Plotinus: The First Philosopher of the Unconscious

Plotinus is sometimes referred to as “the first philosopher of the unconscious.” In his 1960 essay “Consciousness and Unconsciousness in Plotinus,” Hans Rudolph Schwyzer called Plotinus “the discoverer of the unconscious.” What exactly was Plotinus’ unconscious? In the Enneads, Plotinus asks about soul and intellect: “Why then…do we not consciously grasp them…? For not everything which is in the soul is immediately perceptible” (V.1.12.1–15).[i] In the De anima of Aristotle, “Mind does not think intermittently” (430a10–25).[ii]We cannot remember eternal mind in us, because passive mind is perishable. Is the productive or active intelligence in our mind that of which we are not conscious? Can productive intelligence be compared to unconscious thought? Plotinus suggests that we do not notice the activity of intellect because it is not engaged with objects of sense perception. The intellect must involve an activity prior to awareness. Awareness of intellectual activity only occurs when thinking is reflected as in a mirror, but knowledge in discursive reason, reason transitioning from one object to the next in a temporal sequence, is not self-knowledge. Only in the activity of intellect inaccessible to discursive reason is thinking as the equivalent of being. The intellectual act in mind is only apprehended when it is brought into the image-making power of mind through the logos or linguistic articulation; “we are always intellectually active but do not always apprehend our activity” (IV.3.30.1–17). If the Intellectual is the unconscious, then unconscious reason is superior to conscious reason. The inability of conscious reason to know itself in the illusion of self-consciousness is the premise of psychoanalysis in the twentieth century

Alberti and Ficino

Leon Battista Alberti and Marsilio Ficino, though separated by twenty-nine years in age, had a close relationship as mentor and pupil. Concepts which can be found in Alberti’s De pictura (1435) and De re aedificatoria (1450) are infused in Ficino’s De amore (1469). The concepts include Alberti’s theories of armonia, lineamenti, concinnitas, ornamento, and the pyramid of light in the theory of vision. In both Alberti and Ficino, harmonies shared by the body and music are manifestations of the harmonies of the soul. Beauty in body and matter is determined by beauty in mind (mens), that part of mind directed toward intellectus divinus, and beauty is made manifest in mind by the lineamenti, the lines in the mind which are distinguished from matter. Beauty is the internal perfection of the intellectus divinus, which is the good, which is a perfect harmony called concinnitas. Ornament is not beauty, but rather a physical complement to beauty

Plotinus and the Artistic Imagination

In the thought of Plotinus, the imagination is responsible for the apprehension of the activity of Intellect. If creativity in the arts involves an exercise of the imagination, the image-making power that links sense perception to noetic thought and the nous poietikos, the poetic or creative intellect, then the arts exercise the apprehension of intellectual activity. According to John Dillon in “Plotinus and the Transcendental Imagination,” Plotinus’ conception of the imagination led to the formulation of the imagination as a basis of artistic creativity. In Plotinus, imagination operates on several different levels: it produces images in sense perception, it synthesizes images in dianoetic thought, and it produces images in correspondence with the articulation through logos of noetic thought. The imagination is what connects the intelligible in intellect and the form in sense perception. Plotinus imagines an art which is a product of noetic thought as made possible by the imagination. The primary principle of beauty is Intellect, from which all images should be taken, as facilitated by imagination. Forms of art, like the forms of nature, are the product of Intellect. The production of a work of art is an intellectual or spiritual exercise of the imagination that allows apprehension of Intellect and noesis in nous poietikos. All art is metaphysical, and is an expression of intelligible form in imagination, an expression of an intellectual idea that can be differentiated from sensible form in intellectual apprehension. There are many ways in which the tenets of the thought of Plotinus become currents of art and aesthetic theory as it develops to the present day

Neoplatonism in the Risala (De intellectu) of Alfarabi

The Neoplatonism of Plotinus and Proclus played an important role in the development of the Aristotelian concepts of intellect and perception in the Arabic commentators on Aristotle. Plotinus was not known to Arab scholars by name, but books Four to Six of the Enneads from the third century, as compiled by Porphyry, were paraphrased in the text called the Theology of Aristotle, which was translated between 833 and 842 by the circle of al-Kindi in Baghdad. The translation combined Aristole, Plotinus, and Christian and Islamic doctrines, and had a significant effect on early Islamic philosophy. The al-Kindi circle also translated the Elements of Theology of Proclus in the ninth century. An Arabic work derived from the Elements of Theology, called Kitab al-khayr al-mahd, was believed to have been written in an early school of Neoplatonism in the eighth or ninth century in the Near East. It was translated into Latin as the Liber de Causis or Liber Aristotelis de Expositione Bonitatis Purae, by Gerard of Cremona in 1180

Philosophy of Intellect and Vision in the De anima and De intellectu of Alexander of Aphrodisias

Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. c. 198–209) was born somewhere around 150, in Aphrodisia on the Aegean Sea. He began his career in Alexandria during the reign of Septimius Severus, was appointed to the peripatetic chair at the Lyceum in Athens in 198, a post established by Marcus Aurelius, wrote a commentary on the De anima of Aristotle, and died in 211. According to Porphyry, Alexander was an authority read in the seminars of Plotinus in Rome. He is the earliest philosopher who saw the active intellect implied in Book III of the De anima of Aristotle as transcendent in relation to the material intellect. He connected the active intellect with the incorporeal and eternal cause of the universe described by Aristotle in Book XII of the Metaphysics. Plotinus would make a similar connection, between the One as First Cause and the Intellectual in which it participates

Topological Theory in Bioconstructivism

In the essay “Landscapes of Change: Boccioni’s Stati d’animo as a General Theory of Models,” in Assemblage 19, 1992, Sanford Kwinter proposed a number of theoretical models which could be applied to computer-generated forms in Bioconstructivism. These included topological theory, epigenesis, the epigenetic landscape, morphogenesis, catastrophe and catastrophe theory. Topological theory entails transformational events or deformations in nature which introduce discontinuities into the evolution of a system. Epigenesis entails the generation of smooth landscapes, in waves or the surface of the earth, for example, formed by complex underlying topological interactions. The epigenetic landscape is the smooth forms of relief which are the products of the underlying complex networks of interactions. Morphogenesis describes the structural changes occurring during the development of an organism, wherein forms are seen as discontinuities in a system, as moments of structural instability rather than stability. A catastrophe is a morphogenesis, a jump in a system resulting in a discontinuity. Catastrophe theory is a topological theory describing the discontinuities in the evolution of a system in nature. A project which applies these models, and which helps to establish a theoretical basis for Bioconstructivism by applying topological models, is a design for a theater by Amy Lewis in a Graduate Architecture Design Studio directed by Associate Professor Andrew Thurlow at Roger Williams University, in Spring 2011. In the project, moments of structural stability are juxtaposed with moments of structural instability, to represent the contradiction inherent in self-generation or immanence. The singularity of the surfaces of the forms in the epigenetic landscape contradicts the complex network of interactions of topological forces from which they result. Actions in the environment on unstable, unstructured forms, and undifferentiated structures, result in stable, structured forms, and differentiated structures