Speak for yourself, Plotinus (& Augustine)…
"The most influential philosopher of the third century… is Plotinus (AD c. 205–270), a pagan teacher who studied in Alexandria and taught in Rome. His philosophy is otherworldly, deeply religious and entirely unmoved by scientific curiosity. Typically for his times, he tried to combine the ideas of many earlier thinkers while revering Plato above all. The mystically inclined thought of Plotinus inaugurated the final phase of Greek philosophy as it tottered over the brink of reason into occultism and religion. It was perfect for St
Augustine (AD 354–430), who sometimes claimed that it contained everything that was important in Christianity except for the figure of Christ himself. It would be truer to say that
Christian theology came to adopt many of Plotinus' ideas, partly thanks to the efforts of St Augustine.
Plotinus 'seemed ashamed of being in the body', said his pupil and biographer, Porphyry (AD c. 232–305). Plotinus thought of earthly life as a second-rate sort of existence, like that of the manacled prisoners in
Plato's gloomy Cave. Inspired by Plato's talk of immaterial souls and of the ideal Forms which earthly things dimly reflect, he urged his pupils to focus on a higher spiritual realm. What he tried harder than any earlier Platonist to achieve was a grasp of the relation between the lower and higher orders of reality. Plato himself did little more than gesture towards a higher world, but Plotinus tried to draw a map that would show how and where the two realms were connected. The resulting theory, with its rhapsodic descriptions of obscure hierarchies, was spasmodically revived later on in European thought. Historians since the nineteenth century have generally called it
'Neoplatonism' to mark the fact that it goes beyond anything found in Plato.
Plotinus knew that he was trying to describe the indescribable. The goal of his philosophy was union with a God-like One, which he claimed to have experienced himself now and then. But although he could report such fleeting experiences of union, their very nature meant that he could not say much about them. He held that the One was beyond rational comprehension. It was so far above everything else that no ordinary concepts applied to it. In a sense, he admitted, it was misleading to refer to it as the 'One', because this invited the unanswerable question 'one what?' The One (or whatever) could not even be called a being, because it was 'beyond being', to use a phrase of Plato. Plotinus wrote that 'nothing can be affirmed of it—not existence, not essence, not life—since it is That which transcends all these'.
The One transcends everything else because it is the source of everything else. One of Plotinus' favourite images for evoking the indescribable way in which everything comes from the One is '
emanation'. Reality streams out of the One like light emanating from the sun. But this analogy is imperfect because it does not capture Plotinus' idea of a hierarchy of realities. Perhaps a more useful image is that of a cascading fountain in which everything flows from a pinnacle, the One, down to successive tiers below it. This flow from the One must not be thought of as a physical process, though. Indeed it is not really a process at all, because it is timeless. What Plotinus is trying to express is a truth about
what lies behind nature as a whole; he is not just describing a particular natural phenomenon that can be explained in terms of cause and effect.
There are three main tiers to Plotinus' metaphorical fountain, each one in some sense 'overflowing' to produce what is below it. Below the spout-like One comes the level of Intellect, and below that comes the level of Soul. At the level of Intellect we find Plato's ideal Forms, which are also regarded as living intelligences of some sort. Intellect is an overflowing of the One, and Soul is an overflowing of Intellect. Soul can itself be divided into several subsidiary tiers, the lowest of which creates or overflows into the visible universe.
Matter on earth is the lowest of the low. It is furthest from the One, which Plotinus also calls the Good, and this means that it is evil. Evil is a purely negative concept for Plotinus, connoting the furthest possible distance from the One or Good.
There are many degrees of reality for Plotinus, just as there are many degrees of goodness. Some things are more real than others, and the closer they are to the One, the more real they are. By this curious expression he does not just mean, for example, that horses are 'more real' than unicorns because horses exist and unicorns do not. What he means is that there are many gradations of reality even among existing things. Even if unicorns actually existed, he would still put them low down on his ladder of reality because they would still be nothing more than physical things—and Plotinus did not think much of those. This idea is a sort of
perfectionism carried to extremes. Nothing can be regarded as fully real unless it is in every sense complete and perfect, which no physical thing is. For Plotinus, only the One that is absolutely complete. It is 'supremely adequate, autonomous, all-transcending, most utterly without need.' so only the One is absolutely real. Intellect is less real than the One, Soul is less real again, and
we are not very real at all…"
— Dream of Reason: A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance by Anthony Gottlieb
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