living, but life itself, in all its forms (including animals and plants), is immedi-
ately contemplation ( theoria).
Indeed, Plotinus begins with a gesture of whose novelty he is perfectly aware,
attributing contemplation to all living beings, including plants (which for Aris-
totle were the “alogical” beings par excellence) and suddenly announces, appar-
ently in the form of a joke, the thesis of a physis that generates and produces by means of contemplation:
Suppose we said, playing at first before we set out to be serious, that all things
aspire to contemplation, and direct their gaze to this end—not only rational but
irrational living things, and the power of growth in plants, and the earth which
brings them forth—and that all attain to it as far as possible for them in their
natural state. . . . Now let us talk about the earth itself, and trees, and plants in
general, and ask what their contemplation is, and how we can relate what the
earth makes and produces to its activity of contemplation, and how nature, which
people say has no power of forming images or reasoning, has contemplation in
itself and makes what it makes by contemplation. (3, 8, 1)
The first consequence of this “theoretical” or contemplative character of physis is a transformation of the very idea of natural life ( zoè), which ceases to be a sum
of heterogeneous functions (psychic life, sensible life, vegetative life) and is de-
fined from the very start with a strong accent on the unitary character of every
vital phenomenon, as “neither vegetative nor sensitive nor psychic” but rather as
“living contemplation.” The Stoics had elaborated the concept of “logical life”
( logikè zoè) and “logical animal” ( zoon logikon) to characterize properly human with respect to that of other living things. The novelty of this notion, with regard to the classical definition of the human being as an “animal that has logos”
( zoon logon echon) is that logos here is not simply added to the vital functions common to the other animals while leaving them unchanged but pervades the
entire human physis, transforming it from top to bottom so that its impulses,
its desires, its sensations, and its passions appear as intimately logical. Plotinus
pushes this Stoic idea to the extreme and extends it to some extent to all living
things and all forms of life without distinction. Now what is logical and theoret-
THE USE OF BODIES
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ical is life itself, which is articulated, disseminated, and diversified according to
the more or less manifest character ( ergastes, “luminous”) of contemplation that
is proper to it. The intuition of this profound unity of life in its intimate logi-
cal tension toward expression and thought is the most original legacy that the
late-ancient world leaves as an inheritance to Christian theology and, by means
of the latter, to modernity.
Contemplation is a movement of nature toward the soul, and of the soul to
thought, and contemplations become always more intimate and unified to the
contemplators. . . . So this must be something where the two become truly one.
But this is living contemplation [ theoria zosa], not an object of contemplation
[ theorema] like that in something else. For that which is in something else is alive because of that other, not in its own right. If, then, an object of contemplation
[ theorema] and thought [ noema] is to have life, it must be a life that is not vegetative [ phytikè] nor sensible [ aisthetikè], nor psychical. For the other lives are thoughts [ noesis], but one is a growth-thought, one a sense-thought, and one a
soul-thought. How, then, are they thoughts? Because they are logoi, languages.
And every life is a certain thought [ pasa zoè noesis tis], but one is dimmer than the other, just as life has degrees of clarity and strength. But this life is more luminous
[ enargestera]; this is first life and first intellect in one. So the first life is thought, and the second life thought in the second degree, and the last life thought in
the last degree. All life, then, belongs to this kind and is thought. But perhaps
people may speak of different kinds of thought but say that some are thoughts,
but others not thoughts at all, because they do not investigate at all what kind
of thing life is. But we must bring out this point, at any rate, that again our
discussion shows that all beings are contemplations. And if the truest life is the
life of thought, then the truest thought lives and contemplation and the object
of contemplation are a living and a life and the two together are one. (3, 8, 8)
3.3. The counterpart of this dual unity of life and thought in all their mani-
festations is a new ontological status of the living thing, which the treatise “On
Happiness” thematizes obliquely, making use of categories that seem to come
from the traditional vocabulary of political reflection. The central concept of
this new ontology is that of form of life ( eidos zoes or tes zoes), whose peculiarity as a technical term in Plotinus’s lexicon has escaped the attention of scholars.
Plotinus begins by asking whether, once “living well” ( eu zen, the same term that
in Aristotle’s Politics defines the end of the polis) has been identified with being happy ( eudaimonein), one must then also render the other living beings aside
from humans participants in it, for example, birds and plants (in his writings
Plotinus betrays a striking predilection for plants, which by contrast generally
function in Aristotle as negative paradigms with respect to the human). Those
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who deny to irrational beings the capacity of living well end up, without realizing
it, placing living well in something other than life (for example, in reason). For
his part, Plotinus instead declares unreservedly that he situates happiness in life
and therefore seeks to think a concept of life and of being in line with this radical
thesis. Let us read the passage in question, which constitutes one of the supreme
achievements of Plotinus’s genius, the ontological implications of which have
perhaps not yet been fully grasped:
Suppose we assume that happiness is to be found in life; then if we make life a
term which applies to all living things in exactly the same sense, we allow that all
of them are capable of happiness, and that those of them actually live well who
possess one and the same thing, something which all living beings are naturally
capable of acquiring; we do not on this assumption grant this potential solely
to living beings endowed with reason, denying it to the irrational. Life is com-
mon [ koinon] to both, which have in potential the same attitude with respect
to happiness, if happiness is to be found in a kind of life. So I think that those
who say that happiness is to be found in rational life [ en logikei zoei] and not
in common life [ en koinei zoei] are unaware that they are really assuming that
being happy is not a life at all. They would have to say that the rational potential
on which happiness depends is a quality. But their starting point is rational life,
and happiness depends on this, namely on another form of life [ perì allo eidos
zoes]. I do not mean “another form” in the sense of a logical distinction, but
in the sense in which we Platonists speak of one thing as prior and another as
posterio
r. The term “life” is used in many ways, distinguished according to the
rank of the things to which it is applied, first, second, and so on; and thus life
and living is a homonymous term that is said in one sense of plants, in another
of rational animals, and both differ according to their level of clarity or obscurity;
so obviously the same applies to living well. (1, 4, 3)
3.4. Plotinus’s new bio-ontology is articulated by means of a critical reinter-
pretation of the Stoic concept of logical life. Plotinus thinks life, however, not
as an undifferentiated substrate ( hypokeimenon) to which determinate qualities
would come to be added (for example, rational or linguistic being) but as an
indivisible whole, which he defines as eidos zoes, “form of life.” That this expression here has a terminological character emerges beyond any doubt from the
specification that, in it, eidos does not indicate the specific difference of a common genus (for this reason it would be erroneous to translated it with “species”).
The specification according to which the term eidos is not to be understood as
species of a genus but according to the prior and posterior, refers, according to
the definition that Aristotle gives in Metaphysics 1018b 9ff., only to the greater or lesser proximity to an archè (for this reason Plotinus had spoken of “primary”
THE USE OF BODIES
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and “secondary life”). “Life” is not a synonym (in which there is an identity for
the term and of the definition, which have a common referent) but a homonym,
which in each form of life takes on a sense that is differentiated according to
its being more or less manifest, more or less luminous. Pressed by the need for
a new definition of life, Plotinus profoundly transforms Aristotelian ontology:
yes, there is a unique substance, yet this is not a subject that remains behind or
beneath its qualities but is always already homonymically shared in a plurality
of forms of life, in which life is never separable from its form and, quite to the
contrary, is always its mode of being, without for that reason ceasing to be one.
3.5. “If then a human being can have the perfect life, then he will be able to
be happy. If not, one would have to attribute happiness to the gods, if among
them alone this kind of life is to be found. But since we maintain that this
happiness is to be found among human beings we must consider how it is so.
What I mean is this: it is obvious from what has been said elsewhere that the
human being has perfect life by having not only sensibility, but reasoning and
true thought. But there is no human being who does not possess it, in potential
or in act, and when he has it in act, we will call him happy. But shall we say
that he has this form of life [ eidos tes zoes], which is perfect, in him as a part of himself? The human being who has it in potential have it as a part, but the happy
person is the one who already is happy in act and has passed over into being this
(form of life) [ metabebeke pros to autò einai touto]” (1, 4, 4, 1–15).
The happy life here appears as a life that does not possess its form as a part
or a quality but is this form, has completely passed into it (this is the sense of metabaino). In this new and extreme dimension, the ancient opposition of bios
and zoè definitively loses its sense. Plotinus can thus write at this point, with an intentionally paradoxical expression that takes up and twists one of the key concepts from Aristotle’s Politics: autarkes oun ho bios toi outos zoen echonti, “bios is autarchic insofar as it in some way has zoè” (ibid., 23). We have seen that Victor Goldschmidt demonstrated that autarkia in Aristotle’s Politics is not a juridical or economic or political concept in the strict sense but first of all biological. That
polis is autarchic, which has reached the just numerical consistency of its population. Only if it has reached this limit can it pass from simple living to living well.
It is this biological-political concept that Plotinus completely transforms, ren-
dering it indiscernible from bios and form of life. The two terms bios and zoè, on the opposition of which Aristotelian politics were founded, now contract into
one another in a peremptory gesture that, while irrevocably taking leave of clas-
sical politics, points toward an unheard-of politicization of life as such (“bios is
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autarchic insofar as it in some way has zoè”). The wager here is that there can be a bios, a mode of life, that is defined solely by means of its special and inseparable union with zoè and has no other content than the latter (and, reciprocally, that
there is a zoè that is nothing other than its form, its bios). Precisely and solely to the bios and zoè thus transfigured do there belong the attributes of political life: happiness and autarchy, which in the classical tradition were instead founded on
the separation of bios and zoè. One has a political bios who never has his zoè as a part, as something separable (that is, as bare life), but is his zoè, is completely form-of-life.
4
Life Is a Form Generated by Living
4.1. One of the places through which the Plotinian concepts of life and
form of life ( eidos zoes) were transmitted to Christian authors is the
Adversus Arium of Marius Victorinus, a Roman rhetor and convert to Christian-
ity who exercised a determinant influence on Augustine with his translation of
the Enneads. Victorinus seeks to think the trinitarian paradigm, which is taking
form in those years, through Neoplatonic categories, not only by developing
from this perspective the doctrine of the three hypostases (being, life, thought)
but also and above all by deepening the unity between being and life that we
have seen to define Plotinian bio-ontology. Already Aristotle, in a passage of the
De anima that was to have a long lineage, had affirmed, albeit cursorily, that
“being for the living is to live.” Now it is a question, by completely translating
the ontological vocabulary into a “bio-logical” vocabulary, of thinking the unity
and consubstantiality—and at the same time, the distinction—between Father
and Son as unity and articulation of “living” and “life” in God. Mobilizing to the
point of excess the artifice and subtlety of his rhetorical art, Victorinus dedicates
the entire fourth book of his treatise to this difficult theological problem:
“He lives” and life [ vivit ac vita], are they one thing, or the same thing, or are they different things? One? But why the two terms? The same thing? But how
so, since it is one thing to be actually, the other thing to be actuality. Are they
therefore different? But how would they be different, since in that which lives
there is life, and in that which is life, it is necessarily the case that it lives? In-
deed, that which lives does not lack life, since then there would be life that does
not live. Therefore they are different in one another, and consequently, in one
another, whatever they are, they are two; and if, in some way, they are two, they
are not however, two purely and simply, since indeed they are one in the other
and that is the case with both of them. Are they therefore the same thing? But
the same thing in two is other than itself. This identity is therefore at the same
time alterity in each of the two. But if there is an identity, and each of the two
is identical to itself, both are identical and one. Indeed, each one being wh
at the
other is, neither of the two is double [ geminum]. Therefore, if each of the two, by 1227
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HOMO SACER IV, 2
the very same thing that he is, is also the other, each one of the two will be one
in himself. But since each one of the two is one in himself, it is the same one in
the other. . . . Living and life are such that what living consists in is life and what
life consists in is living: not that one is duplicated into the other, or that one is
with the other—for that would be a union [ copulatio: for from this, even if the
connection were inseparable, there is only a union, not a unity ( unitum est, non
unum)]—no in fact they are such that in the very act that is living is to be life
and in the same way, to be life is to live. . . . “He lives” and life are therefore one
substance. (Victorinus, pp. 502–504/253–255)
4.2. Nothing shows the new and decisive centrality that the concept of life
acquires both in the speculations of dying paganism and in nascent Christian
theology as much as the fact that the problem of the consubstantiality between
Father and Son is thought in terms of a relation between pure living and the
life that is co-originarily generated in it. In a passage that, as has been noted, is
perhaps the densest of his entire work, the paradox of this bi-unity is resolved by
Victorinus, with an unquestionable revival of the Plotinian concept of eidos zoes, in the idea of a “form of life” ( vitae forma, forma viventis) generated by the very act of living ( vivendo):
Indeed, life is a habit of living [ vivendi habitus], and it is a kind of form or state generated by living [ quasi quaedam forma vel status vivendo progenitus], containing in itself living itself and that being which is life [ id esse quod vita est], so that both are one substance. For they are not truly one in the other, but they are one redoubled
in its own simplicity [ unum suo simplici geminum], one, in itself because it is from itself [ ex se] and one which is from itself because the first simplicity has a certain work within itself. . . . For living is being; but being life is a certain mode, that is, the form of living produced by the very one for which it is form [ forma viventis confecta
ipso illo cui forma est]. But the producer, living, never having a beginning—for that which lives from itself has no beginning since it lives always—it follows that life also
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