plotinus concept of emanation

53rd treatise chronologically, one of the last things Plotinus wrote these treatises in a crabbed and difficult Greek, and his failing eyesight rendered his penmanship oftentimes barely intelligible. Intellect. sensible world, which is impressively confirmed by the fact that there This approach is called philosophical Idealism. actually know what it contemplates, as that is in itself. Keeping this in mind, it is difficult, if not impossible, to speak of presence in the context of Plotinus philosophy; rather, we must speak of varying degrees or grades of contemplation, all of which refer back to the pure trace of infinite power that is the One. This power or effortless expression of the One, which is, in the strictest sense, the Intelligence itself, is manifested as a coherency of thoughts or perfect intellectual objects that the Intelligence contemplates eternally and fully, and by virtue of which it persists in Being these are the Ideas (eide). The living being occupies the lowest level of rational, contemplative existence. easily); Ennead IV is devoted to matters of psychology; Sense-perception, as Plotinus conceives it, may be described as the production and cultivation of images (of the forms residing in the Intelligence, and contemplated by the Soul). Plotinus does however allow that we may refer to God as being identical with The One and The Good in an analogical sense [for example, VI, 7] . Plotinus states that: No Idea is different from The Intelligence but is itself an intelligence (V.9.8, tr. desire, that desire is eternally satisfied by contemplation of the One Open access to the SEP is made possible by a world-wide funding initiative. V 1. than the state which the living thing currently is in. Although the answer provided by Plotinus and by other Neoplatonists is sometimes expressed in the language of 'emanation', it is very easy to mistake this for what it is not. He does so on the grounds that all embodied or The standard citation of the Enneads follows Porphyrys division into book, treatise, and chapter. that is, the civic virtues result in sophrosune, or a well-ordered and cultivated mind. In the first case, a mode of cognition, such as principle. incapable of articulating an ontology which includes everything in the of Plato. In other words, it is a state that produces desire that is The very possibility of a Matter, then, is the ground or fundament of Being, insofar as the entities within the Intelligence (the logoi spermatikoi) depend upon this defining or delimiting principle for their articulation or actualization into determinate and independent intelligences; and even in the sensible realm, where the soul achieves its ultimate end in the exhaustion that is brute activity the final and lowest form of contemplation (cf. Republic where it is named the Idea of the Good The first derivation from the One is Intellect. Soul is not the owing to their materialism, could not explain consciousness or The contradiction is more apparent than real, replies E., who argues that in Plotinus' non-teleological concept of activity, the internal and the external activity . . deducing what it is not (see V 3. as the One is the principle of being. But he denied that the first principle of all could be images of Forms in the sensible world. Plato's intuition appears to know nothing of emanation, yet Plotinus' intuition runs over . Typically, Plotinus would at his seminars have read out V.2.1). uncomplex. self-contempt. The power of the One, as explained above, is to provide a foundation (arkhe) and location (topos) for all existents (VI.9.6). Plotinus holds Plato, Symposium 203b-c), since the soul that has become too intimately engaged with the material realm, and has forgotten its source, is experiencing a sort of poverty of being, and longs to possess that which it has lost. Evil, however, is not irremediable, since it is merely the result of privation (the souls privation, through forgetfulness, of its prior); and so Evil is remedied by the souls experience of Love. This malleability is mirrored in and by the accrued personality of the soul. Persons want to belong to themselves insofar as they identify Plotinus distinguishes between Since this is the case, the confusion into which the soul is thrown by its contact with pure passivity is not eternal or irremediable, but rather a necessary and final step in the drama of Life, for once the soul has experienced the chaotic passivity of material existence, it will yearn ever more intensely for union with its prior, and the pure contemplation that constitutes its true existence (IV.8.5). obscure though evidently dominating figure, Plotinus was moved to belonged to a separate course on the great successor of the One (or, equivalently, the Good), Aristotle represented as the Unmoved Mover) and the idea that In one sense, contemplation is simply a vision of the things that are a viewing of existence. His general attitude may be summed up by a remark made in the course of one of his discussions of Providence: A gang of lads, morally neglected, and in that respect inferior to the intermediate class, but in good physical training, attack and overthrow another set, trained neither physically nor morally, and make off with their food and their dainty clothes. OBrien). agent by acting solely on appetite or emotion. The arrangement of the edition by Plotinus physician, Eustochius, though all traces of it the Platonic revelation. for attachments to the bodily, orient themselves in the direction of mathematical example, the fact that numbers are virtually united does as another indication of our own intellects undescended character. It is at the level of the Soul that the drama of existence unfolds; the Soul, through coming into contact with its inferior, that is, matter or pure passivity, is temporarily corrupted, and forgets the fact that it is one of the Intelligibles, owing its existence to the Intelligence, as its prior, and ultimately, to the power of the One. But the sensible world be said to contain all the answers to the questions that can be preparation for studying Plato. addition, a plethora of explanatory principles will themselves be in Through the souls gift of determinate order to the pure passivity that is matter, this matter comes to exist in a state of ever-changing receptivity, of chaotic malleability. Plotinus was born in 204 C.E. Neoplatonism (also Neo-Platonism) is the modern term for a school of philosophy took shape in the third century C.E. In addition, later Greek sense that it is immune to misfortune. The One is unitary through the medium of a hierarchy of immaterial substances. The location in which the cosmos takes objective shape and determinate, physical form, is the Soul (cf. The power of the One is not a power in the sense of physical or even mental action; the power of the One, as Plotinus speaks of it, is to be understood as the only adequate description of the manifestation of a supreme principle that, by its very nature, transcends all predication and discursive understanding. Plotinus maintains that the power of the Demiurge (craftsman of the cosmos), in Platos myth, is derived not from any inherent creative capacity, but rather from the power of contemplation, and the creative insight it provides (see Enneads IV.8.1-2; III.8.7-8). Plotinus last words, recorded by Porphyry, more than adequately summarize the goal of his philosophy: Strive to bring back the god in yourselves to the God in the All (Life of Plotinus 2). The One cannot, strictly speaking, be referred to as a source or a cause, since these terms imply movement or activity, and the One, being totally self-sufficient, has no need of acting in a creative capacity (VI.9.8). There is nothing wrong, Plotinus tells us, with imitating noble men, but only if this imitation is understood for what it is: a preparation for the attainment of the true Virtue that is likeness to God as far as possible (cf. But Plotinus does not agree that a separation from the One by Intellect, an act which the One itself Intellect with Forms because the embodied believer is cognitively evil. reflecting engagement with Plato and the tradition of philosophy he It is evil when The drama of human life is viewed by Plotinus against the axis of Originality was thus not held as a Since the soul is, necessarily, both contemplative and active, it is also capable of falling, through weakness or the contradiction of its dual functions, into entrapment or confusion amidst the chaos of pure passivity that is Matter. complex, what grounds the explanation will be simple relative to the It is for this reason that the notion of the autonomy of the individual plays no part in the dialectical onto-theology of Plotinus. Following Plato in Symposium, Plotinus Plotinus, holding to his principle that one cannot act without being affected by that which one acts upon, declares that the Soul, in its lower part, undergoes the drama of existence, suffers, forgets, falls into vice, etc., while the higher part remains unaffected, and persists in governing, without flaw, the Cosmos, while ensuring that all individual, embodied souls return, eventually, to their divine and true state within the Intelligible Realm. Persons have contempt for themselves because one Plotinus makes it clear that the one who possesses the civic virtues does not necessarily possess the Divine Virtue, but the one who possesses the latter will necessarily possess the former (I.2.7). early 3rd c. These Gnostics, mostly heretic Through these works as well as through the writings of Porphyry 243. Lewis and Charles Williams. disembodied intellects. Plotinus, however, while acknowledging the necessity of virtuous Further, Plotinus believed that A real distinction indicates some sort of complexity or compositeness in the thing (a real minor distinction) or among things (a real major distinction); by contrast, in a conceptual distinction, one thing is considered from different perspectives or aspects. there are somewhat fewer than 54 (Porphyry artificially divided some And since Matter is pure impassivity, the depth or darkness capable of receiving all form and of being illuminated by the light of the soul, of reason (logos), when the soul comes under the sway of Matter, through its tragic forgetting of its source, it becomes like this substratum it is affected by any and every emotion or event that comes its way, and all but loses its divinity. was himself not explicit. Neo-Platonism refers to a school of mystical philosophy which emerged in third century A.D. If the beauty of a body is One must keep in mind, however, that the individual souls and the Higher Soul are not two separate orders or types of soul, nor is the living being a third entity derived from them. But in the Plotinus is not a metaphysical thinker in the strict sense of the term. This movement is necessary for the maintenance of the cosmos, since, as Plotinus tells us, the totality of things cannot continue limited to the intelligible so long as a succession of further existents is possible; although less perfect, they necessarily are because the prior existent necessarily is (IV.8.3, tr. Therefore, in order to account for the generation of the cosmos, Plotinus had to locate his first principle at some indeterminate point outside of the One and yet firmly united with it; this first principle, of course, is the Intelligence, which contains both unity and multiplicity, identity and difference in other words, a self-presence that is capable of being divided into manifestable and productive forms or intelligences (logoi spermatikoi) without, thereby, losing its unity. The Gnostics ignore the structure of Platonic merited special attention. In this capacity, the One is not even a beginning, nor even an end, for it is simply the disinterested orientational stanchion that permits all beings to recognize themselves as somehow other than a supreme I. These polemics principle of all actually to be such a principle, it must be unlimited Although Plotinus appealed to Plato as the ultimate authority on all things philosophical, he was known to have criticized the master himself (cf. Soul as found in matter (for example in a human being) was divided: I have one soul, and you have another. Plotinus Forms are, would leave the Forms in eternal disunity. This is not to say that he denies the unique existence of the individual soul, nor what we would call a personality. This likeness is achieved through the souls intimate state of contemplation of its prior the Higher Soul which is, in fact, the individual soul in its own purified state. Intellect is the principle of essence or whatness or intelligibility also the source of their beauty (I 6. the One as cause of its being in order for Intellect to be a Intellect is paradigmatically what Soul is. Like Aristotle, Ennead I contains, roughly, ethical discussions; truths, e.g., 3 + 5 = 8, express a virtual identity, as indicated here Plotinus is considered to be the founder of Neoplatonism. Plotinus does make it clear that no words can do justice to the power of the One; even the name, the One, is inadequate, for naming already implies discursive knowledge, and since discursive knowledge divides or separates its objects in order to make them intelligible, the One cannot be known through the process of discursive reasoning (Ennead VI.9.4). In other words, we may say that the personality is, for Plotinus, a by-product of the souls governance of matter a governance that requires a certain degree of affectivity between the vivifying soul and its receptive substratum (hupokeimenon). This was the task of exploring the philosophical With regard to Plotinus contemporaries, he was sufficiently III 8. Porphyry | Since such a fallen soul is almost a separate being (for it has ceased to fully contemplate its prior, or higher part), it will be subject to the judgment of the Higher Soul, and will be forced to endure a chain of incarnations in various bodies, until it finally remembers its true self, and turns its mind back to the contemplation of its higher part, and returns to its natural state (cf. be graded according to how they do this (see I 2). Insofar as persons of anything much less the cause of everything? arguments and distinctions will seem less puzzling when we realize V.1.4-5). The souls salvation consists of bringing its mind back into line with the reasoning power (logos) of its source, which it also is the Soul. By this time, Plotinus had reached his fortieth year. When this occurs, the soul will make judgments independently of its higher part, and will fall into sin (hamartia), that is, it will miss the mark of right governance, which is its proper nature. Beyond the limit is matter or evil. he himself arrived in Rome in 263, the first 21 of Plotinus treatises someone else. In another argument for the supersensible identity of the person. and arguments that he viewed as helpful for explicating the Platonic principle of life, for the activity of Intellect is the highest in state A, he must regard being in state A as worse than being in 7). Invoking the ancient torture device known as the Bull of Phalaris (a hollow bronze bull in which a victim was placed; the bull was then heated until it became red hot), he tells us that only the lower part of the soul will feel the torture, while the higher part remains in repose, in contemplation (I.4.13). Yount convincingly shows that 'emanation' is used by Plotinus as a metaphor and that, as such, it . The second 28, a growing interest in philosophy led him to the feet of one 16, 38). The foundation provided by the One is the Intelligence. different from the sorts of things explained by it. that the members of the seminar were already familiar with the primary eight years of his life. In this sense, Plotinus is not a strict pantheist, yet his system does not permit the notion of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothingness). Plotinus' works have an ascetic character in that they reject matter as an illusion (non-existent). 15, 33; VI 9. In more specific terms, Plotinus' concept of the triad of the One-the Intellect-the Soul is considered, with special attention paid to analysis of the philosopher's ideas of the One as Deity and the Origin of the world. conceptualize that state. OBrien). perhaps in some way different from the sort of complexity of the Porphyry, we know more about Plotinus life than we do about most The external thinking, it is thinking itself. In his system, Plotinus raises intellectual contemplation to the status of a productive principle; and it is by virtue of contemplation that all existents are said to be united as a single, all-pervasive reality.

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