The Enneads of Plotinos

Plotinos, who you probably haven’t heard of, is undoubtedly the third most influential philosopher in Western history (after Platon and Aristoteles, who you probably have heard of). Providence handed me a copy of his collected works, called the Enneads, in 2022, and I spent the next year-and-change reading it cover-to-cover. In order to understand the material better, I summarized and commented on each essay on my blog as I went along. These summaries and comments are reproduced on this page (with minimal editing, so I apologize for the episodic and conversational tone), hopefully to help others in understanding this difficult work! A warning, though: I have only done a single complete pass through the Enneads, and many of the later essays shed a lot of light on the earlier ones; consequently, many of the earlier summaries make of mess of Plotinos’s reasoning. Please take them as an introduction only, and I hope they inspire you to read the man himself.

Introduction

For some years now, every morning, I cast a geomantic chart in order to help me understand the day ahead. On 20 Apr 2022, I received the following one:

It’s an extremely felicitous chart: Luna (Via in the III), Venus (Amissio in the V), and Jupiter (Laetitia in the XI) all rejoice, and the XII is besieged (indicating that I am protected from troubles).

In particular, though, I would like to draw attention to the court in the middle of the chart. Caput Draconis in the R also occupies (and is in company with itself in) the VII and VIII: this quite clearly says “I have set something aside.” (“I” being indicated as “the other party,” “the one across from you,” “your partner,” etc. In my readings, it generally refers to either my wife or my angel.) Laetitia in the L also occupies the I and XI: this says, “It is a blessing intended for you.” (Laetita rejoicing also carries the connotations of something that will make me happy, optimistic, or hopeful; it also carries the connotations of something idealistic or philosophical.) Via in the J also occupies the III: this says, “Go out and get it!” (But also notice how Via is besieged by Fortuna Major on either side—it is quite literally “under the beams” of the Sun, and this has the same meaning as combustion in astrology: it is something hidden from me! I won’t know where to go or what to look for, but go out all the same. I will also note that a rejoicing Luna is always associated for me with intuition and luck.)

What on earth could it be? Naturally, I’m as curious as it gets. After the morning’s chores, I went out to walk and pray as I often do; for whatever reason, I grabbed my wallet and walked east towards downtown. Both of these are unusual: one doesn’t usually need money to pray, and downtown is noisier than the residential districts north and west of my house—but intuition suggested I do so. I tend to get engrossed in prayer, sometimes to the point of nearly being run over by traffic, so I wasn’t really paying attention to where I was going, but exactly as I finished my prayers—exactly!—I happened to be in front of the used bookstore in town.

“Well, okay,” I thought, “I might as well go in if I’m here.” I head in and start poking around, and what should I happen to find on the first shelf I see?

It’s a 1977 reprint of Stephen MacKenna’s celebrated translation of Plotinos, looking for all the world like it has never been opened before. My angel whispered, “you’re welcome,” in my ear, which made me laugh hard enough to startle the poor shopkeeper.

My course being made plain for me, I started reading it the next day.

I i: What is Man?

I i: What is Man?

Consider an axe. It is the fusion of two things: iron, and the concept of a wedge. Neither a lump of iron nor a mere concept can chop down a tree: it is the fusion of the two that gives it potency.

Now, let us suppose the axe misses its mark and is nicked or dulled. Is the iron harmed? No, of course not: the iron is all still there and can be melted down and reformed. Is the wedge-concept harmed? No, of course not: ideals persist regardless of what happens to any instance of that ideal. It is only the fusion of the two, the axe itself, that can be said to be harmed.

And what if the axe is no longer needed? Well, then one might melt down the iron and put it to some other use. The iron and the wedge-concept persist, of course, but the axe does not.

In the same way, a man is the fusion of a body and a soul; it is only the fusion of the two that can sin; the fusion comes into being only when it is needed; if it is too badly damaged it may be unmade and remade; and it persists only until it is needed no longer.

The “fusion” referred to here either is, or is facilitated by, the “lower soul.” I believe that the “lower soul” is what Porphurios calls the “pneumatic vehicle,” what Sunesios simply calls the “imagination,” and what we moderns would call the “mind:” it is your personality, your imaginative and thinking capacity. In other systems, the soul lives around a fixed star (which is some god or other); as the soul descends from its star through the spheres of the fixed planets, the “lower soul” accretes around the soul in seven layers, giving it a personality. Finally, by the time it reaches the earth, it is dense enough for a body to stick to it. This is instructive, but to Plotinos, the soul doesn’t descend at all: it remains, perfect and pure, and it is merely that its attention is directed here to earth rather than the soul itself. Porphurios agrees with Plotinos, but Iamblikhos and Proklos vehemently disagree, and consider the soul to descend to earth properly, losing its divinity. It seems to me that the soul descending is a Babylonian model, while a pristine soul is a Greek model; while both Porphurios and Iamblikhos were Syrian (and thus perhaps more of an eastern mindset), Porphurios became even more Greek than the Greeks were, and so I think the different models reflect a cultural difference in temperament. (Certainly the notion of original sin seems more eastern to me, and this fits a “soul descending” model.)

There seems to be some disagreement over what Plotinos considered a god. My take from reading the Enneads through the first time was that the all gods are souls: the Intellect is the “father of the gods”—more like “heaven” than “god”—and the One is indescribable in any terms whatsoever. There is disagreement, however, especially from Christian Platonists, who prefer to consider the Intellect to be god. There’s merit to their arguments: Plotinos himself calls the Intellect “the God” (MacKenna translates as “the Divinity”) in §8, and Porphurios (?) seems to poetically refer to the Intellect as God, so clearly my understanding doesn’t match theirs. Maybe this is all just pointless bickering over terminology—“a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”—and as long as we understand the concept... but then, gods are well beyond my comprehension, and I mostly just spend my time with angels, so what do I know?

Plotinos notes in §13 that you are not merely your body, or your soul, but the Intellect, too.

I ii: On Virtue

I ii: On Virtue

Platon tells us [Theaetetus 176A–B], “we ought to try to escape from earth to the dwelling of the gods as quickly as we can; and to escape is to become like God, so far as this is possible; and to become like God is to become righteous and holy and wise,” and, in short, to become virtuous. But is God really virtuous? Surely, for example, He can’t be courageous, since what is there to frighten Him? Neither can He be temperate, since what can He desire that He doesn’t already possess? So if God isn’t virtuous, how does becoming virtuous make us like Him?

By way of analogy, consider a fire: if you come near it, you become warm. But a fire doesn’t need to come near to some other fire to become warm, because it is intrinsically warm. In the same way, virtue is the process of “coming near” some higher power, but the higher power has no need of “coming near” to itself; rather it intrinsically possesses whatever those virtues attain to. So if we practice the “civic” virtues [Republic IV 427E–434D], we make society more orderly and harmonious, which reflects, in a very small way, the Order and Harmony which God intrinsically possesses.

It is all well to live in an orderly society, but how does one become like God? The “purificatory” virtues for doing so are similar to the civic virtues, but consist of the withdrawal of the soul from the body: instead of being courageous in the face of danger, one ceases to worry over the body; instead of being temperate in one’s enjoyment of bodily pleasures, one ceases to regard them; in short, one endeavors, so far as is possible, to submit one’s body to reason and never act involuntarily.

These, too, are modeled on the virtues of the soul, which consist of, so far as is possible, in turning itself towards contemplation, since this is what the Intellect intrinsically possesses. And so everything has it’s own virtues, all leading up, step-by-step like a ladder, to the Source.

In both my summary and Plotinos’s original, “God” refers to the first and greatest soul, the “World Soul,” and not “God” in a monotheistic sense. (In the quote of Platon’s, I think it merely refers to divinity generally.)

Porphurios’s summary of and commentary on this essay is in Sentences XXXIV. (I recommend reading it since he’s rather clearer than Plotinos is.) I, myself, summarize it very briefly here. Regardless, the original is well worth reading: §5 and §7 are great.

I have the half-formed thought that what the Platonists call intellection and reason is not what we moderns mean by those same terms. It seems to me that when Plotinos refers to reason, he is not talking about detached calculation, like what Sherlock Holmes might engage in. No, he seems to mean something more akin to what I might call devotion to some god or gods, subordinating all purposes beneath that which brings one closer to similitude to Them. In this sense, our Holmes is not reasoning, since he is unable to help his calculative ability: exercising it is not a conscious choice for him. (Indeed, his conscious choice is to drown calculation in a sea of cocaine; in Plotinos’s terms, drawing himself away from the soul and into the body. This is quite the opposite of Plotinos’s reason, and indeed a thing much to be pitied!) So we start to see where the man ends and the soul begins: the man, subject to the stars, may have (for example) a good or a bad Venus; but if the man chooses to exercise his or her capacity for love in benefit of or in spite of the Venus, then the repeated conscious choice brings the man more and more in alignment with the soul, and since the soul exists above the stars, the dignity of Venus matters less and less. (Or something like that. As I said, the thought is half-formed, and I have much contemplation ahead of me.)

I also had a moment of clarity as to why I have such a problem with the Christianity I was raised with, and Plotinos elegantly and diplomatically sums it up in a mere sentence in §6: “in all this there is no sin—that is only a matter of discipline—but our concern is not merely to be sinless but to be God.” I realized, reading this, that the doctrines of sin and Satan and demons and hell and so on are like Christianity’s version of the civic virtues: a way of teaching one how to live in the world! But if one is beyond that step, and working on the purificatory virtues, then such things are only a hindrance. The Sufi says, “Citizens of the country of Love have a religion apart from all others, for God alone is their religion.” We citizens of that higher Country should, rather than growing frustrated with such dualisms, peacefully leave those of earthly countries to practice the civic virtues, since it is good to them. (And sometimes, when circumstances grow hard, those civic virtues require the eviction of citizens of other countries—but so much the better for us, I suppose, as doing so merely hastens us on our way!)

Plotinos makes a crucial point at the end of §7, and I wish to call attention to it: “to model ourselves upon good men is to produce an image of an image: we have to fix our gaze above the image and attain Likeness to the Supreme Exemplar.” That is, you can only rise as high as you aim. Socrates said that “the gods need nothing, so those men whose needs are fewest are most like the gods;” hence we have Diogenes living in a jar and smashing his begging bowl and hugging marble statues in winter: he was modeling himself on the gods rather than any human example, thereby purifying himself. Who are you modelling yourself on?

I iii: On Dialectic

I iii: On Dialectic

There are two stages in the journey to the Divine: first, one must cross the threshold from the realm of lower life to the realm of the higher; and second, one must traverse the realm of the higher to its topmost peak. We will set aside the second stage for now and focus on the first.

The tools one uses depend on one’s temperament, but in all cases the process is the same: one begins by pursuit of the physical; with training, one continues by pursuit of the abstract; finally, one eventually masters these and comes to the pursuit of the True. (For example, one might proceed from the love of people, to the love of ideals, and finally to Love itself; or one might proceed from practical thought, to abstract thought, and finally to Thought itself.)

The step from the abstract to the True involves Dialectic, which is the method of determining the nature of things and how they relate to one another. It is the essential tool of philosophy, just as arithmetic is the essential tool of engineering. But it is more than mere logic: logic deals only with rules, but Dialectic brings to bear all the faculties of the philosopher (e.g. lived experience, analogy). It works by examining particulars, determining what is common to them, and thereby resolving them into Unity; then it considers how Unity may resolve back into particulars, thereby coming full circle.

The use of Dialectic exercises the virtue of Wisdom. We call Wisdom a higher virtue since its use naturally causes the ripening of all other virtues.

The first time through this essay, I had thought Plotinos only described two paths (the aesthete and the philosopher); but upon rereading, it’s clear that he’s describing three (drawn apparently from the Phaidros): the ἐρωτικός [“lover”], the μουσικός [“votary of the Muses,” e.g. a creative, like an artist, poet, or scientist], and the φιλόσοφος [“philosopher”]. (MacKenna’s translation is my preferred one in general, but in this case Armstrong’s was clearer.) His discussion of the first two are very similar, and he singles out the philosopher as “better” than them (which is typical of Platonism), but all three are without doubt considered separately: I no longer think I’m being the least bit original in likening the three goddesses contending for the apple to the three broad paths upward.

These aren't so different from the three faculties of soul which Platon describes in the Republic: the lover exemplifying Desire (and thus the virtue of Temperance), the mousikos exemplifying Spirit (and thus the virtue of Courage), and the philosopher exemplifying Reason (and thus the virtue of Wisdom). I have often wondered about how even beginner occultists describe the experience of the Watcher on the Threshold, which is something I’ve never experienced despite my years and years of spiritual practice. But put in these terms, it makes sense: the Watcher is a test of Courage, and since I don’t follow an operative path, why should my tests come from that direction?

It seems to me that the last of Plotinos's steps, from abstraction to Truth, is the hard one—the vision of the Good is something we can only cultivate ourselves in preparation for (and this is what Dialectic is supposed to be about), and not something we can undertake directly. But then—I have not yet attained, and maybe I will think differently once I get there.

I iv: On Well-Being

I iv: On Well-Being

Let us consider a musician and his lyre. It is the lyre that sings sweetly, but can it be considered to have well-being? No—the lyre might be in tune or in good repair, but it is the musician that can be well; the lyre is a mere instrument of the musician’s well-being. But let us suppose that the lyre is out of sorts: does this mean the musician is unwell? Not necessarily: perhaps it fell out of tune in his absence and he is not even aware of it, or perhaps he sings on even without accompaniment, or perhaps he has grown tired of playing and does something else. In whatever case, the musician cares for the instrument, tuning it and fixing it as needed, but only insofar as it contributes to his own well-being.

In the same way, a man’s body is the mere instrument of the soul; and while the body might experience pleasure or contentment, this is merely akin to the lyre being in good shape. No, the Good is the highest of all, and so a man’s good must come from his higher part: his well-being is of the soul, and being of the soul it is to be found solely within and not subject to the vagaries of without.

Just like how the lyre is not essential to the musician’s well being, what does the saintly man—he who is consumed with divinity—care for the body? He will be swayed neither by power and luxury, on the one hand, nor disease and disaster, on the other. Would we not call him a man of tremendous well-being, who could be satisfied even as he is placed on the pyre? But this is just what happens when the practice of the virtues is taken to its end.

In general, in my summaries of Plotinos, I have taken the tack of summarizing his conclusions and more-or-less ignoring his arguments. I think I was upset with my summary the first time since this was the first essay in which doing so was really glaring... it really leaves a lot out. But I think, by the end of summarizing the Enneads, I came to the conclusion that I can’t really do justice to the full arguments; really, these summaries exist to A) remind me of the contents of the essays, and B) maybe, hopefully, entice others to read Plotinos—at least, those essays that seem most interesting to them. So if my summary seems abrupt and you want to know what the good man is like and why, then just read the real thing: it’s linked above and it’s not very long.

I didn’t realize this the first time through Plotinos, but this essay is about εὐδαιμονία eudaimonia, the meaning of which was one of my Big Questions™ when I went through On the Gods and the World. The dictionary gives “prosperity, good fortune, wealth;” Murray and Nock translate this word as “happiness;” Taylor translates it “felicity;” MacKenna goes a little further and translates it “true happiness;” and Armstrong is critical of these and translates it as “well-being.” I agree with Armstrong that any variation on “happiness” is misleading: the philosophers are not saying that the virtuous feel good, they are saying that they have transcended feeling. But it would be wrong to call such people “stoic” or “impassive,” I think: Taoist and Zen masters are well known for their good humor, and angels (as the beings intrinsically possessing the virtues we try to take on) are full of joy. (Indeed, when I think of my own angel, I think of them first and foremost as playful.) Perhaps a very literal translation of eudaimonia might be “well-spirited,” which I can sorta see as encompassing all of these notions.

In my summary I mention tossing the good man on a pyre, but Plotinos’s actual example was of tossing him in the Bull of Phalaris. I wasn’t familiar with it, but good old Diodoros tells us the story in the Library of History IX §18–19. Yipes!

Even though Plotinos is following Platon in his arguments, and even though Platon and Diogenes were at odds, it is hard not to see the stray dog as an exemplar of eudaimonia, retaining his well-being even as he was sold into slavery.

I v: Can Well-Being Increase With Time?

I v: Can Well-Being Increase With Time?

We have said already that well-being is a property of the soul. But the soul exists outside of time: therefore well-being cannot accumulate over time. One might object that memory carries the past into the present, but what good is memory? Does the memory of yesterday’s exquisite dinner satiate you today? No, the only way in which well-being may compound is in the alignment of the man with the soul: the more perfectly one aligns, the more perfectly the soul’s innate well-being may resonate with the man.

So too with misery: misery compounds by the wearing down of the man, but it cannot touch the soul.

Some sight-seeing:

• In §4, Plotinos agrees with (and elegantly subsumes) Aristoteles’s definition of well-being: if one equates well-being with the ability to exercise free will, then they are simply accepting Plotinos’s position, for the soul has free will according to its nature, while the body has none.

• In §7, Plotinos makes the case that eternity isn’t merely the sum of all times, but is beyond time. (This echoes Proklos’s and Taylor’s distinction of “perpetual” and “eternal.”) Thus something which is eternal is better than something which is perpetual, and therefore eternal good is better than perpetual good, and therefore the well-being of the soul is more to be desired than even perpetual pleasure of the body.

• In §10, Plotinos makes a cute distinction between well-being and well-doing, which echoes Platon’s “world of being” and “world of becoming.” I think this neatly describes the functions of each: the intellect essentially is, but a soul only accidentally is, thus the intellect can only be, but a soul can be well or be poorly. The soul essentially moves, but a body only accidentally moves; thus the soul can only do, but a body can do well or do poorly. That is to say: something that essentially possesses some quality simply embodies that quality, but something that accidentally possesses it may have it to a greater or lesser degree.

I vi: On Beauty

(5 May 2022.)

I vi: On Beauty

We call something “Beautiful” when it is unified with its Ideal Form. The Ideal Form organizes the many constituent parts of that thing into a Unity, bringing order and symmetry and communicating a Divine Thought into the material world. Ugliness is the opposite, when something is so covered in the material that the Divine Thought can’t shine through, like a comely youth covered in mud.

But above the Beauty of the material world, there is a higher and more graceful Beauty of the immaterial, visible only to the sense-organs of the soul. And above that Beauty is still a higher, and on and on, all the way to the most Ideal of all Forms, Beauty itself, shining above all things.

In the same way that a sculptor looks at a chunk of marble, sees an angel within it, and chisels away every bit that isn’t an angel, one should look at themselves and chisel away all parts that don’t reflect the soul within. By so doing, you unify yourself with your own Ideal Form, become more Beautiful, and thereby able to perceive those higher Beauties.

I barely hazard an attempt at summarizing this tractate, as it is short and well-worth reading in it’s original, especially the last few sections. Plotinos thrills in that way only one who is deeply in love can, and the feeling he evokes of that higher Beauty is that of the bounty placed upon fugitive Psyche: SEVEN SWEET KISSES FROM VENUS HERSELF, AND ONE EXQUISITELY DELICIOUS TOUCH OF HER CHARMING TONGUE.

I vii: On the Primal Good

I vii: On the Primal Good

All things act on the basis of their desires. They must consider those desires Good (and not just Good, but more Good than their present state) in order to desire them in the first place. But those Good things that they desire must, themselves, desire their own Good. In the limit, therefore, there must be some Ultimate Good. But what does the Ultimate Good desire? There is nothing more Good, so the only thing worthy of Its desire is Itself. But then, in requiring nothing outside of Itself, It must be the ontological First Thing, from which all action arises.

Following that, what is Good to all other things must depend on what is ontologically prior to them. For example, life is Good to the living and thought is Good to the thinking, and further if something is both living and thinking, then it has multiple pathways, so to speak, to the Ultimate Good.

But this doesn’t mean that the opposites of those things are evil. For example, just because life is Good doesn’t mean that death is evil. As we have said, neither body nor soul are alive, but only the man; indeed, when the man dies, the soul is free to act on its own once again. So, in that sense, death is Good to the soul!

This was the very last essay that Plotinos wrote before his death (due to a plague, believed to be leprosy, that broke out in Rome). It seems his worsening health may have been on his mind, as this essay is short and a substantial portion of it is dedicated to how even though life is a good, death is not an evil.

In §3 Plotinos writes, “If life is a good, does every living thing have this good? No: in the bad, life limps. It is like an eye in one who does not see clearly: it is not doing its proper job.” My health wasn’t good a year and a half ago, when I first went through this essay, but I didn’t make much note of this, then. (Though I do still recall MacKenna’s rather vicious use of “vile” rather than “bad!”) It struck a chord with me this time, though; perhaps because my health has gone sharply downhill since then. But you know, just as death isn’t an evil, neither is ill health: while life has not been pleasurable, it has made me a philosopher—most people have to fight very hard to turn away from pleasures, but I get such benefits handed to me for free!

One of my favorite parables comes from Zhuangzi:

One day, elderly Master Yu got sick. His friend, Master Ssu, went to visit him and asked, “How are you doing?”

Master Yu replied, “Amazing! Look at how the Creator has bent me out of shape. My back is so curved that my gut is over my head! My chin digs into my belly button, my shoulders arch upward, and my neck bones point to the sky!” Yet he seemed peaceful and unconcerned. Hobbling over to the mirror, he looked at himself and said, “My, my! How totally He has bent me out of shape!”

“Aren’t you discouraged?” asked Master Ssu.

Master Yu answered, “Not at all! Why should I be? If things go on like this, maybe He’ll change my left arm into a rooster and I’ll announce the dawn! Or, maybe He’ll change my right arm into a crossbow and I’ll shoot a duck for dinner! Or, maybe He’ll change my butt cheeks into wheels and I’ll drive myself around like a chariot—I’ll never need a wagon again!

“No, I received life when the time came, and I’ll give it back when the time comes. Anyone who understands that everything happens exactly when it’s supposed to will be untouched by sorrow or joy. When you argue with God, you lose: that’s just the way it is. That’s why I have no complaint whatsoever.”

Socrates said that “hunger is the best sauce.” If life is deficient here, it means only that Life There will be all the sweeter.

I viii: On the Nature and Source of Evil

(10 May 2022.)

I viii: On the Nature and Source of Evil

Evil is the negation of all that is Good. But Good has Form, has Life, has Beauty, has Being; and so evil must be formless, lifeless, without beauty, without existence. But we see evil all around us, so it must exist—but this demonstrates that evil is not an essential thing, as the Good is; there is no Ultimate Evil in the same way that there is an Ultimate Good. Evil is like darkness, which isn’t a quality that exists on its own, but rather is the absence of light. We say that evil “increases” with distance to the Good, but really it is merely that the inherent Good is diminished.

It is not possible for the soul, which is essentially Good, to have evil anywhere within it. Therefore it is not possible for a man, which cannot exist without the soul, to be wholly evil: evil to a man is to sink, as far as is possible, into the body, and so be as distant as possible from its source of Good. And so we call Matter evil, not because it is essentially evil but because it is the reason for a man to act in ways contrary to the soul.

In the same way that we say virtue is not Good but a path toward the Good, mere vice is not evil but a path toward evil; for even in vice, there is a trace of Good: one undertakes vice because he believes that it will do some Good to him.

I have often said, in comments on this diary and elsewhere, that I do not think evil exists; Plotinos explicitly describes what I mean when I say so right at the end of the tractate:

Evil is not alone: by virtue of the nature of Good, the power of Good, it is not Evil only: it appears, necessarily, bound around with bonds of Beauty, like some captive bound in fetters of gold; and beneath these it is hidden so that, while it must exist, it may not be seen by the gods, and that men need not always have evil before their eyes, but that when it comes before them they may still be not destitute of Images of the Good and Beautiful for their Remembrance.

I ix: On Suicide

I ix: On Suicide

The oracle tells us, “Dismiss not the soul, lest it bear something away with it...”

The body is the reflection of the soul: the soul binds itself to a body, and the body to a soul, because they have a similitude for each other. A soul will not normally detach from a body that it is in harmony with, nor will it remain bound to a body that it is out of harmony with. So if a body loses its physical integrity, it no longer a good match for its soul and the soul will go off and generate a new body for itself; conversely, if a soul has become especially angelic, bodies in general are no longer a good fit for it, and it will release its body, never to return.

So if a body is in a disagreeable condition, it is only because that condition is appropriate to its soul: if one gives in to passion and kills themselves, they haven’t resolved the desire in their soul, and they’ll just end up with the same condition in a new body; with, as the oracle says, the karma of giving in and violence thrown in for good measure.

But what of dementia or insanity or the like? As we’ve said, the soul remains bound to the body while they’re in harmony: we must presume there is some value in sticking it out until the soul decides it’s time.

Porphurios’s fragmentary summary of this essay is in Sentences 7–9.

That oracle (#151 in Cory, #166 in Majercik) is interesting. Taylor says it’s from the Chaldean Oracles (which are known only from fragments); Majercik summarizes the scholarship on it, makes a case that it is unlikely to be from the Chaldean Oracles, and tentatively suggests its an oracle chronicled by Porphurios in his Philosophy from Oracles; however, I think this is unlikely, too, since this essay was complete some time before Plotinos and Porphurios even met. So it’s source is a mystery!

II i: On the Kosmos or on the Heavenly System

(14 May 2022.)

II i: On the Kosmos or on the Heavenly System

Is the universe eternal, or does it have a beginning and an end?

Well, we are alive, and we are a part of the universe, so therefore the universe must be alive. Further, all living things have a body and a soul, and so the universe must also have a body and a soul. Now, our bodies are ever-changing, but our souls are eternal; the universe cannot exist in any lesser capacity than its parts, so the universe’s soul, at least, must too be eternal.

But what about the universe’s body? There is a fundamental difference between us and the universe: we are open systems, and take our bodies from outside of ourselves. But there is nothing outside of the universe, so it must be a closed system. So while we may discard our bodies again, the universe cannot: it must endlessly recycle itself. So the universe’s body must also be eternal, and therefore the universe as a whole.

But everything follows its nature: that means the fundamental nature of our beings must be different than the fundamental nature of the universe’s being. And so we are not of the same order: the universe is sprung from the primary God, while we are—at best!—sprung from secondary Gods that are themselves the offspring of that primary God.

I’m butchering Plotinos’s argument, I’m sure, but that’s no reason not to try!

II ii: The Heavenly Circuit

(14 May 2022.)

II ii: The Heavenly Circuit

The One is the highest Good. As a reflection of this, lesser things, in order to obtain a Good, attempt to become one with that Good. We call this Desire, and it is the cause of motion: when something desires another thing, it moves towards it.

The first thing beneath the One is Beauty. Beauty desires only Itself, because there is nothing else, and so it has no motion.

Beneath Beauty is Soul. Soul is timeless and does not change, but since Soul desires things external to itself, it must move: this implies that its motion must be limited in such a way that it never changes state; therefore it must move in a cyclic fashion. Another way to think of this is that it tries to move towards its Good, but since it cannot coincide with its Good (or it would change state by ceasing to be), it must “miss” it and continually orbit it.

Beneath Soul is Body. Even though Body is animated by Soul and tries to imitate it, it is hampered by friction and cannot maintain perpetual motion. Thus bodies move in straight lines. The planets, however, are nonetheless able to move in circles despite their bodies because they are not hampered by friction—there is nothing to stop them in space.

I was very confused back when we read Sallustios VII; his passing mention of nonmaterial things moving struck me as odd. It’s nice to finally get a deeper look at what was meant by all that!

II iii: Are the Stars Causes?

(16 May 2022.)

You know, there’s something very compelling about Plotinos’s question-and-answer format. The Enneads are something of a great, big Frequently Asked Questions about life, the universe, and everything. What an encouragement it is to get answers to some of those Big Questions that I have had a dim intuition of but no logical reasoning to shore up! Of course, as with all such things, digging up those answers only leaves bigger questions behind them...

II iii: Are the Stars Causes?

Suppose one is suffering from some disease, and a doctor feels their forehead, takes their pulse, examines their eyes, and so on, and is able to determine the disease and prescribe a medicine for it. This doesn’t mean that their forehead or eyes or whatever is the cause of the problem, merely that every part of the body is affected when one part of it is benefited or ailing.

So it is with the stars: barring such effects as the sun’s heat and the moon’s tides, they are too distant to exert forces upon us directly but nonetheless they participate in the same universal Body that we do. The astrologer, like the doctor, is merely diagnosing the condition of one part from that of another.

But what, then, is the cause of such things as wealth or power or marriage? There are, in fact, several that must negotiate with each other. First, there are limits imposed by the dictates of Necessity, which are the results of forces already brought into matter that have not finished playing themselves out. Astrology and other forms of divination read the signs of this first cause. Second, before the soul becomes bonded to body, there is also an element of chance in the nature of the bond which continues after the bond is formed. Finally, there are the desires of the soul itself, for it can only become bonded to a like body and thereafter it continues to exert influence upon the body, the influence varying to a greater or lesser extent depending upon the purity of the soul.

II iv: Matter in its Two Kinds

(25 May 2022.)

This tractate was another very challenging one to me: it is very logical, but it was hard to see the forest for the trees. (I note with some amusement that the last one that gave me a really hard time was I iv, and that 4 is the number of getting stuck.)

II iv: Matter in its Two Kinds

Matter is the passive, qualityless substrate upon which active, qualified Ideas are imprinted. Even though it gives rise to bodies, Matter itself is incorporeal, for corporeality is a quality. Similarly, even though it gives rise to compounds, Matter itself is a simplex, since a compound has distinct parts and distinction requires qualification. It is the same with any other quality you might care to name: shape, color, quantity, heat, etc.: Matter itself has none of these whatsoever, and when they are visible it is because the quality exists in some forming power and is reflected in Matter.

We can extend the analogy to the higher realms: since Matter is a reflection, there must be a Ideal “Matter” it is reflecting. And so it is that empyrean Ideas are reflected in etherial “Matter,” which in turn are the etherial Ideas that are reflected in material Matter. But while the etherial “Matter” is also a passive recipient of Ideas, isn’t quite the same as material Matter: while material Matter is utterly destitute of all qualities, etherial “Matter” occupies a middle ground and is only destitute of some, but not all.

The analogy cannot, however, be extended further: there is nothing formless whatsoever in the empyrean, and so nothing that can be called “Matter” can exist there.

II v: On Potentiality and Actuality

(26 May 2022.)

II v: On Potentiality and Actuality

Matter is potential: it has no actuality of itself. It serves only to give rise to actuality in the Ideas presented to it. But the Matter itself does not actualize: the actualization is in the fusion of Matter and Idea.

But we have said that there is no Matter in the empyrean, and so there is no potential there: everything is actual.

I had made an offhand comment a while back to @boccaderlupo, that I have the impression that souls enter the material world specifically in order to change: that is, that the divine part of one is essentially static, and that if it wishes to become something else it must enter the world of change in order to do so.

This vague notion dovetails nicely with what Plotinos is saying: there is no potentiality in the empyrean, everything there is actuality. Plotinos doesn’t say so himself, but I suspect this is why there is a material world at all, and why we are here in it: if a soul wishes to explore some potential—that is, be other than it already is—the only way to do so is to first create that potential in the lower worlds, become that potential in actuality, and then raise back up into the upper worlds. But this is fraught: the material world has bonds of karma, and in order to set up one’s desired patterns of potential, one necessarily must generate lots—certainly many lifetimes’ worth!—of “bad” karma, meaning that one “gets stuck” here in the material until those bonds are resolved. If you clear your karma, you get to leave materiality behind and go home.

But this is just saying the same thing, of resolving the potential into actuality. If you clear the karma, you’ve turned the potential into actuality, and there’s no reason for you to be in the material any more, having accomplished the original goal.

If that’s all right, what we label karma (and, indeed, “evil”) is simply our lack of perspective enforced by time. With an angel’s eyes, we see that there was purpose behind it all. And not just the purpose of the gods: but our own purposes also. I think it also explains why some people are so hellbent on making a mess of their own lives and the lives of people around them: they are busily setting up the karmic bonds they need in order to actualize their desired potential. (Similarly, people who are heaven-bent (?) on cleaning up their own lives and the lives of others are busily tearing down those karmic bonds and getting ready to move on.)

As a corollary, I suspect that the more sophisticated of an actuality that one desires, the more karma it takes to get there. In a sense we should not envy those hypothetical blessed souls who spend less time in incarnation: if we are here longer, it is precisely because we are striving for a more complex end.

II vi: Quality and Form-Idea

(28 May 2022.)

A very short, but very difficult tractate: not because the concepts themselves are difficult, but because the ramifications of them are sprawling, complex, and many-faceted.

II vi: Quality and Form-Idea

A quality is something that is not essential to a thing. For example, paper may have the quality of being “colorful,” because if lost its color, it would still be paper; but a rainbow cannot be said to have the quality of being “colorful,” because if it weren’t colorful, it wouldn’t be a rainbow.

Qualities, therefore, may only exist where there is the potential for the quality to exist, and they are therefore limited to the lower worlds. We might say of fire that it is warm, it is bright, it is destructive, etc., and of a material fire that may be so. But let us consider ideal Fire: it has no potential, only actuality; it does not have qualities, it acts. Rather than being warm, it warms; rather than being bright, it brightens; rather than being destructive, it destroys; etc.

The lower worlds aren’t Real because they have a qualified existence; Reality is that which exists of itself.

Our souls reside, of course, in the empyrean, and so one wonders what one’s own Real form is when all quality is stripped away.

II vii: On Complete Transfusion

(28 May 2022.)

This is a strange little tractate, concerned strictly with physics rather than metaphysics.

II vii: On Complete Transfusion

Even though physical objects possess bodies, their qualities and, indeed, Matter itself is bodiless. So there is no reason why two bodies—say, two fluids—may not be mixed, since their bodies may be disintegrated into Matter and reintegrated into a mixed form either combining the qualities of the two, or else being re-Mattered anew as their Ideals dictate, depending on the circumstance.

II viii: Why Distant Objects Appear Small

(28 May 2022.)

II viii: Why Distant Objects Appear Small

The more distant an object, the more concentrated that object’s light must be to fit into a pupil. This concentration strips the apparent qualities (magnitude, color, detail, etc.) from an object.

II ix: [Against the Gnostics]

(2 Jun 2022.)

This tractate is much lengthier than those that came before, and I found it beautiful in two ways: first, it contains something of a summary of Plotinos’s worldview, and second, because it contains some very clear and stirring analogies. These are interspersed with a long list of arguments against specific Gnostic teachings, which I have generally skipped over in my summary, but I found reading them interesting—and even funny at times! It is worth reading in the original, and I especially liked §13, §16, and §18.

II ix: [Against the Gnostics]

In the teachings given by the ancients and proven by myriad means elsewhere, there are three transcendent principles: the One (the ineffable unity beyond all things), Beauty (the definition of form), and the World Soul (the definition of animation). The cosmos ultimately comes from the interplay of these. Of ourselves, we too possess a soul, part of which dwells with the World Soul in Beauty and part of which dwells within the body. It is true that the body weighs down the soul, but the soul can never become what it is not: the light of the Divine suffuses the entire cosmos—even, though it be dimmer, here in the material world. Therefore everything that exists partakes of the Divine and exists eternally, without beginning or end: even material forms which may be destroyed get recycled into new images of what they were!

The Gnostics reject these teachings and despise the world as an evil image of a higher world. But if this world is evil, it must be patterned on evil, all the way up to the Highest. If that’s the case, it is hopeless to conceive of “escape:” why would you want to live in a purer version of the world you hate? Won’t you just hate it more? In this and many other ways, their teachings are incoherent.

One doesn’t find light by running away from darkness: if it is all around you, where would you run? And anyway, you would probably just trip over something. If you want light, you should light a lamp! In the same way, merely hating evil does not make one good: rather than leading you to a better world, it will just lead you in circles and trip you up. One should instead take some positive action and love the good things in this world: by doing so, one prepares themselves to love the good things in the higher world.

And with that, we conclude the second ennead and the first third of the text. My bookmark looks to only be about of fifth of the way through the book, though, so the tractates ahead are likely longer and more challenging than those we’ve passed already!

III i: Fate

(3 Jun 2022.)

III i: Fate

Recall that Soul is the cause of motion. This is true both directly and indirectly, for a chain of effects follow from every cause. But this chain of effects can limit the range of motion of one’s future actions, and we call this Fate: our best and truest actions are when our soul is free to act according to its reason, but we may be compelled to act in a certain manner contrary to reason due to the effects of prior actions.

There are many souls in the world, from the World Soul all the way down to the individual souls of people and lesser things, and so when multiple souls interact (again, either directly or indirectly), there must be some negotiation and compromise between them, with greater souls having proportionally greater bargaining power. So the wise and good are better able to express their own soul’s power regardless of circumstance; in lesser beings, the power to act comes occasionally in those moments when they are less bound by Fate; and finally in the least of all, there is no power to act and the chains of fate are total.

I find the notion compelling that our souls accept to enter bodies with various compromises—made necessary by prior actions—in order to express some particular act of their own. So if you hate your body, remember that you yourself picked it for a reason. What was the reason? Figure it out and you’re one step closer to making body and soul one. And you remember where that leads, don’t you?

III ii: On Providence (1)

(16 Jun 2022.)

III ii: On Providence (1)

The world is the product of both Reason and Necessity. Being a divine creation and perfect, the world is beautiful as a whole: though the parts of it that are of Necessity may be ugly. But is it fair to denigrate the whole because of a part? Is blessed Achilles to be condemned because of Thersites, “the ugliest man who came to Troy?”

Life in this world may be likened to a play. The World Soul is the playwright, individual souls are actors, bodies are the characters those actors play, and the material world is the stage. But the greatest plays require drama, and the harm or even the death of characters. But does this trouble the actors? Of course not—they play their parts to the best of their ability, appreciating that the travails of their character are necessary to the story. And if a character dies, what is it to the actor? They simply go backstage, change their costume and makeup, and play a new character in the next act—just as souls do when they take on new bodies. And neither should we consider the actors passive: they did not write their role, sure, but they have considerable freedom to act and improvise within the bounds of the story, and so the greatest actors are celebrated nearly as highly as the playwright themselves.

If this is not enough to go on, let us consider an example: why do the wicked prosper? Because they do the work, of course! The gods help those who help themselves: do you think that if a man who, depraved of morals, has nonetheless trained his body or mind to be strong should have any trouble despoiling those who have not? Even such a man is not pure wickedness, for the discipline and practice it takes to strengthen himself is good! If you wish to protect yourself from him, follow his example and take matters into your own hands—see, the gymnasium and the academy are there before you!—rather than blame Providence for your feebleness.

For sake of sightseeing, let me call out some sections of particular interest: §3, where the material world pleads its nobility, is moving; §13 has an excellent description of karma; and Plotinos’s elegant analogy of the play is from §15.

III iii: On Providence (2)

(22 Jun 2022.)

III iii: On Providence (2)

Continuing from the previous discussion, is it strange, then, to consider the world good while it contains things that may do evil? Wouldn’t it make more sense to consider the world both good and evil?

Consider a general leading an army: he makes plans and manages logistics, yet it is up to the soldiers to carry out those plans. Certainly a general is honored or criticised for the course of the war, but this does not mean we do not award medals to a particularly gallant soldier or that we do not court-martial a soldier derelict in his duties. In our case, the general—the World Soul—is at once doing its duty while some soldiers—individual souls—are derelict in theirs. Providence is when the general takes those soldiers, sets them to hard labor, corrects them, restores them to rank, and at last allows them to demonstrate their own courage and valor again.

To put it another way, a soul might be weighted down by Matter and placed into circumstances that might drive it to do good or evil; but it is well said that an anchorite makes a tavern his cell and a drunk makes a cell his tavern. A mighty soul can do good work even with poor materials, while a feeble soul might struggle even with the finest. But we do not criticize a plant for failing to be an animal, and neither should we criticize a soul for being anything other than what it is. Instead, we should take a wider view: where does a plant or an animal fit into an ecosystem? Where does an evil act fit into a life or series of lives? Where does a soul, be it weak or strong, fit into the World Soul?

Some more sightseeing: §4 calls back to a discussion we had on whether beastly men can reincarnate into beastly bodies (Plotinos follows Platon and disagrees with Proklos and Sallustios), §5 gives a good summary of the entire discussion of Providence in Plotinos’s words, and §6 has an interesting digression on how divination works at the boundary of Providence and Necessity (which reminds me of how Stephen Wolfram is always going on about how everything interesting happens at the boundary of order and chaos).

III iv: Our Tutelary Spirit

(25 Jun 2022.)

III iv: Our Tutelary Spirit

Things of the material world, as we have said, are lifeless. Things of the etherial world can take on several forms, for example: the vegetative, which grows; the sensitive, which responds to stimuli; and the reasoning, which thinks. Humans are a composite of all of these, with the soul overseeing all: not unfailingly, as the lower may overwhelm the higher, but the quality of a person is whichever of these is dominant.

A soul moves to orbit that which it desires, and this motion is the means by which it produces. But the production of a soul is a body, and so a soul which is disembodied must necessarily take on a body of some sort again. If a soul is focused vegetatively, it will take on a plant body; if a soul is focused sensitively, it will take on an animal body; if a soul is focused rationally, it will take on a human body. Note well that this is by choice: the soul takes on the body appropriate to its own desires.

So what is one’s daimon? It is the being that the soul orbits, the immediate source of it’s motion, and is always of a higher sort (since that is the soul’s connection to the One). So a vegetative soul orbits a sensitive soul, a sensitive soul orbits a rational soul, and a rational soul orbits a still higher soul. If a soul follows its daimon’s guidance and rises to its level, it must obtain a daimon of a higher level; but if a soul sinks itself into a lower character, then it will obtain a daimon of that lower level.

But what of these higher-than-rational daimons? They are of an empyrean rather than an aetheric character, and if one’s soul rises back to such a level, then the body it produces can no longer be a material one.

I posted The Myth of Er yesterday, as—in my opinion—it is of a piece with this tractate and provides crucial context. (Plotinos also calls out the Timaios in §5 and the Phaido in §6... I have a hardcopy of Platon now, and will get there...)

For some additional context, Porphurios says in his biography of Plotinos (§10):

In fact Plotinos possessed by birth something more than is accorded to other men. An Egyptian priest who had arrived in Rome and, through some friend, had been presented to the philosopher, became desirous of displaying his powers to him, and he offered to evoke a visible manifestation of Plotinos’s presiding spirit. Plotinos readily consented and the evocation was made in the Temple of Isis, the only place, they say, which the Egyptian could find pure in Rome.

At the summons a Divinity appeared, not a being of the spirit-ranks, and the Egyptian exclaimed: “You are singularly graced; the guiding-spirit within you is not of the lower degree but a God.” It was not possible, however, to interrogate or even to contemplate this God any further, for the priest’s assistant, who had been holding the birds to prevent them flying away, strangled them, whether through jealousy or in terror. Thus Plotinos had for indwelling spirit a Being of the more divine degree, and he kept his own divine spirit unceasingly intent upon that inner presence. It was this preoccupation that led him to write his treatise upon Our Tutelary Spirit, an essay in the explanation of the differences among spirit-guides.

And this is exactly what Plotinos himself expresses in this tractate: his soul was already brushing the upper bound of the etherial, and so his daimon could not be any denizen of the etherial, but must instead be a denizen of they empyrean: that is, as the Egyptian said, no mere spirit but a God. And so, having attained the level of his daimon, when he finally “quitted the tomb that held his lofty soul,” he went on to “spend his days among the Ever-Holy.”

It is worth noting that some authors equate the “higher self” and one’s daimon: Plotinos emphatically does not, drawing a distinction between one’s own soul and the soul it strives to emulate.

MACKENNA ALSO SAYS “EVIL-LIVER”

III v: On Love

(1 Jul 2022.)

III v: On Love

Love is simply the action of the soul: when we say that soul moves in orbits, the soul is the lover, the focus of the orbit the beloved, and the gravitational attraction binding one to the other is desire.

This is what is meant when the Theologists speak of Aphrodite: Aphrodite Ourania is the highest divine Soul itself, being the daughter of Kronos, the highest divine Mind. Aphrodite Pandemos is a lower divine soul, being the daughter of Zeus, the demiurge. Eros, said to be Aphrodite’s son, is the desire that prompts Her motion.

Lower souls act in imitation of these higher ones: we have spoken of this process already, and this is why Eros is said by Platon to be a daimon: He is the production of a soul, and a production must be of a lower category. In this sense, Eros is not one but many: just as superdivine Aphrodite begets a divine Eros, so too does a divine soul—like our own—beget a daimonic Eros in imitation of Her.

So too does Platon speak of Poverty and Plenty and the garden of Zeus and so on: these are not meant literally, but as metaphors for this process by which the soul imitates and strives toward the Good.

I think it’s elegant how Plotinos makes Ouranos to be that which is beyond, Kronos to be the definition of Beauty, Aphrodite Ourania is the most beautiful thing so defined, and Eros to be the mediator by which She operates, weaving all the while a fractal universe out of this. (The above is the hypercosmic order; the same process repeats a level down to produce the cosmic; the same process repeats a level down to produce the microcosmic; etc.) In a sense, Plotinos’s whole philosophy is a philosophy of Love. Plotinos’s own discussion of this is in §§2–4.

As for Platon, well, Diotima did say that she was speaking of the “higher mysteries” of Love, so I guess Plotinos is justified in taking her words to be veiled. Still, as an open and frank person, I rather dislike it. Plotinos’s unpacking of Platon begins in §5.

III vi: The Impassivity of the Unembodied

(9 Jul 2022.)

III vi: The Impassivity of the Unembodied

Consider a mirror: it reflects the image of other objects, but it is in no way affected by doing so. The reflected image comes from the mirror, and not from outside of it, and may be colored by the qualities and fineness of the mirror.

When we spoke of Matter earlier, this is why we called it a reflection: the Ideal does not break apart and enter into Matter, but rather Matter reflects the Ideal, giving rise to the corporeal images we see, and this reflection is the best one possible given the nature of Matter. But Matter itself is not affected: it is permanent and changeless; it is the images reflected in matter that are ceaselessly changing form, in the same way that the reflected image in a mirror may move while the mirror itself is stationary.

This is the same as how transient feelings of the body may be reflected in the eternal soul. For example, suppose one is looking at a statue. The image of that statue is transmitted to the eye and stimulates the body, but this stimulation comes from within the body itself: no piece of the statue enters the body. The body therefore reflects the image of the statue. In the same way in turn, the body stimulates the soul: the mind’s image of the statue is formed within itself out of it’s own mind-stuff by observing the body. The soul therefore reflects the image of the body’s reflected image of the statue. No piece of the body is transported to the soul, and certainly no piece of the statue is, either—the soul already had the capacity for apprehending the image of the statue within it.

This tractate clarifies for me Plotinos’s stance on evil. It is like seeing a woman in a mirror: the mirror may reflect her beauty, but that doesn’t make the mirror itself beautiful. In the same way, Matter is “evil” in the sense that it reflects the Good, but is not itself Good. He discusses this in §11.

I also like how this makes sense of the paradoxical feeling I’ve always had that the world we see with our eyes is simultaneously solid on the one hand and illusory in the other. It’s like how if you hold up a black piece of paper to a mirror—temporarily halting it from reflecting light—you can see scratches or whatever in the mirror’s surface. Similarly, if you could somehow take away everything that Matter reflects, then you’d be able to peel back the illusion and see Matter itself! Just one problem: there’d be no you left to see, hence there’s no way to peel back the illusion (from this side of the mirror, at least), and so it has the appearance of reality. Plotinos discusses this in §13.

III vii: Time and Eternity

(10 Jul 2022.)

III vii: Time and Eternity

Recall from our earlier discussion that the Intellect desires itself and is thus motionless, while Soul desires the Intellect and thus orbits It.

The Intellect is self-complete and unified, needing nothing outside Itself and not being divided into states. Consequently, It has no future or past existence, but always merely Is. Hence we say It is eternal: the only state It possesses is “now” and Its productive Act is timeless.

Soul’s productive Act, on the other hand, is Its motion. We have already said that this motion is what generates the Cosmos, but it is also what generates Time: we might say that the cause of the motion is Desire, the motion itself is Time, and what that motion produces is the Cosmos. We hasten to note that despite Time consisting of a succession of states, Soul itself (being the Production of the Intellect) is timeless: It already contains all possible states within It; but from the perspective of an individual soul within Soul, latent states appear to actualize in succession, just as how with individual souls, latent states are seen to actualize, but this does not imply a change in the soul.

We must also note that, just as the Soul has Its Time, individual souls have their own individual times, hence why each soul perceives Time individually. This also accounts for why Space, being a part of the static Intellect, is easily quantified and measured; meanwhile Time, being a part of the mobile Soul—a moving target!—is difficult to apprehend.

(Sorry for being inconsistent in nomenclature: I refer to the ineffable variously as the One and the Good, I refer to the Nous variously as the Intellect or Beauty or the Ideal, and I refer to the highest Soul variously as the World Soul or simply Soul. In my defense, MacKenna is no better.)

Plotinos offhandedly mentions how we can know that our soul is eternal (and therefore divine) in §7. (Talk about burying the lede! But then, I suppose the fourth ennead is about the soul, so perhaps we’re just not there yet.)

Time’s account of its birth is Plotinos at his best, and can be found in §11.

III viii: Nature, Contemplation, and the One

(22 Jul 2022.)

Here, Plotinos revisits the core idea of his philosophy—emanation and the One—but in a little bit deeper detail.

III viii: Nature, Contemplation, and the One

All things are fundamentally consciousness. Consider by way of analogy a young man entering the workforce: a sharp student may be satisfied with simply thinking about things, but even a dull student who takes to manual labor is directed in his actions by his mind. And too, after he had done a good day’s work, does he not rest satisfied with his work? And is not satisfaction also in the mind? So we can see that action is the byproduct of thought, beginning in thought and ending in thought.

Let’s take a step up from the man and look at Nature generally as another example. It may be unreasoning in how it procreates, but Nature is simply following the forms that exist in the mind of Nature’s Ideal. And there the Ideal rests, thinking it’s many thoughts, and Nature as a result fills the universe to the brim with the expression of these thoughts in their varied forms, so that the thoughts may be—so far as possible—endless.

We can repeat this and sketch how it is so all the way up to Soul Itself. But what is the limit? Things far from the source act limply and blindly as it were, carrying out their source’s knowing without realizing it, but the closer one gets to the source, the greater the unification of Knower and Known. We see the highest form of this in the Ideal, which contemplates only Itself. But even this is divided, ever so slightly: it has a subject to do the thinking and an object to be thought of. There must be a perfect Unity which has neither and therefore transcend knowledge. But being so, there is nothing more we can know or say about It.

I like how a natural consequence of Plotinos’s “unification of Knower and Known” principle implies how meditation is the way to return to the source: self-knowledge is that most like the Ideal.

III ix: Detached Considerations

(24 Jul 2022.)

This is a funny little tractate that seems almost as if it is just a series of scraps—mere reminders of topics for Plotinos to treat more fully elsewhere. (Please note that I present these various notes in a different order from Plotinos, so that they form a logical progression from the One, to the Ideal, to Soul, and finally to individual souls.)

III ix: Detached Considerations

1. The One is not a transcendant God; rather It transcends even the Gods. The One can’t be conscious, since It is the source of consciousness; It can’t be alive, since It is the source of Life; It can’t even Be, since It is the source of Being.

2. The One is un-self-conscious, while the Ideal is self-conscious. (The reason for this is that self-consciousness implies both a subject and object of consciousness; a distinction, and the One is without distinction.) The Ideal is less perfect than the One, since it must be satisfied with Knowing rather than being satisfied without.

3. The One becomes Many by being everywhere, since by being everywhere, it is also nowhere: this distinction becomes the source of many others.

4. By thinking about ourselves, it is clear there is simultaneously a thinker (at rest) and a thought (an action). Since that action pertains to a living being, from this root we can now rest on certain ground by positing Thought (e.g. the Ideal) and Life (e.g. Soul) as Real Things, and that actions proceed from thought.

5. Reality is that which is perfect. Therefore, Real things are those that do not change.

6. Even though the Ideal possesses distinction (of knower and known), this distinction is not a separation: it is, after all, reflecting upon itself. Separation begins with Soul, and thus the Universe, with its many and varied forms, is a product of Soul.

7. Just as Matter is matter to Soul, Soul is matter to the Ideal.

8. Consider geometry: even though it consists of many propositions, it is not shattered into pieces by this. Geometry is a whole thing, and in each of these many propositions the whole is latent.

In the same way, a person may consist of many thoughts and actions, but he or she is not broken into pieces by this; no, in each thought and action is latent the True Being, the soul within. By reflecting on this latent Whole, one more closely unites with It, and draws closer to illumination from Its Source, Soul itself.

And with that, we are now halfway through the Enneads! I note, however, that my bookmark is only perhaps a third of the way through the book; from this I infer that the later material is more difficult than that which we have covered already.

IV i: On the Essence of the Soul (1)

(24 Jul 2022.)

IV i: On the Essence of the Soul (1)

While the Ideal admits distinction (of Knower and Known), separation is alien to It: It is still too close to the One for such a thing. Separation, rather, is the thing of Soul. But since the nature of the Ideal is unity, souls are unified within the Ideal; but since the nature of Soul is separation, souls “descend” into bodies that they may be separate. But this “descending” is not a complete separation: the soul simultaneously exists above, unified in the Ideal, and below, separated in Matter. Each separate part has the Whole latent within it.

HEN TO PAN 🐍

IV ii: On the Essence of the Soul (2)

(24 Jul 2022.)

IV ii: On the Essence of the Soul (2)

We have said that the nature of Soul is division, but let us be more precise. It is the nature of bodies (not Matter itself, but imprinted upon Matter) to be divided, since they stand opposite to the One, Whose nature is unity. It is Soul that bridges this gap, and so it must, in fact, possess both natures: it is both unified and divided at once. This division is not, however, because Soul is cut up into many pieces, but rather that it is clothed in many bodies; but it is the bodies, and not Soul, that is divided. And so we can see that there is a smooth continuum from top to bottom: the One is one, Soul is one in many, souls are many as one, and bodies are strictly many.

It was nice to have a few short tractates to rest myself upon, but the next will like as not take me awhile, as it is three times as long as average!

IV iii: Problems of the Soul (1)

(23 Aug 2022.)

Phew, this chapter took me a month! To be honest, it isn’t really any more difficult that the rest of Plotinos’s work has been (though that’s not to say it’s easy, just that it’s the usual difficultly level): it’s simply very lengthy, and my mind has not been strong with allergy season. Consequently, I took a slightly different tack with my summary of the chapter, by treating it like a Q&A session, which helped me to break summarizing it up into more manageable chunks. (This isn’t so odd as it sounds: Plotinos’s essays came out of discussions he held with his students, and so his writing lends itself to the format.)

IV iii: Problems of the Soul (1)

Where does the soul reside? [§1–3]

The Soul entire—not the soul of any body in particular—is a Divine Idea, and thereby resides strictly in the Ideal.

But the Soul is divided into parts: not like we might divide a bottle of wine among cups, as the Soul is not a thing of quantity, but rather the parts are a continuum of specializations of the whole, like how the life in one’s finger is a specialization of the life in one’s whole. The Soul entire is like the mind of the body—detatched from the physical thing, in a sense—while it’s various constituents together animate the body but still all function together as a whole.

How is it that One be simultaneously Many? [§4–5]

The Soul entire is the expression of everything that is in the Mind of God, but individual souls are the expression of specific ideas. Socrates, we might say, is the expression of Socrates-ness: this Socrates-ness may have many relations to Idea entire—being a partial expression of human-ness and philosopher-ness and pest-ness and so on—but we must say that these higher Ideas encompass the Idea of Socrates-ness. The expression of one entails the expression of the other. So the individual isn’t completely divided from the whole: it stands intermediate between pure unity and pure division.

How is it that the Soul produced a body—the Cosmos—but that individual souls merely inhabit bodies? [§6–8]

This is in regards to a difference in scale. In the same way that the Sun is massive enough to fuse and produce light but the other planets are not, some souls are nearer to the Source—that is, less differentiated—and therefore possess greater expressive potency while others are more distant—that is, more differentiated—and possess lesser potency.

How does the incorporeal Soul descend to matter? [§9–17]

Souls do not act upon bodies as a craftsman creates by art, that is to say, by design; rather it is their natural expression to do so, and they are driven by a sort of instinct or urge to do it—it is an innate capacity that they must do because they contain it. All must descend through the heavenly spheres in this process, colored thereby as they invest themselves with bodies; some souls retain a memory of the world above and draw back from impulse, descending only lightly and taking on ephemeral bodies that they might not linger here too long; while other souls are so caught up in instinct that they descend so forcefully into the lowest and heaviest of corporeal forms, too forgetful to even attempt to return upwards. So to some degree, every soul is responsible for it’s condition, though we would do well to remember that a great deal of happenstance is also involved in the fine details, and that it is not right to, say, blame a person for being born into a condition of poverty.

Do disembodied souls think? [§18]

No. Thinking is what embodied souls do, groping about in their perplexity, swathed in matter and unable to see far. Souls themselves know, instantly and intuitively: nothing is hidden from them.

Are the incorporeal and corporeal phases of Soul the same, or is the latter posterior to the former? [§19]

The cannot be the same, since the former is indivisible, while the latter is divided amongst bodies. So they are distinct, but certainly they can mix to a greater or lesser degree.

How does the soul inhabit a body? [§20–23]

We should be careful of terminology. We say “inhabit” out of convenience and analogy, but souls are incorporeal and don’t exist in space. It is perhaps better to say that a soul “illuminates” a body as light passes through air: the air itself is transparent and not affected by the light, but things in the illuminated space are lit, while things without are unlit. So the body and it’s varied organs and senses, are all illuminated as a group by a soul, and reflect its light according to their peculiar natures.

Where does a soul go after death? [§24]

Souls naturally gravitate to things like itself. If this world and its attachments remain appropriate to a soul, then it will return here; but if not it will be drawn somewhere more appropriate to it. But where is that? Who can say? The space available to souls is vast and diverse. We can only say that Providence is just, and that those who seek, find.

Do the souls of the dead remember their lives? [§25–32]

Memory implies something learned or experienced, and so memory must only be possible where there are state changes and time. This means that the higher phase of the Soul, which is eternal, has no memory, only knowledge. So the things fundamental to the Soul—that divine Idea that the Soul uniquely expresses—are not remembered but are known, fundamentally contained within it’s Being.

The lower phase of the Soul, acting in concert with its body, may certainly be said to have memory, indeed it has memory of not only its bodily experiences but also a dim recollection of its existence in the higher phase. The memory of both the higher Soul and the body are in tension: the better one remembers the body, the more forgetful one is of Soul; and the better one remembers the Soul, the more forgetful one is of the body.

Therefore we might say that holiest people are the most forgetful: those souls who remember their lives are those likely to return to them, but those that do not have found their way to the Ideal.

IV iv: Problems of the Soul (2)

(14 Oct 2022.)

The last couple months have been extremely challenging: I apologize for the hiatus.

IV iv: Problems of the Soul (2)

What do souls do in the Intellectual Realm? [§1]

Recall that there is no change in Eternity, and so there is no notion of change or growth or progress in the Intellectual Realm. Souls who reside there therefore have no memory of of their experience here; instead, they ceaselessly contemplate the Object of their desire, and in so doing give rise to the world we see before us now.

Do souls remember their personalities? [§2–5]

No, the personality is a property of fusion of the soul and the body; it is a thing given to the soul by the spheres of the planets as the soul descends to the earth, and does not exist beyond those spheres. Soul itself is pure awareness or consciousness, intent on the object of its vision. We see this when soul is intent upon a body (it becomes wholly identified with that body), or when one is in an ecstatic state (it becomes wholly and unselfconsciously engrossed in the vision).

Indeed, the degree to which a soul remembers its personalities is precisely the same as the degree to which it is bound to those personalities, which makes the soul distant from the Intellectual Realm.

If souls do not remember their personalities, what do they remember? [§6–15]

By way of example, let us consider the planets—for they, after all, are eternal. Firstly, they lack nothing: so it is impossible for them to learn, since they already have all knowledge. But that knowledge is all one to them: if you ask them what happened yesterday or last year, this is but an artificial distinction we have placed on their motion; to them, it is all a part of a single continuous act. Secondly, they are not even looking at us: their attention is directed upwards towards higher things, and the effects they have upon us are incidental; another way to say this is that their spatial motion is not their essential motion, but rather a secondary one, amply apparent to us but beneath consideration to them, in just the same way we decide where we are going but pay no attention to each and every movement of our feet.

So much for the planets, but let us take a step higher: does not Zeus order and preside over all things? Must not the One who creates each thing remember everything He created? But if the universe itself is unlimited, then one cannot enumerate everything in it, even in theory—so how could even Zeus be conscious of each and every thing? Rather, He knows the universe as a single eternal life, indeed as a part of His own eternal life. Therefore He is aware of it as a whole, but not as a thing of process; having no changing state, He can not be said to be learning or remembering, only knowing.

And what of the All-Soul itself? Recall that the All-Soul is that which produces time; It is not in time, rather some of Its products are. And so the All-Soul, too, has no memory of specific moments or temporal processes; rather it knows its own great Life as an unbroken whole.

So eternal souls do not remember specific events or processes; rather they know, completely, the whole of their unique life.

How can souls be without memory if they have motion, which implies being in some sequence of ordered states? [§16]

The soul’s motion is circular, orbiting a fixed center. So while the soul has motion, it is not perceived by the soul itself, intent as it is upon the center of its orbit: its motion is only perceptible from below the soul, by the personality.

How is it that our eternal souls are timeless, and yet we are blind to the future and filled with misgivings? [§17]

This is because the spirit connecting soul to body is pulled in so many directions by the soul, by the body, by the many and varied sensations clamoring in upon it. It is as if the soul is like a wise man in a public meeting who offers sound counsel, but is drowned out by the braying of the many coarse and foolish. The intuition of the future and the peace that attends it is there for the taking, if only we are able to calm the crowd and listen to it.

Does the body have a life of its own, separate from the soul? [§18–39]

Of course it does—for everything we see, even a corpse or a stone, is brought into being through the power of Soul and must contain some grade of life, however small. We call such things “dead” or “inanimate” because we do not see them move, but in truth even these have a hidden life within them that our senses are not keen enough to discern.

Are we so proud as to think that our own life, such a pale imitation of the Soul as it is, is so far superior to cells or proteins or minerals? No, in the same way that the salts that energize our cells are beneath our own notice, so too are we to that Greater Life in which we play a very, very small part.

How do magic spells work? [§40–45]

When one plucks a string, not only the part plucked but the whole string vibrates together. Further, not only does the string vibrate, but vibrations are induced in others at a distance and they may be swayed by the sound.

The Cosmos operates in the same way: all things are, at root, the disparate parts of that One Body, and the vibration of any one part may affect the Whole in some greater or smaller way. This is really no different than the means by which astrology operates: the planets do not exert their forces upon us directly, but indicate the conditions of the Whole that affect the earth no less than the heavens.

Do we not see this in nature? It is clear that the Moon exerts a force upon the oceans, or the Sun upon the Earth, or a beautiful woman upon a man, even at a great distance. Should we be so surprised that one who has carefully studied such things might induce a similar effect by some artificial means?

And should we be surprised that even the wicked may obtain their petitions from the gods and spirits? After all, the sun shines upon saints and sinners alike, and there is no natural law barring the wicked from drawing water from rivers.

But recall that the soul is eternal and is not affected by change. So a magician might affect the body, but not the soul. But what does the true philosopher care for the body? Such a person is intent only upon the soul, ceaselessly contemplating it—and no magic can affect that. The magician who causes the philosopher physical disease, then, does no harm and perhaps only speeds the philosopher on his way.

It may seem a little odd that Plotinos jumps right from the nature of life to magic, but I think this is because of the silly worldview foisted upon us by modern Western culture. Indeed, Plotinos makes a sweeping summary of his worldview at the end of this tractate, and it seems to me that it flows very naturally from point to point.

IV v: [On Sight]

(15 Oct 2022.)

This is another brief tractate primarily concerned with physics rather than metaphysics.

IV v: [On Sight]

We hold that sight operates through the sympathy of observer and object; for both are part of the same Cosmic Body, enjoined by the unity of Soul, and this is the only way we can see of dealing with the many difficulties presented by a more mechanical explanation (such as some kind of contact occurring between observer and object). However, it is clear that this sympathy is carried out through the operation of the observer’s bodily sense organs with light acting as an intermediary, and that light needs no other medium (such as air or water) for its operation.

Hearing operates similarly to sight, except that air itself—rather than light—acts as an intermediary. However, while it is obvious how air can transmit volume, it is less clear how it can transmit quality of sound, or timbre. By this we suppose that, just like with sight, sympathy of the soul with the cause of the sound must transmit this information.

On the side I’ve been picking at Porphurios’s Sentences. One of them has been giving me trouble, reading thus (tr. John Dillon):

VI. It is not the case that everything which operates on another thing produces the effects that it produces by contiguity and contact; in fact, even those things which operate by contiguity and contact only employ contiguity incidentally.

I wonder if this “sympathy of soul” is what is being talked about?

IV vi: Perception and Memory

(16 Oct 2022.)

IV vi: Perception and Memory

We are used to thinking of perception as a passive ability, but it is not: rather, it is the sensation occurring within the body itself that is passive, but the perception of that sensation is an active power of the soul. The things perceived exist within the mind—that is, are Intellectual—and thus already exist within the soul. By moving ones inner focus towards the perception—that is, remembering it—one brings the soul closer to its native province, and thus it makes greater power of it’s innate ability to Know, and so the memory becomes more vivid.

As evidence of this, consider that the memory is exercised in just the same way as any other active power: those who memorize much, making use of mnemonics and the like, find it easier and easier to remember things even without the use of such tools. If the memory were passive, then those of the weakest mental faculty would be the ones who had the best memory, and we don’t see this at all: rather, the use of memory fades just as the use of muscle does, in the sick or the lazy or the elderly.

IV vii: The Immortality of the Soul

(17 Oct 2022.)

IV vii: The Immortality of the Soul

Suppose a human to be entirely immortal. But, it is self-evident that bodies are mortal. Since a human is at least partly composed of body, a human must not be entirely immortal.

Suppose a human to be entirely mortal. This presupposes that the life-giving faculty is corporeal, that matter is all there is. But a great many arguments refute this. How can nonliving parts assemble into a living whole? How can entropy produce order? How can passivity produce activity? How can that which is self-interested act ascetically or selflessly? How can anything eternal, like geometrical objects, exist in a sea of ceaseless change?

If neither of these cases are possible, then the only possibility remaining is that a human consists of both mortal and immortal parts.

Sightseeing time: §15 contains Plotinos at his best, where he sets aside his proof that the soul is eternal and instead describes what the eternal soul is like, while §19 indicates that Plotinos considers the souls of plants and animals to be no less divine than our own.

IV viii: The Soul’s Descent into Body

(23 Oct 2022.)

This tractate opens thus:

Many times it has happened: lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-encentered; beholding a marvellous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine; stationing within It by having attained that activity; poised above whatsoever within the Intellectual is less than the Supreme: yet, there comes the moment of descent from intellection to reasoning, and after that sojourn in the divine, I ask myself how it happens that I can now be descending, and how did the soul ever enter into my body, the soul which, even within the body, is the high thing it has shown itself to be.

Do not stop there, Plotinos—I beg you to continue! But he does not—this essay is about the nature of the soul and what Platon says about it, and not about Plotinos’s own ecstatic experiences. Alas! I long for missives from the Beyond—but I suppose it is impossible to give voice to the ineffable, and I must patiently await my own turn.

IV viii: The Soul’s Descent into Body

In the Intelligible, there is the Intellect itself, but also smaller intellects within It; as if it is some mighty Organism made up of smaller cells. The whole Organism has it’s own purpose, and while It’s cells share in that purpose, they have also a separate, more specialized purpose (or else they would not be distinct from the Whole). These cells are lower souls, including human souls, which both work towards the purpose of the whole—intellection—but also administer their own little spheres.

This dual purpose is like two forces tugging at souls, one downwards into the realm of actualization, and one upwards towards return to the realm of potentiality. So a soul descends into matter, returns into intellect, back and forth and back and forth, corresponding to the unique nature and degree of purity of that soul.

The many ways in which the ancients describe this process—whether as a voluntary undertaking to create the world, or as a punishment for the sin of turning away from the Source, or as an involuntary result of necessity—are all looking at this same process from different perspectives. It is voluntary as souls all bring it about by their own actions, but it is involuntary as these actions are according to an inherent tendency in the soul’s own nature.

IV ix: Are All Souls One?

(25 Oct 2022.)

IV ix: Are All Souls One?

The Soul is an ideal-form, not a body—it cannot be cut up into little pieces. This ideal suffuses everything derived from it, but is also eternal and complete. In this way it is something like geometry, where geometry itself is a whole and unified thing, and the many propositions of geometry are not, and yet within every proposition of geometry the whole is latent. Individual souls are specializations of the Soul, but while each possesses a unique identity, are all still part of a great continuum: there are no firm boundaries between soul and soul.

Indeed, this principle seems to explain many phenomena, such as how one can themselves feel sympathy pain at the sight of another’s or how magic spells can operate even over distances.

I might say that, to Plotinos, the light emanating from the sun may also be called the sun. We are trained to think of light as interchangeable—as if the source of that light is irrelevant and it is merely an inert messenger—but is it? Certainly sunlight seems to affect things in ways that other lights do not...

So, in that sense, what you give voice to is you, is it not? One should be careful what one does, or says, or even thinks.

V i: The Three Initial Hypostases

(5 Nov 2022.)

V i: The Three Initial Hypostases

As below, so above: we can extrapolate the basics of the nature of the divine realms by looking within. We are alive, and one precedes many, so ontologically there must be one Great Life that precedes and empowers the many lives we see around us. Since even the gods have life, then this Great Life must be the greatest God of them all, and our own small lives must share in its nature (even if in a much smaller way).

But the gods, even the greatest among them, must have an archetype, since potential precedes actualization. Thus there is a Father of the Gods standing above them and providing the substrate of Being in which life participates.

But even this has a limitation, in that there is the distinction between the substrate and that which rests upon it. Distinction is not primal, since, as we have said, one precedes many. So there must be Something beyond distinction, standing above even the Father of the Gods, but since we can only understand things by distinction, whatever It is must be beyond our understanding.

Now, returning to ourselves: how is it, that if we are divine, we concern ourselves with the material rather than the divine? It is because the material is the act of the soul, and indeed the way in which it attempts to apprehend what it greater than it. But the soul is a lofty thing, should we not honor it as highly as any other divinity? Therefore it is only right for one to turn their attentions from the material and back to their eternal home, bringing the soul’s act to completion.

For some sightseeing, Plotinos goes to some effort in §8–9 to demonstrate that his interpretation of Platon regarding his Trinity is in full accord with the philosophy of the ancients and not merely some invention of his own. I’m not well-versed enough in Platon, Aristoteles, Anaxagoras, or Heraclitus to comment on those parts of his defense; but I did find it interesting that he equates the One and Mind with Empedocles’s Love and Strife, respectively.

V ii: The Origin and Order of Beings Following on the First

(5 Nov 2022.)

V ii: The Origin and Order of Beings Following on the First

As we have stated elsewhere, the One is everything and the origin of everything. The byproduct of the One’s self-completeness is the divine Mind. The byproduct of the Mind’s self-contemplation is the Soul. The byproduct of the Soul’s motion is Nature. But note that none of these are separate: everything is composed of its priors, just as its posteriors are composed of it. At the highest levels, there is only the barest distinction between them.

What’s more, spatial extent and position is below all of them. Suppose one cuts off the limb of a tree: what becomes of the soul that was “within” it? Well, the soul remains where it was: it is the body that it severed. In the exact same way, the bodies of material beings are all distinct, but the souls “within” them are all connected. Ultimately, all life is one Life, even if it manifests in many and varied ways.

V ii: The Knowing Hypostases and the Transcendent

(4 Mar 2023.)

...and we’re back! I apologize—mostly to myself, though you have my apologies as well—for the long hiatus; in my defense, I’ve had quite a few major crises (and a baby) in the four months since I last posted on Plotinos. Still, “the Road goes ever on and on,” and things are settling enough that I have managed—slowly and with difficulty, but successfully!—to get over the hump of the next tractate. If you were waiting for me, thank you for your patience.

This essay, discussing the nature of the Intellect and it’s connection to the One, isn’t new material—rather, it’s the primary discussion and proofs of principles already discussed elsewhere. Let’s hop in!

V iii: The Knowing Hypostases and the Transcendent

We have already established that there is a Soul, so let us begin there. The Soul, as we have stated elsewhere, deals with externals. But the Soul isn’t external to itself, so it can’t know itself, except as reflected through externals. But since self-sufficiency is Greater than other-dependency, there must be a Higher Principle that can Know itself.

But this Higher Principle is greater than the greatest God, and so must be perfect—knowing everything knowable about Itself. The only way this is possible is if the Knower and the Known are one and the same; thus the Knowing, which it must Know about, is also the same as it. Another way to put this is that It is that which Thinks Itself into Existence, hence we call it the Intellect, Being, and Truth; for, being self-sufficient, it is the original of which all else must be a copy.

But as we have established, while the Intellect is unitary, it also possesses distinctions—of Knower and Known, for example—so, because the one must precede the many, it is not absolutely primary. Thus there must be an even HIGHER PRINCIPLE that is an ABSOLUTE SIMPLEX in every way. But it is difficult to speak about such a thing: being above Existence, it cannot be said to Exist (or not-Exist); being above Knowledge, It cannot be said to Know (or not-Know); indeed, it is impossible to assert anything about It whatsoever, since for an assertion to having any meaning, it must contain distinctions, which is not possible in the case of the Absolute.

How, then, can we come to know It? If we are part of Soul, and Soul is part of Intellect, and Intellect is part of the Absolute, then we must participate in the Absolute in some small way: if you cut away the part of yourself that is body, that is Soul, that is Intellect, what remains must be the Absolute.

Sightseeing time!

§5 gives Plotinos’s proof that the Intellect must be unitary. I’ve seen another proof of this, relying on Information Theory, given (with very lengthy and gratuitous polemics against creationism, sorry) by Robert G. Brown.

§13 begins with a remarkable parallel to Laozi: “The Tao that can be spoken of is not the eternal Tao.”

§§14–17 give a whirlwind tour of Plotinos’s mysticism: tracing oneself back to their very core of Being, and then Beyond. I find the last three paragraphs to be haunting.

V iv: How the Secondaries Rise from the First, and on the One

(6 Mar 2023.)

A very short tractate to follow on from the previous. I note, though, that the respite is to be short-lived: indeed, the sixth ennead alone comprises an entire third of the text!

V iv: How the Secondaries Rise from the First, and on the One

The One, being absolutely simple, must be the first thing, since there is nothing simpler that could precede it. But how can absolute simplicity give rise to complexity?

As we have already said, the Intellect is the first (and only, so to speak) thing that Exists: whatever It produces must come from It. But since the Intellect, being perfect, cannot change, then Its production doesn’t change It, but rather is the same as the process of generation itself. We analogize this with the image of a fire: the fire produces heat even though it isn’t part of the fire itself, but rather part of the process of burning.

Since the Intellect is an image of the One, the One must be the original of this behavior. But since the Intellect is the definition of what Exists, the One must transcend existence. But the One is nonetheless identical with the Intellect: the One is everything, and the Intellect is everything that Exists (which is to say, everything, or else we are just playing rhetorical tricks). So the Intellect is, in a sense, the Unreal coming to Know Itself, thus making it Real.

That is to say, the One is everything in an un-self-conscious mode; as soon as consciousness (which can, at first, only be self-consciousness, since there’s no other yet) is introduced, it’s the Intellect.

V v: On the Nature of the Good

(10 Mar 2023.)

My copy of Thomas Taylor’s translation of Plotinos arrived in the mail; it appears that Taylor translated fully half of the essays that make up the Enneads (twenty-six completely and one in paraphrase, out of 6×9=54 total). After some consideration, I’ve decided to keep going with MacKenna for now: if I added in cross-referencing against Taylor and his extensive footnotes and commentary, I’d never finish! No, I will complete a first pass of Plotinos tabula rasa, and use Taylor for the second pass.

This has made me consider what I will do after I complete the Enneads: shall I immediately go back over Taylor’s? Probably not right away, since it would be good to get some more breadth before I go deeper. Shall I proceed to Porphurios? Ha, who am I kidding, I couldn’t restrain myself: I’ve already read almost all of Porphurios and indeed went over the Sentences four or five times. (Incidentally, Porphurios is just so easy to read. What a masterful writer he is!) No, I tentatively think my next step shall be Proklos’s Elements, and maybe I’ll do a series on it here, too.

It’s interesting; I spent my early spiritual life going deep on the Taoists, but that’s not hard as there’s very, very little in English. For want of material, I moved on to Zen, filling my shelves with the masters of that great tradition. When I moved a couple years ago, though, I had to sacrifice all of my books. Therefore, I’ve had to refill my shelves again from scratch. As a nod to my “Taoist phase,” I repurchased the Tao Te Ching; as a nod to my “Zen phase,” I repurchased Zen Flesh, Zen Bones; but the rest of my “spirituality shelf” is presently filled with the Pythagorean tradition from Empedocles to Proklos. “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven” [NB: video link].

Enough. Let’s proceed:

V v: That the Intellectual Beings are not Outside the Intellectual-Principle: and on the Nature of the Good

The One is indefinable, illimitable: we cannot say what it is; we can only what it is not. The Intellect is Being, so the One (being above It) neither exists nor is nonexistent. The Intellect is Truth, so the One can neither be true nor false. The Intellect is Form, so the One is neither beautiful nor ugly. Indeed, the only way to speak about the One is to remain silent.

If you wish to step beyond Body and contemplate the Soul, you must lay aside sensation, for the Soul transcends it. Similarly, if you wish to step beyond Soul and contemplate the Intellect, you must lay aside reason, for the Intellect transcends it. Further, if you wish to step beyond Intellect and contemplate the One, you must lay aside definition, for the One transcends it.

As such, those few who glimpse Intellect are awed by Its beauty and become obsessed with Its pursuit; but those who glimpse the One think nothing of it, for how could they?—It is always with them! By this we can safely judge that the Intellect is later than the One, since it requires more sophistication to appreciate.

Some miscellaneous thoughts as I went through this tractate:

• It occurs to me, again and again, that the genius of Plotinos’s system is how he has elegantly set up his definitions and axioms such that it makes it not only possible but convenient to prove so much about the nature of higher realities. (One must accept his axioms, of course, but they are quite reasonable if one accepts mysticism at all.) One wonders to what degree his mysticism informed his logic, and to what degree his logic informed his mysticism.

• Plotinos here says the Intellect is the definition of limit, and has previously compared the Intellect to Kronos (that is, Saturn, the astrological lord of limit).

• So much of this tractate reminds me of the Zen teachings I’ve studied. In §6: “If we are led to think positively of The One, name and thing, there would be more truth in silence” sounds so much to me like Gutei’s Finger; “for [the One] is a principle not to be conveyed by any sound; it cannot be known on any hearing” sounds so much to me like The Sound of One Hand Clapping; the process of walking back from the body, to the Soul, to the Intellect, and finally to the One is so similar to the Ten Bulls; and the beginning of §8 reminds me of the haiku of Basho: “Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.”

• §13 nicely summarizes the entire tractate.

V vi: What Being has Intellection Primarily and What Being has It Secondarily

(12 Mar 2023.)

Several eternities ago, when I was in Sunday School—I must have been nine or ten—the church elder instructing us mentioned that the doctrine of the Trinity was not to be found in the Bible. I raised my hand and, when called upon, asked him, “By what authority do you teach something that doesn’t come from the Bible? Also, if the Trinity doesn’t come from the Bible, where does it come from?”

Of course, he told me to shut up.

Since then, I’ve always wondered where the doctrine came from, since it always seemed bizarre to me. I still don’t have the “where,” but at least Plotinos is good enough to tell us “why” with his usual logical rigor.

V vi: That the Principle Transcending Being has no Intellectual Act. What Being has Intellection Primarily and What Being has It Secondarily.

1. There is an Intellect.

2. Intellection implies duality (of subject and object).

3. Unity precedes multiplicity.

4. Therefore, there is something unitary prior to Intellect, something primarily Intellective (e.g. the subjective Intellect), and something secondarily Intellective (e.g. the objective Intellect; e.g. the Soul).

5. Being prior to Intellect, the First is not intellective.

6. If we consider the First to be Good, the Second is only Good to the degree it is intellective of the First, and the Third is only Good to the degree it is intellective of the Second, and so on.

Point 6, above, is of course why Plotinos considers matter to be evil: something can only be good in participating with that which is above it. Don’t look down!

Plotinos gives us a very elegant analogy in §4: the One is light, the Intellect is the sun (something giving off light), and Soul is the moon (something reflecting light).

Incidentally, most modern commentators describe Plotinos as advocating a trinitarian view; I don’t believe this is so! While he only proves the top three here, both he and Porphurios frequently refer to the four highest beings: the One, the Intellect, Soul, and Nature. (Unless I am much mistaken, Plotinos likens these to the Hesiodic Ouranos, Kronos, Aphrodite Ourania, and Eros, respectively.) What’s more, it’s hard not to see the Pythagorean one-two-three-four and the Empedoclean fire-air-water-earth in these. (One might think this sequence can continue indefinitely, but Plotinos explicitly says it does not: beyond this, the creative power is spent and too weak to continue further; all that remains is to play with every possible combination of principles within these.)

While playing around with these notions, I found a neat geometric correspondence. If one wishes to produce a tetractys with circles alone, it takes six circles, to wit:

Note how we are given two points to begin the construction with. We might as well assign these to the dyadic Intellect, right?—since where else would we assign them? But this is kinda like how Plotinos proves the whole structure also beginning with the Intellect.

V vii: Is There an Ideal Archetype of Particular Beings?

(15 Mar 2023.)

I feel like I have misunderstood or butchered this tractate, but I do not wish to get hung up on it; here is my best guess for the moment, and I’ll have to return to it some other time when my understanding is deeper.

(That’s true of every tractate, I suppose. I’m just saying it’s extra true of this one.)

V vii: Is There an Ideal Archetype of Particular Beings?

Where does a person’s characteristics come from? We hold, of course, that bodies are reflections in matter of souls, so the soul must contain that information—but we also hold that soul contains the entire scope of possibility in the Cosmos, so this isn’t much help.

Since an individual doesn’t resemble all possible individuals, only some of the characteristics latent in the soul must be active at a time; further, since children resemble their parents, the characteristics active must come, in part, from those parents. This does not imply that the parent’s souls exist prior to the child’s or that the parents are more archetypal than the child, for if this were the case there would be a degeneration over time and we have already established the eternity of the Cosmos. No, it simply that some amount of communication or deference to their the parent’s souls is held by the child’s for a time.

But what of twins or the many puppies of a litter—they appear to be the same, so do they have the same soul? No, that cannot be: even if they superficially appear to be the same, they have different bodies and thoughts and actions and so on. We suppose that the Intellect, working out all the unique possibilities in the world, produces a soul unique to each of those possibilities, and those souls are what inhabit the bodies.

That there could be limitless possibilities and therefore unlimited souls should be of no concern to us, as the Intellect is the definition of limit: this would simply imply that the Intellect is unlimited in scope, too.

V viii: On the Intellectual Beauty

(18 Mar 2023.)

V viii: On the Intellectual Beauty

Suppose one has two blocks of stone, one unworked and the other carved into the shape of a woman. Which is more beautiful? As a stone, of course, neither is—they’re just rock, and equally effective at holding up a roof or whatever. But to us, the viewer, the woman is the more beautiful; this is not due to any property of the stone, but rather due something in us: we see a reflection, however, dim, of some beauty within ourselves.

Now suppose the woman was living, rather than stone. Even if her form were identical to the statue, would not the living woman be more beautiful? But of course, her beauty isn’t a property of her blood or cells or whatever; it is that she, being alive, provides a less dim reflection of that inner Beauty. This is because we are no longer looking at a reflection in the mirror of Matter, but rather in the mirror of Nature, which is a higher reality.

In the same way, the mirror of Soul is higher still. So it was that Socrates, famously ugly in body, was enchanting to all who met him.

Beauty is not some property that things can possess: it is something in which we participate, and this is the Intellect. But we despair of describing it, for it is the very beauty of the gods themselves! Here we can only see a reproduction of things, like a photograph; there it is the thing itself and you have no need of eyes to see nor light to illuminate, for all there is unity and you perceive all without need of such crude apparatuses.

So here we have a trail of breadcrumbs from the world of Matter, to Nature, to the Soul, to the Intellect: by grasping how each relates to its prior, you can, in contemplation, walk yourself back, step by step, from the chair upon which you sit to the throne of God.

This is a moving tractate, among the best, and I recommend reading the original since my summary cannot do it justice. §4 has Plotinos speaking of what heaven is and is like. §§9–11 describe, in detail, Plotinos’s method of meditation. §13 reiterates Plotinos’s likening of Ouranos to the One, Kronos to the Intellect, and Aphrodite to the Soul, which we last saw in III v; and also includes the essential point that “we ourselves possess beauty when we are true to our own being; our ugliness is in going over to [self-ignorance].” Don’t let others think for you!

V ix: The Intellectual-Principle, the Ideas, and the Authentic Existence

(24 Mar 2023.)

V ix: The Intellectual-Principle, the Ideas, and the Authentic Existence

The basic pattern of the cosmos is Idea (potential, pattern) and Matter (action, form). The One is Idea to the Matter of the Intellect; the Intellect is Idea to the Matter of the Soul; the Soul is Idea to the Matter of Nature. We take as axiomatic that the prior is more perfect than the posterior, therefore any beauty that exists in the lower must be patterned on the higher.

We see bodies both beautiful and ugly, and so beauty must not be inherent to Nature: it must come from above, and any ugliness must be due to defects inherent in Nature. Similarly with Soul, we see souls both beautiful and ugly, and so beauty must again come from above, and any ugliness must be due to defects inherent in Soul. But we cannot apply this reasoning any higher: there is only one Intellect, so it cannot be some-beautiful and some-ugly; it must only be beautiful. Indeed, other considerations make it out to be the definition of beauty.

Since this beauty is prior to Nature, it is not possible to grasp it with the senses; and since this beauty is prior to Soul, it is not possible to grasp it with reason. It can only properly be understood by the power peculiar to it’s own sphere; that is, unification. Still, let us make the attempt as far as we may. Consider the arts: those that are imitative of senses, like painting or sculpting, must belong to the sphere of senses. However, those that generalize from the senses—for example, music, which considers the harmonies and rhythms in nature and generalizes them to something that does not exist in nature—must have their root in a higher sphere. And then there are those that exist midway, for example medicine: it draws on theory from a higher world, but makes its application here in the world of sense.

Thus we see that the Intellect is the sphere of universals, rather than particulars. There is no ideal Socrates: rather, there is an ideal archetype of which Socrates is a particular. But of things that are in some way corrupt, these are defects in particulars rather than defects in the universal. So a child isn’t born diseased because their soul is a disease-soul; no, the disease is the result of some necessary defect in Nature, perhaps caused by accident, perhaps caused by the free will of some misguided person. Their soul, their archetype, is unaffected by such things and will go on to attempt to produce a body free of disease when the present one expires.

I want to call out §10, where Plotinos discusses physical maladies as a defect of expression of an ideal, rather than as a defective ideal. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, as more and more children are being born diseased, crippled, or generally unable to function; I see this in myself (I am very sickly), in the local area, and in the many children on @tunesmyth’s prayer lists who are suffering egregiously. These children aren’t born harmed because of vengeful gods or demons or whatever: they’re born harmed because we’re poisoning them. That is, we ourselves—both individually and collectively—bear the karma of their suffering. Prayer is good, and we should pray for their well-being—but if we do that while still continuing to douse our lawns and crops with toxic chemicals or participating in communities that cause harm, then our prayers may well be for naught.

I must direct you all to Porphurios’s beautiful letter to his wife, where he goes on at length about this. “No god is responsible for a man’s evils, for he has chosen his lot himself. The prayer which is accompanied by base actions is impure, and therefore not acceptable to God; but that which is accompanied by noble actions is pure, and at the same time acceptable.”

Live pure in mind, simply in body, and make all effort, so that you may yourself be a worthy offering to Divinity.

VI i: On the Kinds of Being (1)

(25 Mar 2023.)

We have entered upon the final Ennead! To be honest I didn’t think it’d take me nearly a year to get this far—the book is not a large one—but it requires a tremendous amount of intellectual energy merely to engage with. Looking back over my summaries so far, I see a rather embarrassing number of obvious mistakes, inconsistencies, and attempted-shoehorning of Plotinos’s position into ill-fitting schema. I reiterate my plea that if you find any of this interesting, that you please attempt to read Plotinos directly, rather than trust my summaries. I will need to do another pass over them at some point and correct myself.

Anyway, to business: you will have to forgive my glossing over this chapter, which is a primarily a critique of Aristoteles’s Categories: Aristoteles is the second most important contributor to Western thought, the Categories are perhaps his most enduring and controversial contribution, I have studied neither, and the discussion is of a highly technical nature. I’m simply not up to the task with the knowledge I presently possess.

VI i: On the Kinds of Being (1)

Aristoteles posits ten “categories” for things that exist by examining how we communicate about them. But communication isn’t the same as reality, and the analysis applied to one can’t necessarily by applied to the other; indeed, even under generous assumptions, doing so sometimes produces absurdities. So while these categories may have logical merit, and indeed provide a useful starting place for investigation of what actually exists, we must dismiss Aristoteles’s classification as inaccurate.

In a similar manner, the Stoics posit four categories for things that exist. However, their error is more fundamental: underlying their choice of categories is the assumption that matter is the all that exists, which we have refuted at great length elsewhere. Even granting this, however, the ontological problems present in their scheme are insurmountable. Therefore, we must dismiss the Stoic classification as well.

Call me petty, but I was rather amused by Plotinos’s dressing-down of the Stoics in §§26–28.

VI ii: On the Kinds of Being (2)

(2 May 2023.)

Sheesh, you guys: here I am, quitting my job so I can both parent and study philosophy properly, and then I get so sick that I can’t do either! I’m still something of a mess but slowly chipping away at the brain fog: luckily, this tractate is much easier than the prior one, and can be understood in terms of Plotinos’s metaphysics on its own, without necessary recourse to prior writers. (Of course, I imagine I’d get much more out of it if I was familiar with Aristoteles, but...)

VI ii: On the Kinds of Being (2)

So after dismissing the predominant views of what is Real, what is our view? We find five categories of things:

• Being must self-exist before anything else can have existence.

• Motion and Stability are how the Intellect has intellection: it is one Being, and thus stable in Its totality, but It has many Motions as that one Being attempts to apprehend every aspect of Itself.

• Identity and Difference are inherent in the very discussion of one and many: for how are we to distinguish many from one unless each of these has some individual identity and has some difference between them?

All five of these must arise together. Being is, in a sense, inherently fundamental and primary, but Being cannot Be without the other four, and so those “secondaries” are also fundamental. In this way the Intellect is a plurality in a unity.

Some of Aristoteles’s categories, such as Quantity, Quality, and Relation, cannot be fundamental categories since they are all conditional on identity and difference: one cannot count things or differentiate their qualities or relate things to each other unless they are different. Hence these categories must be secondary, and thus in a sense illusory: they are not self-existent. Others, such as Magnitude, Place, and Time, are even more illusory, being conditional upon the secondary categories. Various other proposed categories, such as Unity or Goodness or Beauty, are found to either be identical to one of the five already proposed or subsequent to them, depending on how the terms are used.

It occurs to me that the five Real categories are reflected, at a much lower level, as the elements: Being corresponds to “spirit,” and the other four correspond to the classical elements.

For sightseeing: §20–23 describes how the purely-potential Intellect unfolds into the purely-actual intellects. §21, in particular, is beautiful, and it seems to me that it must be inspired by one of Plotinos’s ecstatic visionary experiences, as it reads very much like some of the transcendent NDE’s I’ve read about, but with a great deal more intellectual rigor.

VI iii: On the Kinds of Being (3)

(4 May 2023.)

This tractate is similar to the first one in the series: very technical, and well beyond my comprehension. I gave it the “old college try,” but ultimately I’m rather lost—I think I need to study where all this comes from any why—and so this is a gloss at best.

VI iii: On the Kinds of Being (3)

We have discussed what categories are Real—that is, exist in the intellectual world. But what of the sensible world—do the same categories apply? We believe not, as Matter is too distorted and fragmented to admit the possibility of Stability and Identity, but there are analagous categories that seem to fit:

Substance is the reflection of Being in the sensible world, but it not Being itself, as the things of the sensible world are only illusory. It is that which can not be predicated of anything else. (That is, “white” is not substance, because one may reasonably say “X is white,” but “Socrates” is substance, because one may not reasonably say “X is Socrates” unless X is Socrates himself.) This may be Matter itself, the Form imposed upon Matter, or any combination thereof.

Relation is any accidental feature of a combined substance (not Matter, as Matter is featureless; and not Form, as Form is governed by the Real categories previously mentioned). While “Relation” is something of a catch-all category, there are three more precise kinds of relations: Quantity, Quality, and Motion. (We notably omit the Aristotelian Time as being measurable and hence a Quantity, and the Aristotelian Space as being a property of something else, and hence a Quality.)

It is essential to be extremely particular in assessing any particular predicate: even the same word may refer to a Substance, a Quantity, or a Quality depending on how it is used.

Several centuries ago when we were working our way through On the Gods and the World, there was some discussion of how “motion,” to the Greeks, isn’t what we colloquially refer to as “motion,” today. Plotinos gives his own definition in this tractate: “the passage from potentiality to realization.” (MacKenna kindly translates what we think of motion—that is, movement in space—as “locomotion.”)

Some of the later sections in the tractate speak of how Plotinos considers Forms to imbue Matter with qualities—for example, where sensual beauty comes from, given that the Intellectual beauty is not sensual—but I had a very hard time understanding it and will need to return to it some other time.

VI iv: On the Integral Omnipresence of the Authentic-Existent (1)

(5 May 2023.)

Porphurios writes in his Sentences (I–III):

Spatial position and extent are properties of bodies; incorporeal things do not possess these properties and are therefore omnipresent. As such, they are not physically located within a body, but rather “illuminate” that body in their own peculiar manner when they so choose.

Once the assertion is made, it seems self-evident to me: soul exists at a level of reality higher than space does (e.g. soul is prior to nature) and so seems to need no justification. (After all, no matter how quickly a body moves in space, the soul seems to always be present to animate it; further, my angel’s Presence seems to be a function of my mental state, rather than my physical location.) And yet Porphurios clearly needed justification, since this essay happens to be the very first one he pestered Plotinos to write:

After coming to know [Plotinos], I passed six years in close relation with him. Many question were threshed out in the Conferences of those six years and, under persuasion from Amelius and myself, he composed two treatises [which I have collected as Enneads VI iv–v].

(Porphurios, Life of Plotinos §5.)

In any case, let’s look at what Plotinos has to say on the matter:

VI iv: On the Integral Omnipresence of the Authentic-Existent (1)

Space requires division, since an object being in a location implies that the object is not in others, and that there is space which contains that object and space which does not. But recall that the nature of the intelligible world is unity, while the nature of the sensible world is division. It is not possible to divide things so in the intelligible world—therefore, the intelligible world is not spatial.

So even though we say that the intelligible world “contains” the sensible world, this is not meant in the sense of a box which is spatially larger than its contents: rather, it is that the intelligible world is more fundamental than the sensible world, it contains the non-spatial “building blocks” of which the sensible world is composed. So we say that the sensible world “participates” in the intellectual, but something can’t participate in itself—that is simply identity rather than participation—and so space needs to be a participant in something spaceless.

This is the same as with your body and your soul: your soul isn’t some fragment broken off of Soul itself, but rather a unique range in the continuum of Soul. That soul is eternal, godlike—it is only when it deigns to allow the body to participate in it that it is lost in individuality of the body. By withdrawing again to itself, heedless of the clamoring of the body with its pleasures and pains, it again takes up its rightful estate within the Soul, not separate from any other part of it but unified and whole again.

I had been wondering about where the Homeric shade fits into the system of Plotinos. He goes ahead and lays it out for us in §16: assuming I understand aright, it is the reflection of soul in the sensible world—that is to say, the spirit mediating between the unified soul and the fragmented body. It sticks around so long as the soul allows the body to participate in it—when the soul withdraws to itself, the spirit ceases to have something to reflect and disappears.

VI v: On the Integral Omnipresence of the Authentic-Existent (2)

(9 May 2023.)

Plotinos struggles in this chapter, his analogies are difficult to follow. Alas, the curse of a mystic: when one beholds the world where all is one, how is one to communicate it here, where everything is separate? Examples do no good unless you have experienced it yourself; but if you have experienced it yourself, the example is useless.

VI v: On the Integral Omnipresence of the Authentic-Existent (2)

Because the intellectual world is omnipresent, It is not illuminating the sensible world from somewhere off above, but imminent and supporting it everywhere all at once. Material things always “touch” their Ideas, not by physical contact (for Ideas are not spatial), but by relation to Them. The Idea (again, having no extent) doesn’t “give” anything of Itself to Matter, but rather Matter is allowed to participate in the Idea, live the Idea, and thus become a temporary image of It in such ways it can.

When we say “live the Idea,” that’s not mere rhetoric—participation in the intellectual realm is mediated through Soul, that One Life in which we all share. But Life isn’t limited, available in this place but not that one—no, It too is infinite by Its participation in the intellectual world, you possess It within you, and It is there with you everywhere you go. You don’t return to the intellectual world by leaving here and going off somewhere else: you are already within It by virtue of being alive, upheld by It at every moment.

Nay, more—you are It! You have merely turned away from Yourself! Turn around, look inward again, and there You are—back Home.

I have been thinking to myself for a while that to Plotinos, Love and Truth seem to be one and the same thing—pursued as one, in tandem. I notice this in Porphurios, too; in his youth, Porphurios seemed to be motivated by Truth alone, but as he grew in Wisdom he grew in Love in equal measure. Plotinos all but makes this association explicit himself in §10.

Lest you think I am doing an injustice to Plotinos by straying into a giddy ALL ONE tirade, I refer you to §12 where he does as much himself.

HEN TO PAN 🐍

VI vi: On Numbers

(12 May 2023.)

This was a very valuable tractate to me, I think, clarifying a lot of the moving pieces in Plotinos’s cosmology and helping to see how they all fit together. It’s another one I recommend in full, though I imagine it’s not very accessible without first having read a lot of the others: Porphurios says he placed the more difficult essays later in the text, and that seems the case to me as well.

VI vi: On Numbers

We have elsewhere expressed a definite ordering of principles: the One, the Intellect, the Soul, etc., and there we stated that the Intellect was dual. This must imply that Number transcends the Intellect, for how can something be “dual” before there is “two?” Consequently we must assume that Number is latent within the One, and the Intellect is the expression or unfolding of Number. That is to say, the Intellect is the reflection of Number, and each Idea is the reflection of a particular number.

This is why number is such a slippery thing: if you have ten objects, those are merely objects; they each exist due to their participation in Being, and they each have their own unity due to their participation in the One. But when we count them, it is we who are making the statement: the objects each have their individual existences, but the ten exists within our minds, which is itself a reflection of the true Ten in the Intellect. You have given Life to that ten by counting them, but if you had merely been content with your own Being, resting within your own unity, you wouldn’t have been counting anything! So while Number has true existence (in the One), knowledge of Number is a lesser thing (in the Intellect), and the process of working with Number is a lesser thing still (in the Soul).

What of “infinity?” We take it that the Intellect is limitless in scope, and that all numbers must exist there; but it is not possible to count them up, since individual souls must be limited by whatever number is involved in their composition. Thus infinity exists, but you cannot, say, count to it.

Plotinos uses the term “henad” a lot in this tractate, and by it he just means a reflection of the One at a given level of existence: the One is the original henad (and, of course, the henad at its own level of existence), the Intellect is the henad of the Intellectual level of existence, the Soul is the henad of the Psychic level of existence, etc. But of course, the whole universe is reproduced at each level from this henad—at least, in the best way that henad is able. Indeed, even individual souls are the henad of the microcosmic universe within, which is the basis of Plotinian mysticism: it is why you can look within yourself to find the All. Nowadays we might simply say that the cosmos is fractal at all scales.

This principle is usually stated in Neoplatonism as “All is in all, but each in a manner appropriate to each.” This formulation is commonly cited from Proklos (Elements of Theology CIII) but is due to Porphurios (Sentences X, but be advised that many manuscripts badly mangle it: hence, for example, Thomas Taylor’s translation is nonsensical). §7 contains the principle in Plotinos’s own words.

I had been wondering about Turing Machines and Oracle Machines before. It’s nice to see Plotinos directly answer my questions in §18.

VI vii: How the Multiplicity of the Ideal-Forms Came into Being, and upon the Good

(16 May 2023.)

This tractate is extremely long, and feels to me more like two, one following on from the other. I have broken up my summary in two to help keep it more manageable!

VI vii: How the Multiplicity of the Ideal-Forms Came into Being, and upon the Good

How the Multiplicity of Ideal-Forms Came into Being [§1–16]

We have a conundrum: you have senses; these senses are only of use in the sensible realm; these senses must be patterned on Ideas; but the sense-Ideas must themselves be of no use, since one does not need senses of any kind in the Intellectual realm. The obvious answer to this problem is “Providence:” the Intellect is applying forethought so that our bodies are not devoid of what they need. But this would imply that Intellect is “looking downward” towards body, which we have elsewhere discounted. So what gives?

Our position is that, being in the unitary and infinite Intellectual realm, all souls possess all potentials. This is because a soul isn’t specifically an angel-soul or a human-soul or a horse-soul; the soul is one fundamental thing, and rather the form it takes it a reflection of it’s “level” within Soul itself: a soul may take on a human body if it is at a human level, but if that soul becomes so degraded as to no longer be worthy of that level, it might take on a horse body as it no longer has the strength, the light, the essential power to take on a higher. Thus the soul must have the capacity for all the life forms of which it may take.

Returning to the question of senses, the soul’s capacities must include the imaginative capacities which act in response to the senses: the visionary capacity, the auditory capacity, the tactile capacity, and even capacities of which we cannot conceive. These must have use in the Intellectual. But the soul must also contain the patterns of physical forms themselves: the eye-Idea, the ear-Idea, the skin-Idea, and so on.

But what purpose does the eye-Idea serve in the Intellectual, where one does not need it to see? What purpose do skin-Idea serve in the Intellectual where there is no boundary between anything? Such questions are missing the point: the purpose they serve in the Intellectual is not to serve the individual; they exist because they can exist. In the Intellectual, their purpose is to satisfy completeness, since the Intellect must contain all that can be.

Thus, in the sensible world, the body simply takes out of the vastness of the soul the forms appropriate to its level and needs: here eyes, there wings, here gills, there hooves. In this we see that manifest providence of the Intellect: the One pours down upon it so abundantly that even It, the mighty Intellect, cannot keep it all together as One but expresses it in tremendous diversity. But all this diversity is Good, in that it is the Good made diverse.

On the Good [§17–42]

But why is the Good, good? Because everything pursues it’s own good, even here in our world (if only haltingly and meanderingly); by induction, this process can only terminate if its last step in circular and the ultimate Good pursues only itself. So the Good is good to everything, but indirectly; the closer something is to the Good, the more it participates in the Good, and this is the way by which we may call some things Better than others.

And what of evil? As we have said, evil is the negation of all that is good, and so since good is, evil is not. Thus while we might suppose that evil desires the absence of good, this is not correct: evil is not able to desire anything.

One might say that good, obtained, results in pleasure; but we reject this: especially so in the case of bodily pleasure, for in the same way that True Beauty must be much more beautiful than bodily beauty, we might say that True Pleasure must be much more pleasant than bodily pleasure. No, we say that the Good is that which is desirable for its own sake, and we desire It because we cannot help but desire It, much like falling in love.

I gather than while Platon, Plotinos, and Porphurios assert that the soul can reincarnate into all kinds of things (depending on how focused or dissipated they are); Sallustios and Proklos vehemently disagree with them. (My personal inclination is to side with Plotinos here, but my angel suggests that there are, in fact, different categories of souls. So I suppose my not-deeply-considered position is somewhere in between the two camps.)

§22 and §31–35 feature Plotinos at his best again, caught up in rapture of the Highest.

Plotinos displays a cute rhetorical flourish in §38. We have said that the One, being Good, transcends duality and thus cannot be predicated. Thus, how can we say that the Good is good? Plotinos points out that the only way this is possible is if the subject and object are the same: that is, we are really saying “the Good is the Good,” which is no different than simply saying “the Good is,” which is, in fact, the only statement about the One that can be made.

VI viii: On Free-Will and the Will of the One

(17 May 2023.)

My friends, we have come upon the penultimate tractate! I did not expect that reading Plotinos would be such an undertaking, such an initiation—and yet here I am, different than when we started.

But I am premature. Let us finish, first:

VI viii: On Free-Will and the Will of the One

Will is the capacity to pursue one’s desires. We hold that the exercise of free will is good and, therefore, the Intellect is the only thing with utterly unconstrained free will, being the only Being in unfettered contact with the One. The gods and other Intellectual beings possess free will to the degree they participate in the Good, but this freedom is subject to their peculiar natures. The human, being amphibious, possesses free will to the degree that they participate in the Intellectual and subject their passions to wisdom, but does not possess free will as they are subject to the passions and demands of the sensible. So an animal or even a man who has entirely subjected himself to the bodily passions possesses very little freedom. But since all things participate of the Good, all things possess at least a little free will, however tiny.

But the One transcends all this. It cannot be said to be free because It cannot be said to be anything at all. It cannot be said to possess will because It cannot be said to possess anything at all. It is far too august to discuss: we can merely remain silent in our awe.

Poor Plotinos! From §13 on, he attempts in various ways to express the inexpressible, but always he comes back to “It is, and there’s no more to be said.”

I return to Plotinos’s analogy that the One is light, the Intellect is the Sun, and the Soul is the Moon. We can say what the Moon is. We can even approximately say what the Sun is, though our understanding of it is slight. But light? What is light? We haven’t the slightest idea, and the more we try to figure it out, the more confused we become. All the rules break when you get to light, and all you can really do is see it.

VI ix: On the Good, or the One

(18 May 2023.)

THE PLACE IS HERE

THE TIME IS NOW

LET’S DO THIS

VI ix: On the Good, or the One

Though It seems so alien to us, the One isn’t something “out there”—rather we are like children who left home, got lost, and became so distraught that we don’t even recognize our own Father. Philosophy points the way back, but that final leap can only be made by you, yourself, gathered into a microcosmic One.

The One is thus the great Mystery, because it can only be experienced but not understood or even spoken about. It is in mimicry of this that the lesser mysteries would not divulge their secrets to the uninitiated. Things here in this world such as these are like the signs written upon the walls of the great Temple, where those who are taught to read the signs may enter the holy place and commune with God.

The One is not to be made a common story—only those worthy are enabled to go behind the curtain and See. To those who have Seen, they are forever impressed by that Image—no sensation, no movement, no desire, no self, only Love and Contentment and Rest. This is the life of the gods, and this is the life of the saints: the flight of the alone to the Alone.

This is a short and moving tractate and another of those worth reading in full. For some sightseeing:

• The first few paragraphs of §1 describe a theoretical principle important beyond the realms of mysticism. Mages and suppliants, take note!

• §9 has beautiful observations of the myths of Aphrodite and the myth of Eros and Psyche. “There, the soul is the Aphrodite Ourania; here, the soul turns harlot, Aphrodite Pandemos; but the soul is always Aphrodite.” This meshes with my understanding of the myths going back all the way to Innana. Is there a Love Principle? Of course—but do not forget that you are She, for it is by forgetting that you end up here in the first place.

• §11 is a very beautiful summation and conclusion to Plotinos’s life and thought—a very good place to end his writings on.

And with that, we have completed the Enneads! Back when I had started, my angel had urged me to try and average one tractate a week, but I just missed doing so by (exactly) two weeks. Considering that I got a concussion, that my wife was in the ICU, and that we had a baby in the last year, I suppose that’s not too bad.

I think it’s going to take me some time to gather up and set into order all of my thoughts about Plotinos and do a proper retrospective, but let me say this: Mabel Collins wrote in her Light on the Path that “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear,” and Xenophon wrote in his Memorabilia that “students get nothing from a teacher with whom they are not in sympathy.” So in that sense it is not surprising that when I asked my angel, “why Plotinos?” they responded, “because you will find nothing better suited to your disposition in English.” I was simply ready to hear.

I recognize Plotinos isn’t for everyone. Indeed, Neoplatonism is so obviously not a religion for most people that it’s no wonder at all to me that it died out and was replaced with one that was! No, this is a very peculiar way of understanding the cosmos, only really suited to peculiar people. I have found it tremendously valuable and hope that you’ve gotten something out of following along—but you should not feel bad if you did not, since Plotinos assumes a worldview and a model that was very foreign to most people in his time and is only more so today.

But no matter what your disposition, keep growing, keep seeking, keep praying: Providence is just, and a teacher will be made available for you.

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