Scepticism and Ineffability in Plotinus DOMINIC J. OÕMEARA
ABSTRACT The rst part of this paper traces back to Plotinus a strategy applied by Augustine and Descartes whereby sceptical arguments are used to set aside sensualist forms of dogmatic philosophy, clearing the way for a dogmatism independent of senseperception which is Ôself-authenticatingÕ and thus immune to, and even proven by, sceptical doubt. It is argued that Plotinus already uses this strategy in the opening chapters of Enneads V 5 and V 3. The second part of the paper argues that PlotinusÕ account of how the ine able One is said (we do not actually say the One, but merely express our own a ections) is inspired by the structure of sceptic discourse (the sceptic does not say things as they are, but merely expresses personal a ections). Finally, similarities and di erences between sceptic discourse about things and Plotinian discourse about the ine able are explored.
In 1931, Emile Br hier pointed out, in the opening chapters of two Plotinian treatises (Enneads V 3 and V 5), the presence of sceptical arguments also to be found in Sextus Empiricus. 1 More recently, in 1987, Richard Wallis published an important article in which the relation between PlotinusÕ philosophy and scepticism was examined directly and in greater detail, and his work has been followed by a number of studies. 2 In the rst part of this paper I would like to make some general comments about the historical signi cance of PlotinusÕ use of sceptical arguments in Enneads V 3 and V 5. Then, in the second part of the paper, I would like to suggest that further traces of scepticism can be discovered in Plotinus, in places where we would hardly expect to nd them, in passages concerning the ine ability of the transcendent rst principle, the One. I Returning to the comparisons Br hier made between Sextus Empiricus and arguments to be found at the beginning of Plotinus V 3 and V 5, we might agree that Plotinus is aware to some extent of sceptical philosophy. But 1 E. Br hier, Plotin Enn ades V, Paris 1931, 37-8, 40, 83, 85. By Ôsceptical argumentsÕ in the following I mean arguments (of whatever origin) used in sceptic tactics applied against dogmatists. 2 R. Wallis, ÔScepticism and Neoplatonism,Õ Aufstieg und Niedergang der ršmischen Welt, Teil II, vol. 32.2, ed. W. Haase, Berlin 1987, 911-54; I. Crystal, ÔPlotinus
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we might also feel that this awareness is of fairly marginal signi cance and that in general a philosopher as dogmatic as Plotinus can hardly be said to take seriously the challenge to dogmatism represented by scepticism. Thus, if it is not quite the case that Plotinian dogmatism was ignorant of scepticism, it would seem nevertheless that it developed without taking any real account of sceptical attacks on the possibility of dogmatic philosophy. But is this correct? It may be helpful in this connection to recall very rapidly two later, notorious cases in which a dogmatic philosophy was constituted in the presence, and despite the presence, of sceptical arguments, the cases of Augustine and of Descartes. As regards Descartes, it can scarcely be claimed that he took little account of scepticism in establishing his chain of certitudes. On the contrary, this chain was constituted on the basis of a radical practice of sceptical critique which, driven far enough, Descartes believed, would ground the cogito. Here, we might say, scepticism actually provides the foundation of Cartesian dogmatism. It has often been pointed out that Descartes owes much in this context to Augustine, 3 and, in going back to Augustine, we nd a comparable transition from scepticism to dogmatism. As he describes his intellectual development as a young man in the Confessions (V, x, 19), Augustine went through a sceptical phase before reaching a Platonist dogmatism inspired by Plotinus and his school. This same transition can be found in AugustineÕs writings and it evidently fascinated him throughout his life. Thus, in the Contra Academicos (III, x-xi) and the De libero arbitrio (II, viii), Augustine uses sceptical arguments in order to show that they apply in particular to dogmatic philosophies based on sense-perception (for example, Stoicism or Epicureanism), but that they do not touch an intellectual knowledge independent of sense-perception, a knowledge of eternal logical, mathematical, moral and metaphysical truths, in short Platonism. 4
on the Structure of Self-Intellection,Õ Phronesis 43 (1998), 264-86 (with a bibliography of recent studies at 264, n. 2). 3 For some recent work, cf. for example C. Horn, ÔWelche Bedeutung hat das Augustinische Cogito?,Õ in C. Horn (ed.), Augustinus De civitate dei, Berlin 1997, 10929; M.-A. Vannier, ÔA propos du Cogito chez Augustin,Õ in A. Charles-Saget (ed.), Retour, repentir et constitution de soi, Paris 1998, 85-94; S. Menn, Descartes and Augustine, Cambridge 1998. It is unlikely that Descartes was unfamiliar with AugustineÕs texts, which is not to say that his argument is the same as AugustineÕs; on DescartesÕ use of Augustine cf. the review in Vannier (above). 4 Note AugustineÕs conclusion in Contra Academicos III, xi: Òtheir [the Academic] arguments against sense perception are not valid against all philosophers. There are
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Later, for example in his De Trinitate and De civitate Dei, Augustine came back to the theme, thinking that he could show that one has an interior consciousness of oneself as existing, knowing, loving; that this consciousness is not dependent on sense-perception; that far from putting this knowledge in doubt, the critique of the sceptic actually proves it.5 Thus, for Augustine, scepticism undermines certain forms of dogmatic philosophy, those grounded on sense-perception, supporting thereby and even proving another form of dogmatic philosophy, Platonism. Perhaps the brevity of these remarks might be forgiven, if they are taken merely as indications of a strategy in which scepticism is made to function, paradoxically, as a foundation for dogmatism, not a sensualist dogmatism whose vulnerability to sceptical arguments is fully recognized, but a dogmatism based on intellectual knowledge independent of senseperception, an immediate consciousness of oneself as the place of truths which can even be con rmed by the practice of sceptical doubt. I would like now to show that this strategy is already present in Plotinus, in the way in which he uses sceptical arguments in Enneads V 3 and V 5.6 The general context of treatise V 5 is the argument against Gnosticism. Treatise V 5 is part of a large work, divided into four pieces by PlotinusÕ editor Porphyry (III 8, V 8, V 5, II 9). In this work, before coming to the direct attack on Gnosticism in II 9, Plotinus prepares the ground by explaining what he considers to be the correct understanding of certain Platonic truths perversely interpreted by Gnostics. 7 Among these perversions of Plato, Plotinus nds the Gnostic idea that the world is the work some philosophers, for example, who maintain that whatever the spirit receives by way of bodily sense can generate opinion indeed, but not knowledge. They insist that the latter is found only in the intelligence and, far removed from the senses, abides in the mind.Ó (trans. J OÕMeara). Cf. T. Fuhrer, Augustin Contra Academicos (vel de academicis) BŸcher 2 und 3, Berlin 1997, 332-5. 5 De Trinitate X, x, 14-16; De civitate dei XI, 26; cf. De libero arbitrio II, iii, 7. For discussion of these and related texts in Augustine, cf. the studies cited above n. 3. 6 Augustine uses the opening both of V 3 and of V 5 in De genesi ad litteram and De trinitate (cf. P. Henry, H.-R. Schwyzer, Plotini opera, vol. II, Paris 1959, ad loc.). But it is di cult to establish that he read these texts when writing the Contra Academicos (where he refers to the Academic arguments he read in Cicero). It is possible that (extracts from) the two Plotinian treatises were included in the ÔPlatonic booksÕ which triggered AugustineÕs conversion in 386. 7 I describe the relation between PlotinusÕ anti-Gnostic polemics in II 9 and his argumentative approach in the earlier parts of the work (III 8, V 8, V 5) in ÔGnosticism and the Making of the World in PlotinusÕ, in B. Layton (ed.), The Rediscovery of Gnosticism, vol. I, Leiden 1980, 365-78 (reprinted as ch. VII in my The Structure of Being and the Search for the Good, Aldershot 1998).
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of a demiurge who is ignorant, forgetful, mistaken, a world, therefore, that is the product of ignorance and error. An example of this Gnostic theory might be cited from the Gospel of Truth of Nag Hammadi: Ignorance of the Father brought anguish and terror. And the anguish grew solid like a fog so that no one was able to see. For this reason error became powerful; it fashioned its own matter foolishly, not having known the truth. It set about making a creature . . . a substitute for the truth . . . Being thus without any root, it fell into a fog regarding the Father, while it was involved in preparing works and oblivions and terrors8 . . .
Plotinus believes, however, that it is correct Platonism, in particular a correct interpretation of the Timaeus, to hold, on the contrary, that the world is the expression of knowledge, the knowledge possessed in full truth by a transcendent intellect, Noèw. The Gnostic perversion of Platonic cosmology thus derives from a failure to grasp the nature of transcendent Intellect (which Plotinus identi es with PlatoÕs demiurge) as total knowledge, absolute truth. Hence Plotinus asks, at the beginning of V 5: Could anyone say that Intellect, the true and real Intellect, will ever be in error and believe the unreal? Certainly not. For how could it still be Intellect when it was being unintelligent? It must, then, always know and not ever forget anything, and its knowing must not be that of a guesser, or ambiguous, or like that of someone who has heard what he knows from someone else.9
In what follows in V 5, Plotinus will argue for what he regards as a correct understanding of the transcendent Intellect, an argument that prepares the way for the direct criticism of Gnosticism later in the work, in II 9. In attempting to show in V 5 that transcendent Intellect possesses full knowledge and absolute truth, Plotinus holds this can only be the case if, in this Intellect, thought and its object are joined in such a way that no mediation or externality separates them. But why do the knowledge and truth that Intellect must possess require a unity, free of all mediation and externality, of thought and its object in Intellect? The conditions required for knowledge in Intellect (no mediation, no externality separating subject and object of knowledge) are simply negations of the conditions de ning the acquisition of knowledge according to certain theories of knowledge which we could describe as sensualist or externalist, theories of knowledge which have recourse to sense-perception and/or suppose that the objects 8 The Nag Hammadi Library in English, J. Robinson (ed.), New York 1977, 38 (Nag Hammadi codex I, 3, 17). 9 V 5, 1, 1-6 (Armstrong transl.; unless otherwise indicated the other translations of passages in Plotinus are mine). Compare II 9, 1, 47-50.
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of intellect are external to it. To set aside these sensualist and externalist theories of knowledge, by process of elimination, Plotinus evokes arguments which had already been used by sceptics in a similar attack on dogmatic theories of knowledge of a sensualist or externalist type: Those things which are related to sense-perception, which indeed seem to have the clearest conviction, are put in doubt (pisteÝtai), lest their apparent reality subsist, not in the objects (êpokeim¡noiw), but in a ections (p‹yesin ).10
According to this suggestion, sense-data might perhaps correspond, not to the objects of sense-perception, but to a ections (p‹yh ) in our senseorgans. How is this matter to be judged? Who is to judge? Sense-perception itself cannot arbitrate. Might intellect be the judge (1, 15 noè . . . dianoÛaw krinoæntvn)? Plotinus continues with another sceptical argument: Even agreeing (sugkexvrhm¡nou) that that of which sense-perception has an apprehension (ntÛlhciw) is in the sense-object (êpokeim¡noiw), what is known through sense-perception of the object (pr‹gmatow) is an image, and sense-perception does not grasp the object itself, for it remains outside (¦jv).11
How can the image be compared to the object of which it is an image? Here also, sense-perception cannot arbitrate: it cannot, so to speak, Ôcheck behindÕ the image to see if it corresponds to the object of which it is an image. Again, thought or intellect might be invoked as judge. 10 V 5, 1, 12-15; cf. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism (= HP) I, 19-20 and 94; II, 51, 72 (ÒFor the intellect, as they assert, does not make contact with external objects [tŒ ¤ktñw] and receive presentations by means of itself but by means of the senses, and the senses do not apprehend external real objects [tŒ . . . ¤ktòw êpokeÛmena] but only, if at all, their own a ections [p‹yh]Ó (Bury trans.), 74 (referring to the fourth of the ten modes of Aenesidemus). In VI 6, 13, 57-9 Plotinus contrasts a p‹yhma t°w dianoÛaw with a prgma êpokeÛmenon. The similarities in argument and terminology between Sextus and Plotinus indicated here and in what follows are not intended to suggest that Plotinus uses Sextus. The question of the precise sources of PlotinusÕ knowledge of scepticism would require a further and no doubt di cult investigation. It might be noted, however, that Numenius, a major in uence on Plotinus, wrote much of a polemical nature on scepticism (cf. especially fragments 25-26 des Places). 11 V 5, 1, 15-19; cf. IV 6, 1, 30-32; for the phrasing compare Sextus HP II, 51 (ÒBut let it be granted, by way of concession [sugxÅrhsin ], that the senses are apprehensive [ntilhptik‹w]; yet, even so they will not be found any the less unreliable for judging the external real objects [tÇn ¤ktòw êpokeim¡nvn pragm‹tvn]Ó ) and, for the argument, HP II, 74-5; Against the Mathematicians (= AM) VII, 357-8, 384-5. E. Emilsson (ÔPlotinus on the Objects of Thought,Õ Archiv fŸr Geschichte der Philosophie 77 [1995], 26-8, and ÔCognition and its ObjectÕ in L. Gerson [ed.], The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus, Cambridge 1996, 221-31) takes the two passages I quote here
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However, thinking can also be challenged as a touchstone of knowledge by sceptical arguments, as it is by Plotinus in what follows. Plotinus refers to the thought processes through which we habitually go, in which the thinking subject thinks objects other than it or outside it, thinking them by means of rational deductions based ultimately on images or impressions (tæpoi) of these objects. Here also sceptical criticism can attack: how is thought to verify the reliability of the impressions that furnish the matter of its re exions? 12 The conclusion which emerges from the sceptical arguments applied here by Plotinus must be that no knowledge can be claimed as immune from sceptical doubt if this knowledge is grounded on sense-perception and/or it is assumed that the objects of thought are external to the thinking subject, that some mediation, by impressions or images, is required so as to link the subject to the objects of knowledge. Plotinus follows these sceptical arguments to the extent that he sees the possibility of knowledge and truth in transcendent Intellect only if the conditions which the sceptical critique can exploit are removed: the mediation and externality separating subject and object of knowledge. Thus knowledge in Intellect requires that subject and object of knowledge be uni ed, without externality and mediation. This requirement is satis ed by PlotinusÕ interpretation of transcendent Intellect as united with its objects of thought, the Forms, in a kind of totally transparent mutual self-presence. Plotinus therefore uses scepticism in order to set aside all dogmatism grounded on externality and mediation in sense-perception and thought. Scepticism is made to support a Platonic dogmatism of a speci c kind, a dogmatism in which knowledge is grounded in a transcendent Intellect which thinks its objects of thought, the Forms, immediately, as itself.13 As regards treatise V 3, I think we can show that Plotinus uses sceptical arguments in the opening chapters in a similar way. The problem under discussion in this text is the possibility of self-knowledge. Plotinus takes up the dilemmas that surround this problem and that are exploited from V 5 as expressing PlotinusÕ own theory of perception, not as a sceptical objection to sensualism. However these passages should be read in their dialectical context: they form part of a series of points designed to disqualify sensualist and externalist theories (whose proponents are referred to indi erently as ÔtheyÕ) and thus clear the ground, by elimination, for Plotinus non-sensualist internalist conception of the knowledge characteristic of transcendent Intellect. This conception prepares the way, in turn, for the rejection of the ignorant demiurgic mind of the Gnostics. 12 V 5, 1, 19-29, with the references to Sextus above in n. 10. 13 Cf. Emilsson, ÔCognitionÕ, 240-1.
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by Sextus Empiricus. In self-knowledge, does the self, as the knowing subject, know as a whole or as a part? If it knows as a whole, then there is nothing of the self left over for it to know. And if it knows as a part, as one part knowing another part, then it does not know itself as a whole.14 These sceptical dilemmas, which appear to destroy the possibility of selfknowledge, assume that the knowing subject is other than its object. A way out of such di culties, while accepting the full force of the sceptical critique, is to seek another relation between subject and object of knowledge, in which the subject is its object of knowledge. This is precisely the way in which Plotinus proceeds in his e ort to defend the possibility of self-knowledge. This possibility is fully realized for him in the transcendent Intellect that thinks the Forms as itself.15 Thus the sceptical arguments of treatises V 5 and V 3 lead to precisely the same conclusion: truth and knowledge must be grounded in self-knowledge, the self-knowledge realized in the unity of transcendent Intellect and its objects of thought. To sum up this reading of the opening chapters of treatises V 5 and V 3, we nd in Plotinus, as in Augustine and Descartes, an argumentative strategy which consists in putting to work sceptical arguments as a way of setting aside various forms of dogmatic philosophy (Aristotelianism, Stoicism, etc.) and grounding a speci c dogmatism which resorts to an intellectual knowledge independent of sense-perception, which is selfknowledge, in which, in a kind of interior transparence, subject and object of thought are immediately present to each other, constituting a truth which is self-verifying, self-authenticating, and thus in no need of external proof: Real truth agrees, not with another, but with itself, and does not say something else besides itself, but what it says, it is, and what it is, it says. Who could refute it? From where could this refutation (¦legxon) start?16
Perhaps I should add here that this absolute knowledge, this truth which ÔspeaksÕ itself, is not isolated in some sort of otherworldly solipsism, cut o from all relation to our own all too human e orts to know, to reach V 3, 1-12; 5, 1-48; Sextus AM VII, 310-12. On this cf. Crystal (above n. 2). 16 V 5, 2, 18-21; cf. V 3, 6, 23-5; Plato Gorgias 473b10-11, Sophist 263b4-5. On this Ôself-authenticatingÕ knowledge and its relation to sceptical critique, cf. Emilsson, ÔPlotinusÕ (above n. 11) 38-41 and 36: Òrather than attempting to show where the sceptic goes wrong, Plotinus sees it as his task to nd adequate assumptions that provide a foundation of knowledge that is immune to sceptical attacksÓ. 14 15
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the truth, e orts relating to sense-data, to objects exterior to us, entailing di cult and vulnerable processes of reasoning. In PlotinusÕ view, our soul retains a permanent relation to transcendent Intellect and is always present in it, even if unconsciously, 17 deriving from it the concepts that enable us to understand the exterior world and to become aware of our selves. Thus the primary and absolute form of knowledge which is transcendent Intellect provides the foundation and truth of lower forms of knowledge, our knowledge of the exterior world and of our selves.18 But what does this transcendent Intellect ÔsayÕ when it speaks itself? It say nothing other than itself, and thus cannot err or be vulnerable to the sceptical critique. But in saying itself, it says itself as the expression, the logos, of the ultimate rst principle of reality, the One, a principle beyond all multiplicity and determination. In thinking itself and saying itself, transcendent Intellect thinks and says the One as intelligible and sayable, that is, as the multiple and determinate expression which Intellect is of the unthinkable and ine able. II The second part of this paper concerns precisely the question of the ine ability of the One. I would like to suggest in particular that Plotinus makes use of scepticism, not only to ground his epistemology, but also to solve problems arising from the need to think and speak of what is beyond thought and speech, the One. Elsewhere I have suggested that, in order to explain the possibility of saying the ine able, Plotinus does not claim that we actually think and speak the unthinkable and ine able. Rather, when we are thinking and speaking the One, we are actually thinking and speaking of ourselves, expressing something in us which can be thought and said, but which refers beyond itself, to the One.19 Thus when we speak of the One, we are in fact speaking of multiplicity, of the multiplicity that we are and of our need of a principle of unity which would be non-multiple, in other words ÔoneÕ. And when we speak of the absolute Good that is the One, we are speaking in fact of our own de ciency, our need, and of that which might
According to the much-contested doctrine of IV 8, 8, 1-6. On this cf. Emilsson. ÔPlotinusÕ (above n. 11), 36. 19 ÔLe problme du discours sur lÕindicible chez PlotinÕ, Revue de th ologie et de philosophie 122 (1990), 145-56 (= The Structure of Being and the Search for the Good, ch. XI). 17 18
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meet this need, the Good. This explanation of what saying the ine able actually consists in can be found in the following passage in treatise VI 9: To say [the One] is the cause is to predicate an attribute not of it, but of us, in that we have something from it, [it] which exists in itself. But he who speaks accurately should not say ÔitÕ or ÔexistsÕ, but we circle around it on the outside, as it were, wishing to communicate our a ections (tŒ aêtÇn ¥rmhneæein ¤y¡lein p‹yh), sometimes coming near, sometimes falling back on account of the dilemmas that surround it.20
Thus, in speaking of the One as rst cause, we are in fact expressing our own a ections (p‹yh), our sense of our own contingency and dependence which evokes a foundation of reality, the rst principle which we are not. We do not say the One as it is in itself, but we speak of our own a ections as they relate to the One. A similar manner of speaking is practiced by the sceptic. Among various passages in Sextus Empiricus showing this we might take the following one as an example: And, most important of all, in his enunciation . . . [the sceptic] states what appears to himself and announces his own a ection (tò p‹yow pagg‹llei tò ¥autoè) in an undogmatic way, without making any positive assertion regarding the external realities (tÇn ¦jvyen êpokeim¡nvn).21
SextusÕ sceptic does not claim to speak of external things, as they are in themselves; the sceptic merely expresses his a ections. Thus, regarding the di culty that the dogmatic philosopher must face, and that Plotinus takes up, as we have already seen, that sense-data may correspond, not to the things in themselves, but to the ways in which our sense-organs are a ected, the sceptic avoids making any a rmations about such things as they are in themselves, limiting himself to stating his personal a ections of the moment. Thus the object in itself remains outside the realm of what the sceptic claims to be able to know or say; in this sense it can be said to be and to remain, for him, unknowable and ine able. What the sceptic can know and say are the particular a ections he experiences and to which he gives voice. Similarly, for Plotinus, our speaking about the One is not speech about the One as it is in itself, an unknowable and ine able Absolute. Rather we are speaking of our a ections, which we can know and say. Plotinus even uses the same word as Sextus for that of 20
VI 9, 3, 49-54; for a di erent reading of the earlier part of this passage, cf. P. Meijer, Plotinus on the Good or the One (Enneads VI, 9), Amsterdam 1992, 134-6. 21 Sextus HP I, 15 (Bury trans. slightly modi ed); cf. I, 197: fvn¯ p‹youw ²met¡rou dhlvtik®.
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which we speak, our p‹yh.22 I would therefore like to suggest that Plotinus found, in the structure of sceptic discourse, a solution to the problem of how to explain, in conformity with the radical ine ability of the One, the possibility of discourse about the One, a discourse which in fact expresses what can be said, our own a ections. If this suggestion is not too implausible, it might seem that we require all the same some distinction between the way the sceptic speaks of things and the way Plotinus speaks of the ine able. For we can hardly maintain that Plotinus adopts a sceptical attitude in relation to the One, a reality of such fundamental importance for his world and himself. Perhaps it might be felt that one di erence might be found in the fact that, in the passage quoted above, Plotinus ÔcommunicatesÕ (¥rmhneæein) his a ections in regard to the One, whereas the sceptic simply ÔannouncesÕ his a ections. However this di erence does not seem to be signi cant. Sextus can use PlotinusÕ verb to refer to how certain people describe their a ections, and in announcing his a ections, SextusÕ sceptic is said to be describing them.23 Another di erence might be felt in the contrast between the absolute unknowability of the Plotinian One and the provisional unknowability of the thing in itself for the sceptic. The sceptic remains in principle openminded on this and does not preclude the possibility of one day knowing the thing in itself. However, such is the practice of sceptical doubt that, in e ect, the thing remains unknowable in itself, as does the One for Plotinus. A third, more important di erence, it seems to me, might be found in the fact that the sceptic limits the pertinence of what he says to his person and to the moment of the experience to which he gives voice. The a ections the sceptic expresses have no signi cance beyond the individual who momentarily experiences and expresses them.24 For Plotinus, however, these same a ections relate to something other than the person who expresses them and this expression thus refers to something else. The expression of our contingency and our need is the expression of something in us that relates to something else and of which we are obscurely aware,
22 The Greek term does not appear to have the technical sense it has, for example, in III 6 (cf. B. Fleet, Plotinus Ennead III 6, Oxford 1995, 72-3). 23 Sextus AM IX, 164 (¥rmhneæein); HP I, 197. 24 The sceptic does not take these a ections dogmatically, i.e. they are not the criterion of knowledge that they are held to be by the Cyrenaics; cf. Sextus AM VII, 191, HP I, 15 (quoted above at n. 21) and V. Tsouna, The Epistemology of the Cyrenaic School, Cambridge 1998, 58-60.
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precisely as other than our own contingency. A vivid illustration of this idea can be found later in treatise V 3: But we have it [i.e. the One] in such a way as to speak about it, but not to say it itself. And we say what it is not; what it is, we do not say. So that it is from what is posterior [to it] that we speak about it. We are not hindered from having it, although we do not say it. But like those who are inspired and become [divinely] possessed,25 if they manage to know that they have something greater in themselves, even if they do not know what, from that through which they are moved and speak, from this they acquire a sense (aàsyhsin) of the mover, being di erent from it, thus do we appear to relate to it [the One].26
This passage also describes a form of discourse whose structure corresponds to the manner of speaking practiced by the sceptic philosopher, who gives voice merely to personal a ections. However, the limits which the sceptic sets to the meaning of his discourse, his person and the particular moment, are lifted. Our personal a ections, in Plotinus, go beyond our person, our individual subjectivity, relating as they do to something else of which they are an expression to the extent that this Ôsomething elseÕ is responsible for what we experience in ourselves. This is not to say that we know what this something else is: we are aware only that our a ections presuppose an action or presence of something other than ourselves and our a ections. To generalize this point, we might say that in expressing our a ections, we express not only ourselves at a particular moment, but also something about the world of which we are also aware.27 Thus, if Plotinus does indeed adopt the structure of sceptical discourse in explaining discourse about the ine able, he does this in such a way as to reject the epistemological limitations set on such a discourse by the sceptic: in expressing his a ections, the sceptic, in fact, and contrary to his claim, is saying something about himself as he relates to the world, to things outside him. III I conclude with a summary of the points proposed in this paper. Returning to the well-known presence of sceptical arguments at the beginning of PlotinusÕ editors have noted the closeness of these words to a passage on divinely inspired poets in PlatoÕs Ion 533e6-7. 26 V 3, 14, 5-13. 27 Compare the Cyrenaic principle stated by Sextus AM VII, 194: ÒFor the a ection which takes place in us reveals to us nothing more than itselfÓ and Aristocles of MessineÕs criticism of it as discussed by Tsouna (above n. 24), 65-70. 25
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treatises V 5 and V 3, I have suggested that the approach Plotinus adopts in these texts is of considerable historical signi cance. Plotinus uses sceptical arguments as a method for refuting theories of knowledge based on sense-perception or which separate the subject from the object of thought. Scepticism thus prepares the way for the introduction of a form of Platonic dogmatism in which truth and knowledge are grounded on a unity of subject and object of thought, a unity free of all separation through mediating images or externality, a self-verifying knowledge immune, as such, to scepticism and capable of functioning as the foundation of other, lower forms of knowledge. This use to which scepticism is put anticipates, I believe, the strategies of transition from scepticism to dogmatism that we nd later in Augustine and Descartes.28 Already in Plotinus, we might say, scepticism is made to serve as the foundation of a dogmatism of a speci c type. We have also found a further example of this method of using scepticism so as to go beyond it in the case of the problem of explaining the possibility of discourse about the ine able. I have suggested in particular that Plotinus uses the structure of sceptical discourse in order to describe discourse about the ine able. In speaking of the ine able, we speak of our a ections, and not of the ine able as a reality in itself, just as the sceptic voices his personal a ections, and makes no claims about the things in themselves. However Plotinus does not follow the sceptic in limiting the signi cance of such discourse to the speakerÕs individual subjectivity. On the contrary, for Plotinus, our a ections refer beyond ourselves and bring some awareness of something else beyond them. In expressing them, we therefore express both ourselves and ourselves as a ected by and as relating to something beyond our selves, something of which we are, to this degree, and in this way, aware. In Plotinus scepticism met, I would like to suggest, a well-informed, appreciative and creative critic.29
28 Over and above an anticipation, might one speak of a historical dependence linking Plotinus, Augustine and Descartes? The historical connection between Augustine and Descartes appears to be better established (above n. 3) than that between Plotinus and Augustine, at least as regards AugustineÕs early works (above n. 6). 29 I am indebted to the questions and suggestions of H. FlŸckiger, of the editors of this journal and of those who heard versions of this paper given in Cambridge, Grenoble, Paris and Strasbourg.
