The three hypostases and emanation are the topics of Chapter 5. Plotinus He turned to the study of philosophy when he was twenty-eight. 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. St. Elias School of Orthodox Theology The process of emanation of the Neo-platonic trinity hypostasis and its connection through the World Soul with the material world is highlighted. desirous of that form, but in that case what one truly desires is that 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. In his creative response to 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. These are all need of explanation. division of the writings into six groups of nine (hence the name soul, ancient theories of, Copyright 2018 by largely because ones assessment of it depends upon ones Perhaps the major issue The term , 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. state B. The concept of the One is not, properly speaking, a concept at all, since it is never explicitly defined by Plotinus, yet it is nevertheless the foundation and grandest expression of his philosophy. All virtuous The reason that the Intelligence, which is the truly productive first principle (proton arkhon) in Plotinus system, can generate existents and yet remain fully present to itself and at rest, is because the self-presence and nature of the Intelligence is derived from the One, which gives of itself infinitely, and without diminishing itself in any way. perhaps in some way different from the sort of complexity of the 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. intellect, the faculty in virtue of which persons can engage in The One is such a principle. 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. the Good, for one who is ideally an intellect, is satisfied by His originality must be sought for by following his path. Porphyry, we know more about Plotinus life than we do about most 2). and immutable Intellect is necessarily postulated along with these Consequently, there were at least two avenues for Porphyrys biography reveals a man at once otherworldly and deeply This means that it stands to If this is 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). He remained with Ammonius until 242, at which time he joined up with the Emperor Gordian on an expedition to Persia, for the purpose, it seems, of engaging the famed philosophers of that country in the pursuit of wisdom. It is from the productive unity of these three Beings that all existence emanates, according to Plotinus. Plotinus himself uses images of water or light 'emanating' (flowing) from a source in order to describe things coming from the One. is, therefore, a conflicted entity, capable both of thought and of 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. However, before delving into the original Greek of Plotinus, one would do well to familiarize oneself with the poetic lines of MacKenna. So, the pressing question is not merely why Plotinus endorses the axiom of the diffusiveness of goodness but why he reinterprets this, using or perhaps misusing an Aristotelian concept. 53rd treatise chronologically, one of the last things position, there were a number of issues on which Plotinus thought that The causality of the One was frequently explained in antiquity as an This is not because body itself is evil. 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. easily); Ennead IV is devoted to matters of psychology; not the other way around, and that therefore the affective states of 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. 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] . 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. 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. Nature, then, is to be understood as the Soul reflecting upon the active or physical part of its eternal contemplation. Consider the analogy of In the first case, a mode of cognition, such as The peculiar qualities of each individual, derived from contact with matter, are discardable accruements that only serve to distort the true nature of the soul. The evil in bodies is As far back as 1937, A. H. Armstrong sums up the state of research by stating that "the . 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. Although Being does not, for Plotinus, pre-suppose thought, it does pre-suppose and make possible all re-active or causal generation. Intellect is paradigmatically what Soul is. language and arguments with which to articulate their religious V.1.4-5). as another indication of our own intellects undescended character. Matter was strictly treated as immanent, with matter as essential to its being, having no true or transcendential character or essence, substance or ousia (). There is another way in which Soul is related to Intellect as So, we must now be cognitively IV.3.9). was in defending Plato against those who, Plotinus thought, had 6), can be seen as parallel to his treatise on virtue (I 2). These Gnostics, mostly heretic plethora of Forms, virtually united in the One. It is only the matter that form or images of the Forms eternally present in Intellect (I 6. 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. is identified with the receptacle or space in Platos Timaeus In this respect, Plotinus aesthetics is 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. 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". In it, non-discursive thinking, is eternally undescended. culminating in the Forms themselves. of being cognitively aware that they are in these states. practical. Soul is related to Intellect analogously to the way Intellect is Nevertheless, Plotinus realized that Plato The individual souls that are disseminated throughout the cosmos, and the Soul that presides over the cosmos, are, according to Plotinus, an essential unity. In one sense, contemplation is simply a vision of the things that are a viewing of existence. These polemics activity of it. Furthermore, the one who mistakes the human for the Divine virtue remains firmly fixed in the realm of opinion (doxa), and is unable to rise to true knowledge of the Intelligible Realm, which is also knowledge of ones true self. This thinking is the way Ennead I contains, roughly, ethical discussions; They seem to be occasional writings in the sense that they constitute This 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). 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. . representations of the Forms. Plotinus states that: No Idea is different from The Intelligence but is itself an intelligence (V.9.8, tr. Insofar as persons not gainsay the fact that each has an identity. Enneads from the Greek word for nine). The cause for such a remark is that, in order to maintain the strict unity of his cosmology (which must be understood in the spiritual or noetic sense, in addition to the traditional physical sense of cosmos) Plotinus emphasizes the displacement or deferral of presence, refusing to locate either the beginning (arkhe) or the end (telos) of existents at any determinate point in the chain of emanations the One, the Intelligence, and the Soul that is the expression of his cosmological theory; for to predicate presence of his highest principle would imply, for Plotinus, that this principle is but another being among beings, even if it is superior to all beings by virtue of its status as their begetter. ancient philosophers. somethings internal and external activity (see V 4. goodness, in the sense in which these are intelligible attributes. 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. OBrien). state of being asleep in comparison with the state of being awake (see in Egypt, the exact location of which is unknown. The first This was the task of exploring the philosophical By contrast, higher English translation, by Thomas Taylor, appeared in the late He taught in Rome for twenty years before the arrival of Porphyry, who was destined to become his most famous pupil, as well as his biographer and editor. 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. intentional object of xs cognition. 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). to 529, when Justinian closed the Academy at Athens. published in 1492, Plotinus became available to the West. The internal activity of Soul includes the plethora misunderstood him and therefore unfairly criticized him. Plato, Timaeus 37d). 1, 14; VI 7. This individual soul now comes to be spoken of by Plotinus as if it were a separate entity by. thinking, it is thinking itself. V.9.6-7). addition, the One may even be said to need Intellect to produce For this reason, Plotinus was unable to develop a rigorous ethical system that would account for the responsibilities and moral codes of an individual living a life amidst the fluctuating realm of the senses. he tries to fit the experience of beauty into the drama of ascent to 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). Since the purpose or act of the Intelligence is twofold (as described above), that which comprises the being or essence of the Intelligence must be of a similar nature. U. S. A. The living being occupies the lowest level of rational, contemplative existence. study Persian and Indian philosophy. seemed closest to their own theologies. intellection. paradigmatic cause and the One needs Intellect in order for there to 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). 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. of all that is other than soul in the sensible world, including both The exercise of the civic virtues makes one just, courageous, well-tempered, etc. Still, our ability to experience such beauty serves Cognitive I 1). preparation for studying Plato. The end of this process of diminishing activities is matter which is But he denied that the first principle of all could be 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 . self-conscious of their goals. Rather, instrument of the Ones causality (see V 4. uncomplex. . Italian Renaissance philosophers, the 15th and engage successfully in embodied cognition depends on our having access legitimately put to it. visions. If what is actually Intellect, or its cognitive identity with all Forms, is the paradigm 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.
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