Ursula Coope's Reading List

"This is a very short and accessible introduction to Plotinus. One of the things I really like about it is that it brings out the excitement of Plotinus. It doesn’t just tell you what he thought. It looks at his ideas in a way that engages with the philosophy and isn’t afraid to ask, ‘what could Plotinus possibly mean by this highly metaphorical language? Can we really make sense of it?’ Another thing that I like about this book is that each chapter points the reader to a relevant chapter in Plotinus. This means that the book connects you with the text so you can explore it for yourself. O’Meara does this very well. So the book gives you a lively introduction to what’s exciting about Plotinus, what’s puzzling or peculiar about him, and it also encourages you to go and read Plotinus yourself to see what O’Meara is talking about. I would also like to mention here two other books that are not among my five, but that are nicely complementary to O’Meara’s. One is Eyjólfur Emilsson’s Plotinus , which is similar in scope and aim to O’Meara’s book but slightly more advanced. It would be a good thing to read after O’Meara. The other is Pierre Hadot’s Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision (in the original French, Plotin ou la simplicité du regard ). Hadot is especially good at bringing out the way in which, for Plotinus, philosophy is not only an intellectual exercise but also a way of life: a means to self-improvement and self-transformation. Plotinus wrote on a wide variety of themes within metaphysics , psychology and ethics . All of Plotinus’s writings were collected and edited by his student Porphyry, who called the collection ‘the Enneads ’. ‘Enneads’ means ‘nines’, and the name reflects the fact that Porphyry arranged Plotinus’s writings thematically, into six books, each including nine shorter treatises. There are some places where Porphyry’s attempt at thematic arrangement pulls apart things that one might think should be kept together. However, Porphyry also recorded for us the order in which these treatises were written, so as well as having the order in which Porphyry arranged them, we also know the order of their chronological production. Yes, Porphyry also wrote a short life of Plotinus, which tells us some interesting details about him. Of course, we can’t be sure how reliable it is. Porphyry wanted to paint a particular picture of his own relation to Plotinus. But it’s interesting to have the little details that we get from that portrait."

"This is a more general book on Neoplatonism, going beyond the writings of Plotinus. It’s very hard to write a good general introduction, because a lot of the writings are quite abstruse. Remes’s book does a really good job of bringing out what’s philosophically interesting about the Neoplatonists. Each chapter focuses on a particular theme. In each case, Remes starts off with Plotinus on the topic, and then goes on to discuss later Neoplatonist reactions to, and disagreements with, Plotinus. The disadvantage of this approach is that it foregrounds Plotinus in a way that sometimes underplays the importance of later Neoplatonists, especially when they are not simply reacting to Plotinus. But as an introduction, the book has the great merit of giving you a grounding in Plotinus, and telling you something about how these later Neoplatonists reacted to or disagreed with him. Learning about these disagreements also helps one to engage philosophically with these works oneself. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Remes is very good at bringing out why the Neoplatonists have interesting things to say to us today, and why modern philosophers should pay attention to them. One consequence of this is that, compared to some other writings on the Neoplatonists, Remes downplays aspects of Neoplatonist thought that seem especially weird to us nowadays, in particular some of the religious and ritualistic aspects. But this book provides a wonderful introduction to the Neoplatonists for anyone who has general philosophical interests and wants to explore their thought. I suspect the Neoplatonists might figure more prominently in France or Italy, and there are also interesting connections with German Idealist thought. It seems to me that the philosopher who really should be on the syllabus is Plotinus. I think the fact that he’s not studied much in modern Anglophone departments is partly a matter of fashion, but there are also reasons why his work might not appeal to a certain type of modern analytic philosopher. Firstly, Plotinus’s views are quite weird, and his general approach would seem obviously misguided to modern philosophers who presuppose naturalism or physicalism. Secondly, much of Plotinus’s work is reacting to earlier philosophers, so it is hard to understand what he is up to without having some knowledge of his predecessors. And thirdly, his writing style is very different from that of a modern analytic philosopher. It might be useful at this point to say what kind of a writer Plotinus is. Porphyry tells us that Plotinus had very bad eyesight. For this reason, he tended not to re-read his writings and revise them. Perhaps partly because of this, when you read a bit of Plotinus, it’s as if you’re thinking through a problem with him. This is something I find exciting. He has a very discursive way of writing. It’s almost as if he’s written a dialogue, except without indicating when he is switching from one speaker to another. He will explore one idea for a bit, but then ask, ‘on the other hand, what about this ?’ It isn’t always obvious, in any one part of the text, whether what you’ve got is something that Plotinus is asserting, or instead something that he’s putting forward as a position someone might hold, a position that he is then going to qualify or even refute. Yes, there is perhaps something in common with the style of the Philosophical Investigations . Once you’ve got the hang of what Plotinus is doing, you feel as if you are thinking things through with him. It certainly does have this effect. I suspect that Plotinus’s writing has this discursive character because it arises out of his discussions with his pupils. The fact that Plotinus was so immersed in Plato’s dialogues may also have influenced his way of writing."

"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."

"My last choice is a book by Proclus, On Providence (translated by Carlos Steel). As I said before, Proclus was a fifth-century philosopher. We have many of his works, including substantial commentaries on Plato’s Republic , Timaeus and Parmenides . His Elements of Theology is an attempt to lay out the whole of Neoplatonic metaphysics, in an axiomatic form, modelled on Euclid’s Elements . This is well worth looking at (and there is a wonderful translation and commentary by E. R. Dodds), but it is quite hard, so I have decided instead to recommend On Providence . This is one of three short works Proclus wrote, all of which deal with questions about the problems of evil, providence and freedom. By ‘providence’, he means divine influence over the world for the good. Not really. Proclus has a very non-anthropomorphic idea of divinity. The highest divinity is the ultimate first principle, the One. This has the role of Plato’s Form of the Good. There were lesser types of divinity below this ultimate first principle. Divine beings do not engage in anything analogous to human action, so it is misleading to describe them as helping us. Nevertheless, they have an influence over everything that happens, and this is an influence for the good. Everything in the cosmos is in some way ordered to the good, because everything is governed by these divine principles, and ultimately everything is derived from the first principle, which is the One or the Good. If that’s so, then this raises questions as to how we can make sense of human freedom, or of human evil. Like Porphyry’s treatise on vegetarianism, On Providence is written in the form of a letter. Proclus addresses someone called ‘Theodore the Engineer’, who had a very mechanistic view of the universe. Theodore basically seems to have thought everything in the cosmos works mechanistically, like clockwork, and ‘everything’ here includes human beings. On this view, there is no human free will, and humans cannot rightly be praised or blamed for anything they do. This is the view Proclus sets out to refute. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Proclus argues that if we are to understand what is wrong with Theodore’s view, we have to distinguish rational souls from physical bodies, and relatedly, we have to distinguish between Providence and Fate. The Stoics had regarded ‘Fate’ and ‘Providence’ as two names for the same thing. Proclus disagrees. He argues that Fate and Providence represent different kinds of causal influence. Fate is a kind of causal nexus that governs physical things. If everything were fated, then there would be no free will. We would all be pushed and pulled about mechanistically. But Proclus thinks that human souls are not physical things. They can be caused to be the way they are by Providence, without this undermining free will. So Proclus thinks there are two different kinds of causality, one appropriate to physical things and another to rational souls or intellects. Being fully determined by the former kind of causality would be in tension with being free, but being fully determined by the latter kind of causality is compatible with being free. Another question Proclus discusses concerns divine knowledge of what will happen. If there is an all-knowing god, then that god knows what’s going to happen in the future. How, then, can we be free to act in one way or another? Proclus argues that divine knowledge of the future is compatible with human free agency: I can still count as acting freely even if what I will do is already infallibly known by some divine being. Yes. A kind of compatibilism. But the interesting extra dimension is that, for Proclus, if everything we did was subject to physical causes, then we wouldn’t have the right kind of control over what we do. So his version of compatibilism depends on making this distinction between different kinds of causation. Yes, it is a kind of dualism. The way in which it’s different from certain more familiar, modern versions of dualism is that the spiritual and the physical are not two distinct substances. For Proclus, everything that is physical ultimately depends on and comes from things that are spiritual, or immaterial. Modern philosophers worry about how these two different kinds of things could interact. That worry does not arise for the Neoplatonists, since in their view the physical stuff only exists in the first place because it is in some way derived from the non-physical higher beings. It’s not like doing a crossword puzzle; it’s more like a great imaginative adventure. Ultimately, I’m interested in questions about free will and responsibility, the nature of human reason and the limits of understanding, self-knowledge, self-determination, and so on. For me, thinking about the Neoplatonists is a way of thinking about these questions. I don’t study the Neoplatonists because I believe they have the right answers. But I do think that engaging with these rather alien thinkers can help us to better understand ourselves. This is partly because we come to understand ourselves better when we see our own assumptions against the backdrop of alternative possibilities, but also because many of the concepts we employ in philosophy today have grown out of earlier discussions in the history of philosophy, and the Neoplatonists had a crucial influence on some of these earlier discussions. We can better understand our own use of these concepts if we know their history."