by Max Wade
Dancing appears to be a human universal. Present in nearly every society (perhaps with the exception of a few extreme Calvinist and Quaker circles), dance serves as an essential vehicle for expressing an individual’s joy, developing social cohesion, collectively enacting a ritual, and even attaining mystical revelations. As the contemporary philosopher Kimerer LaMothe argues, dancing together is what makes us human; we are the dancing species. Reflecting on the nature and practice of dance, therefore, poses an interesting challenge. How can we take this profoundly kinetic, embodied art and understand it as being continuous with the rest of human experience—and even consider it to reflect a greater aspect of reality itself?
One particularly interesting perspective on the performing arts can be found in the third century Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus (c. 204/5 – 270 AD), whose metaphysics of dance developed out of a creative redeployment of earlier theories of the unity of the work of art developed by rhetoricians of the Second Sophistic in conjunction with the philosophical views of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. For many Greeks, both ancient and medieval, the performing arts were seen as structured in a way akin to that of living organisms; this view would have a long history, one which developed and matured throughout antiquity and persisted well into the Byzantine period. This is especially true in the case of rhetorical and theatrical performance. The second century rhetorician Hermogenes of Tarsus (fl. c. 170 AD), for example, asserted that the parts of a speech were held together by being actively commingled in such a way that they formed an organic whole. That is to say, discourse was an organism which had a “living harmony of [its] members” (Kustas 1973, 15). Aristotle, too, expressed a similar sentiment in regards to drama, holding that the tale (μῦθος) was the soul of the drama, with the soul being an organizing principle that brings the drama together into an organic and unified whole (Poetics 1450a38).
Although not a well-known philosopher outside of specialist circles, Plotinus was an incredibly important figure in the history of Roman philosophy because he founded a school of thought commonly cited in modern scholarship by the neologism “Neoplatonism.” His school, modeled after the original Platonic academy, was founded in the city of Rome during the reign of Emperor Philip the Arab and quickly attracted a wide audience of students from across the empire. Plotinus’ teaching helped establish a rigorous educational curriculum and institutional structure that persisted for generations after him, and in large part helped to inspire a revival of Platonic philosophy that would have an enduring legacy in the speculative thought of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim philosophers for centuries to come.
His comments on the arts are found in the many treatises compiled by his student Porphyry into the text known today as the Enneads. There, one can find a wide number of references to theatrical performance, musicianship, and various kinds of dance. Importantly, these references are often not musings on the nature of the art itself, but rather are invoked as part of a broader craft analogy where, by taking examples from concrete and familiar human artistic practices, broader philosophical of reality or scientific concepts of wholeness can be clarified. In this think-piece, I focus on that final category, namely, Plotinus’ use of dance as a philosophical metaphor to illustrate points that take on genuinely cosmic importance, such as the role of evil in the universe, the nature of human freedom, and the relation of mortals to the gods. While contemporary philosophy of dance tends to focus entirely on it as an embodied practice or its social role, Plotinus sees dance as akin to the essential activity of life itself, both for humanity and for the gods. Dance, as an energetic and dynamic process, is an expression of what it means to exist in the truest sense of the word.
Before turning to the examples of dance in his writing, it is important to distinguish between the two different kinds of Greco-Roman dance that Plotinus makes use of: choral dancing and pantomime dancing. These have at times been conflated (see Miller 1986, 161–166), but the differences between them are not just of historical significance but genuine philosophical import, as we shall see. First, choral dance is performed as a group activity conducted by a leader, with the various members of the chorus singing and dancing together. This particular kind of dance was often used as an image of orderly movement by classical authors, such as Xenophon (Oeconomicus 8.3), and was sometimes compared to the motion of the stars and other heavenly bodies (Pont 2008, 267). Pantomime dance, on the other hand, involved a single performer whose various movements were meant to convey a dramatic narrative without speaking or singing. The word “pantomime” itself is a reference to this feature, being a portmanteau of the Greek words παντο- (all) and μῖμος (actor), indicating that the one actor performs all roles of the dance. It was often accompanied by music and originated in the Hellenistic period, rising to widespread popularity during the Roman Imperial period (Sheppard 2020, 105–106).
A key distinction between the two kinds of dance, therefore, is whether the dance is a group activity (choral dance) or individual performance (pantomime dance). For Plotinus, the dependence of the choral group on the leader was of crucial importance, as he holds that the organic unity of the group depends on the organizing and ruling power of the group’s leader. In the case of an army, for example, Plotinus states that, “the ruling principle (ἡγούμενον) weaves all things together, while individual things co-operate on one side or the other according to their nature, as in military commands the general gives the lead and his subordinates work in unity with him” (Enn. III.3.2.4–6) and that “the cosmos becomes a complete life when the best parts do the best, according to the best in each of them: and each [being] has to subordinate its best to the ruling principle (ἡγεμονοῦντι), as soldiers to the general” (Enn. II.3.13.28–31). While Aristotle sometimes makes use of similar imagery to convey how a succession of individual things can combine to form a greater whole (Posterior Analytics II.19, 100a12–14), Plotinus emphasizes a far more top-down causal order, with the commanding and ruling principle being the sole cause of the order found among the parts. This has significant cosmological implications, as in both of these quotes Plotinus understands the various parts of the universe to function together in a way similar to that of an army, with all the planetary motions and meteorological fluctuations on Earth being like a grand military maneuver orchestrated by a divine general.
These two military examples illustrate a basic assumption in how Plotinus thinks about the organization of social groups, namely, that their organization and the function of their constituent parts is constructed by the activity of a ruling principle (lit. “hegemon”). In this regard, Plotinus seems to build on the Stoics who held a similar view concerning the ruling principle of all living beings, from the smallest insects to the cosmos as a whole. Marcus Aurelius, for example, wrote that “the ruling principle…makes everything which happens appear to itself to be such as it wills. In conformity to the nature of the universe every single thing is accomplished, for certainly it is not in conformity to any other nature that each thing is accomplished” (Meditations 6.8–9). However, Plotinus makes an even stronger claim in another passage: that, in the absence of this ruling principle, the group itself would cease to exist as such. In describing the relationship between individual souls and the divine first principle, Plotinus writes that,
it is like a choral dance: in the order of its singing the choir keeps round its conductor but may sometimes turn away, so that he is out of their sight, but when it turns back to him it sings beautifully and is truly with him; so we too are always around [the first principle]—and if we were not, we should be totally dissolved and no longer exist—but not always turned to him; but when we do look to him, then we are at our goal and at rest and do not sing out of tune as we truly dance our god-inspired dance around him. (Enn. VI.9.8.39–46; emphasis added)
The analogy is meant to convey the absolute dependence of creatures on their creator, much in the same way that a room remains illuminated only as long as a lightbulb in the center continues to emit light (an argument for the existence of God employed over a millennium later by Descartes in the Meditations). The analogy used here by Plotinus, however, relies on a particularly hierarchical understanding of social groups wherein their existence is only established as a top-down relation of command and obedience; the performance of the choir cannot happen without a conductor to bring the parts together into a genuine whole. The radical conclusion drawn is that all of reality operates this way as well, hence the need to posit a single transcendent divinity at the top of the scala naturae without which nothing, then, would either exist or have any order whatsoever.
Plotinus may on this point be echoing a deeply Platonic pedigree: “Plato [viewed] the art of politics, the royal art of managing the polis, as akin to the orchestration of tribal dance in harmonious array…that innate perception of harmony ultimately extended to the beauty and order of the cosmos as a whole” (Pont 2008, 271). If the whole of reality is organized like a chorus—with a conductor orchestrating the whole of the universe and ensuring a harmonious relationship among all its parts—two important philosophical questions inevitably emerge. First is the problem of evil: why, if the world is divinely ordered, is there disease, war, and even human suffering at all? The second relates to human freedom as, if all parts are ordered in this way, the role of individual agency seems murky at best. While both these questions have produced significant scholarly debate too extensive to be adequately covered here, hints of Plotinus’ answer can be discerned in some additional passages relating to the cosmic dance.
In the case of a pantomime dance, such as the popular performances of Roman love stories like that of Dido and Aeneas, various contrasting movements come together to produce a single narrative whole. Plotinus sees this as clearly analogous to the case of the universe itself, as its various contrary qualities—hot and cold, light and dark, light and heavy, and so on—come together in a ordered arrangement which is like a supremely beautiful dance: “according to every figure of the heavenly circuit there is a different disposition of the things which it governs, as if they were performing a single ballet in a rich variety of dance-movements” (Enn. IV.4.33.6–8; cf. Plato, Timaeus 40c3–d3). By bringing together these various natural forces into a balanced and harmonious world, life on Earth is made possible. In the same way that a human body in a dance must move with contrary motions, so too do the various parts of the cosmos, all in service of some greater cosmic whole.
The dancer does not choose to make these movements for no reason, but each part of him as he performs the dance has its necessary position in the dancing of the whole body. It is in this way, then…the whole universe actively lives its own complete life, moving its great parts within itself, and continually rearranging them. (Enn. IV.4.33.23–29)
Evil, then, only exists from a limited perspective. In the same way that someone untrained in dance may look at a particular part of the performance and find it ugly or inappropriate, the connoisseur looks to the whole of the performance before rendering judgment, often finding these supposedly unsavory elements perfectly complementary and fitting within the bigger picture. As Plotinus describes it, “there are good men and wicked men, like the opposed movements of a dancer inspired by one and the same art” (III.2.17.9–11), but together they all contribute to the dramatic arrangement of the whole.
By giving such a strong priority of the whole cosmos over and above its parts, human freedom is far from the freedom to do whatever one chooses. Rather, freedom consists in conforming one’s motions to the rational and providential order of the universe as a whole. Plotinus uses a rather humorous example of a tortoise caught among a company of choral dancers to illustrate what freedom in an ordered cosmos consists in:
[It is] as if when a great company of dancers was moving in order a tortoise was caught in the middle of its advance and trampled because it was not able to get out of the way of the ordered movement of the dancers: yet if it had [ordered] itself with that movement, even it would have taken no harm from them. (Enn. II.9.7.36–40)
While we may find this particular notion of human freedom to be lacking or his view of evil to be far too dismissive of human suffering, Plotinus nevertheless is strongly committed to his position that this world is a masterfully arranged artistic production. The trials and tribulations of ordinary people are but a small part of a grand cosmic play, and if one were to view things from a god’s-eye-view, everything would appear to have been set in place as it ought to be.
The unity of the performative art, on one hand, can only be accounted for in reference to an external principle, such as the conductor in the case of the choral dance. On the other hand, the dynamic interplay of the various parts in light of the whole, such as in the pantomime dance, illustrates the way in which the plethora of moving parts in the cosmos fit together despite the appearance of disorder. Ultimately, both types of dance are used to illustrate the common point that it is the whole—the whole work of art as well as the whole of reality—which gives rise to the diversity and organization of all its parts; a kind of organic unity which expresses itself in a playful and creative activity that, for Plotinus, constitutes the nature of life itself.
Max Wade is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Boston College. His research primarily focuses on the history of natural philosophy in the ancient world, as well as its impact on medieval philosophy. His dissertation is a reconstruction of Plotinus’ ontology of artifacts, specifically in relation to his responses to Platonic, Aristotelian and Stoic accounts of the arts and the composition of artificial objects.
Edited by Jacob Saliba
Cover Image: Landscape with Dancing Satyrs and Nymphs, by Claude Gellee, called Claude Lorrain, 1646, National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
