In this most welcome new volume of the series Les Écrits de Plotin, Taormina provides a translation of Plotinus’ Ennead IV 6, On Sensation and Memory, treatise 41 in Porphyry’s chronological order, accompanied by a substantial introduction and a detailed commentary. To highlight the philosophical significance of the book, and what I take to be Taormina’s main contributions to current scholarly debates, I will begin by focusing on the introductory essay and on the commentary.
As its title indicates, Enn. IV 6 deals with two topics: sensation (chapters 1-2) and memory (chapter 3). In the first two chapters, Plotinus engages polemically with the thesis—held especially by the Stoics, but, as Taormina argues, also by some later Platonists and, though arguably in my view, by the Epicureans—that sensation is an “impression” (typos) in the soul. By challenging this thesis, Plotinus aims to show that sensation can only be a “judgement” (krisis) about a sensible thing brought about by an active “capacity” (dynamis) of the soul. In chapter 3, Plotinus does something analogous: he challenges the thesis—held by the Stoics, the Aristotelians, but also, as Taormina points out, by some later Platonists and, again arguably, by the Epicureans—that “memory” (mnēmē) is the “retention” (katochē) of an impression in either the soul or the body to show that memory can only be the way in which the soul brings “in front of our eyes” something it took hold of without receiving an impression (more on this below).
Enn. IV 6 is not the only treatise in which Plotinus examines sensation and memory. Yet, it is a treatise in which he makes crucial claims about those topics that are not, or not explicitly, made anywhere else in the Enneads. We find sustained discussions of sensation especially in Enn. III 6 and IV 4.23. On the basis of those texts, Eyólfur Emilsson (Plotinus on Sense-Perception, CUP 1988) has argued that, for Plotinus, sensation is a judgement of the soul, rather than a passive impression, and that this judgement is the work of a single capacity, capable of acting in different modalities. But, as Emilsson points out, it is only in Enn. IV 6 that we find out why Plotinus cannot accept the thesis that sensation consists in the passive reception of an impression in the soul. This is mainly because, if sensations were impressions, we would perceive only images of sensible things, rather than the sensible things themselves. As for memory, Plotinus examines it at length in Enn. IV 3.25-4.17, where he focuses especially on the topic of the subject of memory conceived of as the capacity to both retain and recall information. There, Plotinus makes three substantial claims: first, he says that there is no memory of Forms, since memory must involve time, whereas we do not recall Forms as things we previously learned, Forms being something like pieces of knowledge innately present within us. When we grasp Forms, Plotinus seems to suggest, we do not, strictly speaking, recollect them, even if Plato speaks that way; we, rather, actualize them. Second, Plotinus says that the subject of memory is the “capacity for appearances” (phantasia), and that this operates without any need for a bodily organ. Third, he says that there are two capacities for appearances in human beings, or, perhaps, two aspects of the same capacity, one of which deals with intelligible objects (presumably Forms), while the other deals with sensible ones. Read together, these three claims—i.e., that there is no memory of Forms, that the subject of memory is the capacity for appearances, and that this capacity is double—generate some obvious puzzles: is there or not memory and recollection of Forms? If there is memory and/or recollection of Forms are these the same in type as the memory and the recollection of sensible things, or are they different? What bearing does Plotinus’ appeal to two capacities for appearances (or two aspects of the same capacity) have on his account of memory? It is in the attempt to solve these puzzles that Richard King (Aristotle and Plotinus on Memory, de Gruyter 2009)—to whom, I take it, we owe today’s standard, though not uncontroversial, interpretation of memory in Plotinus—has argued that Plotinus draws a distinction between “memory” (mnēmē) and “recollection” (anamnēsis). Memory, King suggests, pertains to sensible things and experiences, whereas recollection, an altogether distinct process which consists in a rational inquiry, pertains to Forms; the capacity for appearances that deals with intelligible things, in his view, produces representations of Forms which may be retained and recalled in the way we retain in memory and recall sensible things. In Enn. IV 6, Plotinus does not mention at all the capacity for appearances, but, remarkably, he observes that we recall both Forms, not their representations, and sensible things in the same way, a problematic observation in light of what he says in Enn. IV 3.25-4.17, and also for King’s interpretation.
In her introductory essay and in the commentary, Taormina, in my view, makes at least three significant contributions to the analysis of sensation and memory in Plotinus. First, Taormina argues, persuasively, I think, that Plotinus’ individuation of the capacities of the soul in Enn. IV 6 rests on his reading of Plato’s discussion of how to individuate and perhaps define capacities in Republic V (477c-d). She then uses this conclusion to develop a novel analysis of sensation, one which is substantially different from Emilsson’s. While I do not agree with her analysis of sensation in Plotinus (more on this below), Plotinus’ appeal to Rep. V, is, I think, a crucial piece of the puzzle for reconstructing not only his account of sensation and memory, but his psychology in general. Second, Taormina carefully unpacks Plotinus’ remark that we recall both Forms and sensible things in the same way and argues, correctly in my view, that there is no sharp distinction in Plotinus between memory and recollection, as suggested by King. This is because memory, for Plotinus, is an active capacity that, through attention and exercises, can be trained to improve at its task, analogously to our capacities to run and to become a boxer. It can, thus, be trained to retain information by developing the relevant type of stable disposition toward something or other —without the need to store an impression of what it retains—and it can also be trained to efficiently recall something or other, with or without inquiry, by repeated actualizations of that disposition. It is in these actualizations that it brings things “before our eyes.” Thus, Taormina observes, if it is by actualizing pieces of knowledge in our soul that we recollect Forms, and it is by actualizing a disposition that we recall sensible things, then there can be no sharp distinction between recollection of Forms and memory of sensible things. To be sure, the recollection of Forms always involves inquiry, whereas we can recall some sensible things without it, but Forms and sensible things are present in the soul in analogous ways, and both are brought “in front of our eyes” when they are actualized. When we understand that memory, for Plotinus, is not a mere storehouse of information, but an active capacity of the sort described above, Taormina observes, then we should conclude that memories, for him, are dynamic items, rather than mere inert impressions, and this is Taormina’s third important contribution to our understanding of sensation and memory in Plotinus.
While I agree with most of Taormina’s conclusions, I am not fully persuaded by her reconstruction of Plotinus’ account of sensation and by some of her remarks on the nature of memories. In Rep. V, we read that capacities are distinguished from one another only by what they are set over and by what they accomplish. Taormina argues, rightly in my view, that these are the criteria by which Plotinus distinguishes the capacities of the soul in Enn. IV 6. Building on this conclusion, she suggests that, for Plotinus, the senses are not unified into a single capacity, as argued by Emilsson. For Plotinus, she argues, each sensory modality corresponds to a distinct sensory capacity because each sense is set over a different thing and accomplishes something different. Thus, in Taormina’s view, each sense, sight, hearing, etc., judges autonomously its special sensible quality, and the unity of sensation is achieved by the soul itself, which, by comparing different sensible qualities, acts in a way analogous to that of the Aristotelian common sense. According to Taormina, however, when acting as common sense, the soul, for Plotinus, has access to rational resources, and it behaves the way the soul does when it thinks about sensible qualities and compares them, all by itself, in the famous “wooden horse” passage at the end of the first part of Plato’s Theaetetus (184c-185d). By comparing sensible qualities, the soul, for Taormina, produces a second judgement, distinct from that of the senses, that consists in, or brings about, something like a thought, e.g., “red is different from blue,” or “this is a horse.” This account of sensation, it seems to me at least, might not sit well with Plotinus’ repeated claim that sensation requires the body, and it might run the risk of turning sensation into a too sophisticated intellectual exercise, one unavailable to non-human, and thus, for Plotinus, non-rational animals. Perhaps Plotinus has two distinct accounts of sensation, one for human and one for non-human animals; if so, then Taormina’s account could apply to humans only. In that case, however, we would still need an explanation of how the senses can judge their proper qualities while being unable to compare them. Taormina’s account of sensation leads her to emphasize what she take to be the homogeneity between sensations and memories; for, on her reading, memories, too, are thoughts of some kind. She grounds this conclusion, at least in part, on some of Plotinus’ examples of memories in IV 3.32, e.g., the memory of our spouse or of our country. Spouse and country, according to Taormina, are already abstract concepts with no affective content. However, even granting that all memories are thoughts, I read Plotinus in IV 3.32 as saying that the memory of our spouse and that of our country do have an affective content. If this is so, then maybe we need to distinguish more sharply than Taormina does between different kinds of memory-thoughts. For Taormina, the capacity for appearances, unlike the sensory one, is a unitary capacity and so is memory, but I wonder whether the two capacities for appearances that Plotinus introduces in IV 3.31 could not, instead, be set over different things and accomplish different things.
Mine are not critical remarks, however. Taormina is never dogmatic. She does provide her own interpretation, but she does so by discussing alternative readings in great detail. There is plenty of food for thought in this book, and there are plenty of inspiring observations.
I am not a native speaker of French, but I found her translation outstanding, very precise without ever being cumbersome. It is based on the text established in the so-called editio minor of the Enneads, although she tends to prefer the manuscripts’ reading where Henry and Schwyzer depart from it. There are just two points at which I might have made a different choice. I would not have opted for the reading of the mss. at 1.20-21, since, on that reading, we are forced to implicitly ascribe to Plotinus’ opponents, I think, a thesis they did not hold, and that is, instead, only polemically inferred by Plotinus from theses they did hold. As I read the argument in 3.33-38 differently, I would have divided the text in a different way. But these are just details.
Rich in references to the relevant sources and philosophically provoking, Taormina’s book, for this reviewer, is a must-read not only for Plotinus specialists but for anybody interested in Ancient Greek psychology and epistemology.