EL DESARROLLO AGRÍCOLA DEL VALLE DEL CAUCA

Why should Plotinus make nature herself speak in chapter 4 after he already has gone to the trouble of deanthropomorphizing her? As Plato provides myths, ex- amples, playful interludes, dramatic enactments, as well as different sorts of ar- guments, so Plotinus provides a dramatic enactment for us to see through it to the sort of living contemplation in nature for which he has been arguing. He has an- other reason too. Gnostic “principles” have very dramatic roles and do a lot of apocalyptic talking. Plotinus makes nature’s speech dramatically attractive but emphasizes her silence. He gently reprimands her curious questioner—“you should be silent like me”—and then describes what she sees in her silence.17 _{In a}

later treatise on providence, Plotinus has the universe reply (3, 19–20: “if you contemplate this”) to someone who blames the whole because of its parts (in this case a Gnostic) in terms reminiscent of St. Paul’s words on the body of Christ, or at least of a Gnostic version of St. Paul: it is not the function of the finger to see, but the eye in the context of the whole body (III, 2 [47] 3, 21–42). Here too in III, 8, he has the Gnostics in mind, or at least those friends in his own circle who had been attracted by Gnosticism.

The central image of nature’s speech is that of natural geometry. In Plato’s

Republic VI (510 d–e), geometers use visible forms to think through them to their

intelligible paradigms. Here in III, 8, they likewise draw figures “as they contem- plate,” whereas the source, nature, contemplates and the figures fall out into the lines of bodies. Plato represents this activity mythically in the Timaeus as the in- telligible ordering of primordial chaos with geometrical forms by the divine demi- urge or craftsman.18

17. Cf. Rilke, Ich bin, du Ängstlicher: “. . . Siehst du nicht meine Seele, wie sie dicht/vor dir in einem Kleid aus Stille steht?/ . . . Wenn du der Träumer bist, bin ich dein Traum./Doch wenn du wachen willst, bin ich dein Wille/und werde mächtig aller Herrlich- keit/und ründe mich wie eine Sternenstille/über der wunderlichen Stadt der Zeit” (“My soul, dressed in silence, rises up/and stands alone before you: can’t you see?/If you are the dreamer, I am what you dream./But when you want to wake, I am your wish,/and I grow strong with all magnificence/and turn myself into a star’s vast silence/above the strange and distant city, Time”). The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell, Vintage, New York, 1982, 2–3. Compare the Russian poet F. I. Tyutchev (1803– 1873), Silentium (trans. Yuri Corrigan): “Be silent, cover yourself, and hide/Your feeling and your dreams/Let them into the soul’s depths/Let them rise and stay/Silently, like stars in the night/Delight in them–and be silent/—How can the heart articulate itself?/ How can another understand you?/Will he grasp how you live?/A thought, once spoken, is a lie/Erupting, you cloud the springs/Drink from them—and be silent/—Learn only to live within yourself/There is a whole world in your soul/Of mysterious—magical contempla- tion/That is drowned out by external noise/The day’s light disperses the rays/Attend to their song—and be silent.”

18. Compare Coleridge’s view of this passage in his Biographia Literaria, chapter 12. The reality of the “far higher and far inward sources” can be adequately gauged only by

3.11. Synaesthêsis (III, 4, 15 ff.)

What is the character of nature’s contemplation? Nature’s contemplation is a re- flexive self-presence, a sort of trance-like contemplation asleep with itself, by contrast with the “clearer” contemplation of the higher soul, which like Aristotle’s divine thought in the Metaphysics is like self-reflexive thought waking up (cf. VI, 9 [9] 3, 24). Yet even in this dim contemplation everything is included and there is “with-knowing” (synesis, translated here as “understanding”) and “with-per- ception”19 _{(synaesthêsis, translated here as “intimate perception”). This with-}

perception involves a kind of awareness of what flows from nature (just as the World soul has such an awareness in III, 4 [15] 4, 10–11 and just as discursive reason is said to be aware of sense-impressions in I, 1 [53] 9, 20). Treatise IV, 4 (28) 13, represents nature as below reason and imagination and specifically denies understanding (synesis) to her. This synaesthêsis (a kind of “common sense” that is aware of the many individual sense-data), includes a sense of the relatedness of a whole to itself: the world is said to have such a synaesthêsis (cf. IV, 4 [28] 24; 45, 8). Two passages even appear to attribute synaesthêsis to the One (V, 4 [7] 2, 18 and V, 1 [10] 7, 11–13), but in each case the context requires that the unspeci-

experience and represented best by silence. Coleridge links this passage to V, 5 (32), 8: “one must not seek whence it comes” and comments as follows: only those who prepare themselves in silence to see “can acquire the philosophic imagination, the sacred power of self-intuition, who within themselves can interpret and understand the symbol, that the wings of the air-sylph are forming within the skin of the caterpillar; those only, who feel in their own spirits the same instinct, which impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room in its involucrum for antennae yet to come. They know and feel that the potential works in them, even as the actual works on them! In short, all the organs of sense are framed for a corresponding world of sense; and we have it. All the organs of spirit are framed for a correspondent world of spirit: though the latter organs are not developed in all alike. But they exist in all, and their first appearance discloses itself in the moral being. How else could it be, that even worldlings, not wholly debased, will contemplate the man of simple and disinterested goodness with contradictory feelings of pity and respect? “Poor man! He is not made for this world” Oh! Herein they utter a prophecy of universal fulfil- ment; for man must either rise or sink.” Compare Rilke (re: his poem “Gravity” on “taking life heavily”) in a letter to Franz Xavier Kappus, July 16, 1903: “He who is solitary . . . can remember that all beauty in animals and plants is a silent, enduring form of love and yearn- ing, and he can see animals, as he sees plants, patiently and willingly uniting and increas- ing and growing, not out of physical pleasure . . . but bowing to necessities that are greater than pleasure and pain, and more powerful than will and withstanding. If only human be- ings could more humbly receive this mystery—which the world is filled with, even in its smallest Things—, could bear it . . . more solemnly, feel how terribly heavy it is, instead of taking it lightly. If only they could be more reverent toward their own fruitfulness, which is essentially one, whether it is manifested as mental or physical . . .” (Selected Poetry, Mitchell, 342).

fied subject is intellect as it comes to be from the One and has a sort of preintelli- gible awareness of its multiple power.20 _{At any rate, Plotinus defines synaesthêsis}

in V, 3 (49) 13, 21–22 as “a perception of something that is many” and excludes it from the One at V, 7 (24) 1–5, and VI, 7 (38) 41, 25–8; if anything belongs to the One, it is far beyond gnôsis and awareness of itself (synaesthêsis heautou). So this intimate perception, or “withness,” of nature’s dim contemplation looks forward to the synesis and synaesthêsis of true self-thinking, which Plotinus tells us takes care not to stand off by itself from union with its object in wanting to perceive too much (V, 8 [31] 11, 23). Aristotle uses synaesthêsis to describe the shared con- sciousness of thought and existence between friends (EN 1170 b 10). There is a similar, less explicit delicacy in nature’s vision-loving character here, even in Plotinus’ representation of her including the questioner in her otherwise silent contemplation.

3.12. The nature of images and productive art: