a human being, and her soul, stretches all the way from her connection to the body through the hypostasis Soul and Intellect to touch her ultimate source, the One. This explains our capacities, from desire and other living functions to perception, language and concept-formation, discursive thinking, as well as knowledge and moral instinct. While the later Neoplatonists came to question this part of Plotinus’ anthropology, they did retain, in mediated ways, the human soul’s innate capacities of approaching what is perfect or divine.
Given the central role that the soul plays in Neoplatonic philosophy, both in metaphysics and cosmology as well as philosophical anthropology and theories of cognition and knowledge – not to mention the frequency with which late ancient commentators wrote on Aristotle’s de Anima – it is somewhat striking how little concentrated research literature we find on this notion. Admittedly, there is widespread agreement on general axes along which these topics are discussed by Neoplatonists: that the metaphysical top-down approach also pervades what they say about soul, its powers and possibilities, and that this top-down direction nonetheless leaves room for refined accounts of not just intellection but even embodied functions.1 In the case of Plotinus the situation is, further, relatively good: there are strong studies on both sense-perception and intellection in the Enneads, and other aspects and powers of the soul are a topic of increasing scholarly attention.2 But even Plotinus scholarship suffers from central lacunae. The ontology of the soul, and the precise relationship between the higher and the lower soul are far from clear. Is the lower soul part of the World Soul or an unfolding of the individual, rational soul? How does phantasia work in Plotinus? How to square Plotinus’ undeniable top-down directionality with his more Aristotelian-reminiscent remarks on how learning and dialectic begins with our experiences? And so on. In the case of other central figures, such as Iamblichus and Proclus, there is simply quantitatively less on offer.3
This section cannot hope to be encompassing. Rather, it has three ambitions. First, we wish to provide alleys to those aspects of Neoplatonic theories about soul and cognition that exhibit their particular, “Neoplatonic” take on the issue. Second, we aim to fill some of the gaps in the research literature. Finally, it is our aim to show some discussions where Neoplatonists exerted an undeniably detailed, subtle or original approach.
In Plato, famously, knowledge is explained with the help of the natural, inborn connection of human rational soul to the real beings, the Forms. These are either something the soul has learned in a previous existence, or internal to the soul. Combining this with the Aristotelian understanding of both perceptual and rational states of the soul as reception and identity with the object received, Neoplatonists came to emphasize innateness: language learning, concept-formation4 and knowledge acquisition are enabled by the soul’s innate powers to grasp being, powers that the soul receives from the hypostasis Intellect. This is their top-down approach. Plotinus postulated an intellect (an individual copy or instantiation of the Intellect) in each and every human soul. While we may not be – and mostly cannot be – aware of this intellect’s functioning within us, it explains how we are capable of intellection, of knowledge. It also governs – mediated and unfolded – lower forms of thinking, how we may perceive the rational organization in nature, and even the way we form, for instance, words, as we see in van den Berg’s “The gift of Hermes: The Neoplatonists on language and philosophy” (Chapter 16). It is this structural correspondence, as it were, between the organization of the world and that of the mind, that grounds our thinking and knowledge of the former.
The challenge for anyone sharing this picture is to explain, first, why and how we are simultaneously in possession of this knowledge, yet find it so laborious, at times impossible, to become aware of it. And why did the soul, if it has this divine origin, ever come to be imperfect and in the body in the first place?5 Second, as becomes clear in van den Berg’s chapter, even the early Neoplatonists admitted that the soul also engages in concept-formation of the Aristotelian type, namely abstraction. Thereby the question of relationship between such mental contents that are innately specified, and those that arise from interaction with the external world (from down upwards, as it were), becomes pressing. As Gerson explicates in his “Neoplatonic epistemology: knowledge, truth and intellection” (Chapter 17), Plotinus suggests that the Intellect does function as a rule-giver to the discursive forms of ordinary thinking, but the details of how this happens remain somewhat obscure. Yet undeniably the theory fares well in one respect: it provides a very clear answer as regards justification and grounding of knowledge. Knowledge consists, in an Aristotelian manner, of an identity between the knower and the known. As Gerson argues, only this kind of identity between the thinking mind and an immaterial (as opposed to material) object capable of this identity can satisfy what the Neoplatonists require from knowledge, namely infallibility. The Neoplatonists conceive of infallibility as a kind of second-order awareness: you not only know, but also know that you know. This awareness arises out of the unmediated, non-representational unity and identity between the thinking mind, its activity and objects of thinking.
The later Neoplatonists came to deny that the soul would literally exist on all levels of the hierarchy, and posit it more firmly on its own level proper and closer to human beings. In the famous wording of Proclus, “Every particular soul, when it descends into temporal process, descends entire: there is not a part of it which remains above and a part which descends” (ET prop. 211). Iamblichus is the originator of later Neoplatonic conceptions of the soul that differ substantially from their Plotinian-Porphyrian predecessor. In his “Iamblichus on soul” (Chapter 18), Finamore illuminates the ways in which Iamblichus read Plato and combined him with Aristotle, and arrived at the specifically Iamblichean take on the soul, its unity, powers and place within the cosmos. Iamblichus retains the Plotinian idea of an intellect within each human soul, but no longer thinks that it can survive human descent into body intact. It cannot ground infallible knowledge – only the Intellect itself can. The philosophical challenges in this Neoplatonic variety are slightly different. When the strict identity relationship between the knower and the object known is lost for an embodied human being, knowledge as both an epistemological notion and a cognitive, psychological state has to be explained in some other manner. Nonetheless in later Neoplatonism, too, the connection to the higher levels of being is innate and natural for the soul.
Besides the less well-known Iamblichean theory of the soul, the details of the Peripatetic influences on Neoplatonism bring us further from completely charted waters. While everyone who has read Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus knows that Alexander of Aphrodisias was read and commented in Plotinus’ school, the content of his influence is still under examination. On a close reading of Alexander’s position and Plotinus’ critique of it, Schroeder’s “From Alexander of Aphrodisias to Plotinus” (Chapter 19) guides the reader into the ways in which Plotinus builds both his discussion of the physics of illumination in perception and the analogical relationship between the One and that which it illuminates and thus makes intelligible. In causation as well as epistemology, Plotinus turns Alexander’s dualistic discussions into a monism where illumination as well as intellection are looked on exclusively, as it were, from above.
One philosophical thematics in which the Neoplatonic philosophers are likely to go well beyond any of their predecessors and competitors are self-reflexive relations. In here, too, they build upon the Classical and Hellenistic background, upon the Socratic call for self-knowledge, upon the both Platonic and Aristotelian question on whether the perceiver also perceives that she perceives, and the Peripatetic worry of whether the thinker thinks that he thinks. As was already mentioned, the Neoplatonists conceive of infallible knowledge through a self-reflexive relation of the knower also knowing that she knows. This part contains two studies that concentrate on this area in different ways. Aubry’s “Metaphysics of soul and self in Plotinus” (Chapter 20) reveals how Plotinus is capable of separating a notion of self from the notion of soul by elaborating on self-identification. Unlike soul, the self is “that which searches, examines and decides these questions: whatever can it be?” (Enn. I.1[53].1.9–11). Plotinus’ originality lies in the conceptual distinction between a reflexive subject and that of a subject of attribution.
In “Perceptual awareness in the ancient commentators” (Chapter 21), Lautner explores a temporally later discussion on a cognitively more basic level of self-reflexivity, the notion of perception of perception. Like Schroeder, he follows a thread from Alexander of Aphrodisias to Neoplatonism, the Neoplatonic commentators. What we can witness is a rich and intricate discussion in which perceptual awareness is sometimes located in another faculty or the soul as a whole, sometimes seen as included in the perceptual act itself. In this Neoplatonic discussion, surprisingly many of the elements in today’s philosophical treatments on awareness and self-awareness are anticipated: the division between awareness of the object (“content”) and of the activity of perceiving; the question of whether the latter is included in the former or not; and if it is not, whether the higher order awareness is conceptual or perceptual in nature.
NOTES
1. The situation will certainly change in the near future because of the availability of interesting source materials in Sorabji (2004–2005), the translations of some key primary texts (especially the commentaries on Aristotle’s de Anima) in the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle series, as well as other similar advances within scholarship, like the new translation projects of Plotinus by Parmenides Press (English), Cerf (French) and Edizioni Plus (Italian).
2. Here the list of scholarship is actually longer than can be given in this context. Some of the important examples include: Blumenthal (1971a), Emilsson (1988, 2007), Gurtler (2005), Schiaparelli (2009), Kalligas (2011), Chiaradonna (2012b).
3. Steel (1978, 1997a) and the translation and commentary of Iamblichus’ de Anima by Finamore & Dillon (2002), for example, are crucial. Cf. e.g. Opsomer (2006a, 2006b), Gritti (2008), Perkams (2008); on Proclus, Chlup (2012) is also useful in general.
4. There is a new, important study on concept-formation by Helmig (2012).
5. For more discussion on the soul’s presence in the body, see Kalligas (2012).