Return to the One (23 page)

A bad sound will be beautiful in relation to the whole, and an unnatural sound will be natural for the universe…. Just as—to use another image—an evil executioner does not make worse a city governed by good laws; a city has to have its executioner—men such as those are often necessary—and he is in his proper place.
[III-2-17]
³

Most of us fail to see the beauty of the big picture. Each of our consciousnesses is pressed tightly against the minute slice of life immediately in front of each of us, so we fail to see how apparent evils contribute to the overall good. If we could take a few steps back, we’d observe that what looks like a mistake close up actually is a positive contribution to the grand design.

Still, we shouldn’t view Plotinus as a fatalistic relativist who preaches an “it’s all the same and it’s not in our hands” philosophy. For he teaches that it is we who determine the course of our individual destinies. As we read previously,

Providence must not be such that it makes nothings out of us. If Providence alone were all there were, it would no longer be Providence, for upon whom would it exert providential action?
[III-2-9]
⁴

Providence, the hand of destiny, is the loom that weaves together the amazingly variegated and ever changing patterns of material reality. If these patterns are completely predetermined from the moment of creation, if free will is silent and all that can be heard is the mechanical ticking of a clockwork universe then there’s no need for providence. Why have rules for a game if the outcome has already been decided?

The freedom of the human soul necessitates providence, since there must be some means of linking up freely willed actions with their natural consequences. Otherwise, we would be isolated islands of capriciousness disconnected from all else in the universe, an impossibility in a cosmos united by the omnipresence of the One.

Choice Is Compulsion

I
N THE OLD DAYS
, I recall, people went into a café and simply said, “Give me a cup of coffee.” And without delay they received a cup of coffee.

Today, in many parts of the United States at least, people walk into a café and become temporarily mesmerized, staring slack-jawed at a large board on the wall that enumerates the dizzying array of choices open to them. Small, regular, tall, or grande? Single shot, double, triple, or heart-stopping? Caffeinated or decaffeinated? Expresso, latte, mocha, cappuccino? Non-fat, low-fat, high-fat? Syrup, chocolate, cinnamon, nutmeg?

Clearly coffee drinkers have many more choices open to them than they did before. They can even defy convention, order a plain cup, and drink it black. The question, though, is whether choice implies freedom or compulsion. Our intuitive response is likely to be: “Freedom, that’s obvious.”

However, Plotinus argues otherwise. J.M. Rist says, “For Plotinus … it is only at the level
of nous
[spirit, or intellect] that absolute freedom can be found…. Freedom is in fact a kind of natural inclination or élan, present in
nous,
and directed towards the One.”
¹

The soul, then, becomes free when it presses on without hindrance to the Good by means of Intellect.
[VI-8-7]

We’ve learned that the soul has an innate yearning to return to the One. This spiritual pull, the longing that never lessens, is akin to a lighter-than-air balloon tugging at the ropes that keep it earthbound. When these ties are cut, the balloon is free to soar upward and move with the wind. Hot-air balloonists often speak of the freedom of this sort of flying. Yet there are few choices to be made on a balloon (usually, just whether to go up or down). The freedom of ballooning is to let the wind determine one’s course, just as Plotinus says that the soul is free only when it is guided by the all-pervading intelligent current of spirit.

But we shall grant voluntary action to one whose doings depend on the activities of Intellect and who is free from bodily affections.
[VI-8-3]

The descent of the soul from the spiritual world has gotten us into a strange situation. It was
tolma,
a desire for self-assertion, that made us want to leave the embrace of spirit. There, we enjoyed the freedom of moving harmoniously in unison with the whole like a school of fish that is both a one and many. Here on Earth, we are less free because of our power of choice, admittedly a seeming paradox. But Plotinus explains how this came about.

As we learned in the last chapter, providence doesn’t conjure up a destiny for us. Providence simply is the universal power that links up causes and effects so that consequences follow naturally, and rationally, from actions. Since actions flow from choices, the ball of providence gets rolling, so to speak, when the soul makes a choice. Thus Plotinus makes it clear that what we are enjoying or suffering in life is entirely the result of our own choosing, and not the fault of providence.

One has no proper reason for demanding an account or a reckoning from it
[providence]
, as one admits that “the blame lies with the chooser.”
[III-2-7]

Our primal mistake, the original sin if you like, lay in not realizing that plenitude is power. There in the spiritual world the soul already had within it (and still does, for that matter) all that could possibly be possessed, for every form in creation is contained within the one-many of spirit. And the highest aspect of each individual soul is identical with spirit. So if the soul had wanted to exercise true freedom and true power, it should have stayed above rather than descending to the material world.

And inability to go to the worse does not indicate the powerlessness of what does not go, but its not going comes from itself and is because of itself. And not going to anything else has in it the extreme of power.
[VI-8-10]

If we were with the One or spirit, there would be no need to choose anything at all. When there is only good, the question of moving toward bad cannot arise. By contrast, we souls now have to work hard to be virtuous because the potential of vice is ever-present in matter, where evil is emptiness, the absence of form.

People often take pride in their ability to stick to the straight and narrow. However, Plotinus points out that this isn’t a mark of pure virtue, which to him is self-contained and self-controlled, since it’s impossible to be good without the option of being bad.

For to be capable of the opposites belongs to incapacity to remain with the best…. Virtue is always being compelled to do this or that to cope with what turns up.
[VI-8-21, VI-8-5]

A man stuck all by himself on a desert island for a year wouldn’t be justified in coming home after being rescued and saying to his wife, “Honey, I was faithful to you all that time. Aren’t you proud of me?” Well, she would have been
very
proud if the island had been inhabited by a bevy of beautiful sex-crazed Amazons. Virtue presupposes the capacity of engaging in vice.

This is why Plotinus teaches that it is far better for the soul to be beyond the dualities of good and evil, virtue and vice, freedom and necessity. All our vaunted choosing comes about because we’ve shunned the One and embraced the many. Just as a doctor can make people healthy only if they’re diseased and a soldier can demonstrate his bravery only when there’s a war, so is the individual soul able to hold to the right path only because it has entered a realm of reality that contains wrong paths.

For certainly if someone gave virtue itself the choice whether it would like in order to be active that there should be wars, that it might be brave, and that there should be injustice that it might define what is just and set things in order, and poverty, that it might display its liberality, or to stay quiet because everything was well, it would choose to rest from its practical activities because nothing needed its curative action, as if a physician, for instance Hippocrates, were to wish that nobody needed his skill.
[VI-8-5]

The Plotinian ideal is for the soul to be completely self-absorbed—in a highly spiritual, not egotistical, sense. What keeps the soul from returning to the One is a fascination with outward reflections rather than inner reality.

Consider men being drawn to a hardware store by their longing for power tools, or women flocking to a mall because of their attraction to shoes. It is the power saws and the high-heeled pumps that really hold the power, not those who desire them. This is, says Plotinus, an unfitting tyranny for the once-free soul.

For that which is in need and necessarily desires to be filled does not have the mastery over that to which it is simply being led…. For that which desires is led, even if it is led to the good.
[VI-8-2, VI-8-4]

To want something and then go get it is for most people a sign that they are in charge of their lives. Some people want to make a lot of money, and they do. How wonderful, we think. They set their sights on a goal and had the determination and skill to attain it. It does indeed seem that our capacity to consciously choose what to do in life is an expression of the uniqueness
of Homo sapiens,
seemingly the only species not driven by blind instinct and desire.

Or are we? Let’s see how Plotinus approaches this question: What does it mean for something to be within our control?

But we must enquire into the following: to what ought we to attribute this which is referred to us as being in our power?
[VI-8-2]

As he so frequently does, Plotinus starts by answering his own query with a “straw man,” an argument that appears superficially plausible, but is easily refuted. Perhaps, he says, acting on some impulse or desire shows that we are free to do what we choose, especially if that desire is accompanied by a calculation of the associated costs and benefits.

One possibility is to attribute it
[being in our power]
to impulse and any kind of desire, for instance what is done or not done by passion or lust or calculation of the beneficial accompanied by desire.
[VI-8-2]

But, on closer inspection, having a desire doesn’t hold up as proof of our free will because even animals and insane people have lusts and passions. So unless we want to admit that irrational beings have the power to freely choose what they do, which pretty much eliminates any distinction between a man putting away cash in his brokerage account and a squirrel storing up acorns in a hollow tree trunk, we have to look deeper than desire for proof that humans are able to make unconditioned conscious choices.

But if
[being in our power is]
by passion or lust, we shall grant that something is in the power of children and wild animals and madmen and those who are beside themselves and caught by drugs or casually occurring imaginations of which they are not master.
[VI-8-2]

Is a drunk chasing after a vision of pink elephants or a psychotic screaming at demonic voices inside his head, in control of himself? Not to Plotinus and not according to the laws of the state in which I live, which allow “guilty except for insanity” pleas. We expect that a cougar will kill a rabbit but that reasonable people are supposed to know better than to kill each other. So maybe it is reason, what Plotinus calls “correct calculation,” that separates us from purely desire-driven creatures and allows us to make choices without compulsion.

Should we perhaps attribute it
[being in our power]
to correct calculation accompanied by correct desire?
[VI-8-2]

By correct desire, Plotinus probably means the soul’s primary desire for the Good, or One, or at least a secondary desire that supports this divine yearning. For example, if our human incarnation can help us return to the One, and staying alive is necessary to remain human, then a desire for food, drink, and shelter would be a correct desire. Lloyd Gerson says, “There is for Plotinus no such thing as discovering or generating in oneself a rational desire for anything but the good. If the desire is not for the good, it is not rational.”
²

So we’ve gotten down to correct calculation and correct desire as possible sources of free will. But now we’re faced with a chicken-and-egg question. Which comes first? Do we calculate that something will be good for us, which makes us desire that thing, or does a desire for something lead us to calculate that it is good for us?

Yet even here one might enquire whether the calculation set the desire in motion or the desire the calculation.
[VI-8-2]

This all may sound rather academic, but it gets to the heart of a question each of us wrestles with, consciously or unconsciously, every day: Who is in charge here, anyway? Do I rule my desires or do my desires rule me? Am I in control of my body or does my body control me? Do I determine what I think about or does my thinking determine me?

It isn’t so important that we understand how Plotinus answers these queries as how we ourselves do. And this requires some serious introspection. Most of us like to believe, “I am freely choosing to do what is in my best interest.” Perhaps. But who is the “I” that is doing the choosing? Is it soul, body, or mind?

If we’re honest, we probably would have to admit that many, if not most, of the choices we make are compelled by bodily needs. Plotinus points out that our physical bodies generate hunger, thirst, sexual desire, and so many other “imaginations” in our minds. Someone who is starving is going to think and act much differently than will someone who isn’t being driven by a powerful desire for food. We can’t call this self-directed action, because the self is the soul, not flesh and bone.

And we shall not class those who are active according to imaginations of this kind among those whose principle of action is self-determined.
[VI-8-3]

The task of the mystic philosopher is to figure out what is truly in his or her self-interest. Our problem is that the soul has descended into this physical world and incarnated into a succession of physical bodies. Matter, whether of our own form or all the forms that surround us, has captured our attention and now pretty much calls the tune. We dance not to the beat of the soul, which longs only to return to the One, but to the drum of the senses and worldly desire. Since our real good is within, not without, this means that we are, willy-nilly, being led away from what is best for us, and toward the worse.

For the involuntary is a leading away from the good and towards the compulsory, if something is carried to that which is not good for it; and that is enslaved which is not master of its going to the Good.
[VI-8-4]

It’s much as if we had been lured into the clutches of a used car salesman even though we don’t even need a car. We’ve lost sight of the fact that all the choices he’s offering us, “I can give you a good deal on this Ford, and a
great
deal on this Toyota,” are spurious. The only choice we should make is to leave the car lot and spend our resources on something that will actually improve our well-being.