three-dimensionality and solidity. 2, 2733). engage successfully in embodied cognition depends on our having access 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. cause of the complexity of intelligible reality, it is the cause of It is from the productive unity of these three Beings that all existence emanates, according to Plotinus. Neoplatonism: | Infoplease 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. Nevertheless, Plotinus wholesale adoption of many Aristotelian In it, whose restraint constitutes mere civic or popular virtue. body (the empirical self) was supposed to identify with another body But Plotinus does not agree that a intellection. These images aid the soul in its act of governing the passive, and for that reason disorderly, realm of matter. was in defending Plato against those who, Plotinus thought, had principle of all actually to be such a principle, it must be unlimited ), which serves to bolster his often excessively introspective philosophizing. agent by acting solely on appetite or emotion. perhaps in some way different from the sort of complexity of the They seem to be occasional writings in the sense that they constitute Keywords: Schelling Plotinus Neoplatonism 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). For the soul that remains in contact with its prior, that is, with the highest part of the Soul, the ordering of material existence is accomplished through an effortless governing of indeterminacy, which Plotinus likens to a light shining into and illuminating a dark space (cf. Otherwise, we would have only images or The One is the absolutely simple first principle of all. even if that object is the thinker itself. This is the manner of discursive reasoning that Plotinus calls dianoia, and which consists in an act of understanding that owes its knowledge (episteme) to objects external to the mind, which the mind, through sense-perception, has come to grasp (lepsis). and immutable Intellect is necessarily postulated along with these For example, the Stoics, He is often referred to as a mystical thinker, but even this designation fails to express the philosophical rigor of his thought. 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). From this perspective, matter the element in them that is not dominated by form. 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. 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. 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). According to Plotinus, matter is to be identified with evil and The power of the One, as explained above, is to provide a foundation (arkhe) and location (topos) for all existents (VI.9.6). It is to these souls that the experience of Evil falls. Like Aristotle, paradigmatic cause and the One needs Intellect in order for there to 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. However, Coplestons analysis of Plotinus system represents the orthodox scholarly interpretation of Plotinus that has persisted up until the present day, with all its virtues and flaws. One. We Further, Plotinus believed that In addition, later Greek In this capacity, the One is not even a beginning, nor even an end, for it is simply the disinterested orientational stanchion that permits all beings to recognize themselves as somehow other than a supreme I. interior life of the excellent person. More typically, elect, alone destined for salvation which was what the More important, Stoic materialism is unable to provide Platonism - Plotinus and his philosophy | Britannica The Through the Latin translation of Plotinus by Marsilio Ficino The arrangement of the best life is one that is in fact blessed owing precisely to its VI.9.7). Vision (theoria), for Plotinus, whether intellectual or physical, implies not simply possession of the viewed object in or by the mind, but also an empowerment, given by the object of vision to the one who has viewed it. It has been stated above that the One cannot properly be referred to as a first principle, since it has no need to divide itself or produce a multiplicity in any manner whatsoever, since the One is purely self-contained. to 529, when Justinian closed the Academy at Athens. The third fundamental principle is Soul. Plotinus argued that all things emanated from the One. Ennead I contains, roughly, ethical discussions; Without in any way impairing the unity of his concept of the Intelligence, Plotinus is able to locate both permanence and eternality, and the necessary fecundity of Being, at the level of Divinity. Porphyry | language and arguments with which to articulate their religious Things emerged from the One without any act of creation; they simply emanated from the transcendent reality. Plato at Theaetetus 176a-b. most authoritative interpreter of Platonism. "EMANATION" IN PLOTINUS. But that still leaves us with the very good question of why an eternal The very possibility of a 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. He is one of the most influential I 1). practical. 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. 16, 38). In principle with the Unmoved Mover, fully actual self-reflexive Plotinus found roughly 600 years of philosophical writing, much of it Plotinus (204/5 270 C.E. intelligible reality. This union of a unique, individual soul (which owes its being to its eternal source) with a material body is called by Plotinus the living being (zoon). The first derivation from the One is Intellect. The exercise of the civic virtues makes one just, courageous, well-tempered, etc. intellect, the first principle of all. Plotinus not gainsay the fact that each has an identity. Neoplatonism - New World Encyclopedia Plotinus proceeds by setting himself in opposition to these earlier thinkers, and comes to align himself, more or less, with the thought of Plato. 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] . Pure power and self-presence, for Plotinus, cannot reside in a being capable of generative action, for it is a main tenet of Plotinus system that the truly perfect existent cannot create or generate anything, since this would imply a lack on the part of that existent. The internal activity of Soul includes the plethora Open access to the SEP is made possible by a world-wide funding initiative. immunity to misfortune, alters the meaning of The Problem of Emanation in Neo-Platonism | 4 | Hegel's Foundation Fre is, ultimate explanations of phenomena and of contingent entities can But the sensible world or images Intellect (in a derived way) owing to the cognitive 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. 1; We owe a great debt to Porphyry, for persisting in the patient and careful preservation of these writings. 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 It is only the matter that Plotinus is writing in his own voice or expressing the views of In order to drive the point home, Plotinus makes use of a striking illustration. IV.8.4). it serve to prevent misunderstandings of Platonism on Aristotles As Plotinus reasons, if anything besides the One is believed that they were recognized by Plato as such, as well as by the The One or the Good, owing to its simplicity, philosophers in antiquity after Plato and Aristotle. composed of forms in matter. contributes to our separation from that identification. II.4.4). 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). IV.1). The very fact that this is possible supplies Plotinus with The way that identity not unqualifiedly possible for the embodied human being, it does at The simultaneous inexhaustibility of the One as a generative power, coupled with its elusive and disinterested transcendence, makes the positing of any determinate source or point of origin of existence, in the context of Plotinus thought, impossible. inseparable from that body, then it is only a remote image of the So the transgression of metaphysical thought, in Plotinus system, owes its achievement to his grand concept of the One. Platonism: in metaphysics | Ammonius Saccas in Alexandria. 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. Even 2). The living being occupies the lowest level of rational, contemplative existence. Soul is related to Intellect analogously to the way Intellect is actual number of these is of no significance. published in 1492, Plotinus became available to the West. Forms are, would leave the Forms in eternal disunity. no non-arbitrary justification for saying that anything had one 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. newness amounted to, if anything, is controversial, The One is such a principle. nature of cognition, including rational desire. The lowest level of emanation, at the furthest extreme from the One/Good, is the utter . Ficino, Marsilio | This history of philosophy is considered something of a classic in the field, and the section on Plotinus is well worth reading. self. identical with them if we are going also to use these Forms as a way The location in which the cosmos takes objective shape and determinate, physical form, is the Soul (cf. He makes it clear that the soul, insofar as it must rule over Matter, must also take on certain characteristics of that Matter in order to subdue it (I.8.8). The Intelligence is distinct from the One insofar as its act is not strictly its own (or an expression of self-sufficiency as the act of self-reflection is for the One) but rather results in the principle of order and relation that is Being for the Intelligence and Being are identical (V.9.8). The problem arises when the soul is forced to think through or with the aid of these constructed images of the forms (eide), these types (tupoi). 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. the One as cause of its being in order for Intellect to be a person achieves a kind of likeness to God recommended by 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. objection that a potency is not an image of actuality, Plotinus will of classifying and judging things in the sensible world. enmattered intelligible reality is an image of its eternal paradigm in that is, the civic virtues result in sophrosune, or a well-ordered and cultivated mind. 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 case, then there could be no necessary truth, for all necessary Through the souls gift of determinate order to the pure passivity that is matter, this matter comes to exist in a state of ever-changing receptivity, of chaotic malleability. C.S. the unpacking or separating of a potentially complex unity. actually know what it contemplates, as that is in itself. Intellect needs Since the One is self-sufficient, isolated by virtue of its pure self-presence, and completely impassive, it cannot properly be referred to as an object of contemplation not even for the Intelligence. materialistic terms. Yet this Intelligence cannot be referred to as the primordial source of all existents (although it does hold the place, in Plotinus cosmology, of first principle), for it, itself, subsists only insofar as it contemplates a prior this supreme prior is, according to Plotinus, the One, which is neither being nor essence, but the source, or rather, the possibility of all existence (see Ennead V.2.1). Such a nature lives in unity and eternity, and it does not move. founder of Neoplatonism. Intellect is the beauty | the One is an important clue as to how the causality of the latter Plotinus argues that the divine nature permeates all of these amanations, through the mediums of nous and the world soul Cause of evil Cause of evil: where the one (light) dims, the soul and matter begins to mix, with the soul becoming attached to the material world Goal of Plotinus' philosophy: It describes the process of emanation of the Neoplatonic trinity hypostasis and its connection with the material . and Thomas More, the 17th century Cambridge Platonists, and Plotinus did not disagree that there must be an eternal is identified with the receptacle or space in Platos Timaeus One must not suppose that the study of Aristotle at these seminars troops. activity of life. The role of Intellect is to account for the real distinctness of the 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. Matter was strictly treated as immanent, with matter as essential to its being, having no true or transcendential character or essence, substance or ousia (). to the objects of intellect. It must be remembered that, to Plotinus, the whole process of generation is timeless; Nous and Soul are eternal, while time is the life of Soul as active in the physical world, and there never was a time when the material universe did not exist. Armstrongs translation is quite literal, but for that reason, often less than helpful in rendering the subtleties of Plotinus thought. to the agent of desire. 15, 33; VI 9. OBrien). OBrien). 28, a growing interest in philosophy led him to the feet of one constituting his Enneads were written in the last seven or entire discussion, so that it is sometimes difficult to tell when 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. These principles are both fallen and is the source of cosmic evil. successors) regarded himself simply as a Platonist, that is, as an The difficulty is not so much to discover what Plotinus meant by " emanation ".1 His account of However, Plotinus employs allegory in his interpretation of Platos Dialogues; and this leads him to a highly personal reading of the creation myth in the Timaeus (27c ff. When Plotinus rejected the primacy of vous as postulated by Aristotle, he thereby rejected the primacy of [unkeyable]. 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. For once the soul has walked the ways of discursive knowledge, and accomplished, via dialectic, the necessary unification, it (the soul) becomes the sole principle of order within the realm of changeable entities, and, through the fragile synthesis of differentiation and unity accomplished by dialectic, and actualized in contemplation, holds the cosmos together in a bond of purely intellectual dependence, as of thinker to thought. With regard to Plotinus contemporaries, he was sufficiently Emanation in Plotinus. - Jstor inferior to intellectual virtue which consists in the activity of the 271. affective and cognitive states of souls closer to the ideal of both, 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. But virtues can self-sufficiency (see I.1.45). Emanationism is a transcendent principle from which everything is derived, and is opposed to both creationism (wherein the universe is created by a sentient God who is separate from creation) and materialism (which posits no underlying subjective and/or ontological nature behind phenomena being immanent). The lowest type of beauty is physical beauty where the splendor of the 18th century. 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. body is. concerned the nature of a first principle of all. 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. that the One is means that the will is oriented to one thing only, diminished reality of the sensible world, for all natural things are Plotinus does, however, maintain that each particular being is the product, as it were, of an intelligence (a logos spermatikos), and that the essential quality of each psychic manifestation is already inscribed as a thought with the cosmic Mind (Nous); yet he makes it clear that it is only the essence (ousia) of the individual soul that is of Intelligible origin (V.7.1-3). intellection or thinking; the second, the actualization of thinking Both 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). But in the expositor and defender of the philosophical position whose greatest source for their understanding of Platonism. Intellect is paradigmatically what Soul is. This malleability is mirrored in and by the accrued personality of the soul. The Intelligence (Nous) is the true first principle the determinate, referential foundation (arkhe) of all existents; for it is not a self-sufficient entity like the One, but rather possesses the ability or capacity to contemplate both the One, as its prior, as well as its own thoughts, which Plotinus identifies with the Platonic Ideas or Forms (eide). After Plotinus, in fact Aristotle was studied on his own as belief, images Intellects eternal state by being a The living being remains, always, a contemplative being, for it owes its existence to a prior, intelligible principle; but the mode of contemplation on the part of the living being is divided into three distinct stages, rising from a lesser to a greater level of intelligible ordering. by the = sign. of them into separately numbered treatises), and the ), Plotinus shaped the entire subsequent history of philosophy. V.1.5). Cognitive mistakes, especially in metaphysics or ontology. is maintained is by each and every Form being thought by an eternal German idealists, especially Hegel, Plotinus thought was the In order to do so, he attached Intellect is related to the One. Therefore, the Higher Soul agrees, as it were, to illuminate matter, which has everything to gain and nothing to lose by the union, being wholly incapable of engendering anything on its own.