Non-propositional Thought in Plotinus

A.C. LLOYD

It is well known to those interested in Neoplatonism that Plotinus speaks regularly of two ‘intellects’. There is a psychic intellect whose activity he often calls διάνοια and later philosophers discursive thought; and there is a ‘pure’ intellect which has not descended into the soul and whose activity later philosophers often call intuitive or non-discursive thought. For the first to be replaced by, or to become the second, which is of course a higher level for the soul, is a necessary step towards contact with the One. Discursive thought means thought that involves transition, an expression often applied to thought by Plotinus. But mis can be a temporal transition from one element of a thought to another or a logical transition from a premiss to a conclusion. Singular judgments belong to discursive thought.1 No one doubts that temporal transition and inference are both excluded from the activity of pure intellect. But Plotinus regularly describes the object, or better, conteTTtv«£ this activity as ‘everything together’ (όμοΰ πάντα). And in a paper of 1970 I suggested that, extrapolating from Aristotle’s notion of a judgment, he supposed that there is a form of consciousness which is the exercise of a single thought or concept that in discursive thinking would have been subject or precicate of a composite thought called a judgment.2 Thisjgrm of consciousness is what I described as non-propositional and identified with the activity of pure intellect.

Without quarrelling with this notion of ‘non-propositional’ R. Sorabji has disputed that pure intellect's activity is non-propositional according to Plotinus. Sorabji claimed first in Language and Logos and then in his own Time, Creation and the Continuum that the transition which is absent from

1 Cf. H.J. Blumenthal, Plotinus' Psychology, The Hague 1971. 106. Ch. 8 contains the most accurate account of the psychic intellects as well as the not unimportant matter of Plotinus' terrrinology.2 ‘Non-discursive thought - an enigma of Greek philosophy'. Proc. Aristotelian Soc. 70 (1969-70), 261-74.

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pure intellect is only temporal transition, not the transition which I en­visaged and which is represented 5v the copula between one term or concept and another.1 For him ‘all things together’ are, on the contrary, a set of universal propositions, or at least all the things that there are , known by universal propositions. The dispute is more important than any wish to defend myself against so scholarly and courteous an opponent. In rejecting propositions at the stage immediately below the One Plotinus was in my view consciously making a radical, if regressive, departure from the Aristme)ian-*ad prpfrflhly a .Middle Platonist tradition which Sorabji’s thesis implicitly attributes to him.4 That he has departed from it is among the reasons why Plotinus’s position has sometimes escaped recognition. How he thought he could do so I should like to suggest after commenting more directly on the criticisms.

Sorabji makes three objections (p. 152) to my thesis as it was presented in ‘Non-discursive Thought . . . ’. It attributed to Plotinus's non-discursive thought (1) non-complexity, (2) absence of self-consciousness, (3) the typical description as contact: and each of these attributes belong only to union with the One. These objections can be reduced to one. In the case of (3) I had said that it was equally clearly identified as thought. But it must be added that we cannot argue to the effect that all dealings (as Sorabji terms them) with the One are contact, these dealings are not thinking, therefore in Plotinus no contact is thinking. We should need the extra argument that these dealings are not thinking because the One is not complex (Plotinus has no other ground); and this reduces the objection from (3) to the objection from (1). The case of (2) is a misunderstanding. Sorabji rightly says (p. 153) that self-thinking is guaranteed for Plotinus, as it is for Aristotle, by the identity of intellect and object, and that this for Plotinus is self-thinking in the proper sense (κυρίως), while it has a secondary sense in discursive thought. He complains that according to me the identity ruled out self-thought at least in the primary sense' (ibid.). I avoided the am­biguous term ‘primary sense’ just because what is primary or proper for us is liable to be secondary for a Neoplatonist! What I wrote was, ‘There would be a sort of consciousness or substitute for it . . . but not the ordinary sort

’ R. Sorabji, ‘Myths about non-propositional thought1, in M. Nussbaum and M. Schofield (eds. ). Language and Logos, Studies presented to G E.L. OtrJen, Cambridge 1982: id.. Time, creation and the condnuum. London 1983. 152-56. 1 shall be referring only to the latter because it is the later version (p xvi).4 This tradition would have interpreted the prime mover’s thinking as R. Norman does in ‘Aristotle’s philosopher-God', Ph rones is 14 (1969), 63-74; repr. in J. Barnes. M. Schofield, R. Sorabji (eds.). Articles on Aristotle, vol. 4, Metaphysics. London. 1979.

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that accompanies discursive thinking, for this consisted according to Plotinus in consciousness of a self or subject of the thinking.’ Plotinus writes.

There is no point at which the visionary can place himself and mark the boundary ofhis self (VI 5.7.14-15).

and again.When you have reached the All even you could not say, ‘This much is me’; . . . youbecome all by abandoning this much (V I5.12).

Similar language is used in the same tract about union with the One: but these passages, like the ‘living contemplation’ of III 8.8, are about the second hypostasis.

Postponing the question of complexity, we can turn to evidence which was left out of my original paper because I was there more concerned with examining the validity of a concept - the ‘enigma’ of the title - than with expounding Plotinus. (I am also indebted to Sorabji’s case for stimulating me to find and sift more of this evidence.) The most important is Plotinus’s own theory of ‘tpig-kflowledge’ which expressly rejects propositions (but which my critics have not mentioned). In his description at V 8.4-5 of pure intellect he distinguishes knowledge and science - in the accepted or Aristotelian picture of them - from the true state of intellect, which is ‘wisdom’. This wisdom is identical with Being and the Living Creature of the Timaeus as well as, of course, the thinker (see further VI 5.7 and VI 7.36.12). In short, it is prior to the soul’s knowledge and is simply the Ideas. In VI 5.7 it is just called ‘true knowledge’. And in V 5.1.3841 (the chapter is the sequel of V 8) we are told that its objects are not propositions: ‘they are certainly neither προτάσεις nor άςιώματα nor λεκτά’, writes Plotinus so as to rule out all plausible versions of linguistic or quasi-linguistic objects. On the same lines V 8.5 ad fin. says that what the gods or spectators of the heavens in the Phaedrus myth are seeing is not propositions (άςιώματα).5 The sages of Egypt are praised for communicating the character of objects of ‘wisdom’, not by words and propositions, but by images (which may or may not be hieroglyphics), each comprehensible in a single glance, without analysis or discursive thinking. This makes it clear that Plotinus is not distinguishing non-discursive intellect as excluding only inference, even though that is what he goes on to mention. Nor is it just discursive thought

' But the ‘propositions/premisses and syllogisms' which ate to be left behind according to the tract On dialectic (1 3,4. IK-20) probably refer only to logic, and the passage cannot be used here.

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which is excluded but language itself (cf. 5.21-22) and a fortiori proposi­tional thought and definitions. At the same time modern translations and comments have tended to exaggerate the mention of non-discursiveness and to neglect the identity of the thinking with its objects that Plotinus believed to be the ground for excluding language. The point which the Egyptians ‘had grasped’ (6.2) is what was named in the previous sentence - that the Ideas are what really are. In the context that meant that the Idea o f beauty, say, is not like a statue o/Helen: it is beauty.

It must not be objected that what we may call the propositional picture is compatible with all this - that what pure intellect thinks of can still be the Ideas, but thought of in propositions because propositions are what one thinks in. This would he-unaceeptable-to Plotinus. There is to be no ‘in’ or ‘with’ about it. He believes that the propositional picture implies that the Ideas are prior to the knowledge of them, or as the title of V 5 expresses it that they would be outside Intellect.

This is what he means by arguing that propositions should be left behind with the psychic intellect or discursive thought because they ‘say something about other things’. When he denied that thinking and the thoughts were προτάσεις, άξιώματα or λεκχά. he gave as the reason that

these are statements about other things; they are not the existing objects-e.g. the statement that justice is beautiful, justice and beauty being both something dif­ferent (V 5.1.39).

That is, the objects are different from the statement, and almost certainly on the grounds that to express eitherof the terms or their conjunction is not the same as expressing the statement. The text could have been taken as saying that justice and beauty are different from each other whereas the statement asserted their identity. But this makes such an inferior argument; e.g. (i) it would not apply to propositions which do express true identity statements, (ii) it assumes that the copula is a necessary, if implicit, consti­tuent of a proposition. Armstrong’s translation with his explanatory parenthesis, ‘different (from the words used]’ might, perhaps uninten­tionally, lead a reader to suppose that Plotinus is taking the propositions as sentences or expressions and arguing that beauty and justice could not of course be constituents of them. In the context of logic he does call them ‘just letters’ (I 3.5.18). So the reader might infer that if instead we took propositions to be thoughts we need not say that he is rejecting the proposi­tional picture. Even if this rests on a possible interpretation of the text we must notice that with the rejected Stoic as well as Aristotelian propositions are included λεκτά. which is why I have used the ambiguous word ‘state-

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ment’ in my translation; and I cannot believe that Plotinus contused Stoic λεκτά with expressions. They were in fact confused by Neoplatonists with thoughts." In short there is no possibility of identifying propositions and Ideas on the grounds that they are both thoughts, for they have quite different structures.7

The next step in his argument deals with the hypothesis that the νοητά are simple objects like beauty and justice 'separate from each other'( 11.4lff.). If he has not dropped the topic of propositions the ‘separation’ will refer to their not being joined as terms in a proposition; and in that case the proposition can, if not must, be a thought. But this is too uncertain, and I shall turn back instead to the central part of the chapter. This claimed that no apprehension of an object can be knowledge unless the subject of the apprehension is identical with his object. Otherwise it is no better than representative perception in which what is apprehended is an impression. My view is that Plotinus includes under this condemnation the 'propositions and theorems' that he condemns for instance in On intelligible beauty (V 8.4 48). 1 am aware that there is more to be said about that passage too: but the objection to them is not that they are sentences instead of propositions (see c.5 ad in ).

To come now to the problem of complexity. Plotinus often requires thought to be complex, or what is equivalent, :o contain otherness. There is little question but that this amounts to requiring it to be propositional. This follows from its having also to be discursive in the sense of being a transition from one concept to another, subject and predicate. For instance, thinking without internal divisions implies inactivity, according to VI 7 13-14, in­stead of activity which it is by definition. So a non-discursive thincing in the sense of a timeless or simultaneous apprehension of subject and predicate is sailing close to the wind of contradiction - but whether closer than my vessel may be thought a fine point. So perhaps we can leave it unquestioned that there are many passages (a number of them cited by Sorabji) support­ing a priori the claim that the content of any intellect must be propositional in so far as it is complex. (Νους which has traditionally been translated

" Nor (subject to correction; do I think that any other philosopher confused them with expressions. Confusion with thoughts (so as to assimilate them to the Alexander-Por- phyry theory of meaning) is found in Ammon. In De ini. 17.24-28: Simpl. InCat. 10.3-4. Plot nus does not, 1 believe, use the term outside our passage. In grammatical theory Apollonius Dysc. had used it roughly for 'meaning' and not. pace L.S.J., for word'.7 A minor point. References to 'truth' do not (pace Sorabji) imply propositions: Plotinus usesthe term to mean reality' (cf. V 3.6-30). For the whole passage cf. D Rcloff. Plotin: liie Gropschrift III. 8 - V. 8 - V 5 - //. V. Berlin 1970.97.

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‘intellect’ ir.eans ‘thought’.) Indeed when it contains no differentiation it is said to be contact with its object rather than thinking and, in the genesis of Intellect from the One, to belong to the intermediate stage of Pre-intellect.8 But this calls for yet another warning about Plotinus’s vocabulary, which cannot be counted on for consistency: at I 2.6.13 pure intel.ect possesses what it has ‘by contact’, actually contrasted with ‘contemplation’. We must probably accept inconsistency that goes beyond vocabulary.

Nevertheless the demand for a νοητόν whose non-complexity makes it non-propositional can, I suggest, be reconciled with the demand for it to be in another respect differentiated and so capable of thinking and being thought. The totum simul which is associated with pure intellect neither is nor is known by a collection of propositions, but is what occupies the place of the genus of being. For that can be grasped as a merely undifferentiated whole, while in fact it contains a multiplicity of parts. It is the former aspect. Being as an intentional or phenomenological object. which is the content of the thinking qua thinking and whose non-complexity prevents it from being a proposition. In its aspect as the extensional object of thinking it is complex and can therefore be a νοητόν; but this will not be a proposition either, for it is the reference of the propositions of non-discursive thought about Being.

In the second of the tracts On the self-identity and ubiquity o f Being as a whole (VI 5) we found an account of wisdom or true knowledge; and in chapter 5 we can also find the clearest signs that the totum simul is generic Being. (In this tract it is normally called ‘the all’-e .g . in c.7. The adjective is of course used by Platonists as a virtual synonym of ‘universal’.) It is compared to a circle whose spatial dimensions are infinitely diminished so that its radii (representing the ‘parts’ of Being) are reduced to a single point, the centre (representing Being as an ‘intelligible nature’). But its role as a universal, of a Platonic type, is shewn by its comparison to the Idea of Mar on account of which all men have a single character of humanity.

The treatise on How there is a multiplicity o f Ideas (VI 7) goes closer to a concrete summum genus. The contents of Intellect, it tells us in a famous passage, are like a single breath or warmth, or rather it is as though there were only one quality, which possessed all qualities - all tastes, all colours and the rest (c. 12 ad fin.). This is how it seems to us. For it must be indescribable, and we can only recall or reconstruct experiences. In a later chapter the highest point of the hypostasis is distinguished even from the

8 I htve tried to expound this in "Plotinus on the genesis of thought and existence'. Oxford Studies in Ancien! Philosophy 5 ( 1987).

awareness of the species all together’; these count only as ‘varied’ in comparison with ‘the wholly beautiful which is varied and not varied’ and which stands between the Good and the forms.9

It is a familiar feature that the highest point of any stage in the hierarchy has begun to lose the character of that stage, or seems partially to have replaced it with that of the next higher stage. We are dealing here with the highest point of νους and it is certainly the limiting case of thinking. But it is still a case of νοείν. even if Plotinus s concept of thinking does not coincide with ours. But why should we expect it to? His concept of knowing or apprehending which are cases of it, does not. His criterion of knowledge, not merely in the present context, is possessing’, ‘having’, ‘holding' (έχω); and the limiting case of this will be the thinking of pure intellect which, however uncertain his terminology, and however hidden behind modern jargon o f ‘contemplation’, is neither thin king of, nor contact with its object, but identity with it. It impljes knowing the substance of things without language. But this possibility, which will appear to most philosophers as primitive, Plotinus could find in the Cratylus (438a-439b) and perhaps the Seventh Letter (341c ff.). It is not the only example of a regressive attitude on the part of this profoundly original philosopher.

There is no standard genus of Being or Existence: it is what in modern philosophy came to be called a whole that is greater than its parts. Plotinus expresses this in VI 5.9 in the language of School P atonism: Being is a single Life ( Timaeus, Sophist)·, it is a unity which is a true unity and therefore not ‘composed of many’ - in fact a whole before the many’ and not an Aristotelian genus, his trained students would tell themselves. The same formula is applied to the wisdom ‘which is not yet composed of theorems’ (8. 5.4-7). At the same time a Neoplatonic quasi-genus was like the Aristotelian genus in also containing its species potentially."’ The dialectic of ‘collecting the unity’ brings the philosopher at least to the notion of a highest quasi-genus in extension before he abandons his psychic, discursive intellect. (Plotinus’s critique of categories did not argue that there was not a summum genus but that there was not only one.) But if pure intellect thinks of the genus and not of the species will it not follow that

* 7.33.7-12. The construction of line II is as H.-S. indicate.10 Explicit in the case of Intellect or the Living Creature at VI 8.3. For a collection of passages asserting potentiality in pure intellect see A. Smith, ‘Potentiality and the problem of plurality in the irtelligible world’, in H.J. Blumerthal and R.A. Markus (eds.',. Neoplatonism and early Christian thought: Essays in honour o f A.H. Armstrong. London 1981.

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(i) as such the species will not exist except potentially, (ii) correspondingly the intellect will be incompletely actual? Plotinus would reply that both would be the case if the quasi-genus were standard: but it is ά φ ’ ενός and δύναμις πάντων, not just δυνάμει πάντα. (It has to induce the standard potentiality so that it can answer to the standard class logic when this is called for.) This division into species, which pure intellect ignores, is a property of Being that no amount of dialectical or mystical ascent can make it lose. So Plotinus’s totum sirr.ul can be said to be playing off the extension- al against the intentional object. But at another level of analysis this may be thought an inaccurate description. For the identity of thinking and its object may be held to entail the identity of the extensional and the intentional because there is nothing outside thought. We can however say that Plotinus is playing off being against thinking. According to him the genesis of Intellect consisted in splitting the One’s first product, its external ένέργεια. into õv and νοητόν; and these were one (in) subject but not one (in) essence or concept. No doubt the same could be said in the terminology of extension and intention. That this is a device at his command can be seen from his use of it in his comparison of self-thought to the two lights which are seen as one."

All this explains, I believe, why he says that when our knowledge is that of pure intellect, ‘lye fepl--r· if ivr know n o th in g ’ when in fact we are ‘most of all in a state of knowing’ (V 8.11.33-34). And the extensional view of Intellect is precisely what he characterises, not as false, but as how an observer sees it from the outside instead of becoming (sic) what he can see (VI 7.15 ad fin.).

Contemplating ‘the definitions of things, in terms of genus and dif­ferentia, . . . arranged into a unified network’ is Sorabji’s proposal for the stage of non-discursive thought (p. 153). But this direct awareness of the extension of Being does not belong to pure intellect. Though not directly concerned with our problem, VI 2.3.21-32 can validly be applied to it: the whole of Being is divided by our (sic) conceptions into parts which we cali genera - but by doingso shew that we havener! been seeing a totum simul. V 3.15.20-21 also asserts the impossibility of discriminating within a totum simul.'2

l i Palmeira Court, 25-28 Palmeim Square. Hove. Sussex

11 V S.l. 16-22, where at 21 άτι means because’ exactly as at 24.12 I am most grateful to Dr. H.J. Blumenthal for comments on a draft of this paper.

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