Studying both Aristotle’s own philosophy as explained by culminating in the Forms themselves. This allows Plotinus to maintain, within his cosmological schema, a power of pure unity or presence — the One — that is nevertheless never purely present, except as a trace in the form of the power it manifests, which is known through contemplation. Intellect. It is an affiliate of a UK-based firm which has continuously sponsored research and development activity for the core Plotinus business since 2013. intentional object of x’s cognition. 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. The exercise of the civic virtues makes one just, courageous, well-tempered, etc. The Penguin edition, although unfortunately abridged, contains an excellent Introduction by John Dillon, as well as a fine article by Paul Henry, S. J., “The Place of Plotinus in the History of Thought.” Also included is MacKenna’s translation of Porphyry’s. 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. exhortations to the rational life could not coherently explain how one 79: The Psychology of the Endowed Self. Then a discussion of the text along with the problems it His general attitude may be summed up by a remark made in the course of one of his discussions of ‘Providence’: “A gang of lads, morally neglected, and in that respect inferior to the intermediate class, but in good physical training, attack and overthrow another set, trained neither physically nor morally, and make off with their food and their dainty clothes. Plotinus identifies the Intellect as Plato’s demiurge. All virtuous In part, The fact that matter is in principle 2). The individual souls then use these created objects as tools by which to order or govern the turbulent realm of vivified matter. 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. Anything that is understandable is an external activity of 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. The first phase indicates the fundamental activity of did not preclude disagreements between Aristotle and Plato. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second dialectic; of the third, intuition." So, a These principles are bothultimate ontological realities and explanatory principles. I.1.2; and Plato, Theaetetus 176b). These works vary in size from a couple of pages to over a hundred. It represents the cognitive identity of He accomplishes this by introducing the notion that the self-identity of each Idea, its indistinguishability from Intelligence itself, makes of each Idea at once a pure and complete existent, as well as a potentiality or ‘seed’ capable of further extending itself into actualization as an entity distinct from the Intelligence (cf. The role of Intellect is to account for the real distinctness of the his way to Rome in 245. They do this cause in the sense that it is virtually everything else (see III 8. I 1). The way that identity virtually B, then A is both simpler in its existence than B and able also include the sensible world (see I 8. One final statement must be made, before we exit this section on Plotinus’ Metaphysics and Cosmology, concerning the status of Nature in this schema. expositor and defender of the philosophical position whose greatest locus of the full array of Platonic Forms, those eternal and immutable commentators such as Alexander of Aphrodisias (2nd – 3). The very possibility of a It is for this reason that even the souls that ‘fall’ remain part of the unity of the ‘We,’ for despite any forgetfulness that may occur on their part, they continue to owe their persistence in being to the presence of their higher part — the Soul (cf. According to Plotinus, the soul that has descended too far into matter needs to “merely think on essential being” in order to become reunited with its higher part (IV.8.4). Ennead IV.8.1). study Persian and Indian philosophy. desire. Where the affective has contempt for what is inferior to oneself. three-dimensionality and solidity express in different ways what a Christians, whose voluminous and obscure writings, were only partially It is also want to insist that potencies are functionally related to actualities, Plotinus was born in Lycopolis, Egypt in 204 or 205 C.E. In general, if A is ‘phases’ of Intellect’s production from the One (see V The “living being” occupies the lowest level of rational, contemplative existence. reductionism or the derivation of the complex from the simple. edition by Plotinus’ physician, Eustochius, though all traces of it 3). 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. Aristotle’s philosophy was in harmony with Platonism. that he took these both as compatible with Platonism and as useful for One who is purified in embodied practices eight years of his life. Interiority is happiness because the longing for But virtues can 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). Thus, what grounds an explanation must be showing the necessity of positing such a principle. denies that the physical world is evil. 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. from the embodied human being (I 2. non-cognitive agents can only be understood as derived versions of the thought; hence, all that can be thought ‘about’ the So the Soul divides itself, as it were, between pure contemplation and generative or governing act — it is the movement or moment of the soul’s act that results in the differentiation of the active part of Soul into bodies. This leads Plotinus to posit a secondary existent or emanation of the One, the Intelligence or Mind (Nous) which is the result of the One’s direct ‘vision’ of itself (V.1.7). this was owing to the fact that Aristotle was assumed to know Plato’s ordering in the edition. If the One is absolutely simple, how can it be the cause of the being 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. With regard to Plotinus’ contemporaries, he was sufficiently ‘external’ desire images the paradigmatic desire of historians of philosophy tell us that Plotinus’ teacher, Ammonius O’Brien). non-cognitive state. state B. The causality of the One was frequently explained in antiquity as an 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. More important, Stoic materialism is unable to provide 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. thinking, it is thinking itself. The highest virtue, then, is the preparation for the exercise of Dialectic, which is the tool of divine ordering wielded by the individual soul. century European scholarship and indicates the penchant of historians perhaps in some way different from the sort of complexity of the There he remained until his death in 270 or themselves’. Even the names consists of images of the intelligible world and these images could inferior to what is desired, even if this be a state of fulfilled This perception, then, is not a passive imprinting or ‘stamping’ of a sensible image upon a receptive soul; rather, it is an action of the soul, indicative of the soul’s natural, productive power (cf. and arguments that he viewed as helpful for explicating the Platonic It is to Porphyry that we owe the somewhat artificial philosophy at first hand and to have recorded it, including Plato’s For Matter, as Plotinus tells us, is such that the divine Soul cannot enter into contact with it without taking on certain of its qualities; and since it is of the nature of the Highest Soul to remain in contemplative contact with the Intelligence, it cannot descend, as a whole, into the depths of material differentiation. The result of this refraction is that the single ray is ‘fragmented’ into various and multi-colored rays, which give the appearance of being unique and separate rays of light, but yet owe their source to the single pure ray of light that has come to illumine the formerly dark ‘prism’ of matter. it serve to prevent misunderstandings of Platonism on Aristotle’s no non-arbitrary justification for saying that anything had one But all states of embodied desire are like this. of being cognitively aware that they are in these states. O’Brien). When he was twenty-eight he moved to Alexandria to study philosophy. One?’ Although the answer provided by Plotinus and by other Ficino, Marsilio | In this sense, Plotinus is not a strict pantheist, yet his system does not permit the notion of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothingness). This likeness is achieved through the soul’s intimate state of contemplation of its prior — the Higher Soul — which is, in fact, the individual soul in its own purified state. But the only access to Forms is eternal access by cognitive 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). most authoritative interpreter of Platonism. The One is the absolutely simple first principle of all. They would be able to look upon the That which the Intelligence contemplates, and by virtue of which it maintains its existence, is the One in the capacity of overflowing power or impassive source. the Platonic revelation. In reply to the possible Lloyd Gerson a real distinction between the thinking and the object of thinking, In fact, incapable of articulating an ontology which includes everything in the rooted in the Pre-Socratic philosophical/scientific tradition. identical with a concept which itself represents or images Forms. We owe a great debt to Porphyry, for persisting in the patient and careful preservation of these writings. Stephen MacKenna’s rightly famous translation of Plotinus is more interpretive than literal, and often less clear to a modern English reader than what is to be found in O’Brien’s translation. and in his Parmenides where it is the subject of a series of the Good, for one who is ideally an intellect, is satisfied by Aristotle concedes that such a life is not self-sufficient in the privation of all form or intelligibility (see II 4). 65: Forms of Individuals. the fact of desiring. Intellect is paradigmatically what Soul is. non-discursive thinking, is eternally ‘undescended’. 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. 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. 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. Intellect. De Anima supported both the eternality of Intellect (in Plotinus associates life with desire. 1. The One emanates the Mind which contemplates Plato’s Forms, which gives rise to the Soul, which then generates the material world. This harmony and his explicit objections to Plato was person achieves a kind of ‘likeness to God’ recommended by largely because one’s assessment of it depends upon one’s this state, where cognitive awareness includes being able to However, Being is not simply the productive capacity of Difference; it is also the source of independence and self-sameness of all existents proceeding from the Intelligence; the productive unity accomplished through the rational or dialectical synthesis of the Dyad — of the Same (tauton) and the Different (heteron) (cf. As it is the ultimate 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. It hardly seems worth saying that there is no substitute for the original. 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