Max Wade: My dissertation was on Plotinus’ ontology of artifacts, basically looking at Plotinus as a philosopher of technology. It was a fun project. It opens up a lot of interesting questions, and we’ll have a chance to talk about some of that, or just other things in general. Plotinus is my specialty. I’m primarily a historian of philosophy, though I’m also interested in contemporary metaphysics. So I think this will be a fun conversation. Thanks for having me on. It’s always a pleasure.
Jack Bagby: Yeah, I remember talking with you about statues at some point.
Max Wade: Yeah, that topic is important for Aristotle and many others.
Matt Segall: I’m especially curious about technology and Plotinus because I’ve been in the trenches lately with a bunch of computational functionalists who think machines are conscious, specifically large language models. I’d love it if Plotinus could help disabuse people of that delusion. But we don’t have to get into that; we can just talk about how glorious the One is.
Jack Bagby: I think Plotinus would want to be in those fights. I think he would be doing that.
Matt Segall: Yeah. Because I wonder about the possibility of a kind of theurgy downstream from Plotinus’ thought, in Iamblichus or somewhere else, where one might relate to LLMs as one would to statues or symbols: maybe as divination engines of some kind that can do some god-work, if we tune them right.
Max Wade: It’s funny you mention this, because Kevin Corrigan, who was on my dissertation committee, asked me something similar during my defense. I was questioned about what Plotinus’ take on LLMs would be. I’m not sure I have an immediate answer, because it’s complicated.
On the one hand, we can definitely say that LLMs are clearly doing something. They may not be conscious the way we are. They do not have the kind of human embodiment that structures our consciousness. But the fact that they are able to generate things that we find coherent means that Plotinus would probably have to say that, in some mediated or indirect way, they get access to intelligible principles. Otherwise, what they produce would be pure nonsense.
And on the point about statues, that is close to what Plotinus says in one place. He says that statues of gods have the power to bring the gods down, almost like a radio. You tune it to the right frequency and you get the god-frequency. The gods are not literally descending, but you are making a body suitable for this divine energy to be present. Maybe there is something like that we can say about LLMs. There is some structural aspect of the machine that creates the conditions for intelligibility to come through. But it is definitely not intelligent the way we are. It is not itself doing any kind of thinking.
Jack Bagby: This is almost exactly the point Bergson pulls from Plotinus: if we want to remember things, even outside Bergson’s explicit reading of Plotinus, we have to take the posture of that memory, and then it can come to us. The sculpture has the posture of the god, and so the god is drawn toward it. You say “not literally,” but I would think that in some sense it would have to be a little bit literal. Maybe there is something specific in Plotinus where the god does not actually come down, but some lower part of the god does, or the daemonic part of it, or something. I don’t know if you’re making a distinction there.
Max Wade: Yeah, we could say something like this: the god is literally in the statue, but not in the sense that it descends from the heavens. Its power is literally in the statue.
Plotinus makes an analogy that may be useful here. Our souls, being incorporeal and immortal, will always have the power of sight. The soul is always able to see, or to have a kind of visual power. But our bodies may not always be able to actualize that power. Not because our bodies make the soul see, but because the body may lack the proper organ. We may get cataracts, for example. The body is no longer able to provide a means of experiencing that power in the world.
So that is why I like the radio analogy. The radio waves are not being affected. The radio waves are just out there. The question is whether the body is suitable for a given frequency. That is how I would describe it.
Pedro Brea: That helps me understand how Bergson may have been influenced to say that the body is an instrument of discernment. It receives the whole, but discerns only what the body has the capacity to see.
Max Wade: Yeah, very Plotinian.
Jack Bagby: So would an LLM be a prosthetic for the human being, allowing us to access intelligibles, but only because we use it as an instrument of perception?
Matt Segall: I was thinking that English or Greek, or any particular language, is already a copy of a higher Logos. An LLM is a copy of that copy. So it is more like a diminished Logos.
Jack Bagby: Language, yeah. That’s interesting.
Max Wade: Normally Plotinus focuses on technical objects as products of a craft: shipbuilding makes ships, architecture makes houses, and so on. He treats the physical thing as an end product. That is his default mode.
But in a really interesting passage, he talks about a ruler, the kind used to measure length. He describes it as a messenger, an angelos—the word from which we get “angel.” It communicates the straightness in the soul to make sure that the straightness in the soul matches the straightness of the object being measured. So there is a way in which these truth-communicating or reality-checking tools bring the soul and the body into alignment.
LLMs may not be very good at that because they hallucinate; they can fall out of alignment. But when they do line up, they are still in some way doing something similar. They are communicating between two different things. They are a messenger in some way. That connects with what you were saying about the divinatory machine. There is an aspect where you can point to Plotinus there.
Pedro Brea: I’m curious about the passage where he says that everything is contemplation. Bridging this with Whiteheadian process philosophy or metaphysics, how would that help us conceive of LLMs from a panexperientialist perspective? Maybe it is copying the Logos in some sense, but it is not itself receiving it. Maybe the parts are assembled such that it can transmit it, while the parts themselves have just the kind of experience you would expect a hunk of metal to have.
Matt Segall: It’s like humans are taking the mineral, the most removed level of nature from life—it’s not even alive, it’s just silicon—and we are etching patterns into that. Then we are running electrons through it.
From a Whiteheadian or process panexperientialist point of view, those electrons have simple feelings, physical feelings in Whitehead’s sense. The electrons are contemplating themselves as electrons. But is any higher contemplation arising in the silicon chip itself, which has been shaped by an external designer? I don’t know. I don’t think it is the right kind of integration.
Jack Bagby: With the various processes of the circuit board, is there any integration? I don’t know enough about computers, but I don’t think you would say there is a consciousness of the integration of the system.
Matt Segall: Right. Plotinus has this great phrase in the Third Ennead, Eighth Tractate: “This indwelling efficacy of Nature makes without hands.” LLMs are made by hand, more or less. They are shaped from the outside. Whereas when he talks about nature—physis, I think—that makes itself. Maybe computers will get there one day, but the architecture we have now is not that.
Jack Bagby: That is the magic again. Max, you can tell me if I’m wrong, but this is at least Bergson’s reading: the body dances because of this magic, almost as if in a trance. Partially this is because of the soul, but the body also spontaneously, through its own power, does half the work, and then the soul does the other half. Bergson even says that the body does the synthetic side, while the soul does the analytic side. The soul begins in the intelligibles, has all knowledge, and then cuts itself down, focuses, analyzes. The body, on the other hand, synthesizes multiplicity toward a unity, but does not fully get there. They meet halfway and complete what the other cannot do.
Max Wade: Plotinus is going to be a little reluctant about the notion that the body can do something that the soul cannot, because then it seems like matter is contributing something positive. Matter would be giving the body powers that were not there before, and Plotinus would be reluctant to affirm that.
But your point about synthesis is pretty spot on. Only in the physical world—or, in more Plotinian language, the sensible world—are things polarized into opposites: hot and cold, light and dark. The only place where light and dark exist as separate is the physical world. So that is the only place where you need to bring them together and reconcile them. Plotinus thinks about bodily health as creating a harmonious unity between different bodily parts.
In that sense, the soul’s unity does not need to do that. That is why, as you were saying, the soul is the analytic aspect. But if we think about the person as something that inevitably has a body—and for Plotinus, even the gods have bodies—then there has to be some way in which the state of the body, the activity of the body, and what the body does reflect the soul, precisely because the body is not getting anything else from matter. If matter added something else, then the body might diverge from the soul. But if the body is an image of the soul projected into the world, then if it is able to synthesize things in the world, that means the soul has a certain degree of unity and a proper analytic side as well.
Pedro Brea: I’ve thought before about the possibility of a panexperientialist philosophy of technology, and looking at someone like Plotinus seems very interesting for that. In your work, did you consider what it says about us metaphysically to have a culture with a technological obsession? What does that say about the soul?
Max Wade: Yeah. One of my favorite lines—and I’m pretty sure this is in III.8, which we just mentioned—is where Plotinus talks about certain people whose contemplation results in the generation of these little worthless playthings, meaning artifacts.
Pedro Brea: The intelligent children and the less intelligent children, and what they do.
Max Wade: Exactly. I think Plotinus would say that the more you take these technical objects to be the conditions of thinking, or the things that do your thinking for you, the more you are acting like a child. You are contenting yourself with little toys.
It is funny that one of the first things people do with LLMs is make memes and strange psychedelic images. They play with it as a toy. I was talking with my mother about this the other day, and she said she liked how whimsical it could be. There is an element of play here. The people building these systems are saying, “This is going to change everything.” But when you give it to most people, they ask, “How can I make brain rot? How can I make memes?”
Jack Bagby: Historically, the Greek mechanists, the people who made machines, were often making gag things. Like Theo Jansen, the Dutch sculptor who makes those things that walk on the beach with all the moving parts and use the wind. The Greeks would make things like statues that breathed smoke, or self-moving automata, or gag birds that walked across the ground.
Max Wade: Yeah. The main word used for these is thaumata: wonders, but also theater tools. There is a great passage mentioned by Michael of Ephesus where he says that most people find these things scary or gross or uncanny because they are artificial but move on their own, and you cannot see the cause of their motion. That feeling goes away when you open them up and see the gears and pulleys. But people find them scary because it is like a corpse shambling around on its own. You think: why is it doing that? It is not supposed to be doing that.
So, from a Greek perspective, these things were not always seen as technological progress. They were made to perplex and entertain. That is baked into it.
Matt Segall: He could not have foreseen that these trinkets and gadgets would end up reshaping the whole human sensorium. I do not want to be too histrionic about it, but the cultural effects of the alphabet pale in comparison to the effects of screens, especially in making you think you have wisdom and knowledge that you do not actually have.
But I did wince a little at the comment Pedro mentioned about how the duller children work with their hands on the sensory world. Maybe I am just too much of a pragmatist philosophically to accept that. But Plotinus does talk about play earlier in a way I found interesting. At the beginning of III.8 he says something like, “I and all that enter this play are in contemplation, and our play aims at vision,” and there is reason to believe that the child or the man, whether in sport or earnest, is playing or working only toward vision. So at the end of the day, even trinket-makers and machinists are contemplating, right? But it is a lower or diminished form of contemplation.
Computation feels like it pulls us closer to matter in our thinking, when Plotinus would want us to look to the stars, or to the soul, or to Intellect.
Jack Bagby: I would imagine play is a bit better than labor, because in play you are closer to contemplation. In labor, you just have a task you have to complete.
Matt Segall: Because it is an end in itself.
Max Wade: When we take Plotinus’ statements about technology in isolation, he can seem one-sided. Some passages give a negative appraisal of craft activity, as if stupid children do this and it is not worth your time. But elsewhere he praises great sculptors. In the treatise on intelligible beauty, he says that Phidias’ sculpture of Zeus is beautiful precisely because it is not merely based on a real person.
So the context matters. Why is he negative in III.8? Because contemplation is directed at a higher principle, preferably an intelligible principle. The quality or elevation of that contemplation manifests in what is produced. For Plotinus, contemplation is always generative. It always produces something. In III.8, nature generates through contemplation. Everything contemplates. Contemplation is the engine of why things happen and why things are generated.
So if one’s contemplation results in a diminished image, that is lower than contemplation resulting in something more self-contained and unified. But in other contexts, he is asking how artifacts can give us access to intelligible principles or contribute to religious practice. The gods descending into statues is one example. These different contexts help explain why he is negative in some passages and positive in others.
If you are doing craft activity, it requires knowledge of principles. You cannot make a boat without understanding hydrology, winds, materials, and so on. It requires knowledge of the world. But it is degraded compared to purely scientific or philosophical contemplation, where you are looking at the principles themselves rather than tying them to a particular material thing.
Matt Segall: I’m curious if we could make a historical distinction here. I hear the computational functionalist in my head saying, “So you don’t think consciousness or mind is just a functional stream of digits running on a computer? You think it’s magic?” And Jack, you were saying, “Yes, it’s magic.”
Can we explain the historical shift where, in Plotinus’ time and probably until the early modern period, the default assumption was that human souls descend from something even more intelligible and more alive, whereas in the last few hundred years common sense shifted to: mind somehow emerges out of matter, and how could you doubt that? What happened?
Max Wade: I have a quick answer. Early modern scientists realized that energy is conserved in physical interactions. In collisions, no energy is created or destroyed. In the old Aristotelian cosmos, bodies run out of energy without some kind of input. So you need some incorporeal thing to keep pumping energy into the system, otherwise it will run out. Many medieval arguments for the eternity of the world are basically saying that there is a finite amount of energy and thus something must be inputting more.
But once we realize that body-body interaction does not result in the diminution of energy, that energy stays the same, then you start to get people like Descartes. Now there is a question of how mind and matter interact. Is there even the possibility of mind adding anything when matter bounces off matter? If energy is conserved, mind is clearly not adding energy to the system. It must be doing something else. I think that is where the shift happens.
Matt Segall: Matter becomes self-sustaining in a way. You do not need a first mover anymore. And yet, after a few hundred years, you get quantum physics. Instead of needing a first mover, the problem becomes: how do you get from potentiality to something actual and determinate? There is the measurement problem. There may be an analogous issue in contemporary post-classical physics to what led the ancients to reach for something higher rather than thinking matter is self-sufficient.
Pedro Brea: There is also the issue of entropy. If you combine the conservation of energy with entropy moving toward thermodynamic equilibrium, the logical conclusion is heat death. I wrote about this in a chapter of my dissertation.
In the last chapter, I wrote about Deleuze, who criticizes the idea that energy cannot be exhausted and must lead to heat death. This is partly a response to developments in modern science and quantum physics. That is where the argument about intensity and the intensive comes in. Entropy is not simply destructive of form, leading only to greater disorder. Under certain conditions, such as open systems with constant energy input far from equilibrium, entropy can be generative of order. We see that in Ilya Prigogine’s work. Descartes was not aware of that.
I like your answer a lot. I am biased because I wrote my dissertation on the history of the concept of energy.
Jack Bagby: Bergson speaks directly to this. He says the idea that the soul, or a moral force, goes opposite to entropy does not arise until Descartes and after. Not that it is in Descartes exactly, but that is where it starts. Bergson says this is not in the ancients, and we do not find it in Plotinus.
For Plotinus, matter is something completely different. Consciousness is not a good thing in the way we think it is. Matter is pure negativity. It is a minus or subtraction, as we talked about in earlier conversations.
Bergson says Plotinus is the first philosopher to present a theory of consciousness. He says there are three types of consciousness, each linked to a different word used by Plotinus.
The first is parakolouthesis, from akolouthein, to follow. Para means alongside. This is consciousness as accompaniment to the interior state or idea, or consciousness as epiphenomenon. Today, mechanists think of consciousness as a kind of phosphorescent gas coming off the brain. It does nothing; it is just a fluke. It is terrible that we have to experience pain, but that is how it is. Consciousness is an epiphenomenon. Bergson says this idea comes from Plotinus, but inverted. In Plotinus, consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the eidetic or non-material world.
The second kind of consciousness is sympathetic resonance among a multiplicity of parts. It is consensus, agreement, the body being communicative with itself, or the cosmos interconnected with itself in the World Soul. Bergson says we should call this pre-established harmony; here he is plugging Leibniz.
The third form is antilepsis. Consciousness is a fullness that diminishes itself. It dissociates or cuts itself. Bergson uses the psychological term “splitting,” as in split personalities. Consciousness is multiple personality disorder of the One. He connects this with Pierre Janet and early psychoanalytic theories.
So for Plotinus, consciousness is a bad thing in the sense that the virtuous person, when courageous, does not know that he is courageous while doing it. He just does the right thing at the right time in the right way, without reflective self-consciousness.
We think consciousness is great because we see it as a negentropic bringing of goodness into the world. For Plotinus, consciousness is close to matter. Consciousness and matter are both negative, both a minus or subtraction. Bergson says consciousness is a subtraction added to reality. They are both shadows of things.
Matt Segall: So Nous is not conscious?
Jack Bagby: Bergson says, at one point, superconscious or hyperconscious.
Matt Segall: Hyperconscious. Which Greek term is that?
Jack Bagby: I think that is Bergson’s own term. I don’t think he has a Greek term for it. He is saying that what we would call hyperconsciousness is the noetic grasp.
Matt, we talked about this last summer at the biophilosophy conference. Bergson analyzes chess players and says they do not necessarily have an image of the board. They have the dynamic unfolding of the entire game in a series of dynamic interactions. A rook goes forward and sideways, a bishop goes diagonally, and so on. You have the possibilities and their actualization in your mind, but not as a picture of the board. So you can play many games because you are not holding many images. You have the durational unfolding of the game.
There is also the example of forgetting a word. I cannot remember the word I am trying to think of, but when you list off words I say, “No, it’s not that.” So I know the word, but I have no image of it. I am only satisfied once the image comes to me. I know the thing in a way outside awareness, outside images. You might call that hyperconsciousness.
Pedro Brea: So what does hyperconsciousness mean in this context? My understanding is that first there is the procession of Nous from the One, then Nous turns back, and that is where the multiplicity of forms comes from. But is that self-consciousness?
Jack Bagby: Maybe it is connected to the mirror image: matter is a mirror to the intelligibles. It is conscious of the image in the mirror, which is both itself and not itself.
Max Wade: Nous is not looking at matter.
Jack Bagby: Right. It is the soul that looks at the mirror.
Max Wade: Or the soul generates the mirror. We should think of Aristotle’s unmoved mover: thought thinking itself. That is the kind of engine Nous is, which then generates the forms. Insofar as Intellect still has a distinction between thinker and object of thought, it still has duality and plurality. That is why you get a multiplicity of forms.
Further down, soul is also what Plotinus calls intelligible matter. It is the matter of the intelligible world. If we are thinking about the hypostases, soul is like bathos, depth. It is a descent into dark depths. But if you are looking up from the sensible world, soul is the light of everything. These are relative aspects.
Why is there intelligible matter? In some sense, where are the forms going to go? Thought thinking itself is an activity. It is like light coming from the sun. If it is not illuminating anything, it is not visible. When it hits the moon, then something appears. Matter is the mirror in the sense that it is the surface where these different forms can appear. But the mirror itself does not change when hot becomes cold or wet becomes dry. It is the condition that allows the play of Intellect to unfold and realize itself.
Jack Bagby: We read some Raymond Ruyer in a previous meeting, and he uses Plotinus a little bit. He describes essences as going through a one-way mirror. From the perspective of matter, it can see through the transparent side of the mirror up to the essences, but the essences are just mirroring themselves back to themselves. I find that striking, and it feels very Plotinian, even though Plotinus obviously does not talk about a one-way mirror.
Max Wade: It captures the asymmetry. From the perspective of the intelligibles, they are concerned with the intelligibles. They are not focused on matter. They are not looking down toward matter. But matter can look up, or rather bodily things can look up. Matter, to the extent that it looks up, remains matter. It does not change as it is transformed. It is just potentiality.
Pedro Brea: In the process of hypostasis, or the emanative process, Nous proceeds from the One, then turns back toward it, and that contemplation also produces Soul. But where does matter come from? What generates matter?
Max Wade: This is a hotly debated question, both in scholarship and among later Neoplatonists, who disagree with Plotinus on this. For Proclus, the generative activity of the highest principle telescopes all the way down to the lowest. The Henads, or whatever we want to call them in Proclus, make matter. There is a simultaneous movement up and down.
For Plotinus, it is more unidirectional. At least on what I think is the most plausible reading, Soul creates sensible matter, the matter of the physical world. It creates it as a kind of image of itself. Soul is intelligible matter, so it makes its own matter for itself. Then everything else is populated from that.
So it does seem that matter is ultimately the product of Soul. Nous gives things form; it is formal cause. Soul gives things material cause. Gary Gurtler often emphasizes this: when Plotinus talks about matter, he wants matter to just be matter. It has to be the thing that underlies things. It cannot be the efficient cause, formal cause, or final cause. Matter underlies. It allows for a particular form or activity to take place.
Matter can also be a relative term. Copper is the matter of a statue, but it is qualified matter. If we are talking about its shininess or malleability, those are formal qualities.
Pedro Brea: Going back to the philosophy of technology, it is interesting to think about LLMs and AI as part of this process where matter now wants to mirror itself. It seems like philosophic life tries to ascend back up the hypostatic ladder, whereas AI could be matter continuing the process of mirroring itself. Maybe that is reading too much into it.
Max Wade: Plotinus has a line where he talks about bodies coming together on their own and says that this only produces things like puddles of mud. You need some kind of principle to generate something new. Fire can make other fires, but it cannot make a pot of soup without you adding other ingredients.
Jack Bagby: That links to spontaneous generation in Aristotle and in Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan, where the blood is perfectly right on a certain day, the sun hits it in the right way, and a human being is generated.
Max Wade: I taught that last semester.
Jack Bagby: This connects directly with the Bergson questions. There is an embryology of the universe, where the body, with its forces, spontaneously moves toward life and forms living things. Where do you think Plotinus falls on that? Ruyer and Bergson, and later thinkers twisting Plotinus, want to say that body, if not matter, can ingress forms.
Matt Segall: It makes me think about the difference between evolution as historical accumulation of form and emanation as the descent of form from an intelligible realm into matter. Ontogeny or embryogenesis is much more suggestive of that vertical descent than evolution is, at least if we mean speciation through natural selection. But they interface with each other.
I have been talking to biologists these last few days, Michael Levin and Rupert Sheldrake. They both have different versions of this. Sheldrake is more controversial; Levin is a developmental biologist at Tufts doing his work. But both point to some source of form that is not just historically accumulated, something coming from a vertical dimension.
It seems to me that what Plotinus meant by emanation into matter and bodies comes into what appears to us as a sensory world extended back in time through embryogenesis. Each life is born out of nothing, seemingly. It is not preformation; we know embryogenesis is made there and then by something that is not just a genetic trace or a tiny preformed organism.
From Plotinus’ point of view, similar to Hegel, who also dismissed historical evolution, he might say: look at embryogenesis and you can understand how the forms of organisms are not merely historical accumulations from a physical process but emanations from a transcendent process.
Plotinus and Aristotle do not have the phylogenetic part of this, the historical part. We have to find a place for that somewhere. Or maybe Plotinus would say, “No, that is a sensory illusion; turn the soul’s attention to higher things and do not get distracted by efficient causes.”
Jack Bagby: Ruyer tries to do both. In response to the question of whether the evolutionary process infects the realm of forms and changes it, he says there is a lower level. You have the pure essences, then composite essences, which are not atomized in the original essences but come about through consciousness. Then you have the level of mnemic themes, which you could think of as the infecting of essences. They are metaphysically high enough to be trans-spatial and transtemporal, but they are not already there eternally. Once they come about, they will eternally be there. That is the Bergsonian memory side.
Max Wade: There is a great book on Neoplatonic embryology by James Wilberding called Forms, Souls, and Embryos: Neoplatonists on Human Reproduction. It came out in 2016. It is based partly on his research showing that a treatise on embryology traditionally attributed to Galen was probably written by Porphyry. There are also interesting embryological comments in Plotinus.
Jack Bagby: Is there a lot of pneuma in that account?
Max Wade: Plotinus does not really make pneuma part of the account, partly because it is very Stoic and he wants to move away from that. He also does not believe in a fifth element.
But Plotinus does have a notion of seminal principles, logoi spermatikoi. These are immanent formative principles operating within the embryo, so the developmental process does not have to rely on a transcendent cause at every moment. The formative principles necessary for the body to constitute itself are given to it by Nature.
There are also proto-forms of thinking about environmental influence on development. Plotinus thinks astrology can give you insight into how your body will develop. Neoplatonic theories of reproduction are interesting because they think the mother is also a formally contributing cause. In Aristotelian biology, the mother is largely matter; semen provides the formative principles and is self-moving. The Neoplatonists say no, semen is not itself alive. It needs activation by the mother to make the embryo into a living thing.
So the account is not feminist in a modern sense, but it does understand that many factors contribute to embryogenesis: cosmic contributions, Nature giving seminal principles, and both parents actively forming a new bit of life.
A funny side point: later Neoplatonists sometimes explain birth defects or oddities in terms of things happening during the act of copulation. There is a story about a child born exceptionally pale to olive-skinned parents, and one Neoplatonist says this happened because the mother was looking at a pale statue during intercourse. That image imprinted on the embryo.
Jack Bagby: So now we would have to say they were looking at an LLM during intercourse.
Matt Segall: I thought you were going to say she must have been into asphyxiation.
Max Wade: Bottomless.
Matt Segall: To be clear, this vertical direction of formation in embryogenesis does not mean form is being pressed onto the organism from outside, as if the organism were just matter. Plotinus distinguishes matter as the only thing that can be moved, whereas physis is the unmoved principle operating in the cosmos. The vertical is just a signal that form is not coming from the past as an efficient cause. It is coming formatively from eternity. It is always already there.
Max Wade: Yes. There is an interesting thing here with teratology, the science of birth defects. Why are some people born with a sixth finger? Maybe the formative principle was overzealous. There is a proper balance. Too many claws, too much hair, too many teeth: this might mean a formative principle over-reproduced. But if someone is born without an arm or with a very small arm, the formative principle was insufficient. It was unable to fully project itself into the sensible world.
Jack Bagby: Through the myth of Er and related ideas, does Plotinus think your previous life can influence birth defects?
Max Wade: Birth defects, probably not. But Plotinus does think your past life can change your body. He says that if you are an astrologer too focused on the stars, you will become a bird, because you are always looking upward. If you are a politician concerned only with politics, you will become an ant or a bee because you want to live in a political community. If you are a couch potato, you might become a mollusk or something sluggish. That is a Timaeus reference.
Plotinus thinks this is possible because you and your soul contain the principles of these other forms. You have the form of the ox within you when you become the ox. He even uses this to explain spontaneous generation. There were culturally accepted ideas that dead cows or dead horses spontaneously generate snakes. Wilberding has articles on Neoplatonic accounts of spontaneous generation. The idea is that there are immanent principles within the body of the cow, and when the conditions are right, they generate something new. The snake principle is within the cow.
Jack Bagby: People say ancient people were not smart enough to see that flies lay eggs in carcasses, and that is why larvae appear. But what about the snakes? Explain that.
Max Wade: It’s weirder. The World Soul was a scientific explanation for these things until the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Only when people made vacuum-sealed containers with dead things did they realize there had to be some kind of environmental exchange. Before that, you had a World Soul: something that can generate life out of non-life, otherwise you would be violating basic principles of causality.
Jack Bagby: I want to talk more about the World Soul and how it differs from the élan vital, because Bergson may be transforming the notion of the World Soul into the élan vital. But before that I want to ask about matter.
Matt brought up before that matter seems similar to emptiness in Buddhism. In Buddhism, there is a mystical vision of emptiness, and later in Nishida Kitaro and others, place, matter, and emptiness can hold the potential for mystical experience. Is there anything like that in Plotinus, or would he run in the opposite direction and say that matter is the last thing you should look at if you want a mystical experience?
Max Wade: If we compare Plotinus to Eastern traditions, he is more at home with Hindu philosophy in this regard. For him, emptiness is fullness. It is not realizing that you are nothing; it is realizing that you contain the entire universe within you. You are nothing in a sense, but the movement is toward fullness. When he talks about the flight of the alone to the Alone, you are leaving the world outside you to be alone, but that Alone is everything. The principle of everything is within you.
Jack Bagby: Nishida might say something similar: emptiness is the virtuality or fullness beyond thinghood, so full that it is empty.
Max Wade: There is some communication there. But Plotinus’ notion of soul is that it endures beyond anything that happens to the body. In the Treatise on Providence, he says that moving through cycles of reincarnation is like an actor changing costumes. The actor is fine.
In that sense, Plotinus is closer to some Eastern traditions where the soul is a substantive thing that generates the mind, while the body accumulates accretions. With Buddhist notions of anatman, Plotinus would be hard to reconcile, because for him there is a substantive soul. But we can make parallels with the soul as intelligible matter: it does not have positive formal determination in itself, but gets determination from noetic activity. Still, soul is a substance for Plotinus, and it is not for most schools of Buddhism.
Jack Bagby: Maybe the polished mirror analogy is a bridge point. In Zen, we are a fuzzy mirror, and when we clean the mirror and make it empty, we can fully reflect reality.
Matt Segall: I’ve had the thought that matter, to the extent that it is indefiniteness and cannot be intellectually grasped, is similar to the One, which also cannot be intellectually grasped. Matter is indefinite because it is too poor to possess form, and the One is indefinite because it is too rich for form. You end up with a hierarchy.
But if the One is the root of everything contemplating itself, then matter is either nothing, or it is still that.
Max Wade: That is exactly right. Matter is indefinite, undefined. The One is infinite, in the sense that there is no form, because form is an external imposition. It imposes a boundary or limit. For Plotinus, limits are good. Limits are what make something be anything at all.
But it is important to flag that the One is not thinking itself. Plotinus is very clear that the first principle cannot be a self-reflexive thinking activity. He says this is where Aristotle gets it wrong. If the first cause thinks itself, there is still a distinction between thinker and object of thought, so there is still two. The One just ones. It does its own thing. That is its first activity and its sole activity. It is so simple that it does not even have a noetic aspect. That is what comes out of it. Nous is the purest form of dual activity, but the One does not think. There is no noetic content in the One.
Matt Segall: The One is prior to distinction. It is empty of distinction. Matter is also empty of distinction. There is a list of qualities or properties—though not properties of the One, exactly, since calling it “one” is already misleading because it makes you think it is one among several.
I’m trying to turn the hierarchy of emanation into more of a lemniscate, so that when you reach matter as the limit of the overflow, you realize that you are back where you started. A transition happens in indefiniteness. That is more of a Whiteheadian reading, trying to bring in the way matter is creativity for Whitehead: the principle of unrest that prevents the One from ever remaining passive, or prevents it from merely abiding. Why overflow? Because there is a relationship here where matter is creativity. That is probably a bastardization of Plotinus.
Jack Bagby: Do you agree with that, Max? Is it a bastardization?
Max Wade: For Plotinus, matter in a purely unqualified sense is like a limit. The One is infinite not only in the sense of not having form, but also in the sense that it will never run out. You are never not going to have a universe. You are never not going to have its generative activity.
But if the process of emanation went on forever without a stopping point, there would be no boundary. There is a limit to vertical causality, though not a limit to time or activity. Matter is the stopping point. When you get down to matter, there is a rebounding upward toward the One in the sense that matter becomes the condition for the entire universe: stars, Earth, all kinds of life.
But sensible things are hylomorphic, mixtures of form and matter. We do not really go down into matter. The way we go up is by looking at the fullness of things: how parts interrelate and interact. Pure matter is uninteresting. Bodies are more interesting. They have dynamic changing principles. If we want to talk about more Whiteheadian aspects, we should talk about sensible things and bodily things doing interesting things. Pure matter is just a limit point, the boundary that stops the infinite chain of procession, so that you can actually get somewhere.
It is like the sun radiating light and energy. If there are no planets, you do not get life. You need a condition that allows the plenitude to appear. Without that, there is just light emanating. It does not affect the sun. The sun does not care.
Jack Bagby: It feels like Plotinus just posits matter. We have the One, then all of a sudden matter, and then everything we see that seems to have matter is really a body. Matter is trailing off. If we are already talking about something, it is intelligible and determinate. The matter of a statue is relative matter, but not real matter. Real matter is this hypothetical thing we need at the limit.
Max Wade: In Ennead II.4, Plotinus says that matter is a kind of substance. Matter and form are both substances. What makes them substances is that they do not change. Form does not change; matter does not change. But together they create the possibility for change. They create the condition for dynamic activity to happen in time. Without both substances coming together, you do not have anything.
Jack Bagby: What about means and ends? We often mix matter with the idea of a means-ends relationship, as if the means are the matter of the ends. Would Plotinus reject that, because the means would have to have form and so would be bodies rather than matter?
Max Wade: That is a great question because it connects to Plotinus’ weird teleology. Do you remember what Aristotle says is the reason we have eyebrows and eyelids?
Jack Bagby: To catch dust or protect the eyes?
Max Wade: Yes. Plotinus explicitly references this in Ennead VI.7 and says that is not true. We do not have eyebrows and eyelids for that reason. We have them so that the One can be there.
In Aristotelian teleology, the parts make the whole possible through their various functions. But Plotinus says no: the whole is prior to the parts. We have all these parts because a unified principle needs to express itself in all its fullness. For the form of the human being to fully express itself, it needs eyebrows, eyelids, eyes, teeth, and so on. So we are not explaining teleology in terms of something external. We are not saying we have eyes in order to see something else, or hands in order to grab food.
Jack Bagby: That is anti-teleological in a way similar to Bergson in Creative Evolution.
Max Wade: Yes. It is opposed to the picture where we have legs and eyes so that we can walk around and get food. Plotinus says no. We have these things so that we can be a fully constituted organic whole.
Matt Segall: I was going to ask earlier whether there is any place for freedom in Plotinus, especially freedom as a moral good. Or is the idea simply that there is nothing to do other than contemplate the One, so what do you need freedom for?
This came to mind earlier when we asked why there is matter. There is no fall in Plotinus in the Gnostic sense, obviously; he argues with the Gnostics. But he does describe the soul sinking into sensory concerns. To that extent, one might say that the soul loses its freedom and becomes more material. Does he talk about freedom?
Max Wade: I have actually been working on his treatise on fate, where Plotinus argues primarily against the Stoics and astrologers, who say there is a single cause of everything: the universe. Plotinus says no, each individual soul has its own role in the causal chain. There are many different causes accounting for things.
What is the freest thing in Plotinus’ universe? It has to be the One, because nothing else makes it do what it does. There is no higher principle conditioning it. Nothing makes it do anything other than its own activity. So freedom consists in self-actualized activity.
In the Treatise on Fate, Plotinus also discusses the Epicureans and says that the swerve is not a basis for freedom. Freedom is not counter-causal. It is not the ability to do something without any cause. The highest kind of freedom is acting in accord with the One, because the One is the freest thing. You should become most one.
The more dependent you are on other things, the more tied up in external causes, the less free you are. But this can have unexpected implications. Certain things can affect your body no matter how one you are. You could be Plotinus himself and have a boulder fall on you. Your freedom does not factor into that; it is just what happens when boulders fall on people. But Plotinus would say: I am unaffected because the real “me” is the soul. So I put on a new pair of clothes and play my next role.
In some sense, freedom is indifference to or acceptance of horrible things happening to your body. It is acceptance of causal things outside your control. So freedom and necessity are not opposed. Freedom is not the ability to deviate from the world. It is the ability to play your role well. Like an actor: your freedom consists in how you bring the character to life. You do not pick your role, but you make something of the role you are given.
If the World Soul is the director, you are an actor. Do not think you control the universe. Your freedom consists in how well you realize the character you have been chosen to play. The World Soul is a good director, choosing the right people for the right roles. Some people may make very good villains. You are trying to tell a good story, to weave together a good narrative. So play your role in the best way possible.
Jack Bagby: Bergson talks about this in the Freedom Lectures. He says Plotinus is the first philosopher of freedom. There is something vague in Socrates, but Plotinus really raises the problem.
Bergson says there is a Logos account, or rational account, and then a mythical account. In the mythical account, there is the feeling of freedom, the expressive act of playing a part, the language of magic and actors, the fall of the soul, the love of the Good, and the journey back up. But on the rational side, there is a monad or intelligible form that already contains everything and simply unrolls its program.
From one perspective we have necessity, everything pre-programmed and pre-established. From the other side, there is play, uncertainty, contingency. Bergson says Plotinus never quite tries to reconcile these. He holds a kind of cross-eyed compatibilism, where the views are not really compatible. It is not a real solution to freedom, but it raises the problem.
Bergson also says the Epicurean swerve is not actually thinking freedom. It does not raise the problem properly. Plotinus raises it but cannot deal with it. Leibniz then overdetermines it in the direction of all predicates being contained in the individual concept: Caesar crosses the Rubicon, and that was true in advance.
We have talked about this: the idea of Pedro, the idea of Matt, the idea of Jack. How much can that change? How much is that singular formula immanent in our acts, and how much is already determined?
Matt Segall: I can relate to Plotinus on this. When I look back and wish I had done something differently, I am assuming I am free, and I have a hard time not assuming that. But when I think about where I was at the time, and what felt like a free decision, it often appears later as me being swayed by external forces.
Indeterminism is not freedom. Freedom is self-determination. Is it that only the One is free, and to the extent that we participate in the One, we get a taste of freedom? I think of Spinoza here: the intellectual love of God is where freedom is achieved. That does not sound so different from what Plotinus is doing, at least not on the mythic side.
Jack Bagby: In Spinoza, freedom is a kind of fantasy, but a fantasy that gets us somewhere. Geometry is also a fantasy for Spinoza, so fantasy is not bad. Politics is the realm of imagination. We cannot be free without pretending we are free. But that actually does something; it gives us causal efficacy and power.
Matt Segall: Are we only free when we play? We cannot be free if we are trying to achieve something through external means, because then the end is outside ourselves.
Pedro Brea: Iris Murdoch is helpful here. She saw herself as interpreting Plato, as did Plotinus. In The Sovereignty of Good, she critiques the idea that freedom is freedom of the will, and that the will is the heart of morality, and that morality is reducible to publicly observable actions. She develops an account of freedom, drawing on the Symposium and the Republic, where properly human freedom is not freedom of the will but freedom from illusion.
Freedom from illusion comes through attention, or compassionate, loving attention to reality. This requires the diminution of ego, which she considers the enemy of the moral life. In shrinking the ego, we learn to see clearly. In learning to see other people clearly, love becomes a kind of objectivity in human relations, an epistemological attunement to reality. For Murdoch, that is properly human freedom. The asymptote of vision is the Good. The practical means of doing this is learning to see other people.
Jack Bagby: That sounds very Spinozist too.
Matt Segall: It implies that freedom is not merely an intellectual issue. Philosophers get hung up on the freedom-determinism debate and intellectualize it, but it is really a moral issue. It is about learning how to love the other person. That immediately takes you out of the fallen aspect of the soul attached to sensory things. To relate to another person is to relate to the One in them, and that helps you attune again to the One in yourself.
Jack Bagby: Max, do you have thoughts on love in Plotinus?
Max Wade: There is a recent book by Skye Cleary or Skye Bertozzi on Plotinus on love. I have been working my way through it because the Treatise on Love, Ennead III.5, is very challenging. I have never been able to make full sense of it.
Historically, it seems Plotinus probably never had children. Porphyry probably never had children. I think the same is true of Proclus. So there is a valorization of celibacy among Neoplatonists. They are also mostly vegetarians.
There is definitely a sense that the One and the other, through love, allows you to see the One in yourself. But when love becomes reproductive, that seems to introduce a problem. Oneness needs to make a two. Oneness needs to create something external to itself. So the ideal form of love is a love that does not generate new life. It is purely intellectual or reflective love. In the Treatise on Love, Plotinus seems to go to pains to justify the idea that the highest form of love is completely non-reproductive.
Matt Segall: So Plotinus was an antinatalist?
Max Wade: At least on an individual level. He does not think it is feasible for everyone, but the highest life to emulate is the life of the gods, and the gods do not have children. If you want to live like a god—
Jack Bagby: I don’t know what Zeus was doing all that time.
Max Wade: Plotinus does not read that literally. In the Timaeus, reproductive organs are described almost as alien parasites lodged within us. Pedro, it’s funny you mentioned Weil, because I was just reading her Divine Love and Creation for a reading group. Weil has an amazing but strange reading of the Timaeus image of human beings as upside-down plants. Plato says our roots stretch up to the heavens rather than down into the earth. Weil says this is a way for us to receive divine semen, which flows down our roots and stays in our heads. If we imitate the cosmos properly, we have a nice circular motion in our heads that keeps the semen in the thinking place. When that motion is disrupted, it flows down and becomes the corrupt desire to reproduce. She even says people’s glands differ depending on whether they have this circular motion or not.
So it is very corporeal and physical, but also very Platonic. It is as if reproductive desire is feeding a parasite. Again, it is antinatalist if you want to live like a god. If you want to live like a human being, have children. That is what human beings do. But if you want to be more than human, you have that potential.
Jack Bagby: Aristotle has this idea of light as spermatic, or something like that. Plants receive a kind of spermatic energy from the sun. Does that come into Plotinus?
Max Wade: For Plotinus, plant nutrition comes from the earth. Plants get their nutritive faculty and power of growth from the soul of the earth. It is unclear to what extent plants are autonomous organisms for Plotinus. Animals clearly are. Stones grow out of the earth. Plants occupy an awkward middle ground: they are alive, but their nutritive power is derivative of the earth itself. He says we can prove this because when we pull a plant out of the earth it stops growing, but if we pot it again, it can grow again.
He has to say this partly because for Plotinus light is incorporeal. You cannot nourish your body on light because light is not corporeal. Light is more of an epistemological entity. It gives access to forms.
Modern people often think touch is the most immediate perception. But for Plotinus, touch is more like the seven sages and the elephant: you fumble around, getting things part by part. This part is furry, this part is like a trunk, and so on. But turn on the light and suddenly you see what it is: an elephant. You see the whole form.
In the medieval era, taste becomes the most immediate sense because of a wordplay between sapere, to know, and sapere or sapor, to taste. The wise person is the one who has eaten knowledge. So for the Middle Ages, the highest knowing is ingestive. For Plotinus and the Neoplatonists, it is vision: immediate access to the whole form. For moderns, it is touch: holding something with the body. The medievals combine both: you take it into yourself and incorporate it into your substance.
Jack Bagby: You talked about this in the Hermetics video. We had also talked before about thoughts without images and how to get away from the obsession with vision. It seems to me that sound works just as well for what Plotinus is talking about. I hear a whole symphony, all the instruments at once. With touch, I have to move around an object and project the whole through imagination. With sound, maybe because of time, there is a fragmentation, but I still hear the whole.
Max Wade: For Plotinus, sound is lesser because it requires a medium. If you are underwater, you cannot hear as well. If you were encased in stone, you probably could not hear much. Sound requires reverberation through a medium.
Light is unique because it is only impeded by a medium. If the air were perfectly clear, you could in principle see infinitely far. Bodies get in the way. If something moves in front of me, I cannot see. For Plotinus, light also moves instantaneously. It gives instantaneous access to forms at a distance. That is why he uses light as an image for cognition in general. Just as vision gives instantaneous access to forms in an image-sense, mental life is a kind of seeing, a kind of aisthesis.
He says mental aisthesis makes all five bodily senses possible. Because we have the ability to mentally turn our attention toward forms in an immediate, unmediated, full sense, we can then have lower forms of sense perception through the body. When we think, it is all perception, but not perception in terms of images. Understanding anything is a kind of perception.
Jack Bagby: Bergson glossing Plotinus says: we can think without knowing we are thinking, and even when we think, strictly speaking, we do not know we are thinking; we do not perceive our thought.
Take the idea of a triangle. When we are thinking of a particular triangle, we are implicitly aware of the idea of triangle in that almost forgetful sense. Like when I cannot remember a word, I know it is not this word or that word. I have the idea there implicitly, and I am operating under the idea of triangle. Then I have images and demonstrations and differentiate it from lines or circles. But the whole time I have this deeper idea that I am never directly aware of.
Max Wade: A lot of this traces back to Aristotle on technical knowledge. If you are an amateur furniture maker trying to build a chair, you keep checking the IKEA manual. You are constantly being taken out of the activity to consult the principles that make the activity possible.
If you are a skilled carpenter, it is a flow state. You know what to do without rendering it propositionally. You intuitively know this piece needs to go here, this is out of alignment, and so on. You do not need to formalize it step by step. Think of a musician jamming. You are not saying, “Now I need to switch to this key.” That would take you out of the activity.
The more you are able to integrate the principles into the activity itself, the more unified it is, because you are not taken out of the activity by having to think propositionally or piecemeal.
Matt Segall: I need to grab a bite to eat soon, but I was thinking about the ancient-modern shift. Max, you brought up the conservation of energy. There is also the transformation in the understanding of light. With Newton, light becomes something material that can be measured as part of nature. For Plotinus and many ancients, light is more like the condition for the possibility of nature being visible or intelligible to us. It is incorporeal. That is a tremendous shift.
Goethe, who has his theory of color and his polemic with Newton, was reading a lot of Plotinus and gets this idea that there must be something sun-like about the eye for it to see. How we understand light matters. Is light the condition for the possibility of vision, not just sensory vision but intellectual vision? Or is it another part of nature that we can measure and manipulate?
Max Wade: One of the most interesting transitional figures is the medieval philosopher Robert Grosseteste. He has a treatise on light, De Luce. It is fascinating because it is both. He starts from Genesis: God said, “Let there be light.” Light is the first thing created. He says all matter consists first in the expansion of light into three dimensions. Light first creates three-dimensional space. As you go further down, light condenses and bundles up. Stones are densely compacted light.
So on the one hand, light is primarily incorporeal, the condition of possibility for the world. But the world is also made of light. By disassembling matter, we can experience it as light or understand it as the material of creation. Grosseteste is an interesting transitional figure moving us toward light as a physical thing while still rooted in the ancient understanding of illumination and radiation.
Jack Bagby: Bergson directly says that if Plotinus had known modern physics, he would have used light and the prism to understand the multiplicity of being. Bergson does this in Introduction to Metaphysics, and he gets it from Félix Ravaisson, who uses that image to discuss Plotinus. There is the light-cone: the One emanating rays of light into darkness, and the prism creates the whole spectrum of infinite differences.
Pedro Brea: Bringing back Simone Weil, this is why the concept of metaxu is helpful. There are ancient claims about light or eyebrows that seem outlandish now, but the idea of the intelligible is that there is an internal relationality, virtual or intensive, that still holds. Our observation of phenomena like light splitting through a prism can still be a metaxu that makes structures of the intelligible intelligible for us.
If we discover that light is also material, does that mean we throw everything away? No. We can preserve a lot of Plotinus’ insights without making claims that people today would call pseudo-scientific.
Matt Segall: That comment you shared about Simone Weil and the upside-down plant—the idea that we receive a golden shower from the celestial spheres and need to swirl it in our heads rather than letting it descend into the body—is phenomenologically resonant. I can feel that happening when I am trying to finish reading something and other urges come up. It is like: keep it spinning. Keep attention on the intelligible rather than the sensual.
Pedro Brea: Part of why I brought up metaxu is that I am trying to be charitable to Simone Weil. I really like her, and I know she is very intelligent. For me, what she says is a metaxu, a bridge to the divine or intelligible.
Jack Bagby: It would be fun to do another reading focused on metaxu in Plotinus, maybe in Plato, and then in various twentieth-century thinkers.
Matt Segall: Let’s invite William Desmond and see if he wants to join us.
Jack Bagby: Why not?
I also sent another quote about distraction. Matt, that is what you were describing. To act is to be distracted, and consciousness arises only when we forget the greater part of ourselves and fix our attention. So it all comes down to attention. In the sheet, I talk about a metaphysics of dissociation. For Plotinus, everything comes into being through dissociation from the One. That happens in the World Soul in one way, and in us in another.
Matt Segall: It does not seem that different from the Genesis account of the Tree of Knowledge: the fall as the emergence of consciousness. Consciousness gets in the way of the contemplative activity that wants to happen. You think you can act on your own.
I love Plotinus, but I feel the need to reconcile him with embodiment. Eros is a mediating, metaxic power that can raise the soul. But we do have bodies, we are organisms, and somebody has to have babies or there will be no more philosophers. There has to be something the Earth participates in creating.
Jack Bagby: And that is not going to go away. We are not eventually all going to end up in heaven with no Earth.
Max Wade: Plotinus explicitly rejects the Christian idea of a new heaven and new Earth.
Pedro Brea: Speaking of which, I recently learned that both Plotinus and Origen studied with Ammonius Saccas, which I find interesting because I am interested in the convergence of Neoplatonism and Christianity. It is fascinating to see the different conclusions Origen reaches from similar metaphysical bases.
Jack Bagby: The metaxu topic would fit perfectly with that if we want to do a meeting on it and bring in the Christian side.
Pedro Brea: One difference is that Plotinus says, if you want to live a higher life, do not have children because the gods do not have children. But in Christianity, that is different: God did have a child. That leads to a different interpretation of the value of having children. From a Christian Neoplatonic perspective, having children might actually be conducive to the higher life, especially if love is an epistemological attunement to the Good or the One.
Matt Segall: To be continued. There is lots more here. I like the metaxu idea for next time.
Jack Bagby: We’ll connect by email, Max, if you want to continue with this. If you can’t, no worries.
Max Wade: Cool. Awesome.
Pedro Brea: Thank you. It was a pleasure to meet you, Max.
Max Wade: Likewise. Great meeting all of you, and seeing you too. Thanks for having me on. It was a lot of fun. Obviously, I like reading and talking about Plotinus. If you write a dissertation on him, you kind of have to.
I think there is so much here that is really interesting and productive, especially the weirder parts. The pseudo-scientific parts get you thinking and give you a kind of humility. These were smart people saying weird things. Let’s have fun with that. Let’s enjoy the weirdness.
Jack Bagby: Down the line, we’ll do a weird Plotinus session and compile all the weirdest aspects. I really have to run.
Max Wade: Take care. Thanks again.
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