Plotinus on Intellect (review)

In Plotinus’s universe, Intellect is the first “product” of the One. Yet why and how precisely is Intellect “produced”? What characteristics distinguish it, and its particular way of knowing, from its higher cause? Questions such as these will lead one deep into the metaphysics and epistemology of the Enneads, where the operative principles that underlie particular passages often need to be teased out carefully. Indispensable requirements for this task are attention to philological and historical detail, and a general sensitivity to the problems Plotinus is facing. Emilsson combines both admirably.

In the introduction, Emilsson sets out his baseline approach: Plotinus’s Intellect can be understood in terms of an “ideal knower,” i.e., “something that knows and understands what there may be to know and understand in as full a sense as one could possibly postulate” (3). As will become clear from chapters 3 and 4, it is self-knowledge in particular that lies at the heart of Plotinus’s view of the conditions that an ideal knower must fulfill.

Chapter 1 begins with an analysis of how Intellect comes about in the first place. Central to Plotinus’s thought is not some notion of “emanation,” but rather a distinction between two related kinds of activity (energeia), one internal, one external to the agent, where the former causes the latter. The activity of walking, for instance, could count as an internal activity, leaving a trace in the sand as its external manifestation. Applied to lofty metaphysics, Intellect would be the external by-product of the One’s own internal activity.

There are complications with this model, however, which chapter 2 untangles. The first product of the One is a kind of potential, not yet fully distinguished Intellect (the “inchoate Intellect”), which, by turning back (epistrephein) towards the One, becomes the full-blown actual Intellect. But firstly, why does the inchoate Intellect turn back towards the One (its cause) at all, when traces in the sand do not, ostensibly, seek to return to the feet of beach walkers? And secondly, why does Plotinus seem to be insistent that Intellect is divided in two ways, in terms of a subject-object distinction, and in terms of the many things that it knows (the intelligibles), when each one of these two ways of being divided would alone be sufficient to make Intellect different from the One?

There is a common narrative that solves both problems: the inchoate intellect is constituted as a “rudimentary” subject by the One’s external activity, and as such has an indefinite desire to attain self-sufficiency and unity, which is expressed in the conversion. As a result of the conversion, which turns out to be towards an image of the One (the One itself being unknowable), Intellect becomes internally divided into subject (seer) and object (what is seen, viz. the image of the One). On the hypothesis that the actual Intellect is also a self-knower, it is possible to think that the division between subject and object may also result in the further division between different objects of knowledge. Thoughts of the form “I think I am F” have plural objects (“I” and “F”), and require some predicate such as ‘F’ for there to be a distinction between thinking subject (“I”) and object of thought (“I being F”) at all.

Chapters 3 and 4 sweep up a number of more specific problems related to Intellect’s internal structure. The thesis that the intelligibles must be internal to the Intellect raises the question whether Plotinus had subjectivist or idealist leanings; Emilsson comes down on the side of idealism (174). The kind of thinking that goes on in Intellect is often distinguished from the kind of thinking that goes on in souls: the one is immediate, infallible, and non-discursive; the other divided, merely probable, and discursive. An old chestnut is the question whether Intellect’s non-discursive thinking is necessarily non-propositional. Emilsson sees no reason to think that Plotinus is particularly concerned with propositions, rather than linguistic expressions of...