Plotinus' Philosophy of the Self (review)

466 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY hypothetical necessity, in a remoter but still nontrivial sense (as I would think they should), Preus ought to have gone on to show how. All in all, this book must be adjudged a premature publication; yet it contains so much promised interest that one hopes the author will work out some of his suggestions more thoroughly. To take just one from many, he remarks that "correct classification explicates the teleological understanding of the species and genera." This means, if I have decoded it aright, that (a) there is one correct classification among possible classifications; (b) the correct one explains the genera and species; (c) the explanation is teleological. These are three important propositions; if Preus could demonstrate them in proper depth and length, he would greatly contribute to our understanding of Aristotle, and perhaps to the philosophy of biology generally. D. M. BALME University of London PIotinus' Philosophy of the Self. By Gerald J. P. O'Daly. (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1974. Pp. 121. $12.00). Recent commentators have stressed the importance of the concept of self (le moi, das Ich, the ego) in Plotinus, but none, according to O'Daly, has yet offered an exhaustive study (p. 95) of this "novel" and "unique" aspect of his thought (pp. 5-6). With this monograph O'Daly purports to fill this gap. He does not succeed in his major objective. Still, this dense piece offers a determined reader many original and suggestive readings of pivotal passages in the Enneads. I purposefully use the adjectives "dense" and "determined" here. The reader will find no filler here, none of the misleading thumbnail sketches of the Plotinian universe one so often encounters. O'Daly should be praised for leading us into the thickets of PIotinus's arguments, and never lingering to apostrophize but always hurrying us on to further relevant passages. Piotinus emerges here, as he rightly should, as a philosopher worth serious study. The consequent demands on the reader, however, could have been lessened considerably had his presupposed acquaintance with the Enneads and ability to follow an argument not been coupled with presumptions of his linguistic facility. This short work is sprinkled with untranslated quotations from contemporary French and German authors; it also uncharacteristically presumes a knowledge of Greek on the reader's part. Indeed, there are several crucial passages, sometimes quite long, left untranslated from the Greek. It is a pity that O'Daly's audience has been inevitably limited in this way. Piotinus hardly needs a coterie. Many English-speaking readers are unfamiliar with recent continental contributions to Plotinian scholarship, and O'Daly, schooled on the continent (he dedicates his work to Willy Theiler and has been involved in the German edition of Plotinus), offers tantalizing glimpses of this work. An exhaustive study of the concept o'f self in PIotinus might be expected to answer two basic questions: What are the defining characteristics of "self" according to PIotinus? and What are the relationships among self and other central features of Plotinus's system? I hold that O'Daly has not succeeded in his major objective because I find here no clear answer to either of these questions. Just four pages before the end of his study O'Daly suggests why there is no clear answer to the second question. In discussing the union of self and the One, O'Daly writes that Plotinus, out of "philosophical pietas," insists on discussing his novel concept of self in terms of the traditional concepts ofpsych~ and nous (p. 90). On this ground we might expect that Plotinus would develop his concept of self solely in terms of the traditional concepts, and, indeed, O'Daly uses many of Plotinus's pronouncements about such concepts to provide BOOK REVIEWS 467 information about his views on the self. (He cites ample support for this in Plotinus's frequent use of the terms h~meis, autos, and hauton--those most frequently used to refer to self--interchangeablywith those he uses to refer to soul, intelligence, man, and the One.) The situation is complicated by the fact, however, that while Plotinus, according O'Daly, fails to explain union with the One in...