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Plotinus: Principles
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Plotinus is considered to be the founder of Neoplatonism. Taking his lead from his reading of Plato, Plotinus developed a complex spiritual cosmology involving three hypostases: the One, the Intelligence, and the Soul. It is from the productive unity of these three Beings that all existence emanates. The principal of emanation is not simply causal, but ... contemplative. In his system, Plotinus raises intellectual contemplation to the status of a productive principle; and it is by virtue of contemplation that all existents are said to be united as a single, all-pervasive reality. In this sense, Plotinus is not a strict pantheist, yet his system does not permit the notion of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothingness).
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In addition, in order to preserve the self-sufficiency (and therefore the unity) of the Unity or One, Plotinus denies the possibility of intellection, even knowledge of itself. For the Unity or One to know itself would make the Unity or One dependent upon the act of Intellection for its self-knowledge. This would compromise its self-sufficiency. It is nonetheless wrong to say that Unity or One is ignorant because it does not have self-knowledge. Neither knowing not not-knowing applies to it, because both to know and not to know require an object, "something outside," but there is nothing independent of the Unity or One. Although it does not have intellection, the One or Unity is the cause of all intellection ("is intellection"), in that which originates from it.There cannot be self-intellection in the Unity or the One because the act of self-intellection implies lack: "The wholly simple and veritable self-sufficing can be lacking at no point: self-intellection begins in that principle which, secondarily self-sufficing, yet needs itself and therefore needs to know itself" (V.
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Plotinus wonders whether natural non-living objects or artistic objects are more beautiful. Thereby, he compares a raw piece of marble and one in the form of a god, which was created by an artist. As the marble god clearly is more beautiful than the natural piece of marble, Plotinus infers that what makes a thing beautiful is its form, and not its matter, and the reason for this is that the form was in the intellect of the artist before it entered the material world. And it always has to be the case that the creative principle is superior to the created thing
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(Plotinus believes that his teaching of the Intellectual-Principle is found in Plato's Timaeus [III. 9.1].) The Intellectual-Principle has two phases or modes to its being: in repose and active. When it knows, it is in act, i.e., doing something--in this case knowing or contemplating--and has itself for its object, but in its other phase of not being in act, i.e., to be in repose. The objects known by the Intellectual-Principle do not exist before the Intellectual-Principle as that to be known, nor do they come into being as insofar as known. Rather they are eternally co-present to it, so that "the Intellectual and Being are identical" (372). Thus, paradoxically, to know is to be known and to be known is to know; there is no dualism of knowing subject and what it knows (being). Intellectual-Principle is itself what it knows, the Authentic Existences or the Ideas, being one with its contents. As Plotinus put it,
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Being, for Plotinus, is not some abstract, amorphous pseudo-concept that is somehow pre-supposed by all thinking. 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 "being's begetter" (V.2.1). Although Being does not, for Plotinus, pre-suppose thought, it does pre-suppose and make possible all 're-active' or causal generation. 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. Being differentiates the unified thought of the Intelligence -- that is, makes it repeatable and meaningful for those existents which must proceed from the Intelligence as the Intelligence proceeds from the One. Being is the principle of relation and distinguishability amongst the Ideas, or rather, it is that rational principle which makes them logoi spermatikoi.
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Plotinus's writings can hardly be characterized as systematic, although there is a Plotinian system in the sense that there are basic entities, principles of operation, and an effort at a unified explanation of the world. The system... does not for the most part cut up nicely into the written works, such that an introductory exposition of a work would provide one of that system's building blocks.
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