Moments of Truth: The Marginal and the Real

Abstract

Why is Plotinus relevant to a study of marginality? On the one hand, moderns have marginalized the Platonic tradition. On the other, it is our “common sense” that—on Plotinus's account at least—distracts us from the real, and better, world. We could have learned the same lesson even from modern naturalistic science, which seems to show that we live on the margins, in a universe far older, grimmer and more mysterious than we can easily imagine, but from our ordinary point of view it is the universe aloft that is of marginal concern. But the vision which Plotinus hoped to awaken—a vision that he acknowledged was likely to be momentary, and speedily forgotten—is of a wilder world than the modern—and Stoic—theory of a natural, material world. I attempt to give a credible account of this Plotinian perspective, drawing on comparisons both with modern materialistic science and with the “sudden enlightenment” of Zen Buddhism.

Notes

An earlier version of this essay was originally presented at a conference on “The Uncanny,” at the University of Liverpool in April 2004.

1. Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. A. H. Armstrong (London: Heinemann, Loeb Classical Library, 1966–88), 5.5[32].11, 19–23; the reference is to lines 19 to 23, of the 11th paragraph of the 5th treatise, which is the 32nd in chronological order, in Book 5. All further passages from Porphyry's (Life of Plotinus) or Plotinus are taken from Armstrong's edition, except where otherwise indicated.

2. An earlier version of this paragraph appears in my “Plotinus: ‘The Enneads',” in Central Works of the Great Philosophers, vol. 1, ed. J. Shand (Acumen: London, 2005), 119–39.

3. Porphyry, Life of Plotinus, 1.2.

4. Plotinus Enneads 6.9 [9].11, 51: the phrase with which Porphyry elected to close the Enneads, though the treatise is the ninth in chronological order. Plotinus's own last words, apparently, were: “Try to bring back the god in you to the divine in the all” (Porphyry, Life of Plotinus, 2.26f).

5. “Even sleep he reduced by taking very little food, often not even a piece of bread” (Porphyry, Life of Plotinus, 8).

6. I have considered some of the dangerous associations of Platonic practice in “Charms and Counter-Charms,” in Conceptions of Philosophy: Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplementary Volume 65, ed. Anthony O’Hear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 215–31.

7. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.17.1.

8. See James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations (London: Little, Brown & Company, 2004).

9. Paul McCartney, “The Fool on the Hill,” in Magical Mystery Tour (London: Parlophone, 1967).

10. See my “A Plotinian Account of Intellect,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 71 (1997): 421–32

11. See also 4.3.18: “just as in the crafts reasoning occurs when the craftsmen are in perplexity, but, when there is no difficulty, the craft dominates and does its work.”

12. Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, ed. John Dillon (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005), 49.

13. A. H. Armstrong and R. A. Markus, Christian Faith and Greek Philosophy (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1960), 27.

14. William Blake, “Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” plates 6–7, in Complete Writings, ed. G. Keynes (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 150.

15. As Blake called it. Songs of Experience, in Complete Works, 220.

16. Though “one must not think that some things are contained in the order, while others are let loose for the operation of free will (eis to autoexousian)” (4.3 [27].16, 13f): we are all collaborating in that order.

17. See, for example, Nan Huai-Chin, Basic Buddhism: Exploring Buddhism and Zen (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1997), 212, citing Jiyue Lu, Record of Pointing at the Moon.

18. This is not unrelated to the notorious Einstein-Rosen-Podalsky paradox: it seems that “local realism” is false, and that any particles once associated remain “entangled” forever. But this is another story.

19. Nick Bostrom, “Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?” Philosophical Quarterly 53 (2003): 243–55.

20. “khoron sterixan erotos athanatou” (Porphyry, Life of Plotinus, 23.36f, after 22.54ff). The words are not Plotinus's, but still Plotinian: “sterizein” means “to establish, or set firm,” but what is thus established is a dance (compare 2.9 [33].7, 36f on the fate of the tortoise who does not manage to range itself with the movement of the dance!).

21. Lev Shestov, In Job's Balances (1932), trans. Camilla Coventry and C. A. Macartney, ed. Bernard Martin (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1975), pt. 3 “Plotinus's Ecstasies,” at http://shestov.by.ru/ijb/jb_0.html (accessed 22 February 2011).