A STUDY IN THE HISTORY OF HELLENISM

 

5. Ethics.

The good which is beyond beauty is also beyond moral virtue, as we saw at an earlier stage of the exposition. The attainment of it belongs to the mystical consummation of Plotinus's philosophy, and not properly to its ethical any more than to its aesthetical part. At the same time, it is not regarded as attainable without previous discipline both in practical moral virtue and in the pursuit of intellectual wisdom. The mere discipline is not sufficient by itself to assure the attainment of the end; but it is, to begin with, the only path to follow.

In treating of virtue on its practical side, Plotinus differs from his Stoical predecessors chiefly in the stress he lays on the interpretation even of civic virtue as a preliminary means of purifying the soul from admixture with body. The one point where he decidedly goes beyond them in the way of precept is his prohibition of suicide except in the rarest of cases. Here he returns in the letter of the prohibition to the view of earlier moralists. The philosopher must no longer say to his disciples, as during the period of the Stoic preaching, that if they are in any way dissatisfied with life "the door is open." A moralist under the Empire cannot, on the other hand, take the ground of Aristotle, that suicide is an injury to the State. No public interest was so obviously affected by the loss of a single unit as to make this ground of appeal clearly rational. The argument Plotinus makes use of is substantially that which Plato borrowed from the Pythagoreans. To take a violent mode of departing from the present life will not purify the soul from the passions that cling to the composite being, and so will not completely separate it and set it free from metempsychosis. Through not submitting to its appointed discipline, it may even have to endure a worse lot in its next life. So long as there is a possibility of making progress here, it is better to remain.

The view that in moral action the inward disposition is the essential thing, is to be found already, as a clearly formulated principle, in Aristotle. The Stoics had persistently enforced it; and now in Plotinus it leads to a still higher degree of detachment, culminating as we shall see in mysticism. Porphyry made the gradation of the virtues by his master somewhat more explicit; and Iamblichus was, as Vacherot has remarked, more moderate and practical in his ethical doctrine; but invariably the attitude of the school is one of extreme inwardness. Not only is the inner spring that by which moral action is to be tested; the all-important point in relation both to conduct and insight is to look to the true nature of the soul and, keeping this in view, to rid it of its excrescences. First in the order of moral progress are the "political" virtues, which make the soul orderly in the world of mixture. After these conic the "cathartic" virtues, which prepare it to ascend to the ideal world. Positive virtue is attained simply by the soul's turning back to the reality it finds when with purged sight it looks within; and it may find this reality as soon as the negative "purification" has been accomplished.

The perfect life of the sage is not in community but in detachment. If he undertakes practical activity, it must be from some plain obligation, and the attitude of detachment ought still to be maintained internally. Neither with Plotinus nor with any of his successors is there the least doubt that the contemplative life is in itself superior to the life of action. Here they are Aristotelian. The chance that the philosopher as such may be called on to reform practical life seems to them much more remote than it did to Plato. Yet, in reference to politics, as Zeller points out, a certain predilection may be noticed for the "Platonic aristocracy." It may be observed also that Plotinus by implication condemns Asiatic monarchy as unjust and contrary to nature. And the view is met with incidentally that practical wisdom is the result of deliberation in common; each by himself being too weak to achieve it. Thus, in the single resolution arrived at by the joint effort of all, political assemblies imitate the unity that is in the world.

That genuine freedom or self-dependence belongs properly to the contemplative and not to the active life Plotinus maintains in one place by the following argument. If virtue itself were given the choice whether there should be wars so that it might exercise courage, and injustice so that it might define and set in order what is just, and poverty so that it might display liberality, or that all things should go well and it should be at peace, it would choose peace. A physician like Hippocrates, for example, might choose, if it were within his choice, that no one should need his art. Before there can be practical virtue, there must be external objects which come from fortune and are not chosen by us. What is to be referred to virtue itself and not to anything external, is the trained aptitude of intelligence and the disposition of will prior to the occasion of making a choice. Thus all that can be said to be primarily willed apart from any relation forced upon us to external things, is unimpeded theoretical activity of mind.

In another book, the philosopher sets himself to defend in play the paradox that all outgoing activity is ultimately for the sake of contemplation. Production and action mean everywhere either an inability of contemplation to grasp its object adequately without going forth of itself, or a secondary resultant not willed but naturally issuing from that which remains in its own higher reality. Thus external action with its results, whether in the works of man or of nature, is an enfeebled product of contemplation. To those even who act, contemplation is the end; since they act so that they may possess a good and know that they possess it, and the knowledge of its possession is only in the soul. Practice, therefore, as it issues from theory, returns to its. At the end of the book Plotinus, passing beyond the half-serious view hitherto developed, indicates that the first principle of all is prior even to contemplation. Here occurs the comparison of it to the spring of life in the root of an immense tree. This produces all the manifold life of the tree without becoming itself manifolds. It is the good which has no need even of mind, while mind contemplates and aspires after it.

The doubt for Plotinus is not whether the contemplative life is higher than the life of action, but whether it can properly be described as consisting in volition. Volition, he holds, is hardly the right term to apply to pure intellect and the life in accordance with it. Still less is it applicable to the One before intellect. Yet, as he also insists, to speak of the first principle as not-will and not-thought and not-knowledge would be even more misleading than the application to it of the positive terms. What is denied of the primal things is not denied in the sense that they are in want of it, but in the sense that they have no need of it, since they are beyond it. On the other hand, when the individual nature takes upon itself, as appears, one addition after another, it is in truth becoming more and more deprived of reality. To recover the reality that is all, it must dismiss the apparent additions—which, if they indeed affected the being that remains, would be diminutions—and return to itself. Of such additions are practical activities. In the world of mixture they are necessary, but they must be treated as such, not thought of as conferring something more upon the soul than it has in itself. Only by rising above them in self-knowledge can the soul become liberated. Otherwise, it remains attached to its material vehicle, and changes from body to body as from one sleep to another. "True waking is a true rising up from the body, not with a body." This cannot be completely attained by practical virtue, which belongs to the composite nature and not to the separable soul; as the poet indicates in the Odyssey when he places the shade of Hercules in Hades but "himself among the gods." The hero has been thought worthy to ascend to Olympus for his noble deeds, but, as his virtue was practical and not theoretical, he has not wholly ascended, but something of him also remains below. The man of practical virtue, as the Homeric account is interpreted elsewhere, will retain some memory of the actions he performed on earth; though he will forget what is bad or trivial; the man of theoretic virtue, possessing now intuitive knowledge, will dismiss all memories whatever. Memory, however, seems to be thought of not as actually perishing, but as recoverable should the soul redescend to relation with the material universe.

Here Plotinus is expressing himself, after Plato, in terms of metempsychosis. As in the Platonic representation of the future life, intermissions are supposed during which the purified soul gets temporary respite from occupation with a body. Plotinus, however, as we have seen, does not treat that which is distinctively called the Platonic "reminiscence" as more than a myth or a metaphor. When the soul, even here, is energizing in accordance with pure intellect, it is not "remembering." Memory is of past experience, and is relative to time and its divisions. The energy of pure intellect is not in relation to time, but views things in the logical order of concepts. Hence it is that the better soul strives to bring the many to one by getting rid of the indefinite multiplicity of detail; and so commits much to oblivion.

Consistently with this general view, Plotinus holds that the happiness of the sage receives no increase by continuance of time. We cannot make a greater sum by adding what no longer exists to what now is. Time can be measured by addition of parts that are not, because time itself, the "image of eternity," belongs to things that become and are not. Happiness belongs to the life of being, and this is incommensurable with the parts of time. Is one to be supposed happier for remembering the pleasure of eating a dainty yesterday or, say, ten years ago; or, if the question is of insight instead of pleasure, through the memory of having had insight last year? remember things that went well in the past belongs to one who has them not in the present and, because now he has them not, seeks to recall those that have been. To the argument that time is necessary for the performance of fair deeds, the reply is, first, that it is possible to be happy—and not less but more so--outside the life of action. In the next place, happiness comes not from the actual performance of the deeds, but from the disposition with which they are done. The man of right disposition will find happiness in disinterested appreciation, for example, of patriotic deeds which he has not himself had the opportunity of performing. Hence (as the Stoics also held against Aristotle) length of life is not necessary for its moral perfection.

Several points of the ethics of Plotinus are brought together in a book giving a philosophical interpretation of the fancy that to each person is allotted his particular genius or "daemon." Plotinus's interpretation is that the daemon of each of us is the power next above that in accordance with which his actual life is led. For those who live the common life according to sense-perception, it is reason; for those who live the life of reason, it is the power above that. How then, he asks, with reference to the "lots" in the Republic, if each while "there" chooses his tutelary daemon and his life "here," are we masters of anything in our actions? The explanation he suggests is, that by its mythical choice once for all "there," is signified the soul's will and disposition in general everywhere. Continuing in terms of the Platonic imaginations on the destiny of souls, he observes that since each soul, as a microcosm, contains within itself a representation not only of the whole intelligible world, but also of the soul which guides the visible universe, it may find itself, after departure from the body, in the sun or one of the planets or in the sphere of the fixed stars, according as it has energized with the power related to this or that part of the whole. Those souls that have overpassed the "daemonic nature" are at this stage of their mutation outside all destiny of birth and beyond the limits of the visible heaven.