That Day Proust embraced Plotinus, or: on remembering
There is another version of me that never died, and it is this one I want to speak about here — the self who once wanted to be a Hellenist, already circling the problem of memory. Before I can reach her, though, I need to explain how I began to be haunted by Marcel Proust.
Before entering philosophy school I knew very little philosophy, but I read a great deal of literature. That produced a curious habit: for a long time I thought the most important part of my academic work was the epigraph. That was where the poets were. The philosophers always seemed merely to be trying to articulate something the poets already knew. Sometimes I wanted to tell people who do science still searching for some kind of truth that maybe, if they wrote a text composed only of epigraphs, truth might reveal itself. I never did, I chose discretion over revelation.
It was in that spirit that, while googling anything that might give me an idea of a very vivid memory, in 2009 I stumbled upon one of those most beautiful passages known in the history of civilization, the damn Madeleine episode in Proust. In English it says something like this, though in French it is more beautiful:
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of remembering.
So nice, right? But I did not care about Proust at all in 2009. My text was about Plotinus.
Plotinus is a third-century philosopher, something people in my undergrad time used to call Late Antiquity. I like to refer to it, affectionately, as the mystical draft of German Idealism. Plotinus, a rascal born in Egypt though writing (beautifully) in Ancient Greek, condenses all of Platonism and Aristotelianism, along with the totalizing ambition of Hellenistic systems, into a single framework in which everything converges toward one principle to which we devote our entire lives from the perspective of returning to it. Alongside all the heavy metaphysical theorizing cloaked in the guise of an indefinable God, we also find first-person descriptions of mystical experiences in his work, the Enneads. These ancient authors are curious creatures: they tend to reject worldly things, yet they have nothing but language and their own bodies to express what is supposedly not worldly. Perhaps that is why I grew tired of them. For me, being a body and being language already suffices for so many beautiful things, perhaps exactly for the very things that are the disembodied beings who would want to be like us.
Anyway, my favorite thing about studying Plotinus is that he takes Aristotle’s terms and uses them to mean the exact opposite of what Aristotle established. I think that is philosophy done well, and with the utmost respect, I spent 2011 to 2013 there, writing a master’s thesis on what Plotinus did with that whole act-and-potency pair of Aristotle. That’s how Proust embraced Plotinus.
Aristotle once said that something in potency wants to become something in act, as in a student of philosophy who is a potential philosopher, wants to be a philosopher in act. On a similar note, his theology, about the First Unmoved Mover, would describe a God as a kind of pure act (and since I’m writing with the voices in my head and on a blog, I’m going to abstain from checking references; I think this is in Book 8 of the Physics, but if I’m wrong, you tell me). Yet the One of Plotinus, that first principle toward which we make a path of return, is not act. It is the potency of all things. See the difference in meaning? God is no longer act, but pure potency. I think he wanted to say potency did not mean possibility, but meant vitality or force, as he was all about returning to the principles: Homer also meant it that way.
Proust embraced Plotinus because in the tiny little treatise on memory, which I remember as being Ennead IV.6, maybe five pages long, the word potency appears more than twenty times. That very word — the same one used to speak of what is most divine. That’s how Proust embraced Plotinus.
The complex treatise IV.6[41] contains almost twenty occurrences of dúnamis and its derived terms. It is an appendix that deepens issues initiated in the long debate on the soul and memory sparked between treatises 27 and 29; these issues touch not only on the discussion of memory, but also on the topic of sensation. The discussion of Plotinian memory traces back to the Orphic tradition regarding the “fall” of the soul. It refers to the idea that the soul, before incarnating in the human body, “falls” from the divine or pure realm drifting away and literally forgetting some of its original purity. The human soul, lingering in this limbo between the divine and the mundane, longs for the divine unity it lacks — but which, at some point, it once knew. As the Greek religion is also moral, Plotinus makes it additionally metaphysical and seeks to integrate these three ways of seeing the world. Its vocabulary is not precise, using sometimes anámnesis and at other times mnême for the same faculty, though occasionally they appear distinct.
While some people are satisfied with perceiving sensible beauty, others, through memory, acquire reverence for real beauty without disregarding the one more immediately evident to us. This description of memory echoes the path Plotinus seeks in treatise I.3[20], On Dialectic, when he places the knowledge of true beauty closer to the musician, the philosopher, and the lover. From IV.6, we can infer that human memory oriented toward the everyday also imitates God, giving life to events lost in temporal succession. We cannot have divine eternity, the most we can do is reawaken what is no longer. Such a reading is only possible through the meaning Plotinus gives to dúnamis, which I understand to be vitality or force. When approaching human memory Plotinus describes this faculty didactically: while it directs attention to objects that appear, memory makes them remain in their same arrangement, dealing with them as if they were still taking place. Children, in this case, even remember better, because someone trying to discover new things that appear may direct greater attention to what is seen. However, it is not exclusively a matter of age, because memory is a faculty that can be perfected through exercises. The psychic-mnemonic potency, or vitality, describes the causation that motivates the soul to recover contents lost due to an overabundance of activity and the desire to possess what one does not possess besides divine unity: the past. Desire is not only an invitation to contemplation of God; it is an invitation to remember.
I had two unexpected encounters with Proust last year. One, hours before taking off to Germany in a workshop on memory that even gave me an early career award was sublime. I went to a place I needed to go to, but it was closed. Still, it was in the oldest part of Lyon — a Renaissance neighborhood with an Italian feel — and on a spring day when the sun doesn’t kill anyone, it just embraces you. I just turned and there he was, I thought maybe if Proust still existed somewhere he could be sending congratulations.
The other, not that much. When I came back from Cologne, where everyone knows I just handed a PhD thesis on memory, someone had killed themselves on the train line, and I couldn’t continue my journey from Paris to Normandy. I was moody and looked for any cheap hotel and found this place that was super pink and questionably decorated — but in the little sitting room there was this large portrait of Proust staring at me. Right away, I did not feel the sublime. I thought he might be harshly judging me and maybe I had just handed in a thesis which I hadn’t done so well after all.
I decided to respond a little defiantly. When I see his image, my memory does not summon the madeleines everyone clings to, but the murmurs of other dead voices who once agreed that the line between past and present is strange, porous, and that anything that draws them closer bears the weight of the divine. When I look at Proust, I can see a shadow of my young self trying to fit him everywhere, yet beneath that, I see more vividly the traces of a hundred thousand old men who sensed similar things, so that when I write, I try to awaken all of them at once, not only him, reactivating a much older and more anonymous intuition that, in the end, never needed his name.
