Humans, other animals, plants and the question of the good: the Platonic and Neoplatonic traditions
A major contemporary problem that troubles characterizations of Neoplatonism is its hierarchical structure, a structure that, in the assessment of many critics, privileges human beings over other animals and plants, as well as mind, soul and rationality over body.1 This has been partially responsible for the domination of human interests over those of other species, on the one hand, and for the chimera of intrinsic goods based upon the categorical imperatives of rational duty and virtue, on the other.2 Human beings are intrinsic “goods” and have “rights” because they are rational and can make agreements. Other animals, by contrast, can make no rational agreements and are made to serve us. For Stoics and Epicureans, according to Porphyry’s account, “[w]e cannot act unjustly towards creatures which cannot act justly towards us” (Abst. 1.6.89, trans. G. Clark). Christian exegesis of Genesis 1:26 apparently just reinforced the pagan view that animals are made “for us”, just as masters should rule slaves, men should rule women and adults children (S. Clark 2011: 36).
From another perspective, while human beings may be regarded as having intrinsic “rights” by contrast with irrational animals and plants,3 the Platonic tradition, it is often argued, eliminates the value of individual things for their own sakes and makes us respect or love others not for themselves but only for the sake of Forms or the Good beyond Forms (see e.g. Vlastos 1981; Dover 1980: 113). So, on the one hand, this hierarchical view makes human beings disproportionately important and subordinates animals and plants to our interests and, on the other, it seems to eliminate individuality for its own sake in favour of abstract universality. Let me be clear. These criticisms are widespread and powerful, but, in my view, false and profoundly misguided, since Neoplatonism generally, and the Platonic tradition it inherits, is remarkably enlightened on the very issues for which it is criticized. The real issue is how we can provide a more balanced assessment of these negative pictures both of individual human beings and of other animals and plants in light of the demonstrable strengths of Neoplatonism. But we cannot do this without establishing a broader framework and taking into consideration the problematic nature of the Platonic “Good”
One broader problem with theories of rights, intrinsic goods and hierarchy for thinking about the ancient world generally is that such theories are embedded implicitly within modern paradigms of rationality and operate in the sphere of the rational universalizability of principles and axioms, however much these principles (different versions of the categorical imperative) may derive from ancient models (Stoicism or Cicero, de Officiis) (see e.g. Glei 1999). This is why recent attempts to detect animal rights theories in ancient thought (e.g. Sorabji 1995a; see also Sorabji 1993: 134–57) or to build such theories upon modern neo-Aristotelian underpinnings (e.g. Nussbaum 2000, 2003, 2006) are either necessarily inconclusive (as in Sorabji’s case)4 or rationalistic and modern (as in Nussbaum’s call for a capabilities theory to cover human beings and other animals or in Fineman’s [2008] case for a theory of vulnerability and preferences). Rights extended to other animals and plants on the basis of human rationality alone risk being empty extensions, while a blank-cheque notion of justice in which everything has rights risks being even emptier.
What I want to suggest here is that the ancient Platonic principle of the Good should be a starting point for any such considerations: a starting point that may be as fruitful for us as it was for Socrates in Republic, books 6–7, but just as already always forgotten and strange as it proved for his interlocutor, Glaukon, in book 6 (R. 509c) – fruitful, not in terms of developing a modern ethical theory somehow dependent upon or derived from the Good, but rather of seeing what role it might have played both in the thought of Plato and Aristotle and in subsequent ancient practice. This is, in part, precisely what I propose to do – and it is important, since the dimension of the Good, in the ancient sense, seems to have been entirely lost for the modern and contemporary worlds.
The Good in Republic 6–7 is, in fact, not a “rational” principle as such, for it is non-propositional and beyond being and thought (R. 509b6–10). In other words, if rationality is taken to be the criterion by which we parse the world of nature, then the Good too must be excluded from consideration: an absurd consequence, in fact. Yet, at the same time, Socrates represents the Good not simply as the theoretical ground of everything but as the most practical and useful good of all: without it, nothing is truly beneficial (R. 504e–505b). It is, according to Socrates, the regulative ground of all our judgements, dimly glimpsed or “divined” in all our experience (from perplexity [R. 505d11–e2; 506a6] to sex – the latter, at least, according to Aristophanes in the Symposium [Smp. 192c–d]); and it is also what provides both the power and means of seeing, feeling or thinking anything (R. 508e–509b). In short, the Good is that by which the best state or capacity of anything is felt, seen, imagined or thought reflexively.5 Nussbaum’s theory of capacities, despite its Aristotelian resonance, misses this dimension entirely. This is somewhat strange, since Aristotle, despite his somewhat different view of the Good (EN 1.6), actually bases a theory of the “goods” of all animal species upon a “good” which goes beyond them all (EN 6.7: on this passage, see below). This is not an empty “placeholder” as it might seem for us, I suggest, but for Plato and Aristotle the non-rational, but practical ground of all desire, thought and perception: in the case of Plotinus later, the ground not so much of thought and life (although it is also their ground too) as of all existence, including the bare being of ourselves, other animals, plants and stones (Enn. VI.7[38].23.22–4). What it is therefore for anything to be a “good” or to be in the best state of its potentiality or capacity – no matter how rudimentary – is a function of this non-rational, but reflexive activity of the Good, at once a cause and a condition of practical usefulness, creative art and reflexive thought, as well as of the barest existence. This dimension of the Good has been somewhat eclipsed in the modern world but it was the ground of a much broader view of the kinship6 of all animals, plants and things in the ancient world than has been possible until the most recent times. It is also, I shall argue here, a dimension that does not commit the ancients to unnecessary hierarchical thinking, to “intrinsic good” theories or to the erasure of the importance of individuals.
In this chapter I shall briefly outline some of the theoretical and practical consequences of this vision in the ancient Pythagorean–Platonic tradition with particular emphasis upon four figures after Plato (424/423–348/347 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE): Theophrastus (371–287 BCE), Plutarch (46–120 CE), Plotinus (204–70 CE) and Porphyry (234–305 CE) [with a coda from Pseudo-Dionysius (late fifth–early sixth century CE) and Proclus (412–85 CE)]. My focus here is not to give either a history of such thought or a survey of the growing body of contemporary scholarship but rather to highlight what I take to be some major insights of this tradition, to reject some common mistaken impressions and to provide different ways of looking at a lost, but, I think, still significant achievement of the human spirit.7
It seems to me that the Neoplatonists were prepared, as the modern phrase has it, to think globally and act locally. To be a philosopher or a scientist – a lover of wisdom or knowing – in this sense was to live a certain kind of life:8 to renounce any form of money or property, to care for everything in the universe to the best of one’s ability9 and to live a life of scientific enquiry and prayerful contemplation. Plotinus lived in the house of a Roman woman, Gemina (Plot. 9). He owned nothing. Young boys lived in the house too and he apparently helped them with their multiplication tables. He was celibate, and did not himself eat animals or use medicines with animal content (Plot. 2.3–5). He ate, drank and slept little, but accepted the social responsibilities of friendship, acted as an arbitrator in legal disputes, and took seriously his financial and educational duties as guardian for children whose fathers had died (Plot. 7 and 9). He even wanted to found a city based on philosophical principles, a “Platonopolis”, as did Plato himself, but the venture fell through. In other words, he was committed to an ecological programme of some definite sort and took seriously the sustainability issues involved in setting up a modest economic civic programme based on vegetarianism.
In this he was following a long tradition that was in some ways more radical than the contemporary animal rights movement. Pythagoras and Empedocles (although all traditions about the life and work of Pythagoras are contested) argued that animals are akin to human beings not only because they are made of the same elements but also because souls may be reincarnated as either human or other animals. Killing and eating animals was thus equivalent to murder and even cannibalism (cf. G. Clark 2000: 123 n. 11 & 12). In other words, kinship was based upon similarity of biological structure and reincarnation. In fact, Empedocles believed that there was a golden age of friendship between humans and animals, before the rise of Strife.10 Animal sacrifice was, on this basis, seen as a perversion of an original state of friendship. Furthermore, according to Cicero, both Pythagoras and Empedocles gave not only kinship but legal rights to all animals: “those great and learned men, Pythagoras and Empedocles, declare that all living creatures have the same legal status, and proclaim that inexpiable penalties threaten those by whom a living creature is harmed”.11 Empedocles appears to have gone further and extended such status even to plants and the elements, for he proclaimed that he had been “a boy and a girl and a bush and a bird and a fish” (frag. 117b [DK]) and, according to Sextus Empiricus (M. 8.286), Empedocles held that all things are rational, not just animals but also plants, writing explicitly, “Know that all things have wisdom and a share of thought”.12
What exactly “wisdom and a share of thought” (phronēsin … kai nōmatos aisan) meant was a problem for later thinkers. As Sorabji has argued, Aristotle and subsequent writers accused Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Democritus and even Homer of not distinguishing intelligence (phronēsis) from perception (aisthēsis) or other aspects of soul.13 Anaxagoras ascribes mind or nous to everything, great and small, in some places, but, Aristotle complains, elsewhere nous in the sense of phronēsis appears not to belong to all animals and not even to all human beings.14 There thus arises the clear distinction between humans and other animals on the basis of a distinction between understanding, or higher-order intelligence, and perception, a distinction that can be found in Alcmaeon, Anaxagoras himself, Protagoras, Plato and, of course, Aristotle.15
What gets my interest here is not so much the wedge between humans and other animals (and plants, not to mention the elements) based on a sharper distinction between thought and perception that is characteristic of Aristotle’s mature thought.16 Glimpses of this can also be found in Plato, particularly the occasional denial of reason to other animals and the question whether or not (true) beliefs can be ascribed to the non-rational parts of soul (Sorabji 1993: 9–12). My focus is rather upon an important line of thought present in Plato, Aristotle and the later Platonic tradition, which I shall call the inclusive, intelligible nature of biology.
A first part of this intelligible biology can be found in Plato’s Timaeus, where all living creatures are said to be parts of the inclusive intelligible model upon which the Demiurge frames the many species of the sensible cosmos:
let us suppose the world to be the very image of that whole of which all other animals both individually and in their tribes are portions. For the original of the universe contains in itself all intelligible beings, just as this world comprehends us and all other visible creatures. For the god, intending to make this world like the fairest and most perfect of intelligible beings, framed one visible animal comprehending within itself all other animals of a kindred nature.
(Ti. 30c–31a)17
Any interpretation of this famous passage must surely involve an inclusive intelligible design running through all species even prior to the rational deliberative design of the Demiurge, for the Demiurge is represented as looking towards a pre-existent intelligible paradigm. In part, it is true, this is related to Plato’s notion of reincarnation, as we can see in Ti. 76e: “For those who were constructing us knew that out of men women should one day spring and all other animals” (90e–91a). In part, again, it reflects a cyclical view of inter-species transformation, as at Ti. 90e–92c, especially 92b–c: “Thus, both then and now, living creatures keep passing into one another in all these ways, as they undergo transformation by the loss or gain of intelligence or unintelligence” (nou kai anoias, Ti. 92c1–3).
However, it also reflects two further important features of Platonic thought: first, the view that animality includes everything living, both animals and plants, and on the basis of a shared elemental structure:
Blending it [the nature of the mortal, human living creature] with other shapes and senses they engendered a substance akin to that of man, so as to form another living creature: such are the cultivated trees and plants and seeds which have been trained by husbandry and are now domesticated among us; but formerly the wild kinds only existed, these being older than the cultivated kinds. For everything, in fact, which partakes of life may justly and with perfect truth be termed a living creature (zōon men an en dikei legoito orthotata) … Wherefore it lives indeed and is not other than a living creature, but it remains stationary and rooted down owing to its being deprived of the power of self-movement.
(Ti. 77a3–c5, emphasis added)
Plants then are also “animals” or living creatures.18
Second, there is the view that each animal species has its own good, or specific aretē with its own dynamic capacity: “Moreover, the habit and statue of the goddess [Athena] indicate that in the case of all animals, male and female, that herd together, every species is naturally capable of practicing as a whole and in common its own proper excellence (tēn prosēkousan aretēn hekastōi genei pan koinēi dynaton epitēdeuein pephyken)” (Plato, Criti. 110b5–c2). This suggests an important corollary to the intelligible biology of the Timaeus, namely that there is a peculiar good fitted to each species of which the species is capable. So there is a hint of a capacity theory that relates to individuals but that is holistic and specific in nature. In other words, every species has its own particular good or goods, dependent not upon human rationality, but related to the “habit and statue” of the goddess (in the language of the Critias) or to the providential creativity of the Demiurge (in the language of the Timaeus).
It seems to me that this inclusive intelligible biology founded upon divine design or goodness, on the one hand, and specific natural capacities or best fittedness, on the other, is hinted at in a highly significant way in the Nicomachean Ethics, no matter how much Aristotle might otherwise deny intellect and reason to other animals (see notes 13 and 14). In Aristotle, this takes the form of a viewpoint beyond that of human practical intelligence in which the good of all species has to be included. What is the goodness of soul except its conformity to the ultimate end of all best activity? What is this ultimate end? If it is only practical intelligence (phronēsis), then it will be a purely human activity, but there are other things in the universe that are higher and more important than the human being and, therefore, sophia or philosophic wisdom must be a more comprehensive viewpoint than the merely human. Speculative/philosophic wisdom includes the good of all things, as Aristotle puts it:
[Wisdom (sophia) is scientific knowledge] of the highest things, we say; for it would be strange to think that the art of politics, or practical wisdom (phronēsis) is the best knowledge, since a human being is not the best thing in the world. Now if what is healthy or good is different for human beings and for fishes, but what is white or straight is always the same, any one would say that what is wise (sophon) is the same but what is practically wise (phronimon) is different; for it is to that which observes well the various matters concerning itself that one ascribes practical wisdom, and it is to this that one will entrust such matters. This is why we say that some even of the lower animals have practical wisdom, namely, those which are found to have a power of foresight (dynamin pronoetikēn) with regard to their own life. It is evident also that philosophic wisdom (sophia) and the art of politics cannot be the same; for if the state of mind concerned with a human being’s best interests is to be called philosophic wisdom, there will be many philosophic wisdoms; there will not be one concerned with the good of all animals, but a different philosophic wisdom about the good of each species.
(EN 6.7.1141a20–35, trans. McKeon, adapted)19
We are here at the heart of a perhaps paradoxical vision that leads almost directly to Plotinus. For Aristotle, Mind or nous in the primary sense is separate from everything, but it also “includes/embraces everything” especially in so far as the desire to understand the world and ourselves as we are – that is, as being – is already a divine understanding itself.20 Part of that understanding is the life of practical intelligence, but the deeper part is an understanding that goes beyond the merely human perspective to embrace the good of everything. To become fully human, therefore, we paradoxically have to be able to transcend a merely human perspective. Divine understanding, namely that of the apparently solitary Unmoved Mover or the Good, as Aristotle also terms it, is the proper threshold for understanding the goods of all things (animals, plants, blood and elements included). If, then, from a human perspective, the human being is to be distinguished by mind and rationality from the rest of nature, nonetheless, from the perspective of sophia, the human being has to be able to transcend specific interests – including purely human rationality – in order to grasp the good of nature in its broadest and most divine form. In other words, exactly as we will find in Plotinus, through many intermediaries including Alexander of Aphrodisias, mind should not belong to us only; we should belong instead to it, even to the point of our not being entirely human any longer; mind is both “ours” and not “ours” (cf. Plotinus, Enn. V.3[49].3.26–7, 4.25). And if this is so, then while other animals and plants may not have or possess mind or reason, they must belong to the dimension of divine mind, a belonging that enables Aristotle (with Heraclitus) to say even of the lowliest parts of animals that there are deities here too (see Aristotle, PA 1.6).
Precisely how this can be so is, of course, a problem for the interpreters of Aristotle, as it also is for the Stoics and Epicureans, who reject any notion of animal “rights” or of a broader view of animality. Only human beings naturally “belong” with each other (are oikeioi)21 according to the Stoic ideal of a world-wide city (Cicero, Fin. 3.62–8) of fellow-citizens. Instead of some intelligible biology, the Stoics change the otherwise concrete biology of Aristotle, according to whom all living things are animate and plants have “nutritive soul”; that is, they are alive and grow (Aristotle, de An. 413a20–b10). The Stoics, instead, hold that the activity of the nutritive soul in plants is not soul really, since plants have neither impressions nor impulse or desire; instead, plants cohere by nature or physis. And for the Stoics and Epicureans, justice extends only to rational beings, not to non-human animals, for only rational beings can act justly and be treated with justice. Justice is an agreement for mutual advantage, according to an Epicurean argument, and no mutuality on the basis of justice is possible between human beings and animals. Besides, animals endanger us by being predators or by the fact that, if we do not kill them, they will reproduce at an alarming rate and overwhelm the environment and eat all the food.22 Yet Epicurus himself advocated vegetarianism on the grounds that meat-eating was unnecessary and harmful to health; and Lucretius perhaps tries to harmonize Empedocles and Epicurus in so far as domestication of animals involves a sort of implicit (or lesser) contract of mutual advantage of protection from wild animals between domestic animals and human beings (cf. Campbell 2008: 16–21). Indeed, the Stoics famously suggested that dogs could reason syllogistically (at least virtually [dynamei]): in the course of following a scent, for instance, a dog approaching a fork in the trail eliminates trail a and b and immediately goes down trail c.23 So, despite the Stoic and Epicurean rejection of a rational contract, the picture remains more complex.24 How far, then, can explicit or implicit rationality extend and how can the broader perspective of nous or sophia really embrace the goods of all things with practical consequences for ordinary action?
Plotinus and Porphyry in late antiquity answer these questions in illuminating ways, precisely because they see that the cosmos, instead of being an independent body or a body that possesses a mind, is utterly pervaded by the dimensions of soul and mind, dimensions rooted and grounded in the Good itself. In fact, intellect cannot hold the power it receives from the Good and so breaks it up into its own defective, but variegated good-formed vision with the result that “it is good from many good-formed [parts], a good richly varied” (Enn. VI.7[38].15.24–5). For Plotinus, one major problem bequeathed from Plato is to overcome the apparent domination of rationality valorized by the (mythical) representation of the Demiurge deliberating or taking thought, and a second problem is the apparent absurdity of including wild animals in the intelligible paradigm of the Timaeus.
To counter the first problem, Plotinus argues that Plato cannot mean that the Demiurge actually reasons or deliberates because such a representation of rationality in any form of creation is a defect, not an achievement. Reason is necessary to work things out after the fact; understanding grasps reality all at once without the need to work things out. In other words, divine understanding of plants, animals and even the elements does not depend on, or even embody, discursive rationality (dianoia, logismos, etc.). The creative principles in things or logoi are rational only after the fact.25 Understanding (noēsis) is prior to rationality. In other words, at this point in history, human rationality stops being the dominant paradigm for understanding human relations with other animals and plants. This is an immensely important moment in the history of thought!
To counter the second problem – how can nous embrace the goods of all things? – Plotinus develops a rather sophisticated, variegated view of intelligence. In Enn. VI.7[38].9–10, he poses the problem of the apparent absurdity of including some animals in the Timaeus’ Living Creature before offering his own innovative response:
But someone will say, “I grant the valuable living animals, but … how could the cheap and irrational ones [be there in the Complete Living Creature]?” … Now, there …, intelligence (to noein) is different in man and in the other living creatures, and reasoning is also different (to logizesthai); for there are present somehow also in the other living creatures many works of deliberate thought (polla dianoias erga). Why then are they not equally rational? And why are human beings not equally so in comparison to each other? But one must consider that the many lives, which are like movements, and the many thoughts should not have been the same, but different … in brilliance and clarity. … For just as any particular life does not cease to be life, so neither does an intellect of a particular kind cease to be intellect … since the intellect appropriate to any particular living being does not on the other hand cease to be the intellect of all, of man also, for instance, granted that each part, whichever one you take, is actually all things, but perhaps in different ways. For it is actually one thing, but has the power to be all; but we apprehend in each what it actually is; and what it actually is, is the last, so that the last of this particular intellect is horse … as the powers unfold they always leave something behind … and as they go out they lose something … and in losing different things different ones find and add on something else because of the need of the living being … nails … claws and fangs.
(Enn. VI.7[38].9.1–44)26
Here intelligence, far from being a single rationality or monolithic paradigm, as it tends to be in the modern world, is more like a variegated continuum of different intensities of organized life that allows for a sort of natural selectivity, of which we see only the last manifestation. There is a kind of geological depth to each species that prevents us from recognizing that each is, in fact, a holographic representation of a much larger intelligible organism which manifests design or purpose without a designer or deliberative agent. All animals have reason or implicit rationality in such different ways that the barriers are porous. Even human beings are not all equally rational. In fact, we are more “life-kinds” than separated rigidly into different human and other-animal species.27
But what does it really mean to think in terms of what is “good” or “best” in relation to other life-kinds, animals and plants? Plotinus gives a plausible answer to this question as a function of natural capacities in one of his later treatises, Enn. I.4[46].1:
Suppose we assume the good life (to eu zēn) and well-being (to eudaimonein) to be one and the same; shall we then have to allow a share in them to other living things as well as ourselves? If they can live in a way natural to them without impediment, what prevents us from saying that they too are in a good state of life?… But if anyone dislikes the idea of extending some degree of well-being to the other living things – which would involve giving a share in it even to the meanest, because they too are alive and have a life which unfolds to its end-first of all, why will it not seem absurd of him to deny that other living things live well just because he does not think them important? Then, one is not compelled to allow to plants what one allows to all other living beings; for plants have no perception (aisthēsis). But there might perhaps be someone who would allow well-being to plants just because they have life; one life can be good, another the opposite, as plants too can be well (eupathein) or badly off, and bear fruit or not bear fruit. (Enn. I.4[46].1.1–26)
Among the give-and-take of different possibilities, Plotinus clearly makes a case for the well-being even of plants on the basis of life-capacities such as fruit-bearing.28 He also seems to come close to the idea that such well-being is not an “extension” or a human valorization of life so much as a well-being for and of plants themselves, which we are able to recognize. This puts the emphasis on the goods of individuals and species for themselves rather than upon any extension of rights or of “justice” derived from any supposed monolithic human rationality. This is an important statement in the history of thought and accords well with Plotinus’ view that the Good is the most fundamental presence in and to everything (Enn. V.5[32].12): as he puts it in Enn. VI.7[38].23, “But what does it [the Good] make now? Now too it preserves them and makes the thinking things think and the living things live, breathing in intellect, breathing in life, and if anything cannot live, it makes it be.” This suggests that the existence of everything, but especially of stones, rocks and the elements, is rooted directly in the power of the Good. There is in Plotinus a real way of thinking non-hierarchically about everything, since the power of the Good is not abstracted from things through a hierarchy of soul and intellect but rather grounded in and for everything directly in such a way that soul and intellect are co-enfolded in that direct creativity.
Of course, we must also acknowledge – alongside this – that the ancient tradition was somewhat divided on the question of plants and even on transmigration of humans into other animals. Porphyry holds that eating the fruits of plants is not like killing animals. We do not hurt plants or crops by taking them (Abst. 3.26.12, 18.2, 19.2) or sheep by shearing them, and we may take honey as a reward for looking after bees (Abst. 13.2). Plato, as we saw above, holds that plants are “living creatures” and have perception of pleasure and pain, but neither belief (doxa) nor reasoning (logismos) (Ti. 77b–c). And the transmigration of souls was used as an argument against meat-eating, not plant-eating (Plutarch, de Esu Carnium 998c; cf. Plato, Ti. 91d–92c; Phd. 81d–e).
As Sorabji has pointed out, Plotinus, and other Platonists, considered “remote control” options in which the human soul, or its separable (intellectual) part, does not actually enter the animal body (Sorabji 1993: 188–93; also G. Clark 2000: 125–6). How we are to understand this is a real difficulty. Is it simply a question of what will later be called the ghost-in-the-machine syndrome, according to which “lower” realities (like bodies on one interpretation of Descartes) are manipulated by “higher” invisible entities? Or should we see such “remote control” options as an integral part of the intelligible biology based upon the “good” in Platonism and Aristotelianism, according to which in the view from nowhere, or from the threshold of the Good, the goods of all things reside? I tend to favour the latter view. But does this mean that “lower” things such as other animals, plants and stones are in the immediate care of higher principles – as in Iamblichus, “the primary beings illuminate the lasts, and immaterial things are present immaterially [theurgically] to the material” (Myst. V.23.232.11–12) or as in Proclus, one can see “the lasts in the firsts and the firsts in the lasts” (trans Copenhaver); but if so, at least in Iamblichus, and against Porphyry, this unifying theurgic care is compatible with animal sacrifice. Whatever the case, Porphyry is said by Augustine to have argued that a human soul could not be reincarnated in an animal (Civ. Dei 10.30), but he may have considered different possibilities, just as Plotinus also suggests that the individual soul articulates the pre-existent outline prepared for it in matter and, in doing so, becomes what it shapes – either beast or human (Enn. I.1[53].11.9–15; VI.7[38].6–7) – or again that there is transmigration from human to other animal and plant existence, and Plotinus has an intriguing “ent-like” (cf. Tolkien) way of putting it:
and in many ways we live like plants, for we have a body which grows and produces; so that all things work together but the whole form is human being in virtue of its better part. But when it goes out of the body, it becomes what there was most of in it … those who lived by sense alone become animals. … But if they did not even live by sense along with their desires, but coupled them with dullness of perception, they even turn into plants; for it was this, the growth-principle, which worked in them, alone or predominantly, and they were practising to become trees.
(Enn. III.4[15].2.9–24; cf. G. Clark 2000: 125–6)
So there appear to be several different views of transmigration in Plotinus and Porphyry that perhaps cannot be easily reconciled. Nonetheless, the overall practical attitudes to the well-being of animals and plants are strikingly clear in both of them, in line with a tradition that goes back to Pythagoras and Empedocles through the great figures of Theophrastus (c.371–c.287 BCE) and Plutarch of Chaeronea (c.45–120 CE), in whose work some of “the central arguments developed by contemporary animal-rights philosophers relating to intellect and sentience in non-human animals” are already adumbrated (Newmyer 2006: 104). Among Porphyry’s many sources is Plutarch who wrote two dialogues, On the Cleverness of Animals (or Whether Land or Sea Animals are Cleverer) (see on this Gilhus 2006: 45–52; Newmyer 2006: 31–47, 73–5) and Beasts are Rational, and two further treatises On the Eating of Flesh (I and II) (collected in Moralia 12), in which he argued that reason and intellect are distributed in different degrees throughout the animal kingdom and that the eating of animals is one of the least pleasing human customs, a custom that ignores proper consideration of natural justice in favour of cruelty, luxury and excess. Indeed, Plutarch provides a damning picture of animal “husbandry” practices that is worth citing if only because it poignantly anticipates the forced-feeding, chain-production practices of our own age (that one can and should abhor even if one is not a vegetarian). If we have to kill an animal at all, Plutarch argues, we should do so “from hunger, not as a luxury”:
but in pity and sorrow, not degrading or torturing it – which is the current practice in many cases, some thrusting red-hot spits into the throats of swine so that by the plunging in of the iron the flood may be emulsified and, as it circulates through the body, may make the flesh tender and delicate. Others jump upon the udders of sows about to give birth and kick them so that, when they have blended together blood and milk and gore (Zeus the Purifier!) and the unborn young have at the same time been destroyed at the moment of birth, they may eat the most inflamed part of the creature. Still others sew up the eyes of cranes and swans, shut them up in darkness and fatten them, making the flesh appetizing with strange compounds and spicy mixtures. (Moralia 996F–997A, trans. Cherniss & Helmbold)
This is a striking observation of the ethical problems involved in luxury and systemic cruelty that deserves proper acknowledgement, but, of course, it is in Porphyry’s great work on abstinence from flesh-eating that we come closest to a rudimentary theory of animal and plant rights.
As Osborne reminds us, we should not accept Porphyry’s work uncritically. Porphyry addresses philosophers and his view that meat-eating is surplus to requirements and a luxury is not necessarily correct in the diet of ordinary people living on the land and growing their own food (Osborne 2007: 237). We should not blind ourselves to the connection between vegetarianism and luxury in our own society, she argues, and to the practical implications of alternative lifestyles. Nonetheless, Porphyry’s de Abstinentia is an extraordinary, far-sighted work for any age. It is not simply a defence of Pythagoras and Pythagorean doctrine (cf. D. O’Meara 1989: 28). Porphyry conducts a powerful comparative analysis of the rejection of animal-killing in the earlier Greek golden age and among the Egyptians, Jews, Indians and Persians. Following Theophrastus, On Piety, he argues, against the otherwise compelling tradition of animal sacrifice, that such sacrifice is a perversion of the older custom of gathering, cultivating, sacrificing and eating plant foods. This perversion occurred only because in times of war and starvation human beings took up cannibalism, for which animal sacrifice became a substitute. The gods, however, prefer simplicity: “divinity considers rather the quality (ēthos) of the sacrificers than the quantity (plēthos) of the sacrifice” (Abst. 2.15).
Yes, on Porphyry’s thesis against animal sacrifice, vegetarianism, in contrast to a meat diet, demands minimal attention from the soul and therefore helps to liberate the soul imprisoned in the body: a dubious thesis, for some, simply wrong (Osborne 2007: 237); for others, defensible. But the context Porphyry establishes and some of his major arguments are more plausible. The kinship (to syngenes) of all animals is older than aggression: barley and grain antedate meat offerings (Abst. 2.19–29.148–59). The best sacrifice is, instead, a pure heart/mind (Abst. 2.34.163–4). Kinship can be based upon fellow-feeling, sensitivity and a similar sensory/structural apparatus rather than upon rationality.29 At the same time, on the question of spoken language (Abst. 3.3–6), Porphyry argues that each species has its own understanding that is just noise to others (Abst. 3.3.188–90), that the complexity and diversity of other animal speech shows it has meaning (Abst. 3.4.190–91), and that animals don’t speak human language either because they are not taught or because they are impeded by their vocal organs (Abst. 3.4.191–2). At any rate, it is simply prejudice or shortsightedness only to call our speech language and dismiss all other forms of communication (Abst. 3.5.192–3). After all, the gods communicate silently and animals are closer to this form of communication than we are (Abst. 3.5.192). Moreover, people who know and live with animals recognize their calls and are recognized in turn (Abst. 3.5.193–4). On the question of inner logos or understanding (Abst. 3.7–15), Porphyry argues that animals are like us in perception and organization, but that their forms of perception surpass our own (Abst. 3.7–8.195–8), that they have memory (Abst. 3.10.200) and are not completely deprived of logos.30 As in the case of Plotinus, rationality in this sense admits of different degrees (Abst.3.8.197–8) with the result that each species has its own particular wisdom (Abst. 3.8–11.196–201). Furthermore, just as the gods do not need to learn, so animals too can be rational without needing to learn (Abst. 3.10.199–200); and yet they are also taught by nature or learn through each other or through us. In addition, animal groups observe justice (to dikaion) to each other;31 indeed, the reciprocal needs of humans and other animals establish an innate justice between us; and if someone claims there is no connection (schesis, koinōnia) or contract between us and other animals, we may plausibly reply that we do not make contracts with every human being, yet this does not make other human beings non-rational. In fact, the relation between us and other animals is often the reverse of what we claim, for they domesticate us rather than we them!32 So far, there is a theory of natural justice, and a sense of kinship based more upon sensory and structural similarities than direct similarity of reason but little question of rights. On the other hand, justice and reason are not a matter of extending human privileges but rather of recognizing capacities, strengths and vulnerabilities as based on the natures of other animals.
So at Abst. 3.1–2, Porphyry does argue for “extending” justice to other animals but this is on the basis of underlying capacities in animals:
Moving on to the discussion of justice, since our opponents say that it should extend to beings like us and therefore rule out the irrational animals, let us present the view which is true and also Pythagorean, by demonstrating that every soul is rational in that it shares in perception and memory. Once that is proved, we can reasonably … extend justice to every animal. … It is self-love which leads them to say that all the other animals without exception are non-rational, meaning by “non-rationality” complete deprivation of logos. But if we must speak the truth, not only can logos be seen in absolutely all animals, but in many of them it has the groundwork (hypobolē) for being perfected. (Abst. 3.1–2)
Furthermore, we rightly feel the distress of other animals, but the basis for justice is their nature: “It is the nature of animals to have perceptions, to feel distress, to be afraid, to be hurt and therefore to be injured” (Abst. 3.19). And this involves not so much our recognition of their plight as an understanding that their perception and memory respond to a different but recognizable form of logos in them:
But let us suppose that perception does not need intellect to do its job. But when perception has made the animal aware of the difference between appropriate and alien and has gone away, what is it in them that now remembers and is afraid of painful things[?] … let us not say that if beasts think (phronein) more sluggishly and are worse at reflection (dianoeisthai), they do not reflect or think at all, or even have a logos; but let us say that they have weak and turbid logos, like blurred and disturbed vision.
(Abst. 3.22–3; cf. Enn. VI.7[38].7.29–31)
At the same time, Porphyry clearly avoids making these different forms of logos in other animals a founding criterion from which to derive justice, because we spontaneously recognize many examples of justice in animal groups, and because we can see that these are grounded in specific capacities for the good (aretē) in each; that is, in rational dispositions or skills (entrecheia), that should not be erased because of other considerations, such as a lack of predictable stability in some animal natures.
Who does not know how animals that live in groups observe justice towards each other? Every ant does, every bee. … In every creature there is evident a particular virtue to which it is naturally disposed, but neither nature nor the consistency of the virtue takes rationality away from them; and that is the point which must be proved if the acts of virtues are not also appropriate to rational aptitude.33 If we do not understand how an animal acts because we cannot enter into their reasoning, we shall not therefore accuse them of non-rationality. No one can see the intellect of God. … One might be surprised at those who derive justice from reason, and say that animals which are not in our society are savage and unjust, but do not extend justice to those that are in our society. Just as for humans life is over when society is taken away, so also for animals. Birds and dogs and many of the quadrupeds, such as goats, horses, sheep, donkeys, mules, perish if they are deprived of human society. Nature that created them has made them need humans and has also made humans need them, establishing an innate justice in them towards us and in us towards them.
(Abst. 3.11–12)
The analogy between human justice and animal justice is, therefore, more like an innate natural bond of mutual justice between all species that Porphyry argues cannot be simply “for us”; instead, other animals are naturally “like us, not for us”: “If they say that not everything came into being for us …, then in addition to the great confusion and unclarity of the distinction, we still do not escape injustice, because we set upon and treat harmfully creatures which were born in accordance with nature like us, not for us” (Abst. 3.20).
The statement that animals are like us, but not for us, is an important anticipation of one of the major principles of modern thinking about other animals. Consequently, Porphyry concludes (reporting Theophrastus), just as we say that all human groups are related to one another by having the same ancestors or food, customs and race in common, so too is the kinship between all animals strongly grounded in physiology and common psychosomatic structure:
Thus also we posit that all human beings are kin to one another, and moreover to all the animals, for the principles of their bodies are naturally the same … I mean for instance skin, flesh, and the kinds of fluids that are natural to animals. We posit this the more strongly because the souls of animals are no different, I mean in appetite and anger, and also in reasoning and above all in perception. Just as with bodies, so with souls: some animals have them brought to perfection, others less so, but the principles are naturally the same in all. … If it is true that the origin of characteristics is like this, then all species have intelligence (phronousi), but they differ in upbringing and in the mixture of their primary components. The race of other animals would then be related and kin to us in all respects, for all of them have the same foods and breath … and show that the common parents of all are heaven and earth.
(Abst. 3.25)
Just as we saw above that Plutarch pulls no punches when it comes to the abuse of animals in the pursuit of mindless luxury, so Porphyry too compares human beings in many ways unfavourably with animals. Whereas animals feel goodwill even for their eventual slaughterer who nurtures them for his own sake, not theirs, “humans conspire against no one so much as the person who nurtures them; there is none for whose death they pray more fervently” (Abst. 3.13.3). Against the argument that eating plant food is no less killing than eating animal food, Porphyry responds that it “is not the same kind of taking, for it is not from the unwilling. If we let them be, they themselves let fall their fruits, and the taking of fruit does not entail the destruction of plants as when animals lose their souls” (Abst. 2.13).
What is fascinating, then, to see in Porphyry’s de Abstinentia is the following: (1) an irenic tradition that Porphyry claims to be immemorial, namely, the view, however well or ill founded, that we have not always lived by bloodshed and as carnivores; (2) an extended “legal” tradition based not on social contract but on family-relatedness between humans and animals as belonging to one household or oikos – or, in other words, a real ecological relatedness, based on “justice” rather than “rights”,34 or, again, (3) a form of ecology that arises powerfully out of the dimensions of soul-intellect grounded in the Good and that has immediate practical repercussions not least of which are questions of sustainability, economic stability, moral coherence, and the overall quality of life for humans and non-humans in an ecosystem where each needs the other.35
But there is something still more telling in Porphyry’s work. The de Abstinentia, it seems to me, implies a broader understanding (even if elsewhere in his writings Porphyry takes a harsh view of other groups)36 that tolerance of other religions/nations or species is not enough, for it entails a standpoint of false superiority and an unwarranted management model. Other peoples and other species have needs and rights that have to be acknowledged for our benefit and for theirs. In this spirit, Porphyry comes very close to a theory of rights, if such a theory is to be grounded not on our preferences or agency, but on the worth or nature of animals themselves, and on individual animals, not simply groups or species.37 Furthermore, although Porphyry is eager to press-gang everything he can into the service of his own argument, his methodological practice in undertaking such a comparative study is to allow ourselves to be transformed by the superior practices of other religions, nations and times if only we can overcome the unthinking prejudices inculcated in us by narrower social, political, moral and religious forms. Passive tolerance is insufficient, but active tolerance too is not enough. We have to be open to the superiorities we find in other peoples – and in other species (see note 32). And so his collection of materials from different sources on the Egyptians, Indians, Jews and others is an impressive indication that authentic experience and humane practice may be found anywhere – among Brahmans, Essenes and so on – rather than belonging to any single tradition exclusively.
What we find here and in later Neoplatonism is a cosmic attitude and an attentiveness to the lives of animals and of plants that have been almost entirely lost and that provide good evidence for supposing that modern negative views about hierarchy and the elimination of the importance of individuals (whether humans, other animals or plants) are simply misguided. As D. Turner has pointed out in relation to Pseudo-Dionysius:
there could be little more mistaken than to conceive of the One as the being which tops off the ascending scale of beings, ontologically closer to those next to it than to those lesser beings down the scale. … For each and every being the relation of its existence to its creating cause has the same immediacy. God has brought Cherubim and worms into existence in acts of creative causality which are, for want of a better word, “equidistant” from their effects.
(1995: 30–31)
We therefore have to emphasize, and not elide the tension between hierarchical scale and a radical anti-hierarchical creative immediacy in Neoplatonism. This tension is perhaps nowhere more striking than in two passages from Pseudo-Dionysius: “When we talk of yearning, whether this be in God or an angel, in the mind or in the spirit or in nature, we should think of a unifying and commingling power which moves the superior to provide for the subordinate, peer to be in communion with peer, and subordinate to return to the superior” (de Divinis Nominibus 713a–b).38
This providential care of superior for subordinate is,39 in fact, an intimate paradoxical coincidence of opposites – transcendence and immanence – in which the divine longing for all created things is manifested:40
And in truth it must be said too that the very cause of the universe, in the beautiful, good superabundance of his benign yearning for all is also carried outside of himself in the loving care he has for everything. He is, as it were, beguiled by goodness, by love, and by yearning and is enticed away from his transcendent dwelling place and comes to abide within all things, and he does so by virtue of his supernatural and ecstatic capacity to remain, nevertheless, within himself.
(de Divinis Nominibus 712a–b)41
This is a remarkable passage which, in my view, demonstrates the immediacy of the “Good” to everything, and in language that cannot be reconciled in a simple-minded way with any hierarchical thinking that supposedly does away with the radical importance, and even novelty, of individuals, for it is the Divine Thearchy itself which is said to be “enchanted”, “beguiled” or “bewitched”42 by goodness, love and yearning so that it is led down to dwell in everything without ever going out of its own dwelling. Here we find a dimension of sympathy, co-feeling, co-inherence: in the pathos of human beings, other animals or even plants, the pathos of God is or can be manifested.43 It makes little sense, then, to berate Platonism for a blanket failure to recognize individuals when its careful articulation of the fullest recognition of individuals is, in fact, one of its major achievements. Individuals emerge as individuals most fully in the ecstatic love of God.
But we can still ask: does the Good’s love of the goodness in everything really include other animals and plants, or does “everything” mean only those faithful “good” ones who can be included in ecclesiastical and celestial hierarchies? On balance, I think that “everything” really does mean everything for later Neoplatonism, and I suggest that we can see exactly this in a remarkable passage from Proclus’ On the Hieratic Art, which looks so weird to the modern eye as to make us aware that we are dealing with an almost entirely lost ancient sensibility, a sensibility that conspicuously includes plants. Proclus writes:
Just as in the dialectic of love we start from sensuous beauties to rise until we encounter the unique principles of all beauty and all ideas, so the adepts of hieratic science take as their starting point the things of appearance and the sympathies they manifest among themselves and with the invisible powers. Observing that all things form a whole, they laid the foundations of hieratic science, wondering at the first realities and admiring in them the latest comers as well as the very first among beings; in heaven, terrestrial things according both to a causal and to a celestial mode and on earth heavenly things in a terrestrial state.
(de Sacrificio et Magia 148.1–10 [Bidez], trans. Copenhaver)
The example he gives is the heliotrope and its prayer:
What other reason can we give for the fact that the heliotrope follows in its movement the movement of the sun and the selenotrope the movement of the moon, forming a procession within the limits of their power, behind the torches of the universe? For, in truth, each thing prays according to the rank it occupies in nature, and sings the praise of the leader of the divine series to which it belongs, a spiritual or rational or physical or sensuous praise; for the heliotrope moves to the extent that it is free to move, and in its rotation, if we could hear the sound of the air buffeted by its movement, we should be aware that it is a hymn to its king, such as it is within the power of a plant to sing.
(de Sacrificio et Magia 148.10–18)
The thought that a heliotrope prays and that, if we could only hear the sound of the air buffeted by its movement, we would be able to hear what is within the power of a plant to sing, makes clear, however weird it might appear, that even plants are their own individual “goods” whose goodness coheres most fully in their hymn to a higher Good, a relatedness it is possible even for us, as it were, to overhear.
In sum, while the ancient world has a multiplicity of different, often contradictory views about the relation of human beings to other animals and plants, and while Aristotle tends to deny reason, on the one hand, and the Stoics and Epicureans to deny contractual relations, on the other, to other animals, there is another complex tradition running through ancient thought from Pythagoras, Empedocles, Plato and Aristotle into early and later Neoplatonism that is based upon the Good of the Republic, reflects the intelligible biology of the Timaeus, and the more inclusive role of sophia (by contrast with that of phronēsis) in Aristotle’s Ethics. I have argued that the Platonic Good does not commit the ancients to unnecessary hierarchical thinking, to “intrinsic good” theories or to the erasure of the importance of individuals. Instead, hierarchical thinking has to be kept in tension with the anti-hierarchical immediacy of the Good’s presence to everything; and if species or kinds are parts of an intelligible biology based in Plato and Aristotle, individuals must arguably be parts of that biology not only in the intelligible world of Plotinus, where good-formedness is characteristic of each form,44 but especially in the providential care and love of the Good in Proclus and Pseudo-Dionysius, where individuals – all animals and plants – are to be found in their fullest focus, even to the extent that the Good itself is enthralled by them. The practical results of this focus, I have argued, can be seen in the thought of Theophrastus, Plutarch, Plotinus and, above all, Porphyry, who makes the case for an immemorial tradition, according to which we have not always lived by bloodshed or as carnivores, and for a real ecological relatedness, based on “justice” rather than “rights” and on mutual need without undue romanticism. Porphyry, for instance, argues cogently that we may kill other animals that jeopardize our security, but this should not be our mindless practice with all animals; and, at the same time, he is thoroughly realistic about the real limitations of human nature.
On balance, therefore, while we find elements of a language of rights from Cicero to Porphyry, we do not find any fully articulated theory of animal and plant rights in the ancient world. We do, however, find claims based upon justice as well as upon the goods of, and capacities for, the flourishing of animals and plants that are highly significant and practical in their own right. Above all, we find the recognition of perspectives other than our own, whether those of the Good in Plato or of sophia, based upon the proper flourishing of species in Aristotle, or of the best functioning of other animals for themselves and not for us, in Porphyry. The recognition is, of course, our own in the light of what is good or best, but it is not simply a question of our own preference or projection, but rather a claim grounded in the features of things themselves, whether vulnerabilities, shared sensitivity, together with structural, physiological and psychosomatic similarities, or developmental capacities. I suggest that we can talk about such claims in the following ways. We can recognize them in so far as animals and plants possess developmental capabilities that are features of their natures, and not just of our projections. We can recognize them in so far as there is a range of the goods of things (other than those of human beings) that are good for their own sakes (and not just for our sakes). And we can recognize them in so far as these goods, while certainly dependent upon the Good itself, are not simply good for the sake of that Good – as if their goodness were to belong only to it – but rather, in so far as their goodness belongs to them genuinely, however much it may also be a gift, so that we are compelled to recognize this gift as both inherent to them and radically interconnected with other goods.
Finally, what is striking about Neoplatonism (especially by contrast with our contemporary world) is that not only do we find different models of rationality: to be precise, a continuum of different intensities of life-kinds manifested throughout nature; and not only do we find many examples of design without rationality; but, even more important, rationality ceases to be the dominant paradigm for determining whether things are meaningful at all. Intellect, in fact, is not “rational” in any modern sense, although it is supremely meaningful, one might claim; and the One or the Good is even less “rational” than Intellect; and so it is perhaps appropriate that the Good, or what will later be for Nicholas of Cusa both the maximum and the minimum, should be both the source and the refuge of all things, living and non-living, that is, animals, plants, the simplest existences, and even the barest possibilities in which no rational analysis could reasonably discern any genuine potential or dream anything other than hope.
NOTES
1. In this chapter my primary focus will be more upon rationality than upon the mind/soul–body relation. For a treatment of the latter, see Corrigan (2009a: esp. 37–51).
2. The word “hierarchy” is particularly associated with the work of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (see Hathaway 1969; D. Turner 1995: 26–49; Corrigan & Harrington 2004), but the term picks up and recapitulates for a Christian context the descending order of Neoplatonic “hypostases” – the One, Intellect and Soul – in Plotinus and Porphyry, and the more complicated levels of existence in Iamblichus and Proclus, and especially the theory of “chains” we find in Proclus, with “a god presiding as a ‘monad’ over an elaborate chain of angels, daemons, souls, living things and even inanimate objects, which receive the influence of this god as a dominant factor in their existence” (Dillon 1973; cf. Wallis [1972] 1995: 151–3).
3. For evaluation of this claim in connection with the principal terms and related concepts involved – for example, human rights, natural law, justice (Gr. dikaiosynē, dike/to dikaion; Lat. iustitia, aequitas) in accordance with what is appropriate (Gr. kat’ axian; Lat. dignum) or “right/obligation/appropriate” (Gr. to prosekon; Lat. ius) and kinship, belonging or oikeiosis – see Sorabji (1993: 134–57). For the ancient academy, justice is a “hexis that gives each his share according to his worth” (Plato, Def. 411d–e), and this appears in Roman thought under the formula suum cuique tribuere (Cicero, Leg. 1.6.19; Off. 3.5.15; Ulpian, Dig. 1.1.10). Cf. Brill’s New Pauly Encyclopedia of the Ancient World. Classical Tradition (2006–11: vol. 3, 1224–26. On the question of rights specifically, see also note 37 below.
4. For a judicious evaluation of the evidence for and against, see especially Sorabji (1993: 208–19).
5. By “reflexively”, I mean that the Good is the principle by which we are able to conceive the best state of anything, a principle disclosed in the acts of seeing or thinking themselves, just as in seeing we see the light of the sun, according to Socrates’ analogy in Republic books 6–7, and in thinking objects of thought we think of them as “good-form” (R. 508d–509b). For the conception of Forms as ideals or “what should be” and for understanding the Form of the Good as overcoming the modern dichotomy between being and value, see Ferber (1989: 30–33); and cf. Gonzalez (1998: 209–44).
6. “Kinship” is in this case primarily designated by the Greek word oikeiotēs and cognates, a network of terms that is used by Plato (esp. Republic 8–9), Aristotle and others, especially the Stoics. Theophrastus argued for an oikeiotēs or relatedness between humans and animals (see Porphyry, Abst. 3.25); for the history of oikeiōsis, see Long (1996a), Sorabji (1993: 122–33) and G. Clark (2000: esp. 124 n. 17).
7. I am particularly indebted to the many works of S. Clark (most recently 2011: 35–60); G. Clark’s translation and useful notes of Porphyry: On Abstinence from Killing Animals (2000); Sorabji (1993); among other recent works are the following: Cassin & Labarrière (2000), Heath (2005), Steiner (2005), Gilhus (2006), especially the chapter on soul and reason, Newmyer (2006), Nussbaum (2006), Osborne (2007) and Beauchamp & Frey (2011).
8. The classic work on this theme is, of course, that of P. Hadot (1981b [English trans. 1995], 1995: 280).
9. This is, in fact, the model articulated in Plotinus’ view of intellect (nous): all in all, all in each, and each in all. For one conspicuous example, see Enn. V.8[31].4. Cf. Porphyry, Plot. 2 (on Plotinus’ last words).
10. Frags 130b, 128b, 137b [DK]; Sedley (2005: 331–71); Campbell (2008: 6–8).
11. Rep. 3.11.19: “non enim mediocres viri sed maxumi et docti, Pythagoras et Empedocles, unam omnium animantium condicionem iuris esse denuntiant, clamant que inexpiabilis poenas impendere iis a quibus violatum sit animal”, trans. G. Clark (2000: 123 n. 12).
12. Frag. 110b [DK]: πάντα γὰρ ἴσθι φρόνησιν ἔχειν καὶ νώματος αἶσαν, trans. G. Clark (2000: 125). Aristotle, in fact, calls Empedocles’ claim that justice involves not killing anything that has life a “law of all things” “according to nature” “that extends without break through wide-ruling aether and boundless earth” (Rh. 1.13.1373b1–17, my trans.).
13. Sorabji (1993: 8–9); Aristotle, Metaph. 1009b12–31; Theophrastus, Sens. 23; Aetius 4.5.12 (Dox. Graec. 392.4–7).
14. Aristotle, de An. 404b1–6; 405a8–16; 427a19–29.
15. Alcmaeon, frag. 1a [DK] (Theophrastus, Sens. 25); Anaxagoras, frag. 21b [DK]; Plato, Prt. 321d, 322a; Phd 96b; and Sorabji (1993: 9–16).
16. For passages in Aristotle, see Sorabji (1993: 12–16, 17–20, 30–40, 50–51, etc.). One passage, sometimes ascribed as a fragment to Aristotle’s early thought (from Iamblichus, Protr. 36.7–13), according to which animals have small glints of phronēsis, and logos – Sorabji argues (1993: 15–16) – is most likely from Porphyry.
17. Hereinafter the translation of the Timaeus is according to Jowett.
18. Cf. Proclus, On the Hieratic Art, on the heliotrope, below; and on similarities of constituent elements and nourishment, see Ti. 80d6–e2: “And it is owing to this [the work of fire and breath in bodily respiration] that in all living creatures the streams of nutriment course in this way through the whole body. And inasmuch as these nutritive particles are freshly divided and derived from kindred substances – some from fruits, and some from cereals, which god planted for us for the express purpose of serving as food, they get all varieties of colors because of their commingling.”
19. The passage concludes: εἰ γὰρ τὴν περὶ τὰ ὠφέλιμα τὰ αὑτοῖς ἐροῦσι σοφίαν, πολλαὶ ἔσονται σοφίαι· οὐ γὰρ μία περὶ τὸ ἁπάντων ἀγαθὸν τῶν ζῴων, ἀλλ’ ἑτέρα περὶ ἕκαστον (EN 6.7.1141a29–32).
20. While the Unmoved Mover is transcendent or separate from everything, it is also immanent in its own way, as Aristotle suggests at the beginning of Metaph. 1075a11–15: Ἐπισκεπτέον δὲ καὶ ποτέρως ἔχει ἡ τοῦ ὅλου φύσις τὸ ἀγαθὸν καὶ τὸ ἄριστον, πότερον κεχωρισμένον τι καὶ αὐτὸ καθ’ αὑτό, ἢ τὴν τάξιν. ἢ ἀμφοτέρως ὥσπερ στράτευμα; καὶ γὰρ ἐν τῇ τάξει τὸ εὖ καὶ ὁ στρατηγός, καὶ μᾶλλον οὗτος· οὐ γὰρ οὗτος διὰ τὴν τάξιν ἀλλ’ ἐκείνη διὰ τοῦτόν ἐστιν; and it also explicitly “embraces everything” according to traditional wisdom in Metaph. 1074a38–b3: παραδέδοται δὲ παρὰ τῶν ἀρχαίων καὶ παμπαλαίων ἐν μύθου σχήματι καταλελειμμένα τοῖς ὕστερον ὅτι θεοί τέ εἰσιν οὗτοι καὶ περιέχει τὸ θεῖον τὴν ὅλην φύσιν.
21. For the Stoic view of oikeiōsis in this context, see Sorabji (1993: 122–33).
22. S. Clark (2011: 10–11). On contract in Roman law and on animals as enemies to each other and to humans, see Gilhus (2006: 22–36).
23. For context and interpretation of this, see Sorabji (1993: 20–21).
24. S. Clark makes a good sense of this complexity (2011: 35–60).
25. For logoi, see Corrigan 2004 (112–16) and also esp. Enn. V.8[31].5–7.
26. Hereinafter the translation of the Enneads is according to Armstrong (1966–88), with adaptation.
27. S. Clark (2011: 52), especially: “Evolutionary change is no great surprise for either Platonists or Aristotelians.”
28. I recognize that this passage is aporetic and partly directed to unfolding difficulties in Aristotle’s notion of well-being, but I find it nonetheless significant that Plotinus actually poses the question and takes it seriously by recognizing a range of different intensities of goodness of life in animals and plants (Enn. I.4[46].3), even if he is ultimately to restrict well-being in the most authentic sense to the life of Intellect.
29. See e.g. Abst. 3.19.2: “It is the nature of animals to have perceptions, to feel distress, to be afraid, to be hurt and therefore to be injured”; and in Sorabji (2004–2005: vol. 1, 360–61).
30. Cf. Abst. 3.8: “Aristotle says that animals with keener perceptions are wiser (phronimōtera)”; cf. EN 1141a25–8; HA 608a16; and for caution in ascribing intellectual activity to animals, see G. Clark (2000: 169 n. 423).
31. Abst. 3.11–12.200–202, especially: “Just as for humans life is over when society is taken away, so also for animals.”
32. Abst. 3.12–13.202–203: “the one vice they do not have is hostility to someone of goodwill: their response in every case is total goodwill. … But humans conspire against no one so much as the person who nurtures them; there is no one for whose death they pray more fervently”[!].
33. Abst. 3.11: ἐξέχει γὰρ ἐν ἑκάστῳ ἰδία τις ἀρετὴ πρὸς ἣν πεφυσίωται, οὔτε τῆς φύσεως οὔτε τοῦ βεβαίου διὰ τοῦτο ἀφαιρουμένου αὐτῶν τὸ λογικόν· ἐκεῖνο γὰρ ἐλέγχειν δεῖ, εἰ μὴ τὰ ἔργα ἀρετῶν καὶ λογικῆς ἐντρεχείας οἰκεῖα.
34. Abst. 1–4: “our opponents say that justice is confounded … if we treat as family (oikeios) the other beasts which are in no way related to us, instead of using some for work and some for food and regarding them as of another kind, without rights in our community as they are without rights of citizenship” (ἔκφυλα καὶ ἄτιμα τῆς κοινωνίας καθάπερ πολιτείας νομίζοντες).
35. Abst. 3.12.3: “Nature that created them has made them need humans and has also made humans need them, establishing an innate justice in them towards us and in us towards them.”
36. See e.g. his famous work Against the Christians.
37. These are the conditions Sorabji (1993: 156–7) suggests for any theory of animal rights, and one might well argue that Porphyry’s de Abstinentia amply fulfils these conditions.
38. Pseudo-Dionysius, de Divinis Nominibus 713a–b: Τὸν ἔρωτα, εἴτε θεῖον εἴτε ἀγγελικὸν εἴτε νοερὸν εἴτε ψυχικὸν εἴτε φυσικὸν εἴποιμεν, ἑνωτικήν τινα καὶ συγκρατικὴν ἐννοήσωμεν δύναμιν τὰ μὲν ὑπέρτερα κινοῦσαν ἐπὶ πρόνοιαν τῶν καταδεεστέρων, τὰ δὲ ὁμόστοιχα πάλιν εἰς κοινωνικὴν ἀλληλουχίαν καὶ ἐπ’ ἐσχάτων τὰ ὑφειμένα πρὸς τὴν τῶν κρειττόνων καὶ ὑπερκειμένων ἐπιστροφήν.
39. As in Proclus, divine providential love is at root a love that recalls everything to itself, an eros pronoètikos/epistreptikos, that is also a function of our love for each other (cf. Proclus, in Alc. I 54–6).
40. With Iamblichus, and certainly Proclus and Pseudo-Dionysius, we encounter the unfolding of a remarkable view of divine love that is implicit in earlier Platonism and not simply a reaction, I suggest, to Christian influence, namely the view that God’s love involves a kind of radical divine vulnerability, a longing that pierces all created life. On this, see Corrigan (2012).
41. Pseudo-Dionysius, de Divinis Nominibus 712a–b: Τολμητέον δὲ καὶ τοῦτο ὑπὲρ ἀληθείας εἰπεῖν, ὅτι καὶ αὐτὸς ὁ πάντων αἴτιος τῷ καλῷ καὶ ἀγαθῷ τῶν πάντων ἔρωτι δι’ ὑπερβολὴν τῆς ἐρωτικῆς ἀγαθότητος ἔξω ἑαυτοῦ γίνεται ταῖς εἰς τὰ ὄντα πάντα προνοίαις καὶ οἷον ἀγαθότητι καὶ ἀγαπήσει καὶ ἔρωτι θέλγεται καὶ ἐκ τοῦ ὑπὲρ πάντα καὶ πάντων ἐξῃρημένου πρὸς τὸ ἐν πᾶσι κατάγεται κατ’ ἐκστατικὴν ὑπερούσιον δύναμιν ἀνεκφοίτητον ἑαυτοῦ.
42. See also Agathon’s speech in the Smp. 197e, where such a notion of enchantment is first broached.
43. Especially on the “pathetic god”: see Corbin (1969).
44. Where everything that can be fitted to a logos, including bodies and matter, Plotinus claims, must be included (see Enn. VI.2[43].21–2, esp. 21.29–59).