In Being, It Does
On the Possible Aristotelian Origin of the Double Act Doctrine
(Note: This short and rather loose essay is lacking in many citations. Its purpose is to sketch out how Plotinus may have developed the double act doctrine out of a creative application of the notion of activity as found in Aristotle. The primary distinction for this purpose, between activities of being and activities of doing, is indeed not found explicitly in Aristotle. There are scholarly debates ongoing about whether this is the proper interpretation of Aristotle. I do not mean to enter that debate here, but rather presume a distinction of that kind could have been the basis of Plotinus’ interpretation, even if never made explicit. It is, therefore, not only loose but also speculative.)
Plotinus the Aristotelian?
At first it might be thought rather strange: Plotinus, the great Platonist, the great exegete of the Platonic tradition, expresses his highest and most fundamental metaphysical doctrine in terms of activity (ἐνέργεια, energeia). Indeed, the being of the principles is their activity. In the whole series emanatory stages, from the inner activity, to the emanating outer activity, and the subsequent inner activity brought about by reversion — activity is the key. While Proclus for instance tends to express emanation in terms of remaining, proceeding, and reverting, Plotinus often opts for the language of activity.
Activity, in turn, is a central Aristotelian technical term. This is not to say it is a concept totally foreign to Plato (see, for instance, his discussion of potency and becoming in the Timaeus). However, in its developed form, as a term of art with precise conceptual architecture, activity has a primarily Aristotelian provenance.
This may be surprising, but let us consider the matter more closely. Aristotle is by no means a second master to Plotinus, as if Plato and Aristotle each exerted the same kind of influence upon him, perhaps to differing degrees. No, Aristotle is for Plotinus something rather different. Where Plato is divine, his texts inspired, Aristotle is a king of artisan, having crafted great masses of conceptual weaponry. Some of these weapons are useful in certain contexts, for instance in the skirmishes with the Stoics. Some of them are unwieldy or counterintuitive, and do not suggest for themselves any particular role, like pieces of alien machinery. Most of them must be studied and modified by the Platonist before they can be put to use; Plotinus oversaw this inheritance, taking up only the sharpest of Aristotelian weapons to fight the perennial Platonic battle.
What Is Activity?
Activity is proposed in opposition to two things: motion (κίνησις, kinesis) and potency (δύναμις, dynamis). Aristotle himself never truly gives a definition of activity, perhaps because it is too simple, too basic, and comprehensible only by analogy or by some kind of metaphysical intuition. In any case, “activity” covers a number of different cases, and a single definition cannot cover them all. We will primarily be interested in just one kind of activity, so this does not trouble us too much.
Activity differs from motion in that it is complete while motion is incomplete. Motion (or change) has an end or telos. It tends towards that end, and when the end is reached the motion ceases to be. The end is, strictly speaking, external to the motion. For instance, if I am in motion, say, walking to church, then the end of my motion is my arrival at the church. When I am walking there, I am not yet there, and when I get there, when I have walked there, I am no longer underway walking there. Once the end is achieved, the motion ceases. This goes also for changes like thinning. If I’m thinning, I have not yet thinned, and so on. At a certain point, the process will cease, and then I will have thinned (to some degree).
An activity proper, by contrast, is complete at every moment. The classic example is seeing. The telos or end of seeing is the exercise of sight, the act of seeing itself. If I am now seeing, then simultaneously I have seen. The end of seeing is just the seeing, and thus this end is internal to the activity. Another example might be “taking a stroll” without a destination in mind. If I am now taking a stroll, but not going anywhere in particular, then my motion is really an activity, as the goal is just strolling itself.
Although this may be unintuitive to modern sensibilities, an activity is not a change. This does not imply, however, that activity is static or passive. Indeed, it may be quite “dynamic”.
The second opposition is that between activity and potency.1 This opposition actually involves two different cases, and Aristotle sets up an analogy to cover both. Activity is to potency either:
as motion is to the principle of motion; or
as substance is to some particular matter.
That is, activity and potency here have two meanings which are not fully assimilable to one another except by analogy. There is not one definition which would cover both. An example of (1) would be the relationship of building a house to merely possessing the art of housebuilding; an example of (2) would be the statue’s relationship to the bronze out of which it was wrought (and which continues even now to underlie it).
In both cases, activity is conceived as a kind of simple presence, in opposition to the relatively more obscure and shadowy presence possessed by potencies. Activity is, broadly speaking, prior to potency because what is potential depends on what is actively or really present. This is true both logically and ontologically: logically, or in formula, because to potentially see means to potentially actively see; and ontologically, because substance or form is prior to matter.
Platonically speaking, the latter makes good sense, as matter is a posterior emanation. If activity is associated with (or is) form, then it is prior to matter. A composite substance has a prior part (form, activity) and a posterior part (matter, potency). Activity is a way for Aristotle (and for us) to think of form as doing something, en-forming the matter, organizing it and arranging it into something determinate. Consider the soul (form/activity) of an animal, which isn’t just the shape it happens to be in, but rather actively unifies the body, the organs and limbs, the bones and blood, both making them what they are and relating them to the whole and to one another. Even today, the Aristotelians still accuse Plato of holding a static view of the Forms. How could such static, inert, merely intelligible things be causes? How could they make the world the way it is? They must be active! Leaving aside whether that was ever Plato’s view, Plotinus adopts the concept of activity, perhaps in response to a criticism like this. For Plotinus, form is active, as it is for Aristotle.
Substantial Activity (Activity of Being)
Plotinus is primarily concerned with the second meaning of activity: substance. We may distinguish for ease of reference between activities of doing and activities of being (also termed “substantial activity”). Activities of doing include such things as building a house, seeing, walking to church, and so on. Some activities of doing are really motions (e.g., building a house) and some are proper activities (e.g., seeing). Activities of being might include being-a-human or being-a-tree. Substance (what something is) is a kind of activity, an act of being this. It is not inert, but constitutes a kind of life, even if in some things this “life” is a remote echo of life in the primary sense.
As temporal, sensible, composite beings, we possess or engage in both kinds of activity. In the first place, our substantial activity is that of being-a-human, and in addition, on the basis of that fundamental activity, we can go about our lives engaging in many other activities, such as building a house, seeing, reading, running, &c. These latter activities, because they are not essential to what we are, may either be realized or left undone. They are the activation of certain potencies.
Our substantial activity, of being what we are, cannot cease without us ceasing to be, although we can sleep, close our eyes, or stop building a house and nonetheless continue being human. What activities of doing are available to us may in turn depend upon our particular fundamental activity of being. Humans can do mathematics or build houses with wood and nails, for instance, while trees cannot do either. Some activities are therefore characteristic of humans (or trees), but not on that account activities of being or essentially tied to their substantiality.
The activities of doing available to us, which are not essential or substantial, are made possible by potency. We have bodies, that is, particular matter, and live in a world of bodies and matter. As composite beings, there are unactivated potencies all around us and within us. Without potency, without matter and time, all our activity would be substantial. And this is just what we find when we examine the substance and activity of the eternal principles.
Pure Activity
Although Aristotle’s quasi-definition of activity is given in each case in contrast to potency, this is not meant to imply that activity requires a corresponding potency. If activity is really prior to potency in substantiality (in being), it should be possible for activity to exist on its own.
This is just what Aristotle proposes in the case of the Unmoved Mover. Loosely: To guarantee the everlasting existence of motion (in an everlasting universe), there must be a first cause of motion which itself is always active and can never be held in abeyance. And it must itself be unmoved, or else it would change, and change implies potency, and then it could potentially not be. But if it could potentially not be, then it would have ceased to be at some point during the preceding everlasting stream of time. Since this has not happened, it must have no potency.2 It is pure activity, and furthermore always actively causing and sustaining motion (as an object of love, Aristotle says).
Plotinus too thinks the principles are bereft of potency. As eternal, stable, and unchanging, the principles are pure activity. And each principle’s activity is an activity of substance, since activities of doing depend on potencies that may be realized or unrealized (implying time or change, or a sort of capriciousness). What the principles are can nonetheless be thought as a kind of doing (e.g. Intellect intelligizes the intelligibles), but this doing is the very being or substance of the principle. Intellect is this activity. It is not something it sometimes engages in and sometimes ceases to do.
Because the principles are active, they do things. Because they are eternal and unchanging, they always do the same things. And this doing is what they are.3 An intellect that did not think would not be an intellect at all; an eternal intellect that did not think (for as Plotinus conceives intellects, they are necessarily eternal) would be even more absurd, as it would never think.
The Life of the Principles
There is sometimes a tendency to think of the Plotinian principles as dead, static, or abstract. When a modern philosopher speaks of the “principles” of their philosophy, they may refer to logical formalities or axioms, or perhaps to intuitions or insights. This is radically different from the meaning of “principle” within Platonism. A principle is a substance (or “in a way” a hyper-substance in the case of the First). It is thus an activity. This activity is what it is as much as what it does. Plotinus even calls the three principles “gods” in some passages. They are alive, though in a higher and more primary sense than that which refers to sensible organisms.
A Platonic principle is not a “starting-point” for a philosopher to be unfolded. The Platonist does not start from the First Principle and unfold the rest by logical deduction (notwithstanding that the “system” is sometimes presented and taught in this way). He starts rather from life, in particular from a philosophical life, and ascends up to glimpse the higher things.
The principles create all things, and sustain them. Their being is a doing, and we see this particularly where emanation is concerned. In being what it is, the One gives birth to Intellect; in being, it does, and it does eternally just as it is eternally.4 Intellect’s being is its thinking of the intelligibles; and this gives birth to Soul. None of these activities, it should be clear, are logically perspicuous. The principles are not concepts; they are “gods”.
Activities of being, in other words, can sometimes be productive (they can do). We can think of emanation as the coincidence of activities of being and activities of doing in the context of pure activity without any corresponding potency. An eternal genesis, eternally producing, like a photographic plate marked by long exposure and representing a process whose distinct moments have been blurred together; only this too is seen as in a mirror, and the ontological priority of time and eternity has been characteristically reversed.
It is just this insight, of the connection between being and doing, that will lead to Plotinus’ all-important “double activity” doctrine (inner and outer act, or as he puts it, “the activity of the substance” as against the “activity from the substance”). In being, it does, and this itself in a two-fold way. Just as a fire’s activity involves both its inner heat (a being and doing that are self-related or held within) and its radiant heat (a doing that “goes out”), so the principles, in being what they are, will do and are doing and have done what they do, which is everything.
In the Metaphysics, Aristotle distinguishes four meanings of being: being according to the categories (substance, quality, quantity, &c.); being as true (and non-being as false); being as accident; and being-actual (or being-active) and being-potential.
It is possible to give a stricter proof of this, but it is not necessary here. At any rate, the Platonic version of the arguments for a first cause of all, and a first cause of motion, &c., are different from the one given by Aristotle in Metaphysics XII.
This statement glosses over some complexities in Plotinus’ account, for instance, of Intellect’s identity with its objects of intellection. The “cognitive identity” between thinker and object of thought will be the subject of a further essay at some later time. Let it be said that, on some level, thinking and being are not literally and absolutely identical in Intellect.
As always, whenever we speak of the One, we assume the usual caveat “in a way” has been applied.