The title alludes to the classic 1805 poem by the Irish poet
Thomas Moore The Last Rose of Summer, that became an exceptionally
popular song, spawning multiple important musical adaptations. Its relevance to
my entry on Plotinus is in its metaphorical use.
It
is hard to be unequivocal about our next subject of interest, namely, Plotinus
(204-270) who is named in all histories of philosophy as an eminent
Neo-Platonist. On the one hand, being called a Platonist does not confer
on one a badge of originality, suggesting a strong derivative quality. Besides,
he might be described as a poor man’s Plato, in the sense that one can learn
only so much of Plato from reading Plotinus. He is a lover of Plato, who does
not do his love justice by concentrating only on several aspects of Plato’s
theories, while completely ignoring the rest. On the same side of the
pro/contra argument is the fact that Nietzsche, a great connoisseur of ancient
Greek philosophy, does not mention him by name even once, anywhere I looked.
But
on the other side of the argument is the earlier mentioned fact that no history
of philosophy can forgo him, and our friend Bertrand Russell (who is a
formidable authority in philosophy and on philosophers) is quite generous to
Plotinus, allotting him a lengthy fourteen-page Plotinus chapter, the
very last chapter of the First Book of his History of Western Philosophy (Ancient
Philosophy), and calling him “the last of the great philosophers of
antiquity,” and rather than stressing his derivative quality, as a mere
follower of Plato, emphasizes his originality by calling him “the founder of
Neo-Platonism.”
With
regard to the very last point, before we talk further about Plotinus himself,
we may find it interesting to ascertain that Neo-Platonism can indeed be
considered as an original school of philosophy, rather than a wholly derivative
spin-off of Plato’s Platonism. W. T. Jones gives his explanation why
Neo-Platonism is so important by raising two key points. One, that its
particular emphasis on religiosity, far more pronounced than in Plato,
reflected the specific mood of the times (Plotinus’ Third Century AD).
The other, that, had it not been for Plotinus and his new school of
Neo-Platonic thinking, Plato’s virtual defeat by the philosophy of Aristotle
would have been complete. While attempting to solve
the technical philosophical problems on which Platonism broke, and to which
Aristotle had provided at best only a partial answer, Neo-Platonism developed a
philosophy of religion that was to become a major influence on the future
course of Western thought. Indeed, Neo-Platonism proved to be one of the chief
modes of Plato’s endurance.
The
main difference-- and hence the new philosophy’s originality-- between
Platonism and Neo-Platonism was that the former was focused on ethics, while
the latter was focused on religion. Plato’s anti-rationalism was embraced, but
his belief in the possibility of acquiring real knowledge rationally was
ignored, not like the Skeptics ignored it, to prove their Ignoramus et
Ignorabimus, but in order to insist that real knowledge could only be
acquired irrationally through religious mysticism and revelation. Thus,
Neo-Platonism was a deliberate effort to adapt Plato, that is, to enlist him
into the service of a new philosophy, which sprang out of a non-Platonic pool,
but so much liked what Plato had to say, when he was not in contradiction with
its own doctrinal tenets, that it effectively appropriated Plato’s name and
clout, not unlike Fritz Kreisler using hallowed names in classical music to
promote his own compositions, written in the old style, but not quite the same…
The
Neo-Platonic school of thinking was therefore a brand new line of thinking, or
perhaps, a philosophical agenda, which pushed itself so vigorously, and found
for itself such fertile soil in the new age, that it found it possible to alter
classical Platonism in its new image so that the tables were turned and on the
surface it may even seem that Plato had become a Plotinus derivative!
A
few words now about Plotinus proper. He was by no means a Christian thinker
(Christianity at that time was still under persecution), otherwise we would not
have called him the last of the Greeks. But he had an enormous influence
on Christianity, particularly on Eastern orthodox Christianity, which relies on
him far more than Western Catholicism (which has received its “Aristotelian component”
not via Plotinus, but via Thomas Aquinas, who, curiously, had less of an
influence on the Eastern Branch of Christianity!).
Someone
familiar with Jewish Kabbalah would instantly recognize a strong connection
between Plotinus’s theory of The One (Ein Sof) and of the Emanations
from the unknowable and perfect into less perfect and more knowable and
the Kabbalistic theories of the same. It must be borne in mind, however, that
Plotinus had come before any Kabbalah existed, and thus there has been no influence
of Jewish thinkers on the last Greek, but exactly the other way round.
It was the Kabbalah that developed these mystical theological and philosophical
conceptions in the wake of Plotinus’s metaphysical explorations!
And
finally, Plotinus was perhaps at his least
Greek and at his most Christian-like
in his attitude toward the physical body. According to his Neo-Platonic
disciple Porphyry he hated his body and resolutely refused to discuss the
circumstances of his early physical life. (He was born in Egypt but everything
else about him or his family is completely obscure, including the year of his
birth, which is counted back with approximation from the known date of his
death.) He insisted that the philosophical objective of human existence was to
ignore the minutia of everything pertaining to this world, concentrating
instead on the contemplation of the goodness and beauty embodied by The One.
Not that The One could suddenly become accessible, through such
contemplation, but whatever coming to us from the other world via the
emanations reached in these contemplations constituted the highest aim of
philosophy and of human existence as such.
…My
friend Nietzsche would surely make an extra-sour grimace here… But
philosophical tastes vary and differ, and, whether he liked it or not, we are
all the richer for it!
This is the end of the Graeco-Roman,
“pagan” subsection, and next we shall
continue with early Christian philosophy, as opposed to theology, and our first
name on this list is not Saint Augustine, as expected, but … Origen.
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