From the Alien to the Alone: A Study of Soul in Plotinus by Gary Gurtler, S.J

Abstract

Reviewed by: From the Alien to the Alone: A Study of Soul in Plotinus by Gary Gurtler, S.J Lloyd P. Gerson From the Alien to the Alone: A Study of Soul in Plotinus. By Gary Gurtler, S.J. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2022. Pp. ix + 269. $75.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-8132-3451-9. Plotinus admitted, ruefully I would imagine, that Plato sometimes spoke “enigmatically” about the soul. Thoughtful readers of the dialogues will find it difficult to argue with this claim. Although Plotinus never thought of himself as anything other than a Platonist and an accurate expositor of Platonism, his reflections on many issues regarding “soul” (psychē) led him frequently to go beyond the explicit words of the text and both to speculate on their implications and to defend a Platonic account of the soul against opponents. Herein lay Plotinus’s originality: drawing out the implications of Platonic claims and addressing arguments against, in particular, the immateriality and immortality of the human soul. Students of Plotinus know that the fourth Ennead is entirely devoted to the soul and psychological matters, broadly speaking. But there is hardly a treatise among the other five Enneads that does not provide us with additional insight into how Plotinus struggled with the problems regarding the soul and how he “located” it within the Platonic system. Students also know that the fourth Ennead contains nine treatises that were written over many years; they do not represent a chronologically coherent or ordered set of papers on a single topic or group of topics. Thus, we have treatises chronologically numbered 21, 4, 27-29, 41, 2, 6, 8 (out of a total of 54). Most of the secondary literature on the soul in Plotinus focuses on the fourth Ennead with ancillary material drawn from elsewhere. This is not wrong or hermeneutically unsound, but it does suppose a topic-oriented approach on Plotinus’s part that probably does not correspond with reality. One of the distinctive features of Gary Gurtler’s [End Page 167] monograph is that he intentionally ignores the fourth Ennead and instead focuses on a chronological commentary on passages in several major treatises wherein the soul is discussed. This unusual approach certainly comes across as an intriguing novelty for those already familiar with all the treatises. I wonder, however, if such an approach would not be found disorienting by someone not steeped in Plotinus. So, this is not a book for beginners or even for those who come to Plotinus from a study of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, wondering how he internalized and reacted to some six hundred years of intense philosophizing about the soul. The treatises commented on (in part) are chronologically 1, 9, 10, 12, 19, 20, 22-23, 26, all roughly from Plotinus’s “middle period.” They are: I.2 [19] (On Virtue), I.3 [20] (On Dialectic), I.6 [1] (On Beauty), II.4 [12] (On Matter), III.6 [26] (On the Impassibility of Things without Bodies), V.1 [10] (On the Three Primary Hypostases), VI.4-5 [22-23] (That Being, One and Identical, Is Simultaneously Everywhere Whole), and VI.9 [9] (On the Good or the One). The variety of topics discussed in these treatises is considerable. Gurtler’s strategy is to approach the account of the soul from a number of different perspectives, especially in its relations to intellect, the Good, the body, and matter. All of this is done with the assumption that, as Plotinus thought about the topics in these treatises, he continually added new perspectives on the soul. Gurtler agrees with most scholars that there is no profound “development” in Plotinus’s thinking over the relatively short period in which he wrote these treatises. Nevertheless, this certainly does not preclude the likelihood that his views on the soul were more and more profoundly integrated within his larger metaphysical framework. After an introductory overview of the material to be covered and the methodology to be employed, Gurtler begins in chapter 1 to consider our embodied experience of beauty as this is described in Plotinus’s first treatise, On Beauty. Gurtler’s central insight here arises from his focus...