PLOTINO. — Greek philosopher, b. at Lycopolis (Egypt) in 205 A.D. For eleven years a disciple of Ammonius Saccas in Alexandria, he followed the emperor Gordian III in the ill-fated expedition against the Persians, intending to learn about Eastern thought. In 245 he founded a school in Rome, Porphyry (v.) were among his disciples; the latter published, after 300, the master’s six Enneads. He died in Campania in 270.
With P., Greek thought gathered into a brilliant synthesis Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic speculation and, orienting it under the influence of Neopythagoreanism, Hermeticism, and the Judaeo-Alexandrian school toward religious values, accomplished the fusion of rationalistic requirements with the demands of mystical experience. The monistic requirement dominates the Plotinian system, but without abolishing the reality of distinctions: the Principle is not merely the ineffable One (Ἐν ἄρρητον), of which one can say only what it is not (negative theology), but is the primal source of being, thought, soul, and life. The One is the Good, and its generative power is infinite and inexhaustible (Ενν., V, 5, 11): from the One emanates the eternal Intellect (Νοῦς), in which the alterity between Thought and the object thought entails a multiplicity of ideal essences that constitute an immobile and timeless unity (ἐν πολλὰ: ibid., IV, 8, 3; V, 9, 8); from the Intellect emanates the Universal Soul (Ἑναχή), the source of movement and life, which includes within itself the many individual souls and projects its generative power into a sensible world situated in time and space; phenomenal appearances, subject to incessant becoming, are the furthest offshoot of that multiplicity which, the farther it moves from the One, the more it disperses and deteriorates (ibid., III, 8, 8). Matter is non-being, the negative terminus of divine generation, the locus of sensible appearances, the limiting concept of thought, and the principle of divisibility and evil (ibid., I, 8, 3; II, 4, 8; III, 6, 15; II, 4, 5). Multiplicity, an expression both of vital richness and of dangerous dispersion, is absent from the One, which is absolute simplicity and the original source of the multiple; it is the richness of ideas within the unity of the poetic world; it is the complexity of individual souls within the Universal Soul; it is the fecundity of seminal reasons within the individual soul; it is the fluidity of sensations and qualities in time and space. The lower is an image of the higher, on which it depends and to which it leads back. One, Intellect, and Soul are the three hypostases (the “Plotinian trinity”) that determine the three substantial planes of reality, coordinated with one another by a bond of dependence and subordination. The Intellect generates insofar as it contemplates the One; the Soul generates insofar as it contemplates the Intellect: every life is a thought more or less clear and conscious (ibid., III, 8, 8).
In this universe of eternally immobile entities that know nothing of the life of history, and whose correlation constitutes one of the gravest aporias of Plotinism, the soul of man bears the dramatic tone of its individual existence, suspended 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 the intellect and the will, while at the same time freeing itself from the constraints of empirical individuality; or else it resolves the sphere of sensations and inferior nature in terms of spiritual life, that is, in guilt, error, and pain. The process from the One to the multiple is necessary and involuntary (ibid., III, 5, 3; V, 2, 2); the return from the multiple to the One is the work of the soul’s free initiative, for whose will there is open the possibility of entering into the order of metaphysical values or plunging into the whirlpool 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 is an image of the intelligible and that the soul, which must depart from empirical immediacy, recognize that affinity and likeness. Its return is the reconquest of its own interiority and the discovery, within it, of the eternal hypostases. Art, love, dialectic, and virtue are the paths of return (ibid., I, 3; I, 6, 5; II, 9, 16): values realized in the human world and forming, through the work of man, the history of civilization and culture; for P., the only authentic history, 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 of every sensible and passionate element and the object of pure intuition (ibid., I, 6, 5-7; V, 8, 8). Its function is cathartic and theoretical. The artist does not imitate particular things as such, but intuits the eternal in the phenomenon 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 making the inevitable means of sensible expression perform an initiatory and suggestive function.
Art, insofar as it is a spiritual act, cannot be reduced to pure visibility: the work of art, as a revelation of the Idea, is the object of an entirely inward and intellectual intuition; its function therefore culminates in a theoretical act, freeing the soul from the irrationality of sensations and leading it back into the region of pure Intellect (ibid., I, 6, 1; V, 8, 9). Love (ἔρας), too, although born from the fascination of beautiful appearances, can be a path of return; its initial affectivity is gradually purified in proportion as thought illuminates its object and clarifies its metaphysical conditions. But love, too, far from establishing on earth the kingdom of human solidarity, culminates in a contemplative act in which both lover and beloved are stripped of their individuality and identified with the universality of the idea (ibid., III, 4, 3; III, 5, 4). Beauty and love, then, lead toward truth only insofar as the λόγος accompanies them and transforms into full rational recognition what was merely an ineffable aspiration or a vague foreboding. In dialectic, the extrarational elements present in art and love disappear: thought finds itself there in its authentic purity and rediscovers, through discursive inquiry, that which lies beyond discursiveness: the immobile unity of the poetic cosmos; eternal Being, which, although articulated in the multiplicity of ideas, preserves its spiritual simplicity; the fixity of the divine Intellect, which possesses everything because it is everything (τὸ αὐτὸ νοεῖν καὶ εἶναι: ibid., V, 1, 8; I, 3, 4-5). Dialectic unfolds and separates the elements, in themselves indissoluble, of Truth, which is one, in order to recompose them in unity and comprehend their intimate unitary structure: if it cannot lead us back to the absolute One, since the One surpasses thought and therefore eludes it, it nevertheless succeeds in knowing that unity which alone is granted to the intuition of human thought and which is the authentic preparation for the ineffable One.
Moral activity, in this return of the soul, is not so much a new path as the condition of all paths: catharsis frees the artist’s gaze from the dross of practicality and makes it pure intuition; it redeems love from the sexual yoke and makes it clairvoyant; it releases thought from the attractions of the sensible and prepares it for knowledge of the invisible (ibid., V, 3, 17; I, 2, 4). But the One lies beyond thought, because it precedes the Intellect; art, love, dialectic, and the virtues do not reach it insofar as they preserve the alterity of relations. Only in “ecstasy” does the soul become one with the One (μόνος πρὸς μόνον:
ibid., VI, 9, 11); and ecstasy is an ineffable act which, although prepared by the individual’s work in attaining cultural values, is nevertheless always an unexpected gift: here the soul frees itself from the spatiotemporal limits of individuality and gathers itself entirely into its “center” in order to savor a joy without a name. In ecstasy P., as though disappointed by the vain pretensions of λόγος, celebrates the secret impulse of Life; but it must be remembered that that abyssal One, in which the soul sometimes loses itself, is also the primary source of thought, being, reason, and λόγος; and that no absurd diaphragm separates the ineffable from the expressible, the Divine from the human. Ecstasy does not deny the authority of thought, but reaffirms, on the plane of life, the conclusions that thought has reached concerning its own limits and conditions. Nor is it a cessation of life and activity, since from it the soul draws that unitary sense which it then brings among human beings and which inspires wise laws and just actions. Plotinian mysticism, whose pantheistic accent is suggested more by the literary expressions employed to describe mystical union than by its doctrinal foundations, is therefore not the final word of his message, but one of the many aspects of his thought, intended to interpret the complex manifestations of life and of the Spirit.
The influence of Plotinism has been among the most profound in the history of philosophy. In Greek and Latin patristic thought, the essential elements of its theology contributed to the speculative formulation of the new philosophical-religious problems and helped initiate a theocentric conception of the world. Through the works of Pseudo-Dionysius (v.), the Liber de causis, and the pseudo Theologia Aristotelis, Scholasticism too was influenced by it, and not only in the Scoto Eriugena (v.) to Master Eckhart (v.). During the Renaissance, the renewed conception of man and his spiritual destiny drew from P., whose themes had by then become definitively fused with what Platonism (v.). Almost absent during the Enlightenment (although Leibniz, Berkeley, and the Cambridge school were not unrelated to it), Plotinism came to life again in the Romantic movement, which rediscovered in it the pantheistic sense of the world, the continuity and connectedness of all beings, the analogical relation between the visible and the spiritual, and the consequent poetic symbolism. Schelling (v.) Hegel (v.), SCHOPENHAUER, ARTHUR (v.), not infrequently appeal to II. Still alive today in not a few of its inspiring themes (in Bergsonian intuitionism, in Bosanquet’s neo-Hegelianism, in Royce, in Martinetti...), it is the subject of extensive investigations that attest to the enduring vitality of its message.