Pauliina Remes

Mind’s relationship to its own contents can be explained either in detectivist-observationalist or agential terms. Ancient philosophers often sided with the former view: minds activities and contents pre-exist - or coincide with - the act of thinking or being aware of them. The article argues that in late antiquity vestiges of an agential variant emerge in the works of Plotinus and Augustine. Augustine suggests that the mind’s relationship to its own contents is not one of observation, a predominantly receptive capacity. Rather, it is one of _cogitation_, sometimes voluntary and reflective introspection, more often a kind of unreflective, incessant weaving together of different contents into new meaningful connections. The sources of this conception are to be found in Plotinus: in the emergence of the idea of a self capable of inward directed reflection and self-identification. Unlike Augustine, however, Plotinus still operates with mainly obervationalist metaphors of “looking within” and with a detectivist notion of ideal self.

Plotinus (ca. a.d. 204–270) operates with an in his time novel distinction between the soul and the self that enables asking questions about self-knowledge more directly. His _Enneads_ provide both epistemic and ethical discussions on self-knowledge. Plotinus presents an elaborate picture of self-reflexivity. His other main contribution lies in the discussion of self-knowledge that is not a given, but an accomplishment. Becoming self-knowledgeable coincides with self-transformation. The inner turn coincides with a process in which the infelicities found within are chiseled away. The theory has a proto-voluntarist aspect: human beings are points of identification and origins of self-improvement. Second, we are not devoid of any essence: at the core of each human being is an innate intellect, governing and directing our lives as rational beings. Self-knowledge is self-realization of this true nature of our selfhood, and thus ennobling.

In the Timaeus, human bodies are treated as homeostatic systems, striving to maintain their natural state. This striving constitutes Plato’s explanatory framework for perception: perceptions come about when the equilibrium is shaken, and when it is restored. The article makes two main suggestions: first, that experienced pleasure and pain are grounded in non-experiential departures from and restorations of the natural state. Second, that the striving to maintain the natural state grounds perceptual interests, especially through conscious algesic and hedonic affection. Explanation of what humans find desirable and avoidable in their environment – what they attend to – is a complicated story that in the context of the Timaeus must include the role of human rational abilities. This article, however, only sheds light on its other, very basic aspect: the teleology involved in bodies and how it affects perceptual interests.

Plotinus treats certain pre‑philosophical concepts as reliable or promising starting‑points for philosophical study. This article studies the way in which he, in the act of philosophizing, conceives of the passage from an unclear understanding, a kind of pre‑concept, to a better, philosophical conception. What are the sources of this passage? What is the role of data given by sense‑perception? In what way are innate conceptual and cognitive capacities involved? It will be argued that the methodology suggested is a Platonic version of the Stoic appeal to common notions (koinai ennoia). Moreover, Plotinus seems to maintain several features of the empirical original. The concepts discussed are not primarily introspected or intuited, but seem to result from both experience and from innate tendencies. The bottom‑up approach of scrutinizing the combination of inquiries in the Enneads (and in a commentary of Proclus) and the methodological remarks made within these same inquiries, exposes, further, an interesting list of concepts significant for the Neoplatonic theory‑building : freedom, oneness, time and eternity, as well as good and evil.

Plotinus' recognises the possibility of conflict between self-referential aims and the good of the kosmos. His solution resembles closely one attributed sometimes to the Stoics. The inner reformation Plotinus proposes will yield a detached understanding of the whole universe. This view is accompanied by a realisation that one's happiness lies in functioning as a part of the whole and in contributing to the perfection of the universe. Other-regard cannot, therefore, be seen as altogether missing from neoplatonic ethics. What gives Plotinus' ethics an agent-centred spin is its emphasis on how this state can be attained. Promoting the self's true well-being by an inward turn is the only means to an understanding of what is good simpliciter.