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Inaction: Reading Hadot on Plotinus in the First Hours of the Year

By Justin Loke

“When people are too weak for contemplation, they switch to action, which is a mere shadow of contemplation and of reason. Since, owing to the weakness of their souls, their faculty of contemplation is insufficient, they cannot grasp the object of their contemplation and be fulfilled by it. Yet they still want to see it; and so they switch to action, in order to see with their eyes what they could not see with their spirit. In any case, when they create something, it is because they themselves want to see it and to contemplate it; and when they propose to act, insofar as they are able, it is because they want their act to be perceived by others.” (III 8, 4, 33–39)

This is not a review of the book, nor even a considered assessment of Pierre Hadot’s book on Plotinus as a whole, but merely a response to a segment I stumbled upon late last night, reading without urgency, in the first hours of the new year. It is a habit I seem to have acquired long after the drinking and parties of younger days fell away, and perhaps not entirely without precedent in older traditions, where the turning of the year called less for release than for attentiveness, for restraint in speech and gesture, for a certain care at the threshold, with 2026 already vaguely in mind as the year in which I am meant to be finishing other, heavier things.¹

Plotinus writes with a severity that is so uncompromising it sometimes becomes almost funny. When he claims that “when people are too weak for contemplation, they switch to action, which is a mere shadow of contemplation and of reason,” he reverses an entire moral economy at a stroke. Action is no longer strength, courage, or engagement, but impatience, a compensatory movement for a soul unable to remain with what it sees. We act, he says, because we cannot bear contemplation long enough to be fulfilled by it. Action becomes a kind of visual aid, a way of seeing with the eyes what could not be sustained by the spirit. Even creation, in this account, is not generosity or excess, but restlessness: we make things because we ourselves want to see them, and we act because we want our acts to be perceived by others.

This is Platonism at its most extreme, pushed so far that it tips into inversion. Action is not condemned outright, but quietly degraded, reduced to a shadow cast by failed contemplation. One can almost hear the irony: the more urgent and energetic the action, the more it betrays spiritual weakness. It is not inaction that Plotinus praises, but a stillness so demanding that most souls flee from it. The rush to act becomes faintly comic, not immoral, just hurried, unable to endure the intensity of seeing without immediately externalizing it.

The same logic reappears in his account of beauty. Plotinus insists that beauty does not reside primarily in symmetry or proportion, but in an added presence, “some kind of aura,” a light that shines upon form and animates it, luminous, though not quite equal to light itself.

“Even in this world,” he writes, “we must say that beauty consists less in symmetry than in the light that shines upon the symmetry, and this light is what is desirable. After all, why is it that the splendor of beauty shines more brightly upon a living face while only a trace of beauty appears on the face of a dead man?… The living man, even if he is ugly, is more beautiful than the most beautiful statue, because life is better than stone. (VI &, 22, 24-32)”

Here again, the claim is initially compelling. Pure proportion is not enough; something lifelessly perfect can fail to move us. But the final analogy falters. A living face compared to the same face dead is an easy case. It quietly replaces the harder aesthetic question (living face versus statue) with an ontological one. Life is smuggled in as a guarantee of beauty, and the hierarchy of being is allowed to decide what perception should conclude.

I do not agree that an ugly living man is more beautiful than a great statue simply because he lives. A statue is not cold; it appears finished, but we know that for its maker it is always unfinished, or rather, it accepts its incompletion, abandoned by the artist in the way Giacometti leaves a figure unresolved, or the way Paul Valéry speaks of abandoning a poem rather than finishing it. It is a sentence with parts best left unsaid. As La Rochefoucauld reminds us, eloquence lies in knowing what not to say. It does not lack light; it refuses transcendence. What Plotinus distrusts, here as elsewhere, is anything that might rest in itself, anything that does not point upward or demand completion elsewhere. Life, movement, action, illumination, all are valued because they refuse closure. An ugly man, by contrast, is an actuality, the realization of a failed ideal, failing even to fulfill the idea of ugliness itself, something that being alive cannot compensate for.

This is where Plotinus becomes most revealing. His philosophy is not wrong so much as excessive. It is so faithful to contemplation that it must demote action, so faithful to ascent that it must suspect form, so faithful to life that it must slight the completed object. The arguments are beautiful. One could admire the purity while smiling at Plotinus’s impatience in advocating contemplation and derogating action.

1. It is worth recalling that the association of the New Year with excess (drinking, noise, release) could be relatively recent. In older ritual traditions, particularly within Confucian culture, the turning of the year was treated as a threshold rather than a rupture. One was careful with words, gestures, and conduct, as if the opening days set a tonal pattern for what followed. Feasting existed, but it was governed, not compensatory. The modern New Year, by contrast, bears the mark of fatigue: a sanctioned interval of excess that answers the pressures of work and accumulation. What now appears as celebration once functioned more as alignment. ↩︎