ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 19: PLOTINUS
205-270
- Neoplatonism; Plato, Aristotle, Alexander’s commentaries
- new Platonic system, for him its only Platonic exegesis
- Alexander made Aristotle into a metaphysician, Plotinus made Plato one
Three Hypostases:
- each is a cause
- One: absolutely simple
- being cannot be predicated to it, it has no properties, its that simple
2. Intellect: unified multiplicity of the Forms - every form contains all the others, complete unity; one-many-many-one
- each form is an intellect contemplating itself, and thus all other forms
3. Soul: one and many - exists in time and space, exists causally
Parmenides as the main dialogue:
- forms as causes (participation, imitation, presence)
- One has no being, thus has complete unity
- reality is impermanent ontologically (becoming), extra-physical causes
- causes as heterogeneous
- a metaphysics of light, Forms cause through illuminating
One:
- everything is One + being
- negative theology, One means ‘not many’
- generative, origin of everything
- anti-Aristotle’s unmoved mover (it cannot be simple, you need a thinker and a thought)
- cannot be being since it causes being, and something other than being must have caused it
- emanatory theory of causality
- two activities: first proper to its nature, second an emanation of its activity
- the fire burns (first), and heats others (second)
- from the One all emanates
The intellect and the forms:
- emenation turned towards the one becomes intellect which comprehends the One as the Forms (eternal un-temporal action); so this intelligence is like the unmoved mover
- the thinker is equivalent to thought
- thinking is being
- the Forms are the maximum amount of the One that a complex intellect can conceive of; each Form is a perspective of the Intellect
- light is degrees of reality and life
- IN THINKING THE ONE THE INTELLECT THINKS OF ITSELF, DOES IT TWOFOLD (THE THINKER AND THE THOUGHT), AND THUS MAKES IT NO LONGER ONE, THE FORMS
- the intellect essentially refracts the light of the one due its complicated nature, like a prism creating a rainbow
The Soul:
- incorporeal, unextended, unspacial
- but temporal, thinking in succession
- anti-Aristotle, the body is inside the soul
- causal potency
Matter:
- generation unclear
- lack of being, just a causal mirror; origin of evil
- moral evil is turning to the body, not the soul
Humans:
- in intellect-hypostasis, intelligible world
- descent of the soul makes us forget our pasts
- the soul can think the same thing as the intellect, BUT ONLY IN SUCESSION, since the intellect thinks at once, eternally
- our true nature is achieved in contemplation (divine, intelligible)
- no ethics, limiting passions to achieve ascend