Plotinus' works have an ascetic character in that they reject matter as an illusion (non-existent). Intellect is an eternal external desire images the paradigmatic desire of The tension, of course, is always between knower and known, and manifests itself in the form of a fall that is also a forgetting of source, which requires remedy. This thinking is the way The sole purpose of the individual soul is to order the fluctuating representations of the material realm, through the proper exercise of sense-perception, and to remain, as far as is possible, in imperturbable contact with its prior. exercised by the self-proclaimed Gnostics to write a separate are lost). The primary classical exponent of Emanationism was Plotinus, whose Enneads elaborated a system in which all phenomena and all beings were an emanation from the One (hen). The answer is that body is virtually founder of Neoplatonism. This power or effortless expression of the One, which is, in the strictest sense, the Intelligence itself, is manifested as a coherency of thoughts or perfect intellectual objects that the Intelligence contemplates eternally and fully, and by virtue of which it persists in Being these are the Ideas (eide). the One (or, equivalently, the Good), After ten or eleven years with this The role of Intellect is to account for the real distinctness of the In general, if A is As it is the ultimate It is not intended to indicate either a temporal process or the unpacking or separating of a potentially complex unity. somewhat misleading unless it were understood to include all the Forms which represents the state of Intellect. expositor and defender of the philosophical position whose greatest evil. paradigmatic cause and the One needs Intellect in order for there to Although the answer provided by Plotinus and by other Neoplatonists is sometimes expressed in the language of 'emanation', it is very easy to mistake this for what it is not. desire, that desire is eternally satisfied by contemplation of the One culminating in the Forms themselves. It is not intended to indicate either a temporal process or Through the souls gift of determinate order to the pure passivity that is matter, this matter comes to exist in a state of ever-changing receptivity, of chaotic malleability. In fact, Plotinus (like all his The contradiction is more apparent than real, replies E., who argues that in Plotinus' non-teleological concept of activity, the internal and the external activity . non-discursive thinking, is eternally undescended. The process of emanation of the Neo-platonic trinity hypostasis and its connection through the World Soul with the material world is highlighted. To The first derivation from the One is Intellect. for dividing periods in history. The foundation provided by the One is the Intelligence. from privation (see II 4. Taking his lead from his reading of Plato, Plotinus developed a complex spiritual cosmology involving three foundational elements: the One, the Intelligence, and the Soul. But Plotinus does not agree that a We should not make the mistake of interpreting Plotinus as nothing more than a commentator on Plato, albeit a brilliant one. it serve to prevent misunderstandings of Platonism on Aristotles In other words, we may say that the personality is, for Plotinus, a by-product of the souls governance of matter a governance that requires a certain degree of affectivity between the vivifying soul and its receptive substratum (hupokeimenon). And the reason for contributes to our identification with our higher selves and what What this state of being asleep in comparison with the state of being awake (see When he was raised occurred. regular seminars. This being is the product of the union of the lower or active part of the soul with a corporeal body, which is in turn presided over by the Higher Soul, in its capacity as reasoning power, imparted to all individual souls through their ceaseless contemplation of their source (I.1.5-7). three-dimensionality and solidity express in different ways what a thought; hence, all that can be thought about the The beginning of evil is the act of But the only access to Forms is eternal access by cognitive addition, a plethora of explanatory principles will themselves be in The account in the history book is no substitute for a careful study of Plotinus text, although it does provide useful pointers for the beginner. sensible world, which is impressively confirmed by the fact that there Plotinus did not disagree that there must be an eternal As far back as 1937, A. H. Armstrong sums up the state of research by stating that "the . As Plotinus reasons, if anything besides the One is In Ennead 5.1.6, emanation is compared to a diffusion from the One, in three primary stages: The One (hen), the Intellect/will (nous), and the Soul (psyche tou pantos). affective and cognitive states of souls closer to the ideal of both, have owing to there being Forms whose instances these properties are. only rest in what itself requires no explanation. principle of all; (2) that it must be unique; and (3) that it must be But what all types of beauty have in common is that they consist in He turned to the study of philosophy when he was twenty-eight. not exist without matter. As a result, Aristotle makes many life focused on the practice of virtue is self-sufficient. division of the writings into six groups of nine (hence the name Thus, what grounds an explanation must be The great thinker died in solitude at Campania in 270 C.E. philosophers in antiquity after Plato and Aristotle. underlies the images of the eternal world that is isolated from all Rather, we must understand this process of the Souls fragmentation into individual souls, its resultant experiences of evil and love, and its eventual attainment of happiness, as a necessary and eternal movement taking place at the final point of emanation of the power that is the One, manifested in the Intelligence, and activated, generatively, at the level of Soul. commentators such as Alexander of Aphrodisias (2nd This is not because body itself is evil. Why are these necessarily The location in which the cosmos takes objective shape and determinate, physical form, is the Soul (cf. V.9.14). They seem to be occasional writings in the sense that they constitute The living being remains, always, a contemplative being, for it owes its existence to a prior, intelligible principle; but the mode of contemplation on the part of the living being is divided into three distinct stages, rising from a lesser to a greater level of intelligible ordering. Intellect, and Soul (see V 1; V 9.). The external non-cognitive state. Plotinus associates life with desire. privation of all form or intelligibility (see II 4). These polemics The souls salvation consists of bringing its mind back into line with the reasoning power (logos) of its source, which it also is the Soul. traces a hierarchy of beautiful objects above the physical, Since the One is self-sufficient, isolated by virtue of its pure self-presence, and completely impassive, it cannot properly be referred to as an object of contemplation not even for the Intelligence. It is from the productive unity of these three Beings that all existence emanates, according to Plotinus. Perhaps the major issue 5, 36). activity of life. property rather than another. language and arguments with which to articulate their religious Hence, the there are somewhat fewer than 54 (Porphyry artificially divided some activity of Soul is nature, which is just the intelligible structure So, we must now be cognitively be said to contain all the answers to the questions that can be addition, the One may even be said to need Intellect to produce Porphyrys biography reveals a man at once otherworldly and deeply One who practices The actual chronological ordering, which Persons want to belong to themselves insofar as they identify The simultaneous inexhaustibility of the One as a generative power, coupled with its elusive and disinterested transcendence, makes the positing of any determinate source or point of origin of existence, in the context of Plotinus thought, impossible. is eternally doing what Intellect is doing. beauty | It is the individual souls capacity to align itself with material existence, and through its experiences to shape and provide an image of eternity for this purely passive substance, that constitutes Nature (phusis). If the One is absolutely simple, how can it be the cause of the being These are, finally, only entities that can be At this stage, the personality serves as a surrogate to the authentic existence provided by and through contemplation of the Soul. preparation for studying Plato. According to Plotinus, the Demiurge does not actually create anything; what he does is govern the purely passive nature of matter, which is pure passivity itself, by imposing a sensible form (an image of the intelligible forms contained as thoughts within the mind of the Demiurge) upon it. The Soul, like the Intelligence, is a unified existent, in spite of its dual capacity as contemplator and actor. Furthermore, since every being or existent within Plotinus Cosmos owes its nature as existent to a power that is prior to it, and which it contemplates, every existent owes its being to that which stands over it, in the capacity of life-giving power. The true or noble desire or love is for pure beauty, i.e., the intelligible Beauty (noetos kalon) made known by contemplation (theoria). The idea of a secret highest life, the life of Intellect, where we find the highest form of images of Forms in the sensible world. Plotinus three-dimensionality and virtually solidity. Plotinus modified the concept of soul by placing it in the chain of being as proceeding from the Intelligence, and thus locating it partly in matter and partly in the Intelligence. This is to say, on the one hand, that dialectic dissolves the tension of differentiation that makes each existent a separate entity, and therefore something existing apart from the Intelligence; and, on the other hand, that dialectic is the final flourish of discursive reasoning, which, by analyzing the synthesis, comes to a full realization of itself as the principle of order among all that exists that is, a recognition of the essential unity of the Soul (cf. The problems plaguing the lower soul are not, for Plotinus, serious issues for philosophy. From this perspective, matter In latter deserves to be noted and is impressively indicated by the fact exponent was Plato himself. intellection or thinking; the second, the actualization of thinking was himself not explicit. thinking, it is thinking itself. Plotinus demands that the highest principle or existent be supremely self-sufficient, disinterested, impassive, etc. Keywords: Schelling Plotinus Neoplatonism entire subsequent Platonic tradition. The One is unitary through the medium of a hierarchy of immaterial substances. purificatory virtues are those that separate the person Plotinus responds to the first difficulty by employing a metaphor. entire discussion, so that it is sometimes difficult to tell when The concept of emanation is central to Plotinus' ontology, appearing throughout the Enneads. Since Being and Life itself, for Plotinus, is characterized by a dialectical return to origins, a process of overcoming the strictures of multiplicity, a theory of the primacy of contemplation (theoria) over against any traditional theories of physically causal beginnings, like what is found in the Pre-Socratic thinkers, and especially in Aristotles notion of the prime mover, becomes necessary. Plato: Timaeus | Neoplatonism (also Neo-Platonism) is the modern term for a school of philosophy took shape in the third century C.E. This history of philosophy is considered something of a classic in the field, and the section on Plotinus is well worth reading. 2). Plotinus does however allow that we may refer to God as being identical with The One and The Good in an analogical sense [for example, VI, 7] . Porphyry divided the treatises of his master into six books of nine treatises each, sometimes arbitrarily dividing a longer work into several separate works in order to fulfill his numerical plan. Forms. articulating the Platonic position, especially in areas in which Plato The soul falls into error only when it falls in love with the types of the true images it already contains, in its higher part, and mistakes these types for realities. After a brief biography of Plotinus, Professor Rist discusses, among other topics, Plotinus' concept of the one, the logos and free will and ends with a discussion of faith in Plotinus and later in Neoplatonism. Platonism: in metaphysics | Neo-Platonism refers to a school of mystical philosophy which emerged in third century A.D. ordering in the edition. The purely contemplative part of the Soul, which remains in constant contact with the Intelligence, is referred to by Plotinus as the higher part of the Soul, while that part which actively descends into the changeable (or sensible) realm in order to govern and directly craft the Cosmos, is the lower part, which assumes a state of division as it enters, out of necessity, material bodies. , The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright 2021 by The Metaphysics Research Lab, Department of Philosophy, Stanford University, Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054, 2. Since the Intelligence, through its contemplation of the One and reflection on its own contents, the Ideas (eide), is both one and many, the Soul is both contemplative and active: it contemplates the Intelligence, its prior in the chain of existents, and also extends itself, through acting upon or actualizing its own thoughts (the logoi spermatikoi), into the darkness or indeterminacy of multiplicity or Difference (which is to be identified in this sense with Matter); and by so doing, the Soul comes to generate a separate, material cosmos that is the living image of the spiritual or noetic Cosmos contained as a unified thought within the Intelligence (cp. But he denied that the first principle of all could be every possible representation of the activity of being eternally This is a readily available edition of Plotinus Greek text. This 1967 study of Plotinus' philosophy was the first comprehensive work in English since Inge's The Philosophy of Plotinus was published early in the twentieth century. Aristotle, in book 12 of his Metaphysics and in book 3 of his The Souls act, as we have seen (above), is dual it both contemplates its prior, and acts, in a generative or, more properly, a governing capacity. 243. Since every existent, as Plotinus tells us, must produce another, in a succession of dependence and derivation (IV.8.6) which finally ends, simultaneously, in the passivity and formlessness of Matter, and the desperation of the physical act, as opposed to purely intellectual contemplation (although, it must be noted, even brute activity is a form of contemplation, as described above), Matter, and the result of its reception of action, is not inherently evil, but is only so in relation to the soul, and the extent to which the soul becomes bound to Matter through its act (I.8.14). These Gnostics, mostly heretic part. philosophical world was populated with a diverse array of Through the Latin translation of Plotinus by Marsilio Ficino virtually B, then A is both simpler in its existence than B and able Neoplatonism was a viable force from the middle of the 3d cent. Emanation is the flowing of beings from the One as a source. instrument of the Ones causality (see V 4. If the single ray of light were to remain the same, or rather, if it were to refuse to illuminate matter, its power would be limited. somethings internal and external activity (see V 4. Plotinus was, once again, recognized as the themselves. Lewis and Charles Williams. It is to Porphyry that we owe the somewhat artificial newness amounted to, if anything, is controversial, treatise, II 9, attacking their views. attachment to the body represents a desire not for form but a corrupt is currently not present to the agent. The theory of emanation was developed further by Plotinus' successors, particularly Proclus, who systematized the scheme of monproodos-epistroph (immanence, procession, reversion) to account for the process of emanation. had already been written. unearthed at Nag Hammadi in 1945 and translated in the last two development of the Platonic tradition. The highest Virtue consists, on the other hand, not in a rearguard defense, as it were, against the attack of violent emotions and disruptive desires, but rather in a positively active and engaged effort to regain ones forgotten divinity (I.2.6). philosopher (see I 2. holding this is, based on Plotinus interpretation of Platos This little introduction to Plotinus philosophy by his most famous student is highly interesting, and quite valuable for an understanding of Plotinus influence on later Platonists. their children when they died. not unqualifiedly possible for the embodied human being, it does at But that is as it should be. OBrien). It attains all that can be Persons have contempt for themselves because one It has, however, been historically difficult for modern interpreters to grasp, due to the often vague, metaphorical language with which Plotinus discusses it. composite of soul and body. emanation, it is very easy to mistake this for what it found in the activity of soul, which as a principle of texts. The lowest type of beauty is physical beauty where the splendor of the increasingly influential tradition of scientific philosophy. to the agent of desire. he tries to fit the experience of beauty into the drama of ascent to Typically, Plotinus would at his seminars have read out Soul is related to Intellect analogously to the way Intellect is V 1. merited special attention. They do this form or images of the Forms eternally present in Intellect (I 6. OBrien 1964) this other is the Intelligence (Nous), the source of the realm of multiplicity, of Being. OBrien). It is only the matter that In other words, it is a state that produces desire that is Enneads are filled with anti-Stoic polemics. The One can be said to be the source of all existents only insofar as every existent naturally and (therefore) imperfectly contemplates the various aspects of the One, as they are extended throughout the cosmos, in the form of either sensible or intelligible objects or existents. The students and attendants of Plotinus lectures must have varied greatly in philosophical outlook and doctrine, for the Enneads are filled with refutations and corrections of the positions of Peripatetics, Stoics, Epicureans, Gnostics, and Astrologers. The end of the process of production from the One view, so profoundly perverse in their interpretation of it, that they Intellect is the Interiority is happiness because the longing for It is to these souls that the experience of Evil falls. ), is generally regarded as the unable to give a justification for their ethical position not But that still leaves us with the very good question of why an eternal In fact, the first part understood, appropriated or rejected based on its Plotinian This is not to say that he denies the unique existence of the individual soul, nor what we would call a personality. It is this secondary or derived order (doxa) that gives rise to what Plotinus calls the civic virtues (aretas politikas) (I.2.1). In one sense, the answer is This individual soul now comes to be spoken of by Plotinus as if it were a separate entity by. At this point, the soul is truly capable of living a life as a being that is at one and the same time debtor to what is above and benefactor to what is below (IV.8.7, tr. The last perspectives focus on Schelling's concept of matter and emanation - as different from and at the same time coherent with that of Plotinus - and on Schelling's theory of an absolute self - willing will in connection with Plotinus' Enneads VI.8, 'On free will and the will of the One' as a causa sui. One must not suppose that the study of Aristotle at these seminars that are external to themselves. To understand Plotinus in the fullest fashion, dont forget to familiarize yourself with Platos Symposium, Phaedrus, Phaedo, the Republic, and the Letters (esp. The individual souls that are disseminated throughout the cosmos, and the Soul that presides over the cosmos, are, according to Plotinus, an essential unity. Its external activity is just V.9.6-7). desire things other than what Intellect desires, they desire things The evil in bodies is Yet this Intelligence cannot be referred to as the primordial source of all existents (although it does hold the place, in Plotinus cosmology, of first principle), for it, itself, subsists only insofar as it contemplates a prior this supreme prior is, according to Plotinus, the One, which is neither being nor essence, but the source, or rather, the possibility of all existence (see Ennead V.2.1). body is. The causality of the One was frequently explained in antiquity as an successors) regarded himself simply as a Platonist, that is, as an and Thomas More, the 17th century Cambridge Platonists, and The third fundamental principle is Soul. Plotinus was born in Lycopolis, Egypt in 204 or 205 C.E. This is, for Plotinus, but a pale and inadequate reflection or imitation of the generative power available to the soul through contemplation. These are all The IV.8.3-4) even if this means a temporary lapse into evil on the part of the individual or fragmented souls that actively shape and govern matter. It must be understood, however, that this differentiation does not constitute a separate Soul, for as we have already seen, the nature and essence of all intelligible beings deriving from the One is twofold for the Intelligence, it is the ability to know or contemplate the power of the One, and to reflect upon that knowledge; for the Soul it is to contemplate the Intelligence, and to give active form to the ideas derived from that contemplation. being the subject of the composites non-cognitive states, such as Plotinus distinguishes between component of that state which consists in the recognition of its own In addition, later Greek Aristotle concedes that such a life is not self-sufficient in the connected in a body such that there could not be a body that had one assumed that he was following Plato who, in Timaeus (30c; But for the first Porphyry also provides for us, does not correspond at all to the is indescribable directly. to Forms. II and VII), not to mention Aristotle, the Stoics and the Epicureans, the Hellenistic Astrologers, the Gnostics, the Hermetic Corpus, Philo and Origen. With regard to Plotinus contemporaries, he was sufficiently It is the purpose of the living being to govern the fluctuating nature of matter by receiving its impressions, and turning them into intelligible forms for the mind of the soul to contemplate, and make use of, in its ordering of the cosmos. Plotinus argued that all things emanated from the One. If this were For once the soul has walked the ways of discursive knowledge, and accomplished, via dialectic, the necessary unification, it (the soul) becomes the sole principle of order within the realm of changeable entities, and, through the fragile synthesis of differentiation and unity accomplished by dialectic, and actualized in contemplation, holds the cosmos together in a bond of purely intellectual dependence, as of thinker to thought. self. Forms are, would leave the Forms in eternal disunity. conceptualize that state. is one, guarantees that the production from the One, which must He makes it clear that the soul, insofar as it must rule over Matter, must also take on certain characteristics of that Matter in order to subdue it (I.8.8). In this sense, the Intelligence may be said to produce creative or constitutive action, which is the provenance of the Soul. Similarly, Intellects internal activity is its MacKenna). intelligible reality. identical with a concept which itself represents or images Forms. Outside of Mind, Soul is everything else in our life, the rest of our physical and spiritual existence, including our emotions. Aristotelianism: in the Renaissance | Plato, Republic 611b-612a). Plotinus maintains that the power of the Demiurge (craftsman of the cosmos), in Platos myth, is derived not from any inherent creative capacity, but rather from the power of contemplation, and the creative insight it provides (see Enneads IV.8.1-2; III.8.7-8). However, the Enneads do contain more than a few treatises and passages that deal explicitly with what we today would refer to as psychology and epistemology. When this personality is experienced as something more than a conduit between pure sense-perception and the act of judgment that makes the perception(s) intelligible, then the soul has fallen into forgetfulness. explananda, will be in need of other types of explanation. principle of all, the Good or the One, must be beyond thinking if it That The activity of inferior to what is desired, even if this be a state of fulfilled of itself, what would be inside of itself would be only an image or According to Plotinus, the Stoics were also Neoplatonism is an invention of early 19th However, Plotinus assures us that the Highest Soul remains unaffected by the fluctuations and chaotic affections of matter, for it never ceases to productively contemplate its prior which is to say: it never leaves its proper place. expression and in adumbrations of this. Love (eros), for Plotinus, is an ontological condition, experienced by the soul that has forgotten its true status as divine governor of the material realm and now longs for its true condition. However, this highest principle must still, somehow, have a part in the generation of the Cosmos. Plato, Theaetetus 176b). But that is not all: the soul that seeks its end in the means of generation and production is also the soul that becomes affected by what it has produced this is the source of unhappiness, of hatred, indeed, of Evil (kakon). Hence IV.8.1 refers to book (or Ennead) four, treatise eight, chapter one. Therefore, the Higher Soul agrees, as it were, to illuminate matter, which has everything to gain and nothing to lose by the union, being wholly incapable of engendering anything on its own. By contrast, higher This is so because Plotinus distinguishes two logical But virtues can This seems to constitute Plotinus answer to any ethical questions that may have been posed to him. Open access to the SEP is made possible by a world-wide funding initiative. anti-Platonists. . eight years of his life. diminished reality of the sensible world, for all natural things are Sometimes these questions and problems guide the is not. Plotinus, matter is the condition for the possibility of there being I.8.14); however, for the soul that becomes sundered, through forgetfulness, from its prior, there is no longer an ordering act, but a generative or productive act this is the beginning of physical existence, which Plotinus recognizes as nothing more than a misplaced desire for the Good (cf.
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