(Note that this post ended up too long to fit in the email. You will have to click over to Substack to read the whole thing, I think.)
On Problems of Soul (and Souls)
The present article is an attempt to make plausible the Platonic doctrine of the World-Soul. It is neither a close textual exegesis nor a reconstruction of a particular passage. My aim is only that this underappreciated and understudied idea receives the interest it deserves. To that end, it is partly argumentative (why the World-Soul exists) and partly descriptive (what it is and how it appears). While the One, Intellect, and Soul have received numerous in-depth treatments by scholars, the World-Soul, a necessary piece of the Platonic cosmological puzzle, is thought perhaps too odd, too archaic, and too superstitious to accept today. This will change.
Whenever one attempts to explain Soul in Plotinus, one runs immediately into numerous problems. In some places, it seems like Plotinus distinguishes the hypostasis or principle Soul and the World-Soul or Soul of the All; in other passages, he elides this difference or even appears unaware of it. Nowhere does he provide a really clear account of the issue from beginning to end. One can consider the hypostasis Soul to be the “whole of soul”, the World-Soul then being that of the cosmos; individual souls would then be “parts” of Soul, since souls are undivided in themselves but divided in bodies. The World-Soul on this understanding would then be “a” particular soul, and a part of Soul—though it is a unique and very important one. As noted, however, sometimes the World-Soul seems to take on the functions of Soul itself, and the distinction in practice is less clear than I have tried to make it here. The interested philosopher should make sure to read Ennead 4.9, “On Whether All Souls Are One”, for the relationship of individual souls to the whole. Just as Intellect is a one-many, so Soul is a one-and-many. This leads to numerous problems that are addressed throughout Ennead 4.
There is another difficulty. Nature would seem to be something like the ‘lowest phase’ of the World-Soul. Ennead 3.8, “On Nature, Contemplation, and the One”, can be considered the definitive account of this quasi-principle. As we shall see, all souls have an upward and a downward tendency or activity, and Nature would seem to be the downward-facing aspect of the World-Soul. This is, of course, obscure and confusing.
The present article will not provide the fullness of clarity that the problems of Soul (and/or the World-Soul) deserve. However, it is imperative for the philosopher to understand this cosmos to be suffused with soul, alive with life and enlivened with various degrees of thinking. A key theme will be the intermediary nature of all soul, its (sometimes-variable) place between the sensible and the intelligible. Because of this dual nature, the soul has a particularly vital part to play in what we might call the practical side of (contemplative) philosophy, whose task is nothing but the ascent of the soul to its priors.
(Note: If anyone wishes to understand this cosmos in more depth and in far greater detail, let him commence a study of the Platonic Timaeus, wherein many doctrines both exo- and esoteric might be contemplated. In addition, the above-mentioned Plotinian treatises should be consulted, namely the entirety of Ennead 4, Ennead 3.8, 1.1, 2.1 “On the Cosmos”, and even the two-part treatise 3.2 and 3.3 “On Providence”. I do not exaggerate when I proclaim the difficulty and obscurity of many of these doctrines, and the range of study required to thoroughly treat of them.)
A Philosophical Gymnastic: Wonder
Certain ancient doctrines are more readily assimilable to the modern mind than others. When we hear of the soul as the cause of life, and death as the separation of soul from body, we find this within the realm of comprehension. Indeed, even the incorrigible materialist judges the doctrine of the personal soul to be sensical, though he thinks it utterly wrong. The proof is that he argues against it, and such arguments are understood on both sides, who simply disagree as to the truth-value of the conclusion or the validity of the logical inferences involved.
Other doctrines, however, do not receive the least respect from their modern adversaries. Sometimes this is with good (or at least, as above, sensical) reason, and here we are reminded of certain features of ancient cosmology that have long ago been superceded by more exact scientific methods, by the Copernican revolution, and so on. The perfect circularity of the revolution of the heavenly bodies, read as an empirical observation, is one such teaching. The doctrine of the four (or five) elements, again read as a (proto)scientific theory, is another. Typically, a modern student of philosophy will find in ancient metaphysics or epistemology much to excite and illuminate his otherwise starved intellect; cosmology, on the other hand, he has trouble digesting. The ancient view of the universe is indeed so different from ours that it is difficult for most to even begin to take it seriously. This is, however, just what we must do.
In such cases, it is advisable to engage in a kind of philosophical gymnastic, involving both discursive and imaginative elements, in the hope that intuition will be soon to follow. It is possible to identify certain questions, certain points of contention or wonder, that appear to us as naive or preposterous, if not merely silly. For instance, in the De Caelo we find Aristotle wondering why stars, although they are animals, lack feet. We can be assured that Aristotle is neither naive nor silly, and yet such a thing was a question for him. His view of the cosmos demanded that such a topic be addressed, and if we cannot see why, we must give the matter more thought.
The student of philosophy should, indeed, begin with his own wondering at Aristotle’s wonder at the feet-less stars. This wondering at another’s wonder can, for one with the requisite will (and sufficient humility), become a first-order wonder through a process of intellectual transmutation. From wondering at wondering at the stars, we too can come to wonder at the stars.
The difficulty is that the use of this transmutative power appears to us as the inverse of the systematizing drive of most of our metaphysical investigations. In the latter, we feel ourselves climbing a great summit or stepping up the rungs of a ladder. Following through Aristotle’s Metaphysics, for example, we slowly construct our understanding of Being through doctrines of substance and substrate, form and matter, activity and potency, with an ultimate crowning in the theology of Book Λ. Hopefully, already at the beginning of the journey, we find Being something to be wondered at. Of course, this is not always a given.
But here, in effecting our wonderful transmutation regarding stars and feet, we are not climbing a summit nor constructing carefully the rungs of our philosophical ladder as we rise step by step towards the culmination. Instead, we find ourselves over a precipice. A chasm opens up beneath our own feet, and then we may discover that there is something wonderful in this drop, as there obviously was in prior climbs. So we let ourselves fall, and that is usually something we are accustomed to fear and reject.
The point is not that such falling and such climbing are incompatible, nor is it to say that one cannot come to understand the question of why stars lack feet through study of the Aristotelian principles of circular motion and the parts of animals. Rather, of course it is necessary to understand the question in its context. But often “understanding” lacks its roots in wonder, and then it is hardly worth the effort put forth to acquire it.
It is just this sort of gymnastic, and just this sort of wonder, that must be applied to and cultivated in other manifestations of ‘out-dated’ and ‘preposterous’ ancient cosmology. Thus we begin with the ancient view of the cosmos itself, hopefully wondering all the way, and eventually propose a soul for such a bounteous wondrous thing.
Cosmos
The Greek term “κόσμος” (kosmos) can be translated not only as “universe” (“cosmos”) but also as “ornament”, “decoration”, and “order” (and the LSJ records more valences of meaning than these). The related verb κοσμεῖν (kosmein) possesses a range of meanings: to order, arrange, prepare, rule, or adorn. Despite how disparate all these English terms might seem, there is a single theme of meaning running through each of them. Indeed, our historical (and one might even say “spiritual”) inability to gather these meanings up into a unity symbolizes perhaps better than anything else the distance between us and the wise men of old.
As everyone today knows, the universe is a cold, dead place. The protests of certain popular ‘science advocates’ notwithstanding, wonder and beauty and order are not part of this universe. This is not to say that no one of us has ever felt wonder when confronted with natural fact, but rather that such wonder is a feeling, subjective only, and finally, totally superfluous. It is not necessary to dwell too long on the modern ‘scientific’ view of the cosmos, for it is familiar to everyone. Here we only remark that this view is not only held by scientists, nor only by atheists, but more or less by everyone today. It is collective, unconscious, a simple bit of background noise, always there, reinforced as much by explicit theory as it is by everyday practice. Our interactions with the cosmos, our reverence withheld, the so-called tool-being or the standing reserve that confronts us; before intellection, we believe in death.
For the ancient Greeks, the kosmos was an intrinsically beautiful, ordered whole. For the Platonist, this amounts to a shapely adornment laid atop the shapeless matter beneath. Order and beauty are on this view not merely subjective projections and responses to what is in itself meaningless and blind; rather, they are somehow woven into the fabric of sensible existence. The night sky held meaning for those who could read it, and each thing possessed its natural place and fulfilled its inborn natural function (or sometimes, of course, failed to do so). These two things, beauty and order, came together, and this was for the Greeks a remarkable fact, indeed something at which to wonder.
How is it that all has been measured, that limit has come to govern what in itself must be lawless and indeterminate? We are everywhere confronted by definite things, things with forms and meanings. The order of the All even goes so far as to admit of precise mathematical precision—this too must be something divine! In the revolutions of the planets, the succession of the seasons, and even—if certain heterodox thinkers are to be believed—the precession of the equinoxes, the ancients encountered Number and order, limit and measure, form and telos. The Pythagoreans in particular marveled at this, seeing in the mathematical order the hand of divinities and a clue towards the riddle of the soul (and we shall have more to say about soul shortly).
The very fact that Number pressed itself into everything, especially in astronomy and music, was suggestive of a great unity, that all of this was one. The cosmos was thus conceived as a great body, the body a single entity, the All. Its various parts are obviously related, in that they possess the very same gift of measure, and occupy a contiguous space from here in the center of the earth (where I am writing this in Agartha) to the outer spheres of the fixed and the wandering stars.
All things are like in these astonishing ways. Whence came this beautiful array?1
Indeed this requires further investigation.
Psyche
We have been presented with the wonder of this cosmos, which is one, beautiful beyond imagining, ordered into a whole both visibly and in secret and marvelous ways. Here, one should settle into a state of sweet shock, for it is a law of sincere philosophical investigation that one’s wonder at the problem cannot be exceeded by the wonder of the solution, at least at the start. Otherwise, the solution will appear ill-advised, producing just as many difficulties as the problem itself, and therefore treated as a step in the wrong direction. Or even worse, one will be misled by the seduction of a wild hypothesis, which one desires to believe for its very unreasonableness.
Most readers will probably be familiar with the general outline of the ancient Greek concept of the soul (ψυχή), conceived as the cause of life (ζωή) in the living thing. The distinction between living and dead is fundamental, and was considered obvious by the Greeks. It is by no means the same thing to recline beneath a green-growing oak and to sit upon a long-rotted trunk or stump. A living tiger and a dead could indeed not be further apart in many ways. If these are different things, there must be a reason why, which is to say a cause. All ancients agreed that there must be something, some cause of life, and this is the basic doctrine of the soul. Commonsensically, the presence of soul “in” a body caused it to live, and its absence submerged the body into death and ultimately dissolution. Life was further divided into various functions, such as nutrition or growth, spiritedness, locomotion, sensation, and even speaking and reasoning. Thus there were various “types” or “parts” of soul for various types of living beings, whether plant, animal, or human. For the life of an oak is not the same as that of a tiger, nor is either of these the same “life” as that lived by a human being. Life is, therefore, equivocal; it is not a single genus and is not adequately captured by the modern scientific understanding (insofar as there is one).
As Joe Sachs remarks in the preface to his translation of Aristotle’s De Anima, the existence of soul for the Greeks was a fundamental quasi-phenomenological truth; even materialists accepted a (certainly material) soul, for they too could see the difference between living and dead (or non-living).
But the soul is of all things exceedingly mysterious. As the cause of life in living beings, it is even more marvelous than that life. Life is already something difficult to understand—how much more so its source!
For the Platonist, the soul must be prior to body, and therefore immaterial. There are numerous arguments for this, none of which will be summarized here.2 It is important, however, to consider the implications of these truths. In the first place, soul is prior to body and is a cause of body. The soul ‘rules’ the body while the latter is alive. What we are is most of all a soul—the soul accomplishes both ontological and ‘psychological’ functions. In a human being, the soul enables all our perceptions, beliefs, and judgments, as well as (embodied) thinking itself. The soul is therefore a seat of great powers, and it is hard to enumerate them all.
As the cause of life in bodies, the soul itself possesses life in a more primary sense. In Platonism generally, the cause of x possesses x in an equivocal (but pros hen) way, since the cause is a kind of archetype for the effect, which is thus an image. If this is so, then the soul is indeed immortal and deathless (for which see the spectacular end of the Phaedo).
Furthermore, the soul is impassible. It is not affected by experience as if it were a passive piece of wax receiving the impressions thrust into it by the body and its sensory organs. Memory is not a shape pressed into the soul that it seeks in trying to remember. The soul is once again immaterial, and thus intelligible in a fundamental sense. Once again, it possesses powers, and its existence “in” the body is not like that of a compound or mixture (which would constitute the lower affecting the higher), but rather like a light shining into the body and leaving its trace.3
Finally and most importantly, the soul is a kind of intermediary between the intelligible and sensible worlds. In judgment, the soul compares an assimilated form from bodily sense-perception and an unrolled intelligible from Intellect. Soul brings (images of) the Forms down into matter and makes this world derivatively intelligible. Soul moves up and down in the great hierarchy, falling deeper into evil and matter and rising up again to the bliss of contemplation. Here indeed is where we are, in between a glorious light and a seductive darkness. All this the soul can do, and more.
Therefore, given all these things, we should ever keep in mind that soul is responsible both for en-forming and for living, both for a kind of creation and for apprehension. We will not here go into the difficult reconciliation of these two functions, but they should always be kept in mind: Soul both brings the intelligible traces down to matter and then forthwith assimilates them again in its attempted self-rising to its source.
Much could be added to the present account, and much could be argued far more clearly and directly. Nonetheless, let this brief summary stand as an introduction to the Platonic doctrine of the soul, upon which of course the Soul of the World also depends.
Being & Being-One
One function of the soul that is not usually emphasized is unification. The soul is indeed not just “psychological” but metaphysical, unifying the body into one (and making it be). Let us consider the problem of unity.4 For earlier we noted the unity of the cosmos as one great body, everywhere imprinted with form and measure, constituting a true “cosmos”, a beautifully ordered whole with marvelous secret sympathies and wonderful visible connections.
A mob of fighting men is made one, and thus becomes one army, by the activity of a general. Just so, a choir only becomes a choir (one choir) through the ordering and authority of the choir-master. In each of these cases, we have a loose sort of unity. A choir or an army are one, but this is rather the uniting of bodies through a singular function, directed by an authoritative leader. The unity of such groups of bodies is ephemeral and inessential; the many bodies do not become truly a single body (although we call them loosely a singular ‘body’ in recognition of said unity). Each member of a choir or an army is a part of the whole, but these parts are only weakly related to the whole and to each other. They are, in fact, not even contiguous parts, nor does each part or member necessitate the presence of precisely all of the others in order that both whole and parts be essentially what they are. The singer or soldier remain.
Consider now a living being. A horse, for example, is a horse, its being and its unity coming to it together and at once. If it were to lose its unity it would by the same token lose its being, dissolving into parts that are no parts at all. The parts of the living horse, however, are not like the parts of an army or choir. The horse’s hooves are only what they are in relation to the horse itself, to both the other parts and the whole. Consider also the many systems and processes of the horse, those that preserve it in life and cause it to grow and digest and move and perceive things as a single being. The soul is the (proximate) cause and master of the unity of a horse, as it is what makes the horse alive, and thus makes the whole ‘system’ of the horse exist and sustain itself.
The horse is one to a degree far higher than exists in an army or a choir, or even a single, contiguous, but ‘inanimate’ thing like a stone.5 When Aristotle declares that living beings are (sensible) substance most of all, it is due among other things to the extraordinary unity possessed by them. The hoof that is cut off from the horse is only a hoof in name, and has ceased to be what it was. Within the living horse, governed by soul, each part strives for the single end given by its form, given indeed its being by said unified form.
Let us now return to this sensible cosmos. It is one—we now ask in what way.
It is common to describe the universe as being in harmony. Its many parts turn and move and relate to one another like the instruments in a grand symphony. Is it, then, like a choir?
It is and is not. On the one hand, the universe seems in a way to be composed of many bodies which do indeed relate harmoniously. On the other hand, the parts which make up the universe cannot ever be separated from that whole. The singers in a choir go home after their labors and cease to be a choir, becoming (or rather remaining) individual human beings. But a part of the universe can never cease to be a part thereof, unless we are speaking about something passing into non-existence. The parts of the cosmos, therefore, are related to the whole in an exceedingly strong sense—a sense which will become clearer as we proceed. Further, the harmony they possess with one another is indeed marvelous, and more so than that of a choir or army.
Might the single body of the universe possess a single, great, cosmic soul? Not like a choir, but like a living being, each part striving and straining for the telos given by the whole? How else should it be that this universe is one, that its parts mysteriously interrelate, that increase and decrease and indeed all motion and change harmoniously lead to corresponding changes, that all is, indeed, a single great system of sorts? Even bolder: a single organism?6
A Messenger of the Gods
As the cosmos possesses a single harmonious body, so we posit a single source of governance, a single cosmic soul. We can approach the World-Soul through a closer consideration of this governance.
Plato’s great insight into the true cause of things teaches us the distinction, often rehearsed among his disciples, between cause and condition. To briefly summarize in loose terms: The true cause is the paradigm, the intelligible what-it-is to be something; the conditions are those quasi-causes which often attend the true cause in its sensible operation. For instance, the paradigm Fire is the cause of the sensible fire (and of its being-a-fire); the sticks that I have rubbed together are a condition thereof, as is the presence of dry wood. Dry wood and a fire-starting stick can never cause nor explain (which amounts to the same thing) a fire, for they are not what a fire is nor can ever be. The cause of this beautiful painting being beautiful is, once again, Beauty. These true causes are never seen with the eyes, for they are not sensible but intelligible.7
Paradigms can be understood in many ways. Most famously, the paradigms are the Forms, which Plotinus places eternally within the divine Intellect. But these are not the only paradigms, and participation in Forms is not the only participation within the Platonic system. (Note that what from the higher perspective could be called a causing or overflowing, otherwise emanating, could be called from the lower point of view participation; these are but two sides of the same coin.)
In fact, there is reason to think that the Forms in Intellect cannot themselves immediately govern the universe and administer to its particulars. There are two major reasons for this: first, Intellect is self-directed, and thus does not perform the imaging of form in matter; and second, the Forms are cognitively identical each with every other and with every intellect, and thus are too unified, inasmuch as they are present always and everywhere as a whole.
As to the first point, readers of Aristotle will be familiar with the claim that the divine Mind thinks itself. This it does not as an infinite recursive act of thinking itself thinking itself… and so on. Rather, what it thinks is ‘within’ itself in that it is cognitively identical with what it thinks (the totality of the Forms), and it has these objects of its thought themselves (not a mere impression), which are in each case identical to its act of thinking them. Thus true knowledge is first of all made possible; without Intellect eternally and perfectly thinking the totality of what is perfectly thinkable (the Forms within it), there could simply be no knowledge, and all would be mere opinion. Just as disastrous, there would be no Being at all; but that is absurd.
This self-directedness of Intellect, the very thing which renders it both possible and perfect, by the same token renders it unable to perform the bestowing of limit and form upon what comes after it. Or rather, it does so bestow it, but not directly nor immediately.
Second—and closely related—is the problem of unity and multiplicity. We have already noted, briefly here and more thoroughly elsewhere, the one-many fractal identity of all that reposes within divine Intellect. There, we can conceive each thing as within each other, such that nothing is external. But here, in the sensible world, we are confronted by a great multitude of exteriority, by parts outside of parts, a universal distancing of each thing from other. Here there is a horse, and there a fire; here is the horse’s hoof, and there his mane; here a flame, and there an ember. Each thing appears divided both from itself, even its own parts, and from those of others.
While Forms are ever-present, they are not given all immediately, fully, and in the same way to all; in such a sensible world there would be no order.8 For order here depends upon such things as symmetry, arrangement, and sympathy, even if that is not the essence of order there. To ask the implied question yet more clearly: How is it that the totality of Being manifests in this sensible world, wherein it forms a very different kind of totality, rather a whole of many externalized and different parts, in the body of the cosmos?
A sensible thing possesses both matter and form. Why does it take on this form rather than that? Why does it participate in one thing and not in another? Why does it not simply participate in Intellect as a whole, and in all the Forms equally (since in each are all the rest)?
The too-great unity of the contents of Intellect thus demands a degree of separateness of intelligible content in order that it govern such divisible and manifold things as we see exist in the sensible realm. There must be, therefore, something posterior to Intellect and prior to the world of sense, that ‘unrolls’ the Forms, as it were, that to some degree separates them out, imaging their intelligible content, and transmits these down into the darkness beneath. This is one way to think about Soul, in addition to its roles as cause of life and proximate cause of sensible unity; it is also what Lloyd Gerson calls the “ἀρχή of transitive motion”.9 Evidently, then, Soul performs many functions, and it is often hard for the student of philosophy to unify each of these in his understanding and pierce through to true apprehension of this principle.
In any case, these unrolled forms are effects of the divine Forms in Intellect, contemplated and passed down in a higher degree of difference and multiplicity; they are the λόγοι (logoi), usually translated in this context as either “productive principles” (Taylor), “reason-principles” (MacKenna), or “expressed principles” (Gerson et al).10
Here we note that the expression of these logoi posterior to Intellect may seem to threaten to fall into the same problem of too-great unity we noted before. While the solution to this worry is complex—as the case always must be whenever Soul and logoi are involved—here we can at least point to the solution: Contemplation.11
The World-Soul, then, is responsible for the fact that “this world is all form and all things in it are forms” (Plotinus, Enneads 5.8.7.23). For the substance of each sensible thing is its logos, and we perceive the activity of these logoi also as form. It is necessary that the things of this cosmos receive being, unity, and thus their identity as what they are, from a soul. It is not only my body that partakes of this or that Form, governed by my soul; it is necessary that all things, as parts of the whole, receive what forms are ordained for them, and thus there is a Soul of the All.
To put it in a schematic way: the Forms are indivisible while the sensible world is divisible. The division of the Forms into logoi is necessary for intelligibility to come into the sensible world, for soul (and the logoi) are undivided in themselves and yet divided in bodies. Soul is thus a necessary step in the unfolding of the inexorable power of Being and of what is prior even to that. The World-Soul’s contemplation images the intelligible cosmos and allows for the Forms to enter, through their effects, the logoi, into multiplicity and divisibility.
But how does this great soul proportion and distribute these logoi, and how indeed so marvellously that the revolution of the heavens and the cycle of the seasons, not to mention so many biological and chemical processes, participate in new Forms in so orderly and coherent a manner?
As Above, So Below, And In Between
One characteristic of soul is its bi-directional nature. We have already referred to the ‘intermediary’ nature of soul found in the doctrine of the logoi. Here, however, let us consider more closely the two possible moments of that mediation, namely, looking to what is above, and looking to what is below (“below” meaning: either itself or what is posterior to it).12
The human soul is that nearest to us, so we will begin there—once again, with the caveat that this is a simplified account. The human soul is partway between a greater power and a lesser, a holier world and a more despised. As noted elsewhere, we have the power to contemplate the Forms, as well as to engage in discursive reason, and even to plunge ourselves into bestiality and drag ourselves through the mire of bodily passions. The human being is typically indeed nothing if not variable and incontinent. When we look to what is prior, to intellect, we may ‘become’ intellect; when we situate ourselves in the middle, we reason and judge; when we descend to the uttermost, we are dominated by the infirmities of the body, or at least seem to be so.
Speaking of our souls, Plotinus writes:
When it looks towards what is prior to it, it thinks, but when it looks to itself, it turns to ordering and administering and ruling what is below it. (4.8.3.25-27)
In addition, in disordered persons, it may at times have little power to rule its charge, and this is an evil thing.
It is extraordinary that such souls as ours can do this much, and this “much” is indeed a sign of weakness more than one of strength; yet not one long road to our homeland is foreclosed to us. It is worth pausing to ponder both the strangeness—in that such inconstancy and even motion is embedded in the inexorable hierarchy of Being—and the obviousness—in that this is what we suffer most in existing here at all—of this fallen/unfallen state.
It is important here to note that our soul is not really itself divided in our bodies, as if a part were in the hand and another part within the head, nor as if our soul were partways in itself and partways in the body. Soul remains in itself undivided, though simultaneously divided in bodies—consider this a trace of soul. Hence our being plunged into matter is a difficult thing; our souls remain in themselves things of great worth, and getting to the soul’s “in itself” is the work of catharsis. The related doctrine of the undescended intellect is controversial even among Platonists. More could be said here, but in any case our souls, or at least the ‘we’ associated with them, do not always contemplate the Forms in perfect tranquillity.
And what of the Soul of the World? Is it fallen into matter as are we? Can it commit great evil, even to the point of forgetting itself and its father? In Plato’s Laws, the Athenian, having established that soul is prior to body and the source of all motion, proposes that soul inhabits all things that move, including of course the heavens. He continues:
One soul, is it, or several? I will answer for you—“several.” Anyhow, let us assume not less than two—the beneficent [εὐεργέτιδος] soul and that which is capable of effecting results of the opposite kind. (Plato, Laws X, 896e)
The “opposite kind” (τἀναντία) is evil. Now, he asks, which soul governs the heavens? The good soul, or the evil? In fact, the very best soul orders and governs the whole of the cosmos, and each visible god in it. The World-Soul is “best” (ἀρίστην) because its motion is in imitation of the motion of intellect (κίνησις νοῦ). This we see because of its perfect measure, because (for Plato) the heavens move in a perfect circle, and because such motion is everlasting and infallibly ordered.
For Plotinus too the World-Soul remains ‘above’, ever in contemplation of its prior, in unceasing imitation of the intelligible cosmos, which en-forms its image, producing the sensible universe. In its contemplation, it inexorably produces what is to come after it.
Another evidence of the goodness of the World-Soul is its role in providence. It may be difficult for us moderns to accept, and yet we should at least attempt to bend our minds thereto. One who wishes to advance far in philosophy should heed well the higher things wherever he finds them, honoring them in proper manner, and the Soul of the World is good above all parts of its sprawling and lovable body.
For the parts are for the sake of the whole, and the body’s end is to serve the soul. Let local evils and all vile soul-caused motions fall into the divine measure of that glorious prior universe, all increase and decrease contend and blend in the harmony of the whole. It is perhaps first of all a feeling or a disposition, before it ever can become for us an intellectual position. Everything that happens has a meaning in the moral and ontological order of the cosmos—all is in a way the self-affection of the divided image of the celestial Living Being.
Cosmic Life, Cosmic Sympathy
The existence of the World-Soul, and of this sensible cosmos as its very body, implies of course that our universe is alive. Life suffuses the Forms and Intellect, and the effects of such Forms cannot be entirely devoid of life so far as they possess any measure of being (or of intelligibility or unity). For effect is ever like unto cause, though in a different and diminished manner. Here we do not live as the gods live, but live nonetheless we do.
We should be careful here, however, as this is not a typical ‘panpsychism’ and even less an ‘animism’. A stone does not possess a soul in the way as does an animal. The World-Soul is not plunged into its body, but shines down logoi as a kind of byproduct of its spotless contemplation. The cosmos is alive because anything with intelligible being is alive; but some lives are very dim indeed, and so far as soul is concerned there is not a ‘personal’ soul attached so tightly to a stone. As my fingernail is ‘alive’ as a part of my life, so a stone may be alive as a part of the cosmos itself.13
For Plotinus, the World-Soul enables not only a kind of cosmic life, but a deep and universal cosmic sympathy:
Since all souls come from the identical source that the soul of the universe comes from as well, they are in sympathy with one another.
ἐκ γὰρ τῆς αὐτῆς πᾶσαι οὖσαι, ἐξ ἧς καὶ ἡ τοῦ ὅλου, συμπαθεῖς. (4.3.8.2-3)
We, all our souls and the souls of all living things, share a common origin with the World-Soul. Therefore share we also a common cause, which produces proportioned effects, as if its various acts were pre-coordinated in a providential plan. Consider the action of magic at a distance, the power of words and phantasies to affect things far away. For those who disbelieve in that sort of occult sympathy, consider rather the case of love. When a lover sees his beloved, something of his inner being is pricked, and the two may be bound together even at a distance. Somehow, the beloved has entered into the lover. As Plotinus writes, “While something is outside of us, we do not yet see it” (Enneads 5.8.2.25). But how is it that anything at all can come to be inside us from first being outside?
Let us put the matter somewhat more rigorously. We have examined already the paradigmatic causality that suffuses everything that is. This is the true causality, from the prior to the posterior, from the higher to the lower. ‘Horizontal’ efficient causality—the only kind admitted in our age—is no causality at all. Sensible things do not, in truth, cause other sensible things to be or change (nor does the action of a material object, nor its energy nor heat nor gravity, cause of itself a change in any other object or in itself, whether that change be motion or heating or anything else). While this is perhaps difficult to fully accept, it is a central truth for Plato and his successors.
How, then, does sensible change proceed? For change it surely does. In fact, one can think of it as a parallelism, each logos proportioned to the others and seeming to react thereto by their unity of origin in the archetypal intelligible world and their patterning in Soul. It is something like the monads of Leibniz or the parallelism of Spinoza, though in other ways, certainly, it is completely the opposite. For Plotinus, instead of a pre-ordained harmony of monads each entirely separate, there is a unity of all things through the medium of Soul, in which all things share:
From such phenomena, one may conclude the unity of all things, by reason of the unity of soul.
ἐξ ὧν ἐστι τὴν ἑνότητα μαθεῖν ἁπάντων τῆς ψυχῆς μιᾶς οὔσης. (4.9.3.8-9)
Not a result of calculative reasoning, it nonetheless appears as if arranged by the most perfect foresight. No sensible thing affects any other as such—through Soul each thing receives its due, such that it appears to the materialist that such a horizontal cause has really come to be. Of course, speaking loosely, we may term them to be subordinate “causes”, but they are really nothing other than mere conditions (for more on which see Lloyd Gerson’s Platonism and Naturalism: The Possibility of Philosophy).
In a beautiful passage worth quoting at length, Plotinus writes:
This unified universe is actually in a condition of sympathy, and is one in the manner of a living being, and the distant parts of it are actually close together, just as in a single particular living being a nail, a horn, a finger or any other of the parts that are not contiguous, but have something in between which is not subject to affection, are affected by what is not near to them. For when things that are the same are not located contiguously, but are set at an interval by other things in between, while being affected sympathetically because of their sameness, what is done by what is not placed alongside it necessarily reaches even to what is at a distance. And since it is a living being and forms part of a unity, nothing is so divided spatially as not to be close enough to the nature of the one living being in respect of being affected sympathetically. (Enneads 4.4.32.13-22)
Such sympathy is because all things come from a single origin, and constitute parts of a universal living being, image of that celestial Living Being and seat of both thinking and Being. Thus we say that the various parts of the cosmos are as if they were limbs or organs of the all—in a way, we speak equivocally, but pros hen.
Just as radical is the implication and importance that this doctrine has for sense-perception itself:
For it seems that any kind of sense-perception happens because of the living being—that is to say, this universe—is in sympathy with itself. For if this were not so, how could one part of it participate in the power of another, particularly when that power is at a distance? (Plotinus, Enneads 4.5.3.18-21)
When love pricks the lover’s soul through the sense of sight, this is, like all things great and small, an apportionment of intelligibility in one single whole. We participate freely in the Forms because their Being is everywhere (or nowhere), but we perceive and feel because the object of our perception and feeling is somewhere. Without providence and sympathy, via that great Soul, it would indeed in a Platonic world be totally impossible for anything at all to be either affected or perceived.
Practical Contemplation of the World-Soul
At this point the present introduction to the World-Soul is nearly complete. But after comprehension must come ‘intuition’. It is by no means an exaggeration to say that direct familiarity with the World-Soul is perhaps one of the greatest stumbling blocks for the aspiring student of the hoary perennial philosophy. It is all well and good to be, early on, attracted primarily to the strange and transcendent One; it is the first, and the best, and therefore the student pours himself into Ennead 6.9 or the latter parts of 5.1, or else has designs on the first hypothesis of the Platonic Parmenides. But one cannot overleap from the depths of the cave to perfect union with the One, nor can one hope to straightaway contemplate the beauty of the Forms ere one has some inkling of the starry sea of logoi and of their goodly governing souls.
In several places, Plotinus prescribes what have been called (famously by Pierre Hadot) “spiritual exercises”. While we can debate the name, there are indeed meditations that constitute an important part of Platonic philosophy more broadly, and of its Plotinian form in particular. I am not in the business of teaching any secret initiation on this score; nonetheless, one should follow Plotinus’ lead as best one can and practice at the very least a shift of worldview and of intuitive imagination; it may yield effects and influences far out of their predicted measure.
It is worth it, then, to carefully envision the cosmos and in the imagination (at first) to make contact with that great living being of which we are each a part; to seriously attempt to intuitively grasp the activity of the logoi and their raining-shining down in every worldly being and in every change and motion.
Consider the visible world as the very tips and flowering branches of a magnificent and occulted tree, stretching from its ineffable root through its intelligible trunk and out to the branches to the things of the world—the very tip of the cosmic iceberg, so to speak. Consider this.
Walking on High & Governing the Whole Universe
There remains but one final, brief point in the present essay, which is already far too long. I think it is an important one.
It is just for this reason that Plato says that our soul, too, if it would come to associate with that perfect soul [εἰ μετ’ ἐκείνης γένοιτο τελέας], would come to be perfected [τελεωθεῖσαν] itself, and would also “walk on high and govern the whole world” [μετεωροπορεῖν καὶ πάντα τὸν κόσμον διοικεῖν]; when it stands apart in such a way as not to be enclosed within [ἐντὸς] any body nor involved with it, then it, too, even as is the case with the soul of the universe, will cooperate readily in the administration [συνδιοικήσειν] of the cosmos, […] (Plotinus, Enneads 4.8.2.19-24)
This astonishing passage requires more explanation than I can here give it. On the one hand, the World-Soul is perfect qua soul, whereas our souls are sadly imperfect. They become better and worse according to virtues both civil and cathartic, according as they contemplate divine Forms or else in self-forgetfulness and tolma degrade themselves into something unworthy of their god-given birthright. Our soul may associate itself with bodies and matter, or else assimilate itself to better things. In between this ‘we’ and Intellect lies a great and wondrous soul, associating with which ‘we’ can come to be “perfected” as it is unceasingly “perfect”.
The Plotinian map (insofar as such a thing can exist) of the ascent of the soul thus could be said to involve, before contemplation of the Forms in Intellect and “assimilation to god” (Plato, Theaetetus 176b1), before the unio mystica of and with the highest One (as in Plotinus, Enneads 6.9.9-11), an association of the individual human soul with the Soul of the World. Each union rests in its proper place, from here to there to journey’s end.
Because the World-Soul itself governs the whole universe (in the sense above discussed), that soul in union with it will undertake the same task. The substance of the soul is undivided in itself but divisible in bodies, and therefore leaving the body behind (refusing to be so enclosed), the soul contracts to a kind of unity; the World-Soul, not being plunged into its body, is undivided in its parts. And so can we too be.
Coda
The general presentation of the present article, while good, leaves something to be desired when it comes to rigor. This is acknowledged. As stated above, the purpose is merely to render the Soul of the World something sensical, whether accepted or no. Perhaps it has failed even in this. In which case, a better account of soul, both as an hypostasis or principle and as it exists for the human being, is wanted. To unify the powers of soul into an intuitive unity is indeed very hard; perhaps I shall try to do so one day.
All of which is to say: I am publishing this and moving on, instead of spending too much time attempting to refine it into a diamond. But the topic (with its difficulties and paradoxes) will someday return.
I also here can recommend St. Augustine’s enigmatic De Musica and De Ordine, alongside the frequent accounts of the Pythagorean worldview which anyone can find. See for example, for a modern text, the first chapter of Pesic’s Music and the Making of Modern Science. For deeper knowledge, the works of Ernest McClain stand out as masterpieces of Pythagorean insight.
My personal favorite argument for the priority of the soul is found in Plato’s Laws X. See also the Phaedo and many other places in Plato, or else see Plotinus, Enneads 1.1 and 5.1.
For which, see Plotinus, Enneads 1.1, “What Is the Living Being and What Is the Human Being?”
See Plotinus’ Ennead 6.9, “On the Good, Or the One” for a careful analysis of Being and unity.
We shall hear more about stones and other ‘inanimates’ in due time.
For the Platonist, there is a World-Soul. Strictly speaking, the “proof” is as easy as this: the intelligible cosmos is a Living Being, and thus the sensible cosmos, as an image of that other, must itself be alive; what is alive here must have soul; therefore, there exists a Soul of the World. But as mentioned above, and in my other writings, it is often the case that such reasoning, while potentially helpful, is not always altogether illuminating. It relies on grasping what is prior, and more difficult, in order to explain what comes after, which in this case is, while ‘closer’ to most of us, still quite obscure. Nonetheless, we must blend something of both approaches (the upwards and the downwards) to make the plainest case, for everything fits into its proper place.
If this is confusing, one should return to other essays and articles, and especially to Plato himself. For an overview of paradigmatic causality, see the end of the Phaedo, or else my primer on Platonic Causality posted on my old blog. It is probably a tad outdated, but the doctrine of paradigmatic causality is so fundamental to Platonism that it must be understood in some wise for nearly any of the rest of that philosophy to make sense.
Note that what is a mark of perfection in the intelligible would be in the sensible a great horror; of course this is homonymous, and not the ‘same thing’, but give to each degree of Being its proper due.
Gerson, Lloyd. Plotinus, p.60. Routledge, 1994.
In a broad sense, any principle that is an effect of a prior principle is a logoi of that prior, in the sense that it is the expression (with greater multiplicity) of it. In a narrower sense, however, logos is usually applied by Plotinus to those at the level of Soul, prior to sensible things but posterior to Intellect.
To follow this clue, see Plotinus, Ennead 3.8, “On Nature, Contemplation, and the One”. It is a masterpiece of heavenly delights and of great obscurity both.
We shall perhaps have more to say about a soul’s looking to what is below itself, distinct from looking to itself, soon enough.
Plotinus’ enigmatic masterpiece Ennead 3.8 is a great help on this topic, as it argues, at first ‘playfully’, that all things contemplate.