6th Ennead | Plotinus | Book 7-1
Book 7
How the Multiplicity of the Ideal-Forms Came Into Being: And Upon the Good
God, or some one of the gods, in sending the souls to their birth, placed eyes in the face to catch the light and allotted to each sense the appropriate organ, providing thus for the safety which comes by seeing and hearing in time and, seeking or avoiding under guidance of touch.
But what led to this provision?
It cannot be that other forms of being were produced first and that, these perishing in the absence of the senses, the maker at last supplied the means by which men and other living beings might avert disaster.
We may be told that it lay within the divine knowledge that animal life would be exposed to heat and cold and other such experiences incident to body and that in this knowledge he provided the senses and the organs apt to their activity in order that the living total might not fall an easy prey.
Now, either he gave these organs to souls already possessing the sensitive powers or he gave senses and organs alike.
But if the souls were given the powers as well as the organs, then, souls though they were, they had no sensation before that giving. If they possessed these powers from the moment of being souls and became souls in order to their entry into process, then it is of their very nature to belong to process, unnatural to them to be outside of process and within the Intellectual: they were made in the intent that they should belong to the alien and have their being amid evil; the divine provision would consist in holding them to their disaster; this is God’s reasoned purpose, this the plan entire.
Now what is the foundation of reasoned plan?
Precedent planning, it may be; but still we are forced back to some thing or things determining it. What would these be here?
Either sense-perception or intellect. But sense-perception it cannot in this case be: intellect is left; yet, starting from intellect, the conclusion will be knowledge, not therefore the handling of the sensible; what begins with the intellectual and proceeds to the intellectual can certainly not end in dealings with the sensible. Providence, then, whether over living beings or over any part of the universe was never the outcome of plan.
There is in fact no planning There; we speak of reasoned purpose in the world of things only to convey that the universe is of the character which in the later order would point to a wise purposing; Providence implies that things are as, in the later order, a competent foreplanning would produce them. Reasoning serves, in beings not of the order above that need, to supply for the higher power; foresight is necessary in the lack of power which could dispense with it; it labours towards someone occurrence in preference to another and it goes in a sort of dread of the unfitting; where only the fitting can occur, there is no foreseeing. So with planning; where one only of two things can be, what place is there for plan? The alone and one and utterly simplex cannot involve a “this to avert that”: if the “this” could not be, the “that” must; the serviceable thing appeared and at once approved itself so.
But surely this is foreseeing, deliberating: are we not back at what was said at the beginning, that God did to this end give both the senses and the powers, however perplexing that giving be?
No: all turns on the necessary completeness of Act; we cannot think anything belonging to God to be other than a whole and all and therefore in anything of God’s that all must be contained; God therefore must take in the future, present beforehand. Certainly there is no later in the divine; what is There as present is future for elsewhere. If then the future is present, it must be present as having been foreconceived for later coming to be; at that divine stage therefore it lacks nothing and therefore can never lack; all existed, eternally and in such a way that at the later stage any particular thing may be said to exist for this or that purpose; the All, in its extension and so to speak unfolding, is able to present succession while yet it is simultaneous; this is because it contains the cause of all as inherent to itself.
Thus we have even here the means of knowing the nature of the Intellectual-Principle, though, seeing it more closely than anything else, we still see it at less than its worth. We know that it exists but its cause we do not see, or, if we do, we see that cause as something apart. We see a man — or an eye, if you like — but this is an image or part of an image; what is in that Principle is at once Man and the reason of his being; for There man — or eye — must be, itself, an intellective thing and a cause of its being; it could not exist at all unless it were that cause, whereas here, everything partial is separate and so is the cause of each. In the Intellectual, all is at one so that the thing is identical with the cause.
Even here the thing and its cause are often identical — an eclipse furnishes an example — what then is there to prevent other things too being identical with their cause and this cause being the essence of the thing? It must be so; and by this search after the cause the thing’s essence is reached, for the essence of a thing is its cause. I am not here saying that the informing Idea is the cause of the thing — though this is true — but that the Idea itself, unfolded, reveals the cause inherent in it.
A thing of inactivity, even though alive, cannot include its own cause; but where could a Forming-Idea, a member of the Intellectual-Principle, turn in quest of its cause? We may be answered “In the Intellectual-Principle”; but the two are not distinct; the Idea is the Intellectual-Principle; and if that Principle must contain the Ideas complete, their cause must be contained in them. The Intellectual-Principle itself contains every cause of the things of its content; but these of its content are identically Intellectual-Principle, each of them Intellectual-Principle; none of them, thus, can lack its own cause; each springs into being carrying with it the reason of its being. No result of chance, each must rise complete with its cause; it is an integral and so includes the excellence bound up with the cause. This is how all participants in the Idea are put into possession of their cause.
In our universe, a coherent total of multiplicity, the several items are linked each to the other, and by the fact that it is an all every cause is included in it: even in the particular thing the part is discernibly related to the whole, for the parts do not come into being separately and successively but are mutually cause and caused at one and the same moment. Much more in the higher realm must all the singles exist for the whole and each for itself: if then that world is the conjoint reality of all, of an all not chance-ruled and not sectional, the cause There must include the causes: every item must hold, in its very nature, the uncaused possession of its cause; uncaused, independent and standing apart from cause, they must be self-contained, cause and all.
Further, since nothing There is chance-sprung, and the multiplicity in each comprehends the entire content, then the cause of every member can be named; the cause was present from the beginning, inherent, not a cause but a fact of the being; or, rather, cause and manner of being were one. What could an Idea have, as cause, over and above the Intellectual-Principle? It is a thought of that Principle and cannot, at that, be considered as anything but a perfect product. If it is thus perfect we cannot speak of anything in which it is lacking nor cite any reason for such lack. That thing must be present, and we can say why. The why is inherent, therefore, in the entity, that is to say in every thought and activity of the Intellectual-Principle. Take for example the Idea of Man; Man entire is found to contribute to it; he is in that Idea in all his fullness including everything that from the beginning belonged to Man. If Man were not complete There, so that there were something to be added to the Idea, that additional must belong to a derivative; but Man exists from eternity and must therefore be complete; the man born is the derivative.
What then is there to prevent man having been the object of planning There?
No: all stands in that likeness, nothing to be added or taken away; this planning and reasoning is based only on an assumption; things are taken to be in process and this suggests planning and reasoning; insist on the eternity of the process and planning falls to the ground. There can be no planning over the eternal; that would imply forgetfulness of a first state; further, if the second state were better, things stood ill at first; if they stood well, so they must remain.
Only in conjunction with their causes are things good; even in this sphere a thing is good in virtue of being complete; form means that the thing is complete, the Matter duly controlled; this control means that nothing has been left crude; but something is so left if anything belonging to the shape be missing-eye, or other part. Thus to state cause is to state the thing complete. Why eyes or eyebrows? For completion: if you say “For preservation,” you affirm an indwelling safeguard of the essence, something contributory to the being: the essence, then, preceded the safeguard and the cause was inbound with the essence; distinct, this cause is in its nature a part of the essence.
All parts, thus, exist in regard to each other: the essence is all-embracing, complete, entire; the excellency is inbound with the cause and embraced by it; the being, the essence, the cause, all are one.
But, at this, sense-perception — even in its particular modes — is involved in the Idea by eternal necessity, in virtue of the completeness of the Idea; Intellectual-Principle, as all-inclusive, contains in itself all by which we are brought, later, to recognise this perfection in its nature; the cause, There, was one total, all-inclusive; thus Man in the Intellectual was not purely intellect, sense-perception being an addition made upon his entry into birth: all this would seem to imply a tendance in that great Principle towards the lower, towards this sphere.
But how could that Principle have such perception, be aware of things of sense? Surely it is untenable on the one hand that sense-perception should exist There, from eternity, and on the other that only upon the debasement of the soul should there be sense-perception here and the accomplishment in this realm of the Act of what was always a power in that?
To meet the difficulty we must make a close examination of the nature of Man in the Intellectual; perhaps, though, it is better to begin with the man of this plane lest we be reasoning to Man There from a misconception of Man here. There may even be some who deny the difference.
We ask first whether man as here is a Reason-Principle different to that soul which produces him as here and gives him life and thought; or is he that very soul or, again, the [yet lower] soul using the human body?
Now if man is a reasonable living being and by “living being” is meant a conjoint of soul and body, the Reason-Principle of man is not identical with soul. But if the conjoint of soul and body is the reason-principle of man, how can man be an eternal reality, seeing that it is only when soul and body have come together that the Reason-Principle so constituted appears?
The Reason-Principle will be the foreteller of the man to be, not the Man Absolute with which we are dealing but more like his definition, and not at that indicating his nature since what is indicated is not the Idea that is to enter Matter but only that of the known thing, the conjoint. We have not yet found the Man we are seeking, the equivalent of the Reason-Principle.
But — it may be said — the Reason-Principle of such beings must be some conjoint, one element in another.
This does not define the principle of either. If we are to state with entire accuracy the Reason-Principles of the Forms in Matter and associated with Matter, we cannot pass over the generative Reason-Principle, in this case that of Man, especially since we hold that a complete definition must cover the essential manner of being.
What, then, is this essential of Man? What is the indwelling, inseparable something which constitutes Man as here? Is the Reason-Principle itself a reasoning living being or merely a maker of that reasoning life-form? and what is it apart from that act of making?
The living being corresponds to a reasoning life in the Reason-Principle; man therefore is a reasoning life: but there is no life without soul; either, then, the soul supplies the reasoning life — and man therefore is not an essence but simply an activity of the soul — or the soul is the man.
But if reasoning soul is the man, why does it not constitute man upon its entry into some other animal form?
Man, thus, must be some Reason-Principle other than soul. But why should he not be some conjoint — a soul in a certain Reason-Principle — the Reason-Principle being, as it were, a definite activity which however could not exist without that which acts?
This is the case with the Reason-Principles in seed which are neither soulless nor entirely soul. For these productive principles cannot be devoid of soul and there is nothing surprising in such essences being Reason-Principles.
But these principles producing other forms than man, of what phase of soul are they activities? Of the vegetal soul? Rather of that which produces animal life, a brighter soul and therefore one more intensely living.
The soul of that order, the soul that has entered into Matter of that order, is man by having, apart from body, a certain disposition; within body it shapes all to its own fashion, producing another form of Man, man reduced to what body admits, just as an artist may make a reduced image of that again.
It is soul, then, that holds the pattern and Reason-Principles of Man, the natural tendencies, the dispositions and powers — all feeble since this is not the Primal Man — and it contains also the Ideal-Forms of other senses, Forms which themselves are senses, bright to all seeming but images, and dim in comparison with those of the earlier order.
The higher Man, above this sphere, rises from the more godlike soul, a soul possessed of a nobler humanity and brighter perceptions. This must be the Man of Plato’s definition ["Man is Soul"], where the addition “Soul as using body” marks the distinction between the soul which uses body directly and the soul, poised above, which touches body only through that intermediary.
The Man of the realm of birth has sense-perception: the higher soul enters to bestow a brighter life, or rather does not so much enter as simply impart itself; for soul does not leave the Intellectual but, maintaining that contact, holds the lower life as pendant from it, blending with it by the natural link of Reason-Principle to Reason-Principle: and man, the dimmer, brightens under that illumination.
But how can that higher soul have sense-perception?
It is the perception of what falls under perception There, sensation in the mode of that realm: it is the source of the soul’s perception of the sense-realm in its correspondence with the Intellectual. Man as sense-percipient becomes aware of that correspondence and accommodates the sense-realm to the lowest extremity of its counterpart There, proceeding from the fire Intellectual to the fire here which becomes perceptible by its analogy with that of the higher sphere. If material things existed There, the soul would perceive them; Man in the Intellectual, Man as Intellectual soul, would be aware of the terrestrial. This is how the secondary Man, copy of Man in the Intellectual, contains the Reason-Principles in copy; and Man in the Intellectual-Principle contained the Man that existed before any man. The diviner shines out upon the secondary and the secondary upon the tertiary; and even the latest possesses them all — not in the sense of actually living by them all but as standing in under-parallel to them. Some of us act by this lowest; in another rank there is a double activity, a trace of the higher being included; in yet another there is a blending of the third grade with the others: each is that Man by which he acts while each too contains all the grades, though in some sense not so. On the separation of the third life and third Man from the body, then if the second also departs — of course not losing hold on the Above — the two, as we are told, will occupy the same place. No doubt it seems strange that a soul which has been the Reason-Principle of a man should come to occupy the body of an animal: but the soul has always been all, and will at different times be this and that.
Pure, not yet fallen to evil, the soul chooses man and is man, for this is the higher, and it produces the higher. It produces also the still loftier beings, the Celestials [Daimons], who are of one Form with the soul that makes Man: higher still stands that Man more entirely of the Celestial rank, almost a god, reproducing God, a Celestial closely bound to God as a man is to Man. For that Being into which man develops is not to be called a god; there remains the difference which distinguishes souls, all of the same race though they be. This is taking “Celestial” ["Daimon"] in the sense of Plato.
When a soul which in the human state has been thus attached chooses animal nature and descends to that, it is giving forth the Reason-Principle — necessarily in it — of that particular animal: this lower it contained and the activity has been to the lower.
But if it is by becoming evil and inferior that the soul produces the animal nature, the making of ox or horse was not at the outset in its character; the reason-principle of the animal, and the animal itself, must lie outside of the natural plan?
Inferior, yes; but outside of nature, no. The thing There [Soul in the Intellectual] was in some sense horse and dog from the beginning; given the condition, it produces the higher kind; let the condition fail, then, since produce it must, it produces what it may: it is like a skilful craftsman competent to create all kinds of works of art but reduced to making what is ordered and what the aptitude of his material indicates.
The power of the All-Soul, as Reason-Principle of the universe, may be considered as laying down a pattern before the effective separate powers go forth from it: this plan would be something like a tentative illumining of Matter; the elaborating soul would give minute articulation to these representations of itself; every separate effective soul would become that towards which it tended, assuming that particular form as the choral dancer adapts himself to the action set down for him.
But this is to anticipate: our enquiry was How there can be sense-perception in man without the implication that the Divine addresses itself to the realm of process. We maintained, and proved, that the Divine does not look to this realm but that things here are dependent upon those and represent them and that man here, holding his powers from Thence, is directed Thither, so that, while sense makes the environment of what is of sense in him, the Intellectual in him is linked to the Intellectual.
What we have called the perceptibles of that realm enter into cognisance in a way of their own, since they are not material, while the sensible sense here — so distinguished as dealing with corporeal objects — is fainter than the perception belonging to that higher world; the man of this sphere has sense-perception because existing in a less true degree and taking only enfeebled images of things There — perceptions here are Intellections of the dimmer order, and the Intellections There are vivid perceptions.
So much for the thing of sense; but it would appear that the prototype There of the living form, the universal horse, must look deliberately towards this sphere; and, that being so, the idea of horse must have been worked out in order there be a horse here?
Yet what was that there to present the idea of the horse it was desired to produce? Obviously the idea of horse must exist before there was any planning to make a horse; it could not be thought of in order to be made; there must have been horse unproduced before that which was later to come into being. If, then, the thing existed before it was produced — if it cannot have been thought of in order to its production — the Being that held the horse as There held it in presence without any looking to this sphere; it was not with intent to set horse and the rest in being here that they were contained There; it is that, the universal existing, the reproduction followed of necessity since the total of things was not to halt at the Intellectual. Who was there to call a halt to a power capable at once of self-concentration and of outflow?
But how come these animals of earth to be There? What have they to do within God? Reasoning beings, all very well; but this host of the unreasoning, what is there august in them? Surely the very contrary?
The answer is that obviously the unity of our universe must be that of a manifold since it is subsequent to that unity-absolute; otherwise it would be not next to that but the very same thing. As a next it could not hold the higher rank of being more perfectly a unity; it must fall short: since the best is a unity, inevitably there must be something more than unity, for deficiency involves plurality.
But why should it not be simply a dyad?
Because neither of the constituents could ever be a pure unity, but at the very least a duality and so progressively [in an endless dualization]. Besides, in that first duality of the hypothesis there would be also movement and rest, Intellect and the life included in Intellect, all-embracing Intellect and life complete. That means that it could not be one Intellect; it must be Intellect agglomerate including all the particular intellects, a thing therefore as multiple as all the Intellects and more so; and the life in it would nat be that of one soul but of all the souls with the further power of producing the single souls: it would be the entire living universe containing much besides man; for if it contained only man, man would be alone here.
Admitted, then — it will be said — for the nobler forms of life; but how can the divine contain the mean, the unreasoning? The mean is the unreasoning, since value depends upon reason and the worth of the intellective implies worthlessness where intellection is lacking. Yet how can there be question of the unreasoning or unintellective when all particulars exist in the divine and come forth from it?
In taking up the refutation of these objections, we must insist upon the consideration that neither man nor animals here can be thought of as identical with the counterparts in the higher realm; those ideal forms must be taken in a larger way. And again the reasoning thing is not of that realm: here the reasoning, There the pre-reasoning.
Why then does man alone reason here, the others remaining reasonless?
Degrees of reasoning here correspond to degrees of Intellection in that other sphere, as between man and the other living beings There; and those others do in some measure act by understanding.
But why are they not at man’s level of reason: why also the difference from man to man?
We must reflect that, since the many forms of lives are movements — and so with the Intellections — they cannot be identical: there must be different lives, distinct intellections, degrees of lightsomeness and clarity: there must be firsts, seconds, thirds, determined by nearness to the Firsts. This is how some of the Intellections are gods, others of a secondary order having what is here known as reason, while others again belong to the so-called unreasoning: but what we know here as unreasoning was There a Reason-Principle; the unintelligent was an Intellect; the Thinker of Horse was Intellect and the Thought, Horse, was an Intellect.
But [it will be objected] if this were a matter of mere thinking we might well admit that the intellectual concept, remaining concept, should take in the unintellectual, but where concept is identical with thing how can the one be an Intellection and the other without intelligence? Would not this be Intellect making itself unintelligent?
No: the thing is not unintelligent; it is Intelligence in a particular mode, corresponding to a particular aspect of Life; and just as life in whatever form it may appear remains always life, so Intellect is not annulled by appearing in a certain mode. Intellectual-Principle adapted to some particular living being does not cease to be the Intellectual-Principle of all, including man: take it where you will, every manifestation is the whole, though in some special mode; the particular is produced but the possibility is of all. In the particular we see the Intellectual-Principle in realization; the realized is its latest phase; in one case the last aspect is “horse”; at “horse” ended the progressive outgoing towards the lesser forms of life, as in another case it will end at something lower still. The unfolding of the powers of this Principle is always attended by some abandonment in regard to the highest; the outgoing is by loss, and by this loss the powers become one thing or another according to the deficiency of the life-form produced by the failing principle; it is then that they find the means of adding various requisites; the safeguards of the life becoming inadequate there appear nail, talon, fang, horn. Thus the Intellectual-Principle by its very descent is directed towards the perfect sufficiency of the natural constitution, finding there within itself the remedy of the failure.
But failure There? What can defensive horns serve to There? To sufficiency as living form, to completeness. That principle must be complete as living form, complete as Intellect, complete as life, so that if it is not to be one thing it may be another. Its characteristic difference is in this power of being now this, now that, so that, summing all, it may be the completest life-form, Intelligence complete, life in greatest fullness with each of the particulars complete in its degree while yet, over all that multiplicity, unity reigns.
If all were one identity, the total could not contain this variety of forms; there would be nothing but a self-sufficing unity. Like every compound it must consist of things progressively differing in form and safeguarded in that form. This is in the very nature of shape and Reason-Principle; a shape, that of man let us suppose, must include a certain number of differences of part but all dominated by a unity; there will be the noble and the inferior, eye and finger, but all within a unity; the part will be inferior in comparison with the total but best in its place. The Reason-Principle, too, is at once the living form and something else, something distinct from the being of that form. It is so with virtue also; it contains at once the universal and the particular; and the total is good because the universal is not differentiated.