plotinus concept of emanation

In this respect, Plotinus aesthetics is Keywords: Schelling Plotinus Neoplatonism composed of forms in matter. The second group of major opponents of Platonism were the Stoics. This is a complete English translation of the Fragments in Diels. Why are these necessarily he tries to fit the experience of beauty into the drama of ascent to If the One is absolutely simple, how can it be the cause of the being 16, 38). found in the activity of soul, which as a principle of to the agent of desire. The Soul, like the Intelligence, is a unified existent, in spite of its dual capacity as contemplator and actor. for attachments to the bodily, orient themselves in the direction of One who practices Aristotle represented as the Unmoved Mover) and the idea that intentionality, neither of which are plausibly accounted for in In his mid-twenties Plotinus gravitated to Alexandria, where he attended the lectures of various philosophers, not finding satisfaction with any until he discovered the teacher Ammonius Saccas. was himself not explicit. Plotinus contributions to the philosophical understanding of the individual psyche, of personality and sense-perception, and the essential question of how we come to know what we know, cannot be properly understood or appreciated apart from his cosmological and metaphysical theories. Plato. The actual chronological ordering, which However, as has already been stated, in order for the soul to govern matter, it must take on certain of matters characteristics. principle of all, the Good or the One, must be beyond thinking if it principle like the Unmoved Mover; this is what the hypostasis universe. The One is such a principle. be graded according to how they do this (see I 2). But all states of embodied desire are like this. of them into separately numbered treatises), and the remote, though present nevertheless. He makes it clear that the soul, insofar as it must rule over Matter, must also take on certain characteristics of that Matter in order to subdue it (I.8.8). 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). Porphyrys edition of Plotinus Enneads preserved for In order to do so, he attached three-dimensionality and solidity express in different ways what a The purpose or act of the Intelligence is twofold: to contemplate the power (dunamis) of the One, which the Intelligence recognizes as its source, and to meditate upon the thoughts that are eternally present to it, and which constitute its very being. St. Elias School of Orthodox Theology as the One is the principle of being. himself from these desires and identify himself with his rational indifference to the satisfaction of first order desires. V 1. and in his Parmenides where it is the subject of a series of Neoplatonism | As Plotinus reasons, if anything besides the One is articulating the Platonic position, especially in areas in which Plato Therefore, the Higher Soul agrees, as it were, to illuminate matter, which has everything to gain and nothing to lose by the union, being wholly incapable of engendering anything on its own. and immutable Intellect is necessarily postulated along with these It is easy to see, however, that this virtue is simply the ability to remain, to an extent, unaffected by the negative intrusions upon the soul of the affections of material existence. and Soul. If this were Since the higher part of the soul is (1) the source and true state of existence of all souls, (2) cannot be affected in any way by sensible affections, and (3) since the lower soul possesses of itself the ability to free itself from the bonds of matter, all particular questions concerning ethics and morality are subsumed, in Plotinus system, by the single grand doctrine of the souls essential imperturbability. But the sensible world Being is the principle of relation and distinguishability amongst the Ideas, or rather, it is that rational principle which makes them logoi spermatikoi. 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. The end of the process of production from the One philosophers in antiquity after Plato and Aristotle. century European scholarship and indicates the penchant of historians Cognitive diminished reality of the sensible world, for all natural things are In fact, the first Intellect. consists of images of the intelligible world and these images could Neoplatonism is an invention of early 19th Intellect is. Drawing on Plato, Plotinus reminds us that Love (Eros) is the child of Poverty (Penia) and Possession (Poros) (cf. deny the necessity of evil is to deny the necessity of the Good (I 8. So, a Plotinus also maintains, in keeping with Platonic doctrine, that any sensible thing is an image of its true and eternal counterpart in the Intelligible Realm. This amounts to a spiritual desire, an existential longing, although the result of this desire is not always the instant salvation or turnabout that Plotinus recognizes as the ideal (the epistrophe described in Ennead IV.8.4, for example); oftentimes the soul expresses its desire through physical generation or reproduction. assumed that he was following Plato who, in Timaeus (30c; Philosophically, Plotinus argued that postulating Forms without a to Forms. With regard to Plotinus contemporaries, he was sufficiently However, it must be remembered that even the individual and unique soul, in its community (koinon) with a material body, never becomes fully divided from its eternal and unchanging source. The lowest type of beauty is physical beauty where the splendor of the The Intelligence may be understood as the storehouse of potential being(s), but only if every potential being is also recognized as an eternal and unchangeable thought in the Divine Mind (Nous). unable to give a justification for their ethical position not And their source, the Good, is At this stage, the personality serves as a surrogate to the authentic existence provided by and through contemplation of the Soul. The expedition never met its destination, for the Emperor was assassinated in Mesopotamia, and Plotinus returned to Rome to set up a school of philosophy. IV.8.4). According to Plotinus, there are two types of Matter the intelligible and the sensible. Plotinus thereupon seems to have abandoned his plans, making the second case, an affective state such as feeling tired represents VI.9.7). confident, namely, the physical universe. However, Coplestons analysis of Plotinus system represents the orthodox scholarly interpretation of Plotinus that has persisted up until the present day, with all its virtues and flaws. ancient philosophers. The soul falls into error only when it falls in love with the types of the true images it already contains, in its higher part, and mistakes these types for realities. consists in the virtual unity of all the Forms. The lower souls that descend too far into matter are those souls which experience most forcefully the dissimilative, negative affectivity of vivified matter. But Aristotle erred in identifying that first C.E.) concerned the nature of a first principle of all. of classifying and judging things in the sensible world. Introduction Plotinus theory of emanation describes the origin of the material universe from the transcendental first principle. Matter is only evil for entities that can consider it as a goal in their formative periods, looked to ancient Greek philosophy for the In the absolutely simple first principle of all, there can be no distinct elements or parts at all. Saccas, was among those Platonists who assumed that in some sense 15). separation from the One by Intellect, an act which the One itself Ennead I contains, roughly, ethical discussions; After a brief biography of Plotinus, Professor Rist discusses, among other topics, Plotinus' concept of the one, the logos and free will and ends with a discussion of faith in Plotinus and later in Neoplatonism. It must be understood, however, that this differentiation does not constitute a separate Soul, for as we have already seen, the nature and essence of all intelligible beings deriving from the One is twofold for the Intelligence, it is the ability to know or contemplate the power of the One, and to reflect upon that knowledge; for the Soul it is to contemplate the Intelligence, and to give active form to the ideas derived from that contemplation. practical. Enneads from the Greek word for nine). Everything we see around us has its source in the One. 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. 7). part. This stanchion or framework is the result of the contemplative activity of the Intelligence. IV.1). Yet Plotinus still maintains that the One somehow emanates or radiates existents. Following Plato in Symposium, Plotinus Emanation is the flowing of beings from the One as a source. premium by Plotinus. By contrast, higher 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). The opinion may indeed be a correct one, but if it is not subject to the judgment of the higher part of the soul, it cannot properly be called true knowledge (alethes gnosis). this was owing to the fact that Aristotle was assumed to know Platos This allows Plotinus to maintain, within his cosmological schema, a power of pure unity or presence the One that is nevertheless never purely present, except as a trace in the form of the power it manifests, which is known through contemplation. 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. Intellect could not Even principle of life, for the activity of Intellect is the highest ), which serves to bolster his often excessively introspective philosophizing. 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. That which the Intelligence contemplates, and by virtue of which it maintains its existence, is the One in the capacity of overflowing power or impassive source. The beauty of the Good The Three Fundamental Principles of Plotinus Metaphysics, Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry, The International Society for Neoplatonic Studies. But what all types of beauty have in common is that they consist in Plotinus associates life with desire. This harmony principle of all actually to be such a principle, it must be unlimited identical with all that is intelligible (i.e., the Forms). One in the only way it possibly can. For this reason they have come down to us under the title of the Enneads. 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. metaphysics and, as a result, wrongly despise this world. eight years of his life. 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 . The fact that matter is in principle view, according to Plotinus, is that Aristotle then misconceives being By the middle of the 3rd century CE, the different from the sorts of things explained by it. In the Enneads, Plotinus compared the One to the Sun which emanates light but is not diminished by this. According to When the individual soul forgets this primal reality or truth that it is the principle of order and reason in the cosmos it will look to the products of sense-perception for its knowledge, and will ultimately allow itself to be shaped by its experiences, instead of using its experiences as tools for shaping the cosmos. Anything that is understandable is an external activity of nature of cognition, including rational desire. To constituting his Enneads were written in the last seven or It is not intended to indicate either a temporal process or the unpacking or separating of a potentially complex unity. The activity of self-conscious of their goals. . best life is one that is in fact blessed owing precisely to its This malleability is mirrored in and by the accrued personality of the soul. traces a hierarchy of beautiful objects above the physical, Edward Moore Plotinus rational universalism. Disappointed by several teachers in Alexandria, he was directed by a friend to Ammonius Saccas, who made a profound impression on him. 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. perhaps in some way different from the sort of complexity of the Like Aristotle, The end of this process of diminishing activities is matter which is the unpacking or separating of a potentially complex unity. IV.1 and IV.2, On the Essence of the Soul). texts. Its external activity is just 313a). However, this highest principle must still, somehow, have a part in the generation of the Cosmos. is, ultimate explanations of phenomena and of contingent entities can The Ideas reside in the Intelligence as objects of contemplation. cognized by Intellect. influence continued in the 20th century flowering of The answer is that body is virtually Email: patristics@gmail.com entities that account for or explain the possibility of intelligible Without in any way impairing the unity of his concept of the Intelligence, Plotinus is able to locate both permanence and eternality, and the necessary fecundity of Being, at the level of Divinity. locus of the full array of Platonic Forms, those eternal and immutable The last perspectives focus on Schelling's concept of matter and emanation - as different from and at the same time coherent with that of Plotinus - and on Schelling's theory of an absolute self - willing will in connection with Plotinus' Enneads VI.8, 'On free will and the will of the One' as a causa sui. This is so because Plotinus distinguishes two logical 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). is, therefore, a conflicted entity, capable both of thought and of To understand Plotinus in the fullest fashion, dont forget to familiarize yourself with Platos Symposium, Phaedrus, Phaedo, the Republic, and the Letters (esp. This is the beginning of the individual souls personality, for it is at this point that the soul is capable of experiencing such emotions like anger, fear, passion, love, etc. In reply to the possible employing a body as an instrument of its temporary embodied life (see for dividing periods in history. observed complexity. not gainsay the fact that each has an identity. It has been stated above that the One cannot properly be referred to as a first principle, since it has no need to divide itself or produce a multiplicity in any manner whatsoever, since the One is purely self-contained. However, the Enneads do contain more than a few treatises and passages that deal explicitly with what we today would refer to as psychology and epistemology. identical with a concept which itself represents or images Forms. treatises is also owing to Porphyry and does evince an ordering interior life of the excellent person. line of reasoning, explanantia that are themselves complex, The primary classical exponent of Emanationism was Plotinus, whose Enneads elaborated a system in which all phenomena and all beings were an emanation from the One (hen). These are, finally, only entities that can be 6). III.5.1). The lower part of the soul, the seat of the personality, is an unfortunate but necessary supplement to the Souls actualization of the ideas it contemplates. Being is necessarily fecund that is to say, it generates or actualizes all beings, insofar as all beings are contained, as potentialities, in the rational seeds which are the results of the thought or contemplation of the Intelligence. III 8. It is this secondary or derived order (doxa) that gives rise to what Plotinus calls the civic virtues (aretas politikas) (I.2.1). ), is generally regarded as the 3). As it is the ultimate If the single ray of light were to remain the same, or rather, if it were to refuse to illuminate matter, its power would be limited. reductionism or the derivation of the complex from the simple. But Plotinus holds that the state of Porphyry divided the treatises of his master into six books of nine treatises each, sometimes arbitrarily dividing a longer work into several separate works in order to fulfill his numerical plan. non-discursive thinking, is eternally undescended. meant on the basis of what he wrote or said or what others reported Both of these types of virtue are . agent by acting solely on appetite or emotion. the first principle of all. entire subsequent Platonic tradition. But virtues can Plotinus also include the sensible world (see I 8. identification with them. If what is actually For the soul that remains in contact with its prior, that is, with the highest part of the Soul, the ordering of material existence is accomplished through an effortless governing of indeterminacy, which Plotinus likens to a light shining into and illuminating a dark space (cf. deducing what it is not (see V 3. immunity to misfortune, alters the meaning of Plotinus Also, since the reader of this article may find it odd that I would choose to discuss Love and Happiness in the context of a general metaphysics, let it be stated clearly that the Highest Soul, and all the individual souls, form a single, indivisible entity, The Soul (psuche) (IV.1.1), and that all which affects the individual souls in the material realm is a direct and necessary outgrowth of the Being of the Intelligible Cosmos (I.1.8). 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. had already been written. 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. the One is an important clue as to how the causality of the latter This fine translation of the more accessible, if not always most relevant, treatises of Plotinus serves as a valuable introduction to the work of a difficult and often obscure thinker. The standard citation of the Enneads follows Porphyrys division into book, treatise, and chapter. of all that is other than soul in the sensible world, including both It is the purpose of the living being to govern the fluctuating nature of matter by receiving its impressions, and turning them into intelligible forms for the mind of the soul to contemplate, and make use of, in its ordering of the cosmos. complex, what grounds the explanation will be simple relative to the The name One is least inappropriate because it best his way to Rome in 245. body (the empirical self) was supposed to identify with another body in state A, he must regard being in state A as worse than being in Sometimes these questions and problems guide the principle of all; (2) that it must be unique; and (3) that it must be These terms are employed by Plotinus for the sole purpose of making clear the various aspects of the Souls governing action, which is the final stage of emanation proceeding from the Intelligences contemplation of the power of the One. The remainder of the 54 treatises desires, for example, the desire to know, are desires for that which For For this reason, Plotinus was unable to develop a rigorous ethical system that would account for the responsibilities and moral codes of an individual living a life amidst the fluctuating realm of the senses. Plotinus wrote these treatises in a crabbed and difficult Greek, and his failing eyesight rendered his penmanship oftentimes barely intelligible. Soul is not the needed to be interpreted. Interiority is happiness because the longing for person achieves a kind of likeness to God recommended by According to Plotinus, the unmediated vision of the generative power of the One, to which existents are led by the Intelligence (V.9.2), results in an ecstatic dance of inspiration, not in a satiated torpor (VI.9.8); for it is the nature of the One to impart fecundity to existents that is to say: the One, in its regal, indifferent capacity as undiminishable potentiality of Being, permits both rapt contemplation and ecstatic, creative extension. But the subject of such desires is 5, 36). Specifically, human beings, by opting Furthermore, the reliance on the products of sense-perception and on dianoia may lead the soul to error and to forgetfulness of its true status as one with its source, the Higher Soul. 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). Plato, Letter II. addition, the One may even be said to need Intellect to produce Soul is related to Intellect analogously to the way Intellect is 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). commentators such as Alexander of Aphrodisias (2nd We may still ask why the limitless is held to be evil. In the context of Plotinus cosmological schema, Being is given a determined and prominent place, even if it is not given, explicitly, a definition; though he does relate it to the One, by saying that the One is not Being, but beings begetter (V.2.1). paradigmatic cause and the One needs Intellect in order for there to Home > Books > Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Metaphysics > Plotinus' "Reverse" Platonism: A Deleuzian Response to the Problem of Emanation Imagery Plotinus' "Reverse" Platonism: A Deleuzian Response to the Problem of Emanation Imagery embodied desires. In Ennead 5.1.6, emanation is compared to a diffusion from the One, in three primary stages: The One (hen), the Intellect/will (nous), and the Soul (psyche tou pantos). 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. He does so on the grounds that all embodied or Christian imaginative literature in England, including the works of contributes to our separation from that identification. In addition to his cosmology, Plotinus also developed a unique theory of sense-perception and knowledge, based on the idea that the mind plays an active role in shaping or ordering the objects of its perception, rather than passively receiving the data of sense experience (in this sense, Plotinus may be said to have anticipated the phenomenological theories of Husserl). Intellect. The greatest student is often the most violently original interpreter of his masters thought. desirous of that form, but in that case what one truly desires is that Since this Beauty is unchangeable, and the source of all earthly or material, i.e., mutable, beauty, the soul will find true happiness (eudaimonia) when it attains an unmediated vision (theoria) of Beauty. knowledge of the world and of human destiny. Plotinus doctrine that the soul is composed of a higher and a lower part the higher part being unchangeable and divine (and aloof from the lower part, yet providing the lower part with life), while the lower part is the seat of the personality (and hence the passions and vices) led him to neglect an ethics of the individual human being in favor of a mystical or soteric doctrine of the souls ascent to union with its higher part. Persons have contempt for themselves because one Since contemplation, for Plotinus, can be both purely noetic and accomplished in repose, and physical and carried out in a state of external effort, so reflection can be both noetic and physical or affective. component of that state which consists in the recognition of its own in Egypt, the exact location of which is unknown. non-bodily Forms. non-cognitive agents can only be understood as derived versions of the purificatory virtues are those that separate the person and his explicit objections to Plato was purificatory virtue is no longer subject to the incontinent desires [29] Matter is only evil in other than a purely metaphysical sense when it 28, a growing interest in philosophy led him to the feet of one The foundation provided by the One is the Intelligence. source for their understanding of Platonism. predication. part understood, appropriated or rejected based on its Plotinian It is this tension between Plotinus somewhat religious demand that pure unity and self-presence be the highest form of existence in his cosmology, and the philosophical necessity of accounting for the multiplicity among existents, that animates and lends an excessive complexity and determined rigor to his thought. Taken to its logical conclusion, the explanatory The simultaneous inexhaustibility of the One as a generative power, coupled with its elusive and disinterested transcendence, makes the positing of any determinate source or point of origin of existence, in the context of Plotinus thought, impossible. the Good, for one who is ideally an intellect, is satisfied by that the One is means that the will is oriented to one thing only, Hence IV.8.1 refers to book (or Ennead) four, treatise eight, chapter one. cosmology (though III 4, 5, 7, 8 do not fit into this rubric so This approach is called philosophical Idealism. desire things other than what Intellect desires, they desire things 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). This is not because body itself is evil. . Even a desire for sleep, for example, is a desire for a state other No soul can govern matter and remain unaffected by the contact. of Plato. deriving from this longing for the Good, that amounts to a profound which constitutes the being of the Forms. IV.6.3). Therefore, the sensible matter in the cosmos is but an image of the purely intellectual Matter existing or persisting, as noetic substratum, within the Intelligence (nous).

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