Armstrong, A. H. ed. The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy. 

THE ONE AND INTELLECT

236

Originality is particularly obvious in the account which Plotinus gives of the first principle transcending being from which all reality springs, the One or Good

…Plotinus…first…coherent doctrine of he One or Good clearly distinguished from and transcending its first product, the divine Intellect (Nous)

237

Even soul for him is single and simple when compared with the multiplicity of body

….thought about intellect…must be a thought of something thinking about something …involve a certain duality:…even of intuitive self-thinking intellect (Nous)

…first principle…free from even the minimum duality…

One…absolutely beyond highest conceivable…limitation or determination….not a being; …authority…Idea of the Good in the Republic

…doctrine of the One beyond being again distinguishes Plotinus sharply….

…absolute absence of limitation and determination seen primarily as the absence of duality, making analytic description impossible

138

The universe of Plotinus is conceived entirely in the classical hellenic manner, the manner of Plato and Aristotle, up to the level of divine Intellect

The beings of the world of Intellect, th Forms, are definite in character…finite in number…Beyond Intellect lies the total indetermination of eh One…which…cannot be thought of

…Porphyry,…One,…absolute being, in which the first existent, Intellect, participates

Plotinus…the One…has a special kind of transcendent thinking of its own, more immediate even than that of Intellect, with no duality of subject and object…a pure thought without object.

239

a sort of ‘Form of thinking’

The whole purpose of the critical purification of our minds by negation which Plotinus requires of us if we are to pass beyond Intellect to the first principle of reality is to reveal to us the eternal source of being, intellect, good and unity

…shock of this coupled affirmation and negation which drives us beyond the highest intelligible perfection, prevents us from settling down comfortably in the universe in which our perfected minds discover themselves, and pushes us on to an obscure awareness of something greater and better than any possible thought can contain

…Plotinian purification cannot be effectively thought through (except  perhaps in the second-rate and second hand manner proper to historians of philosophy without being lived through

…Plotinus does not believe that you can live through it without thinking through it…intellectualism

The mind has to be purged of its philosophy to find the Good.  The supreme achievement of the intellect is to leave itself behind.  But for Plotinus there is no way of passing beyond intellect other than through intellect.  We cannot leave our philosophical minds behind till we have used them to the full.

…no alternative route to God

…the second hypostasis, Intellect, proceeds from the One…’emanation’

240

…origin of this way of speaking is to be found in a late Stoic doctrine of the emanation of the Hegemonikon, the ruling intellectual principle in man, conceived in the usual Stoic way as a material pneuma, a ‘fiery intelligent breath’, from the sun, its source

…does not mean that Intellect takes the form of the One and simply ‘becomes what it thinks’ in the Aristotelian manner.   The One has no form or forms to give it.  It is beyond all form, and Intellect can only reach its unformed and unbounded simplicity by rising above itself

What happens… in Intellect’s normal contemplation of the One is that, though it directs itself towards the absolute unity of its source, it cannot receive it as it is, but ‘breaks it up’ or ‘makes it many’, and so, by the power of the One, constitutes itself as a unity-in-multiplicity,

…desire for that union with the first principle which in the system of Plotinus is the legitimate and necessary aspiration of all derived beings

Gnostic systems a break in the middle of eh processio of all things from the first principle,…discontinuity between the spiritual world and the material world…which Plotinus cannot tolerate…

Gnostic…and …Plotinus…transcendent and unknowable first principle,…highest reality…complete in itself and perfect…unity-in-diversity.

Gnostic influence…cannot be absolutely ruled out.

…original…Plotinus…Intellect…vitality and activity…relationship in it of parts to whole in terms of the interpenetration of a community of living minds.

Platonic Forms were ‘thoughts of God’

246

Intellect…only perfectly real being, the fullness of life, and the perfection of intuitive thought

Intellect in relation to the Good…’always desiring and always attaining its desire

247

‘primary kinds’,…one single reality,…an expression of Leibniz, as ‘a reflective analysis which brings to light different aspects of he same whole’.  So, when we concentrate our attention on its reality we see Being in it;  when we attend to its life and activity of thought we see Motion; when we turn back to its eternal changelessness we see Rest; when we concentrate on its diversity we see Otherness; when we recognize that in all its diversity it is still a unity we see Sameness.

Aristotelian psychology;…each part of Intellect or the intelligible world…is itself an eternally actual and active intellect, it thinks and so is the whole.  What makes it this or that particular intellect seems to be that one element int he complex whole ‘stands out’…also…on the level of Soul

His real universe of interpenetrating minds…based on ideas derived from Plato and Aristotle

Plotinus…separation and distinctness,…bound up with matter, space and time.…immaterial world does not exclude…copresence and interpenetrabiltiy of the different entities, so that they can be at once really one and really different.

FROM INTELLECT TO MATTER: THE RETURN OF THE ONE

Soul and the Material World

250

Soul…lives...in the world of Intellect, and with Intellect can rise in self-transcendence to union with the One.

Plotinus never allows the distinction between it and Intellect to disappear (though it may in some passages become a little blurred)…intermediary between the worlds of intellect and sense-perception,…

…characteristic activity is discursive thinking, reasoning from premises to conclusions

The relationship between the three hypostases in Plotinus is one of hierarchical distinction in unity.

The One and Intellect are always present to Soul

251

…origin of time…the only way of being different which is left for Soul is to pass from eternal life to a life in which, instead of all things being present at once, one thing comes after another, and there is a succession, a continuous series, of thoughts and actions.  Soul’s tolma is in fact a sort of restlessness

Plotinus makes much use at this point in his system of the term logos in a special sense.

…active formative principle

Soul is the logos of Intellect and the forms in it are logoi of those in  intelligible world.

…scheme of three, and only three, hypostases on which he insists

253

Plotinus,…his great image of body floating in soul like a net in the sea.

Soul does not work on the universe from outside,…on the basis of an external knowledge of it.

The universal order springs from Soul spontaneously as a tree grows.  The laws of nature are not laid down in advance and then applied, but are the immediate undesigned result of Soul’s contemplation of the higher order of Intellect.

…when men’s contemplative powers are too weak for them to arrive directly at the vision which they desire, they try to satisfy themselves by action, doing and making things which are images of the object they seek

254

…may eventually lead them back to it by a roundabout route

EPILOGUE

322

The Philosophical characteristics of Neoplatonism

…few undeniable ‘dialectical’ processes in the history of philosophy.  The absorption of Aristotle transformed Platonism.

…ad unum or ab uno…Metaphysics E a universal science of being…

323

…compare the double structure of Aristotelian genera which obeyed formal logic and Platonic ‘kinds’ which did not with Hegel’s ‘concepts’ and ‘universals’.

…after Porphyry any idealist trend was resisted; Being was placed firmly above Thought (Intellect), where Plotinus had been thoroughly equivocal;…Iamblichus the priority of thought to thinking was schematized.

324

Porphyry had rejected the Aristotelian view of God…highest principle as thought and its object united,…the One above thought was the unity which was not thought but was attained in thought.  But the next generation of Iamblichus and Theodorus ruled that out;…’imparticipable’

…mystical union with the One…not only ineffable, it is the negation of thought;…negation of consciousness…seems to belong to some Indian mysticism…no place in what counts as philosophy in Europe.

…ascent to the One could logically be detached from the ascent to the unity of Intellect…path of Dialectic…

But they universally held…theoretic virtues were necessary preliminaries to the theurgic,…

…division of unity into a unity which exists…into the kinds of existing unities and then the species of tehse…applications of thought or reflection…’procession’ of  Intellect.

325

…reverse process represents successively less thought or reflection;…So the One as non-thought will not be at the end of a different series form that of the unity of intellect.

…how the essential activity of thought…lie in thinking less…is the second paradox

‘Essential’ thinking was thinking at its best rather than thinking most,…’ones’ over ‘manies’..

…whatever these had been in the Symposium,…now distinguished…from the Aristotelian genera of species.