PLOTINUS. – Greek philosopher, born in Lycopolis (Egypt) in 205 AD. For eleven years a disciple of Ammonius Saccas in Alexandria, he followed the Emperor Gordian III in his ill-fated campaign against the Persians with the intention of acquainting himself with Eastern thought. In 245 he founded a school in Rome, where his disciples included Amelius and Porphyry (v.), who published the master’s six Enneads after 300. He died in Campania in 270.
With Plotinus, Greek thought achieves a brilliant synthesis of Platonic, Aristotelian and Stoic speculation, and, under the influence of Neoplatonism, Hermetism and the Jewish-Alexandrian school, directs itself toward religious values, effecting a fusion of rationalistic demands with the demands of mystical experience. The monistic exigency dominates the Platonic system, yet without annulling the reality of distinctions: the Principle is not merely the ineffable One (“ἓν ἀπὸρρητον”) of which one can say only what it is not (negative theology), but is the first source of being, thought, soul, and life. The One is the Good, and its generative power is infinite and inexhaustible (Enn., V, 5, 11): from the One emanates eternal Intelligence (Nous), in which the otherness between thought and thought-object implies a multiplicity of ideal essences constituting an immobile and unchanging unity (ἐν τῷ αὐτῷ: ibid., IV, 8, 3; V, 9, 8); from Intelligence emanates the Universal Soul (Ψυχή), source of movement and life, which includes within itself individual souls and projects its generative power into a sensible world situated in time and space; and the phenomenal appearances, subject to incessant flux, are the extreme fringe of that multiplicity which, the farther it recedes from the One, the more it disperses and degrades (ibid., III, 8, 8). Matter is non-being, the negative term of divine generation, the place of sensible appearances, the limiting concept of thought, the principle of divisibility and of evil (ibid., I, 8, 3; II, 4, 8; III, 6, 15; IV, 4, 5). Multiplicity, an expression of vital richness and at the same time of dangerous dispersion, is absent in the One, which is absolute simplicity and the original source of the manifold; it is a richness of ideas in the unity of the noetic world; a complexity of individual souls in the Universal Soul; a fecundity of seminal reasons in the individual soul; a fluidity of sensations and qualities in time and space. The inferior is an image of the superior, on which it depends and to which it returns. One, Intelligence, Soul are the three hypostases (the “Platonic Trinity”) which determine the three substantial planes of reality, coordinated among themselves by a bond of dependence and subordination. Intelligence generates insofar as it contemplates the One; Soul generates insofar as it contemplates Intelligence: all life is a thought, more or less clear and conscious (ibid., III, 8, 8).
In this universe of eternally immobile entities, which do not know the life of history and whose correlation constitutes one of the most serious works of Platonism, the human soul bears the dramatic tone of its individual existence, poised between the limits of truth and error, redemption and perdition, ineffable joy and irrational anguish. Its free choice transforms the metaphysical hypostases into values of intelligence and will, at the same time freeing itself from the narrowness of empirical individuality; or else it resolves, in terms of spiritual life—that is, in guilt, error, and pain—the realm of sensation and of inferior nature. The process from the One to the manifold is necessary and involuntary (ibid., III, 5, 3; V, 2, 2); the return from the manifold to the One is the work of the soul’s free initiative, to whose will is open the possibility of inserting itself into the order of metaphysical values or of precipitating into the body of passions or appearances (ibid., III, 8, 6; VI, 9, 7). And the return (ἐπιστροφή: ibid., I, 3) is possible only on condition that the sensible be an image of the intelligible and that the soul, which must depart from immediate experience, recognize that affinity and that likeness. Its return is the reconquest of its own interiority and the discovery, within it, of the external hypostases. Art, love, dialectic, virtue are the ways of return (ibid., I, 3; I, 6, 5; II, 9, 16): values realized in the human world and forming, through human agency, the history of civilization and culture; the only authentic history, in Plotinus’ view, whose task is the conquest of the Universal and the establishment of the Eternal in time—that is, the annulment of historicity understood as infinite renewal. Art reveals the Beautiful, and the Beautiful is the Ideal free from every sensible and passionate element and the object of pure intuition (ibid., I, 6, 5-7; V, 8, 8). Its function is theoretical and contemplative. The artist does not imitate particular things as such, but intuits the eternal in the phenomenal and suggests it through expressive means (ibid., V, 8, 1): his creation in time and space is the ultimate continuation of the generative activity of the One, but its spiritual value consists in causing the inevitable means of sensible expression to perform an initiatory and suggestive function.
Art, if it is a spiritual act, cannot be resolved into mere visibility: the work of art, as a revelation of the Idea, is the object of an entirely interior and intellectual intuition; its function therefore culminates in a theoretical act, freeing the soul from the irrationality of sensation and restoring it to the region of pure Intelligence (ibid., I, 6, 1; V, 8, 9). Love (ἔρως), too, though arising from the fascination of beautiful appearances, can be a way of return; its initial affectivity is gradually purified as thought illuminates its object and clarifies its metaphysical conditions. Yet even love, far from establishing on earth the kingdom of human solidarity, culminates in a contemplative act in which lover and beloved are stripped of their individuality and identified in the universality of the Idea (ibid., III, 4, 3; III, 5, 4). Beauty and love are thus only approaches to truth insofar as λόγος accompanies them and transforms what was merely indefinite aspiration or vague presentiment into full rational recognition. In dialectic, the extra-rational elements present in art and love disappear: thought finds itself in its authentic sincerity and rediscovers, through discursive inquiry, what lies beyond discursivity—the immobile unity of the noetic cosmos; the eternal Being which, though articulated in the multiplicity of Ideas, preserves its spiritual simplicity; the fixity of divine Intelligence, which possesses all things in that it is all (τὸ αὐτὸ νοεῖν καὶ εἶναι: ibid., V, 1, 8; I, 3, 4-5). Dialectic unfolds and analyzes the elements, in themselves inseparable, of the Truth which is one, only to recompose them in unity and comprehend their intimate unitary structure: if it does not succeed in leading us back to the absolute One, since the One transcends thought and therefore eludes it, it nonetheless enables us to know that unity which alone is granted to human thought’s intuition and which is the true preparation for the ineffable One.
Moral activity, in this return of the soul, is not so much a new way as the condition of all ways: catharsis frees the artist’s gaze from the dross of practicality and renders it pure intuition; it redeems love from the yoke of sexuality and makes it clairvoyant; it disengages thought from the attractions of the sensible and matures it for the knowledge of the Invisible (ibid., V, 3, 17; I, 2, 4). Yet the One is beyond thought, because it is prior to Intelligence; art, love, dialectic, and the virtues do not reach it insofar as they maintain the otherness of relations. Only in ecstasy does the soul become one with the One (μόνος πρὸς μόνον):
The influence of Platonism has been one of the deepest in the history of philosophy. In Greek and Latin patristics, the essential motifs of its theology contributed to the speculative formulation of new philosophical-religious problems and to the development of a theocentric conception of the world. Through the works of Pseudo-Dionysius (v.), the *Liber de causis*, the *Pseudo-Theologia Aristotelis*, Scholasticism also felt its influence, not only in the speculative mysticism that runs from John Scotus Eriugena (v.) to Meister Eckhart (v.). The renewed concept of man and his spiritual destiny, in the Renaissance, drew from Platonism, whose motifs had by then definitively fused with what is commonly designated as Renaissance Platonism (v.). Almost absent in the Enlightenment (though Leibniz, Berkeley, and the Cambridge School are not entirely foreign to it), Platonism revived in the Romantic movement, which found in it the pantheistic sense of the world, the continuity and connection of all beings, the analogical relationship between the visible and the spiritual, and the consequent poetic symbolism. The idealism of Schelling (v.) and Hegel (v.), SCHOPENHAUER, ARTHUR (v.), often drew upon II. Still alive today in many of its inspirational motifs (in Bergsonian intuitionism, in Bosanquet’s neo-Hegelianism, in Royce, in Martinetti, etc.), it remains the subject of extensive studies that attest to the enduring vitality of its message.