Plotinus' Radical Vision: Universal Contemplation as Nature's Hidden Language (Schelling, Blake)

Some fifteen hundred years before Wordsworth and Coleridge argued for our essential identity with the natural world, Plotinus (1993) wrote in the opening lines of ‘Ennead’ iii, Section 8:

If, before speaking seriously, we were to say playfully that all things desire contemplation and aim towards this end, not only rational creatures but irrational ones and the nature in plants and the earth that generates them, and that all things achieve contemplation in a different manner, some truly reaching it, others through imitation and image, would the paradoxical nature of what we are saying be recognised.

Plotinus speaks “playfully”. But he continues immediately with a further reflection: what if playing itself is a form of contemplation? Playfulness is just as much action directed at contemplation as is “serious” thinking; more, the success of so-called “serious” activity often requires the freedom of playfulness to be effective. An early statement of the role of imagination in thinking. But then we are confronted with the revolutionary: that nature itself does what it does through contemplation, "which it ought not to possess”.

And it is true, for the modern mind with its sure separation of the physical and mental, a separation overcome only when the latter is reduced to the former, that we cannot accept what we see as an illicit transfer of the human to the natural world; we have a name for it, "the pathetic fallacy”. In reply, it may be pointed out that this separation is without merit in respect to the naturally poetic language of our encounters with the world in which word and world; gesture to each other. Schelling thought that in this first instance of their interaction these exists no place no distinction between the human and natural worlds. The belief in the distinction between the psychological and the natural is itself the outcome of a process in which they develop together as joint expressions of cognitive and neural complexity. But the question remains: why choose contemplation as the middle term?

We may begin to answer this question if we consider the distinction Plotinus makes between knowledge which is "the other in the other” from knowledge which "is in that which is” as the two orders of the mind. The former reaches its conclusions by reasoning, placing propositions in logical order, the latter is the contemplation of that which is drawn together in its essential form. To think in terms of another in another is to place each in an external relation to the other, whilst the discovery of "what is in that which is” requires the contemplation of an inclusive identity. If, for example, we wish to understand “the beautiful” or “the just”, we must refer to this order which is available to us either as “fine images” which, are ideas in a sensuous form, or as ideas themselves.

But, of course, as mere mortals we cannot imagine the whole, the One in its totality, although we may sense in the beautiful or the just the "mesh” of everything with everything. Indeed, is this not exactly how those moments appear to us? In the contemplation of a beautiful subject, for example, we sense something which is absolutely itself and yet is without any limiting context; it is as though the “what is within that which is”, having no external reference, is accompanied by a sense of limitlessness, an exactness without limitation, as Paul Klee described his ambition for his painting.

The truth that contemplation seeks is the truth of identity, of that which becomes and expresses itself. Since any natural object possesses that truth, we understand the accuracy of the term, contemplation. I suggested earlier that one might view the use of contemplation by Plotinus as a middle term between the human and the natural. We might, therefore, grant that his application of contemplation to a tree, for example, has a metaphorical significance; there are many examples in poetry of the metaphorical tree - Stevens’ "tree at the end of the mind” or Rilke’s strange "tree in the ear” - but Plotinus demands more of us than this metaphorical attribution: he requires that we see the growth and expression of the natural world as involving essentially the same process in the human and natural worlds. For Plotinus there is mind in nature.

At this level it is purely expressive, following its formal and final cause; in humans, who exist additionally at the symbolic level, it is inescapably self-reflective: we must search for our "final cause”; in contemplation we piece together the strands of our experience to place ourselves as identities within the natural world. But the idea of "mind in nature”, that there is an evolution of forms of being and a transition from the expressive to the self-reflective, is supported by historical and anthropological evidence and by developments in science which support ideas of ‘emergence’, of the wholeness of nature, and of a realm of implicative discourse essential to an adequate description of natural phenomena.

Plotinus, Calasso (2020) asserts is the discoverer of interiority in the Western philosophical tradition. Contemplation conducts us on an inner journey progressing towards the recognition of the One in the Many. It is the progression of inwardness which increases the depth and the breadth of understanding, revealing that beneath the opposites of paradox there lies a realm of unity. In his dedication to attain a oneness with the One, to be "alone with the Alone”, all else besides that dedicated concentration takes second place. This is because all statements that are open to qualification cannot themselves reach an absolute finality of vision; statements relating to the practice of virtue and the playfulness of the poetic imagination may help us towards the ultimate source of the One, suggesting its existence in their expressions, but a further abstraction is required to become aware of this inexpressible source. For Plotinus, a devoted follower of Plato, that abstraction can be nothing other than that of the idea of the Good.

The Good is the original source (the ‘Urquelle’); "there is nothing for it except itself. After one has pronounced this word "Good”, one should ascribe nothing further to it because any addition, of whatever sort, will make it less than it really is. Not even thought should be attributed to it. To do that would be to introduce a difference and thus make it a duality of intellection and goodness. "The Intelligence needs the Good; the Good needs not the Intelligence. Upon attaining it, the Intelligence becomes like the Good because it is formed and perfected by it” (Plotinus, 1993). Intelligence acquires a "radiance” suffusing all our activities which in turn confirm its source.

But the Intelligence (which is the mind) functions within the world of the qualified statement. It can only sense the One through its embodiment in the sensuous. Also, according to Plotinus, the One is complete in itself and has no desire outside of itself, whereas the mind exists in the midst of desires - to survive, to express itself in its attempts to understand, to gain pleasure, and so forth. The mind can only be identical with the One if it totally sets aside such preoccupations, and to do so would be a curtailment of life. And how can no desire lead to the desire to possess no desire? We seem to be confronted here with a choice.

On the one hand we can follow the need for a total identity with the One to the exclusion of the world of action: to be "alone with the Alone” in an ultimate sanctuary. Or we can choose to express our insight in our transactions with the world through what Merleau-Ponty called a constant "carrying forward”. The choice, the paradox, is resolved when we see the one possibility in the other, so that together they form the framework for an authentic existence: to be alone with the One does not point inwards to a self-concerned life - it is the ultimate inwardness that celebrates an ultimate otherness of self within world; equally, our engagement with reality is underpinned with a necessary belief or faith in the universal principle of the Good, which we grasp, not by thought alone, but by the lived idea moderated through its adaptation to the varied demands made upon it. The Gospel is one of ecstasy and moderation.

What becomes clear, also, is that Keats was quite in order to identify truth and beauty as one, for what is the beauty revealed in contemplation but a celebration of "what is” becoming "what it is”? But of greater significance is the ease with which the aesthetic transfers into the ethical when reflection reveals the "ought” in the becoming of "what is”. For the Reason that observes, the passage from is to ought is a category mistake; for the Reason that participates in the life of the other, it is the fundamental necessity of a life fulfilling its purpose, applicable to both the natural and the human worlds. We can appreciate how this principle in its application to all living things forms the primary basis, the ground, of ethical action: we are the Many in the One. When we incorporate this principle into our lives, we can recognise that what we refer to as our "duty” towards others is actually the fulfilment of our and their being in the Good. But it should not be viewed as a synthesis which integrates false dualisms. Thinking through paradox, metaphor, and irony leaves the polarities intact: the structure revealed is always "is” and "is not”. The tragic remains itself, your understanding of it may change. What these forms of relationship do achieve is the perspective of a central "space” in which the essential contradictions of existence can be addressed. We should think of it as the interior equivalent of that central space located by our ancestors as the one suitable for the rituals of sacrifice and augury.

A ritual is a performance defined by repetition. Repetition provides the mind with the assurance it needs to oppose despair. Vico argued that the dangers the mind faces in its quest for harmony lie either in the excess of interiority over exteriority or in the suppression of inwardness by the excess of the objective. He would, I believe, have had no difficulty in applying this framework to the events of the twentieth century. But he could not have anticipated how the influence of technology as the expression of exteriority and consumerism as the fulfilment of inwardness have combined to dominate everyday life in a thriving symbiosis of the two barbarisms. The vocation of both is the pursuit of novelty in the service of life enhancement. In this process, inwardness becomes equivalent to entertainment, and objectivity is reduced to information and gadgetry. Living life "to the full”, being "at the edge”, is the key message of this culture. It is the world of the Tourist and the Robot.

The pursuit of novelty does an injustice to both subjectivity and objectivity because it makes no provision for the growth of that which can link them, the central space of repetition and contemplation. Without that link the distinction between the two is erased in the identity of their purpose. But contemplation views the two neither as a unity nor as distinct: it asserts they are both. For the contemplative mind, unity reveals itself in difference, difference in unity. They are independents that require one another to reveal themselves and flourish, a self-identity dependent upon what is other than itself. Contemplation is essentially the development of that "double vision” which allowed Blake could "see the world in a grain of sand”. It is a progressive internalisation and abstraction towards increasingly inclusive forms of thought and feeling. Its structure is that of metaphor and paradox in which each of a pair of terms safeguards its independence while suggesting an interdependence.

Consider as a special example how self and other are interrelated. We have seen earlier that the self seeks its identity by taking something other than itself as its measure. One assumes an identity through place of birth, religion, or vocation. In self-reflection an identity is formed through self-attributed character traits - honesty, faithfulness, and so forth. We say of our selves that we ‘possess’ these attributes: they are what we are. But reflection concerning our identity can move a stage further on entering the realm of the possible, of being and becoming. We move from attributing qualities to our selves to thinking of qualities that we may aspire to and which can serve as our measure. Now for a quality to be a measure it must be independent of that which it measures; moreover, contemplation seeks the ultimate measure and finds it in the idea of the Good. But, if this idea is ultimate and sufficient unto itself, how can a tentative and insufficient human ever attain an identity with it?

In order to answer this question, we need to remind ourselves of the essential structure of that symbolic relation whose aim we have called the truth of identity and is expressed succinctly in Blake’s verse:

For double the vision my eyes do see,
And a double vision is always with me:
With my inward eye ‘tis an old man grey;
With my outward eye a thistle across my way.

The development of symbolic vision requires the co-relation of the inner and outer through metaphor and paradox. The two aspects develop together so that we may talk of a joint differentiation of self and world: the self-defines itself by the other that it takes as its measure. Now, whilst it is easy enough to accept that, in order to adapt in this way, the self must make itself available to the other - negate itself to experience the other as it appears - it is more difficult to countenance the other - the Absolute, the Good - negating itself to accommodate to the self’s needs. How can that be justified?