MacKenna-Plotinus: body and Soul

Let us take first the Couplement of body and Soul. How could suffering, for example, be seated in this Couplement? It may be suggested that some unwelcome state of the body produces a distress which reaches to a Sensitive-Faculty which in turn merges into Soul. But this account still leaves the origin of the sensation unexplained. Enneads   I,1,

Here, however, we must distinguish between a centre in reference to the two different natures, body and Soul. Enneads II,2,

While body and soul stand one combined thing, there is a joint nature, a definite entity having definite functions and employments; but as soon as any Soul is detached, its employments are kept apart, its very own: it ceases to take the body’s concerns to itself: it has vision now: body and soul stand widely apart. Enneads II,3,

Again, this Kosmos is a compound of body and soul; but Aphrodite to Plato is the Soul itself, therefore Aphrodite would necessarily – he a constituent part of Eros, dominant member! A man is the man’s Soul, if the world is, similarly, the world’s Soul, then Aphrodite, the Soul, is identical with Love, the Kosmos! And why should this one spirit, Love, be the Universe to the exclusion of all the others, which certainly are sprung from the same Essential-Being? Our only escape would be to make the Kosmos a complex of Supernals. Enneads III,5,

Secondly, there is the entry from the wholly bodiless into any kind of body; this is the earliest form of any dealing between body and soul, and this entry especially demands investigation. Enneads IV,3,

May we think that the mode of the soul’s presence to body is that of the presence of light to the air? This certainly is presence with distinction: the light penetrates through and through, but nowhere coalesces; the light is the stable thing, the air flows in and out; when the air passes beyond the lit area it is dark; under the light it is lit: we have a true parallel to what we have been saying of body and soul, for the air is in the light quite as much as the light in the air. Enneads IV,3,

Such explanations do not account for the differences of things, and there are many phenomena which cannot be referred to any of these causes. Suppose we allow them to be the occasion of moral differences – determined, thus, by bodily composition and constitution under a reigning heat or cold – does that give us a reasonable explanation of envy, jealously, acts of violence? Or, if it does, what, at any rate, are we to think of good and bad fortune, rich men and poor, gentle blood, treasure-trove? An immensity of such examples might be adduced, all leading far from any corporeal quality that could enter the body and soul of a living thing from the elements: and it is equally impossible that the will of the stars, a doom from the All, any deliberation among them, should be held responsible for the fate of each and all of their inferiors. It is not to be thought that such beings engage themselves in human affairs in the sense of making men thieves, slave-dealers, burglars, temple-strippers, or debased effeminates practising and lending themselves to disgusting actions: that is not merely unlike gods; it is unlike mediocre men; it is, perhaps, beneath the level of any existing being where there is not the least personal advantage to be gained. Enneads IV,4,

It is thought that in the Conjoint of body and soul the soul holds the rank of Form to the Matter which here is the ensouled body – not, then, Form to every example of body or to body as merely such, but to a natural organic body having the potentiality of life. Enneads IV,7,

Now the wonder comes how a unity of this type can be many as well as one. In the case of body it was easy to concede unity-with-plurality; the one body is divisible to infinity; its colour is a different thing from its shape, since in fact they are separated. But if we take Soul, single, continuous, without extension, of the highest simplicity – as the first effort of the mind makes manifest – how can we expect to find multiplicity here too? We believed that the division of the living being into body and soul was final: body indeed was manifold, composite, diversified; but in soul we imagined we had found a simplex, and boldly made a halt, supposing that we had come to the limit of our course. Enneads VI,2,