Plotinus: The First Philosopher of the Unconscious

John Hendrix

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. In the same year, Eric Robertson Dodds wrote that in the thought of Plotinus “there are sensations which do not reach consciousness,” and there are desires that are “unknown to us.” [1] In 1965 Dodds wrote: “Plotinus was the first writer to recognize that the psyche includes sensations, desires and dispositions of which the ego is normally unconscious….” [2] In the Meno (80d, 81b–c) and Phaedo (68b–d, 74b), Plato (429–347 BC) suggested that we have knowledge of which we are not aware at the moment, in anamnesis. But Plotinus was the first writer to address the thought of which we are not aware, and incorporate it into a philosophy of intellect. What exactly was Plotinus’ unconscious?

In the thought of Plotinus (204–270), seen as the first philosopher to develop a systematic conception of the presence of unconscious thought in conscious thought, or a systematic philosophy of intellect involving unconscious thought, concepts that contribute to a theory of unconscious thought include the nous poietikos (noetic thought or Intellect), the intelligible, phantasia (imagination), and the logos endiathetos (unuttered word) which aids in translating the intelligible into the presentation of it available to discursive reason or conscious thought. Plotinus did not use the word “unconscious.” It was introduced as the German “unbewusst” by Friedrich Schelling in the System of Transcendental Idealism in 1800. It was a popular concept among Romantic writers, and was developed into a philosophy by Ernst Platner, “Philosophical Aphorisms,” 1776, and Eduard von Hartmann, The Philosophy of the Unconscious, 1869. Roots of the concept can also be found in Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel. The study of the unconscious was turned into a kind of science by Sigmund Freud, beginning with The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, and further developed as a “science of the letter” by Jacques Lacan in theories of psychoanalysis in the twentieth century. Both Freud and Lacan attempted to present psychoanalysis as something other than philosophy, which supposedly depends on conscious thought knowing everything about itself, but that is clearly not the case in the philosophy of Plotinus. There is an element of thought not known to conscious thought, described by Plotinus, which became the unconscious.

In the Enneads, Plotinus asked about soul and intellect: “Why then…do we not consciously grasp them, but are mostly inactive in these ways, and some of us are never active at all?… For not everything which is in the soul is immediately perceptible” (V.1.12.1–15). [3] In the De anima of Aristotle (384–322 BC), “Mind does not think intermittently” (430a10–25). [4] We cannot remember eternal mind in us, because passive mind is perishable. Is the productive 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 consciousness is the premise of psychoanalysis in the twentieth century.

[1] E. R. Dodds, “Tradition and personal achievement in the philosophy of Plotinus,” in Journal of Roman Studies 50 (Cambridge: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 1960), pp. 1–7.

[2] E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 88, n. 4.

[3] Plotinus, Enneads, trans. A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, The Loeb Classical Library, 1966).

[4] Aristotle, On the Soul (De anima), trans. W. S. Hett (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, The Loeb Classical Library, 1964).