“All in all, my hope is that what emerges from these papers is a portrait of a thinker of remarkable insight and power, even if I have not succeeded in doing him full justice” (3). So concludes Professor John Dillon in the Introduction to his collection of essays on Plotinus that span more than five decades. Anyone with even a trifling familiarity with research in the Platonic tradition for the past half century knows well that Dillon’s has been a primary voice in growing the field, and the essays gathered here, despite his humility, succeed remarkably well in doing justice to Plotinus’ oeuvre. For the purposes of this review, I have done my best to sort the papers across three very broad topical categories.
The first group of papers is Historical in that they situate Plotinus in the larger eidetic world in which he found himself. Two essays—“Plotinus, Enn. 3.9.1, and Later Views on the Intelligible World” (47-54) and “Plotinus at Work on Platonism” (5-23)—showcase the volume’s range of appeal. While the latter will be sought by seasoned readers of the Platonic tradition, the former provides a systematic overview of Plotinus helpful to those just setting out, featuring a clear and penetrating exposition of the three hypostases and the intellectual context for their emergence in Plotinus’ thinking. Of particular help here for the novice reader is Dillon’s careful analysis and exposition of technical Plotinian vocabulary.
In both essays, Dillon emphasizes that Plotinus is a “thinker with an open-ended, ‘aporetic’ approach to philosophy, a mystic who is also a rationalist” (5). This aporetic dimension resurfaces throughout the volume, and is present even in one of the collection’s more complex essays, “Enn. III 5: Plotinus’ Exegesis of the Symposium Myth” (55-78), a paper in which aporia includes not just Socratic puzzlement but an absence of finality and a space for development in one’s thought, here in the shape of the emergence throughout Plotinus’ life of suggestions like that of ‘moments’ within Nous—which prefigures the triad ‘Being-Life-Intellect’ developed by Porphyry—and the suggestion of a transcendent and participable aspect of Nous—formalized by Iamblichus (78).
While the volume thus attends to Plotinus’ interpretative ingenuity as a reader of Platonic dialogues in a way that looks forward to his inheritors, Dillon also looks backward to Plotinus’ predecessors in “Plotinus, Speusippus, and the Platonic Parmenides” (243-256), arguing that, “while a metaphysical interpretation of the second part of the Parmenides is not supposed to antedate Plotinus…” (247), “an ontological interpretation of Plato’s argumentation in the second hypothesis of the Parmenides may have been behind the theorizing of Speusippus in the Old Academy” (256).
Additionally, Dillon showcases Plotinus in conversation with other philosophical, religious, and mystical traditions, including the Epicureans, Stoics, Pythagoreans, and Gnostics—“The Theory of Three Classes of Men in Plotinus and Philo” (131-138)—the Chaldean Oracles—“Plotinus and the Chaldean Oracles” (177-188)—and the Christians—“Origen and Plotinus: The Platonic Influence on Early Christianity” (155-176). A second essay on Plotinus and Christianity—“‘A Kind of Warmth’: Some Reflections on the Conception of ‘Grace’ in the Neoplatonic Tradition” (199-209)—centers Augustine’s claim in the Confessions (VII 20-1) about what he found wanting in the ‘books of the Platonists’, which Dillon describes as “any sense of the total helplessness of man to attain moral excellence (never mind divinity) by his own unaided efforts, and his utter dependence on ‘grace’ (gratia, χάρις) emanating from God” (200). Where one finds in Augustine a God exercising compassion for his creatures on a personal basis, in Plotinus there is a ‘light’ or ‘warmth’ that “streams down upon all alike, and its influence is limited, not by any exercise of will on the part of the One, but simply by the limits of receptivity… of the recipient” (204).
In the last Historical essay, “Plotinus Orator: Literary and Rhetorical Features in the Enneads” (297-313), Dillon demonstrates Plotinus’ use of rhetorical flourishes and literary strategies to advance his philosophical positions. In addition to the fascinating catalogue of Plotinus’ celebrated ‘dynamic images’, the paper contains an illuminating adumbration of Plotinus as expositor of Greek myth, which, though seeming to reveal “a cavalier disregard for accuracy” (309), rather manifest a thinker “not so much distorting the myth concerned, as drawing out of it levels of meaning not dreamt of” (312) by the original poet.
The second section of papers is focused primarily on Psychological topics. Each paper reveals Dillon’s insight into some of the more complicated elements of Plotinus’ thought, especially concerning the relationship of the soul to the intelligible world. In “The Mind of Plotinus” (25-46), for instance, we find the argument that Plotinus writes in such a way that “he gives one the overwhelming impression of a man who has actually experienced Nous” (45), which, Dillon suggests, “must be conceived of as being in a continuous (or rather, instantaneous) state of multidirectional motion (κίνησις), while the otherness (ἑτερότης) of each of the Forms from every other subsists in tension with the sameness (ταυτότης) that is characteristic of each of them, and of the whole of Nous” (42-43). Though the analysis here is dense, the reward is indubitable.
Similarly, in “Aisthêsis Noêtê: a Doctrine of Spiritual Senses in Origen and in Plotinus” (115-130), Dillon explores the possibility that Plotinus posits some form of sense-faculties in the soul before it leaves the intelligible realm, and that in speaking of noetic sensibilia, he must therefore mean not forms of sensibilia but noetic correlates of sensibilia (124-125). The proposition elicits from Dillon the humble admission that there are times that he finds it difficult to understand what Plotinus is saying while still maintaining that he is saying something rather interesting. It is refreshing to witness a scholar of this rank admit such a thing in print; Dillon does so on more than one occasion throughout the volume, and it provides encouragement for the steadfast though sometimes wearied reader of Plotinus’ often cryptic formulations.
Finally, in “Plotinus and the Transcendental Imagination” (103-114), Dillon locates two faculties of imagination in Plotinus, one of which involves no synthesis or judgment but simply takes in data, while the other synthesizes the data of sense-perception and delivers an opinion on the basis of them (106-107). This higher imagination, however, is also a receptacle for noesis, or intellectual acts, and thus makes possible the dynamic images mentioned above, i.e., “those spiritual exercises which he prescribes for us at various points in the tractates in order to make vivid some knotty point of doctrine” (108). Those interested in invigorating the typically inferior capacity of phantasia in the Platonic tradition will find a wealth of material here.
Two more papers in this section concern the mind/body problem, “Plotinus, the First Cartesian?” (139-154), and “Shadows on the Soul: Plotinian Approaches to a Solution of the Mind-Body Problem” (271-284). In both, Dillon shows that the seriousness with which Plotinus treats the problem outstrips his predecessors, for he resists appeal to the so called ‘pneumatic vehicle’ of the soul in effort to explain its interaction with the body (149-153, 272-273, 281-283). So too Dillon meticulously articulates that for Plotinus, the true soul, strictly speaking, does not experience passions, for “mental activities are properly to be seen as actualisations (ἐνεργείαι) of potencies in the soul, which, as he sees it, do not count as πάθη, ‘affections’ of the soul” (143). Readers wanting a closer analysis of the Plotinian ‘irradiation’ (ἔλλαμψις) or ‘trace’ (ἴχνος) of the soul, a kind of psychic shadow that illuminates the body and thus serves as a soul/body intermediary, should consult the latter essay, while those interested in Plotinus’ developing a contrast between res extensa and res cogitans that anticipates Cartesian sensibilities should look to the former.
Finally, “The Freedom of the Caged Bird: Plotinus on ‘What is in Our Power’” (257-269), provides insights into Plotinus’ conception of agency and philosophy of action, and Dillon emphasizes what in his view is a “remarkable version of human freedom, based on the autonomy of the higher, ‘undescended’ soul, and its oneness with the cosmic Intellect” (257). Far from postulating freedom as a matter of deliberating between alternative courses of action, for Plotinus, “The only circumstance in which a being can be regarded as completely free is when it is free from any-decision making whatever, and is able to exercise its intellectual power in pure contemplation, and in striving towards the Good” (263). Such a thesis—which appears again in a more astronomical context in the short essay, “Plotinus on Whether the Stars are Causes” (233-242)—is amongst the more provocative in the entire volume.
We come in the end to a set of essays concerning Ethical matters, which set out the virtuous way of life to which Plotinus is committed, but which also presents him with a problem, for he wants to account for the four cardinal virtues of Plato’s Republic but also the description in the Phaedo of virtue as a purging of the soul from the passions and bodily concerns, and both of these in view of Theaetetus 176a-b, in which the purpose of life is achieving a likeness to god (79-80).
Dillon recapitulates Plotinus’ response—a distinction between the civic virtues, concerned with imposing measure on the soul’s appetitive part, and the purificatory virtues, “not concerned with the ordering of the irrational soul or of the body, but rather from escaping from all entanglement with the sense world” (88)—in “Plotinus, Philo and Origen on the Grades of Virtue” (79-101). This hierarchy is well known to readers of late antique Neoplatonism, and those interested in the nuanced accounts that emerge in Porphyry, Iamblichus, and subsequent thinkers would be well advised to consult Dillon’s explication here.
“An Ethic for the Late Antique Sage” (211-232) centers the scale once more, and here Dillon extrapolates the consequence that the Plotinian ethical ideal is, by comparison to modern theories, self-centered and intellectualist, possessing as its goal contemplation of intelligible forms by the purified true soul, which constitutes its eudaimonia. Whether or not the sage should sever the connection between body and soul if eudaimonia proves impossible is the subject of the brief essay, “Singing Without an Instrument: Plotinus on Suicide” (189-198).
The sage also figures in “Plotinus’ Doctrine of the Sage in its Historical Context” (285-296), and it is here that Dillon himself, by taking up criticisms that his own assessment that the Plotinian ideal is rather austere, exhibits the very aporetic development for which he praises Plotinus. Readers who seek a nuanced account of the relationship between Plotinus’ personal, everyday ethic—he is known to have cared for a household full of orphans and to have shown impressive concern for his companions—and his professed philosophical positions would do well to take up Dillon’s analysis here. The bond between Plotinus’ personal experiences—now of mystical union—and his written work surfaces again in “‘Intellect Sober and Intellect Drunk’: Some Reflections on the Plotinian Ascent Narrative” (315-330), in which Dillon places Plotinus in conversation with contemporary neurology, recent accounts of near-death experiences, and first-hand reports on the afterlife. What emerges in this essay, the volume’s last, is what has been present all along, i.e., a picture of Plotinus as a first rate philosopher in the Platonist tradition and, also, “perhaps primarily, a mystic—though one who is at every stage concerned to structure his mystical insights within the framework of his philosophy” (330).
It is, in conclusion, a challenge to review a work such as this one, i.e., a collection of already published essays written by an architectonic figure in the field who has done an exhaustive amount to build the scholarly discourse and from whose work the reviewer, himself but a neophyte in the conversation, has learned so much. My hope is that what has emerged is a portrait a scholar of remarkable insight and power, even if I have not succeeded in doing him full justice.