The Interior Turn

The interior turn names plotinus‘s methodological innovation in Enneads V.1 and elsewhere — the directive that the soul’s path back toward the-one runs not outward through the cosmos but inward through the self. The famous opening of V.1 is its statement: “What can it be that has brought the souls to forget the father, God, and, though members of the Divine and entirely of that world, to ignore at once themselves and It?” The remedy is the inward gaze.

richard-sorabji‘s reconstruction in Emotion and Peace of Mind preserves the tripartite structure that grounds the doctrine. Plotinus “distinguishes three powers in the soul which he sometimes calls three selves (hēmeis). Below there is that concerned with the body. Above there is the soul, which is uninterruptedly contemplating the Forms, although we are normally unconscious of it. But the true person (alēthēs anthrōpos), that which he sometimes singles out… ” is the highest, identified with the contemplative depth (Sorabji 2000).

The phrase is decisive for the Lineage: uninterruptedly contemplating the Forms, although we are normally unconscious of it. This is the first explicit articulation in Western philosophy of an unconscious as a depth proper to the soul — not the privative unconsciousness of sleep or distraction, but a constitutive contemplative depth that operates beneath waking awareness. The doctrine names what Jung will, sixteen centuries later, recover as the collective-unconscious continuously active beneath the discursive ego.

The interior turn is also the philosophical precursor of two practical disciplines. First, the Christian-monastic discipline of recollectio — the calling-back of the soul from dispersion in externals — which descends through Augustine’s Confessions and the contemplative tradition. Second, the depth-psychological discipline of active-imagination — Jung’s directed inward attention to the autonomous contents of the psyche. Both depend on the Plotinian premise that the soul has an interior depth that is not less but more real than its external self-presentation.

Relationships

• psyche-plotinian
• nous
• contemplation-theoria
• collective-unconscious
• active-imagination
• epistrophe

Primary sources

• enneads (Plotinus 270, esp. V.1)
• Emotion and Peace of Mind (Sorabji 2000)