Plotinus and Spinoza

Plotinus lived about a century before St. Augustine. He was one of the first of what are known as Neo-Platonists.

A (ridiculously short) summary of Plato:

Plato was a hard dualist: He believed that there existed two aspects of reality, the physical (what we perceive with our senses) and the ideal (what we perceive with our minds). The Ideal realm existed in the mind of God, and consisted of the Forms—the Ideal man, the Ideal horse, the Ideal circle, and so on. These Ideals existed before individual people, horses, or circles could ever come into existence.

Matter and Form were united by a Prime Mover, but only Form subsists on its own. Because matter is ontologically separate from God, it’s subject to change, death, and evil; life and the ultimate good emanate from the divine to inhabit and give order to chaotic matter.

(If all this sounds familiar, it’s because Thomas Aquinas converted Plato to Christianity, in a way! Aquinas was also a precursor of Renaissance Humanism.)

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Plotinus renewed and expanded Platonic thought and in a way made it his own. He may have actually edged out of dualism into a complex, many-shaded monism.

In Plotinus’ view, the ultimate source of existence was the One, or the Good, loosely corresponding to an impersonal theism. The world came to be through a series of emanations—not in time, but in levels of reality.

One stage “below” the One is the Intellect. This is pure mind, pure reason, unconnected with physical reality. The job, so to speak, of the Intellect is to contemplate the One; through this contemplation, Plato’s Forms are created.

Below Intellect is Soul. This is a tricky concept, because modern Westerners think of Soul as an animating principle of sorts. Another way to describe it might be something like the Will of German Idealism. Plotinus’ Soul is nothing more than the nature of desire. Soul desires the Intellect, just as the Intellect contemplates the One. When we find beauty in things, that’s Soul at work. (It’s also Soul at work when we’re hungry, horny, or acquisitive!)

Each principle that “emanates” from the One has an internal and external activity. The One’s internal activity is the Intellect, while its external activity is emanation itself. The Intellect both contemplates, and therefore produces, the Forms. Soul both desires, and produces, the sensible world. In this way everything that exists, whether physically, mentally, or spiritually, exists in a chain of reality constantly moving in and out from the One to the world and back again.

Plotinus can be thought of as a moral dualist--it's matter's separation from the One that leads to change, death, and evil. But he's also a sort of monist, in that everything springs from, and ultimately returns to, the One.

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Compare all this to Spinoza’s thought:

Spinoza thought that nature and God were synonymous. The term “pantheism” was actually coined specifically to describe his theology.

He was also a monist (monism, the idea that everything shares the same substance or existence, stands in opposition to dualism, the idea that the world has two separate natures)—specifically a substance monist.

In the Ethics, Spinoza begins by explaining the substance at the base of all existence. This way of conceiving of things goes all the way back to the early Greeks, much of whose natural philosophy and metaphysics was occupied with the question of what, exactly, was the “substance” (literally, “standing under”) that made up the universe. The Greek conception of substance included the traditional elements: earth (solidity), air (rarity), fire (warmth), and water (moisture); the argument among many natural philosophers was which of these primordial elements was the first.

Spinoza skipped that argument and simply said that the primordial substance was, well, Substance. Because Substance was the only thing that existed—in fact, it was the very definition of existence—Substance was God.

He then proceeded to explain the properties of Substance. Substance must have the attribute of infinity—after all, if more than one substance existed, then they would cancel each other out. So there’s only one Substance. Because there’s only one Substance, its attributes include everything—matter and mind being the most important for his theories (they were, to him, two sides of the same coin).

So out of Substance, attributes are formed, similarly to Plotinus’ Intelligence emanating from the One.

From these attributes, modes are then created. These modes are like the Forms—each mode being the Ideal of every physical thing. The end point of Substance, attributes, and modes is the world around us, but everything consists of the same Substance: everything was made up of God.

The most important attribute of God, in Spinoza’s theory, is Mind (which loosely corresponds both to Plotinus' Intelligence and the Stoic divine Reason). Because God has both the attribute of infinity and the attribute of mind, God can be thought of as Infinite Mind, or Infinite Reason.

This in turn goes back to the Stoic tradition of Greek and Roman philosophers; Spinoza shares much of their ethical theory of acceptance (which itself bears a striking resemblance to Buddhist nonattachment). More on Stoicism later.

Because Mind or Reason is the same thing as Will, God could also be thought of as Infinite Will. This idea of Will being active as a part of universal existence pops up again in the thought of German Idealists like Arthur Schopenhauer and Johann Fichte. Fichte’s essays were one of the inspirations of German National Socialism.

The history of pantheistic thought is not all roses. I’ll talk about Fichte’s ideas of the self/Self and how it led into some very dark history in a different post.