Ennead I.3: On Dialectic [The Upward Way]

What's a philosopher to do?

The first line:

What art is there, what method, what discipline to bring us there where we must go?

A perfectly reasonable question. I was on the Neoplatonism subreddit the other day, and there was a neophyte asking, “So how do we actually see the forms??” This is basically the same question.

There are two steps necessary to arrive at the highest point, at the goal of philosophy:

1. Conversion from the lower life.

2. The path of Dialectic that leads to the very top of the Intellectual realm.

In considering the first step, he looks at three types of person which are more likely to make this ascent: the musician, the born lover, and the metaphysician. He puts them in this order, with the first two being disposed to philosophy on account of their inclination towards beauty: for the musician, it is the beauty of tone and rhythm, “he longs for measure and shapely pattern”; whereas the lover is drawn to the beauty of a beloved and is amazed by it. In both of these cases, the love needs to be refined: the musician must learn that it is the intelligible beauty which makes the sensible beauty delightful; the lover must not be caught up in any individual beauty, but must learn to see what is beautiful in everything, and especially what is beautiful in immaterial things, such as art, science, virtue.

The metaphysician is one who naturally has the right sort of character. The study of math (which will come easy to him) will train him for abstract thought and increase his confidence in immaterial reality.

The next stage for all of these is Dialectic. As far as I can tell, Dialectic in Plotinus is identical to logic, but it is not merely about the forms of logic, but the very things themselves. The following statements testify to the strength of his conviction on that point:

What, then, is Philosophy? Philosophy is the supremely precious.

Is Dialectic, then, the same as Philosophy? It is the precious part of Philosophy.

We must not think of it as the mere tool of the metaphysician: Dialectic does not consist of bare theories and rules: it deals with verities; Existences are, as it were, Matter to it, or at least it proceeds methodically towards Existences, and possesses itself, at the one step, of the notions and of the realities.

When St. Jerome places logic as the highest sort of philosophy, he must have in mind a logic that encompasses all of being as this Dialectic of Plotinus.

In Aristotle and St. Thomas, logic seems to be more of an art than a science (even if it is the ars artium, the greatest of all arts). And yet, and especially to the degree it is a science, it has the act of reason as its object. Now, if Plotinus is right that the highest object of knowledge (the Intellectual-Principle?) is within us, then to have knowledge of the act of reason and the act of Intellection (if these be diverse) is to have knowledge of the most important things. This is perhaps why he says that Dialectic “knows above all, the operation of the soul.” And from this knowledge, it knows what to affirm or to deny.

He then gives another account of what Dialectic does:

The virtue of Wisdom is a certain super-reasoning much closer to the Universal; […] Wisdom and Dialectic have the task of presenting all things as Universals and stripped of matter for treatment by the Understanding.

This agrees quite well with what St. Thomas says about the science of metaphysics which he argues proceeds intellectualiter, rather than rationabiliter (as in natural science) or disciplinabiliter (as in mathematics). Of course, one will use reason in the science about being qua being, but the work of reason terminates in a simple understanding; in determining the one cause (God) of the many things; in drawing out one universal which is predicated of many things. And so the highest science, according to both St. Thomas and Plotinus is about moving toward the more universal, the more immaterial, and from reason to understanding.

Plotinus ends on a slightly pessimistic note: “But, ever, the natural virtue is imperfect in vision and in strength.” St. Thomas agrees that this is true for the wayfarer as well, but he has hope that the blessed comprehend the First Cause: “The blessed in heaven, however, also know what he is, because they see his essence. […] But we are said not to understand them because the intellect does not have a full knowledge of them. That indeed is promised to us as our reward.”¹

Whatever differences exist between Plato and Aristotle on the means of attaining the highest sort of knowledge, the account of Plotinus for how to arrive at the highest knowledge seems to agree with either of them. Though he speaks of a “memory of beauty” in the natural born lover, which sounds distinctly Platonic, it is still the case that anyone arriving at the Term must move from the particular and visible to the universal and immaterial—in perfect agreement with Aristotle. Though Plotinus may disagree with Aristotle in naming Dialectic as the highest part of Philosophy, it is still this same work of Dialectic and logic that is used by Aristotle to arrive at the most universal genera and the most universal causes. Even the disagreement about whether the highest object of thought is identical with us or not may be moot to some extent: for even if the most universal cause is not already with us (as Plotinus seems to say), we are still united to it in some respect by knowledge, so to know it is a self-knowledge to the extent that our mind is united to it. I expect this matter will be considered more explicitly in later treatises, either about the Soul or about the Supreme Being.

1. St. Thomas, De Trinitate, q. 6, a. 1, number 3, ad. 2 et 4.