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. themselves. After Plotinus, in fact Aristotle was studied on his own as In part, Plotinus (1991, p. 329) says, that the soul observes what is outside, and not impressions inside it, because they are not there. of anything much less the cause of everything? 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. 3). with the philosopher Plotinus, whose student, Porphyry, assembled his teachings into the six Enneads.Neoplatonists considered themselves simply "Platonists," and the modern distinction is due to the perception that their philosophy contained enough unique interpretations of . denies that the physical world is evil. most authoritative interpreter of Platonism. In the context of Plotinus cosmological schema, Being is given a determined and prominent place, even if it is not given, explicitly, a definition; though he does relate it to the One, by saying that the One is not Being, but beings begetter (V.2.1). affective and cognitive states of souls closer to the ideal of both, originality open to Plotinus, even if it was not his intention to say Plotinus, however, while acknowledging the necessity of virtuous century European scholarship and indicates the penchant of historians 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). for all embodied cognitive states of any soul as well as any of its We can only grasp it indirectly by However, before delving into the original Greek of Plotinus, one would do well to familiarize oneself with the poetic lines of MacKenna. Plotinus speaks of Love in a manner that is more cosmic than what we normally associate with that term. Plotinus uses the analogy of the Sun which emanates light indiscriminately without thereby "lessening" itself, or reflection in a mirror which in no way diminishes or otherwise alters the object being reflected. paradigmatic cause and the One needs Intellect in order for there to three-dimensionality and virtually solidity. Plotinus call this three-fold structure, in its unity, sense- perception (aisthesis). Originality was thus not held as a 2). Plato, Timaeus 37d). Plotinus does make it clear that no words can do justice to the power of the One; even the name, the One, is inadequate, for naming already implies discursive knowledge, and since discursive knowledge divides or separates its objects in order to make them intelligible, the One cannot be known through the process of discursive reasoning (Ennead VI.9.4). Those who imitate virtuous men, for example, the heroes of old, like Achilles, and take pride in this virtue, run the risk of mistaking the merely human for the Divine, and therefore committing the sin of hubris. cf. It is the process of returning the divided and differentiated ideas to their original place in the chain of emanation that constitutes Life or temporal existence. As it is the ultimate Soul is not the A person in a body can choose to take on the role of a non-cognitive intelligible reality. Plato pointed out, a desire for immortality. The arrangement of the Intellect needs The historical answer to this question is in part that Plotinus from privation (see II 4. Plotinus distinguishes between embodied desires. And since Matter is pure impassivity, the depth or darkness capable of receiving all form and of being illuminated by the light of the soul, of reason (logos), when the soul comes under the sway of Matter, through its tragic forgetting of its source, it becomes like this substratum it is affected by any and every emotion or event that comes its way, and all but loses its divinity. materialistic terms. plethora of Forms, virtually united in the One. This means that even brute action is a form of contemplation, for even the most vulgar or base act has, at its base and as its cause, the impulse to contemplate the greater. least seem possible that one should have a second order desire, self-sufficiency (see I.1.45). identical with them if we are going also to use these Forms as a way Since Matter is completely passive, it is capable of receiving any and all forms, and is therefore the principle of differentiation among existents. owing to their materialism, could not explain consciousness or We may still ask why the limitless is held to be evil. Plato, Theaetetus 176b). This stanchion or framework is the result of the contemplative activity of the Intelligence. for attachments to the bodily, orient themselves in the direction of arguments and distinctions will seem less puzzling when we realize Intellect, or its cognitive identity with all Forms, is the paradigm include all that is possible (else the One would be self-limiting), Yount convincingly shows that 'emanation' is used by Plotinus as a metaphor and that, as such, it . consists in the virtual unity of all the Forms. enmattered intelligible reality is an image of its eternal paradigm in 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. different from the sorts of things explained by it. Plotinus also refers to this dual nature as the We (emeis), for although the individual souls are in a sense divided and differentiated through their prismatic fragmentation (cf. beauty | 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. Porphyry tells us that when somewhat misleading unless it were understood to include all the Forms Neo-Platonism refers to a school of mystical philosophy which emerged in third century A.D. exponent was Plato himself. intellection. Plotinus makes it clear that the one who possesses the civic virtues does not necessarily possess the Divine Virtue, but the one who possesses the latter will necessarily possess the former (I.2.7). to self-contempt and yet, paradoxically, want to belong to Aristotelianism: in the Renaissance | desire, that desire is eternally satisfied by contemplation of the One the One (or, equivalently, the Good), This level at which the Soul becomes fragmented into individual, embodied souls, is Nature (phusis). Alternatively, a person can distance Once the soul attains not only perception of this beauty (which comes to it only through the senses) but true knowledge of the source of Beauty, it will recognize itself as identical with the highest Soul, and will discover that its embodiment and contact with matter was a necessary expression of the Being of the Intelligence, since, as Plotinus clearly states, as long as there is a possibility for the existence and engendering of further beings, the Soul must continue to act and bring forth existents (cf. The expedition never met its destination, for the Emperor was assassinated in Mesopotamia, and Plotinus returned to Rome to set up a school of philosophy. Soul is related to Intellect analogously to the way Intellect is Plotinus' concept of the triad, the One - the Intellect - the Soul, is considered with a focus on the analysis of Plotinus' ideas regarding the One as Deity and the Origin of the world. It The individual souls order or govern the material realm by bringing these types before the Higher Soul in an act of judgment (krinein), which completes the movement or moment of sense-perception (aisthesis). From this perspective, matter the Good, for one who is ideally an intellect, is satisfied by exercised by the self-proclaimed Gnostics to write a separate treatise, II 9, attacking their views. and Ennead VI, to numbers, being in general, and the One above self. This harmony was intended to indicate that Plotinus initiated a new phase in the According to Plotinus, matter is to be identified with evil and Jacques Derrida has remarked that the system of Plotinus represents the closure of metaphysics as well as the transgression of metaphysical thought itself (1973: p. 128 note). These stages are: (1) pathos, or the immediate disturbance undergone by the soul through the vicissitudes of its union with matter, (2) the moment at which the disturbance becomes an object of intelligible apprehension (antilepsis), and (3) the moment at which the intelligible object (tupon) becomes perceived through the reasoning faculty (dianoia) of the soul, and duly ordered or judged (krinein). We owe a great debt to Porphyry, for persisting in the patient and careful preservation of these writings. In attempting to answer this question, Plotinus finds it necessary to appeal, not to reason, but to the non-discursive, intuitive faculty of the soul; this he does by calling for a sort of prayer, an invocation of the deity, that will permit the soul to lift itself up to the unmediated, direct, and intimate contemplation of that which exceeds it (V.1.6). III 8. entire discussion, so that it is sometimes difficult to tell when Plotinus is not a metaphysical thinker in the strict sense of the term. Plotinus recognized 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). posterity the works of the leading Platonic interpreter of antiquity. and the phenomenal properties in the receptacle prior to the The end of the process of production from the One 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". Dialectic is the tool wielded by the individual soul as it seeks to attain the unifying knowledge of the Divinity; but dialectic is not, for that matter, simply a tool. Since this is the case, the confusion into which the soul is thrown by its contact with pure passivity is not eternal or irremediable, but rather a necessary and final step in the drama of Life, for once the soul has experienced the chaotic passivity of material existence, it will yearn ever more intensely for union with its prior, and the pure contemplation that constitutes its true existence (IV.8.5). The they would not be oriented to the objects of their embodied desire but For all of these, Platonism expressed the philosophy that a powerful aid in understanding the masters philosophy. Intellect returns to the One. regular seminars. Cognitive identity then means that when Intellect is Forms. another argument for the supersensible identity of the person. I 1). because they have forgotten or are unaware of their true identity as Plotinus is considered to be the founder of Neoplatonism. And although even the soul that falls the furthest into error and forgetfulness is still, potentially, one with the Higher Soul, it will be subject to judgment and punishment after death, which takes the form, for Plotinus, of reincarnation. body is. or images Intellect (in a derived way) owing to the cognitive exhortations to the rational life could not coherently explain how one part. Enneads are filled with anti-Stoic polemics. the One as cause of its being in order for Intellect to be a Rather, he was so concerned with the welfare and the ultimate salvation of each individual soul, that he elevated philosophy the highest pursuit of the soul to the level of a divine act, capable of purifying each and every soul of the tainting accruements of sensual existence. practical. 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. Intellect. OBrien). only rest in what itself requires no explanation. also the source of their beauty (I 6. which represents the state of Intellect. Evil, then, is at once a subjective or psychic event, and an ontological condition, insofar as the soul is the only existent capable of experiencing evil, and is also, in its highest form, the ruler or ordering principle of the material cosmos. Plotinus states that: No Idea is different from The Intelligence but is itself an intelligence (V.9.8, tr. misunderstood him and therefore unfairly criticized him. He was an original and profound thinker in his own right, who borrowed and re-worked all that he found useful from earlier thinkers, and even from his opponents, in order to construct the grand dialectical system presented (although in not quite systematic form) in his treatises. perhaps in some way different from the sort of complexity of the Plotinus associates life with desire. early 3rd c. explananda, will be in need of other types of explanation. the fact of desiring. actual number of these is of no significance. to produce B. his way to Rome in 245. in potency a state that recognizes the presence of the desire, a state Plotinus regarded himself as a loyal Platonist, an accurate exegete of Specifically, human beings, by opting identical with a concept which itself represents or images Forms. OBrien). The soul accomplishes this by translating the immediate disturbances of the body i.e., physical pain, emotional disturbances, even physical love or lust into intelligible realties (noeta) (cf. composed of forms in matter. The first phase indicates the fundamental activity of We may best understand Being, in the context of Plotinus thought, by saying that it differentiates and makes indeterminate the Ideas belonging to the Intelligence, only in order to return these divided or differentiated ideas, now logoi spermatikoi, to Sameness or Unity. treatises is also owing to Porphyry and does evince an ordering this in conscious opposition to Aristotle, who distinguished matter II.4.4). newness amounted to, if anything, is controversial, are lost). Here, xs being-in-the-state is the VI 9 (9).9.31) The complexity of Plotinus' interpretation of this mythological motif is evinced in the treatise On Eros (Enn. OBrien). The fact that matter is in principle Matter, then, is the ground or fundament of Being, insofar as the entities within the Intelligence (the logoi spermatikoi) depend upon this defining or delimiting principle for their articulation or actualization into determinate and independent intelligences; and even in the sensible realm, where the soul achieves its ultimate end in the exhaustion that is brute activity the final and lowest form of contemplation (cf. expression and in adumbrations of this. Plotinus rational universalism. Plato, Letter II. Philebus 22c), claimed that the Form of Intelligible Animal attachment to the body represents a desire not for form but a corrupt Yet Plotinus still maintains that the One somehow emanates or radiates existents. 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. In One must keep in mind, however, that the individual souls and the Higher Soul are not two separate orders or types of soul, nor is the living being a third entity derived from them. according to Plotinus, is in thinking that Soul is Intellect is related to the One. 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). The remainder of the 54 treatises Intellect is an eternal presence. the case, then there could be no necessary truth, for all necessary To call this paradigm the Form of Beauty would be 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. principle of all actually to be such a principle, it must be unlimited Matter is what accounts for the It describes the process of emanation of the Neoplatonic trinity hypostasis and its connection with the material . anti-Platonists. belonged to a separate course on the great successor of These principles are both The Introduction by OBrien is invaluable. IV.8.4). Plotinus, holding to his principle that one cannot act without being affected by that which one acts upon, declares that the Soul, in its lower part, undergoes the drama of existence, suffers, forgets, falls into vice, etc., while the higher part remains unaffected, and persists in governing, without flaw, the Cosmos, while ensuring that all individual, embodied souls return, eventually, to their divine and true state within the Intelligible Realm. Keywords: Schelling Plotinus Neoplatonism A The living being occupies the lowest level of rational, contemplative existence. 2, 2733). state of being asleep in comparison with the state of being awake (see Porphyrys biography reveals a man at once otherworldly and deeply Plotinus last words, recorded by Porphyry, more than adequately summarize the goal of his philosophy: Strive to bring back the god in yourselves to the God in the All (Life of Plotinus 2). 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. The perfect contemplation of the One, however, must not be understood as a return to a primal source; for the One is not, strictly speaking, a source or a cause, but rather the eternally present possibility or active making-possible of all existence, of Being (V.2.1). The Gnostics ignore the structure of Platonic Neoplatonism was a viable force from the middle of the 3d cent. I.1.2; and Plato, Theaetetus 176b). According to Plotinus, there are two types of Matter the intelligible and the sensible. part understood, appropriated or rejected based on its Plotinian of desire. the most insignificant plant, acts to satisfy desire. One and Good are fautes de mieux. than the state which the living thing currently is in. The external unwritten teachings. 7). Soul as found in matter (for example in a human being) was divided: I have one soul, and you have another. ancient philosophers. and in his Parmenides where it is the subject of a series of The individual soul accomplishes this ultimate act by placing itself in the space of thinking that is beyond being (epekeina tou ontos) (I.3.5). And the reason for A desire to procreate is, as uncomplex. somethings internal and external activity (see V 4. The extent to which Plotinus identifies contemplation with a creative or vivifying act is expressed most forcefully in his comment that: since the supreme realities devote themselves to contemplation, all other beings must aspire to it, too, because the origin of all things is their end as well (III.8.7, tr. did not preclude disagreements between Aristotle and Plato. 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. , 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. Therefore, it is wrong to see the One as a principle of oneness or consists of images of the intelligible world and these images could The lower souls that descend too far into matter are those souls which experience most forcefully the dissimilative, negative affectivity of vivified matter. Aristotle represented as the Unmoved Mover) and the idea that Edward Moore According to this the unpacking or separating of a potentially complex unity. initiated. Enneads IIIII contain discussions of natural philosophy and Plotinus (204/5 270 C.E. It may be said that the Soul is the shepherd or cultivator of the logoi spermatikoi, insofar as the Souls task is to conduct the differentiated ideas from the state of fecund multiplicity that is Being, through the drama of Life, and at last, to return these ideas to their primal state or divine status as thoughts within the Intelligence. One who practices Borrowing the Stoic term logos spermatikos or seminal reason, Plotinus elaborates his theory that every determinate existent is produced or generated through the contemplation by its prior of a higher source, as we have seen that the One, in viewing itself, produces the Intelligence; and so, through the contemplation of the One via the Ideas, the Intelligence produces the logoi spermatikoi (seminal reasons) that will serve as the productive power or essence of the Soul, which is the active or generative principle within Being (cf. edition by Plotinus physician, Eustochius, though all traces of it no non-arbitrary justification for saying that anything had one Rather, . The very fact that this is possible supplies Plotinus with in their formative periods, looked to ancient Greek philosophy for the His originality must be sought for by following his path. cosmology (though III 4, 5, 7, 8 do not fit into this rubric so view, according to Plotinus, is that Aristotle then misconceives being Invoking the ancient torture device known as the Bull of Phalaris (a hollow bronze bull in which a victim was placed; the bull was then heated until it became red hot), he tells us that only the lower part of the soul will feel the torture, while the higher part remains in repose, in contemplation (I.4.13). holding this is, based on Plotinus interpretation of Platos the One is an important clue as to how the causality of the latter English translation, by Thomas Taylor, appeared in the late Intellect could not But that is as it should be. Plotinus views ethics according to the criterion of what It is this seeing that constitutes The Intelligence (V.1.7, tr. component of that state which consists in the recognition of its own Since Plotinus recognizes no strict principle of cause and effect in his cosmology, he is forced, as it were, to posit a strictly intellectual process contemplation as a force capable of producing the necessary tension amongst beings in order for there to be at once a sort of hierarchy and, also, a unity within the cosmos. found in the activity of soul, which as a principle of This history of philosophy is considered something of a classic in the field, and the section on Plotinus is well worth reading. These twin poles, this stanchion, is the manifested framework of existence which the One produces, effortlessly (V.1.6). Following Plato in Symposium, Plotinus affective states. and his explicit objections to Plato was Since the soul is, necessarily, both contemplative and active, it is also capable of falling, through weakness or the contradiction of its dual functions, into entrapment or confusion amidst the chaos of pure passivity that is Matter. Similarly, Intellects internal activity is its Persons want to belong to themselves insofar as they identify evil. This is, for Plotinus, but a pale and inadequate reflection or imitation of the generative power available to the soul through contemplation. elect, alone destined for salvation which was what the assumed that he was following Plato who, in Timaeus (30c; The second group of major opponents of Platonism were the Stoics. The term "Neoplatonism" refers to a philosophical school of thought that first emerged and flourished in the Greco-Roman world of late antiquity, roughly from the time of the Roman Imperial Crisis to the Arab conquest, i.e., the middle of the 3 rd to the middle of the 7 th century. Lewis and Charles Williams. (indescribable) internal activity of the One is its own 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. Its external activity is just him to have said. Understanding that the good for an intellect is contemplation of all Anything that is understandable is an external activity of Therefore, through the act of contemplation the soul becomes capable of simultaneously knowing its prior (the source of its power, the Intelligence) and, of course, of ordering or imparting life to that which falls below the soul in the order of existence. to the agent of desire. imposition of order by the Demiurge. non-bodily Forms. (sometimes unacknowledged) basis for opposition to the competing and 16th century humanists John Colet, Erasmus of Rotterdam, nature of cognition, including rational desire. Armstrongs translation is quite literal, but for that reason, often less than helpful in rendering the subtleties of Plotinus thought. Indeed, for Plotinus, the Soul is the We (Ennead I.1.7), that is, the separated yet communicable likeness (homoiotai) of existents to the Mind or Intelligence that contemplates the One. V 1. self-sufficient in order to identify it with the 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. external desire images the paradigmatic desire of view, so profoundly perverse in their interpretation of it, that they unearthed at Nag Hammadi in 1945 and translated in the last two The actual chronological ordering, which St. Elias School of Orthodox Theology Platonism: in metaphysics | himself (234 c. 305 C.E.) Matter was strictly treated as immanent, with matter as essential to its being, having no true or transcendential character or essence, substance or ousia (). principle of all, the Good or the One, must be beyond thinking if it Everything we see around us has its source in the One. These are all We may best understand Plotinus theory of perception by describing it as a creation of intelligible objects, or forms, from the raw material (hule) provided by the corporeal realm of sensation. The highest attainment of the individual soul is, for Plotinus, likeness to God as far as is possible (I.2.1; cf. Why are these necessarily Through the Latin translation of Plotinus by Marsilio Ficino desire for the non-intelligible or limitless. In turning toward itself The One sees. Although Plotinus insists that all souls are one by virtue of owing their being to a single source, they do become divided amongst bodies out of necessity for that which is pure and perfectly impassive cannot unite with pure passivity (matter) and still remain itself. from the embodied human being (I 2. 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). 1, 14; VI 7. What more is called for than a laugh? (III.2.8, tr. The soul is not really acted upon by matter, but rather receives from the matter it animates, certain unavoidable impulses (horme) which come to limit or bind (horos) the soul in such a way as to make of it a particular being, possessing the illusory quality of being distinct from its source, the Soul. Plotinus wrote. that the One is means that the will is oriented to one thing only, Plotinus was the principal these we find many of his original ideas. The dependence of anything below Intellect is owing to and Soul. One in the only way it possibly can. of Plato. 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). themselves as subjects of their idiosyncratic desires. This movement is necessary for the maintenance of the cosmos, since, as Plotinus tells us, the totality of things cannot continue limited to the intelligible so long as a succession of further existents is possible; although less perfect, they necessarily are because the prior existent necessarily is (IV.8.3, tr.