On Plotinus and the "Togetherness" of Consciousness

On Plotinus and the "Togetherness" of Consciousness RICHARD E. AQUILA PLOTINUS IS OFTEN assigned a special position in regard to the history of the concept of consciousness: "In Plotinus, for the first time in its history, psychology becomes the science of the phenomena of consciousness, conceived as selfconsciousness ",; before Plotinus, the notions of consciousness and self (moo had passed practically unnoticed among Greek philosophers;' Plotinus was the first to isolate a sense of "self" or "ego's; the sense of "a person's identity .., was a concept for which Greek had no word. Plotinus deals with it... in terms of what constitutes the 'we', zb ~g.~g or simply T]p.e~g, which becomes virtually a technical term" for him.4 In this new sense, as a number of commentators seem to conclude, "self" is not so much (like "soul," for Plato and some others) any particular sort of entity to which one's states of consciousness are ascribable as to a subject, but precisely the very "spotlight of consciousness" itself.5 ' G. S. Brett, A History of Psychology, 2 vols. (Allen and Unwin, 1912, 1921), l: 302; cited by D. B. Klein, The Concept of Consciousness:A Survey (I.incoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 7- ' Emile Br~hier, La philosophiede Plotin (Paris: Boivin & Cie., ~diteurs, t928), 112. s E. R. Dodds, commenting in informal discussion in Les sources de Plotin, Entretiens sur l'antiquit~ classique, 5 (Vandoeuvres-Gen/~ve: Fondation Hardt, 196o), 385. 4 H.J. Blumenthal, Plotinus's Psychology:His Doctrinesof theEmbodied Soul (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), 1o9. E. R. Dodds, "Tradition and Personal Achievement in the Philosophy of Plotinus,"Journal of Roman Studies 5~ 096o): 6. Cf. Br~hier, La philosophie de Plotin, 68; Eyj61fur Kjalar Emilsson, Plotinus on Sense-Perception:A PhilosophicalStudy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 27-29. Cf. alsoJ. P. O'Daly, Plotinus' Philosophyof the Self (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1973); Edward W. Warren, "Consciousness in Plotinus," Phronesis9 0964): 9*: "For Plotinus the self is a dynamic agent; it is a point of attention, which may function at various cognitive levels"; also by Warren, The Concept of Consciousnessin the Philosophy of Plotinus, doctoral disseration, The Johns Hopkins University, 1961. Blumenthal (1o9-1o) criticizes Himmerich's tendency to equate the [7] 8 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 30:1 JANUARY 1999 Considered with regard to the background of modern concepts of consciousness , these assertions may seem to skirt an important issue. Perhaps it is true that Plotinus offers a new notion of consciousness, conceived as some kind of self-consciousness. Perhaps he thereby offers a new notion of the "subject" of consciousness as well. The question remains: To what extent does he offer significant development with regard to the concept of consciousness simpliciter, and not just with regard to that of some (perhaps special) kind of self-consciousness? As is well known, a recent tendency to assign preeminence to Descartes in these matters has centered on questions concerning the epistemic status of conscious states. In particular, it has centered on a supposedly special certainty attaching to what M. F. Burnyeat has called "unambiguously subjective states.''6 The suggestion is, of course, that however much earlier thinkers may have connected some notion of consciousness with some notion of "subjectivity," it remains dubious to what extent they approached Descartes's, and thus our own, concept of the "unambiguously subjective." Thus to whatever extent Plotinus may have identified some notion of consciousness with that of some kind of consciousness of the "subject" of consciousness itself, we may all the same be led to conclude with Gareth Matthews : "One does find interesting anticipations of it [the Cartesian conception] in Augustine, but not much earlier, and not much between the time of Augustine and that of Descartes."71 want to suggest, to the contrary, that it is fruitful to focus on Plotinus's identification of a certain sort of self-consciousness with consciousness "simpliciter," precisely in order to appreciate the respect in which he may indeed have anticipated at least an essential part of what is "distinctively modern" in some more modern concepts of consciousness. I want to pursue these suggestions in connection with the following (oftencited...