The Death of a Plotinus scholar

Rest in peace Paul Kallagas.

I read in Leiter's blog about his passing. Letter is just passing along what he encountered from a professor at McGill University.

Kalligas has been the leading scholar on the work of Plotinus, a great Greek philosopher of the third century AD (or, if you prefer, CE).

He wrote a three volume commentary on Plotinus' major work, the ENNEADS. Kalligas writes in (modern) Greek, but two volumes of these three are available in English.

Since this is our all-philosophy week, and since Kalligas would probably like it, let us quote a bit from Plotinus -- the founder of neoplatonism, a systematic re-working of Plato's Platonism.

Plotinus is nowadays much more read about than read. Most of those of us who read philosophy, or even read about, philosophy at all have essentially left Plotinus' texts as a reservation for such scholars as Kalligas.

But let us read one paragraph together.

Plotinus:

We may treat of the Soul as in the body — whether it be set above it or actually within it — since the association of the two constitutes the one thing called the living organism, the Animate. Now from this relation, from the Soul using the body as an instrument, it does not follow that the Soul must share the body's experiences: a man does not himself feel all the experiences of the tools with which he is working.

I love the logical step-by-step nature of this paragraph. He considered with imperious brevity the question of the LOCATION of the soul -- in the body or above it -- a question that would give Descartes considerable aggravation much later. The pineal gland?

Anyway, Plotinus considers the broad question just to set out aside. What matters is not where the soul is but what it is. It is the carpenter of whom our body is a tool.

And from this he passes on to another crucial step -- the soul need not share the body's experiences. Presumably the body HAS experiences that do not rise to the level of being en-souled. We might briefly wonder, in the spirit of the "tools" analogy, what experiences a hammer has as it is hitting a nail? On what is the carpenter missing out by virtue of the fact that he does not feel that?

Oh, yes, a little reflection makes us think that the carpenter is lucky not to feel that. Such feelings inherited from his tools would make the carpenter a much less effective carpenter. And THAT, I submit is Platonus' point. He is building an ontological hierarchy here.

I have no love of the ontological hierarchy proposed, but I admire the proposer's panache.

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