Ennead VI.8: On the Voluntary and on the Free Will of the One

"The first is one of Plotinus’s works, Ennead VI.8, On the Voluntary and the Free Will of the One . There is a good recent translation, with commentary, by Corrigan and Turner. Ennead VI.8 deals with two connected sets of questions about freedom: questions about what it is for human beings to be free and questions about what it is for a god (and in particular, the highest god, the One) to be free. With regards to human beings, he asks what it is for our actions to be in our control, or ‘up to us’. Plotinus ends up arguing for a very constrained picture of what it is for our actions to be up to us: we’re not properly in control of what we do when we’re ignorant or when we act on false beliefs. But even when we act on true beliefs, our actions aren’t properly speaking ‘up to us’ unless they are based on knowledge of what we should do. If you have knowledge, then you not only believe something true, but also understand why it is true. If you have true belief without knowledge, then you are just lucky that you are right. Plotinus thinks that if you act on a mere belief of this kind, then you aren’t properly in control of what you do. For example, if you believe something just because you’ve accepted what someone else has told you, and you act on the basis of this belief, Plotinus thinks you are not really in control of what you do, because you are just going along with what somebody else has said. By contrast, if you understand why what you believe is true, there’s a sense in which you take ownership of your belief, and hence have a kind of control both over what you believe and over what you do as a result. Plotinus also says that if you act on your passions (e.g. from anger or from appetite) then you are not acting freely. In such cases, there is a sense in which you are dragged about by your desires and emotions. Plotinus even says that you aren’t fully free when you act virtuously in response to circumstances you would prefer not to be in. For instance, if you go to fight in a war because you think this is the right thing to do given your circumstances, you are not fully free. In this case, you are not free because you are adapting to circumstances you would never have chosen to be in. Plotinus thinks if you were fully in control, you would do just what you ideally want to do. That wouldn’t include going to war. People fight in wars because it is the best option available to them in their circumstances, not because it is what they would want to do if they had full control over their circumstances. Plotinus thinks that all ethically virtuous action is in response to such non-ideal conditions. Because of this, he ends up arguing that we are only fully free, insofar as we are engaged in pure philosophical contemplation of the realm of Platonic Forms. The idea seems to be that when you engage in pure contemplation, you assimilate yourself to the realm of the Platonic Forms. Ultimately, we aim to assimilate ourselves to the One itself. These are difficult questions. Plotinus’s view is that when you fully understand something, you become one with what you understand. And he also thinks that understanding one Form requires understanding all the others. So when you contemplate the Platonic Forms, you become one with all the Forms. In fact, Plotinus has the view that there’s a sense in which you are always already one with the Platonic Forms. In your fallen bodily state, you engage in activities in the world, but your true self remains on a higher plane, always contemplating the Forms. For Plotinus, that’s what makes it possible for you to fully assimilate yourself to the higher realm and to be free, and it is also what justifies us in holding you responsible for your actions, even when you fail to be free. The similarity is probably just a coincidence, but interestingly, we know from Porphyry that Plotinus was eager to learn about Indian and Persian philosophy. He even joined the Emperor Gordian III’s military expedition to Persia, in an attempt to do so. But the expedition was unsuccessful. The emperor was assassinated and Plotinus made his way to Rome. For Plotinus, everything is ultimately derived from, and in some way dependent on, the One. The One itself is perfectly simple. Plotinus tells a story about how the different levels of his ontological hierarchy can be derived from the One. For instance, the Forms exist because the One overflows in its abundance, as it were. This overflow from the One strives to return to the One by attempting to grasp the One intellectually. That is impossible, so the attempt fails, but in making this attempt, this overflow from the One succeeds in intellectually grasping itself. In doing so, it constitutes itself as the Platonic Forms. The Forms make themselves as like the One as possible, by unifying themselves in a kind of self-knowing activity, but they remain distinct from the One. As I said, the other main question Plotinus addresses in Ennead VI.8 concerns the One. After discussing what it is for our actions to be ‘up to us’, he asks about the One: is the One free? Does the One have control over what it is or what it does? “The Neoplatonists have a very demanding notion of freedom” Plotinus raises a puzzle. Nothing can cause the One to be the way it is, because if anything caused the One to be as it is, then that other thing would be the highest thing. But if nothing causes the One to be as it is, that suggests that the One is the way it is by chance. And Plotinus says that it can’t be right to think that the One is the way it is by chance. Remember that the One is meant to be the source of all goodness. How could it explain the goodness of everything else if it were simply the way it was by chance? An obvious solution is to say, ‘the One isn’t caused to be as it is by anything external . Instead, it causes itself to be as it is’. But Plotinus can’t say that either, because he thinks that something could only be self-causing if it were complex. A self-causing thing would have to be both cause of itself and caused by itself , so it would have to have two aspects: as cause and caused. But the One is meant to be something that has no complexity at all. So it can’t be self-causing. In fact, Plotinus claims that the simplicity of the One raises a deeper problem. If the One is in no way complex, how can we say anything about it at all? How can we be having this conversation about the One? Plotinus wants to say that, strictly speaking, you can’t talk about or think about the One. So all the stuff we’ve just been saying about the One can’t really be right. In the second half of Ennead VI.8, Plotinus is struggling with these problems. His response is to advocate a kind of ‘as if’ way of talking about the One. Instead of claiming that the One is self-causing, we have to say that things are ‘as if’ the One is self-causing. Strictly speaking the One is ineffable: we cannot say or think anything about it. But nevertheless, we need to be able to gesture towards some truths about the One, if we are to encourage people to strive for what is best, so we need some way of gesturing towards the ineffable. Plotinus’s struggles with this problem influenced later Christian discussions of how one could or could not talk about God. There is certainly quite a sophisticated discussion of this puzzle in Plotinus. The later Neoplatonist philosophers tend to be stricter about insisting that we cannot make positive claims about the One at all, so they reject even Plotinus’s qualified way of talking about the One. I don’t know whether Kant studied Plotinus, but he would surely have studied Christian thinkers who were influenced by the Neoplatonists. Some of the German Idealists certainly read, and were influenced by, the Neoplatonists. Yes, I think he’s a deep and imaginative thinker. He’s in some ways less easily accessible than, say, Plato and Aristotle, at least for people trained in modern analytic philosophy. Although I think that difference can be overplayed. Some bits of Plato and Aristotle are also difficult for analytic philosophers, but that doesn’t stop us studying their works. It’s not as if the works of Aristotle and Plato are all transparent, easy, and straightforward."