Union by Subtraction, Not by Climbing

Hadot's reading of Plotinus turns on a word choice in his own book's title, simplicity rather than ascent, and the distinction matters for what henosis is actually supposed to be. A picture of climbing suggests the soul travels toward the One by adding capacities, moving through ever higher and more powerful states until it arrives. Hadot argues Plotinus describes the opposite process throughout, a stripping away of the very distinctions, between seer and seen, between the soul and what it contemplates, that make ordinary experience and even ordinary contemplation possible at all. What is reached is called simple because multiplicity itself, not merely ignorance or attachment, is the obstacle being removed, so the state Porphyry records his teacher entering only rarely is not a richer or fuller condition than ordinary awareness but a plainer one, with the machinery of subject and object taken away rather than perfected. This is why Plotinus insists the last step cannot be willed the way a climb can be pushed through by effort, an act of will is itself one more piece of the structure being simplified away, so the soul cannot reach for the One as its object without the reaching itself keeping the distance in place. Hadot's title names the whole argument in two words, and the difficulty the tradition never resolved, how a person deliberately abandons the last thing standing between themselves and the goal, follows directly from taking simplicity rather than ascent as the operative image.