Written In & Filled Up

A Short Commentary on Ennead 5.3.4

Perception, Recollection, Contemplation?

In my previous post, “Philosophy Has Always Been (Sort of) Transcendental”, I explained in introductory terms just how the intelligibles are found in sensible phenomena. The “intelligible content” that we recognize in sense-perception is already in our soul, though it must be recollected. In the instance of seeing the two equal sticks, we perceive the equality that is in the sticks, and we can do so only because the Equal, Equality itself, is somehow within us. We know it already such that we can recognize it, a process that empirically looks a lot like learning.

In Plato’s Meno, this paradox is made explicit by Meno. He drops it on Socrates as if it were an argumentative bomb, designed to reduce the discussion to smithereens. A trump card for when he is cornered. The two of them have been seeking the nature of virtue, that is, to learn what virtue is and to be able to provide a good philosophical account of it. Meno says:

Why, on what lines will you look, Socrates, for a thing of whose nature you know nothing at all? Pray, what sort of thing, amongst those that you know not, will you treat us to as the object of your search? Or even supposing, at the best, that you hit upon it, how will you know it is the thing you did not know? (Meno 80d)

As Socrates points out, this argument makes learning either unnecessary (since you already know what you’re looking for, why look?) or else impossible (since you don’t know what you’re looking for, how could you recognize it if you did find it?).

The solution lies in the theory of recollection. We do already know what we are looking for, but it must be recollected, brought forward, placed into the soul within access of the inquirer. Prior to recollection, we knew what we were looking for, but had merely lost it, forgotten it. It was somewhere in us, but not there for us. The transcendental condition of possibility for my perceiving equal sticks is the Form of Equality, somewhere in me.

Here, one could ask: Does this condition remain a condition? To this, Platonism of whichever sort always answers “No”. The condition is really a cause, and its being is actually the real being of what it makes possible. The sticks want to be like the Equal, they are in fact images of it. The intelligible content, i.e. what they are, is “really” the Equal. The similarity/likeness and difference of the paradigm and its image must be simultaneously preserved, such that we do not misunderstand this word “really” in the phrase “what things really are”.

In any case, there is an ambiguity in the way the Forms are present in the soul. It is evident that anytime I perceive the equal sticks, Equality is at work (both in the soul and in the world, but more on that some other time). But if Equality were merely this background necessity, a strictly formal condition of possibility for seeing equal things, how would we ever come to know the equality that is in those equal things? In that case, the Forms would be at work but always hidden as they are in themselves. Knowledge would be impossible.

Plato writes in the Parmenides of the “greatest” impasse for the theory of Forms. Forms are unknowable, Parmenides says. Socrates of course is baffled, and asks how this can be. The old metaphysician explains:

“Because, Socrates, I think that you or anyone else who claims that there is an absolute idea of each thing would agree in the first place that none of them exists in us.”

“No, for if it did, it would no longer be absolute,” said Socrates.

“You are right,” he said. “Then those absolute ideas which are relative to one another have their own nature in relation to themselves, and not in relation to the likenesses, or whatever we choose to call them, which are amongst us, and from which we receive certain names as we participate in them. And these concrete things, which have the same names with the ideas, are likewise relative only to themselves, not to the ideas, and belong to themselves, not to the like-named ideas.” (Parmenides 133b-d)

On the one side we have the conditions of possibility (or more properly, the paradigmatic causes), and on the other we have the deficient givens. That we find the one in the other is already strange enough. The soul must, in addition, possess the capability of rising, so to speak, to the level of those perfect intelligibles. It is not enough to say that, as causes, the paradigms can produce their own likenesses in the world. We must be able to mirror that same movement in the soul. The conditions cannot remain conditions in us. Contemplation must be possible. WE must be the ones with knowledge.

Let us see what Plotinus has to say about these two ways that intelligibles can be present in our souls.

A Short Exegesis of Ennead 5.3.4

For the Platonist, sense-perception is our messenger, but Intellect is our king. We sit suspended between the intelligible Forms above us and the world of mutable sense-perception below us. “The sovereign part of the soul - in the middle between two powers” (5.3.3.38-39), we send out perception as a messenger, yet we too are a sort of messenger of what is prior to us. Our king is true thinking and real Being.

But we are kings, too, whenever we are in accord with Intellect. We can be in accord with it in two ways: either by, in a way, having its writings written in us like laws or by being in a way filled up with it and then being able to see it or perceive it as being present. (Ennead 5.3.4.1-4)

There are two ways we come into accord with Intellect (the realm of Forms): first, in a law-like way, in writing; and second, in a direct or immediate way, in being filled up.

The first way, that of writing and law, is already clear from the previous section regarding the necessity of transcendental conditions to experience this or that. The soul perceives particular things, with particular natures, and these particulars are governed by what is intelligible. The divisions of intellect and the divisions of being are the same, and if we behold a particular being this is because in our soul there is a particular “law” or “writing” which serves to indicate the nature of what we are seeing. The totality of intelligibles is all the ways that beings can be, and so these may be written in us such that they are recognizable when we come across them.

The second way, that of being filled up, is certainly more mysterious. But it cannot be dispensed with, since as I have noted the identification of the real being of sensibles with the intelligibles is something that separates Platonism from those philosophical systems that might superficially resemble it.

Plotinus describes this second way as a vision, a seeing, a presence, a being “filled up”. It is no longer to be governed by the laws of intelligibility shining down from above, but to come into communion and identity with them directly. It is the moment of contemplation, when one ascends to the level of intellect:

And, due to this vision, we know ourselves when we learn about other things, either through the faculty of knowledge itself, because we learn about other things by means of it, or because we become what we learn, so that one who knows himself is double, one part knowing the nature of the discursive thinking of the soul, the other knowing that which is above this, namely, the part which knows itself according to the Intellect that it has become. (5.3.4.4-11)

There is a truly incredible number of High Platonic doctrines packed into this passage, not all of which can be adequately gone into here. Nonetheless, it is worth it to go as far as we can with a passage like this; it is one of the most worthwhile intellectual activities one can do, if we are being really honest with ourselves.

In this vision, one is not following the strictures of a law, of something written about the intelligibles. Rather, in the vision of intellect the philosopher sees the intelligibles directly. While I do not contemplate the nature of the Equal every time I see or call to mind equal sticks, such a contemplation or vision is indeed possible and desirable. No longer discursive, it is more like an immediate intuition than a syllogism (so long as we are careful not to interpret “intuition” here as something hazy or subjective).

The vision grants knowledge, and simultaneously self-knowledge. This is a key point, and one of Plotinus’ truly great doctrines (whether he first fully articulated it or not). All knowledge, knowledge in the primary sense, is self-knowledge. Plotinus wrote a treatise largely concerned with this, namely 5.5, “That the Intelligibles Are Not Outside the Intellect, and on the Good”. There, he argues that if the intelligibles were “outside” the Intellect, then that Intellect would not “have” the intelligibles themselves, but only an image of them (their trace or emanation). In fact, the identity of intellect and intelligible is extremely close. In thinking the intelligible, an intellect is identified with the object of its thought (another gloss on what the intelligibles being “inside” Intellect means).

The ancient Greeks were very convinced of the idea that “like knows like” (and we should be, too). The objects of knowledge are different than the objects of opinion. If knowledge is supposed to be something stable and true (unlike opinion), then we can be sure the objects of knowledge are stable and true. If this is taken to its logical conclusion, then all knowledge is self-knowledge. To perfectly know something, one must, in a certain sense, be that thing. We might rephrase this old idea more precisely: “Like opines on like, but identical knows identical”. It is by identity that knowledge is possible at all, for otherwise knowledge would not be the possession of the inner being of the intelligible, but only of some effect or trace of it. There can be no distance between the knower and the known, thus: identity.

Now, when knowledge is directed at the self, which just before this passage Plotinus has identified with “the sovereign part of the soul” (as cited above), something strange happens: a person becomes double.

One part (for “man is many” as Plato says) has, Plotinus writes, become Intellect, both subject and object of knowledge. The other part is the one that “knows” the discursive nature of soul. There must be two parts because, as we said, like knows like, and we have here two ontologically distinct regions, hierarchically arranged. The kicker, however, is that both of these parts are referents of “me” or “us”. One part ascends, as if soul were stretching itself out to cover the higher things under itself:

Furthermore, in thinking himself again, due to Intellect, it is not as a human being that he does so, but as having become something else completely and dragging himself into the higher region, drawing up only the better part of the soul, which alone can acquire the wings for intellection, in order that there be someone who could be entrusted with what he sees in the intelligible world. (5.3.4.11-14)

The contemplator is said to be “dragging” himself up, so that he has something like a witness of the mystical delights that await him. Intellect is always there, and always contemplating; this is necessary for sensibles to be intelligible to us even partially. Our intellects are always knowing all things, though our souls are not aware of this. When “we” contemplate, we are expanding this “we” through expanding the soul. The soul comes up into the intelligible, and there it “becomes” intellect, while yet remaining a soul.

There is no memory in the intelligible world, so when Plotinus speaks of “entrusting” the visions to the soul, perhaps he is thinking of this. The soul as witness of what is always there, always going on in all its fullness: divine intellection. When the heights of contemplation are relinquished, intellect remains as it was, but the soul comes back into the body, contracting and taking its usual place as the sovereign power between sense-perception and intellection.

Some very dense technical questions follow, the answer to each of which is “yes”.

Is it actually the case that the faculty of discursive thinking does not see that it is the faculty of discursive thinking, and that it acquires comprehension of externals, and that it discerns what it discerns, and that it does so by internal rules, rules which it derives from Intellect, and that there is something better than it that seeks nothing but rather, in fact, has everything? (5.3.4.15-19)

Yes.

To know the essence or nature of discursive thinking is to know an intelligible, not to think discursively about it. Discursive thinking cannot think itself adequately, as it is not unified enough for self-thinking. There is in discursive reason a symbolically-mediated distance between the act of thinking and the semi-intelligible objects which it apprehends. The soul, whose nature includes discursive thinking, desires and seeks, but does not possess. If Intellect has a kind of “intellectual motion” (see Plato’s Laws X in this connection), a motion which is intransitive, then the soul’s own motion is transitive.¹ And it moves towards things outside itself, and is governed by the laws of something outside (and prior) to itself. Only Intellect possesses wholly its objects; again, the intelligibles are internal to Intellect.

But after all, does it not know what it itself is just when it has scientific understanding of what sort of thing it is and what its functions are? (5.3.4.19-20)

Yes.

Once again: Discursive reason cannot ever know itself, since it would cease to be discursive reason as it came closer and closer to self-knowledge. Intellect is the only sort of thing that can really think itself.

If, then, it were to say that it comes from Intellect and is second after Intellect and an image of Intellect, having in itself in a way all its writings, since the one who writes and has written is in the intelligible world, will one who knows himself in this way halt at these, but we, by using another faculty, observe again Intellect knowing itself; or, by sharing in Intellect, since it belongs to us and we to it, shall we in this way know Intellect and ourselves? (5.3.4.20-26)

Yes.

Soul is an image of Intellect. The essence of a thing is its paradigm, its intelligible cause. Therefore it is only by identifying with Intellect that “we” are fully intelligible, since our soul is not perfectly intelligible but bears a stain upon it. To “know thyself” in its most proper and strict sense is not possible as a human being, but as Intellect. However, Intellect is not merely unrelated to our being human beings, either.²

Now Plotinus answers his own questions:

In fact, it is necessary that we know it in this way, if indeed we are going to know what ‘self-thinking’ is for the Intellect. Someone has himself indeed become Intellect when he lets go of the other things that belong to him, and looks at Intellect with Intellect; he then looks at himself with himself. It is, then, actually as Intellect that he sees himself. (5.3.4.26-31)

The thinker, the thought, the thinking. All become one, become “us”, when Intellect has filled us up. And then we see directly what was written in our souls, even at the time when we first saw two equal sticks as children.

We Can Be in Accord with Intellect in Two Ways

We asked at the beginning, more or less, what separates critical-transcendental “conditions of possibility” from the Platonic understanding of said conditions. It is true that the writings of Intellect, in us “like laws”, function as conditions of possibility for the partial intelligibility of the sensible world (and of discursive thinking). But they do not remain formal. Put another way, the intelligibles are not only to be found in sensible things. They exist on their own, independent and “separate”.

The conditions can themselves be given. And not only that, but those conditions constitute the real being (and also the intelligibility) of sensible givens, which derive from them.

The Platonic doctrine of contemplation complements and completes the theory of recollection. If “we” are to perceive and judge sensibles, then “we” must know, and some part of us must contemplate. Perhaps it is something more empirical (or something “revealed” in a broad sense) to ask if “we” can become identified with that higher part of ourselves. But if not, our arguments and discourse about it would remain unable to produce anything but more discourse; disastrously, knowledge would be possible, but never for us. Such a (critical-transcendental) severing is the nightmare of philosophy. What would it even mean? It is the “greatest impasse” of Plato’s Parmenides recurring once again.

If it is possible to marshal and argument for the necessary possibility of contemplation, it must go through Parmenides.³

1. See Gerson’s Plotinus, specifically the chapter on Soul.

2. More on this some other time. I have in mind a passage from 1.1 (and maybe another place) where animals and children and adult human beings are compared in terms of psychic structure and access to Intellect.

3. I may write something on this soon.