How to Live Metaphysics? Plotinus on Contemplation

Mateusz Stróżyński

What could seem to be more abstract and divorced from daily life than metaphysics? Plato records a popular anecdote in his Theaetetus (174a) about Thales of Miletus, who fell into a pit because he was looking up at the stars; a clever Thracian servant girl laughed at the fact that he couldn’t see what was directly in front of him at his very feet. Late-medieval scholastics were mocked by Protestant historians of the 17^th century for apparently wasting their time debating about how many angels could stand on the head of a pin. With the rapid advance of natural sciences in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, metaphysics was declared obsolete and replaced by physics. The headline of a Telegraph article in 2011 was “Stephen Hawking tells Google ‘philosophy is dead’.”

However, in the modern era, certain metaphysicians have tried to argue that metaphysics is not (or is not only) an abstract, conceptual science which, unlike physics or chemistry, cannot redeem itself by producing microchips, microwave ovens or electrical conductors. The French philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), who dedicated his life to reviving the metaphysics of St Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), shared in his book Approaches to God,^[1]The book was originally published in French in 1949; the first English translation was made by P. O’Reilly: J. Maritain, Approaches to God (Harper & Brothers, New York, 1954). a personal experience that he boldly called “the sixth way” (alluding to the famous quinque viae – five ways – from the second question of Aquinas’ Summa theologiae, Iª q. 2 a. 3 co.):

I am busy thinking. Everything in me is concentrated on a certain truth which has caught me up in its wake. This truth carries me off. All the rest is forgotten. Suddenly I come back to myself; a reflection is awakened in me which seems to me quite incongruous, altogether unreasonable, but whose evidence takes possession of me, in my very perception of my act of thought: how is it possible that I was born?^[2]Ibid. 70.

That Maritain is describing an experience of intense philosophical thinking is merely an occasion for this experience. It can happen to us during the most trivial and mundane activities. What is crucial here is the question that emerges from the very depths of our being: how is it possible that I was born?

The Buddhist Zen tradition, which originated in early medieval China, and flourished in Japan from around the 13^th century, is famously hostile to all forms of abstraction, conceptualization, and discursive thinking. Some great Zen masters would quite literally break your leg or, in the best-case scenario, slap you in the face, if you tried to indulge in the intellectual games which in the West are now often called “philosophy”. However, one of the famous Zen ‘koans’ (paradoxical stories, short poems or questions whose purpose is to pull the student out of conceptual discourse), says: “Not thinking of good, not thinking of evil, just at this moment, what is your original face before your mother and father were born?”^[3]P. Yampolsky, The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch (Columbia UP, New York, 1967) 110.

The face we had before our parents were born points to an intuitive experience similar to the one described by Maritain:

I am facing a lived contradiction, an incompatibility (known in actu exercito [in lived-out reality]). It is as if I were in a room and, without my having left for an instance, someone were to say to me that I just came in – I know that what he says is impossible. Thus, I who am now in the act of thinking have always existed.^[4]Maritain (as n.1) 70–1.

This seems like the moment that a witty Thracian servant burst into laughter. “I have always existed?” What a ridiculous idea! How could I have existed before my parents were born? Zen Buddhism attempts to lead its students into that experience, but refuses (in principle at least) to give any philosophical or religious explanations of how it is possible that I was, obviously, born a couple of decades ago and, at the same time (or in fact, outside of time), I was never born but have always been there. Zen says: don’t think about it, don’t try to understand that. Be that! Live that in every moment, when you’re driving your kids to school, when you’re talking to your spouse, when you’re reading or taking a shower.

Maritain, however, describes this as metaphysics in a “wild state”, in a purely intuitive mode. He claims that the traditional metaphysics from Plato to Aquinas strove to interpret this experience and other similar metaphysical experiences in conceptual terms. Maritain’s answer is that we have always existed in God before we were created, so an experience that we can have spontaneously or (more probably) through the disciplined practice of meditation or prayer, is our direct feeling of the root of our selfhood in the eternity of God.

In my recent book Plotinus on the Contemplation of the Intelligible World: Faces of Being and Mirrors of Intellect, I claim that the philosophy of Plotinus (AD c.204–70), a Greek philosopher born in Egypt, is one of the most brilliant and harmonious examples of true metaphysics: both a direct experience of reality and the conceptual understanding of that. Zen masters, slapping their disciples in the face to stun them into the experience of timeless reality, reject philosophical thinking, rational arguments, and discourse as such, reducing metaphysics to ineffable silence of “don’t think, just be.” Modern Western philosophers reject any metaphysical experience of our soul, reducing metaphysics to constructing abstract edifices of concepts.

Plotinus shows how these two can be integrated, and mutually enriching, and the great Platonic tradition follows in his footsteps – St Augustine, Dionysius the Areopagite, St Maximus the Confessor, John Scotus Eriugena, St Bonaventure and St Thomas Aquinas, to name a few.

Plotinus asks:

τίς τέχνη ἢ μέθοδος ἢ ἐπιτήδευσις ἡμᾶς οἷ δεῖ πορευθῆναι ἀνάγει; ὅπου μὲν οὖν δεῖ ἐλθεῖν, ὡς ἐπὶ τἀγαθὸν καὶ τὴν ἀρχὴν τὴν πρώτην, κείσθω διωμολογημένον καὶ διὰ πολλῶν δεδειγμένον· καὶ δὴ καὶ δι᾿ ὧν τοῦτο ἐδείνυτο, ἀναγωγή τις ἦν. τίνα δὲ δεῖ εἶναι τὸν ἀναχθησόμενον; (Enn. .1–6)

What art is there, what method or practice, which will take us up there where we must go? Where that is, that it is to the Good, the First Principle, we can take as agreed and established by many demonstrations; and the demonstrations themselves were a kind of leading up on our way. But what sort of person should the man be who is to be led on this upward path?^[5]Plotinus, Enneads, trans. A.H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library, 7 vols (London/Cambridge, MA, 1966–88).

He is speaking about dialectic here, which is interpreted in the modern period as an abstract mental exercise of thinking about concepts and propositions. But for Plotinus this is a practice which leads us “upward”, to the Good, to the highest God, the source of all reality. We need “demonstrations” – rational, conceptual discourse – and Plotinus never denies that; but we also need to “walk the path” of philosophy, to actually experience the presence of the spiritual reality, which he calls “contemplation” (θεωρία, theōriā; θέα, theā). How to arrive at this experience? It’s not only about reading, studying, and thinking; we have to become a certain “sort of person”. We need to be transformed by philosophical practice.

In the book, I propose calling the two dimensions of Plotinus’ metaphysics (and all great metaphysics, for that matter) “the first-person perspective” and “the third-person perspective”. The latter is an attitude in which reality is an “it” to us, something to be observed from a distance, analysed, and thought about. The first-person perspective is an attitude where we discover that we participate in reality, and are connected to it and united to it, so that the distance between ourselves and the whole of being disappears. Thanks to that we can, as it were, feel from the inside the reality that seemed to be “out there”.

It seems that we are arriving in the West at a great shift in the philosophical paradigm. A good example is the philosophy of Iain McGilchrist, a literary scholar and psychiatrist, who shows that we experience the world through two distinct modes, which are in fact modes of attention. One is associated with the left hemisphere of our brain, and the other with the right-hemisphere.^[6]See his two books The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, (Yale UP, New Haven, CT/London, 2009) and The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (Perspectiva Press, London, 2021).

The left hemisphere sees the world through the lens of conceptual categories as a collection of fixed, separate things, which we can name, think about, and manipulate. The right hemisphere experiences reality as a living whole which is beyond concepts and categories, in which we participate; we belong to it instead of having control over it. According to McGilchrist, we should strive at the harmony between hemispheres, under the primacy of the right one; this is as necessary for our flourishing as it is difficult to achieve. Our modern culture, especially in the West, is a miserable example of the absolute dominance of the left-hemispheric way of seeing reality.

It seems that Plotinus, just like the other great metaphysicians, is offering us a philosophy which is the true love of wisdom: a harmonious synthesis of the theoretical and the practical, the rational and the imaginative, the individual and the all-encompassing. He says:

διὸ οὐδὲ ῥητὸν οὐδὲ γραπτόν, φησίν, ἀλλὰ λέγομεν καὶ γράφομεν πέμποντες εἰς αὐτὸ καὶ ἀνεγείροντες ἐκ τῶν λόγων ἐπὶ τὴν θέαν ὥσπερ ὁδὸν δεικνύντες τῷ τι θεάσασθαι βουλομένῳ. μέχρι γὰρ τῆς ὁδοῦ καὶ τῆς πορείας ἡ δίδαξις, ἡ δὲ θέα αὐτοῦ ἔργον ἤδη τοῦ ἰδεῖν βεβουλημένου.

Therefore, Plato says, “it cannot be spoken or written,”^[7]Plato, Letter 7, 341c. but we speak and write impelling towards it and wakening from reasoning to the vision of it, as if showing the way to someone who wants to have a view of something. For teaching goes as far as the road and the travelling, but the vision is the task of someone who has already resolved to see. (Enn. 6.9.4.13–16)

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The launch for the book will take place at the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Platonism on 28 January; remote participation is possible. A conversation about the book at the Dionysius Circle channel is available here.

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Mateusz Stróżyński is a Classicist, philosopher, psychologist, and psychotherapist, working as an Associate Professor in the Institute of Classical Philology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. He is interested in ancient philosophy, especially the Platonic tradition. His most recent books are The Human Tragicomedy: the Reception of Apuleius’ Golden Ass in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century (ed., Brill, Leiden, 2024) and Plotinus on the Contemplation of the Intelligible World: Faces of Being and Mirrors of Intellect (Cambridge UP, 2024).

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Further Reading

M. Stróżyński, Plotinus on the Contemplation of the Intelligible World: Faces of Being and Mirrors of Intellect (Cambridge UP, 2024).

K. Corrigan, Reading Plotinus: A Practical Introduction to Neoplatonism (Purdue UP, West Lafayette, IN, 2005).

I. McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Yale UP, New Haven, CT/London, 2009).