Plotinus

Like every Platonist, Plotinus holds universals to be realities in themselves, more real than individuals: the intelligible Forms exist independently of sensible things, of which they are the models. But he lodges them in the divine Intellect rather than in a separate heaven, which makes them universals ante rem thought by an eternal mind.

Enneads, V, 9 (On Intellect, the Forms and Being)

Happiness lies neither in pleasure nor even in the virtuous life alone: virtue is only a first degree, a purification that detaches the soul from the sensible and makes it like the divine. The true sovereign good is beyond, in the contemplation of the Intellect and then in union with the One, where the soul rejoins its source. Plotinus takes up Greek eudaimonism, the happy life as the activity of our best part, but shifts its summit: blessedness is no longer the excellence of action but a contemplative ascent that passes beyond moral virtue itself. The perfect sage, already united to the intelligible, stays happy even in misfortune, for his true self is not reached by it.

This is the life of gods and of godlike and blessed men: a deliverance from all things here below, the flight of the alone to the Alone.Enneads, VI, 9, 11

Enneads, I, 4 (On Well-Being) · Enneads, I, 2 (On Virtues)

The very movement of being is circular: each thing proceeds from the One by emanation and then tends to return to it, and the return (epistrophē) is inscribed in the nature of whatever issues from the Good. The meaning of human life is therefore neither to be invented nor absent: it is given by this structure, the soul having consciously to retrace the path to its source. To live fully is to convert one's gaze, to turn away from the outside and climb back toward the origin from which one is never wholly cut off.

Enneads, VI, 9 · Enneads, V, 1

The self is not the bodily composite but the soul, an immaterial and immortal substance, and more deeply still the intellect within us. Plotinus presses inwardness to a singular thesis: the highest part of the soul never wholly descends into the body but abides permanently in the intelligible. Our true self is that unaltered summit, of which we have usually lost awareness, absorbed as we are in sensible life. To know oneself is to awaken to this higher identity, more real than the empirical person.

Enneads, IV, 8, 8 (the undescended soul) · Enneads, I, 1 (What Is the Living Being, and What Is Man)

The soul being a simple substance, immaterial and akin to the intelligible, it does not decompose and survives the body's dissolution: Plotinus takes up and develops the immortality of Plato's Phaedo. Death is only a stripping away, the liberation of the soul from its bodily envelope, and so nothing to be feared by one who has already learned to live turned upward. The sage rehearses it in this life, by detaching his true self from the body.

Enneads, IV, 7 (On the Immortality of the Soul) · Enneads, I, 9 (On Leaving the Body)

Plato's Forms receive in Plotinus a proper home: they are the thoughts of the Intellect, which contemplates them eternally in a unity where thinking and being coincide. The essence of each thing is thus its intelligible Form, prior and superior to its sensible existence, which is only a reflection of it. Platonic essentialism is therefore preserved and even reinforced, the intelligible becoming the living content of a divine mind.

Enneads, V, 5 (That the Intelligibles Are Not Outside the Intellect) · Enneads, V, 9

The path to the principle runs not through the outside but through a turning of the soul upon itself: "withdraw into yourself and look". Since the One is present at our innermost, closer to the soul than the soul is to itself, it is by gathering oneself, by sculpting one's own inner statue, that one rises to it. This absolute primacy of contemplative inwardness over outward action makes the examined life the whole of philosophy, and anticipates Augustinian interiority.

Withdraw into yourself and look: and if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the sculptor of a statue that is to be made beautiful.Enneads, I, 6, 9

Enneads, I, 6 (On Beauty) · Enneads, VI, 9, 7

The true self being the soul, the body is only its instrument and provisional envelope, the low place where the soul lingers and risks forgetting itself. Porphyry reports that Plotinus "seemed ashamed to be in a body" and refused to have his portrait made. The body is not the subject we are but that from which we must free ourselves in order to ascend, which places Plotinus at the extreme of the body-as-instrument.

Porphyry, Life of Plotinus, 1 · Enneads, IV, 8; I, 1

Bodily pleasures bind the soul to the lowest degree of being and turn it away from its ascent: the first virtue, the "purificatory" one, consists precisely in detaching from them so as to return the soul to itself. Without condemning the body as a positive evil, Plotinus urges a resolute asceticism, the sage holding bodily needs to be mere necessities to be met at a minimum, never ends.

Enneads, I, 2 (On Virtues) · Enneads, I, 4

Plotinus extends the erōs of Plato's Symposium: love is that drive born of lack which carries the soul from sensible beauty toward intelligible Beauty, and thence toward the One, source of all beauty. It is an ascending love, a desire to be united with that from which one proceeds. A note of gift nonetheless surfaces, for the One itself lacks nothing and overflows by pure superabundance, which reverses the lack at the summit.

Enneads, III, 5 (On Love) · Enneads, VI, 7, 31-34

The first principle can be neither a being nor a thought, for every being is already manifold, distinct from what it thinks: to ground multiplicity without belonging to it, there must be an absolutely simple One, "beyond being" and beyond intellect, of which nothing can properly be said. Plotinus thus radicalizes Plato's Good above essence into a pure transcendence. Yet emanation tempers the distance: the One overflows without dividing or diminishing itself, and stays present to all that proceeds from it, more inward to the soul than the soul is to itself. Hence a strong transcendence, but not without a graded immanence, which holds the score back from the extreme.

It is none of the things of which it is the source; such is its nature that, though nothing can be affirmed of it, not name, not reason, we can yet say something concerning it.Enneads, V, 3, 13-14

Enneads, VI, 9 (On the Good, or the One) · Enneads, V, 3 and V, 5

Plotinus's whole metaphysics culminates in a single, absolute principle, the One, source of all that is and term of the soul's return: a first divine principle exists, and atheism is beside the point. But this principle is not the personal, creating God of monotheism: it is impersonal, "beyond being", does not know, does not will, does not create by decision but overflows by the necessity of its superabundance. This metaphysical theism, without personal providence or creation ex nihilo, holds the score back from the extreme while remaining firmly on the side of affirming a divine absolute.

Enneads, VI, 9 · Enneads, V, 1 (On the Three Primary Hypostases)

The real unfolds as a hierarchy of degrees of being, from the One down to matter: the more a thing is one and intelligible, the more real it is; the more dispersed in the sensible, the less. The sensible world is therefore not illusory but the lowest degree, a faint image produced by the Soul that orders and animates the cosmos. Matter, at the bottom of the scale, is all but nothing, sheer lack. This priority of mind leans strongly toward idealism, but it is a Platonic gradation, not the idealism of a Berkeley for whom to be is to be perceived: a duality of intelligible and sensible persists, hence a residual weight on dualism.

Enneads, V, 1 and V, 2 · Enneads, IV, 8 (On the Descent of the Soul into Bodies)

If all things proceed from a perfectly good principle, whence comes evil? Plotinus refuses to make it a positive principle, a power rivaling the Good: evil has no being of its own, it is privation, a lack of good, a defect of being at the lowest degree of the procession. He identifies it with matter as the ultimate limit where the light of the One fades out, not as a force but as an absence. Moral evil is then merely a soul turning away from the higher toward the lower. This dissolution of evil into non-being, which saves the goodness of the whole without denying the reality of our ordeal, is a form of theodicy; it will bequeath to Augustine the idea of evil as privatio boni.

Enneads, I, 8 (On What Evils Are and Whence They Come) · Enneads, III, 2-3 (On Providence)