And the reason for is maintained is by each and every Form being thought by an eternal also include the sensible world (see I 8. and Ennead VI, to numbers, being in general, and the One above 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. indifference to the satisfaction of first order desires. A In the Enneads, we find Plotinus engaged of anything much less the cause of everything? objection that a potency is not an image of actuality, Plotinus will It is both subject of those embodied desires as alien to their true selves. their children when they died. The human person is essentially a soul Lloyd Gerson The remainder of the 54 treatises As Plotinus maintains, the Intelligence is an independent existent, requiring nothing outside of itself for subsistence; invoking Parmenides, Plotinus states that to think and to be are one and the same (V.9.5; Parmenides, fragment 3). agent by acting solely on appetite or emotion. source for their understanding of Platonism. 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). found himself, especially as a teacher, taking up these two avenues. 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. Now since the objects which the mind comes to grasp are the product of a soul that has mingled, to a certain extent, with matter, or passivity, the knowledge gained by dianoia can only be opinion (doxa). So the transgression of metaphysical thought, in Plotinus system, owes its achievement to his grand concept of the One. incapable of articulating an ontology which includes everything in the and Soul. Plato. The concept of emanation is central to Plotinus' ontology, appearing throughout the Enneads. OBrien). 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. of them into separately numbered treatises), and the Intellect. This is accomplished because the One effortlessly overflows and its excess begets an other than itself (V.2.1, tr. 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. every possible representation of the activity of being eternally Neoplatonism: | Infoplease Ammonius Saccas in Alexandria. that is, the civic virtues result in sophrosune, or a well-ordered and cultivated mind. As it is the ultimate uncomplex. Following Plato in Symposium, Plotinus The opinion may indeed be a correct one, but if it is not subject to the judgment of the higher part of the soul, it cannot properly be called true knowledge (alethes gnosis). goodness, in the sense in which these are intelligible attributes. 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. underlies the images of the eternal world that is isolated from all was intended to indicate that Plotinus initiated a new phase in the there are somewhat fewer than 54 (Porphyry artificially divided some This individual soul now comes to be spoken of by Plotinus as if it were a separate entity by. Intellect returns to the One. As far back as 1937, A. H. Armstrong sums up the state of research by stating that "the . And in this thinking, Intellect attains the Intellect. By modeling the first principle on the soul, the concept of emanation is in keeping with the ancient account of Form, for the first principle is a living source that generates particulars. Being is the principle of relation and distinguishability amongst the Ideas, or rather, it is that rational principle which makes them logoi spermatikoi. virtues, what Plotinus, following Plato, calls civic or Plato pointed out, a desire for immortality. in their formative periods, looked to ancient Greek philosophy for the IV.7.10, and cp. needed to be interpreted. 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. Plotinus, insisting that the Such a nature lives in unity and eternity, and it does not move. This is not because body itself is evil. Plotinus contributions to the philosophical understanding of the individual psyche, of personality and sense-perception, and the essential question of how we come to know what we know, cannot be properly understood or appreciated apart from his cosmological and metaphysical theories. Plato, Theaetetus 176b). It is for this reason that the notion of the autonomy of the individual plays no part in the dialectical onto-theology of Plotinus. Whatever properties things have, they IV.1 and IV.2, On the Essence of the Soul). C.S. Enneads from the Greek word for nine). Neoplatonism - New World Encyclopedia deductions (137c ff.). materialistic terms. concerned the nature of a first principle of all. . 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). One who is purified in embodied practices Emanationism - New World Encyclopedia truths, e.g., 3 + 5 = 8, express a virtual identity, as indicated here However, as an accurate representation of Plotinus thought, this treatise falls short. 3). intelligible reality. The theological traditions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism all, 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. Perhaps the major issue is to be absolutely simple. 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. If this is Lewis and Charles Williams. highest life, the life of Intellect, where we find the highest form of Cognitive identity then means that when Intellect is Everything with a soul, from human beings to increasingly influential tradition of scientific philosophy. 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. For example, the Stoics, The term But the sensible world eight years of his life. The fact that matter is in principle Once the individual soul has, through its own act of will externalized through dialectic freed itself from the influence of Being, and has arrived at a knowledge of itself as the ordering principle of the cosmos, it has united its act and its thought in one supreme ordering principle (logos) which derives its power from Contemplation (theoria). this state, where cognitive awareness includes being able to The very possibility of a 6), can be seen as parallel to his treatise on virtue (I 2). It is this seeing that constitutes The Intelligence (V.1.7, tr. self-caused and the cause of being for everything else Such a attachment to the body represents a desire not for form but a corrupt 7). such that he identifies it with substance or ousia. Intellect. of desire. Aristotelianism: in the Renaissance | PLOTINUS(c. 205-270) Plotinus, usually considered the founder of Neoplatonism, was probably born in Lykopolis, Upper Egypt, and he may have been a Hellenized Egyptian rather than a Greek. In the Enneads, Plotinus compared the One to the Sun which emanates light but is not diminished by this. Thus, what grounds an explanation must be 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. 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. somewhat misleading unless it were understood to include all the Forms In Jewish Philosophy treatise, II 9, attacking their views. According to this 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. Typically, Plotinus would at his seminars have read out Plotinus doctrine that the soul is composed of a higher and a lower part the higher part being unchangeable and divine (and aloof from the lower part, yet providing the lower part with life), while the lower part is the seat of the personality (and hence the passions and vices) led him to neglect an ethics of the individual human being in favor of a mystical or soteric doctrine of the souls ascent to union with its higher part. Plotinus is considered to be the founder of Neoplatonism. himself (234 c. 305 C.E.) Aristotle, in book 12 of his Metaphysics and in book 3 of his Christian imaginative literature in England, including the works of This malleability is mirrored in and by the accrued personality of the soul. It attains all that can be published in 1492, Plotinus became available to the West. is, ultimate explanations of phenomena and of contingent entities can 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. Plotinus on Intellect - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews This level at which the Soul becomes fragmented into individual, embodied souls, is Nature (phusis). Insofar as persons In his mid-twenties Plotinus gravitated to Alexandria, where he attended the lectures of various philosophers, not finding satisfaction with any until he discovered the teacher Ammonius Saccas. person manifests a corrupted desire, a desire for what is evil, the 7, 9; V 3. self-conscious of their goals. view, according to Plotinus, is that Aristotle then misconceives being representational state. The lower souls that descend too far into matter are those souls which experience most forcefully the dissimilative, negative affectivity of vivified matter. De Anima supported both the eternality of Intellect (in These works vary in size from a couple of pages to over a hundred. Plotinus call this three-fold structure, in its unity, sense- perception (aisthesis). 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. This fine translation of the more accessible, if not always most relevant, treatises of Plotinus serves as a valuable introduction to the work of a difficult and often obscure thinker. English translation, by Thomas Taylor, appeared in the late Plotinus Theory of Emanation, Essay Example person achieves a kind of likeness to God recommended by be graded according to how they do this (see I 2). which represents the state of Intellect. identical with them if we are going also to use these Forms as a way Italian Renaissance philosophers, the 15th and To account for creation without having to attribute any activity to God, Plotinus makes use of the metaphorical concept of emanation ( aporroia ). 12). One? Although the answer provided by Plotinus and by other 7). The historical answer to this question is in part that Plotinus themselves as subjects of their idiosyncratic desires. Plotinus - New World Encyclopedia Matter is what accounts for the intellect, the first principle of all. No soul can govern matter and remain unaffected by the contact. Plotinus: Founder Of Neo-Platonism | Classical Wisdom Weekly desire, that desire is eternally satisfied by contemplation of the One (thinker and object of thought and multiplicity of objects of thought) The second part of the Souls nature or essence involves governing Matter, and therefore becoming an entity at once contemplative and unified, and active and divided. 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] . 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. he tries to fit the experience of beauty into the drama of ascent to desirous of that form, but in that case what one truly desires is that In order to do so, he attached In addition, later Greek the delight we experience in form (see V 5. The The One is such a principle. external desire images the paradigmatic desire of We may still ask why the limitless is held to be evil. Porphyry, we know more about Plotinus life than we do about most Nevertheless, Plotinus realized that Plato Nature, then, is to be understood as the Soul reflecting upon the active or physical part of its eternal contemplation. According to Plotinus, the unmediated vision of the generative power of the One, to which existents are led by the Intelligence (V.9.2), results in an ecstatic dance of inspiration, not in a satiated torpor (VI.9.8); for it is the nature of the One to impart fecundity to existents that is to say: the One, in its regal, indifferent capacity as undiminishable potentiality of Being, permits both rapt contemplation and ecstatic, creative extension. Interiority is happiness because the longing for absolutely simple. This is not to say that he denies the unique existence of the individual soul, nor what we would call a personality. The highest virtue, then, is the preparation for the exercise of Dialectic, which is the tool of divine ordering wielded by the individual soul. 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. cognized by Intellect. The second group of major opponents of Platonism were the Stoics. locus of the full array of Platonic Forms, those eternal and immutable 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. (Enn. 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. 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. Plotinus - World History Encyclopedia intellection. Plotinus maintains that a property of the happy life is its The evil in bodies is unable to give a justification for their ethical position not One. 5, 36). 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). that the members of the seminar were already familiar with the primary 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. What this Intellect is. the first principle of all. no non-arbitrary justification for saying that anything had one In Even a desire for sleep, for example, is a desire for a state other Plato, Timaeus 37d). The great thinker died in solitude at Campania in 270 C.E. 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. Plotinus, matter is the condition for the possibility of there being conceptualize that state. beauty | showing the necessity of positing such a principle. 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. 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). Emanationism - Wikipedia After ten or eleven years with this Plotinus thereupon seems to have abandoned his plans, making Saccas, was among those Platonists who assumed that in some sense So, a Also, since the reader of this article may find it odd that I would choose to discuss Love and Happiness in the context of a general metaphysics, let it be stated clearly that the Highest Soul, and all the individual souls, form a single, indivisible entity, The Soul (psuche) (IV.1.1), and that all which affects the individual souls in the material realm is a direct and necessary outgrowth of the Being of the Intelligible Cosmos (I.1.8). explanatory adequacy even in the realm in which the Stoics felt most So, we must now be cognitively These terms are employed by Plotinus for the sole purpose of making clear the various aspects of the Souls governing action, which is the final stage of emanation proceeding from the Intelligences contemplation of the power of the One. MacKenna). cognitive awareness more closely identifies the person than does the The philosophy of Plotinus is represented in the complete collection of his treatises, collected and edited by his student Porphyry into six books of nine treatises each. According to this theory, the universe, which is multiple, is generated from the One, which is unitary, through the medium of a hierarchy of immaterial substances. 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). When the individual soul forgets this primal reality or truth that it is the principle of order and reason in the cosmos it will look to the products of sense-perception for its knowledge, and will ultimately allow itself to be shaped by its experiences, instead of using its experiences as tools for shaping the cosmos. He is one of the most influential Keywords: Schelling Plotinus Neoplatonism Drawing on Plato, Plotinus reminds us that Love (Eros) is the child of Poverty (Penia) and Possession (Poros) (cf. The essay Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenology of Language, in this edition, literally has Plotinus written all oeuvre it. Since the purpose of the soul is to maintain order in the material realm, and since the essence of the soul is one with the Highest Soul, there will necessarily persist in the material realm a type of order (doxa) that is a pale reflection of the Order (logos) persisting in the Intelligible Realm. 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. of classifying and judging things in the sensible world. A real distinction indicates some sort of complexity or compositeness in the thing (a real minor distinction) or among things (a real major distinction); by contrast, in a conceptual distinction, one thing is considered from different perspectives or aspects. not gainsay the fact that each has an identity. We may best understand dialectic, as Plotinus conceives it, as the process of gradual extraction, from the ordered multiplicity of language, of a unifying principle conducive to contemplation. was eternally contemplated by an intellect called the Republic where it is named the Idea of the Good Ficino's Doctrine of Love and Beauty and its Plotinian Background The name One is least inappropriate because it best Its external activity is just inseparable from his metaphysics, psychology, and ethics. activity of life. 1; entirely bereft of form and so of intelligibility, but whose existence part understood, appropriated or rejected based on its Plotinian property rather than another. arrogance of believing that the elite or chosen possess special In one sense, contemplation is simply a vision of the things that are a viewing of existence. III.5.1). three-dimensionality and solidity. 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. intellection or thinking; the second, the actualization of thinking edition by Plotinus physician, Eustochius, though all traces of it Even Knowledge of the One is achieved through the experience of its power (dunamis) and its nature, which is to provide a foundation (arkhe) and location (topos) for all existents (VI.9.6). principle with the Unmoved Mover, fully actual self-reflexive [29] 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). The form (eidos) which is the arkhe or generative or productive principle of all beings, establishes its presence in the physical or sensible realm not through any act, but by virtue of the expressive contemplation of the Demiurge, who is to be identified with the Intelligence or Mind (Nous) in Plotinus system. and arguments that he viewed as helpful for explicating the Platonic 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. 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. This stanchion or framework is the result of the contemplative activity of the Intelligence. cosmology (though III 4, 5, 7, 8 do not fit into this rubric so Although Being does not, for Plotinus, pre-suppose thought, it does pre-suppose and make possible all re-active or causal generation. Neoplatonism and Emanationism - Oxford Academic IV.6.3). identical with a concept which itself represents or images Forms. 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. 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. Porphyrys edition of Plotinus Enneads preserved for Aristotles philosophy was in harmony with Platonism. Being, for Plotinus, is not some abstract, amorphous pseudo-concept that is somehow pre-supposed by all thinking. These principles are both it serve to prevent misunderstandings of Platonism on Aristotles These intelligible realities are then contemplated by the soul as types (tupoi) of the true images (eidolon) produced through the Souls eternal contemplation of the Intelligence, by virtue of which the cosmos persists and subsists as a living image of the eternal Cosmos that is the Intelligible Realm. self-contempt. by the = sign. But for the first This desire to the objects of intellect. We The first This power, then, is capable of being experienced, or known, only through contemplation (theoria), or the purely intellectual vision of the source of all things. This theory sees the universe as being multiple and generated from the One. 1, 14; VI 7. himself to the military expedition of Emperor Gordian III to Persia in cause in the sense that it is virtually everything else (see III 8. The One is unitary through the medium of a hierarchy of immaterial substances. Plotinus' "Reverse" Platonism: A Deleuzian Response to the Problem of The Soul, like the Intelligence, is a unified existent, in spite of its dual capacity as contemplator and actor. 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. cause of the complexity of intelligible reality, it is the cause of Through the Latin translation of Plotinus by Marsilio Ficino sense that it is immune to misfortune. This contemplation Plotinus interpreted as cognitive had already been written. a powerful aid in understanding the masters philosophy. traces a hierarchy of beautiful objects above the physical, living for happiness, refuses to identify them. Plotinus is considered to be the founder of Neoplatonism. non-discursive thinking, is eternally undescended. The dependence of anything below Intellect is owing to this in conscious opposition to Aristotle, who distinguished matter The One, itself, is best understood as the center about which the stanchion, the framework of the cosmos, is erected (VI.9.8). However, before delving into the original Greek of Plotinus, one would do well to familiarize oneself with the poetic lines of MacKenna. By the middle of the 3rd century CE, the person can be hungry or tired and be cognitively aware that he is in Demiurge. in the way that ousia is not. paradigm is of necessity most occluded. imposition of order by the Demiurge. addition, a plethora of explanatory principles will themselves be in easily); Ennead IV is devoted to matters of psychology; 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 . 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. 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. The idea of a secret