ABSTRACT
One of the great singularities of the philosophy of Plotinus consists in thinking of the self1 for its own sake and, in particular, in producing a concept of it di erent from that of soul.2 is philosophical breakthrough is inseparable from the discovery of immediate re exivity; that is, the subject’s ability to apprehend itself independently of its relation to an object or to another subject.3 In Plotinus, however, this re exivity occurs only in an interrogative form, which can be read, in particular, in Enn. I.1[53] and Enn. VI.4[22]. In other words, it does not, as in Descartes, assume the form of an intuition by means of which the subject, grasping itself as consciousness, would, at the same time, have an evident revelation of its essence. In Enn. I.1 and Enn. VI.4, the two re exive questions serve as preludes to two enquiries involving the concepts of soul and human being, but also manifesting the irreducibility of the self to either of them. It is precisely this irreducibility that will interest us: we will see how Plotinus, although he seems to think of the self by means of the connected notions of soul and human being, but also of individual or even of consciousness, ceaselessly produces and renews a gap between them and the self. It is on the gap between soul and self that our attention will focus more particularly, both because it carries the others along with it, and because these two concepts are also susceptible of di erent meanings in Plotinus: just as he allows levels of the soul, so he is also prepared to accept levels of the self. And yet, they do not coincide. e self properly so called, which Plotinus refers to as the hēmeis, is distinct both from the essential or separated soul and from the soul linked to the body. Situated rather than de ned, it cannot be substanti ed. To use Plotinian terminology, the hēmeis is neither god nor animal, but rather the power to become either one. ese two possible and exclusive identi cations depend on the orientation it gives to its consciousness. Consciousness therefore does not appear, as it will in Descartes, as a revelation of identity, but as a means of identi cation.
