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How to Become Unconscious
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 July 2010
Abstract
Consistent materialists are almost bound to suggest that ‘conscious experience’, if it exists at all, is no more than epiphenomenal. A correct understanding of the real requires that everything we do and say is no more than a product of whatever processes are best described by physics, without any privileged place, person, time or scale of action. Consciousness is a myth, or at least a figment. Plotinus was no materialist: for him, it is Soul and Intellect that are more real than the phenomena we misdescribe as material. Nor does he suppose that consciousness depends on language (as Stoics and modern materialists have sometimes said): wordless experience is actually superior. And much of what counts towards our present consciousness is to be discarded. It is better not to remember most of what now seems more significant to us; better to discard images; better that the intellect be ‘drunk’ than ‘sober’, losing any sense of separation between subject and object. The goal of the Plotinian intellectual is to join ‘the dance of immortal love’, but it is a mark of the good dancer that she is not conscious of what she does. There is therefore a strange confluence between Plotinus and modern materialists: our experience at least is transitory, deceitful, epiphenomenal, and ‘reality’ is to be encountered when we have shed our illusions.
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1 An ‘emergent’ property of a whole differs from a ‘resultant’ in that whereas the latter has an intelligible, mathematical relationship with the properties of the parts, the former does not. There are no really convincing instances of such ‘emergence’ that are not simply versions of the very puzzle, the so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness, that we face: a problem created, as I suppose, by first imagining a merely material world and then being surprised that once purged of any so-called ‘secondary’ qualities it has no intelligible connection with those same ‘secondary’ (but for us immediate) properties themselves.
2 See my ‘Plotinus: Body and Mind’ in Cambridge Companion to Plotinus, edited by Lloyd Gerson (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1996), 275–91; and ‘A Plotinian Account of Intellect’, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 71 (1997), 421–32.
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8 Purgatory §33, 91–9; 127–9: Dante at the top of Purgatory peak drinks first of Lethe, banishing all memory of sin, and then of Eunoë, restoring an objective, guiltless knowledge of what has been.
9 Ennead III.6.5, 23ff.
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22 Ennead VI.7 [38].34.
23 Ennead IV.8 [6].1.
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25 Ennead IV.8 [6].4.
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28 Ennead V.3 [49].5, 44. This is the real Plotinian Trinity: see also Enneads VI.8 [39].15, where lover, beloved and love are also unified.
29 Ennead V.8 [31].5f, citing Plato, Symposium 215b; see also Ennead IV.3 [27].11. It is commonly suggested that Plotinus is here mistaking the nature of hieroglyphs, but there is good reason, despite later oversimplifications or inventions (on which see Hornung, Erik, The Secret Lore of Egypt: its Impact on the West, translated by Lorton, David (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001)Google Scholar), to think that he got it right. ‘The Egyptians do not hesitate to call hieroglyphs “gods”, and even to equate individual signs in the script with particular gods; it is quite in keeping with their views to see images of the gods as signs in a metalanguage. As is true of every Egyptian hieroglyph, they are more than just ciphers or lifeless symbols; the god can inhabit them, his cult image will normally be in the same form, and his priests may assume his role by wearing animal masks’ (Hornung, Erik, Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: the One and the Many, translated by Baines, John (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 124Google Scholar).
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31 Ennead 4.3 [27].30, 12–6.
32 Ennead I.3 [20].5.
33 Ennead I.6 [1].4, McKenna's translation.
34 Ennead I.3 [20].4, citing Plato, Phaedrus 248b6.
35 See Ennead I.3 [20].1f.
36 Ennead IV.4 [28].7; see Edward W. Warren, ‘Consciousness in Plotinus’, Phronesis 9 (1964), 83–97: even here-now we are only conscious that we were reading when we are no longer absorbed in the content of what we were reading.
37 Ennead V.3 [49].17.
38 Ennead III.8. [30].6, 14 & 27–9.
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41 Peter Carruthers, Language, Thought and Consciousness: an Essay in Philosophical Psychology, op. cit., 59; see also 138f.
42 Ennead VI.7 [38].41.
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48 Ennead I.4 [46].10.
49 Hadot, Pierre, Plotinus, or The Simplicity of Vision, translated by Chase, Michael (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993), 32Google Scholar. Amusingly, the notion that consciousness is a report of what has happened also turns up in Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained as a modern insight.
50 Ennead I.8.15; cf. Ennead I.6.9, on the golden screen or advance guard that is placed between us and the Good.
51 Ennead V.1.2, after Iliad 20.65.
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55 Some of the material in this section was presented at an ISNS conference at the University of Liverpool in the summer of 2004. See also ‘Conclusion’ in Vassilopoulou, Panayiota and Clark, Stephen R. L. (eds), Late Antique Epistemology: Other Ways to Truth (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 289–301CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
56 Ennead VI.7 [38].35. This is closer to the thesis of The Cloud of Unknowing than to that of Ps-Dionysius. ‘For Denys the divine darkness lies beyond the farthest effort of the mind, and it is the mind (the nous) that enters it: for the author of the Cloud, we enter the cloud of unknowing when we renounce the activity of the mind and rely solely on “the loving power” of the soul’: Louth, Andrew, Denys the Areopagite (London: Continuum, 1989), 125Google Scholar.
57 Ennead III.5 [50].7: wine had not been invented at the birthday celebrations for Aphrodite, at which Poros got drunk and was seduced by Penia (after Plato's weird story in The Symposium: that is, this allegorical event ‘precedes’ material reality).
58 Philo, De Ebrietate 41, citing Genesis 19.33.
59 Ennead V.3.3, 46ff.
60 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers 7.65.
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62 Aristotle, Problemata 30. He adds that wine is also aphrodisiac, and can sometimes improve a poet (unless the remark is ironical): ‘Maracus the Syracusan was a better poet when he was out of his mind’.
63 Philo, Legum Allegoriarum 3.228f. in Philo of Alexandria: the Contemplative Life, The Giants, and Selections, translated by D. Winston (London: SPCK, 1981), 151.
64 Philo, De Ebrietate, 48.
65 See also the Hermetic Corpus 1.27 (Hermetica, translated by Brian P. Copenhaver (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 6): ‘People, earthborn men, you who have surrendered yourself to drunkenness and sleep and ignorance of god, make yourselves sober and end your drunken sickness, for you are bewitched in unreasoning sleep’ (see also 7.1, Ibid., 24).
66 Harris, Marvin, Cows, Wars, Pigs and Witches (New York: Vintage Books, 1989; 1st published 1974), 266Google Scholar.
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70 See Nelson, John E., Healing the Split (New York: SUNY Press, 1994), 147–52Google Scholar for a balanced and well-informed discussion of the issues.
71 Ibid., 358–9.
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74 Ennead VI.7 [38].26, 21f.
75 I should add – merely to avoid misunderstanding - that Plotinus reckons that ‘if [lovers] remain chaste there is no error in their intimacy with the beauty here below, but it is error to fall away into sexual intercourse’: Ennead III.5 [50].1, 36f.
76 Ennead V.8 [31].10, after Plato, Phaedrus 246eff.
77 Ennead VI.9 [9].11.
78 Ennead IV.4 [28].7.
79 Actually, as he points out, non-rational creatures manage very well: Ennead I.4 [46].2.31–43.
80 Ennead V.3 [49].3, 46ff.
81 Weil, Simone, Notebooks, translated by Wills, A. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), Vol.2, 423Google Scholar. This thought is not to be taken lightly: it is difficult not to see in it one aspect of Weil's fatal anorexia, but her insights should not be ignored merely because, as it so often does, ‘the disease’ (that is, the demon) took advantage of them. When she wrote that ‘I cannot conceive of the necessity for God to love me, when I feel so clearly that even with human beings affection for me can only be a mistake. But I can easily imagine that he loves that perspective of creation which can only be seen from the point where I am… I must withdraw so that he can see it. I must withdraw so that God may make contact with the beings whom chance places in my path and whom he loves’ (Weil, Simone, Gravity and Grace (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1952), 88Google Scholar), the disease was speaking. How could it be that God loved everything but Weil? See also Lippitt, John, ‘True self-love and true self-sacrifice’, International Journal of Philosophy of Religion 64–5 (2009)Google Scholar.
82 The punning relationship of aletheia, truth, and lethe, forgetfulness, is founded on a false etymology, but still has some force: see my God's World and the Great Awakening (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 48–54.
83 Ennead III.8 [30].4. 5–6.
84 Ennead V.3 [49].13. That the One is not a thing is a doctrine ably discussed by Perl, Eric D. in Theophany: the Neoplatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite (New York: SUNY Press, 2007)Google Scholar. On the apophatic tradition, see Sells, Michael Anthony, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)Google Scholar.
85 Ennead VI.9 [9].4, quoting Plato, Letter VII.241c5.
86 Ennead V.3 [49].10; see also VI.7 [38].35.
87 Ennead VI.7 [38].41; see also Ennead V.1 [10].4, 38: ‘if you take away otherness, it will become one and remain silent’.
88 Tao Te Ching, ch.1.
89 Hume, David, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), pt.4: Hume on Religion, edited by Wollheim, R. (London: Fontana, 1963), 131Google Scholar.
90 Ennead V.2 [11].2: plants embody the most audacious and stupid part or sort of soul!
91 Compare Enneads I.6 [1].9, 39 and I.8 [51].15, 25.
92 See also Ps-Dionysius, , The Complete Works, translated by Luibheid, Colm (London: SPCK, 1987), 73Google Scholar: The Divine Names 697A: ‘Its nature, unconfined by form, is the creator of all form. In it is nonbeing really an excess of being. It is not a life, but is, rather, superabundant Life. It is not a mind, but is superabundant Wisdom.… And one might even say that nonbeing itself longs for the Good which is above all being.’
93 E. Hornung, Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt, op. cit., 253.
94 This collapse of boundaries, ‘the death of the “I” as knower, chooser, and doer’, is the sinister image of the Plotinian ascent: see John E. Nelson, Healing the Split, op. cit., 43. In a way the psychotic is correct: reality is larger than we know, and full of demons. But if Plotinus is correct, so also was Housman, in his more optimistic mode: ‘The world is round, so travellers tell,/ And straight though reach the track,/ Trudge on, trudge on, ‘twill all be well,/ The way will guide one back’ (Housman, A. E., ‘A Shropshire Lad’ 36 in Collected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956; 1st published 1939), 65Google Scholar).
95 Ennead VI.7 [38].36.