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[ 36 ] the rise and fall of soul and self
presence at every point in the recipient, but it is indivisible as dwelling entire in
any part.” If the soul “had the nature of body,” he continues, “it would consist of
isolated members each unaware of the conditions of each other.” In that case,
“there would be a particular soul—say, a soul of the finger—answering as a dis-
tinct and independent entity to every local experience”; hence, “there would be a
multiplicity of souls administering each individual.” Since the mental lives of
such individuals, he points out, would be unlike our own mental lives, each of us
cannot be administered by a multiplicity of (equal) souls. “Without a dominant
unity,” he concludes, our lives would be “meaningless.” So far as is known, no
one had entertained such thoughts before.
9
Plotinus’s preoccupation with the question of how to account for the unity of
consciousness foreshadowed discussions that would reemerge in the eighteenth
century and then again in our own times. In the eighteenth century it was also
presupposed that each individual human’s consciousness is unified. The ques-
tion was whether matter could account for its unity. In our own times, not only
has the unity of each individual human’s consciousness been called into question
but theoretical fragmentation has raised the prospect that varying accounts of
this or that aspect of mentality may not be capable of being integrated into a
single coherent account. We shall return to these worries in our final chapter.
In regard to the comparison with the eighteenth century, it is interesting that
Plotinus’s thoughts about the unity of consciousness are similar to Locke’s dis-
cussion of what, in our own times, have come to be known as fission examples.
These are hypothetical examples in which a person’s consciousness is supposed
to divide into two parts, each of which is mentally complete in itself and neither
of which is conscious, from the inside, of the other’s mental states. When Locke
introduced fission examples, he even used the image of a finger’s retaining an
independent consciousness after it had been separated from the rest of the body.
Although it is impossible to know whether Locke’s reading of Plotinus sug-
gested these ideas to him, it seems highly likely that he had read Plotinus or was
at least familiar with his views through the writings of the Cambridge Platonists.
In any case, among the questions that eighteenth-century philosophers (but not
Locke) soon asked about fission examples, two are crucial: In fission examples,
what becomes of the identity of the person (or mind) that divides into two uni-
fied wholes—does the prefission person persist? And, if that question were
answered in the negative, could the prefission person nevertheless obtain what
prior to fission mattered primarily to him or her in survival?
Plotinus’s approach to such issues occurred within the context of his view of
the soul’s concurrent existence at the sensory, intellectual, and mystical levels. At
the sensory level, the soul is unified with the body and involved in its life. In this
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