Plotinus: His Philosophical Critique In this paper I will compare some of the ways in which sexual orientation research is connected to its social contexts. I will try to show how attempts to explain the origins and manifestations of homoerotic interests and behaviors can be viewed by Plotinus and Nietzsche. Even if science nowadays is fundamental in conceiving its projects and priorities, for the greatest part of Western history the origins of homoeroticism held no scientific interest whatsoever in contrast to philosophy. When Friedrich Nietzsche chose gay science as the title of his reflections on culture and morality, he did so in order to contrast a spirit of robust and adventurous inquiry to the oppressive and limiting conventions he found prevalent in science and scholarly inquiry of the day. Gay ethics has built on a rejection of heteronormative values and gone on to criticize formalistic, rigid, and inhumane social principles. It may be that science and ethics can join forces in their opposition to unfounded beliefs whether those beliefs occur in regard to the origins of erotic interests or the value of gay people to society.
Nietzsches characterizations of homoeroticism as a medical disorder quickly joined and sometimes supplanted prevailing social and ethical characterizations of homoeroticism, characterizations that had been couched almost exclusively in the language of morality and religion. Discursively speaking, medical terminology displaced moral characterizations and became constitutive of homoeroticism itself: homosexuality was construed as inherently pathological as a disease in its own right or as a symptom of underlying disease. This historical shift of perspective did not occur in a vacuum. During the rise of sexual science, the social authority of medicine was beginning to coalesce into new forms and strengths. Invested with new authority and social prestige, medical judgments of pathology spread widely and quickly throughout a society already prepared on other grounds to believe the worst about homosexuality. Nietzsche merges the perspective of the genealogist on the value of truth with that of the philosopher and the practitioner of gay science. The faith on which philosophy rests – emphatically including Nietzsches gay science and his genealogy – derives from and even more of the animal, and more still of the material… this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to get away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wishing, from longing itself (The Gay Science, 299).
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Calling the goodness of truth into question is the latest and highest expression of the service of truth and hence a reaffirmation that truth is good. We also can regard Nietzsches critique towards homosexual behavior here: How can we make things beautiful, attractive, and desirable for us when they are not? (The Gay Science, 299).
Certainly, according to Nietzsche, a person cannot be attracted to another person of the same sex, since it is not beautiful and furthermost not good. In the Ennead Plotinus discusses the non-affectability of the soul. Plotinus admits that there are alterations in the soul, and that we have perceptions of them: To deny that there are in us both changes and intense perceptions of the changes would be to deny the evident (Ennead III-4).
Plotinus shows that these alterations are not affections, which are to do with something other than the soul, and that our perceptions of them do not themselves constitute affections. To desire food or sex or friendship or even empirical knowledge is to be oriented in a manner essentially different from the way that intellect is oriented to the good.
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For desiring it as intellect does would, it seems, mean just being an intellect. What an embodied soul can have, however, is a desire to have the desire that intellect has, though this be a desire for the relatively unknown. According to Plotinus, Beauty in the soul, that is, virtue, is true beauty compared with the beauty produced by soul (I15).
If we compare Plotinus in contrast to Nietzsche makes a statement which can be understood as homosexual behavior is oriented towards the good, because it is driven by body and intellect. As Plotinus believes that, when a man has an appetite for sexual pleasures, it will be the man that desires, but in another way it will be the desiring part of the soul that desires (I 2931).
One the one hand, sexual intercourse is ugly according to Plotinus, and then his logic of argument requires that he renounce it unqualifiedly. On the other hand, however, he also praises sex which is inspired by a love of beauty (III62).
The right interpretation then seems to be that all depends on whether the delight in sex is correctly viewed as an image or mistakenly viewed as the paradigm itself.
Sexual intercourse is not incompetently condemned by Plotinus. In this respect, his view should be distinguished from that of the more extreme ascetics. His relatively moderate view is that the desirability of sexual intercourse can only be properly evaluated according to whether it abets or inhibits ascent to the good. A man has not failed if he fails to win beauty of colors or bodies, or power or office or kingship even, but if he fails to win this and only this. For this he should give up the attainment of kingship and of rule over all earth and sea and sky, if only by leaving and overlooking them he can turn to that and see. (I9) Therefore, even homosexual orientation can be perceived as the good since it is inspired by love and beauty, which nowadays, is a commonly accepted fact.
We can explain in the same way Plotinus striking belief that intelligible beauty can distract us from the good (V7).
Certainly, no discarnate intellect experiences such a distraction. It is those endowed selves who have intimations of intellectual beauty through the work of their own intellects who are susceptible if they do not at the same time recognize the subordination of Intellect to the Good. In the late nineteenth century and in a substantial portion of this century the opinion prevailed among a great many Western psychologists and medical practitioners that homoeroticism was a serious disorder of psychic and/or biological origin. Before that century medicine scarcely noticed homoeroticism let alone considered it fit for investigation. If Plotinus was Nietzsches contemporary, I suppose he would have thought that that any example of beauty can be instrumental in the ascent to the Good or it can be an impediment depending on whether that beautys proper place in the hierarchy of reality is understood or not.
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Bibliography:
Nietzsche, Friedrich.
The Gay Science, Translated and edited, with commentary, by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. Plotinus, The Enneads, edited and translated by Stephen McKenna..
