#plotinus

Plotinus wrote a lot, but his major work is called The Enneads, literally “the nine-nesses.” He wrote the material, but it was organized by his major student and biographer Porphyry, who did quite a bit of chopping and screwing to make it all fit into chunks of nine. One Ennead is even cut-and-pasted in the middle of a sentence. It is impossible to give a crash course in Plotinus. Or, it is impossible according to Plotinus. His philosophy is performative in the sense that you have to actually sit down, read the Enneads cover-to-cover, and puzzle it out for your damn self. That process of puzzling out is philosophically important to Plotinus. He refers to it as “noesis” literally “the process of knowing.” Therefore, there is no quick guide version of Plotinus that could accurately represent Plotinus’s actual philosophy. He would see such things as fundamentally incomplete. 

The acorn theory proposes and I will bring evidence for the claim that you and I and every single person is born with a defining image. Individuality resides in a formal cause—to use old philosophical language going back to Aristotle. We each embody our own idea, in the language of Plato and Plotinus. And this form, this idea, this image does not tolerate too much straying. The theory also attributes to this innate image an angelic or daimonic intention, as if it were a spark of consciousness; and, moreover, holds that it has our interest at heart because it chose us for its reasons.

وهكذا، فمع الخير لدينا الشر: لدينا الحركات المتعارضة لراقص يسترشد بخطة فنية واحدة؛ ندرك في خطواته الخير في مقابل الشر، ونرى أن في المعارضة تكمن قيمة التصميم.

What is meant by the purification of the soul is simply to allow it to be alone. It is pure when it keeps no company, entertains no alien thoughts; when it no longer sees images, much less elaborates them into veritable affections.

We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching. Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.