Jack Bagby ( SocraticSwansongs ), Pedro Brea, Max Wade, and I explored Plotinus as a philosopher of technology, matter, embodiment, love, consciousness, and the living cosmos. Max began from his dissertation on Plotinus’ ontology of artifacts, suggesting that even technical objects may, in certain cases, function as “messengers” or angeloi, that is, instruments that communicate intelligible order, bringing the soul and body into alignment. This immediately raised the question of LLMs. If languages are already copies of a higher Logos, then an LLM, as a copy of our language, is a copy of a copy, a diminished Logos. It is not itself thinking, or at least if it contemplates it does so only at the level of minerals, not even at that of plants, and is not conscious in the way we are. Yet insofar as it generates coherence rather than pure nonsense, Plotinus might have to say that, in some mediated or indirect way, an LLM accesses intelligible principles. Like a statue of a god, or like a radio tuned to a frequency, the machine may create conditions for intelligibility to come through without itself being the source of that intelligibility.
We then turned to Plotinus’ account of Nature as contemplation from top to bottom. Nature “makes without hands”: its efficacy is indwelling, not externally imposed. This marks a crucial contrast with LLMs, which are in an extended sense made by hand, shaped from the outside, etched into silicon transistors that direct electrons. From a panexperientialist perspective, those electrons may have simple physical feelings, and so are contemplating themselves as electrons, but the question is whether any higher integration arises in the circuit itself. Plotinus’ physis makes itself, but our current machines do not. Plotinus can seem contemptuous of artifacts since they are merely diminished products of lower contemplation, yet elsewhere he praises sculptors like Phidias, whose depiction of Zeus gives access to intelligible beauty more powerfully than any empirical model.
A major thread concerned the ancient/modern shift from a divinely inspired world descending from intellect, soul, and life to a godless one in which mind is supposed to accidentally emerge from matter. Max located a decisive turn in the early modern discovery of the conservation of energy. Once body-body interaction no longer required an incorporeal input to keep motion going, matter could appear self-sustaining, and mind became a problem. Pedro added entropy, with Prigogine’s far-from-equilibrium systems complicating the story by showing how entropy can also become generative of local order. Jack brought in Bergson’s reading of Plotinus: consciousness is not, for Plotinus, the modern heroic principle of negentropic moral creativity. It is closer to matter, a subtraction or dissociation from fuller noetic life (Nous is not ordinary consciousness but hyperconsciousness).
The question of matter recurred. Matter in Plotinus is not creative fullness but the limit of procession, pure indefiniteness, the boundary that stops vertical causality from trailing off forever. Soul, as intelligible matter, creates sensible matter as a kind of image of itself. Nous gives formal causes, Soul gives material causes. Matter is the underlying condition that allows form and activity to take place. Yet matter strangely mirrors the One: both are empty of distinction and cannot be grasped intellectually. But the difference remains absolute for Plotinus: matter is indefinite because it is too poor for form, while the One is infinite because it is too rich for form. I tried to bend the hierarchy into a lemniscate, where the overflow reaches matter and immediately returns to source, a Whiteheadian transmutation in which material multiplicity and Oneness are two faces of the same self-differentiating Creativity (there are no non-paradoxical ways of speaking about such Ultimates). Max resisted making Plotinian matter too interesting. Pure matter is just a limit point; bodies, with their hylomorphic dynamism, are where the action is.
Embryology then gave us an opportunity to think the vertical descent of form. Evolution appears as the historical accumulation of form, while embryogenesis is at least suggestive of emanation: each organism is made there and then, not by preformation, nor merely by a genetic trace, but through formative entelechies that are not reducible to efficient causes from the past. Max brought in James Wilberding’s work on Neoplatonic embryology, logoi spermatikoi, and the Neoplatonic insistence that the mother is also a formally contributing cause (contra the Aristoteleans). The embryo is a nexus of cosmic contributions, nature’s seminal principles, and both parents’ active participation.
We also explored emptiness and mystical experience. Plotinus is closer to a metaphysics of fullness than to Buddhist emptiness or anatman. The flight of the alone to the Alone is not the realization that one is nothing, but that the principle of everything is within. Still, soul as intelligible matter has a kind of indeterminacy in that it receives formal determination from noetic activity.
The discussion of freedom centered on Plotinus’ treatise on fate. Freedom is not the Epicurean swerve, not counter-causality, but self-actualized activity. The freest reality is the One because nothing external conditions it. For human beings, freedom means becoming more one, less dependent on external causes, and on learning to play one’s role well. Like an actor in the cosmic drama, one does not choose the role but can bring it to life well or badly. Jack, drawing on Bergson, described Plotinus as raising the problem of freedom without finally reconciling its two sides: the mythical view of expressive play, fall, love, magic, and return, and the rational view in which the monad already contains its predicates and unrolls its program. Pedro brought in Iris Murdoch to shift freedom away from the idea of free will and toward freedom from illusion, such that love is objectivity in human relations, an epistemological attunement to reality through the diminution of ego.
Love, finally, appeared as the metaxic power that tied the conversation together. Plotinus’ highest love is non-reproductive, a pure intellectual or reflective love. The gods do not have children, and to live like a god is to rise beyond ordinary generation. But this provoked the Christian and embodied counterpoint that we do have bodies, we are organisms, and somebody has to have babies or there will be no more philosophers. Eros is a mediating power, able to raise the soul through beauty, but I feel the soul and spirit must also be reconciled with earthly incarnation.
