ABSTRACT
Soul is the entity by means of which the incorporeal comes into effective contact with the corporeal and which lies, as it were, on the borderline of the transcendent and physical universes. It is, in Plotinus’ own words, ‘amphibious’.1 Plotinus takes up the challenge of the Platonic concept of soul which entails a tension between the transcendent functions of soul, seen in its essential capacity to think clearly when freed from the constraints of the body, and its function as the giver of life to the body, whether the individual body or the body of the universe. But if the soul is freed entirely from the body, in what sense can it be said to fulfil the latter function? The stress on soul’s essential nature as thinking, that is as being truly soul when it returns into itself in contemplation, is maintained by Plotinus even though he locates the level of truly transcendent thought in Intellect. Although, as we shall see, Plotinus does sometimes appear to blur the distinctions between intellect and soul, he sees in the end little difficulty in maintaining the Platonic concept of the transcendent functioning of soul as a distinct activity of soul as opposed to bodily perception on the one hand and the activities of intellect on the other. The presence of the soul to the body, however, occasions him far greater philosophical difficulties. In his Life of Plotinus Porphyry tells us how he raised this difficult issue with Plotinus who then, much to the annoyance of many members of his seminar who were apparently content with straightforward expositions of his thought, declared that the discussion must continue until all of Porphyry’s problems and objections had been answered.2 It is a good example of Plotinus’ genuinely thorough, exploratory and questioning style of philosophising. In the case of soul it prompted not only the sort of problem solving in the long treatise (later divided by Porphyry) on ‘Problems of the soul’3 but also the even more fundamental posing of the problem of how the
incorporeal is present to the corporeal in Enneads VI. 4 and 5. An essential feature of soul, as being incorporeal, is that it is undivided and one. Thus Plotinus can talk about Soul as a whole, whereas we would more naturally begin from a consideration of individual souls. Plotinus must, however, accept the unity of soul, which must then be reconciled with the concept of individual souls. Equally curious for us, but not for him, was the idea that the world has its own soul, responsible for its shaping and life. For Plotinus individual souls and the World Soul are subordinate aspects of Soul as a whole. As embodied individuals we are closely related to the World Soul which, like ourselves, is also in direct contact with the corporeal.
