10.13125/CH/3714
Plotinus developed a metaphorical approach to language that allowed him to offer a transcendent vision of God, a paradox that made clear how ineffably and incontrovertibly unclear God is – as is our relationship with Him. Ricoeur bridged the centuries by working intensively upon Plotinus in the 1950s-70s. He was seeking a philosophy of negation to help him understand the ways in which modern humans define themselves by lack, loss and longing and asked himself: ‘what is not-ness?’ Eventually Ricoeur abandoned his search for a philosophy of negation that would explain the negative turn in modern life, and developed a model of language and of dialectic within which the negative was embedded. By fully integrating negation into various language forms (metaphor, dialectic) he was implementing the conviction that we have to accept that the negative (that which we want to reject) is an integral part of each of us: blame cannot be attributed to others. Through his negation project Ricoeur applied existential thinking to negative theology and gave its structural strangeness a new application. Using Plotinus he ensured that opposing existential concerns can in fact be brought into discussion, when we accept the impossibility of the unity for which we long. I propose that he even created a strange kind of analogue between negative theologies and existentialist problems, adapting the powerful provisionality of Plotinus’ dialectical and metaphorical devices, to help him address modern crises. Laclau believed that these crises can be solved, and Butler and Lorey concur, all three arguing for close attention to language, rhetoric and the people’s potential. In this context we can instructively apply Ricoeur’s adaptation of Plotinus to consider the emerging patterns around the Mediterranean, which we wish to negate and really must act upon: a mounting refugee crisis, the instability created by wars and an increasingly insecure workforce. The first step for a nation to take is to be able to talk about such matters and research on university campuses suggest that this is being inhibited by government regulatory practices. Attempts to reverse this trend render the extraordinary worlds of Plotinus and Ricoeur immensely useful. Using Plotinus he ensured that opposing existential concerns can in fact be brought into discussion, when we accept the impossibility of the unity for which we long. If we contrast this with the non-dialogic, argumentative and polarised discourse of populist political parties across Europe and round Plotinus’ Mediterranean, we can see how potent it could be to re-introduce Ricoeur’s response to Plotinus into modern discourse.
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Critical Hermeneutics
Ricoeur on Plotinus: Negation and Forms of Populism
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Ricoeur on Plotinus: Negation and Forms of Populism
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Ricoeur on Plotinus: Negation and Forms of Populism


                              Alison Scott-Baumann




Abstract
Plotinus developed a metaphorical approach to language that allowed
him to offer a transcendent vision of God, a paradox that made clear
how ineffably and incontrovertibly unclear God is – as is our relation-
ship with Him. Ricoeur bridged the centuries by working intensively
upon Plotinus in the 1950s-70s. He was seeking a philosophy of ne-
gation to help him understand the ways in which modern humans de-
fine themselves by lack, loss and longing and asked himself: ‘what is
not-ness?’ Eventually Ricoeur abandoned his search for a philosophy
of negation that would explain the negative turn in modern life, and
developed a model of language and of dialectic within which the neg-
ative was embedded. By fully integrating negation into various lan-
guage forms (metaphor, dialectic) he was implementing the convic-
tion that we have to accept that the negative (that which we want to
reject) is an integral part of each of us: blame cannot be attributed to
others. Through his negation project Ricoeur applied existential think-
ing to negative theology and gave its structural strangeness a new
application. Using Plotinus he ensured that opposing existential con-
cerns can in fact be brought into discussion, when we accept the im-
possibility of the unity for which we long. I propose that he even cre-
ated a strange kind of analogue between negative theologies and ex-
istentialist problems, adapting the powerful provisionality of Plotinus’
dialectical and metaphorical devices, to help him address modern cri-
ses. Laclau believed that these crises can be solved, and Butler and
Lorey concur, all three arguing for close attention to language, rheto-
Alison Scott-Baumann, Ricoeur on Plotinus




ric and the people’s potential. In this context we can instructively ap-
ply Ricoeur’s adaptation of Plotinus to consider the emerging patterns
around the Mediterranean, which we wish to negate and really must
act upon: a mounting refugee crisis, the instability created by wars
and an increasingly insecure workforce. The first step for a nation to
take is to be able to talk about such matters and research on univer-
sity campuses suggest that this is being inhibited by government
regulatory practices. Attempts to reverse this trend render the ex-
traordinary worlds of Plotinus and Ricoeur immensely useful. Using
Plotinus he ensured that opposing existential concerns can in fact be
brought into discussion, when we accept the impossibility of the unity
for which we long. If we contrast this with the non-dialogic, argumen-
tative and polarised discourse of populist political parties across Eu-
rope and round Plotinus’ Mediterranean, we can see how potent it
could be to re-introduce Ricoeur’s response to Plotinus into modern
discourse.
Keywords: Ricoeur, Plotinus, Negation, Populism




1. Introduction
Our world is unrecognizable from that of Plotinus. We walk around
with wires coming out of our ears while we commune with small
bright tablets in our hands, oblivious to the world around us and able
to reach millions with a photograph of a kitten or the hint of a scan-
dal. Plotinus knew the stars and the soil and his innermost thoughts,
which are still of great interest but which have affected relatively few.
Despite these shocking differences between his time and ours, one
feature of this transformed digital world that can usefully be com-
pared and contrasted with that of Plotinus is his and our use of lan-
guage. Plotinus used metaphorical structures to present God as pos-
sessing both positive and negative and mutually contradictory fea-


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tures, such as being both attainable and unattainable. Now many of
us are convinced of a different Godhead: we believe that our commu-
nications and knowledge are stored in some beautiful, heavenly way,
in the ‘cloud’ (Hu, 2015). This metaphor makes attractive the jumble
of wires and electrodes that enslave us and rationalises the addiction.
    Yet the online world enables us to behave almost without moral
inhibitions in terms of the ways in which we use language: we can be
aggressive, abusive and extremely opinionated with no evidence base
and there need be no consequence of our actions. It’s in the cloud,
it’s safe up there, don’t worry about it. Two features of this addictive
digital madness are remarkable and they are interconnected: our
ability to influence many people and the fact that it is easier to catch
people’s attention by shocking them than by being reasonable, by
‘moving fast and breaking things’ as Taplin put it (Taplin, 2017). Thus
many who use the internet in order to influence others will choose to
be shocking precisely in order to reach the largest audience possible.
Most significantly this form of communication is profoundly unbal-
anced; it does not facilitate communication, rather it suppresses it by
its essentially non-dialogic nature. Moreover, unlike television or ra-
dio, the digital world is ungovernable and impossible to regulate and
thus has no need to adhere to a moral standpoint, rather it offers the
certainty of being right for no reason because other people ‘like’ what
we ‘post.’
    All the more reason to study Plotinus now, because of his ex-
traordinary capacity to encourage discourse that invites a provisional
meontological debate. Meontological thinking, by going beyond an
ontology and challenging the possibility that we can even have a be-
lief system, confounds any certainty we may have about our position
in the world. This can expand into a dialectical flow that opens up be-
tween ideas and remains open as long as possible to allow maximum
exploration of problematic issues and possible bridging. Populist dis-


                                                                            129
Alison Scott-Baumann, Ricoeur on Plotinus




course, by contrast, brooks no dissent, is intolerant of ambiguity and
uses passion and conviction to create binaries of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and
give the impression of authority and authenticity. Using Plotinus, Paul
Ricoeur ensured that opposing shores can in fact be connected, in
contrast with the polarising Manichean dichotomies of the populist
type that preclude connections. Such integrated thinking is only pos-
sible once we accept the impossibility of the unity we long for and the
reality of the negative within us1. Paul Ricoeur’s work on Plotinus and
the negative can contribute to a re-evaluation of the value of Ploti-
nus. Ricoeur, surrounded in Strasbourg by the negative impulses of
the Second World War, worked from 1946-1970 on negation and the
negative. He published very little on this, but kept his notes in good
order and they are available in the Fonds Ricoeur archives. His work
on Plotinus and the negative can show us, like the eleven beautiful
bridges in Isfahan that span the Zayanderud River, that there are
many different ways to bridge the centuries.


2. Plotinus and Ricoeur on negation
Plotinus offers a resolution to the problem of nothingness both
ontologically and by using metaphorical structures. We cannot know
God and our knowledge of this is the ultimate nothingness to which
we must surrender, and yet for Ricoeur something new opens with
this ontological closure because Plotinus offers the possibility to
consider nothingness in its positive aspects as well as its negative
ones: the apophatic approach is life-giving because of God. This


1
  This work has recently become accessible through creation of the Ricoeur archives
in Paris. Ricoeur abandoned his attempt after 20 years. I was able to research Ric-
oeur’s negation for five years and through a one year Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow-
ship I published my findings Please see my 2013 book Ricoeur and the negation of
happiness for more detailed analysis of Ricoeur’s various explorations of different
models of the negative, including Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plotinus and Kant. New
York, London: Bloomsbury. Archives Ricoeur/Fonds Ricoeur, BIB.IPT: Inv 1, dossier
96 «La Négation» Cours (c.1952-1970).



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                                           Critical Hermeneutics, special (2019)




provides both an idea and a method: the idea and the method will
need to be kept together for theological purposes. For Ricoeur’s work
on metaphor and other language forms that use the negative they
also need to be separated from each other.
    The idea we have from Plotinus is that nothingness can be rich
and wonderful by making it possible for us to accept our disunity with
God (and Plotinus believed that this would eventually lead to unity).
By extension Ricoeur will invite us to see this as a way of accepting
our disunity with others and of struggling to improve the situation by
using language ethically.
    The method is based upon hermeneutics – hermeneutically un-
derstanding the negative; a method that offers various different types
of negative impulse – privation, abstraction and negation. There is
much contestation among scholars about what these three mean.
Jugrin’s 2014 analysis of the academic field shows considerable disa-
greement, although some concurrence about the way in which ab-
straction encapsulates best that which exercised Plotinus. In terms of
modern application, privation may be the one closer to existential
angst because it shows an ontological gesture towards definitions that
allude to possible, potential and currently missing features. Ricoeur
explored all three terms in lectures that span twenty years (c. 1950-
1970). Towards the end of this period he offered negation as the
dominant mode that encompasses three features that he identified in
modern European society, haggard, hungry and suspicious after two
world wars; our tendency to measure ourselves by loss, lack and
longing.
    Ricoeur focussed upon the apophatic tradition, using the term
‘negation’. Ricoeur proposed to his students in 1959 in Strasburg, to
explore the apophatic tradition in philosophy, which he detected as
starting with the pre-Socratics, evolving in Plato and Aristotle, reach-
ing its culmination in Plotinus and in modern times coming to domi-


                                                                            131
Alison Scott-Baumann, Ricoeur on Plotinus




nate European thought through the philosophy of Hegel. Ricoeur was
particularly exercised by Aristotle’s creation of binary models of struc-
ture and logic which he believed denied the possibility of the nega-
tive: ‘everything must be either affirmed or denied’ and ‘it is impossi-
ble at once to be and not to be’, and all other such premises (Meta-
physics III 996b 26-30). Aristotle believed that there is no negative in
physical nature: yet both Ricoeur and Derrida see that there is a pre-
ferred half in each binary logic pair and that the less preferred half
can become negated, diminished, absented. Ricoeur believed that Ar-
istotle, through use of division and contradiction, created the condi-
tions of possibility for negating and social exclusion:


      This famous problem of division is at the centre of a truly
      Aristotelian theory, which will play a significant role in the
      philosophy of negation, the theory of specific differences, by
      means of which one moves from a genus to a species by
      means of a negative action which consists in excluding a
      portion from the definitional field of the genus, in order to
      exaggerate the difference. This is what is in gestation2.


      In Ricoeur’s later philosophy (such as Oneself as Another) there
is room to see how this ‘portion that is excluded’ can become the
other person, who is by definition not me and is therefore different
from me. In fact while we are ‘excluding a portion from the defini-
tional field of the genus, in order to exaggerate the difference’, the
exaggerated difference can provide a mechanism for ‘othering’. This


2
  AR/FR, BIB.IPT: Inv 1, dossier 96 «La Négation» Cours feuillet 8631 - ce fameux
problème de la division est à l’origine d’une théorie proprement Aristotélienne, qui
jouera un rôle considérable dans la philosophie de la négation, la théorie des diffé-
rences spécifiques, selon laquelle on passe d’un genre a une espèce par une opéra-
tion négative qui consiste à exclure du champ de signification du genre une portion,
et à faire saillir la différence. C’est ce qui est ici en germe.



132
                                             Critical Hermeneutics, special (2019)




can lead to forms of negation such as we see with anti-Semitism and
Islamophobia, and with homophobia and sexism.
    In his early work on negation, Ricoeur believed that a partial an-
tidote to Aristotle’s binary logic was the work of Plotinus. Plotinus
worked through three different variations on the negative: the first is
privation (steresis). We see in Enneads 2.4.13.12 the lack of a quality
that one would expect e.g. we can expect a blind man to be sighted;
privation has the possibility of positive possession of qualities, so this
has ontological property as it relates to the characteristics that make
a being into that being, or could/ should/ would give that being the
expected characteristics that we would predict. Privation thus makes
use of the alpha privative which denies the existence of something
that should be there (Aristotle). Plotinus Treatise 6.3.(19) shows how
privation is parasitic: it depends for its existence on that which it de-
nies. Privation makes assertions about absences of phenomena and
can only exist by making such assertions. Yet this can also be a posi-
tive component: it contains understanding of that which could be,
although it is currently not in existence. Ricoeur adapted this model
of the negative for modern existential use, in which the human is the
centre, not God. Thus he sees how we often define ourselves by that
which we have lost or that which we lack and that for which we long.
    Plotinus also uses abstraction (aphairesis): that which is not: pu-
rification, notness as non-attributable; nothing can be attributed to or
compared with the uniqueness of the notness of God; this character-
ises the first of two types of mystical experience for Plotinus i.e. mys-
tical union with the One. Negative theology systematically dismantles
the layers of physical existence to reveal the essential beginning. The
second form of mystical experience is the intuitive knowledge of the
intelligible realm… this resembles Husserl, of whom more later, and
functions as a conceptual tool for proposing the essence of nonbeing,
not being limited by that which it denies.


                                                                              133
Alison Scott-Baumann, Ricoeur on Plotinus




      Thirdly,    negation     (apophasis)   which   we   find   in   6.7.38.1;
6.9.5.30; similar to abstraction, which shows how Aristotle used it to
argue logically for lack of something. Negation is the term Ricoeur
used to frame his ideas, perhaps because he was grappling with Aris-
totle and his logic of contradiction and also because negativity
summed up the pessimistic mode of post-war Europe. All three terms
(privation, abstraction and negation) bear a Wittgensteinian family
resemblance. Because of negation’s similarity with abstraction, and
with the via negativa, which was a deep and fulfilling spiritual tradi-
tion, Ricoeur also saw the potential in the apophatic mode to enrich
language. He sought to facilitate the use of linguistic forms like meta-
phor to create a deep understanding of the negative as a positive
force and to anchor the negative within our daily speech acts.
      For Ricoeur and his contemporaries there was a great deal at
stake in the mid twentieth century – phenomenology was about to be
swept aside by structuralism. Structuralist methodology provides ex-
cellent analytical tools, but structuralist thought brought its bullish
assertion that language structures exist and determine the way we
think and act. This could be construed as a renunciation of the part
that humans play in creating their own language and thus renders
human agency less culpable than it might be considered to be after
the atrocities of war: in structuralism, it is almost as if language is to
blame for people’s actions, not the actors themselves. Ricoeur was
influenced by the desire to understand ourselves based upon a very
different approach: Husserl’s phenomenology argued that through
our perceptions we create the world we see and this can lead to great
clarity but also to the self-doubt of ‘phenomenological distress’ - not
knowing what or how I think about what I believe that I see (Ricoeur,
1969). After Marx, Nietzsche and Freud this involves doubting our
perceptions, our motivations and therefore our capacity to be respon-
sible agents. Husserl refused to engage with this hermeneutic of sus-


134
                                          Critical Hermeneutics, special (2019)




picion so Ricoeur returned to Hegel, then Kant, to struggle with Des-
cartes’ subject: object dualism, which is an artificial binary and yet
integral to human thought habits (Scott-Baumann, 2009).
    Ricoeur concluded that in order to think more clearly within this
human habit of creating dialectical discourse we create dualistic ten-
sions: he argued that we tolerate the positive/negative tension be-
tween the linguistic terms of a statement (developed by structural-
ism); we tolerate the tension between literal and metaphorical inter-
pretations of the world around us (developed by Ricoeur into ‘seman-
tic and impertinent’ insistence upon similarity in the face of differ-
ence) – and we tolerate the tension that the metaphor can create be-
tween being and not-being (is and is not: you are not me and our dif-
ferences should not negate our relationship). At the heart of each of
these polarised approaches he saw the positive/ negative pattern that
we use to permit ourselves to reject or accept certain phenomena.
We have existential tendencies to measure ourselves against who we
are not, what we have lost and what we desire, rather than what
/who we are. Ricoeur used a more mellow form of existentialism
(warmed by his religious belief) to shape his hope that we can bear
witness, attest to potential for good and enact improvements in the
world. Yet I contend that the tools he developed can help us even
without religious faith, and of course he developed other tools, such
as the hospitable nature of good translation from one language to
another (Scott-Baumann, 2010).


3. Affirmative negatives
By the mid-1950s Ricoeur concluded that there are at least three
possible forms of negation, still dominated by Hegel, yet beginning to
adopt a Kantian turn;
    1. Otherness implied in the objective distinction between some-
    thing and something else


                                                                           135
Alison Scott-Baumann, Ricoeur on Plotinus




      2. Lessening of existence, subjectively experienced in the feel-
      ings of need, loss, regret
      3. Transcendental negation: I am not what I am. I am not, as
      thought and freedom, what I am as finite point of view and as
      limited power of life.
      In addition to these three truth-seeking properties of negation,
which can become dangerously entangled in each other, when, for
example, we erroneously use 2 and 3 to affect 1, Ricoeur was fasci-
nated by Plotinus’ use of metaphorical structures to present God as
possessing both positive and negative features, such as being both
attainable and unattainable. Here there is a metaphorical expression
of will and essence, in which the soul (or the human spirit as nous) is
a desire both for absence of difference, for unity (with self and with
God) and for proof of lack of unity. Ricoeur shows also how this legit-
imises the heuristic value of metaphor – saying what something is by
saying what it is not:


      The metaphor here consists of postulating a duality and
      then suppressing it3.


      Ricoeur also describes a movement within Plotinus that resem-
bles metaphor:


      a discourse that suggests something, by giving the energy
      to go beyond it, yet retains something of that which it has
      passed, to show what it is moving beyond4.




3
  AR/FR –Bib. IPT, Inv. 1, d96 'La négation' Cours. Feuillets 9236-9258: 9243
96F/025.
4
  AR/FR –Bib. IPT, Inv. 1, d96 'La négation' Cours. Feuillets 9236-9258: 9243
96F/025.



136
                                            Critical Hermeneutics, special (2019)




Such discourse creates a provisional, temporary meontological de-
bate. This can expand into the dialectical gap that Ricoeur opens up
between ideas and keeps open as long as possible to allow maximum
exploration of problematic existential issues. Ricoeur applies existen-
tial thinking to negative theology and gives its structural strangeness
a new application, namely the capacity to make ignorance, provision-
ality and frustration into useful features of our thought. Using Plotinus
he ensures that opposing existential concerns can in fact be integrat-
ed, when we accept the impossibility of the unity we long for. I pro-
pose that he even creates a strange kind of analogue between nega-
tive theologies and existentialist problems. He balances the trilogy
identified by Plotinus and clustered around not knowing the One,
namely privation, abstraction and negation, with the trilogy that Ric-
oeur himself sees as clustered around modern human negation,
which is seen in modern society as identifying ourselves through loss,
lack and longing. Ricoeur concluded that we measure ourselves by
what we have lost, what we do not possess and what we desire Ric-
oeur, instead of adopting a more hopeful approach. Ricoeur takes the
ideas of Plotinus’ differently defined negative impulses and uses them
to show how deeply modern society is mired in negative impulses. By
this argument Ricoeur also shows how very pessimistic modern socie-
ty is in its approach to its dilemmas, when contrasted with Plotinus’
liberating use of the negative to free us from the literalist constraints
of trying to imagine God. Of course these are two different problems
– existence versus salvation – and whereas Ricoeur, as a man of
faith, would see the relevance of the latter for resolving the former,
he accepted that this was not available to many modern individuals.
    Other problems also faced Ricoeur in his attempt to use Plotinus
to address the ‘negative proof of being, the empty ontology of lost
being’ that Hegel had developed and that had become so pervasive in
modern continental philosophy (Husserl by Ricoeur, 1950/1967: 210,


                                                                             137
Alison Scott-Baumann, Ricoeur on Plotinus




229). One of these is the question about God; if I have no God then
(it seemed to Ricoeur in the 1950s-70s) there was always the possi-
bility to become Sartrean in one’s denial of God and even make an
attendant hubristic attempt to replace God with one’s own despair.
Another problem is the issue about the many types of negation that
Ricoeur located when attempting to develop a philosophy of negation,
most of which he found contradictory and even self-contradictory;
Heraclitus and Parmenides, Plato, Plotinus through to Hegel, Freud,
Marx, Heidegger and Sartre and many others. He analysed the di-
chotomous approach adopted in many cultural traditions, where he
was wary of the positive/ negative extremes adopted: he wrote for
example about the way in which Plato exaggerated the differences
between Heraclitus (flux and conflict) and Parmenides (stability and
oneness), differences perpetuated by many later thinkers, including
Heidegger. He was impressed by the way, in contrast, Plotinus used
language to hold contradictory approaches without difficulty and in-
deed with the benefit of tolerating ambiguity.     Plotinus tried to ex-
plain Parmenides’ ‘One’ by describing all forms as emanating from the
One who is ‘beyond being’, the Godhead as unknowable – a mystical
position that tried to show how diversity and unity are the same and
also different (Enneads, 5.1.8).
      I want to explore the possibility that we can use these insights –
Plotinus filtered via Ricoeur – to better understand the populist im-
pulse that is convulsing Europe. This may even provide us with some
tentative solutions. Populism is an overused term that may need to
be abandoned because it cannot tolerate the epistemological burden
placed upon it. Behind such distorted uses of language there are, of
course, complex economic realities that have created inequalities, in-
justices and iniquities across the social spectrum. However, in this
discussion I will use the term ‘populism’ as a form of shorthand to
explain the linguistic phenomena that surround politics in this digital


138
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age of soundbites and verbal posturing. Anselmi points out that at-
tempts to reduce what is happening to a simple single category are
both desirable and impossible. It is of course crucial that the simplifi-
cation arising from intolerance of ambiguity that we see in populist
discourse, must not be replicated in academic attempts to pin popu-
lism down. First, a brief overview of the major attempts to define and
explain populism will be useful. What I can focus upon here is the
way language is misused in order to exploit and perpetuate these sit-
uations. We respond or react, when faced with language without am-
biguity, aggressive, violent and hate filled, far from the ambivalence
of Plotinus. Anselmi argues that populism is much more than this, yet
also includes a form of discourse: passionate, assertive, authoritative,
charismatic and above all non-dialogic, which recalls Ricoeur’s work
on violence and language (Ricoeur 1967/74).


4. Populism
So what is populism? A common feature agreed upon by most com-
mentators, is that populism is based upon a dichotomy of unex-
plained extremes: the belief that a ‘pure’ people is being deceived by
a ‘corrupt’ elite, as well as the people demanding retention or re-
possession of popular ‘sovereignty’ (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017).
Mudde and Kaltwasser also present populism as a ‘thin ideology’, i.e.
unlike fascism, democracy or communism, in that it cannot stand
alone and is parasitic upon another ideology: currently in Europe this
‘other’ ideology is often liberal democracy. It can even seem as if
some democracies, while appearing disgusted with its demagoguery,
nevertheless need populism as their shadow and collaborator. Laclau
(2005) hopes for radical, positive left wing politics, whereby hope can
inspire us and we can cast off the false binaries of difference (ine-
qualities that cause friction) and equivalences (similarities that bind
groups together) that he sees as intrinsic to political movements and


                                                                             139
Alison Scott-Baumann, Ricoeur on Plotinus




therefore also to populist discourse. If we despair of how this idealis-
tic aspiration can become reality, then perhaps this shows that we
are too much in thrall to populist discourse.
      Laclau challenges Mudde and Kaltwasser and many other key
writers for their tendency to denigrate populism. Laclau argues, on
the contrary, that populism presents a legitimate version of the ways
in which language and naming are used to replace conceptual analy-
sis of realities, such that populist discourse can become a reality of its
own, even when it represents unreality. Laclau shows us that, as
Freud identified through mass psychology, we all have the populist
impulse in us and thus that populism is simply a way of constructing
the political that is part of us all in our social functioning. He also
shows us, by analysing Canovan’s work, that populism can be ex-
plained by analysis of the linguistic terms used to attempt to define
it, but that this will fail because the essence of populism is in fact not
separable from politics, but should not be relegated to the margins
and is in fact at the core of political actions (Laclau, 2015: 7). The
importance of language is clearly crucial, as we see in Minogue’s de-
scription of populism as comprising an ambivalent (and therefore
fundamentally unclear) relationship between rhetoric and ideology
(Laclau, 2005: 11). This, for Laclau, reflects well the actual state of
political realities when we attempt to map them onto our lives. The
people, for Laclau, is the central category of all political action and
thought: he accepts that the use of language is distorted by populist
movements, as by all political groups, and pleads that we ‘never suc-
cumb to the terrorism of words’.
      There are different sorts of negative impulse to deal with here…
privation (steresis) is ontological in form, so it fits Ricoeur’s model of
lack, loss and longing as defining the human condition. We long for a
time with no populist rhetoric and believe it will never come. Abstrac-
tion (aphaeresis) and negation (apophasis) are more epistemological


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in direction. We deny the populist voice its validity, or accord it too
much power, as with the BREXIT referendum. Ricoeur developed oth-
er models of negation to resolve the existential post-war crisis, and
these can all help us to understand Plotinus’ potency for our prob-
lems. I propose that he even creates a strange kind of analogue be-
tween negative theologies and existentialist problems. In the course
of his philosophical research Ricoeur found various different sources
of negation, ranging from Parmenides’ repeated use of the negative
in order to assert the non-existence of the negative because of the
Oneness of everything and the non-existence of anything else, to Plo-
tinus’ mystical forms of metaphor that painted the apophatic path of
not-knowing God, in order to get to God. Adapting Aristotle, Ricoeur
identified that the human condition consists partly of both willing and
suffering from three negatives: loss, lack and privation. He identified
the complexity of the situation, while finding it impossible to bring all
the incompatible forms of negation together from their varied
sources.
    From Plotinus we derive negation as ontology and meontology,
the study of what is not, or of what we do not know. Ricoeur wanted
to leave behind the signs, semata (σεματα), and the symbols of Par-
menides’ Poem in order to seek the foundation, the radical origin of
human existence. He travelled from ἄπειρον/ the infinite/ apeiron of
Anaximander, through Plato’s Good (beyond essence) to the One of
Plotinus. Here he would explore ontological negation, through which
he would then pass on the apophatic way, which shows that God does
not exist in any way that we can understand. God is not to be under-
stood and this is good; for a religious person, negation takes on a
positive, apophatic form at this point. Here also is the negative im-
pulse developing into dialectical argument and debate as integral and
indeed core to Ricoeur’s ethical work, including a turn back to the im-
possibilities of phenomenology and the Kantian struggle with percep-


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Alison Scott-Baumann, Ricoeur on Plotinus




tion. This develops into negation as a critical ethical philosophy, as in
The Conflict of Interpretations (Ricoeur, 1969/74: 310–314) and
From Text to Action and, most crucial of all, the use of dialectic be-
yond Hegel’s absorption of the negative, seeking instead less com-
fort, an oscillating provisionality that informs Ricoeur’s turn back from
hermeneutics to phenomenology, his first approach, with the close
attention to the other, be it an aspect of one’s split self, another per-
son, an idea, a language or even and especially a belief. In all these
patterns meontological debate can stretch out into the gap that Ric-
oeur opens up between ideas and keeps open as long as possible.


5. Plotinus as a spur to activism
A case study will help to illustrate my point. Students on campus in
European universities have historically been able to open up spaces
between ideas and keep the discussion open for as long as possible,
in order to discuss difficult issues that may, initially, be too delicate
to discuss beyond the university. However there has been increased
concern from government and media that students on university
campuses in Britain are actively inhibiting free speech. This led to a
sense of moral crisis such that the Joint Committee on Human Rights
(JCHR), a cross parliamentary group, conducted an investigation into
the matter of free speech on campus (JCHR, 2018). In fact research
shows clear empirical evidence that securitisation on campus has
played a major role in any chilling of speech that takes place (Heath-
Kelly, 2017). Moreover the JCHR invited me to give evidence, agreed
with my research findings (Scott-Baumann and Perfect, 2018) and
requested the Charity Commission, who are in charge of charity regu-
lation of student unions, to loosen their grip on the student unions in
the interest of free speech. There is also evidence that the securitisa-
tion strategy known as the ‘Prevent Duty Guidance’ is having a
chilling effect on Muslim students in particular (Scott-Baumann, 2017


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a and b). This was a concerted attempt to challenge a use of negation
that erroneously seeks to offload governmental fault and blame lack
of free speech upon students. It is a populist device that asserts that
the will of the people is being thwarted by privileged young people
inhibiting free discussion of difficult issues that it would be in the in-
terest of the nation to discuss. Yet in fact it is the Charity Commis-
sion, acting on behalf of the government that imposes a list of pro-
scribed topics ranging from whale hunting to the state of prisoners
held abroad, and Israel/ Palestine, and it is the Prevent Duty Guid-
ance that, acting on behalf of the government, discourages discus-
sions around Islam and Muslims, which includes the Middle East and
foreign policy (Charity Commission, 2000; Hooper, 2017; Home Of-
fice Prevent Duty Guidance, 2015; Scott-Baumann, 2018).
    I recommend, following Judith Butler and Isabell Lorey, that we
construe this situation as an affirmative basis for emancipatory poli-
tics, precisely because it also poses an indefeasible existential threat.
The young will inherit this world and we are not allowing them to de-
bate it. We can locate the Mediterranean that Plotinus knew (coast-
lines now tormented, attempting to both welcome and rebuff mi-
grants) inside our own British cultural imagination and demand social
justice for those among us who are ‘othered’ and thus alienated
(Scott-Baumann, Contractor, 2015). By creating safe spaces for the
study of our incoherent responses to confusing situations and facili-
tating currently forbidden discussions on British campuses about Syr-
ia and its neighbours, we will acknowledge that Plotinus’ imperma-
nence and difference define our existence and are necessary nega-
tives. Ricoeur developed this approach partly through his use of Ploti-
nus and his interpretation of Plotinus as part of a phenomenologico-
hermeneutic tool can give us the confidence and the curiosity to en-
joy provisionality, not-knowing and a refusal to inhabit starkly dichot-
omous debates of positive/ negative tension. As Laclau asserted,


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Alison Scott-Baumann, Ricoeur on Plotinus




vagueness and indeterminacy are integral to the lives we lead
(Laclau, 2005: 67).


6. Conclusions
What is ‘not-ness’? Ricoeur wondered, as had Plotinus, whether this
can be a positive attribute, like colour or texture… Ricoeur challenged
the established dichotomy presented by many thinkers from Plato to
Sartre, and he challenged them at the heart of the debate about ne-
gation by criticising their polarisation of Parmenides and Heraclitus,
wherein the former is completely focussed and positive and the latter
completely negative and chaotic. For Ricoeur this was another way of
trying to understand the modern negative turn, initiated by Hegel and
exemplified by Sartre and which he found desperately unproductive.
Yet he published very little on this topic.
      In the late 1940s Ricoeur wanted to develop a philosophy of ne-
gation. His stated aim was to find the source of the negative. He
hoped that at its core he would find the human spirit affirming itself.
He was also perplexed by the idea of nothingness; is it a ‘bad’ thing
that we should deny, as Parmenides argued, or is it a good thing as
understood by Plotinus in the powerful humility of the apophatic way
to God. Alternatively, could the negative be an inevitability of exist-
ence, to be managed as best we can, as Sartre saw it? Or, is it simply
our fear of pain and death?
      He lectured and wrote notes for over twenty years on negation.
He found the roots of this thought in his early training in pre-Socratic,
Platonic, Aristotelian and Neo-Platonist philosophy and used this to
identify specific problems within modern philosophy, starting with
Hegel, then Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre. Is ne-
gation the opposite of something? Is it the other person? Is it noth-
ingness?




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    Ricoeur concluded that there are many forms of negation from
different sources; negation can, for example, be manifested by the
other person –whom I will never understand (Plato); it, negation, can
itself be rejected, negated (Parmenides and Aristotle); it can be the
powerful contrast between ideal and real (Hegel); it can be willed
spiritual deprivation (Plotinus on not being able to know God) and it
can be existential nothingness (Sartre). Plato considered that state-
ments which seem false are presumed false and different, and other
people as non-being and different, because in neither case do we fully
understand them. This renders negation, in the Platonic sense, vitally
important as we need to acknowledge its important role in identifying
whether we know the truth about something or not, yet Plotinus took
this further into unknowing. However, for the ancient philosophers,
negation was more to do with knowledge. It was often epistemologi-
cal and not the direct ontological threat to personal identity and
thought that it has become for us now. Ultimately Ricoeur concluded
that the different sources of negation stemming from Parmenides,
Heraclitus, Plotinus, Kant and Hegel are incompatible: this tension
contributed to the development of his dialectical model, which permit-
ted him to hold incompatibilities in some sort of stability while analys-
ing them, as in his work on structuralism and hermeneutics. However
he found it impossible, in the end, to develop a philosophy of nega-
tion, because of the difficulty in making the assertion that he desired,
namely that there is a power of affirmation, of ‘yes’ hidden in all ne-
gation. Yet as a result of twenty years spent with Plotinus and many
others he was able to reject a Hegelian approach, which risks remov-
ing the frightening yet creative energy from the negative within us all
by absorbing it, containing it within a dialectical form in which all is as
it should be and has the totalising effect that Parmenides sought.
    What Ricoeur achieved instead of a philosophy of negation was
an immensely valuable critique of modern philosophy from Descartes


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Alison Scott-Baumann, Ricoeur on Plotinus




onwards, by using the classical problematics from Plotinus and oth-
ers. The One (Godhead) as sought by Plotinus and defined by him as
ineffable, is inextricably linked with the negative, because God must
be ‘not understood’, ‘not known’ in order that we can hope for a
glimmer of understanding about Him. If we know nothing, bit by bit,
we may end up with a gleam of the stripped clean God, or the
stripped clean Platonic Good. Ricoeur developed a philosophy that in-
vites us to seek out the good, and also the other, the negated, the
hated and the rejected possibilities. This approach is based partly up-
on the Neoplatonic method of challenging dichotomous, polarised
language and seeking the benefits of the metaphor (and other forms
of language) that bring together that which is through that which is
not. This methodology of not knowing can help us to face populism as
an integral part of ourselves, rather than as an alien aberration to be
censured and rejected5.
        This phenomenon is visible in daily politics, as I show with my
research and activist engagement with government on free speech on
campus. We should use this extraordinary way of thinking to chal-
lenge our futures, as seen in the governmental duel between Brex-
iteers and Remainers, neither of whom make their position clear ex-
cept in its being diametrically opposed to the ‘other side’, an unfortu-
nately banal, unrealistic and dangerous example of Aristotle’s binary
logic. This is not to argue that those who fear Brussels or immigrants
are right or wrong, rather it is to propose that the omnipresent nega-
tivity that distorts these arguments needs to be addressed. One way
of attempting this is to engage with the discourses around us: the
non-dialogic rhetorical devices used in populist discourse can be un-
derstood and countered with reasoned debate if we can have the con-
fidence and courage partly available from accepting our own negative


5
    AR/FR –Bib. IPT, Inv. 1, d96 'La négation' Cours. Feuillet 9208.



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ways of thinking (our fear and our sense of loss, lack and desire) and
partly from a Plotinian acceptance that it is impossible to know
properly what we try to grasp. We have to be tolerant of ambiguity
and embrace unknowing, nevertheless working pragmatically and
ethically towards societal improvements. The internet has created
amplification of all these problems, which are not addressed by any of
these thinkers. Whether or not we can subscribe to Laclau’s belief
that populism can facilitate a new, active era of politics in which
equivalence and difference are addressed directly depends entirely on
whether we, the people, take up this challenge; control the internet
and influence our governments as part of a truly populist movement.




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