Plotinus on Self: The Philosophy of the 'We' (review)

Plotinus's theory of dual selfhood is one of the best-known and most puzzling aspects of his philosophy. Each human being, he held, is both a compound of body and soul and a discarnate member of the hypostasis Intellect. He built evaluative norms into this duality, all of which derive from what he argued to be the ontological superiority of the discarnate element in us over the body-soul compound. This led him, in turn, to claim that the best and happiest human life is a life of self-purification, mostly devoted to the care of the higher self.

Until fairly recently, scholarly consensus had been that, in so centering his "ethics" around the higher self, Plotinus had downplayed what we moderns take to be the very core of the moral life, namely, concern for the needs and entitlements of other agents (see, e.g., Dillon, "An Ethics for the Late Antique Sage"). It was also generally agreed that, in his description of the ethical life, Plotinus had done no more than develop a claim that is prevalent in ancient theories of ethics, most of which present the life of rational self-fulfillment as the best life for a human being to lead. Ancient ethics, it was then concluded, crucially differs from its modern, post-Kantian, counterpart.

This interpretation is now under attack. While some historians of ethics (e.g., Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends and The Constitution of Agency) have for some time argued that it is exegetically misleading to set up a sharp dichotomy between ancient and modern ethical systems, scholars of Neoplatonism (e.g., D. O'Meara, Platonopolis, and Schniewind, L'Ethique du Sage chez Plotin), for their part, have endeavored to show that Plotinus and his successors did build other-regarding norms into their philosophy. This latter interpretation, which is currently in the ascendant, is the one that Remes aims at strengthening. Her book is an intelligent, painstaking, and honest attempt at demonstrating that the Plotinian sage's overall concern with the cultivation of his higher self places him in a unique position to contribute to the well-being of the kosmos as a whole. Through his possession of the intellectual virtues, which presuppose the civic virtues, he has elevated himself above self-interested and particularistic concerns and is "at home" in Intellect. But, she argues, this does not mean that he takes no heed of his fellow embodied souls. On the contrary, he treats them with the same degree of care and/or detachment that he shows towards the compound that constitutes his lower self. As a consequence, he is a paradigmatic moral agent and his life a paradigmatic good life, according to our lights as well as Plotinus's.

To substantiate this thesis, Remes first proceeds to a highly focused reconstruction of Plotinus's theory of dual selfhood and its background in Platonic and post-Platonic ontology (ch. 1). Her reconstruction, which is carried out in the discourse of Anglo-American analytical philosophy, makes heavy demands upon the reader, who is required, throughout this long chapter, constantly to correlate two very different sets of concepts and problems. Is the distancing from the Plotinian outlook that this exercise produces beneficial to the understanding of the Enneads? Yes and no. While it stands to give patient readers fresh insights into a number of Plotinian concepts and theories, it is also likely to blind them to fundamental differences between Plotinus's philosophical manner and our own. In any case, it is far from certain that Remes would succeed in persuading analytical philosophers to take a look at the Enneads.

Chapters 2 and 3 are devoted to a detailed analysis of the various concepts used by Plotinus to account for self-awareness and self-knowledge. These chapters are strategic in intent, aimed at providing support for Remes' view that Plotinian scholarship has generally been guilty of over-stating the differences between the respective modus operandi of Intellect...