We have elsewhere pointed out the hopelessness of escaping either
aspect of the problem of the One and the Many; and that the attempt
of the Stoics to avoid the Platonic dualism by a materialistic monism
was merely a change of names, the substance of the dualism remaining
as the opposition of the contraries, such as active and passive,
male and female, the predominant elements,[474] etc. Plotinos, in
his abandonment of Numenian dualism, and championing of Stoicism,
undertaking the feud with the Gnostics, the successors of Numenius,
must therefore have inherited the same difficulties of thought, and we
shall see how in spite of his mental agility he is caught in the same
traditional meshes, and that these irreducible difficulties occur in
each one of his three periods of life, the Eustochian, the Amelian, and
the Porphyrian.
In the Amelian, he teaches two matters, the physical and the
intelligible, by which device he seeks to avoid the difficulties of
dualism, crediting to intelligible matter any necessary form of Being,
thus pushing physical matter into the outer darkness of non-being.
So intelligible matter is still a form of Being, and we still hold
to monism; as intelligible matter may participate in the good; while
matter physical remains evil, being a deprivation of good, not
possessing it. This, of course is dualism; and he thus has a convenient
pun on the word matter, by which he can be monist or dualist, as
the fancy takes him, or as exigencies demand. This participation,
therefore, does not eliminate the dualism, while formally professing
monism. Therefore Plotinos tries to choose between monism and dualism
by surreptitiously accepting both.
In the Porphyrian period, he rejected the idea of intelligible
matter.[475] Forced to fashion entirely new arguments, he seizes as
tool the Aristotelian distinction between potentiality and actuality,
or energy as dynamic accomplishment.[476] But no logical device can
help a man to pull himself up by his boot-straps. If by Being you
mean existence, then its opposite must be negative, and to speak of
real non-being, as something that shares being, is an evasion. To say
that matter remains non-being, while having the possibility of future
Being, which however can never be actualized, is mere juggling with
words. Even if matter is no more than a weak, confused image, it is
not non-being. If it is a positive lie, it is not non-being. To talk
of a higher degree of Non-being, that is real non-being, is simply to
confuse the actuality intended with the thought of non-being, which
of course is a thought as actually existing as any other. Moreover if
matter is imperishable, it cannot be non-being; and if it possesses
Being potentially, it certainly is not non-existence. The Aristotelian
potentiality could help to create this evasion, but did not remove its
real nature; it merely supplied Plotinos with an intellectual device
to characterize something that would not be actually existing as still
having the possibility of existence; but this is not non-existence. In
another writing[477] of this period Plotinos continues his evasions
about the origin and nature of matter. First, he grants that it is
something that is not original, being later than many earthly, and all
intelligible objects; although, if he had returned to the conception
of intelligible matter, he would have been at liberty to assert the
originality of the latter. Then he holds that Being is common to both
form and matter, as to quality, but not as to quantity. Last, he
closes the paragraph by saying that perhaps form and matter do not come
from the same origin, as there is a difference between them.
In Plotinos's third, or Eustochian period, the same evasions occur.
For instance[478] he limits Being to goodness. Then he acknowledges
the existence of evil things, and derives their evil quality from a
primary evil, the "image of essence," the Being of evil. That he is
conscious of having strained a point is evident from the fact that he
adds the clause, "if there can be a Being of evil." Likewise,[479]
while discussing evil, which is generally recognized because in our
daily lives there is positive pain, and sensations of pain, he defines
evil as lack of qualities. To say that evil is not such as to form,
but as to nature is opposite to form is nonsense, inasmuch as life is
full of positive evils, as Numenius brought out in 16, and Plotinos
acknowledged even in spite of his polemic against the Gnostics.
Finally Plotinos takes refuge in a miracle[480] as explanation of
"unparticipating participation." This is commentary enough; it shows
he realized the futility of any arguments. But Plotinos was not alone
in despairing of establishing an ironclad system; before him Numenius
had, just as pathetically, despaired of a logical dualism, and he
acknowledged in fragment 16 that Pythagoras's arguments, however true,
were "wonderful and opposed to the belief of a majority of humanity."
In other words, monism is as unsatisfactory to reason as dualism. This
was the chief point of agreement between Pythagoras and the Stoics; and
Pragmatism has in modern times attempted to show a way out by a higher
sanction of another kind.
Perhaps the reader may be interested in a side-light on this subject.
Drews is interested in Plotinos only because Plotinos's super-rational
divinity furnishes a historical foundation for Edouard Hartmann's
philosophy of the Unconscious. It would seem, however, to be a mistake
to use the latter term, for it is true only as a doubtful corollary.
If the Supreme is super-conscious, it is possible to describe this
logically as unconscious. But generally, however, unconsciousness is a
term used to denote the sub-conscious, rather than the super-conscious,
and the use of that term must inevitably entail misunderstandings. It
would be better then to follow Pragmatism into the super-conscious,
rather than to sink with Hartmann into the sub-conscious. It was
directly from Plotinos[481] that Hartmann took his expression "beyond
good and evil."
Having watched Numenius, for Platonic dualism; and Plotinos for Stoic
monism, both appeal to a miracle as court of last resort, we may now
return to that result of Platonism which has left the most vital
impress on our civilization, its conception of the divine.