Plotinus

Plotinus (Greek: Πλωτίνος; Latin: Plotinus; 205-270) was a Hellenistic Greek philosopher, author of the Enneads (Ἐννεάδες; in Latin: Enneades), and founder of Neoplatonism, a current that also included Numenius of Apamea, Porphyry, Iamblichus and Proclus. He was born in Egypt and educated in Alexandria, being a student of Ammonius Saccas (who had tried to harmonize Aristotle and Plato). He eventually settled in Rome.

Plotinus' work is essentially an original commentary on Plato's works, in a much more structured way than Philo of Alexandria did. Attracted to Platonic idealism, he developed his philosophy by incorporating Christian elements with Greek and Eastern philosophical ideas.^{[citation needed ]}

His main work was the Enneads, a compilation of treatises that he began to write from the year 253 until a few months before his death, 17 years later. The task of compiling the treatises and organizing them as a book was carried out by Porfirio, who grouped them into six groups of nine (in total, 54 treatises). The Enneads collect the lessons that Plotinus taught at his school in Rome.

Plotinus elaborated a theological structure that saw the universe as the result of a series of emanations from an ultimate, eternal and immaterial reality that he called One. From it arises another divine principle, the Nous, source of the Platonic forms from which the Soul emanates. Plotinus believed like Plato that the body is the "prison" of the soul and his purpose is to return to the One through a life of wisdom and virtue.

Subsequently, other philosophers, especially of Christian beliefs, such as Augustine of Hippo and Boethius, showed a strong influence of Plotinus and Neoplatonism. His metaphysical writings have inspired pagan, Jewish, Christian, Gnostic, and Islamic mystics.

Biography and work

Although Eunapius maintains that he was born in Lycón and Suidas assures that in Lycopolis, his place of birth is not known with certainty. A native of the Roman province of Egypt, he was born around 203 or 204 AD. C. In 232 he entered the circle of Ammonius Saccas (or Sakkas) in Alexandria, of whom Origen (the pagan), Longinus and Erenius were also disciples. He embarked in 242 on Emperor Gordian III's war expedition to Persia with the purpose of learning Persian philosophy. The expedition failed and the emperor murdered, he managed with difficulty to take refuge in Antioch. He opened a school in Rome (246) where he soon enjoyed the favor of the most conspicuous personages of the court, including the Emperor Gallienus and his wife Cornelia Salonina.

He used to take orphaned children into his home and act as their tutor and, although personally he led a very ascetic life, he had a sweet and affectionate nature. so as not to give rise to a shadow of another shadow". Mystical visionary gifts were attributed to him. His disciple Porfirio, author of his biography Life of Plotinus and of the systematization and publication of his central work Enneads, reports that in the six years he was with him, Plotinus reached to "join and be united with the all-transcending God" up to four times.

Since 254 he began to put his works in writing. His treatises are in total 54 and are arranged in six books of nine chapters, as a result of which they receive the name Enneads . It is considered one of the most solid Treatises of Antiquity, along with those of Plato and Aristotle. He died suffering from a painful disease (leprosy) in 270 AD. C. at the age of 66, in Campania.

Defined as a mystical Neoplatonist, Plotinus makes a new foundation of classical metaphysics, taking paths more linked to the mysticism of Pythagorean and Platonic roots than to the path followed by Aristotle.

We should start from the idea that Plotinus' philosophy is a sort of Cosmogony linked to a Physics. The theoretical form that his discourse assumes is metaphysics. In that sense he is heir to Aristotle, but above all to Plato.

Doctrine

Plotinus' central proposal consists in affirming that there is a reality that founds all other existence: the One. From an act of procession, some opt for emanation, the nous and the soul emerge. In reality, the basic principle is only the One, while the other two hypostases and the rest of the realities are derived.

Talking about hypostasis is an attribution made by Porphyry, a disciple of Plotinus, to the thought of his teacher, since the term hypostasis is not found in the text of the Enneads.

Hypostasis

The One

The One of Plotinus's theory is indescribable, since it is the unit, the greatest, to such an extent that sometimes the author himself calls it God, unique, infinite. Plotinus, before wanting to correct, prefers to remain silent than to say something. A clearly mystical attitude. As a principle and ultimate reality, this absolute transcendence means that there are no terms to refer to it. It is then the Unity that founds the existence of all things. That is the center of all his doctrine. The One is beyond Being and therefore there is no definition that positively describes the One and opts for the negative path. He evades his understanding because he considers it impossible according to the human modality of knowing. Plotinus contemplates the One as an unbeatable and supreme reality from which the nous and the soul come. He affirms that the act of existence of all entities depends directly on the One. He considers it the maximum unit of the beginning of all reality since it is unlimited, perfect and does not tend to end, therefore, it is a single reality.

The Nous

The next reality or hypostasis is the nous. There is no adequate translation, but some authors identify it with spirit, while others prefer to speak of Intelligence, but this time not with a mystical but an intellectual sense. In the explanation of the "nous" Plotinus starts from the similarity between the Sun and Light. The One would be like the Sun and the Light like the nous. The function of the nous as light is that the One can see itself, but since it is the image of the One, it is the door through which we can see the One. Plotinus affirms that the nous is observable simply by applying our minds in the direction opposite of our senses. Plotinus states that the nous is the result of "contact" with the One since, before the existence of the nous or spirit, this was an indeterminate idea that, upon witnessing the One, delimited itself as spirit and acquired the idea of the forms of existing entities.

This concept is taken from the notion of dialectic of The Republic where a similar process is said to lead to the vision of the form of the Good, not of the Good itself.

The "nous" it can, and very probably should, be understood as "pure intelligence". The "nous" comes from "the One" not at will because "the One" is "more than perfect" who cannot have a will, is far beyond; and all that proceeds from "the One" it is a kind of "spreading out", in the act of making oneself that is "the One"; therefore the analogy of the sun and light must be understood as a mere image to give an idea of how "light emanates" of the sun; it is more illustrative to think of "the unfolding of a circle from its center".

The soul

The third reality or hypostasis is the soul which is double in nature. At one end it is tied to the nous and pulls on it. At the other extreme, it is associated with the world of the senses, of which it is the creator (or, better, shaper). Therefore Plotinus considers Nature as the result of a procession that goes "downwards" from the soul. For Plotinus, the soul is the ruler of all objects and thoughts in the tangible world, that is, ours. It is responsible for generating matter due to the insufficiency of producing ideas and executing them.

On immortality, Plotinus adopts the criteria set forth in the Phaedo. The soul of man is an essence, and as such is immortal, but affirms that it tends to merge with the nous and therefore loses its personality.

Movement of the cosmos

Plotinus' hierarchization in hypostases converts the cosmos into an ordered structure. In fact, he thinks of the cosmos as a living, eternal, organic, perfect, and beautiful reality. As a living entity, it must necessarily have movement. This movement consists of two phases, and can be interpreted both in a cosmological and religious sense:

• The development is diversification (cosmic motion), which comes from unity and makes multiplicity appear by emanation.
• The redeployment or recovery (spiritual motion), is the movement of simplification, from the multiple to unity.

Neither of the two movements is complete by itself, since there is a double movement accompanied by descent and ascent.

Form of knowledge and virtue

Knowledge can only be authentic if it is linked to the mystical contemplation of unity. However, this poses a problem, since the one is incomprehensible in being beyond the human being. For Plotinus, the only way to overcome this apparent contradiction is not to lose one's knowledge, since true knowledge is precisely that of the unknowable. Knowledge that does not follow from one has no starting point. Thus, knowledge can only be understood as a hard process of ascension of the human being.

The four degrees of knowledge that Plotinus describes correspond to the degrees of virtue:

• Politics responds to the need to moderate passions.
• The intuition of the intelligible in the sensitive is both art, contemplation of God and liberation of the body.
• The intuition of the intelligible in itself and for itself is science.
• Ecstasy is the meeting and identification with the One.

The theme of happiness is one of Plotinus's greatest traces in Western thought, as he is one of the first to introduce the idea that eudaimonia (happiness) is attainable only within of consciousness. Plotinus gives a full account of his conception of a person who has achieved eudaimonia. "The Perfect Life" it involves a man who commands reason and contemplation. A happy person will not move between happy and sad, as many of Plotinus's contemporaries believed.

Beauty

Plotinus's beauty can be seen in parallel with his virtue. He tries to fit the experience of beauty into the drama of the rise to the first beginning of all. In this sense, Plotinus' aesthetics is inseparable from his metaphysics, psychology, and ethics.

As in the case of virtue, Plotinus recognizes a hierarchy of beauty. But what all types of beauty have in common is that they consist of forms or images of the Forms eternally present in the Intellect. The lowest type of beauty is physical beauty. Even so, the ability to experience your paradigm. Following Plato in his Banquet, Plotinus traces a hierarchy that culminates in the Forms themselves. And his source, Good, is also the source of his beauty.

Return to One

Returning to one is the goal of all human life and describes 4 steps to achieve it:

1. Truth (intelligence)
2. Good.
3. Beauty
4. One

We can extract it from this snippet:

"Let it be done, first, all deiforme and all beautiful who are willing to contemplate God and Beauty. Because, on its rise, it will come first to Intelligence, and there you will know that all Forms are beautiful and will say that Beauty is this: the Ideas, based on that all things are beautiful by these, by the progeny and substance of Intelligence. Beyond that which is beyond it, we call it the nature of the Good, which has anteposed Beauty before it."

To clarify this cryptic text a bit, we can summarize that beauty emanates from the One, but since it cannot participate in that unity, it displays its qualities and sees goodness, which is reached through intelligence. Man's mission is then to free himself from matter through the liberation of passions through intelligence since he is in contact with the needs, problems, passions and sensations of this physical world and thus achieve goodness, and by getting rid of Completely from forms to reach beauty, where the one is.

This fragment, on the other hand, served as the philosophical foundation of the transcendentals of being, which were extensively developed in scholasticism, as well as by Kant.

Influence

Ancient World

The Emperor Julian the Apostate was deeply influenced by Neoplatonism, as was Hypatia of Alexandria. Neoplatonism also influenced many Christians, including pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. According to fragments preserved by Eusebius, the resemblance and identity of doctrine between Plotinus and Numenius extends to capital points of Philosophy.

Christianity

Plotiny in the Nuremberg Chronicles.

Plotinus' philosophy had an influence on the development of Christian theology. In Saint Augustine of Hippo, Neoplatonism, and Plotinus in particular, was a relevant philosophical source, through which he acquired philosophical tools.

In A History of Western Philosophy, the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote that:

For the Christian, the Other World was the Kingdom of Heaven, to be enjoyed after death; for the platonic, it was the eternal world of ideas, the real world in opposition to that of illusory appearance. Christian theologians combined these views and embodied much of Plotin's philosophy. [...] Plotinus, therefore, is historically important as an influence to shape Christianity of the Middle Ages and theology.

Islamic

Neoplatonism and the ideas of Plotinus also influenced medieval Islam, as Sunni Abbasids fused Greek concepts into state-sponsored texts and found great influence among Isma'ili Shiites. In the 11th century, Neoplatonism was adopted by the Fatimid Caliphate of Egypt and taught by its Da'i.

Judaism

As with Islam and Christianity, Neoplatonism in general and Plotinus in particular influenced the thought of Solomon ibn Gabirol (Avicebron) and Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides). As with Islam and Christianity, apophatic theology and the privative nature of evil are two prominent themes that such thinkers learned from Plotinus or his successors.