The Philosophy of Plotinus: Part Six

Movement and rest in ‘thought’, the most intense activity and stillness in unity

Plotinus called the grasp by Intellect of the immaterial object - their  immediate identity and unity - ‘intuitive thought’.

(Intellect)...is the level of intuitive thought which grasps its object immediately and is always perfectly united to it, and does not have to seek it outside itself by discursive reasoning: and we at our highest are Intellect, or Soul perfectly formed to the likeness of Intellect ...1 

As with every aspect in his distinction between the universe of matter and the senses and the universe in Intellect, Plotinus made the logic of discursive reasoning (which he equated with sense perception) the deficient copy of intuition (dialectic) in Intellect.2  

In order to use language, discursive thought has to consider things sequentially, it passes from one point to another, it endlessly divides.3 This is the method of description. Such reasoning is utterly inadequate to address the relationship between soul and the One - it is a hindrance to the love which desires beyond Form. Discursive thought is inseparable from the burden of sensory life. The need to reason thus results in a diminution of the independence of ‘thought’

Does the soul use discursive reasoning before it comes and again after it goes out of the body? No, discursive reasoning comes into it here below, when it is already in perplexity and full of care, and in a state of greater weakness; for feeling the need of reasoning is a lessening of the intellect in respect of its self-sufficiency...4 

Dialectic is the method of Intellect. Dealing with the truths of the higher cosmos, it involves a surrendering to the illumination of God’s light in which Intellect ceases a 

wandering about the world of sense and settles down in the world of intellect, and there it occupies itself, casting off falsehood and feeding the soul in what Plato calls “the plain of truth,” using his method of division to distinguish the Forms, and to determine the essential nature of each thing, and to find the primary kinds...and then, keeping quiet...it busies itself no more, but contemplates, having arrived at unity. It leaves what is called logical activity, about propositions and syllogisms, to another art, as it might leave knowing how to write...whatever is submitted to it it perceives by directing intuition...5

Intuitive reasoning ‘is a static activity and a kind of reflection of Intellect...’.6 It is practised separate from the body, because the body would only impede its inquiry.7 It is an activity of our true self in which it moves with a motion which is not bodily but of its own life.8 

The desire for a unifying intuition underlies Plotinus’ doctrine. Not only can we intuit being, Plotinus theorised on the direct intuition of the Good.

...our power is that of knowing the intelligible by means of the intelligence: but this Entity (the First Existent or The Good) transcends all of the intellectual nature; by what direct intuition, then, can it be brought within our grasp?9 

He answered

But possess yourself of it by the very elimination of Being and you hold a marvel. Thrusting forward to This, attaining, and resting in yourself, seek to grasp it more and more - understanding it by that intuitive thrust alone, but knowing its greatness by the Beings that follow upon it and exist by its power.10

He believed that any intuition, particularly that of the Good, depends on how much of what is being intuited we have within ourselves. An intuition is a ‘direct intellectual act’, an intellection of self. In being known, the subject is excluded.11 Soul therefore holds that act not as a memory in time, dependent on an external source, which memory can be easily lost, but as a possession of its eternal essence.12

In its intuition in Intellect, Soul looks first to what is a unity and then to what is multiple, to all that is.13 It possesses and becomes the totality of things, but imperfectly. It grasps not a pure unity, but

all the intellectual facts of a many that constitutes a unity. For since the object of vision has variety (distinction within its essential oneness) the intuition must be multiple and the intuitions various, just as in a face we see at the one glance eyes and nose and all the rest. 

But is not this impossible when the object to be thus divided and treated as a thing of grades is a pure unity?

No: there has already been discrimination within the Intellectual-Principle; the Act of the Soul is little more than a reading of this.

First and last is in the Ideas not a matter of time, and so does not bring time into the Soul’s intuition of earlier and later among them. There is a grading by order as well: the ordered disposition of some growing thing begins with root and reaches to topmost point, but, to one seeing the plant as a whole, there is no other first and last than simply that of the order.14 

Plotinus defined ‘intuition’ as ‘knowledge with identity’.15 It is by such a method that Soul might attain the highest, and a complete unity with the One - in which it cannot distinguish itself.16 He made the greatest possible distinction between Soul’s intellection and the body’s sensory perception:

...the Soul is unfailingly intent upon intellection; only when it acts upon this image-making faculty does its intellection become a human perception: intellection is one thing, the perception of an intellection is another: we are continuously intuitive but we are not unbrokenly aware: the reason is that the recipient in us receives from both sides, absorbing not merely intellections but also sense-perceptions.17 

Consciousness is the reflection of the life of Intellect, through the soul’s engagement with body. Plotinus criticised conscious awareness as being 

likely to enfeeble the very activities of which there is consciousness; only when they are alone are they pure and more genuinely active and living; and when good men are in this state their life is increased, when it is not spilt out into perception, but gathered together in one in itself.18 

Not all outside Intellect seek to attain it because the requisite motives are ‘reasoned’, but all look to the Good because it is before all ‘reason’...

----

Notes.

1. Armstrong, op. cit., vol. I, xxi

2. In the analogy of the Divided Line in Bk VI of the Republic, illustrating the relation between the two orders of reality and states of ‘mind’, Plato allowed knowledge by the direct apprehension (vision) of truth through Intelligence (Dialectic) or by Mathematical Reason. Belief and illusion function in the physical realm, giving mere opinion. 

3. Plotinus believed that the language of numbers may help us to a direct apprehension of the realities of the intelligible universe and the One.

4. IV,3.18. In a most interesting sentence, implying a relationship between intuition and ‘pre-reason’, Plotinus wrote: ‘And again the reasoning thing is not of that realm: here the reasoning. There the pre-reasoning.’ VI,7.9.

5. I,3.4

6. IV,3.18

7. ‘But what about reasoning and intellect? These no longer give themselves to the body; for their work is not done through the instrument of the body: for this gets in the way if one uses it in rational investigations.’ IV,3.19. Plotinus wrote of his experience of descending from Intellect to discursive reasoning. IV,8.1.

8. Plotinus referred to this as ‘...the superior life of reason...’ III,4.6. Reason functions above chance. Cf. Bergson.

9. III,8.9

10. III,8.10

11. See following note.

12. ‘(A self-intellection is not)...something entering from without, to be grasped and held in fear of an escape...’ IV,3.25. ‘When we seize anything in the direct intellectual act there is room for nothing else than to know and to contemplate the object; the subject is not included in the act of knowing, but asserts itself, if at all, later and is a sign of the altered; this means that, once purely in the Intellectual, no one of us can have any memory of our experience here. Further, if all intellection is timeless - as appears from the fact that the Intellectual beings are of eternity, not of time - there can be no memory in the intellectual world, not merely none of earthly things but none whatever: all is presence. There; for there is no discursive thought, no passing from one point to another.’ IV,4.1.

13. IV,4.1. ‘...the unity of the Soul’s faculty (of intuition) is not incompatible with multiplicity in the object; it does no possess all its content in a single act of thought; each act is incomplete in itself, but all are being constantly exercised; the faculty is permanently there and its effects are external. The object itself is no unity and can therefore harbour a multiplicity which previously it did not contain.’ Ibid.

14. IV,4.1

15. IV,4.3

16. ‘Soul must see in its own way; this is by coalescence, unification; but in seeking thus to know the Unity it is prevented by that very unification from recognising that it has found; it cannot distinguish itself from the object of this intuition. None the less, this is our one resource if our philosophy is to give us knowledge of The Unity.’ VI,9.3. Plotinus distinguished between Soul’s understanding given by contemplation and Intellect’s apprehension of presence: ‘Wisdom and understanding consist in the contemplation of all that exists in the Intellectual-Principle, and the Intellectual-Principle itself apprehends this all (not by contemplation but) as an immediate presence.’ I,2.6.

17. IV,3.30

18. I,4.10

The Philosophy of Plotinus: Part Five

Movement and rest in ‘thought’, the most intense activity and stillness in unity

Intellect is both thought (thinking being, ‘that which primarily thinks’)1 and the objects of its creation existing in the realm of thought.2 It is eternal mind and absolute living Being.3 It contains a finite totality of non-sensory, interpenetrating beings which are both Forms and intelligences,4 and is the highest knowable reality, majestic and beautiful. It

...might be likened to a living sphere teeming with variety, to a globe of faces radiant with faces all living...with Intellect enthroned over all so that the place entire glows with Intellectual splendour.5 

In Intellect, there is no past nor future, only an eternal present. Though having shape (because it contains being), and despite existing as the absolute standard of measurement, it has no extension and is beyond all bound, measure, and even spatial and numerical infinitude.6 It is infinite power.

By an intensely active and stationary wandering within itself, in the universe of ‘the Meadow of Truth’,7 Intellect produces its act - everlasting Being.8 Motion (both in a creative outpouring and towards the Good, and the attainment of self-knowledge) enables the former, rest sustains the latter.9 The existence and movement of Intellect lie in the ceaseless diversity of its production.10 

The lower activity of Intellect falls short of lasting unity, contemplating (thinking and looking at) the objects of its creation. As the creator of All, Intellect is unity-in-multiplicity - a unity of thought and Forms, a reflection of the whole within the part, an identicality of the whole and the part - of  thought, being and life.

(In) the true and first universe (of Intellect)...each part is not cut off from the whole; but the whole life of it and the whole intellect lives and thinks all together in one, and makes the part the whole and all bound in friendship with itself, since one part is not separated from another and has not become merely other, estranged from the rest...And since it is everywhere one and complete at every point it stays still and knows no alteration; for it does not make as one thing acting upon another. For what reason could it have for making, since it is deficient in nothing?11 

In a going outwards, the multiplicity of Intellect is a dissipation of self. In its higher activity - eternally loving and desiring its prior12 - and in its return, Intellect is above multiplicity. With Forms at rest, it approaches and unites in direct awareness with its source, the Good. In this process, thought (active actuality) is the bringing to completion of something prior to thought, and within it. 

For it has something to think about because there is something else before it; and when it thinks itself it is in a way comprehending what it had from the vision of another in itself.13  

We are each an intelligible universe. Thus, to attain (or more precisely, return) to Intellect,14 because it is independent of our lower nature and the outward, we must leave the sensory world behind. Yet we can know it almost like an object of sense.15 

Unlike sensation, which can only give knowledge of the images of objects existing independently of it and individually, knowledge in Intellect is undifferentiated from the object, because the objects exist as a partless unity-in-multiplicity, in which movement is both thought and primary, real and living substance. Thought cannot exist without this movement.16 The act of intellection requires the identity of subject, immaterial object and (movement in) the act of knowing. 

The Intellectual-Principle is not something taking cognisance of things as sensation deals with sense objects existing independently of sense: on the contrary, it actually is the things it knows: it does not merely possess their images or representations: whence could it have taken them? No: it resides with its objects, identical with them, making a unity with them: knowledge of the immaterial is universally identical with its objects.17  

These objects are not abstractions but are concrete reality. Proof of their truth is neither necessary nor possible.18

Part Five/To be continued...   

Notes.

1. II,9.1. In MacKenna’s translation, ‘Intellectual-Principle’ is the first emanation from the Good and is manifested in every Form. The term refers to the creative element of Divine Mind or Divine Intelligence. Plotinus defined thinking as a soul’s ‘...kind of seeking its substance and its self and what made it, and...in turning back in its contemplation and recognising itself it is at that point rightly and properly Intellect...’ VI,7.37.

2. IV,8.3

3. Cf. Timaeus 31B1 and 39E7-9

4. Each Form, as being and intellect, is both one and a composite of many parts existing prior to it. Consistent with Platonism, Plotinus understood the Forms to be the thoughts of God (see V,9.7). He used the metaphor of a circle and its radii to explain the multiplicity of beings in the universe of Mind: ‘Often for the purpose of exposition - as a help towards stating the nature of the produced multiplicity - we use the example of many lines radiating from one centre; but while we provide for individualisation we must carefully preserve mutual presence. Even in the case of our circle we need not think of separated radii; all may be taken as forming one surface: where there is no distinction even upon the one surface but all is power and reality undifferentiated, all the beings may be thought of as centres uniting at one central centre: we ignore the radial lines and think of their terminals at that centre, where they are at one. Restore the radii; once more we have lines, each touching a generating centre of its own, but that centre remains coincident with the one first centre; the centres all unite in that first centre and yet remain what they were, so that they are as many as are the lines to which they serve as terminals; the centres themselves appear as numerous as the lines starting from them and yet all those centres constitute a unity.

Thus we may liken the Intellectual Beings in their diversity to many centres coinciding with the one centre and themselves at one in it but appearing multiple on account of the radial lines - lines which do not generate the centres but merely lead to them. The radii, thus, afford a serviceable illustration for the mode of contact by which the Intellectual Unity manifests itself as multiple and multipresent.’ VI,5.5. For Plotinus, the bodies of the celestial living beings are spherical. Although Plotinus held that the Form of man exists in Intellect as a universal, in some sections of the Enneads, counter to traditional Platonic doctrine, he allowed the existence of Forms of individuals (see V,7). Thus we are each the All. ‘...to become Intellect does not involve the destruction or absorption of the particular personality but its return to its perfect archetypal reality...’ Armstrong, op. cit., vol. I, xxii. The universe of Intellect contains or in a sense is all particular minds or intelligences.

5. VI,7.15. Intellect is a ‘bulkless power’ in us, beyond sense-perception, ‘standing on itself, no feeble shadowy thing but the most living and intelligent of all, than which nothing is livelier or more intelligent or more substantial...’ VI,6.8. ‘...the perfect life, the true, real life, is in that transcendent intelligible reality, and...other lives are incomplete, traces of life, not perfect or pure and no more life than its opposite.’  I,4.3. Being and beauty are identical.

6. Because thought is common to all and is not physical, it has no need of these qualities. The unity of real beings would not be possible otherwise. Similarly, we all share the same Good.

7. Of the intelligible Plotinus wrote there is an ‘...endlessness for ever welling up in it, the unwearying and unwearing nature which in no way falls short in it, boiling over with life...’ VI,5.12. ‘Beings could not exist save by the activity of Intellectual-Principle; wandering down every way it produces thing after thing, but wandering always within itself in such self-bound wandering as authentic Intellect may know; this wandering permitted to its nature is among real beings which keep pace with its movement; but it is always itself; this is a stationary wandering, a wandering within ‘the Meadow of Truth’ from which it does not stray.

It holds and covers the universe which it has made the space, so to speak, of its movement, itself being also that universe which is space to it. And this Meadow of Truth is varied for that movement through it may be possible; suppose it not always and everywhere varied, the failing of diversity is a failure of movement; failure in movement would mean a failing of the Intellectual Act; halting, it has ceased to exercise its Intellectual Act; this ceasing, it ceases to be.

The Intellectual-Principle is the Intellectual Act; its movement is complete, filling Being complete; and the entire of Being is the Intellectual Act entire, comprehending all life and the unfailing succession of things. Because this Principle contains Identity with Difference its division is ceaselessly bringing the different things to life. Its entire movement is through life and among living things. To a traveller over land all is earth but earth abounding in difference: so in this journey the life through which Intellectual-Principle passes is one life but, in its ceaseless changing, a varied life.’ VI,7.13. The ‘Meadow of Truth’ is from Phaedrus 248B. Plotinus’ usage of the Greek for ‘wandering’ (pláne), applied to the life of Intellect, is from Parmenides 136E. The ‘planes’ of ‘Analytical’ Cubism can be analysed from this perspective. Real numbers (of which quantitative numbers are an image) are prior to and generate beings. They are also a particular kind of beings and forms with the same reality and causative power as other Forms. (Armstrong) Number is a structuring principle in the intelligible world and the Forms can be considered as a system of quasi-mathematical formulae, which project themselves onto Matter to produce the multiplicity of the physical world. (J. Dillon in his Introduction to Plotinus. The Enneads. Third ed. Abridged. Trans. S. MacKenna. op.cit.).

8. ‘Intellect, to act at all, must inevitably comport difference with identity; otherwise it could not distinguish itself from its object by standing apart from it, nor could it ever be aware of the realm of things whose existence demands otherness, nor could there be so much as a duality.’ VI,7.39. Plotinus defined being as the self-directed activity of thought. ‘The Being of Intellect, therefore, is activity, and there is nothing to which the activity is directed; so it is self-directed. Thinking itself, it is thus with itself and holds its activity directed to itself.’ V,3.7. Being is an image, but of an original so great that the very copy stands as a reality.

9. ‘(Intellect) is both at rest and in motion; for it moves around Him [the Good]. So, then, the universe, too, both moves in its circle and is at rest.’ II,2.3. Plotinus also referred to the ‘static activity’ of Intellect.  II,9.1.

10. ‘...we must think of it as a quiet, unwavering motion; containing all things and being all things, it is a multiple but at once indivisible and comporting difference.’ VI,9.5. Multiplicity in Intellect is not evil because Intellect is unified. Since Intellect has multiplicity, it is less than the One.

11. III,2.1. Also ‘From everything which has been said this is perfectly clear, that each thing in the All, according to how it is in nature and disposition, contributes to the All and is acted upon and acts, just as in each individual living thing each of the parts, according to how it is in nature and condition, contributes to the whole and serves its purposes and has its own proper rank and utility; it gives what comes from it and receives as much of what comes from the others as its nature is capable of receiving; and all has a kind of common awareness of all; and if each of the parts was a living being, it would have functions as a living being different from its functions as a part.’ IV,4.45. ‘Intellect is many, intelligible, intelligent and in motion because it thinks and each thought, to be a thought, must be something multiply various - i.e. in Intellect, thought thinks of another. Substance thinks in Intellect, but the greatest substance (the Good) stands still in majesty since it transcends thought....Thinking brings substance into being. Thinking is a power of generation itself. Thought and substance are the same things. The Good is beyond substance and thought and is alone by itself with no need of the things which come from it. it did not act before it generated activity, nor did it think before it generated thought. There is no thought in the Good itself, otherwise the Good would be in a unity with that which is less than it. Thus thought and substance are together.’ Armstrong, op. cit., vol. VII, 209-211.

12. I.e. Formless Form. ‘...in Intellect there is desire and a movement to convergence with its form.’  III,8.11. Intellect always needs, desires and attains the Good; but the Good, as the one productive power, needs nothing.

13. VI,7.40

14. Plotinus believed we must first acquire the moral and intellectual perfection necessary to attain  Intellect before aspiring to the One. He referred to both the One and Intellect as God. For example, we originally existed in Intellect, in which some were even gods: ‘...pure souls and intellect united with the whole of reality...’. VI, 4.14. ‘But if someone is able to turn around, either by himself or having the good luck to have his hair pulled by Athene herself, he will see God and himself and the All...’ VI,5.7.

15. VI,9.5

16. ‘But if someone were to say that “in immaterial things the knowledge and the thing are the same”, one must understand what is said in the sense that it does not mean that the knowledge is the thing nor the reason contemplating the thing the thing itself, but the other way round, that the thing itself when it is without matter is object of thought and thought, not thought in the sense of being a definition of the thing or an intuition of it, but the thing itself in the intelligible is nothing else but intellect and knowledge. For the knowledge is not directed to itself, but the thing there makes the knowledge, which does not stay like the knowledge of a thing in matter, to be different: that is, makes it true knowledge: that is, not an image of the thing but the thing itself. So the thought of movement has not made absolute movement, but absolute movement has made the thought of it, so that it has made itself as movement and thought; for movement there is also the thought of that thing itself, and it itself is movement, because it is the first movement - for there is no other before it - and real movement, because it is not incidental to something else, but is the active actuality of what is moved, which exists in actuality. So, again, it is substance...’ VI,6.6. ‘...if it (Intellect) stands still, it does not think; so that if it came to a standstill, it has not thought; but if this is so, it does not even exist. It is, then, thought; that is, all movement filling all substance, and all substance is all thought encompassing all life...’ VI,7.13.

17. V,4.2. Plato argued for the same pathway to unity with real Being. By developing the divine within us - ‘thought’ in its movement - we can unite our understanding with what is understood. ‘There is of course only one way to look after anything and that is to give it its proper food and motions. And the motions that are akin to the divine in us are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe. We should each therefore attend to these motions and by learning about the harmonious circuits of the universe repair the damage done at birth to the circuits in our head, and so restore understanding and what is understood to their original likeness to each other. When that is done we shall have achieved the goal set us by the gods...’ Timaeus 48, 90. The One’s inability to see itself as external is the supersession of intellection. Plotinus made frequent use of the metaphor of light to express the unity of the subject and the object of contemplation: ‘...shining down upon all, the light of godlike Intellection.’ I,6.5.

18. The real beings of Intellect exist in the ‘thinking’ subject. ‘In its (Intellect’s) thinking, then, there is activity and motion, and in its thinking itself, substance and being: for, existing, it thinks itself as existent...’ VI,2.8.

The Philosophy of Plotinus: Part Four

Movement and rest in ‘thought’, the most intense activity and stillness in unity

The One or The Good1 is the First hypostasis of the divine triad. It is logically the One, morally the Good. Plotinus also referred to it as The Formless Form, The Father, The Simple, The Absolute, The Infinite, The Transcendent, The Unconditioned, The Fountain and Principle of Beauty. Plotinus stressed its transcendence of that of which it is the source - existence, essence and life. It is the greatest of all, not in size, but in reality2 and power. Before all else, it is pure will,3 an undifferentiated power4 beyond comprehension, and is boiling with pure activity, the first of which is its goodness. Free from substance and being, it is the principle of substance and being in the intelligible world and ultimately of the becoming of the physical universe.5 It is everywhere, yet is beyond space, time, state, quantity, quality and extension - it is the source of all these. 

Transcending the need for thought, the One is pure thought beyond knowledge. It can know neither itself nor anything else. Unthinking (since thinking is movement), but the cause of thinking, it exists before movement and rest, which pertain to being and make being multiple.6 Above all existence, it is not the Creator but is the source of life and generates that which creates in its image - Intellect or Divine Thought. To be precise, it is beyond even naming. Language and discursive reasoning are inadequate to it.7 Self centred, it is self-determined and self-sufficient because it is complete and has no parts. It is the goal to which all and everything aspires. Even those who have never entered the Good must acknowledge its existence because of the presence of its weak images in this world.

To find the One, we must turn inwards through silent contemplation, transcend morality, difference, and the form of intellect, and seek perfect unity with him, at the centre of our souls. Yet we are in Him and all souls find unity there. In reaching for the Good, Soul is reaching for its essence. On attaining its goal, it is beyond being and is truly (knows beyond knowing) itself. Since vision requires shape and desires its acquisition, unity with the One is the shedding of vision and a merging of seer, seeing and seen.

The First has no self-awareness; there is no need. It is no duality - or rather, no manifold consisting of itself, its intellective act distinct from itself, and the inevitable third, the object of intellection. No doubt since knower, knowing, and known are identical, all merges into a unity: but the distinction has existed and, once more, such a unity cannot be the First; we must put away all otherness from the Supreme which can need no such support; anything we add is so much lessening of what lacks nothing.8

The attainment of this unity gives a unique experience higher than possible through the thought of Intellect. It is ‘an immediate intuition, self-directed.’9 Plotinus asked ‘But what if one be deceived?’ (regarding whether The Good has come to him). He answered: ‘In that case there must be some resemblance to account for the error: the good will be the original which the delusion counterfeited and whenever the true presents itself we turn from the spurious.’10 

The Good is infinite productive power extending throughout creation. It is of eternal duration.

All derives from this: it (the Good) is the origin of the primal movement which it does not possess and of the repose which is but its absence of need; for neither rest nor movement can belong to that which has no place in which either could occur; centre, object, ground, all are alike unknown to it, for it is before all. Yet its being is not limited; what is there to set bounds to it? Nor, on the other hand, is it infinite in the sense of magnitude; what place can there be to which it must extend, or why should there be movement where there is no lacking? All its infinitude resides in its power: it does not change and will not fail; and in it all that is unfailing finds duration.11 

Like a sun before shape, it generates Intellect - its light12 and most perfect possible image.

Part Four/To be continued...  

Notes.

1. Compare ‘“...the highest form of knowledge is knowledge of the form of the good, from which things that are just and so on derive their usefulness and value.’” Republic VI,505a, and ‘Knowing of The Good or contact with it is the all-important...’ VI,7.36. For Plato, the Good is a special Form synonymous with beauty and truth. “The truth of the matter is, after all, known only to God. But in my opinion, for what it is worth, the final thing to be perceived in the intelligible realm, and perceived only with difficulty, is the absolute form of Good; once seen, it is inferred to be responsible for everything right and good, producing in the visible realm light and the source of light, and being, in the intelligible realm itself, controlling source of reality and intelligence. And anyone who is going to act rationally either in public or private must perceive it.’” Republic Bk VII, 517b-c. Plotinus also drew on Aristotle’s definition of the Good as that ‘to which everything aspires’ (Nicomachean Ethics I.1094a3) and his Unmoved Mover, which moves all things as the object of desire (Metaphysics A7.1072a-b). Plotinus clearly parted from Aristotle on the latter’s rejection of a transcendent Good.

2. ‘...you may not hope to see it with mortal eyes, nor in any way that would be imagined by those who make sense the test of reality and so annul the supremely real. For what passes for the most truly existent is most truly non-existent - the thing of extension least real of all - while this unseen First is the source and principle of Being and sovran over Reality. 

You must turn appearances about or you will be left void of God.’ V,5.11.

3. ‘So he was all will, and there is nothing in him which is not that which wills - nothing, then, before willing. So he himself is primarily his will. So then he is also as he willed and of the kind he willed, and what follows upon his will, what this kind of will generated - but it generated nothing further in himself, for he was this already.’ VI,8.21. ‘Neither can it have will to anything...’ VI,9.6.

4. ‘Power, There (in the Good), is no producer of opposites; it is that steadfast constant which is most decidedly power by inability to depart from unity: ability to produce opposites is inability to hold by the perfect good...’ VI,8.21.

5. ‘For the trace of the shapeless is shape; it is this which generates shape, not shape this, and it generates it when matter comes to it. But matter is necessarily furthest from it...If then what is loveable is not the matter, but what is formed by the form...one must assume that the first nature of beauty is formless.’ VI,7.33.

6. ‘The Unity is none of all; neither thing nor quantity nor quality nor intellect nor soul; not in motion, not at rest, not in place, not in time: it is the self-defined, unique in form or, better, formless, existing before Form was, or Movement or Rest, all of which are attachments of Being and make Being the manifold it is.’ VI,9.3. ‘That which can make all can have, itself, no extension; it must be limitless and so without magnitude...’ VI,7.32. Sources for these negations include the Parmenides 138b5-6 (on motion and rest), 139b3 (on place) and 141a5 (on time); also the Symposium 211b1.

7. ‘strictly speaking, we ought not to apply any terms at all to It; but we should, so to speak, run round the outside of It trying to interpret our own feelings about It, sometimes drawing near and sometimes falling away in our perplexities about It...’ VI,9.3.

8. VI,7.41

9. VI,7.38. Also ‘Since the Supreme has no interval, no self-differentiation, what can have this intuitional approach to it but itself? Therefore it quite naturally assumes difference at the point where Intellectual-Principle and Being are differentiated’ VI,7.39.

10. VI,7.26

11. V,5.10. Note that Plotinus associated movement with lack.

12. ‘The only reasonable explanation of act flowing from it lies in the analogy of light from a sun...the One shines eternally...’ V,3.12. ‘A circle related in its path to a centre must be admitted to owe its scope to that centre; it has something of the nature of that centre in that the radial lines converging on that one central point assimilate their impinging ends to that point of convergence and of departure, the dominant of radii and terminals: the terminals are of one nature with the centre, feeble reproductions of it, since the centre is, in a certain sense, the source of terminals and radii impinging at every point upon it; these lines reveal the centre; they are the development of that undeveloped.

In the same way we are to take Intellectual-Principle and Being. This combined power springs from the Supreme, an outflow and as it were development from That and remaining dependent upon that Intellective nature, showing forth that, so to speak, Intellect-in-Unity which is not Intellectual-Principle since it is no duality. No more than in the circle are the lines or circumference to be identified with that centre which is the source of both: radii and circle are images given forth by indwelling power and, as products of a certain vigour in it, not cut off from it.

Thus the Intellective power circles around the Supreme which stands to it as archetype to image...’ VI,8.18. Intellect cannot exist in the Good - to do so (adapting from Nietzsche on virgin birth) would make the One maculate.

The Philosophy of Plotinus: Part Three

Movement and rest in ‘thought’, the most intense activity and stillness in unity

The creative process is a result of illumination from the One which from its superabundance, overflows and generates its image, Intellect. Living Mind in turn, stable beyond change, spontaneously and eternally pours forth the multiple power of the Forms in its image, Soul. It does so without reason, calculation, imagination or memory.1 

Soul, like Mind, is moved and aspires to and returns into its prior. There it is filled and in the movement of its own excess, creates through its image Nature, the universe of sensation. As the lowest part of Soul, Nature does not know, but only gives form to matter. Because it brings form into being, creation is both contemplation and consummation,2 the divine contained in every act. Yet man,3 having ceased to be Intellect, cannot produce true images of himself. On the contrary, restoring himself to Intellect, he again becomes creator of everything, he again becomes God.4 

Plotinus valued the dynamic creative soul5 and the principle (power) of creation over the created object.6 The two-way dynamism of his doctrine - the flowing from, return to, and absorption in the Absolute - is a complex dialectics of ‘mind’ involving a simultaneity of identity and difference, rest and movement. Plotinus theorised a dual activity on each level of being: one activity that is internal to it and one that goes out from it. The dynamism and fluidity of his doctrine is paramount.7 

In the Enneads, movement is not the sign of life, it is the primary life. It is common to all life in ‘the sleepless light’8 of Intellect. It is the life of ‘mind’ and the active actuality of being and substance. It is being and substance itself.9  Being and movement are a unity since movement, in taking being from potentiality to actuality, makes it perfect, makes form awake.10 The artificial separation of being from movement occurs in discursive reason.11  

Movement occurs through elevation, introversion (intensification and concentration), and a flowing outwards (dispersion and diminution). The fourth method of ‘thought’ which produces movement is in the dialectical opposition between the one and the many. This underlies the other three. Plotinus’ usage of the term is spiritual and moral,12 and he emphasised its importance with many metaphors:

...the Good stays still in himself; but intellect moves about him in its activity, as also it lives around him. And soul dances round intellect outside...13

Movement, rest and being are the inseparable genera of real beings.14 When Intellect thinks these, they therefore exist, beyond the physical universe. Rest is not the opposite of movement, but is different to it. It is not a passive state of being.  

...it is impossible to say that rest is the abolition of movement because it does not exist when movement has stopped, but when movement exists rest also exists. And rest there in the intelligible does not consist in the fact that something which is naturally adapted to move is not moving, but in so far as rest has a hold on it, it stands still, but in so far as it is in motion it will always be moving: therefore it stands still by rest and moves by movement. But here below it moves by movement, but when movement is not there it stays still because it is deprived of the movement which it ought to have.15 

For Soul, knowledge of itself is self-movement aspiring towards its purity.16  In bringing the copy of Intellect to this world, Soul originates the copies of movement and rest - motion17 and stillness.

Part Three/To be continued... 

Notes.

1. This function of Intellect, the true creator of this universe, is based on the Demiurge or Craftsman of the Timaeus, in which thought in its movement is creation. In this dialogue Plato argued that the elements of the universe - earth, air, fire, and water - are composed of planes, which are in turn made out of elementary triangular shapes. Bergson, who thought that we are all born Platonists (Selections from Bergson. op. cit., 64), that there exists nothing positive outside Ideas (Creative Evolution.1907, trans. A. Mitchell, New York, 1911, reprint., 1983, 316), and that ‘consciousness does not spring from the brain’ (Creative Evolution. op. cit.,  262), thought that there are ‘thousands of different planes of consciousness’ (Matter and Memory. 1896. Trans. N. Paul, W. Palmer. New York,1988, 241). Aristotle attributes a highly mathematicised account of the Forms to Plato’s later years.

2. ‘And lovers, too, are among those who see and press on eagerly towards a form.’ III,8.7

3. I use this gender consciously, both because Plotinus did, and in order not to disguise the patriarchal nature of his philosophy.

4. ‘...To me, moreover, it seems that if we ourselves were archetypes, Ideas, veritable Being, and the Idea with which we construct here were our veritable Essence, then our creative power, too, would toilessly effect its purpose: as man now stands, he does not produce in his work a true image of himself: become man, he has ceased to be the All; ceasing to be man - we read - “he soars aloft and administers the Cosmos entire”; restored to the All he is maker of the All.’ V,8.7. Beyond this, ‘The vision has been of God in travail of a beautiful offspring, God engendering a universe within himself in a painless labour...’ V,8.11.

5. IV,3.10

6. ‘What we long for is the originating power, not the originated thing. For this reason, nature, having an immediate relationship to the creative power, also has a precedence over art.’ In Barasch, M. Theories of Art, From Plato to Winckelmann, New York, 1985, 37.

7. Plotinus drew on the Stoic notion of a dynamic power diffuse throughout the universe, which he concentrated in the One.

8. VI,1.8

9. ‘For if movement is the activity of substance, and being and the primary genera altogether are actively actual, movement could not be something incidental, but, being the activity of what is actively actual, could not any longer be called something which contributes to the completion of substance, but is substance itself: so that it has not entered some subsequent genus, not even quality, but is ranked as simultaneous.’ VI,2.15.

10. On this particular point, compare Republic Bk VII 529-530 in which Plato argued ‘that the true, philosophical astronomer should not seriously study the motions of the visible heavenly bodies, which, being material, are imperfect and changeable, but devote his attention to the laws of motion perceived by the intellect alone.’ Armstrong, op. cit., Vol. II, 12. The text around that to which Armstrong refers is ‘“Isn’t the true astronomer in the same position when he watches the movements of the stars?” I asked. “He will think that the heavens and heavenly bodies have been put together by their maker as well as such things can be; but he will also think it absurd to suppose that there is an always constant and absolutely invariable relation of day to night, or of day and night to month, or month to year, or, again, of the periods of the other stars to them and to each other. They are all visible and material, and it’s absurd to look for exact truth in them.”’ At 529d2-3 Plato equated ‘the true realities’ of the stars with their ‘true relative velocities’. As I have stated previously, the precedent for Plotinus regarding movement and motion was clearly in the import and text of Plato’s writing. See Note 40.

11. ‘...(movement) is found in being not as inhering in a subject; for it is its active actuality and neither of them is without the other except in our conception of them, and the two natures are one nature: for being is actual, not potential...discursive thought says that they are separate...’ VI,2.7.  ‘...if we bring in also Intellect and its life, we shall posit as common to all life a single genus, movement. And we shall posit substance and movement, which is the primary life, as two genera. For even if they are one, [the observer] separates them in thought, finding the one not one; otherwise it would not have been possible to separate them. But observe in other things also how movement and life are clearly separated from being, even if not in the true being, yet in the shadow and that which has the same name as being. For as in the portrait of a man many things are wanting, and especially the decisively important thing, life, so in the things perceived by sense being is a shadow of being, separated from that which is most fully being, which was life in the archetype.’ VI,2.7.

12. ‘When the soul begins again to mount, it comes not to something alien but to its very self; thus detached, it is in nothing but itself; self-gathered it is no longer in the order of being; it is in the Supreme.’ VI, 9.11.

13. I,8.2.

14. In VI,2 Plotinus expounds the Platonic doctrine of the categories of the Intelligible World (Sophist 254D-257A), Being, Rest, Motion, Same and Other.

15. VI,3.27.  In the Timaeus is an encapsulation of a process and purpose which is of the greatest importance to Western philosophy, Christian theology and Western art theory and practice. ‘And (the Demiurge) gave each divine being two motions, one uniform in the same place, as each always thinks the same thoughts about the same things, the other forward, as each is subject to the movement of the Same and uniform; but he kept them unaffected by the other five kinds of motion, that each might be as perfect as possible.’ (my Italics) Timaeus, 8,40. Timaeus and Critias, op. cit., 52. (‘And he bestowed two movements upon each, one in the same spot and uniform, whereby it should be ever constant to its own thoughts concerning the same thing; the other forward, but controlled by the revolution of the same and uniform: but for the other five movements he made it motionless and still, that each star might attain the highest completeness of perfection.’ The Timaeus of Plato. Ed. R. D. Archer-Hind. New York: Arno, 1973, 131-133.) This little group of words summarises the pathway Plato established and Plotinus maintained - comprising at the same time identity and difference, stasis and movement - between perfection, its divine medium, and creation. It asserts that creation and ‘thought’ in its motion are equivalent and defines the nature of that process. The motions of Plato’s divine beings differ from those of the sensory world - they are effects of the soul in its activity. Plato is too often simplistically remembered as having given us eternal Forms (Plato as an eternal Form?). This quotation again exemplifies the importance and complexity of motion in his philosophy.    

16. III,7.4. ‘...knowledge is self-movement, since it is a sight of being and an active actuality, not a state; so that it also comes under movement - but, if you like, under rest, or under both; but if under both, it is as something mixed...’ VI,2.18. Plotinus considered the ‘unchanging’ stars as part of Soul -  therefore their movement is not spatial as in this universe, but one of divine life and vitality. It is therefore a self-referential and eternal movement of being which, to anything outside, would appear to be at rest. (my Italics) ‘This is the origin of the fixed stars, which are living beings divine and eternal and remain always rotating in the same place and the same sense...’ Timaeus 8, 40.

17. ‘...soul is the “origin of motion” and is responsible for the motion of other things, and it is moved by itself, and gives life to the ensouled body...’ IV,7.9. The quotation within the quotation is from Plato’s Phaedrus 245C9. Plato believed soul to be the ultimate cause of motion: Laws Bk X 895-897 - ‘Athenian: So what’s the definition of the thing we call the soul? Surely we can do nothing but use our formula of a moment ago: “motion capable of moving itself”. Cleinias: Do you mean that the entity which we all call “soul” is precisely that which is defined by the expression “self-generating motion”’?...Athenian: Very well, then. So soul, by virtue of its own motions, stirs into movement everything in the heavens and on earth and in the sea. The names of the motions of soul are: wish, reflection, diligence, counsel, opinion true and false, joy and grief, cheerfulness and fear, love and hate...Soul also uses all related or initiating motions which take over the secondary movements of matter and stimulate everything to increase or diminish, separate or combine...’. Notice that Plato cited emotions as motion(s of soul).