The present study is an enquiry into ‘philosophic silence’ in Plotinus. The line of enquiry pursued arose from wonder at a seeming paradox: Plotinus posits a radical truth available to the philosophic seeker, a truth that is an ontological transformation as much as it is an epistemological attainment, but refuses to speak this truth, and denies that it may be spoken. Why, then, write about it? The ineffable nature of the One or Good for Plotinus, coupled with what may be termed its transcendence and immanence at all levels of being and knowing, naturally gives rise to this tension between utterance and silence.

Plotinus also positions himself as an exegete of an esoteric philosophic tradition, with a concern for keeping certain philosophic matters out of the hands of the vulgar crowd. He claimed a great reluctance to write and publish his philosophy. Yet publish he did, as well as teaching a philosophic seminar open to all, and to questions from every quarter. How should we account for these apparent contradictions?

The most common account of Plotinus’ use of the intensive negative language known as apophasis, of the rhetorics of silence and secrecy and of the paradoxes of transcendence and immanence, is that all these techniques are legitimate philosophical responses to the ineffable first principle of later Platonism. Viewed from the perspective of the philosophic history of ideas, Plotinian paradox and indeed what is widely termed Plotinian ‘mysticism’ arise from Middle and Late Platonist hermeneutics of Platonic premises, and are simply logical. Since the publication in 1928 of Dodds’ seminal ‘The Parmenides of Plato and the Origin of the Neoplatonist One’, the dominant tendency in Classical scholarship has been to regard the rise of the transcendent first principle in Platonism, and particularly in Plotinus, as an outcome of exegesis primarily of the Platonic dialogues and secondarily of other Greek philosophical materials, particularly of Aristotle and the commentary tradition. The intellectual history which has emerged, painted in broad strokes, describes a more or less linear progression toward an idea of a first principle which, whether it is an intellect, a monad, or something else, surpasses being and essence.

I have argued that there were certain typical themes which characterised a Platonist perennialism discernible across a wide spectrum of second-century Platonist thought. The significance of this line of argument for understanding Plotinus is the subject of the present chapter. Plotinus, like Plutarch, Numenius and Celsus, believed in the wisdom of the ancients, and the Enneads show a thoroughgoing deference and culture of respect toward the canonic sages of the past. But most importantly for this discussion, Plotinus applies a hermeneutic of enigma and esoteric meaning to this tradition in a way which seems to have been unprecedented and innovative: like the Middle Platonists he finds wisdom hidden in myths and rituals, but unlike them, he also unearths it, with the same methodology, in Plato.

The tradition to which Plotinus allies himself has an ‘open’ side – the realm of philosophical dialectic, the disputes and liberties proper to a culture of parrhêsia and the ‘republic of letters’ of Græco–Roman Hellenism – but there is no corner of Plotinian philosophy which is not also informed by an esoteric privileging of knowledge. This chapter will help to nuance and complete our picture of the ‘open’ aspects of Plotinus’ project with a contextualised understanding of the ways in which the practice of esoteric reading and writing define his relationship to – or construction of – a perennial tradition.

The Plotinian Idea of Tradition

In light of the well-known remark of Plotinus, cited at the beginning of the previous chapter, that he is not an innovator but an exegete of the ancients, and of the evidence presented subsequently for a widespread Platonist tradition of perennialism, it will come as no surprise that Plotinus may profitably be described as a Platonist perennialist. While the formulation of Platonist perennialism formulated in the present work is in some respects new, the fact that Plotinus saw himself as indebted to an immemorial tradition is well known.

The thesis of Odo Casel was that the cultural trope of silentium philosophorum in antiquity was in large part a transference over time of religious arcana – actual doctrinal secrets, and the culture of secrecy surrounding them – to the idea of an ineffable reality which could not, by its own nature, be revealed. The evidence traced in the present volume supports this analysis in many respects. There is however an important proviso: for Casel, and most scholars after him, the late antique philosophic use of the themes of mystic silence and other rhetorics of concealment and secrecy was entirely metaphorical. The mystic arcanum stood for the ineffable first god.

I would argue that this is too simple, and ignores what written secrecy and written silence have in common: they both advertise a truth to which the author is privy and the reader is not. Throughout the history of philosophic secrecy, concealment was rarely the main aim, but rather revealing the existence of privileged knowledge on the part of the philosopher. The act of written hiding and revealing applies equally well to the hidden arcanum which must be kept from the uninitiated and the openly announced, but ineffable, reality.

Discussing the interference between secrecy and ineffability found in Plotinus, Jean Pépin poses the question, without answering it, of why and how one would guard against communicating the incommunicable, and whether it makes sense to forbid the impossible. It is hoped that this book has posed some answers to the ‘how’ part of the question: forbidding communication of the ineffable should be understood as an exercise of rhetorical hiding and revealing, part of a long Platonist tradition of treating the highest matters of philosophy as ‘secret knowledge’. Even in the earliest sources cited in this book, such as the mysteries and the Presocratic poets, the concerns of secrecy are at least as much to do with identity and exclusion and with the identification of the ‘mystery’ as a mystery as with the concealment of genuine secrets. Keeping this in mind, the seeming paradox of the Plotinian move to conceal the ineffable should become less inexplicable. Platonist philosophic silence has its own internal logic, but this logic only makes sense if we cease to imagine that the exercise of secrecy either implies secrets or even necessarily requires the presumption that there are secrets.

Plotinus’ world-view is, in a sense, very simple; at the same time, it is very difficult to understand and explain. Plotinus is intensely aware of this difficulty, and his work is a series of attempts at clarifying the ramifications of this world-view. The Enneads reflect to some extent the day-to-day disputations of Plotinus’ philosophic seminar, and the reader can often detect the puzzled questions of his students informing the varied approaches Plotinus musters to clarify difficult points, and in his patient, indefatigable attempts to explain these matters one sees the Socratic midwife gently encouraging the truth, bit by bit, into the light of day.

Scholarship, particularly over the course of the last fifty years, has gone a long way toward explaining how Plotinus thinks the world is, and why it is that way. There is a problem prior to the questions of metaphysics, however, which the disciplines of analytic philosophy and the history of ideas have largely failed to address. This is the problem of ineffability and its implications for written philosophy.

Plotinus simply does not believe that reality is fully susceptible to an explanatory account. He has cogent and well thought-out reasons for this belief; the history of philosophy has long since disposed of the anachronistic figure of Plotinus the anti-rationalist, who took refuge in the vague territory of ‘mysticism’, and has brought forth in its stead the more accurate model of a philosopher whose reason led him to place certain aspects of reality outside the scope of thought and language. Analytical philosophy has done an excellent job of delineating the levels of reality in Plotinus’ metaphysics, and a decent job of showing at what points Plotinus believes discourse and thought fall short of reality; we have, as it were, a good map of Plotinus’ world-view, with the borders roughly marked out. The present chapter explores these borders, noting the limits Plotinus places on discourse and on different types of cognition. While recognising these limits, we should also be alive to the power of rhetoric in philosophy; the following chapter will thus proceed to tear down this elegant systematic structure, when we address Plotinus’ writing of the unwritable, in which he repeatedly assails, and passes beyond, these self-erected borders.

Plotinus describes himself, not as an innovative thinker or the founder of any philosophical system, but as an exegete of ‘the ancients’. He tells his readers: ‘Our doctrines are not novel, nor are they modern: they were said long ago, but not openly. Our present doctrines are explanations of those older ones, and the words of Plato himself show that they are ancient.’ It is widely agreed that Plotinus was indeed engaged in exegesis of a philosophic textual tradition owing its greatest debt to the Platonic dialogues, and his work, while usually described as ‘Neoplatonist’, is better described simply as ‘Platonist’. Plotinus would not have understood the term ‘Neoplatonist’, and saw himself as a philosopher in the same tradition as Plato.

But a further aspect of Plotinus’ express view of his philosophical project, encapsulated in the quotation above, is that his doctrines are not presented as ‘Platonist’ doctrines; they are presented as explanations of ancient logoi, stemming from a deeper tradition of which Plato is himself a part, rather than an originator. In other words, Plato is seen as a strong exemplar of the philosophy of the ancients, and by showing that one is in agreement with Plato, one can show that one is in agreement with that philosophy.

An aspect of the problem of ineffability not yet touched upon is the problem of transmission; how might a textual or other tradition discuss, teach, or otherwise transmit knowledge of the unthinkable, the unsayable? One possible answer to this question is suggested by the structures of Platonist philosophy: since the Forms are eternal truths, access to the Forms (and, for Plotinus, access to nous, the location of the Forms) guarantees the philosophic seeker an atemporal, unchanging reservoir of truth upon which he may draw through personal philosophic anagôgê. This method of accessing the truth is insisted upon by Plotinus, and much in the Enneads may be read as detailed instructions for attaining to this type of knowledge; the texts of Plato and other great philosophers would then be the textual concomitant of this philosophic truth. But texts transmit knowledge; what tradition can transmit that which transcends knowledge and speech?

The present volume is a study of a recondite aspect of Plotinus’ philosophy: his use of tropes of secrecy and silence in his discussions of the nature of his ineffable first principle. Recondite and perhaps obscure, but not unimportant: because Plotinus tells us that the One cannot be spoken of – writes that the One cannot be written about – the tropes of secrecy and silence cast a kind of shadowy paradox over his entire project. Plotinus tells us many things about the One, only to contradict them later, often denying that he can tell us anything about it at all, and if one were to arrive at a clear-cut conclusion from all this, it ought to be that Plotinus, by his own admission, should not be writing. The One, for Plotinus, is utterly ‘silent’ and the philosopher should seek to emulate this silence. And yet, were Plotinus to have kept silent, there would be no one to tell us of the need to keep silent about the One.

It has been noted that reading apophatic language or ‘negative theology’ can be a fairly agonising process, and any work which has apophasis as its theme tends to be agonising in direct proportion to its fidelity to the subject matter. The present work, it is hoped, treads an elusive middle path between self-negating obscurity and facile ‘explanation’ which enables some new insights into Plotinus’ practice of written silence but is also somewhat readable. The goal has been to explore and describe some of Plotinus’ techniques of written silence in an intelligible way without straying too far from the intrinsically mind-bending difficulty of the subject matter. The author craves the reader's indulgence for the many points at which the text falls too far in one direction or the other.

This book also treads a line between over-specialisation and general treatment. The discussion inevitably covers quite a bit of ground which has been treated elsewhere, in the interests of giving a reasonably complete overview of the subject matter. Plotinian specialists may thus find themselves frustrated by a certain amount of well-discussed material being covered (not the three primary hypostases again!), while there is still a danger that novices will find themselves adrift in a strange thought-world.