Lev Shestov - Potestas Clavium - Part III

Not only is Plotinus chronologically the last great representative of ancient philosophy; in him ancient philosophy reached its completion. I have already said that with the Greeks reason gave birth to wisdom, and wisdom brought them the recognition and conviction that true reality must not be sought in the world inherited from the dead gods, but in the ideal world created by that reason which had become heir to the rights of the gods. Greek philosophy, the philosophy of reason, was bound in the end to set ethics on the throne of ontology. If there are no gods, the world is masterless. How can we live in such a world? In it everything is false, fortuitous, transitory. In it is neither truth nor justice. So the ancients taught; so the world revealed itself to them when they regarded it with eyes of reason. So, too, Plotinus saw the world. And thus he, like his predecessors, was faced with the necessity of finding for this world another which should answer the demands of reason. In this respect he treads paths which had been trodden before him. And he strives with all forces at his disposal to prove that the "visible" world is a false world, a world of shadows and non-existence, while the only real world is the moral world. He carries out this task with astonishing persistence and incomparable mastery. He makes use of all the achievements of the ancients; the Pythagoreans, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics had prepared him sufficient material. He was able to blend everything which had been collected by the great Hellenic thinkers in the course of a thousand years into a single system, the magic of which not even the leaders of the rising force of Christianity could withstand.

Plotinus begins: Archê oûn logos kai panta logos [Reason is the beginning and everything is reason](III, ii, 15). Reason is lawgiver and creator, it does all things, what it will and how it will. At the same time it is also the original source both of truth and of good. Dialectics, in which the working of reason is expressed, not only reveals truth to man, but also brings him the good. In this way the vera philosophia and optima philosophia blends into one:

Ou toinun toîs hêdomenois to eû dzên huparksei, alla to genôskein dunamenôi hoti hêdonê to agathon. Aition de toû eû dzên ouch hêdonê estai, alla to krinein dunamenon, hoti hêdonê agathon. Kai to men krînon beltion ê kata pathos. Logos gar ê noûs, hêdonê de pathos: oudamoû de kreîtton alogon logou. Pôs an oûn ho logos auton apheis allo thêsetai en tôi enantiôi genei keimenon kreîtton eînai heautoû; (I, iv, 2).

[Thus the good life does not belong to those who enjoy, but to him who is able to know that pleasure is the good. And the cause of good living will not be pleasure, but the power of judging that pleasure is good. And judging is better than sensation. For the mind is logos and pleasure is sensation; and the irrational can in no wise be better than the rational. How, then, should the logos abandon itself and call something better than itself which is of opposite nature to itself?]

These words epitomize Plotinus' whole "doctrine"; they are also the sum of what his predecessors taught him. Reason (it is not by chance that he speaks here of logos ê noûs) will not under any circumstances admit that there is something over it, which is not like itself, and will never renounce itself and its own sovereign rights. To it and to it alone is given to judge what is truth and what the good. Truth lies in the fact that the law of impermanence rules in the visible world, and good in the fact that man shall not seek for that which he desires but for that which reason prescribes as the best. And the highest good, summum bonum, that which appears the end of the eû dzên, is not hêdonê, for hêdonê is not subject to reason (and neither is that visible world with which all hêdonai are bound up) but the ability to judge that hêdonê to agathon. To make it clearer what is the contrast between to krînon and kata pathos, I may quote another passage from Plotinus (I, vi, 4): "How lovely," he writes, "is the face of justice and self-control (sôphrosunês), before whose beauty even the morning and the evening star grow pale!" He repeats the same thought in even stronger expressions at the end of VI, vi, 6. Reason decides on its own authority that justice and self-control are more beautiful than the morning and the evening star, and since, as Plotinus has just told us, it will not abdicate its rights to anyone, this will remain so forever, and man must submit, even were he to find, kata pathos, that the morning and the evening star are far lovelier than such virtues as justice and self-control, which are, after all, only mortal.

     Man must submit. Or is it permissible, after all, to ask: Has not reason overstepped its bounds here? It has power over self-control and over justice, for it has created them. But it did not create the morning and the evening star. Has it a right to dispose and judge where it is unable to create? Ancient philosophy felt exceedingly strongly the whole importance and significance of this question - and Plotinus knew this better than anyone else. This is why he puts his assertion in so categorical a form. In such cases the positiveness of an assertion is a reliable index to the doubts which still cling about it. Aristotle would of course have preferred to evade this question, even as he preferred not to talk too much about Phalaris' bull. And in fact, reason's sovereign rights can only be thought to be guaranteed when all kata pathos is absolutely and unconditionally placed at its disposal. Kata pathos in Phalaris' bull is terrible; kata pathos a man, even one who lives a virtuous life, would perhaps be able to forget himself in contemplation of the morning star. But philosophy requires of him that before he fear or rejoice, he shall come to reason, hoti krinei, hê anakrinei, kai hoti toîs en heautôi kanosin, hous para toû noû echei [because he judges what he judges according to the canons within himself, which he has from the mind] (V, iii, 4); and learn from reason whether what attracted him might be the good, and what repelled him, the evil. For only under these conditions can it promise him the Magna Charta of the poor earthly freedoms proclaimed by the old wisdom and confirmed again by Plotinus: orthôs legetai, ouden kakon tôi agathôi, ou d'aû tôi phaulôi agathon [It is rightly said that there can be no evil for the good man and no good for the bad man] (III, ii, 6). We know that this passed as quite unquestionable; men can only overcome the accursed chance which rules in this God-forsaken world, when everything which is kata pathos is overcome and the last word left to the logos by whose decision anything you please is turned into a good. We remember, too, that the beginning of philosophy is the knowledge of impotence, and we remember how Epictetus found his magic wand. The Stoics repeated tirelessly: Si vis tibi omnia subjicere, te subjice rationi. Nihil accidere bono viro mali potest... est enim omnibus externis potentior [Wouldst thou submit all things to thyself, then submit thyself to reason. No evil can befall a good man... for he is mightier than anything that comes from without].

     Plotinus adopted the Stoic wisdom complete, but lent it an indescribable charm and a quite new profundity; here his inner kinship and congeniality with Plato showed itself. While Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius himself sometimes seem to us mere wooden moralists and preachers, the inspired philosopher ever stirs in Plotinus. He, too, says, in the imperative of course: genesthô dê prôton theoeides pâs, kai kalos pâs, ei mellei theasasthai theon te kai kalon [therefore let him who would see God and the Beautiful first become godlike and beautiful] (I, vi, 9); but one gets an impression as though this imperative of his were bound up by invisible threads with the ultimate mystery of the universe. In reality Plotinus is much nearer the Stoa than he seems. His verdicts that the virtues are more beautiful than the stars of heaven, and the passage quoted above, always contain the same fatal consciousness of impotence which haunted Socrates and which Epictetus admitted openly. And this consciousness, which is suggested to man by reason, the discoverer of genesis and phthora in the world, forces Plotinus to rank the moral world above the real world and to oust ontology by ethics. He looks on kata pathos as the original sin: archê men oûn autaîs (taîs psychaîs) toû kakoû hê tolma, kai hê genesis, kai hê prôtê heterotês, kai to boulêthênai de heautôn eînai [The beginning of evil was for them (the souls) the audacity and the birth and the first differentiation and the desire to exist for themselves] (V, i, 1). The katharsis, the moral perfection, becomes accordingly a method of seeking for truth, a road which leads to truth. But the katharsis consists in isolating one's soul, not allowing it to depend on other things, not letting it consider those things at length. Hence hê tôn legomenôn agathôn toû sômatos kataphronêsis (I, iv, 4) - just like Epictetus's contempt of the so-called physical goods. Everything which does not lie within man's power is only shadowy, imagined being. "And here (in life) as in the theatre, it is not the inner man, but his shadow, the outer man, which laments and groans" (oimôdzei kai oduretaî; III, ii, 15).

     As we see, wisdom goes hand in hand the whole time with reason. Reason, proceeding from the self-evident truths (noûs didôsin enargeîs archas; I, iii, 15), determines what it can do and what not, or, as it prefers to express itself, what is possible and what impossible. Wisdom, however, convinced that oudamoû alogon kreîtton tôi logôi, that the irrational can never be better than the rational, calls that which is possible for reason the good, and that which is impossible for it the evil, or stronger yet (in Plotinus; the Stoics were not so bold): that which is possible for reason it calls true reality, and that which is impossible, deception and illusion. The gods when they died took with them the secret of the world which they had created; reason is unable to decipher how the world was created, and cannot gain mastery over it, and wisdom declares this world non-existent. In the depths of men's souls, even after the death of the gods, an ineradicable love for their creations has survived; wisdom gathers all its forces and arms against hêdonê and kata pathos, as it calls man's love of God's world. It demands that men should regard the world with the eyes of reason, not treasure what they desire, not hate what is repellent to them, not love or hate at all, but only "judge" - on the ground of the ready-made, universal rules which reason offers, and judge only with respect to what is good and what evil. Therefore it describes as the "outward man" that which laments and sighs (Spinoza says later: non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari). For this reason, too, it declares the individual, differentiated man not only illusory but an unlawful, sinful intruder into existence, and sees in his appearance a tolma, an impious act of audacity. Accordingly it considers it its task to expel this pushing intruder out of existence, to drive him back again into that general being whence he sprung. Here, and here alone, has the task of wisdom always lain: in taming recalcitrant man.

     Thus it appears that wisdom is only another name for morality. Wisdom demands and orders, just as morality does. Wisdom is just as autonomous, as self-sufficient as morality. Its last wish is to transform and remold the world and man. But it never finishes with the world. It is, however, easier to finish with man. Man can be brought to obedience, can be convinced by threats and enticements that obedience is the supreme virtue, that all daring is impious, that independent existence is a sin and a crime, that man has not to think of himself but of the "Whole," not to love the morning and the evening star but to call moderation and reason divine, even when his sons are slain, his daughters violated, his fatherland ravaged - but this divine reason which boasted that it could do what it would, confines itself to discussions on the theme that here only the "outward man" suffers and only the "outward man" cries out: "My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" And if reason, with the help of morality, really or only in imagination forces "the individual man" to be silent - only then does philosophy reach its last end: ontology, the doctrine of real existence, turns into ethics, and the wise man becomes unlimited ruler over the universe.