SOURCE: “The Symbolism of the Enneads,” in Reading Neoplatonism: Non-Discursive Thinking in the Texts of Plotinus, Proclus, and Damascius, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 91-114.

[In the following excerpt, Rappe contends that Plotinus used metaphorical language in the Enneads to help readers to understand difficult concepts.]

The significance of imagery or symbolism in the Enneads has long been a source of scholary contention.¹ In 1961 Beierwaltes published his well-known article, “Plotins Metaphysik des Lichtes,”² in which he studied Plotinus' extensive employment of the image of light. Beierwaltes starts out with an assumption that governs the way he looks at the metaphors in the Enneads. He assumes that figures of speech can be more or less adequate to the task of representation, and that representational adequacy depends upon the ontological approximation of image and archetype. Since it is incorporeal, light turns out to be the most appropriate image for the task of representing philosophical truth.

In Beierwaltes's view, light is not merely a metaphor when it is used to describe intellect, since it can succeed as an image of the intellect only when “there is a presence of the original in the image.”³ Visual seeing differs from intellectual seeing because the visual object is external to the subject whereas the intellectual object is internal to the subject. Thus vision can be either intellectual or perceptual, but light, as the medium of vision, remains the same entity in either mode.⁴

Replies to Beierwaltes have been both numerous and extensive, but most interpreters believe that in the Enneads symbols have no independent value.⁵ The majority of scholars insist that, far from speaking of the adequacy of symbols, one should speak of the subordination of symbols, since metaphor only redescribes doctrine.

In my reassessment of the Enneads' metaphors, I show that previous approaches have been hampered by their adoption of a lexical rather than a rhetorical understanding of metaphorical language. My claim is that although metaphor in the Enneads provides pragmatic variation upon already established themes, it does not compete with literal language as a means of conveying doctrine. Instead, its purpose is to assist the reader in assimilating doctrine. At least some metaphors in the Enneads can be read for their rhetorical function as directive utterances, designed to tell us not how things are, but how to see things.

How does metaphor accomplish this? To answer this question, one has to be familiar with what Plotinus sees as the major drawback besetting doctrinal deliverances.⁶ Plotinus holds that language fails as a vehicle for conveying metaphysical truth since words necessarily refer to entities standing outside of the linguistic system, whereas truth is both self-certifying and self-revealing.⁷ Truth cannot be ascertained by linguistic or conceptual representations; it can be apprehended only when there is an identity between the knower and the known.⁸ Of course, the major problem with such a theory is that it appears necessarily to elude both verification and experience.

Metaphor enters as one way in which Plotinus, holding to this theory of truth, tries to bring the possibility of the identity of the knower and the known into the sphere of experience. He employs metaphorical expressions to point out features of accessible experiences that exhibit, more or less perfectly, some degree of unity between the knowing subject and the object known. In this way, he uses metaphor to guide the reader to a better understanding of what knowing, in the most proper sense, is and is like.

Plotinus employs the image of the diaphanous earth to contrast two ways of looking at the world. The first way of looking at things he describes as “looking outside”; the second way of looking at things he sometimes calls “seeing inside.”⁹ My concern will be to show that when Plotinus wants to contrast discursive thinking with non-discursive thinking (or intellectual knowledge) he invokes this distinction between looking outside and seeing inside. To give his readers a sense of what seeing inside might be like, Plotinus employs the image of the transparent world.

The chapter develops in four stages. First, I elaborate a rhetorical reading of the metaphorical utterances in the Enneads. Next I review some of the distinctions between discursive and non-discursive thinking relevant to the discussion in part three, where I apply a rhetorical reading of the metaphor of the transparent earth. I conclude with some remarks on Plotinus' philosophy of metaphor.

METAPHORICAL DEIXIS IN THE ENNEADS

Earlier we saw that Plotinus criticized discursive thought for misrepresenting reality: true being does not exist externally to the knower. The unity of the knower and the known is the condition sine qua non for intellectual apprehension; discursive thought involves the severance of this unity.¹⁰ How does Plotinus' own linguistic praxis conform with his views on the limitations of discursive thought? We might aver that, practically, the consequences of Plotinus' critique leave us no better off than does Skepticism—deserted by an author who becomes almost willfully inscrutable and taunted by a text that becomes almost instantly displaced.

One scholar who has raised this issue is Steven Strange.¹¹ He writes:

Plotinus' critique is metaphysically important, because it requires a new view of the status of the language of metaphysics. Terms of ordinary language, the normal use of which is to speak about everyday sensible experience, must have new meanings if they are to be applied to Forms. Plotinus thinks that the highest and most important kind of reality can only be spoken of using metaphors.

Strange's remarks are relevant because they consider how Plotinus' theoretical constraints operate upon his own discourse. But Strange does not consider why it is that metaphor is any less vulnerable to Plotinus' criticisms. Is not metaphorical thinking—the obvious objection—itself discursive? It has been far more common for scholars to argue that symbolic language in the Enneads should enjoy no such privileged status. We find this opinion expressed in Ferwerda's monograph and echoed in Blumenthal's bibliographic survey.¹² Plotinus never uses a symbol without a surrounding context that explicates the contents of that symbol, presenting it in a discursive form. Ferwerda concludes that symbols in effect only redescribe the doctrinal content and are used as a cap, functionally insignificant as vehicles of meaning. They have no independent value.

Metaphor here is thought to have a purely derivative status because it must be interpreted in the light of statements of fact or of doctrine. This is to discover the meaning of the metaphor in the cognitive content that it is purported to have and to say that, as a vehicle of this content, the metaphor depends upon a literal statement of fact, which accurately describes, one might say, the way things are. Metaphor is thereby disparaged on the philosophical grounds that any representation equates with derogation, in accordance with standard Platonic ontology.¹³ Whereas Strange's remarks hinted at a role that metaphor might be able to play in the exposition of Plotinus' philosophy by circumventing the strictures of ordinary literal usage, the majority of Plotinus scholars are doubtful that such a role would be consonant with the cautionary views that any Platonist is bound to hold concerning the status of images in general.

How one responds to the use of metaphor in Plotinus' text may be conditoned by one's understanding of the nature of metaphorical utterances. Thus before looking at metaphorical language in Plotinus, I would like to sketch more precisely what I have in mind by a rhetorical conception of metaphor.

The traditional comparison theory of metaphor is most familiar to classicists from Aristotle's Rhetoric.¹⁴ It simply asserts that all metaphors are elliptical usages for similes, or imply similes. Thus the metaphor can be explained in terms of other, literal species of language use, in the sense that once a comparison is stated, it may be literally true that certain objects share features in common.¹⁵

If Thrasymachus says to Socrates, “You need a wet nurse,” he is using the metaphor of infancy to describe Socrates' behavior and is suggesting that Socrates and infants share some behavioral features. Thrasymachus' Socrates and babies both snivel, and so the metaphor is simply an elliptical way of asserting some real property of Socrates.

An objection to this theory is that often the comparison itself seems to carry a feature that is either irreducibly metaphorical or would not count as a literal use of the term.¹⁶ For example, although young children may be said to whine, this usage of “whine” is perhaps itself metaphorical since it refers only secondarily to a noise and primarily to some kind of behavior that has certain psychological features not captured in the physical act of whining.

The comparison theory has recently given way to various pragmatic views of metaphor. According to these views, the sentence or literal meaning of the statement diverges from the utterance meaning of the sentence, or the way that the sentence is being used, such that the literal reading of the metaphor has a false truth value, whereas the metaphorical reading of the metaphor has a true truth value.¹⁷

When Thrasymachus says “Socrates needs a wet nurse,” that is not literally true, because in fact Socrates has long been taking solid food. Nor would any serious listener berate Thrasymachus for having failed to notice this about Socrates. We would, however, seriously fault the truth of Thrasymachus' statement if it turned out that Socrates was behaving appropriately in the course of his argument and was responding in a judicious way to his interlocutor.

The literal falsity of this metaphor suggests to his audience that Thrasymachus is using language (a) not literally and (b) with some other objectives. Perhaps he wants to say that Socrates is caviling unnecessarily. Finally, though, he intends his assertion to have some effect on Socrates. Thrasymachus will be trying to change the format of the conversation by getting Socrates to concede that Socrates is expecting Thrasymachus to be too punctilious in his speaking style. He is therefore positively asserting that he is not going to be the wet nurse that Socrates seems to demand as his interlocutor.

Moreover, Thrasymachus' very use of this wet nurse metaphor shows that he refuses to be a wet nurse. By insulting Socrates in this way, he exhibits non-compliance with Socrates' strictures. So metaphor here is like a dialect that speaker and listener share,¹⁸ used to encourage the interlocutor to expect changes in the conversational dynamics.

The views of Beierwaltes and Blumenthal depend upon a comparison theory of metaphor: for both scholars, the literal resemblance between the comparanda (whether this resemblance be construed as ontological, pace Beierwaltes, or doctrinal, pace Blumethal) is the source of the metaphor's meaning. In short, these interpreters view Plotinus' metaphors as straightforwardly lexical.¹⁹ The meaning of the metaphor must be recovered by looking at what we take it to be asserting, that is, at its paraphrased cognitive content, according to the majority view, or by keeping in mind the true ontological reference of the symbol, according to Beierwaltes.

What these interpretations have left out is a pragmatic account of metaphorical language.²⁰ A pragmatic view might reveal that Plotinus' metaphors are irreducible to literal language because of the cognitive enhancement they lend to the process of communication.²¹ The heuristic value of metaphorical language in the Enneads cannot be measured by its doctrinal equivalent, in the sense that one might abstract a propositional content existing independently of any contextual considerations.

In fact the often abrupt, often subtle, perspectival shift that metaphor effects in an audience is garnered by Plotinus as a means of interrupting, then helping us to distance and even to abandon, habitual ways of thinking. Plotinus' metaphors attempt at once to describe how things are, so that they succeed in being reality depicting, and at the same time to diverge from normal descriptive use by telling us how to see things.²² His metaphors push us outside of the semantic system, in which a word is exchanged for some conceptual equivalent, by partially denoting some feature of the world or indeed of experience itself.²³ Plotinus relies on metaphor to communicate ostensively; he uses it to pick out features from within his own cognitive environment, in the belief that the same kind of experience or object may become apparent to his audience as well. Communication, essentially the awareness shared between speaker and audience resulting from the intentions of the speaker to bring this state of affairs about, is facilitated by means of metaphorical utterance.²⁴

By using the metaphor of the transparent world, Plotinus pushes us to the limits of language's signifying function, forcing us to ask ourselves how we should be looking if we wish to follow the argument. His metaphor is designed to make the reader reflect upon the question of how the world is seen, and whether or not the world is as it is seen:

as if someone should have the sight that Lynkeus is said to have had, and to see the inside of the earth, as the myth riddles about the eyes they have there.

(V.8.4.26)

The self-repudiating feature of Plotinus' most prominent metaphor does more than convey a sense of the mythical. By means of this image, an experiential component is infused into the text. Seeing through the earth is not possible for human beings, and yet Plotinus returns to this image as the basis for establishing communication between himself and the reader.

DISCURSIVITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS

Let us now turn to Plotinus' typology for discursive thinking. My central point is that for Plotinus, one of the most salient characteristics of discursive thought is its intentional structure: discursive states exhibit directedness by being about objects that are ontologically independent of those states:

We allocated to [discursive reason the ability to] reflect upon what is external to it and to meddle in external matters, but we take it that it is basic to intellect to reflect upon its own nature and what belongs to its own nature.

(V.2.3.17)

Of course, thinking or saying that things are thus-and-so is not identical to their being thus-and-so, in most circumstances. The point seems almost too obvious to belabor, and yet it is a point that Plotinus repeatedly stresses when discussing the ontological concomitants of discursive thought.

How is it that discursive states are directed toward particulars in the world? Here Plotinus' account is informed by the Aristotelian doctrine of isomorphism, enunciated at De anima III.8, according to which the mind, when comprehending or perceiving an object, becomes identical with the form of that object. Aristotle stipulates that the mind “thinks the forms by means of mental images” (De anima, 43165; Hicks) in order to represent its objects (whether they be perceptual or conceptual). Finally, he employs a strong analogy between sense-perception and mental perception, describing ordinary thought as a kind of mental receptivity to form.²⁵ Here is the relevant passage from the De anima.²⁶

But if thought is like perception, then the mind must be acted upon by the thought object or something else must [happen] which is analogous to this. Therefore, the mind must be impassive, but must be capable of receiving the form.

Following Aristotle, Plotinus preserves this analogy between mental and physical perception. Discursive thinking involves mental representation of the forms:

the soul … is other than its object, and has a discursive awareness that sees as if it were one thing gazing at another.

(III.8.6.22-25 [with omissions])

Having appropriated the Aristotelian terminology, Plotinus sets himself the task of making a clear distinction between noesis and dianoesis, or non-discursive and discursive thought, a distinction that is absent in the Aristotelian discussion. In Enneads V.5, we see him groping toward an account of noesis that departs from the intentional model that Aristotle uses.

In the opening chapter of this treatise, we encounter the well-worn Plotinian formulation of discursive thought as that which is “cognizant of what is external.” … Plotinus etymologizes the word … “opinion,” from the verb “to receive,” in keeping with Aristotelian isomorphism:²⁷

Opinion receives, indeed, that is why it is opinion, because it receives something from an object that is substantially different from that which receives it.

In the case of non-discursive thought, Plotinus breaks with the Aristotelian conception of noesis by rejecting its criterion for the identity of the knower and the known as too weak: the mind's coming into contact with the [noetón] is not enough to render the mind identical with its intelligible object.²⁸ Although it is true that Aristotle distinguishes between perception and thinking on the grounds that the latter is “up to us” because the objects of thought are internal to nous, nevertheless, as we have seen, Aristotle indicates that “thinking is [a case of] being affected, or of being acted upon.”²⁹ Aristotle thinks that, for human beings, using one's nous involves representing (already acquired) concepts by means of mental images.³⁰

By contrast, Plotinus' account of thinking at the highest level is that such thought is precisely non-representational, whereas discursive thinking is always inherently representational.³¹ Discursive thought gazes outside at the world and discovers the sensible object, or gazes within toward the Forms and represents them by means of concepts.³² Absent from intellectual activity, noesis, is the intentional structure of discursive thought in which there is a discrete subject that stands apart from the object known. No longer can it be said that the mind exhibits directedness toward an object in the act of noesis. Rather, the subject discovers that it is its own object: “when something knows itself, [this] is the proper meaning of knowing” (V.3.13.15).

Plotinus derails the Aristotelian analogy between perception and knowledge by introducing Platonic language to describe the act of [nóesis] … They show up in V.3 as a countermeasure to Aristotelian isomorphism. Here the Platonic categories of sameness and difference violate the unilateral direction of intentionality:

That which contemplates must be [divided] into two things and each of these must be external [sc. to each other] or both must be internal. Contemplation must constantly [take place] within identity and difference.

(V.3.10.23-26)

But what does this experience of difference within identity amount to? One answer is that it amounts to a paradox. Plotinus exploits the fact that the Platonic categories are a series of paired opposites to demonstrate the paradoxical nature of intellect's activity: the intellect knows an object that is simultaneously not grasped as an object. Moreover, this object is both unitary and inherently multiple.³³ These contradictions cause Plotinus' difficulties to proliferate as he tries to describe the nature of intellectual thought.³⁴ This “knowledge which is not one thing different from that in which it is”³⁵ is enigmatic by Plotinus' own admission: “just how [this form of thought can exist] Plato left for us to investigate …” (V.8.4.54).

THE METAPHOR OF THE TRANSPARENT WORLD

The problem with Plotinus' formulation in Enneads V is that it would seem to posit a solipsistic activity that is a far cry from what ordinarily takes place in human cognition. At this juncture, Plotinus turns to the metaphor of the transparent world.³⁶ He uses this metaphor in an effort to represent a methodology that can escape from the limitations of discursivity, because it circumvents or modifies the subject / object dichotomy that characterizes ordinary thought.

At the opening of V.8.9 there is an extended meditation upon the relationship between wisdom and the products whose creation it governs. The beauty of our cosmos, Plotinus tells us, can best be appreciated if we conceive of the cosmos as transparent. We can see the beauty of the world only if we are capable of seeing through the world. Although the remarks in chapter 1 may seem elusive, falling somewhere in between metaphor and cosmological speculation, it quickly becomes apparent that Plotinus expects the reader / audience to be following very closely indeed.

He offers us nothing less than instruction in how to recreate this image of the transparent world for ourselves, describing an exercise involving visualization of the world as situated within a diaphanous sphere: “So far as possible, try to conceive of this world as one unified whole, with each of its parts remaining self-identical and distinct …” (V1.8.9.1-3.)

Here Plotinus suggests that the reader try to perceive the world as unified within thought, to think of the world as a single object of thought, yet as retaining all of the features of its different members. At this point we might do well to ask, why does Plotinus want his reader to think of this world as a whole?

Plotinus attempts to fine-tune the manner in which we normally comprehend the world by opening up the field of awareness to include all possible objects of awareness. His purpose is to restore the natural fullness that is available to the human intellect as a birthright but has been obscured due to the dominance of discursive thinking. Normally he discursive mind focuses its attention upon a succession of objects in an unceasing temporal flow: “discursive thought, in order to make a statement, must grasp its objects one [after] another.”³⁷ This concentration upon the objects of discursive thinking leads to a forgetfulness of the full resources of consciousness, a condition that Plotinus refers to as “bewitchment” or “falling under the spell” of the objects of consciousness: “everything that is directed toward another thing is under the spell of the other” (IV.4.43.16).

By contrast, Plotinus describes non-discursive thinking as the ability to see the objects of awareness “all together together at once.”³⁸ The first step in the visualization presented in our text, then, is intended to develop the reader's ability to unify the objects of consciousness. This will be the first step that Plotinus wishes the reader to follow in order to gain some sense of what Plotinus means by nondiscursive awareness. Another feature of the image now emerges into view.³⁹

So that whatever part of, for example, the outer sphere is shown forth, there immediately follows the image of the sun together with all of the other stars, and earth and sea and all sentient beings are seen, as if upon a transparent sphere.

Although the sphere is envisioned as transparent, it is not empty. Holding the simple image, the sphere, before the mind's eye, the reader is to fill up the space of that image entirely, to picture the entire universe of sentient and non-sentient beings in all of their diversity. The reader has before the mind's eye a vast field consisting in the panoramic sweep of the entire cosmos that is simultaneously intricate in its detail and specification. The purpose of this interior visualization is to call attention to the quality of interior vision itself, and in particular, to its capacity to be at once unitary and multifaceted in a way that exterior vision is not.

This facet of the image, its appearance as an integral totality, functions as a balance upon the monolithic quality of the initial visualization. It also introduces a third stage in the developing vision:

Let the luminous sphere pictured in the mind contain all things within it, whether in motion or at a standstill, or rather both in motion and at a standstill. Keeping watch over this image, place another next to it, taking away its mass. Remove both space and the imaginary conception of matter in you [altogether]; do not simply try to get hold of another sphere, smaller in mass than [the first].

(V.8.9.9-14).

The reader, trying to contract the teeming morass of all sentient beings into this tiny sphere, must ruthlessly compress the entire universe. Instructions for this form of imaginary compression are included in the exhortation to “remove space.” Here Plotinus suggests that the student try to picture the world as existing within his imagination, that is, to confront the world solely as it is apprehended in awareness.

A parallel image is developed in VI.4.7.22-6:

If you were to make a small luminous mass a kind of center and then to place a spherical body around it so that the light inside illuminated the entire container, there being no other source of light for the outer mass …

The image is very similar in structure and content to the one developed in V.8. The subject of consciousness, represented by the center, is described as pervading the entire field of light, which represents consciousness. From the viewpoint of this subject, there is no source of light for the outer mass other than that which originates in the center. That is to say, the objects of awareness are and must be available for a conscious subject. Although this state of affairs may seem quite obvious and not altogether interesting, it is a state of affairs to which Plotinus is very concerned to alert the reader: Plotinus is communicating a way of looking at the objects of awareness such that one sees them as pervaded by, or not other than, the subject of awareness.

The sustained practice of this visualization leads to a state of greater detachment from the objects of awareness. None of the beings, either animate or inanimate, either human or non-human, is to have priority within the vision. All are equidistant from the subject of consciousness, an equidistance that Plotinus signals by using the word “center” in VI.4.7.23. similarly, the objective status of the knower herself or himself is now open for investigation.

Any objective fact about this knower, as for example his or her location in time or place, now becomes one more component of the integral vision that includes all beings, even the knower himself or herself. Given this initial confrontation with the world in all of its vastness as experienced within consciousness, the identity of knower itself becomes an issue, since the knower is discovered to be outside of the contents of the sphere, and yet related to it as its cause and source.

One obvious feature of these images is their fluid dynamism, the precision and clarity of an extremely vivid picture that undergoes a sudden shift of perspective.⁴⁰ Such a combination of sustained observation together with abrupt displacement reflects two primary mental components that accompany the non-discursive thinking conveyed in these texts: concentration and insight. The contemplative practice that is meant to underlie these images is designed to strengthen these intellectual qualities within the student and employs a non-discursive approach to that end. The self-disciplined effort of focusing the mind upon its object with intensity and attention is a feature of non-discursive thinking, since in this state, the subject and object of awareness must merge.

HEURESIS AND DIDAXIS IN THE ENNEADS

Now it is time to cast our gaze back toward the subject / object dichotomy that characterizes discursive thinking and to ask whether there has been any modification of the intentional structure noticed earlier. In ordinary visual experience and for that matter, in ordinary discursive experience of any kind, we find ourselves looking outside the mind. Plotinus contemplates the possibility of entering into these same discursive states with a kind of readjusted gaze, directing the attention inward and looking, not at the visual or conceptual object as situated outside of the intentional state, but at the intentional structure of the mind, which includes both the subject and the object of knowledge.

Once this perspective is adopted, the knower is no longer looking outside of the mind. Gazing outside of the mind, one also gazes into the mind. This metaphor of the transparent world is designed to give the reader some indication of an experience that, although it cannot be viewed as approximating the unity of intellection, is nevertheless a relative unity that can be recalled with respect to intentional states.

Plotinus would have us contemplate not simply visual experience, but the entirety of the objective world—any possible object available for representation—and ask, how is it present to us? The reader, looking simultaneously into his or her own experience and out at the world, interprets the text fully only when thought turns back upon itself. In this respect, these texts may remind us of the identity of word and object that characterizes the kind of speech that Plotinus posits as an ideal philosophical language:

The wise men of Egypt … did not use the forms of letters which follow the order of words … but by … inscribing in their temples one particular image of one particular thing they manifested the non-discursiveness of the intelligible world.

(V.8.6, Armstrong's translation)

Not everyone agrees that there may be a self-referential element embedded within this allusion. One scholar, concluding his article with a glance at the Egyptian sages, comments:⁴¹

This is the prelapsarian language which, had it ever existed, might be recovered to supply the words the mystic lacks. But the passage is poignant precisely because its author knows that such a language signifies only to the wise and that between theirs and ours lies an (almost) unbridgeable chasm.

This assessment of sagacious discourse may leave us with an excessively pessimistic view about the possibility of coming to understand the philosophy of the Enneads. For what happens when, in contemplating the visual field as such, the reader is looking into his or her own thought? Surely it could be argued that just this self-awareness is an example of the subject and object of consciousness approaching a unity. The transparent world is a metaphor for what is actually present to consciousness, and Plotinus directs us to our own consciousness to discover what he is trying to communicate by means of this image. The exercise that he prescribes is an appreciation of the simultaneous presence of all beings together as a unified objective field for consciousness to experience. This experience of the unity of consciousness, which neither excludes the outside world nor isolates the mental apart from its intentional content, becomes a reference point for the reader as he or she attempts to follow Plotinus in his investigations. Above all, Plotinus would remind us that we can truly enter into the life of philosophy, not by virtue of an individual claim to philosophical expertise, but by virtue of the reality of our essential nature as intellect. For the discovery of this nature, we have to begin in the midst of our own cognitive life.

PRAGMATICS OF METAPHOR RECONSIDERED

Here I commence to argue for a rhetorical reading of the metaphors in the Enneads by meeting some methodological objections: are all of Plotinus metaphors to be read in a strong creative sense, or is only the metaphor of the transparent earth to be so read? Are there any linguistic criteria by which we can justify this reading? I am going to suggest that Plotinus approximates ritual language as a signal to his audience that his metaphors are meant to be creative in the sense outlined earlier.

To capture the ritual features of Plotinus' metaphorical language, we turn briefly to a body of Alexandrian religious literature that antedates the Enneads, the Corpus Hermeticum (CH).⁴² The CH is a group of treatises couched as dialogues between Hellenized Egyptian deities (Hermes, Tat, Asclepius / Imhotep, Ammon, and Agathos Daimon, with the addition of Nous, who also functions as an interlocutor) broadly informed by an eclectic mixture of Greek philosophical schools, and framed as either revelatory or initiatory in tone.⁴³ Much could be said about the possible influences of Hermetic literature in the Enneads, given its probable development during the first to third centuries c.e. What especially concerns me is the linguistic marking that designates the dialogic and initiatory aspects of this literature.

In what follows I suggest that there is a dialogic element present in some of the imagistic sequences in the Enneads that may recall the Hermetic tradition. Linguistic phenomena such as intimate address, real time intruding upon the narrative voice, the presence of technical prayer formulae or invocations, and the heavy use of epithets as well as anaphora feature significantly in Hermetic initiatory texts. These same elements are self-consciously adopted and prominently displayed in those texts of Plotinus that appropriate the ritualistic milieu of his Alexandrian predecessors. Syntactically, the grammar exhibits a shift from the indicative to the imperative, subjunctive, or optative moods. This shift in the mood of the verb is often accompanied by a shift in the person of the verb, from third to second.

Turning now to a lexical item, in the opening lines of V.8.9, two terms, [kósmos] and [pan] are used in a way that recalls ascent formulae found within the Hermetica.⁴⁴ Plotinus' exercises actually recall the hymnic quality of many of the Hermetic ascent sequences, which in the CH may appear coupled with an epiphany or declaration of enlightenment on behalf of the student. Such is the case with CH XI, an initiatory dialogue between Nous and Hermes, in which Hermes asks for clarification concerning the relationship between God and the universe. The first part of the dialogue is conceived as a hymn by at least some editors, and hence I use Scott's translation and presentation of the opening series of formulae:⁴⁵

God, Aeon, Kosmos, Time, Coming-to-be.
God makes the Aeon,
the Aeon makes the Kosmos,
the Kosmos makes Time,
and Time makes Coming-to-be.
The essence of God is the Good,
the essence of the Aeon is sameness,
the essence of the Kosmos is order,
the essence of Time is change,
and the essence of Coming-to-be is life.
The workings of God are mind and soul,
the workings of the Aeon are immortality and duration,
the workings of the Kosmos are
reinstatement in identity and
reinstatement by substitution,
the workings of Time are increase and decrease,
and the workings of Coming-to-be are quality and quantity.
The Aeon then is in God,
the Kosmos is in the Aeon,
Time is in the Kosmos,
and Coming-to-be is in Time.

The visionary passage at V.8.9 forms a similar sequence, beginning with the body of the universe, moving on to the cosmos, then to soul, and finally to nous or theos. Anaphora accentuates the ritualistic element of the texts, so that there is an iconic relationship between the form of the language and its pragmatic function.⁴⁷ The sense of transformation is graphically conveyed through the repetition of key words in slightly different collocations, and by the end of the passage, a given image can become the inverse of its initial presentation.

For example, in VI.7.12, the vision moves from a tiny point of light to the unbounded light of the sun and, beyond that, to a light that is coextensive with all things. Again, in V.1.2 the adjective … (tranquil) is repeated in a series that begins with the individual body and terminates in the surrounding heavens.⁴⁸

As an example of an ascent text in which these same features are conveyed by an authoritative wisdom voice transmitting instruction in gnosis, we can turn to the roughly contemporaneous Hermetic treatise twelve:

Gather all of the opposites into yourself, such qualities as fire, water, heat and cold, dry and wet. And realize that you are everywhere at once, in the earth, in the sea, in heaven. You are not yet born, you are in the womb, you are old, a youth, dead, in an afterlife. Realize all of these things simultaneously, all times, places, things, qualities, and you can realize God.⁴⁹

The conceit of the world within the mind is a central element of the Hermetic corpus that becomes the fulcrum of the religious experience promulgated in these texts: rebirth of the self as the world soul.

The image of the sphere is also frequent in the Hermetica, appearing as a cosmic head in more anthropomorphized versions,⁵⁰ and elsewhere as the great krater, the cosmic mixing bowl of Plato's Timaeus, into which the divine mind has been poured as into a baptismal font.

He filled a great basin with mind and sent it down to earth; and he appointed a herald and bade him make proclamation to the hearts of men: hearken each human heart; dip yourself in this basin if you can, recognizing for what purpose you have been made, and believing that you shall ascend to him who sent the basin down.

(CH IV.4, Scott's translation)

By now it should be clear that Plotinus has recast a tradition of gnosis within a framework of classicizing dialectic, thereby developing a unique philosophical dialect that speaks not to different audiences, but rather with varying voices. Pragmatically, these texts are marked as belonging to an initiatory askesis.

CONCLUSION: METAPHOR AND METAPHYSICS

I have been discussing the use of metaphor in a highly eclectic and perhaps even syncretistic text. Although the path of least resistance might prompt us to view this text solely within the cultural amalgam of Alexandrian gnosis, there is some merit in viewing the text as Plotinus' unique contribution to a theory about the language of metaphysics and perhaps as a critique of philosophical discourse within the Platonic tradition. I would suggest that Plotinus has attempted to invert the usual relationship that exists between metaphor and metaphysics.

Rather often, critics charge metaphysicians with subverting natural language for their own purposes,⁵¹ inventing a parasitic orthodoxy that thrives at the expense of usual semantic relationships. The language of metaphysics is typically the language of unsaying, of the unseen and insensible. Perhaps Derrida best captures the suspicion that metaphysical discourse arouses precisely because of the metaphorical subterfuge with which it engages its audience: “Presence disappearing into its own radiance, the hidden source of light, of truth and of meaning, the erasure of the veils of being—such must be the insistent return of that which subjects metaphysics to metaphor.”⁵² In Platonic metaphysics, Form, or eidos, is metaphorized to become precisely the opposite of what it signifies. The eidos of an object is no longer what it appears to be, nor can a given Form signify or refer to any object in the world. In this way, Plato constructs a language far removed from the semantics of natural language.

A practical way of envisioning Plotinus' metaphors is to see that they constitute a reversal of the Platonic strategy. Plotinus represents the language of metaphysics as preeminently concrete and as securely grounding its references in that which is immediately accessible. In this respect, he employs what we might term a rhetoric of immediacy, in contrast to the Platonic tendency toward the ontological deferment of meaning.

Occasionally, we catch glimmers of Plotinus' critique of linguistic practices that characterized or even became the hallmark of the prior philosophical tradition. Here for example Plotinus criticizes the Platonic language of abstraction and along with it the entire Platonic dualist ontology.⁵³ Here Plotinus is quoting Plato's Timaeus with respect to the Platonic concept of participation in the Forms.

I am afraid that this manner of speaking is vacuous. What would the words, “far off” or “separate” mean in this context? If not for this way of speaking, there would in turn be no difficulty or puzzle about the concept of participation …

(VI.5.8.6)

By contrast, Plotinus will sometimes bestow a didactic largesse upon his readers, insisting that they too have access to being, that the universe is but an imbrication of the intelligible forms, and that even the lowest possible mode of consciousness, sense-perception, cannot finally veil higher truths:

If someone is unable to discover the soul in this detached state, first let him grasp the discursive soul, and then ascend from there. But if he cannot even do this, then [let him grasp] the faculty of sense-perception that conveys the intelligibles still more distantly, or even sense-perception by itself (with its faculties) since sense-perception has its nature [determined] by the Forms.

(V.3.9.28 ff.)

Notes

1. For concise histories of this controversy, see Schroeder 1992, p. 37, and Blumenthal 1987.

2. Beierwaltes 1961.

3. Beierwaltes 1991.

4. Beierwaltes 1961, p. 342: “Thinking and realization are actually a mode of seeing.”

5. Perhaps the first response came in the form of Ferwerda's monograph (Ferwerda 1965), whose view can be summarized from the following paragraph taken from his introduction (p. 7): “Nous pouvons donc conclure que l'image chez Plotin tout comme chez Platon ne vaut jamais en soi; elle vaut ce que vaut la connaissance de celui qui s'en sert; elle ne vaut que si elle est vraie et, ce qui est extrèmement important, si elle est verifiée. Sa fonction est donc purement illustrative et pedagogique, parce qu'elle constitute un procède dialectique et non pas la description adequate de l'unité rétablie entre les Formes et le monde sensible.” See also Cilento and Blumenthal 1987.

   Recently, Schroeder 1992, pp. 24-39, has come to the defense of Beierwaltes's views. He reiterates his position in Schroeder 1994, p. 473.

6. A minor flurry of scholarship has arisen over the issue of whether Plotinus equates non-discursive with non-propositional thought. For the controversy and its history, see Lloyd 1969-70, Sorabji 1983, Lloyd 1986, Alfino 1990, and Lloyd 1990. Sorabji's argument is that non-propositional thought is a concept at odds with Plotinus' account of nous's activity, since the latter involves complexity. Alfino and Lloyd respond by countering that nous's thoughts cannot be propositional since in that case they would be assimilable to language and so possess a signifying function. However, they argue, nous's thoughts are not representational and do not signify.

   A lack of standard terminology makes this debate difficult to resolve. When Plotinus explicitly denies propositional thought to nous, the terms he actually uses are προτάsειs, άξιwματα, λεκτά. This vocabulary is eclectic, comprised of the Aristotelian and Stoic words denoting “propositions.” In short, Plotinus might be taken to exclude Stoic or Aristotelian accounts of propositional thought from nous, without thereby precluding propositional thought eo ipso. For this point, I am indebted to the written remarks of Steven K. Strange. In this chapter I attempt to locate a non-discursive methodology in the the texts of the Enneads rather than reviewing the grounds for positing the existence of non-propositional thinking as a construct of Plotinus' philosophy.

7. Sorabji 1983, p. 152; Lloyd 1986, p. 259; Alfino 1990, pp. 274-5.

8. At V.5 1, for example, Plotinus disparages discursive reasoning because it deals only with things that exist outside of itself (V.5.1.30): … [Intellect's thoughts] are certainly not premises or theorems or propositions. These are about things other [than themselves] and are not identical with the realities [that they signify].

9. Cf. Enneads V.8.4.26, … Just as Lynkeus was said to see the inside of the earth …

10. Alfino 1990; Lloyd 1990. Actually, Plotinus employs more than one tack for the purpose of criticizing discursive thought. Another strategy, equally pervasive throughout the Enneads, is to demonstrate the indeterminacy of discursive thinking with regard to the expression of necessary truths. This second type is squarely grounded in Plotinus' anti-essentialist analysis of individuation.

11. Strange 1987.

12. Ferwerda 1965, p. 7. See also Blumenthal 1987a, p. 572.

13. Cf. Blumenthal 1987a, p. 542: “This view is required by the many texts where Plotinus speaks of likeness as a relation of inferiority.”

14. Classicists are most familiar with the substitution theory of metaphor, a theory purportedly extending all the way back to Aristotle's Poetics, chapter 21, and Rhetoric, chapter 11. Black 1977 summarizes this theory as follows: “The substitution view regards the entire sentence that is the locus of the metaphor as replacing some set of literal sentences.” For modern explication of this theory, see Searle 1979, and for recent criticism, see Lakoff and Turner 1989, p. 123. For extensive discussion of Aristotle's views of metaphor, see Ricoeur 1977, pp. 9-43.

15. See Searle 1979.

16. Searle 1979.

17. Needless to say, this chapter does not offer a complete survey of all pragmatic theories of metaphor. In particular, it omits the recent work of Lakoff and Turner 1989, which holds that metaphor is a process of cognitive enhancement in which concepts from one semantic domain are mapped onto another domain (Lakoff and Turner 1989, p. 112).

18. Skulsky 1986.

19. On the lexical interpretation of Aristotle's theory, see Ricoeur 1977, pp. 9-43. Aristotle defines metaphor (Poetics 1475b) as “the application [epiphora] of an alien name.”

20. I am using the word “pragmatic” here as a means of introducing a semantic / pragmatic distinction. Pragmatics considers the contextual background of word usage or conversational implicatures associated with an utterance, as distinct from the lexical denotation the word is commonly understood to have. Cf. Lakoff and Turner 1989, pp. 125-6.

21. Ricoeur 1977 and Laks 1992 have attempted to assimilate Aristotle's theory to more recent cognitive approaches to metaphor. According to Laks, Aristotle tells us in the Poetics that good metaphors actually help us to perceive likenesses and that one species of metaphor, metaphor by analogy, can even produce likenesses between the objects under comparison. Thus Laks finds no real contradiction between substitution and cognitive views of metaphor when it comes to the interpretation of Aristotle's text.

22. This view of metaphor is often called the “strong creative theory” (Black 1977). According to this theory, metaphors function by mapping some semantic domain (the focus) onto a literal frame. This view has it that by conceptualizing the frame in terms of the focus, we increase our ability to comprehend the frame. Such cognitive enhancement occurs maximally when the set of correspondences noticed between frame and focus are created by the metaphor. When we see something as something else, then we create a likeness in certain respects between the objects insofar as we are considering them: “Some metaphors enable us to see aspects of reality that the metaphor's production helps to constitute.”

23. Cf. Soskice 1991, for the idea of metaphor as accomplishing its work through an indeterminacy or refusal to specify fully the conceptual frame with which it is involved.

24. Davidson 1978 in this line of thought writes:

    We imagine that there is a content to be captured when all the while we are in fact focusing on what the metaphor makes us notice. If what the metaphor makes us notice were finite in scope and propositional in nature, this would not in itself make trouble; we would simply project the content the metaphor brought to mind onto the metaphor. But in fact there is no limit to what a metaphor calls to our attention, and much of what we are caused to notice is not propositional in character.

25. Again, in V.3., Plotinus employs the aisthesis / noesis analogy, but at the same time he tries to modify it by refining his vocabulary, using the terms … (sight) and … (look at) as contrasting terms: “if [sc. discursive mind] looks, it looks at an object different from itself that becomes complete in something different from itself. But in the intelligible order none of this takes place: the seer and the seen are in the same place.”

26. De anima III.4.13-16; 429a3.

27. Enneads V.5.1.62. The actual details of Aristotelian noetic isomorphism are open to interpretation. Whether the form of the noeton is numerically one and the same as the form within intellect, or whether the intellect is caused to become like in form to the noeton is a question that remains problematic, whichever horn of the dilemma one chooses to grasp.

28. In cases of non-perceptual thought, it is extremely difficult to get at what Aristotle means when he asserts the identity thesis, that mind is identical to its thoughts. On the mechanics of Aristotelian thought, see Wedin 1992. Wedin holds that the productive intellect contains a repository of concepts and that the passive intellect recalls these concepts when actualizing its capacity to know.

29. De anima 429b24. …

30. Aristotle De anima 431b4. … Cf. also De memoria 450a1-7. … On both of these passages, see Wedin 1992. See also Frede 1991 and Kahn 1991 for the role of phantasmata, or images, in the act of thinking.

31. Plotinus finds that this same intentional structure operates in cases of sense-perception. Visual experience is subject to evaluation as true or false because it is a mental state directed toward particulars in the world. At V.3.3 Plotinus narrates a kind of script in which he spells out what is taking place mentally when a perceiver recognizes a visual object: “One might ask oneself, ‘Who is this?’ if he has met the person on a previous occasion, and answer with the aid of memory that it is Socrates. So too when someone pays attention to the details of what he sees, he analyses the [visual] presentation.”

    The experience as a whole, designated by the phrase … “what the imagination presents,” is associated by the percipient with a propositional content. When we think or perceive, we represent to ourselves a certain propositional content that “unfolds” (we might say unpacks) the intuition or describes what has been apprehended in perception. This logos, or propositional content, goes hand in hand with the intentional object, telling us what the mental state is about.

32. The representation of Forms by means of concepts or logoi is obviously an enormous topic and one that cannot be discussed here. See Emilsson 1988, especially chapter 7.

33. V.3.10.39.

34. Cf. VI.7, where the reader encounters an aitiology for the complexity of the intelligible world … (VI.7.13.55). There is nothing in it which is not other, so that in its otherness it may contribute this too.

35. Plotinus quoting Phaedrus 247d7-e1.

36. For a very lucid discussion of the metaphor of transparency in V.3.9 and V.8, see Beierwaltes 1961 and Beierwaltes 1991.

37. V.3.17.23. Cf. V.1.4.19-21: “Indeed, there is a succession of things involved with soul, at one moment Socrates, at another a horse, always one particular thing, whereas Intellect is all things” (Atkinson's translation).

38. V.8.6.9: άθρόου

39. V.8.9.3. Armstrong's translation.

40. For some comments that confirm the meditational quality of VI.4.7.23-40, see Armstrong's and Dodd's discussion in Entretiens Hardt V, pp.338-9: (Dodds) “This very striking passage of which Armstrong has reminded us suggests the exercises that are sometimes prescribed for contemplatives: the novice must first visualise an image, then correct it step by step in order to make his contemplation more perfect. I have wondered whether Plotinus is not here prescribing such an exercise. One finds similar things in the discipline of the Indian Yogis and I think also sometimes in some of the Christian mystics.”

41. Alfino 1990.

42. For a modern English translation of the CH, see Brian Copenhaver, Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a new English translation, with notes and introduction (Cambridge; New York, 1992). For a Critical edition of the text of the treatises II-XII of the Hermetica, see Corpus Hermeticum, Tome I, Traités II-XII, texte établi par A. D. Nock et traduit par A. Festugière, Septième edition (Paris, 1991).

43. On the nature and history of Hermetic literature, see Fowden 1986.

44. Cf. Festugière, vol. IV. pp. 156-7.

45. Walter Scott, Hermetica. The ancient Greek and Latin writings which contain religious or philosophical teachings ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus. Introduction, texts, and translation. Vol. I (Boulder. 1982), pp. 206-207, CH XI.

46. Following the edition of Nock here.

47. Janowitz 1989, pp. 12-14.

48. V.1.2.14-20. … Let the body now become still for the soul, not just body enveloping [soul] and the body's turmoil, but the entire body that surrounds it. The earth must become still, the sea and sky, and the heaven itself, still greater, must become still (V.1.2.14-17).

49. CH XII, 10b, Scott's translation.

50. CH X.103, Scott's translation: “Since the kosmos is a sphere, that is to say a head, whatever is connected to the membrane of the head is soul and is by nature immortal.”

51. The critics' number is legion, but I am thinking especially of Wittgenstein, of Derrida, and of Ayer.

52. Derrida 1982, p. 268.

53. For recent work on this passage, as well as on Plotinus' interpretation of Plato's participation metaphor, readers are referred to Strange 1992.

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