Plotinus' Conception of the Functions of the Artist Author(s): John P.

Anton Reviewed work(s): Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Autumn, 1967), pp. 91101 Published by: Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/429247 . Accessed: 22/10/2012 13:58
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JOHN

P. ANTON

Plotinus'

Conception

of

the

Functions

of

the

Artist*

iavra 077 Ta 7tp6y?LEfa, ErT TE(XVP77 .pvriKa Et EwTE E, oYola rts v'roei, KaL

iravraxoi ?oopta. )yEcTratrijs nrotaEffws

Enneads,V. 8, 5.

I
IT HAS BECOME

an acceptable

doctrine

today among scholars and historians of ideas to see Plotinus as one of the genuine representatives of the rational ideal of Hellenic thought in the Hellenistic age and one whose philosophy sealed the end of that period in the development of Western philosophizing. For both of these reasons Plotinus' reflections on art have a special appeal to those who wish to know what final form the classical views on art and aesthetic problems received toward the end of classical antiquity. Again, increasing recognition of the fact that some
JOHN P. ANTON is professor of philosophy at the State University of New York, Buffalo. He is the author of Aristotle's Theory of Contrariety (London and New York, 1957) and has published articles and reviews in journals here and abroad. His article "Plotinus' Refutation of Beauty as Symmetry" appeared in the Winter 1964 issue of this journal. * This paper was read at the 1965 annual meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics in Washington, D.C. I am indebted to Professor Douglas Morgan for reading an earlier version and drawing my attention to certain central issues that at the time needed further elaboration.

of his basic ideas eventually found their way in the philosophical theology of St. Augustine and strengthened the humanistic side of the Christian attitude toward the arts, to say nothing of his influence on post-medieval theories of poetry, has done much to alert us to Plotinus' importance as a seminal thinker. One should hasten at this point to add that Plotinus' view of the functions of the artist is surprisingly more pertinent to certain trends and problems characteristic of the conception of the artistic self in modern times than the run-of-the-mill intellectual histories would allow us to suspect. The purpose of this paper is to explore Plotinus' understanding of the functions of the artist and to delineate the broader metaphysical framework that render them intelligible. Three basic issues are primarily relevant: (a) the source of beauty, (b) the theory of artistic creation, and (c) the artist's answer to the quest for
being.

To explore our theme it is not necessary to extend this inquiry over the entire denotation of Plotinus' notion of art.1 Nor

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P. ANTON

demands and values derived from what lies below the level of human existence and issues from the lesser quality of the sort of existence which is comprised by the sensible world. The soul attains its genuine self-identity, its state of authentic existence, only after it has come to exhibit an unshakable determination and a constancy in deliberate choosing and acting in ways exclusively appropriate to man's own higher nature. That man is II a mixture of levels of being makes it posTHE SOURCEOF BEAUTY. Plotinus taught sible for these levels to interact in a that Beauty is a divine essence and one of variety of patterns. The outcomes are the many manifestations of the absolute. neither known in advance, however, nor This sweeping claim circumscribes the are inevitably beneficial to the higher metaphysical framework within which the grades of being in man. Inversions and artist's functions can be best understood perversions, when affecting the natural and fulfilled. It is clear that Plotinus in- ontic relationship of the functioning of tends beyond the shadow of a doubt to man's faculties, lead to a host of evils. say that cosmic and ontic categories of the Among their worst ones is the fatal susdivine realm apply to man and his ac- pension of the process of self-realization tivities to the letter. Plotinus is discussing followed by an attendant atrophy in virtue, the relationship between man and the which in turn causes permanent damage cosmos at large in terms of isomorphic to a person's ability to envisage and atanalogues. Man's body is to his intellect tain the soul's native end. as matter is to the Nous, the Intellectual Given this cosmic and human scheme of Principle. It is evident that the supreme things, the beauty of sensible bodies (inmodel on which man is expected to fashion cluding man's body) is assigned a special his life is not derived from the social, place and performs a function of its own. the political, the religious, or any other Thus sensible beauty is not rejected. But type of experiences available to him. Noth- this beauty has its own way of kindling the ing less than the universe itself at its best divine love of the intelligible world and can serve to provide the requisite paradigm stirring the soul to renewed enthusiasm for for man's ideal fulfillment. It is the One, the original fatherland. The active life the source and fountain of ultimate values has a significance of its own, even if its which alone qualifies as the supreme good quality ranks below that reserved for the for men. Within this context, then, contemplative life of theoria. Like so many Plotinus has no problem in asserting that other Greek philosophers before him, the ultimate criterion of beauty is the Plotinus argues that the active life lacks Intellectual Principle; in fact this principle the self-sufficiency characteristic of the is the very locus of the ideal archetype theoretical. The belief is based primarily of beauty. In other words, Beauty is on the conviction that, in its effort to present as a distinct idea within Nous and secure both the discovery of ends and the imparts itself to Nous as a whole.3 As provision of means, without appealing to an emanation, Beauty comes to be according another principle or faculty, only the to the unity of the Intellectual Principle. theoretical side of man possesses the ability According to Plotinus' ethics of self- to scan its own depths. It is the theoretical realization, the souls of men are destined man who singularly attains the vision of to fall short of the appropriate human the divine in its utmost purity. Plotinus goal unless they learn to rise above all is also of the conviction that since the

is an excursion into such themes as the hierarchy of the arts and the various grades of beauty vitally relevant. Furthermore, the classification of the arts to which Plotinus subscribes is comparably secondary to our purpose.2 Suffice to say, Plotinus recognizes the irreducible nature of the arts and the distinctive character of artistic activity.

Plotinus' Conception of the Functions of the Artist theoretical pursuit discloses and warrants the supreme purpose of life, the functions of the soul lend themselves to a hierarchical stratification according to a pattern homologous to that of the cosmos. The human microcosm is obviously fashioned after the cosmic macrocosm. It is only when the ideal cosmic order serves as the conscious end of conduct and the ultimate value of human aspiration that selfrealization is genuinely under way. Plotinus proposes the following hierarchy of faculties, in rising axiological order: sensation and imagination,4 reasoning5 and Nous.6 When the soul reaches the heights to which only Nous has access and envisages the permanence and unity of the intelligible world, it blissfully comes to rest in its native realm and readily fuses itself with it. But this even so is not the ultimate resting place. A still higher step is needed before man's power of fulfillment accedes to the supreme heights of reality, the source of all, the One. Once the One as the terminus of man's selfrealization is attained, the soul is said to lose itself in a mystical unity with it and thus is able in ecstasy to abandon all aspects of determinateness and all the distinctiveness of separate existence. The soul is now beyond the realm of Nous. It has come to the source of all science and all reason. In effecting this final leap man leaves even the purest of logical distinctions behind. When the moment of ecstasy occurs, one is suddenly united with the One. With the exception of the ideal unity with the One, all other human attainments have their archetypes in the Intellecutal Principle, which, by embracing both the one and the many, provides Plotinus the requisite framework to make the plurality of human ideals philosophically significant and ontologically defensible. This side of Plotinus is grounded on his pluralistic Platonism. But his own brand of pluralism enables him to counter-balance the irresistible tendency to force every particular idea and event into a place within his diverse hierarchical structures of existence. What this pluralism entails is that

93

the ideal of beauty is not in principle deducible-for instance, from moral considerations and practical values. But Plotinus' meaning is clear: the genuine apprehension and grasp of beauty require as a concurrent factor the presence of a moral unity of character. A more appropriate formulation would be that the aesthetic, the ethical, and the intellectual activities have their essential independence and that each yet needs the cooperation of the others for its own completion. The model for this view is in Plato, who eloquently presented and argued for it in the Protagoras and the Gorgias. One of Plotinus' firmest convictions is that the Intellectual Principle is at once True and Good and Beautiful. It is both the locus of ideals and a distinctive whole, and in such a way that while each of the contained ideal essences is predicable of it, no substantial change is being caused in it. These interrelations being given, Plotinus is able to undertake a variety of analyses of the Intellectual Principle from a number of different perspectives, depending on what the context of his dialectic demands. In a revealing passage, for instance, he states:
Beauty without Being could not be, nor Being voided of Beauty: abandoned of Beauty, Being loses something of its essence. Being is desirable because it is identical with Beauty; and Beauty is loved because it is Being. How then can we debate which is the cause of the other, where the nature is one. The very figment of Being needs some imposed image of Beauty to make it possible, and even to ensure its existence; it exists to the degree in which it has taken some share in the beauty of Idea; and the more deeply it has drawn on this, the less imperfect it is, precisely because the nature which is essentially the beautiful has entered into it the more intimately.7

Mutatis mutandis, the same pattern of relationships obtains in the case of Truth and Being, Goodness and Being, and so on, with the other Ideas. When the proper substitutions are made, acceptable Plotinian doctrine allows a reconstruction of part of the passage to read: "Being is desirable because it is identical with Truth; and Truth is loved because it is Being." 8

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P. ANTON

III
THE THEORY OF ARTISTIC CREATION.

Within the context of the Plotinian theory of artistic creativity, the more successful the artist as creator is, the closer he comes to the source of Beauty, and in the same measure the more he diminishes the initial distance separating him from perfect Being. Fundamental to this issue is the theory that, despite any evidence to the contrary, the arts owe their utmost seriousness to the fact that they are at once imitative and emanative:
Still the arts are not to be slighted on the ground that they create by imitation of natural objects. ... We must recognize that they give no bare reproduction of the thing seen but go back to the Ideas from which nature derives, and furthermore, that much of their work is all their own; they are molders of beauty and add where nature is lacking.'

Although Plotinus repeatedly states that he owes his principal teachings to Plato and depends on Plato precisely in the way a disciple derives his theories and inspiration from his teacher, Plotinian scholars recognize that Neoplatonism and Platonism can and should be distinguished from each other. Similarly, scholars have come to admit that Plotinus' philosophy of art has a certain highmindedness that makes it difficult to show that in all its details and explicit emphases it is indebted to the writings of Plato. Whatever else he may have derived from the teachings of Plato or Aristotle, the fact remains that for Plotinus art is in some fundamental sense an emanative process. And even if in its creative aspect art is undeniably imitative, in accordance with the schemata of a devolutionary cosmology, this feature of it cannot be fully understood apart from the Plotinian ontology of emanation. This use of emanation to interpret the nature of art still is not so radically novel as it would seem upon first reading. Plotinus does not dispense with the imitative side of art altogether. In fact it would be impossible for him to do so without falling into a most serious inconsistency. Were art not imitative, the artist would

be nothing less than an absolutely pure creator, a delineation which is inadmissible because it makes the Plotinian cosmology incurably self-contradictory. There can be only one absolute source of creativity: the One. Hence, only the One is absolutely emanative and, consequently, non-imitative. Without the imitative aspect, art is automatically raised to the level of pure emanative being, and this dearly entails either that the One and art are identical, or that they are two distinct and cooperative sources of the universe. If the former, then Plotinus has incorrectly located the ultimate source of art in Nous; if the latter, then the theory of the One is selfcontradictory. Thus it is essential to Plotinus' doctrine that the artistic act be at once emanative and imitative. Even if the critical reader has no sympathy with Plotinus' views on ontology, he would misinterpret seriously if he charged Plotinus in this portion of his theory of art with logical flaws of which he is clearly not guilty. The property with which the artist endows his selected materials has its source not in the medium but in the imagination of the creator. On this point Plotinus is both unequivocal and insistent. Still, what the artist truly reveals originates ultimately in the Intellectual Principle. Vital to this thesis is the important distinction Plotinus draws between natural beauty and artistic beauty. Both kinds of beauty have their source in the archetypal Beauty which resides in the first hypostasis, the Intellectual Principle. On the basis of what is stated in Enneads V, Tractate 8, Chapters One and Two, the following central doctrines result: (i) Nature creates beautiful things unconsciously. The origin of the beauty which is present in sensible things belongs to a higher hypostasis that precedes the World-Body and the World-Soul which animates it: Beauty in Nous. (ii) Man as artist creates beautiful things. Artistic beauty is decidedly superior to natural beauty, despite the fact that the principle operating through the imagination of the artist is ultimately the same

Plotinus' Conception of the Functions of the Artist

as that which is the cause of beauty in sensible things. (iii) Whether the creative act occurs unconsciously through nature or consciously through man, the creative power, like the source from which it proceeds, never enters with all its original fullness into the material it structures. The rule is that the outcomes of art are always less than their creative causes:
Art, then, creating in the image of its own nature and content, and working by the Idea or Reason-Principle of the beautiful object it is to produce, must itself be beautiful in a far higher and purer degree since it is the seat and source of that beauty, indwelling in the art, which must naturally be more complete than any comeliness of the external.'0

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Since the cause is more than any of its effects, it follows that no work of art can ever succeed in embodying or equalling the degree of beauty present in the proximate cause, namely the artist. The products of art evidently have less value and less being than do their human creators. For Plotinus man as creator is the principal and sole agent of artistic beauty. Even so, the effects of man's creative imagination suffer from the inescapable defect of their being unable to embody all which the original vision was intended to disclose. In Plotinus' own words: "... every prime cause must be, within itself, more powerful than its effect can be: the musical does not derive from an unmusical source but from music." 11 (iv) Nature and its beautiful works can never attain a degree of beauty higher than, or even equal to, that which man as a result of his artistic creativity is truly able to impart to things. Man extends the aesthetic aspects of nature and fulfills its possibilities for beauty. Through his art, man elevates nature to a level of beauty which nature could never achieve through its own powers. Man as conscious creator is superior to nature and the universe of sensible things, in respect to both artistic activity and artistic attainment. In man the mode of creation and the quality of beauty testify to the presence of a superior grade of Being.

(v) Nature or the sensible universe can never embody the fullness of beauty Plotinus believes the Intellectual Principle possesses.12 Hence, whereas nature embodies a grade of beauty and a level of Being which man is entitled to appreciate and enjoy, man himself must refrain from imitating them, for to do so would be tantamount to compromising his own potentialities. Plotinus' meaning is plain enough. (a) Nature as a medium neither exhausts the range and quality of beauty nor is able ever to express the aesthetic richness of the Intellectual Principle. (b) Man is an intermediary between nature and Nous; this means that a higher grade of aesthetic revelation is expected to take place through the creative activity of man. (c) By way of emanation, man's artistic imagination is the only avenue open to the higher ontological levels of the cosmos for the inflow of more beauty into the structure of the sensible universe. Hence, man imitates successfully when he reveals something of the ideal source of Beauty. (d) In the artistic act of emanation-imitation, something of the original and authentic quality of the artist's vision is irretrievably lost in the very act of material embodiment. This loss Plotinus attributes to the ontological limitations manifesting themselves as a certain incapacity in the medium to receive in toto the aesthetic vision of the creator:
The stone .. . brought under the artist's hand to the beauty of form is beautiful not as stonefor so the crude block would be as pleasant-but in virtue of the Form or Idea introduced by the art. This form is not in the material; it is in the designer before it ever enters the stone; and the artificer holds it not by his equipment of eyes and hands but by participation in his act. The beauty, therefore, exists in a far higher state in the art; for it does not come over integrally into the work; that original beauty is not transferred; what comes over is a derivative and a minor: and even that shows itself upon the statue not integrally and with entire realization of intention but only in so far as it has subdued the resistance of the material."8

This passage makes abundantly clear that Plotinus does not want the reader to draw the inference that the artist

96 genuinely imparts the Idea of Beauty when he transfers the beauty residing in his imagination to the chosen medium. Nor does he mean to say that what the artist actually discloses is something like a copy of a copy, or that his work is thereby twice removed from ideal reality. The sharp difference between Plotinus' views expressed here and the theory of art Plato offers in the Republic is quite clear and requires no extensive commentary. The criterion for evaluating the function of art in the Republic is admittedly political, whereas in the Enneads the emphasis falls on the cosmic dimension of the aesthetic vision. That Plato is able to show the inferior epistemological character of the artistic claim to truth should be of no surprise to his readers. This type of criticism would be out of place in Plotinus' lofty approach to Beauty and art. A re-affirmation of the position expressed in the Republic would have simply defeated Plotinus' conception of the significance of art. Plotinus derives his Platonism not from the Republic but from the inspiring message of Diotima in the Symposium. Negatively, Plotinus' text allows us to conclude that (1) man cannot possibly through a medium embody all that the Idea of Beauty is, and (2) nature as the realm of artistic materials is incapable of taking on the complete vision of even man's grade of beauty. Yet if there is anything that is capable of approximating the absolute fulfillment reserved for the Idea of Beauty, this cannot be some particular, however successful, work of art; what lies closest to Beauty is man's profound imaginative vision enjoyed as a whole, at once intense and immediate, act of our human Nous. In the specific context of the process of artistic creation this means that for Plotinus the artist proceeds from the vision to his medium with full awareness of what is expected of him to do: to transfer his vision to it rather than wait for the medium to suggest to him artistic possibilities that might be lurking somewhere in some secret abode longing to see the light of day. It is also evident that Plotinus does not deny that the medium possesses aesthetic qualities,

JOHN

P.

ANTON

but he firmly believes them to be of a sui generis; they are of the sort that cannot constitute part of the genuine aesthetic themes the artistic man is rightfully expected to articulate. Plotinus never makes the claim that the artist is an absolutely self-sufficient creative man, as some of our contemporary aestheticians have come to assert. For Plotinus the artist works on his medium and imparts his imaginative vision through it. No matter what it is that he allows the medium to embody-or conversely, what the medium permits to be expressed through itself, as it were-the forms and shapes of art ultimately are not the artist's own personal doing. Everything around us has form. These forms are not invented; they owe their existence to their archetypal counterparts in the Intellectual Principle. While sensible things may or may not fully possess form, the degree to which they display formal structure determines the degree and quality of beauty in each case. Even when this natural quality is at its best, it is still not good enough. This notion is at the basis of Plotinus' argument that art expresses and articulates the forms far better than sensible existents do. The artist evidently has the ability to decipher the ideal aspects of aesthetic perfections by virtue of the fact that he has access to the realm of Nous, and he does so in a way nature cannot. Thus art is superior to the natural course of creation. What the artist does, then, is to complete the tasks of nature by bringing to the world of plural materiality more Being and more Reality-even though it already possesses a certain degree of aesthetic quality-perhaps, even better, more Ideality. This completing that the artist does is evidently viewed by Plotinus as an act of elevation rather than one to be understood as a humanization of nature. In its full significance, it is an achievement of the spirit, an ontological enhancement of materiality. By bringing the beauty of sensible things closer to the beauty of their corresponding archetypal Forms, the artist transmutes their mode of aesthetic existence not by affecting the things directly but by erecting comparable ana-

Plotinus' Conception of the Functions of the Artist logues with the aid of some medium. The artistic act is one of upgrading natural reality by way of reversing the downward course of cosmic development from the One to matter. To put the issue differently, the artist is the world's exclusive means for meaningful aesthetic enrichment. Through the beauty that flows from the imagination of the artist into the sensible universe, man has the privilege of helping the world really to be. In addition to asserting the cosmic aspect of the artistic act, Plotinus also draws attention to an important theoretical issue that concerns the nature of emanation. The issue has to do with the thesis that the value which the artist imparts to things cannot be explained by means of the products of art, let alone by some abstract principles derivable through the observation of things naturally beautiful. Like a true Platonist, Plotinus appeals to the metaphysical axiom whereby the cause, the ontic beginning of a thing, is also its causal explanation. Ultimately, the artistic value is in effect not a property of things in the sensible world; actually it stems from the creator. Beauty does not reside in some antecedent fashion in sensible objects and media, to be realized as a forthcoming perfection or as a deliberate drawing out of the aesthetic possibilities. In the Plotinian view, the origin of artistic values precedes all artistic and naturally beautiful things. Hence aesthetic significance is neither derived from nor exhausted by the sensible or even intelligible products of human creativity. The implication for aesthetic theory is plain: all empirical generalizations lack scope and efficacy when introduced as explanation and rules in aesthetics. In Plotinus the theory which claims that art is basically an act originating in some fundamental sense in the aesthetic resources of the creator, found its first ardent expounder. More specifically, what is here is a philosophical view of art both as emanation and as the expression of the beauty of the cosmos. Accordingly, beauty is claimed to be present in man in ways

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far more authentic and superior than in any other natural existent. But if and when the presuppositions of this metaphysical theory of art are abandoned in favor of a more tempered naturalistic anthropocentrism, which is what actually has happened in modern times-that is to say, when the Plotinian theory of art as emanation is severed from its supporting metaphysics and when the ontological commitment is gone -this theory is readily transformable into a theory of art as subjective expression.
IV
ART AS THE QUEST FOR BEING. There

is a

sense in which Plotinus can be said to have generated a paradox. On the one hand, he teaches that the artist, no matter how successful, can never truly come to occupy the lofty place reserved for the philosopher;l4 on the other, he asserts that beauty is unequivocally divine in its origin. The paradox pivots on the basic presupposition that the supreme life for man is ultimately attainable only through theoretical contemplation. What this means in the broader context of his ontology of art is that, whereas the Intellectual Principle is fundamentally available to the rational powers, the Idea of Beauty, even though it in principle demands the involvement of cognitive apprehension, does not constitute the supreme subject matter of the theoretical life. The Idea of Beauty neither encompasses nor precedes the realm of Reason. The paradox stems from the tension between two concurrent demands: (a) that the artist has access to the realm of divine essences, and (b) that ultimately the supreme life for man is attainable only through theoretical contemplation. It would be unfair to charge that Plotinus compromises the demand for consistency so that he can preserve the niceties of a hierarchical ontology and axiology. True, he assigns important tasks to the artist, just as it is true that these tasks never come to equal, let alone rank above, the ideal end of the theoretical life. Somehow, art, even if divine in origin,

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cannot be regarded as self-sufficient, nor is it offered as a suitable substitute for the activity that secures the summum bonum for man. At its worse, art is cheapened when it becomes imitative of things sensible or of anything inferior to its primal intention; at its best, it is cooperative and coordinate with the other activities of man in the quest for Being. In this light, then, the question is no longer whether art is supremely divine; for it is not. The question is rather what are the real tasks that confront the artist and what conditions must be present for him to succeed in what he undertakes. When man as artist is nature-oriented, he mediates between sensible beauty and Ideal Beauty. To the degree that he attends to things divine he aims at effecting transformations in the sensible world. If he is felicitous in his efforts, he ends by adding a new aesthetic dimension to his natural environment. But, above all, his success lies in bringing forth within himself the sort of realization that elevates his very existence to loftier strata of Being. Thus, art, among other things, is essentially bound to the quest for Being. Practically speaking, the artist is an agent acting in the interests of the ultimate values of the universe. He is expected to salvage the aesthetic aspects of those things whose birthright belongs to the realm of nature. This is the task of the artistic man only when he works with external materials, however. There is also the side of the artist which must eventually come to grips with the internal materials, human nature itself. These two sides of the artistic enterprise are expected to take place concurrently if ethical failure is to be avoided. Assuredly, aesthetic appreciation depends for its proper functioning upon the cooperative development of all the other powers of man. There is a basic condition man must satisfy before he is genuinely able to bring beauty to natural things, let alone appreciate what is already there: he must realize what beauty is within him. Plotinus insists that one cannot begin to see the beauty of things until he has climbed

appreciably high on the ladder of selfrealization. But be that as it may and assuming that such aesthetic development has occurred, it remains a fact that the artistic act is truly one of emanation. Beauty flows from the artist into the sensible world only when the artist as man has already realized beauty within himself. The frequent failures of man to rise to the demands of real artistic creation and aesthetic appreciation testify to the lack of prior aesthetic self-realization. The artist who has failed to turn himself into a thing of beauty is doomed to failure. Plotinus, though not without a certain tone of disappointment, remarks that the imparting of beauty is contingent upon the soul's own state of beauty and that it is a pity to see so many souls fall short of this quality: "Is soul of itself, a thing of beauty? We find it is not since differences are manifest, one soul wise and lovely, another foolish and ugly: soulbeauty is constituted by wisdom." 15 Evidently, all is not well with the universe; nor is it with the souls of men. He dislikes the differences mentioned in the preceding passage and urges his fellowmen to cultivate their souls so that the spiritual blemishes may vanish. Plotinus, like the Stoics before him, however, is reluctant to attribute these peculiar failures of man to the ultimate source of the cosmos. Ugliness, he declares, is not of Being. The real consolation comes with his insistence upon the educability of human nature: it is neither necessary nor desirable for men to stay in a state of failure and ignorance. Man has the power of self-redemption. He can do something about himself just as it is within his power to rise above the limitations he truly experiences when he sees himself primarily as a sensible thing. Within this context, the quest for Beauty is part of the broader quest for Being, both essential to the process of self-realization. In his eagerness to assert this ethical ideal, Plotinus gives the impression that he is so intent upon maintaining the view that the source of the universe is worthy of man's highest intellectual and ethical pursuits that he is prepared to stretch logic to the breaking

Plotinus' Conception of the Functions of the Artist point. No doubt he considers the chance worth taking, for he never fails to exploit every opportunity that presents itself to reiterate his love for mankind, hopeful always that the listeners will decide to choose nothing but the best as the objects of their noble aspirations. The art of inculcating this humanistic lesson he no doubt learned from his acknowledged master, Plato of Athens. If we admit that fundamentally Plotinus' philosophy is an ethical one centered around the quest for Being, it is no longer difficult for us to understand why he assigned to a theory of beauty so basic a role within the system. There is hardly a tractate in the Enneads in which Plotinus does not discuss some basic aspect of his theory of cosmic kalologia. It looms largely both in the systematic aspects of his intellectual vision and in the principal concepts of his ontology. Plotinus is not altogether immune to criticism here, however, for what the system apparently gained by way of a constant emphasis upon the speculative side-one which admittedly makes aspiration to cosmic beauty one of Plotinus' most appealing elements-the theory lost in logical cogency and argument.16 Plotinus tenders an unmistakably heaven-bound philosophic vision. The vista he describes is a restful realm of essential unity reserved for men when their humanity issues forth in excellence of mind and deed. Whatever its logical weaknesses, Plotinus' philosophy has the special merit of assigning the artist a place in the universe that offers an invitation if not an opportunity for the eventual removal of all those resented differences between foolish men and wise men; what awaits those who succeed is a blissful sense of identity with the source of Beauty itself. Because of his profound faith in man and the universe, Plotinus could confidently exclude from his ethics such views that advocate a human condition of total estrangement. He believed man, whether artist or knower, to be continuous with nature and ultimately with sublime Being, the One. This Plotinian faith in ontological continuities turns out to be incompatible with views implying

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or openly asserting man's permanent alienation from the sources of his being. Man may be a sinner and an incomplete being, as unpredictably subject to deception as he is incurably open to failure. Whatever his shortcomings, man, for Plotinus, is immune to such evils as total estrangement from his self. As artist, man is never cut off from the Idea of Beauty; and as knower, he is never completely betrayed by reason. The Plotinian view of man never speaks of an irreparably incapacitated humanity. It may well be that Plotinus has no real cure for our own brand of ailments, especially those that come under the presentday, somewhat fashionable disease of alienation. What is important however is that Plotinus, like his Greek predecessors, offers an alternative to the very outlook generating the feelings of estrangement. This alternative, this Plotinian naturalistic metaphysics of being, persuasive in tone and content, asserts with the fervor of honest commitment the continuity of ontic realities and man's firm place in a universe sustained by the highest of values. This side of Plotinus, namely his contribution to a metaphysics of art and a philosophical conception of the artist's functions, has received considerable attention in recent times.17 His thought has found sympathetic interpreters just as it has provoked others to approach him with skepticism and in certain cases with open hostility. There are those who judge him in terms of an admittedly social philosophy of art;18 others prefer to think that Plotinus considers the arts mainly as creators of symbols.19 Illuminating and helpful as these interpretations seem to be, considerably more work needs to be done on the philosophy of this last of the Greeks before the secrets of his metaphysical vision can be known in all its intricacy, especially those pertaining to the concep tion of beauty and man's pursuit of completion in Being. Plotinus philosophizes in a multifocal manner. For instance, he does not discuss ethics without weaving into the fabric of his discussion ontology and cosmology, dialectics and aesthetics. Also when he

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JOHN

P. ANTON

proceeds with aesthetics he hardly begins his exposition of a theme without obscuring it with large boulders of thought taken from the surrounding mountains of Being and the Good, the Intellect and the One, the Soul and the splendor of natural wonders. Plotinus' philosophical imagination is always complex, organic, manysided and, above all, at once anthropocentric, cosmocentric, and theocentric; in a word, polycentric. Whenever an interpreter selects some special center as the exclusive feature of the system, misunderstanding inevitably sets in. Plotinus' very style reflects his faith in the dialectical involvement of all human activities, much in the way in which the Platonic virtues intertwine in the Dialogues. It has its counterpart in his aesthetic faith, for he never tires of reminding us how the artist must never turn himself into a one-sided person. The artist who allows his art to become pure in the sense that it is a self-sufficient and insulated enterprise succeeds primarily in persuading himself to follow a dangerous course that can only terminate in irrationality. Few will question either the richness of his insights or his influence throughout the ages.20 These are good enough reasons for wanting to understand the philosophical tradition in aesthetic theory that remains indebted to Plotinus.

1 he fact that Plotinus includes under the notion of art such things as skills, professions, various activities ranging from medicine and agriculture to politics and rhetoric, does not in any way affect the thesis of this paper; nor would any extensive treatment of the broader denotation of art, it seems to me, lead to conclusions different from the ones presented in this paper. 2 For theiclassification of the arts in Plotinus and antiquity in general, see W. Tatarkiewicz, "Classification of Arts in Antiquity," Journal of the History of Ideas, XXIV (1963), 231-240. 8 Plotinus devoted a separate treatise to this topic: Enneads, V, 8. The ideal archetype of beauty, is in the Intellectual PrinX6yos v&)Xovs &pX%Ewros, ciple, vois, Enneads, V. 8, 3. 4 Sensation and imagination occupy a lower position in the scale of cognitive powers, because their function is to provide the connecting link between the soul and the entities that belong to the

sensible world. The criterion of worth is evidently the grade of being which the corresponding object of cognition possesses. Ontological levels, since they precede acts of cognition, determine the axiological quality of cognitive events. Plotinus is no doubt an ontological philosopher. 6 Reasoning or dianoia attends to objects of higher value. This is the faculty that enables the soul to accede to levels of finer substantial realities and consequently to attain knowledge of its appropriate entities. Thus, the proper subject matter of reasoning, according to Plotinus, is the world of intelligibles. In terms of ethical conduct this means that the method which enables the soul to complete its journey in the sensible world and eventually rise above it is the dialectical method. The proper and natural habitat for man qua reasoning being is the intelligible world of ideas and essences, viz., the contents of the first hypostasis, the Platonic ideas, ra Y'O77. 'Nous is man's highest cognitive faculty; it is the human counterpart of the realm of cosmic Nous. Thus, the Intellectual Principle, the first emanation of the One, regarded as above and more than the sum of its parts or set of intelligible essences, is the proper ideal entity to which human nous ought to aspire. By means of nous man knows himself. In this respect, nous and its object are identical. Man qua nous is for Plotinus continuous with eternal Nous or the Intellectual Principle. 7Enneads, V. 8, 9. The translations used in this paper are from Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, 2d rev. ed. by B. S. Page. Foreword by E. R. Dodds and introduction by P. Henry, S. J. (London, 1956). 8Irwin Edman's comment is most interesting here: "Plotinus, save in very rare instances, never discusses anything, the soul or happiness, virtue or magic, God or matter, without unmistakable reference to the totality of the universe. Each separate inquiry is a function of a whole analysis, as each separate life and thought and existence are incidental expressions of that pervasive unity about which alone it may be said that It is." "The Logic of Mysticism in Plotinus," Studies in the History of Ideas (New York, 1925), II, 52. 9Enneads, V. 8, 1. 10Enneads. 11Enneads. 12 In a revealing passage Plotinus answers his own question whether the universe, jd waav, can simultaneously possess extension and beauty: "Yes, because it has not been allowed to slip away into the limitless but is held fast by unity; and it has beauty in virtue of Beauty, not Magnitude; it needed Beauty to parry that magnitude; in the degree of its extension it was void of beauty and to that degree ugly. Thus extension serves as Matter to Beauty since what calls for its ordering is a multiplicity. The greater the expansion, the greater the disorder and ugliness." Enneads, VI. 6, 2. " Enneads, V. 8, 2. "Irwin Edman, for instance, does not suspect the possibility of a paradox here. He interprets

Plotinus' Conception of the Functions of the Artist

Plotinus, though not without a certain violence of the texts, as holding the position that all paths, three in number, which lead to the divine are of equal promise and efficaciousness: "There are, according to Plotinus, three temperaments or types peculiarly susceptible to divinity, peculiarly candidates for the complete recovery of the complete life. Plotinus, like Plato, saw a singular kinship between love and art and philosophy. The chord that thrills the musician, the comeliness that captures the lover and the consistency that convinces the logician were to his poetic mind three variants of the same eternal thing, the ordered loveliness, the lovely order of Reason" p. 69; italics mine. 1 Enneads, V. 9, 2. 18 On another occasion I have examined the logical aspects of a certain phase of Plotinus' aesthetic theory. I endeavored to show how the soundness of his arguments designed to refute rival views leaves much to be desired. See my "Plotinus' Refutation of Beauty as Symmetry," JAAC, XXIII (Winter, 1964), 233-237. 17Milton Nahm discusses Plotinus' views in his Aesthetic Experiences and Its Presuppositions (New York, 1946), esp. pp. 37-49, also The Artist as Creator (Baltimore, 1956, pp. 92-111. P. 0. Kristeller in his The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino (Columbia, 1943) offers valuable insights. Also noteworthy are the relevant discussions in the following: P. V. Pistorius, Plotinus and Neoplatonism (Cambridge, 1952); J. Katz, Plotinus' Search for the Good (New York, 1950); P. Merlan, From Plato to Neoplatonism (The Hague, 1960); and E. Brehier, The Philosophy of Plotinus, tr. J. Thomas (Chicago, 1958). 18 Cf. A. Hauser, The Social History of Art (New York, 1957), I, 113-120; also H. M. Kallen, Art and Freedom (New York, 1942), I, 75-80. The latter, for instance, writes: "The Plotinian philosophy was utterly a philosophy of escape and salvation, of selfliberation from the world. It turned its back upon doing and the control of doing and sought beatitude in aesthetic contemplation" (78). Cf. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York, 1934), pp. 290-292. 19See A. Hofstadter and R. Kuhns, eds., Philosophies of Art and Beauty (New York, 1964), pp. 139141. The editors of this anthology state in their prefatory note to the section on Plotinus that for him "artists' products are therefore valuable chiefly as symbols. It is with Plotinus that the symbolic nature of art receives its first comprehensive formulation" (140). Again: "Art is a Symbol in a double sense: of that lower reality which it perfects, and that ultimate reality which it mirrors" (141). It is difficult to challenge the Hofstadter-Kuhns interpretation of Plotinus' philosophy of art since their editorial statement offers neither argument nor textual evidence in support of their view. However, it is interesting to note that the symbolist inter-

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pretation they propound has been anticipated by Bernard Bosanquet in his A History of Aesthetic, 2d ed. (1904; London, 1949): "Therefore the whole metaphysical assumption that art is limited by ordinary perception, which assumption is one with the imitative theory of fine art, is now [with Plotinus] broken through. It is henceforth understood that art is not imitative but symbolic" (114). Bosanquet gives the impression that there are only two alternatives available to the philosophical treatment of art: to understand art as being either imitative or symbolic. Plotinus presumably rejects the first but embraces the latter. The shaky grounds on which this disjunctive argument rests need not concern us here, but suffice it to say that Bosanquet gives no indication that he suspected anything specious in his argument, any more than he questioned the possibility that this sort of treatment might not have suited Plotinus' views on art at all. The thesis that for Plotinus art is symbolic is questionable on at least two counts: (a) for Plotinus artistic creation is an authentic relevation, and (b) the outcome of the artistic activity embodies more reality than the initial material actually possessed prior to the act. What is overlooked by Bosanquet as well as by Hofstadter and Kuhns is that art, even if symbolic, transcends all symbolic aspects it may have. Art comes to express that aspect of Being that is beauty and does so in the degree in which the conditions of embodiment permit in each particular work. Plotinus' writings allow the reader to reach the conclusion that are, whatever else it is, is a certain ontological immediacy as both act and embodiment of beauty. To deny this side of his aesthetics, which is in effect what the symbolist interpretation entails, is to make incomprehensible the relationship between aesthetics and ethics in the theory of man Plotinus so passionately advocated. ^Nothing is being claimed in this paper about Plotinus' popularity or any influence his views might have exerted during his own time. It seems rather doubtful that his theory of the functions of the artist won an audience beyond his immediate followers. Again, there is no ground for believing that the artists of that period might have recognized Plotinus as their intellectual spokesman. If the story Porphyry reports in his biography of Plotinus about the master's refusal to have his portrait painted is true, then it adds further support to the prevalent view that the basic principles of Plotinus' philosophy of art have no direct relationship to any first-hand acquaintance with the artistic realities of his own times. The philosophical concepts and ideas with which Plotinus works belong to that strand of the classical tradition that has its roots in the writings of Plato. Plotinus and his followers are correctly called Neoplatonists.