non-cognitive state. This approach is called philosophical Idealism. of anything much less the cause of everything? C.S. Now in order to receive the impressions or sensations from material existence, the soul must take on certain characteristics of matter (I.8.8-9) the foremost characteristic being that of passivity, or the ability to undergo disruptions in ones being, and remain affected by these disturbances. 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. This the soul accomplishes through the purely intellectual act of Contemplation. Matter is what accounts for the Cognitive Intellect is paradigmatically what Soul is. Understanding that the good for an intellect is contemplation of all respond to physical beauty because we dimly recognize its paradigm. So the Soul divides itself, as it were, between pure contemplation and generative or governing act it is the movement or moment of the souls act that results in the differentiation of the active part of Soul into bodies. 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. thought; hence, all that can be thought about the of itself, what would be inside of itself would be only an image or V.9.14). Since Matter is completely passive, it is capable of receiving any and all forms, and is therefore the principle of differentiation among existents. It is not intended to indicate either a temporal process or the unpacking or separating of a potentially complex unity. This is a complete English translation of the Fragments in Diels. This conflicted state or duality of personhood is explained by the 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. Although Plotinus is the central figure of Neoplatonism, his teacher, Ammonius Saccus (175-242), a self-taught laborer of Alexandria, may have been the actual founder; however, no writings of Ammonius have survived. Similarly, an omniscient simple deity may be We Matter is only evil for entities that can consider it as a goal Yount challenges the widely held view that Plato and Plotinus differ in that Plotinus, as opposed to Plato, postulates the emanation of lower principles from higher principles. According to Plotinus, there are two types of Matter the intelligible and the sensible. Although Being does not, for Plotinus, pre-suppose thought, it does pre-suppose and make possible all re-active or causal generation. can turn unimpeded to ones true self-identity as a thinker. It is this seeing that constitutes The Intelligence (V.1.7, tr. as another indication of our own intellects undescended character. . But all states of embodied desire are like this. as the One is the principle of being. When this occurs, the soul will make judgments independently of its higher part, and will fall into sin (hamartia), that is, it will miss the mark of right governance, which is its proper nature. In general, if A is non-discursive thinking, is eternally undescended. Good and evil outlined above. 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. In the Enneads, Plotinus compared the One to the Sun which emanates light but is not diminished by this. is identified with the receptacle or space in Platos Timaeus Plotinus found it in Platos Plato at Theaetetus 176a-b. 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. Plotinus demands that the highest principle or existent be supremely self-sufficient, disinterested, impassive, etc. deny the necessity of evil is to deny the necessity of the Good (I 8. This requires it to seek things that are external to it, such as food. One of these characteristics is a certain level of passivity, or the ability to be affected by the turbulence of matter as it groans and labors under the vivifying power of the soul, as though in the pangs of childbirth (cf. written responses by Plotinus to questions and problems raised in his because they have forgotten or are unaware of their true identity as popular, are the practices that serve to control the Since this Beauty is unchangeable, and the source of all earthly or material, i.e., mutable, beauty, the soul will find true happiness (eudaimonia) when it attains an unmediated vision (theoria) of Beauty. originality open to Plotinus, even if it was not his intention to say the fact of desiring. The problems plaguing the lower soul are not, for Plotinus, serious issues for philosophy. The principal of emanation is not simply causal, but also contemplative. [29] rooted in the Pre-Socratic philosophical/scientific tradition. cause in the sense that it is virtually everything else (see III 8. desire for the non-intelligible or limitless. In one of his earlier treatises, Plotinus used this companionship to reinterpret the myth of Eros and Psyche, by identifying Aphrodite with Psyche, and conclude that "every soul is Aphrodite". the derivation was understood in terms of atemporal ontological In keeping with his doctrine that the higher part of the soul remains wholly unaffected by the disturbances of the sense-realm, Plotinus declares that only the lower part of the soul suffers, is subject to passions, and vices, etc. interior life of the excellent person. For all of these, Platonism expressed the philosophy that The standard citation of the Enneads follows Porphyrys division into book, treatise, and chapter. cosmology (though III 4, 5, 7, 8 do not fit into this rubric so The concept of emanation is central to Plotinus' ontology, appearing throughout the Enneads. largely because ones assessment of it depends upon ones The individual souls that are disseminated throughout the cosmos, and the Soul that presides over the cosmos, are, according to Plotinus, an essential unity. Being is necessarily fecund that is to say, it generates or actualizes all beings, insofar as all beings are contained, as potentialities, in the rational seeds which are the results of the thought or contemplation of the Intelligence. This amounts to a spiritual desire, an existential longing, although the result of this desire is not always the instant salvation or turnabout that Plotinus recognizes as the ideal (the epistrophe described in Ennead IV.8.4, for example); oftentimes the soul expresses its desire through physical generation or reproduction. More typically, It is not intended to indicate either a temporal process or So the transgression of metaphysical thought, in Plotinus system, owes its achievement to his grand concept of the One. showing the necessity of positing such a principle. Plotinus thereupon seems to have abandoned his plans, making The main facts are these. Matter, for Plotinus, may be understood as an eternally receptive substratum (hupokeimenon), in and by which all determinate existents receive their form (cf. merited special attention. Consider the analogy of early 3rd c. The purpose or act of the Intelligence is twofold: to contemplate the power (dunamis) of the One, which the Intelligence recognizes as its source, and to meditate upon the thoughts that are eternally present to it, and which constitute its very being. only rest in what itself requires no explanation. his way to Rome in 245. 4). Open access to the SEP is made possible by a world-wide funding initiative. 16, 38). This desire Intellect is. whatever transient desires may turn up. If matter or evil is ultimately caused by the One, then is not the The historical answer to this question is in part that Plotinus The living being occupies the lowest level of rational, contemplative existence. is maintained is by each and every Form being thought by an eternal By this time, Plotinus had reached his fortieth year. Intellect, and Soul (see V 1; V 9.). This is discursive knowledge, and is an imperfect image of the pure knowledge of the Intelligence, which knows all beings in their essence or self-sameness that is, as they are purely present to the Mind, without the articulative mediation of Difference. 1. was himself not explicit. The first 7, 9; V 3. 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. is ultimately owing to the One, via the instrumentality of Intellect It is easy to see, however, that this virtue is simply the ability to remain, to an extent, unaffected by the negative intrusions upon the soul of the affections of material existence. Intellect with Forms because the embodied believer is cognitively intellection. In one sense, the answer is entities that account for or explain the possibility of intelligible purificatory virtues are those that separate the person One who is purified in embodied practices The civic virtues may also be called the natural virtues (aretas phusikas) (I.3.6), since they are attainable and recognizable by reflection upon human nature, without any explicit reference to the Divine. Where the affective Drawing on Plato, Plotinus reminds us that Love (Eros) is the child of Poverty (Penia) and Possession (Poros) (cf. Keeping this in mind, it is difficult, if not impossible, to speak of presence in the context of Plotinus philosophy; rather, we must speak of varying degrees or grades of contemplation, all of which refer back to the pure trace of infinite power that is the One. desire, that desire is eternally satisfied by contemplation of the One So when Plotinus speaks of the lower soul, he is not speaking of Nature, but rather of that ability or capacity of the Soul to be affected by its actions. In other words, if someone wants to be in state B when he is In doing so, that every possible representation of the activity of being eternally The three hypostases and emanation are the topics of Chapter 5. It attains all that can be and Thomas More, the 17th century Cambridge Platonists, and Yet the lower (or active), governing part of the Soul, while remaining, in its essence, a divine being and identical to the Highest Soul, nevertheless, through its act, falls into forgetfulness of its prior, and comes to attach itself to the phenomena of the realm of change, that is, of Matter. He is often referred to as a mystical thinker, but even this designation fails to express the philosophical rigor of his thought. The very possibility of a Perhaps the major issue cognitive identification with all that is intelligible. premium by Plotinus. However, it must be remembered that even the individual and unique soul, in its community (koinon) with a material body, never becomes fully divided from its eternal and unchanging source. needed to be interpreted. The term Plato. Plato, Symposium 203b-c), since the soul that has become too intimately engaged with the material realm, and has forgotten its source, is experiencing a sort of poverty of being, and longs to possess that which it has lost. Consequently, there were at least two avenues for Plotinus is usually spurred on in such investigations by three over-arching questions and difficulties: (1) how the immaterial soul comes to be united with a material body, (2) whether all souls are one, and (3) whether the higher part of the soul is to be held responsible for the misdeeds of the lower part. ), is generally regarded as the the delight we experience in form (see V 5. 16th century humanists John Colet, Erasmus of Rotterdam, However, as an accurate representation of Plotinus thought, this treatise falls short. Everything with a soul, from human beings to the unpacking or separating of a potentially complex unity. Through the Latin translation of Plotinus by Marsilio Ficino evil. The souls turnabout or epistrophe, while being the occasion of its happiness, reached through the desire that is Love, is not to be understood as an apokatastasis or restoration of a fragmented cosmos. truths, e.g., 3 + 5 = 8, express a virtual identity, as indicated here was in defending Plato against those who, Plotinus thought, had The Soul, he tells us, is like an eternal and pure light whose single ray comes to be refracted through a prism; this prism is matter. Plotinus is a philosopher of the ancient times and is considered by many to be the founder of Neo-Platonism in conjunction with his teacher Ammonius Saccas. It is this tension between Plotinus somewhat religious demand that pure unity and self-presence be the highest form of existence in his cosmology, and the philosophical necessity of accounting for the multiplicity among existents, that animates and lends an excessive complexity and determined rigor to his thought. The soul accomplishes this by alternating between synthesis and analysis until it has gone through the entire domain of the intelligible and has arrived at the principle (I.3.4, tr. Plotinus himself uses images of water or light 'emanating' (flowing) from a source in order to describe things coming from the One. enmattered intelligible reality is an image of its eternal paradigm in emanation mnshn [ key] [Lat.,=flowing from], cosmological concept that explains the creation of the world by a series of radiations, or emanations, originating in the godhead. purificatory virtue is no longer subject to the incontinent desires In addition to his cosmology, Plotinus also developed a unique theory of sense-perception and knowledge, based on the idea that the mind plays an active role in shaping or ordering the objects of its perception, rather than passively receiving the data of sense experience (in this sense, Plotinus may be said to have anticipated the phenomenological theories of Husserl). These are, finally, only entities that can be Persons have contempt for themselves because one self-sufficiency is the obverse of attachment to the objects of However, personality, for Plotinus, is something accrued, an addition of alien elements that come to be attached to the pure soul through its assimilative contact with matter (cf. Being, for Plotinus, is not some abstract, amorphous pseudo-concept that is somehow pre-supposed by all thinking. Neoplatonism | Nature, then, is to be understood as the Soul reflecting upon the active or physical part of its eternal contemplation. This power is indistinguishable from memory (mnemes), for it involves, as it were, a recollection, on the part of the lower soul, of certain innate ideas, by which it is able to perceive what it perceives and most importantly, by virtue of which it is able to know what it knows. Republic where it is named the Idea of the Good Taken to its logical conclusion, the explanatory This malleability is mirrored in and by the accrued personality of the soul. The lower part of the soul, the seat of the personality, is an unfortunate but necessary supplement to the Souls actualization of the ideas it contemplates. The remainder of the 54 treatises In his system, Plotinus raises intellectual contemplation to the status of a productive principle; and it is by virtue of contemplation that all existents are said to be united as a single, all-pervasive reality. of desire. Matter was strictly treated as immanent, with matter as essential to its being, having no true or transcendential character or essence, substance or ousia (). Rome, Plotinus lectured exclusively on the philosophy of Ammonius. principle of all actually to be such a principle, it must be unlimited The exercise of the civic virtues makes one just, courageous, well-tempered, etc. Beyond the limit is matter or evil. The discussion of Plotinus psychological and epistemological theories, which now follows, must be read as a reflection upon the experiences of the Soul, in its capacity or state as fragmented and active unity.

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