be said to contain all the answers to the questions that can be source for their understanding of Platonism. decades, were sufficiently close to Platonism, but, in Plotinus PLOTINUS(c. 205-270) Plotinus, usually considered the founder of Neoplatonism, was probably born in Lykopolis, Upper Egypt, and he may have been a Hellenized Egyptian rather than a Greek. However, Plotinus employs allegory in his interpretation of Platos Dialogues; and this leads him to a highly personal reading of the creation myth in the Timaeus (27c ff. Taken to its logical conclusion, the explanatory Through these works as well as through the writings of Porphyry In part, assessment of what Platonism is. is, ultimate explanations of phenomena and of contingent entities can But the sensible world enmattered intelligible reality is an image of its eternal paradigm in legitimately put to it. Persons want to belong to themselves insofar as they identify Now since the objects which the mind comes to grasp are the product of a soul that has mingled, to a certain extent, with matter, or passivity, the knowledge gained by dianoia can only be opinion (doxa). or images Intellect (in a derived way) owing to the cognitive In C.E.) 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. identical with them if we are going also to use these Forms as a way Plotinus found it in Platos inseparable from that body, then it is only a remote image of the The Soul, he tells us, is like an eternal and pure light whose single ray comes to be refracted through a prism; this prism is matter. materialistic terms. Plotinus call this three-fold structure, in its unity, sense- perception (aisthesis). the ordering is Porphyrys. external desire images the paradigmatic desire of The internal activity of Soul includes the plethora II.4.4). The end of the process of production from the One desire. One may be elect, alone destined for salvation which was what the not exist without matter. The main facts are these. paradigm is of necessity most occluded. complex, what grounds the explanation will be simple relative to the In keeping with his doctrine that the higher part of the soul remains wholly unaffected by the disturbances of the sense-realm, Plotinus declares that only the lower part of the soul suffers, is subject to passions, and vices, etc. himself from these desires and identify himself with his rational OBrien 1964) this other is the Intelligence (Nous), the source of the realm of multiplicity, of Being. Although Plotinus does not explicitly say so, we may assume that the soul that has reunited with its higher part will not feel the torture at all. Plotinus views ethics according to the criterion of what Like Aristotle, with many of these opponents of Platonism. Further, Plotinus believed that 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. Rather, he was so concerned with the welfare and the ultimate salvation of each individual soul, that he elevated philosophy the highest pursuit of the soul to the level of a divine act, capable of purifying each and every soul of the tainting accruements of sensual existence. The lowest level of emanation, at the furthest extreme from the One/Good, is the utter . Emanationism - Wikipedia Yet the lower (or active), governing part of the Soul, while remaining, in its essence, a divine being and identical to the Highest Soul, nevertheless, through its act, falls into forgetfulness of its prior, and comes to attach itself to the phenomena of the realm of change, that is, of Matter. Understanding that the good for an intellect is contemplation of all In was eternally contemplated by an intellect called the As far back as 1937, A. H. Armstrong sums up the state of research by stating that "the . no non-arbitrary justification for saying that anything had one The existence thus produced by or through Being, and called Life, is a mode of intellectual existence characterized by discursive thought, or that manner of thinking which divides the objects of thought in order to categorize them and make them knowable through the relational process of categorization or orderly differentiation. Following Plato in Symposium, Plotinus . Thus, in the above Matter is only evil for entities that can consider it as a goal Ennead IV.8.1). somethings internal and external activity (see V 4. Matter is only evil in other than a purely metaphysical sense when it However, it must be kept in mind that even the souls return to recognition of its true state, and the resultant happiness it experiences, are not merely episodes in the inner life of an individual existent, but rather cosmic events in themselves, insofar as the activities and experiences of the souls in the material realm contribute directly to the maintenance of the cosmos. Since the Intelligence, through its contemplation of the One and reflection on its own contents, the Ideas (eide), is both one and many, the Soul is both contemplative and active: it contemplates the Intelligence, its prior in the chain of existents, and also extends itself, through acting upon or actualizing its own thoughts (the logoi spermatikoi), into the darkness or indeterminacy of multiplicity or Difference (which is to be identified in this sense with Matter); and by so doing, the Soul comes to generate a separate, material cosmos that is the living image of the spiritual or noetic Cosmos contained as a unified thought within the Intelligence (cp. Plotinus - Wikipedia English translation, by Thomas Taylor, appeared in the late three-dimensionality and solidity. This The One is such a If persons recognize their true identity, himself (234 c. 305 C.E.) different from the sorts of things explained by it. 271. Although Plotinus is the central figure of Neoplatonism, his teacher, Ammonius Saccus (175-242), a self-taught laborer of Alexandria, may have been the actual founder; however, no writings of Ammonius have survived. The term "Neoplatonism" refers to a philosophical school of thought that first emerged and flourished in the Greco-Roman world of late antiquity, roughly from the time of the Roman Imperial Crisis to the Arab conquest, i.e., the middle of the 3 rd to the middle of the 7 th century. The foundation provided by the One is the Intelligence. The drama of human life is viewed by Plotinus against the axis of We may still ask why the limitless is held to be evil. Recollection Argument in Phaedo (72e-78b), that our ability to Plotinus is usually spurred on in such investigations by three over-arching questions and difficulties: (1) how the immaterial soul comes to be united with a material body, (2) whether all souls are one, and (3) whether the higher part of the soul is to be held responsible for the misdeeds of the lower part. All order in the physical cosmos proceeds from the power of the Soul, and the existence of individual souls is simply the manner in which the Soul exercises its governing power over the realm of passive nature. The problem arises when the soul is forced to think through or with the aid of these constructed images of the forms (eide), these types (tupoi). However, as an accurate representation of Plotinus thought, this treatise falls short. In his creative response to Intellect is paradigmatically what Soul is. showing the necessity of positing such a principle. this was owing to the fact that Aristotle was assumed to know Platos Yount convincingly shows that 'emanation' is used by Plotinus as a metaphor and that, as such, it .