Plotinus: The Enneads (LP Classic Reprint Series) [Hardcover]

Stephen MacKenna (Author)

Book Description

Series: LP Classic Reprint Series | Publication Date: June 15, 1992

The best edition to dateof the unabridged definitive Stephen MacKenna translation.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Greek

Product Details

• Hardcover: 768 pages
• Publisher: Larson Publications (June 15, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0943914558
• ISBN-13: 978-0943914558
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #605,015 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Arguably the greatest mind in Western culture, May 22, 2002

By 

richard hunn (Kyoto, Kansai Japan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Plotinus: The Enneads (LP Classic Reprint Series) (Hardcover)

Plotinus ought to be read and digested by anyone who asks the ultimate question. Ultimately, his words point to a central experience - and presuppose that we wish to tread the same way. Western philosophy has had a lot of 'stick' in recent years, an inevitable reaction - given the fact that since the 18th c., much if not most Western philosophy has become a head trip - a tangle of knots. Modern philosophers like Heidegger have located the problem further back - with Platonism, and it has become a common place to see all Western philosophy as chopped logic, resulting in a fragmented perception of reality.

Everything Plotinus says - points to a crowning experience, what he termed 'henosis' - realising a state of 'at-onement.' Hence, any idea of identifying Plotinus use of the term 'Nous' (translated as 'intellect' in English) with its narrower, modern equivalent, would be a fatal misunderstanding. Plotinus leaves no room for distinctions between the knower and the known, presenting a marked parallel with Buddhist intuitions. Given the extensive influence that Buddhism has exerted upon western culture in recent years, it would be a crime to ignore the fruit-ful parallels afforded by Plotinus.

More to the point, a reading of Plotinus raises some serious questions about the verdict of people like Heidegger - when it comes to the history of Western philosophy. Moreover, it would not do to whinge about the Christian refutation of 'pagans,'as if the Church ignored Plotinus. His ideas influenced the early Church fathers - an influence that continued with people like Aquinus, Augustine - Eckhart etc.Hence, Heidegger's view of Western philosophy/theology as a kind of degeneration and fragmentation of 'Being' - is open to question, and one wonders why a whole generation of scholars like him, have persistently ignored what philosophers like Plotinus had to say. It is not all 'bad news.' A certain kind of 'Platonism' may well amount to what Nietzsche called 'the palest and thinnest ideas of all,' but by the same token, another form of it helped shape the intuitions of Meister Eckhart, and inspired Renaissance thinkers like Ficino. W.Y. Evans-Wentz, the noted American scholar-gypsy, a Rhodes scholar who sat at the feet of eminent Tibetan Lamas, and helped pave the way for a Western absorption of Buddhist ideas, held Plotinus in great esteem - seeing a perennial philosophy in the best of Western and Oriental civilisation.Hence, the Paul Brunton foundation endeavoured to promote a proper study of Plotinus' thought.

Stephen Mackenna's translation of the Enneads was a labour of love, and gave his life to the task. It taxed Mackenna's strength, some portions of the text being completed by people like B.S. Page. The Larson edition is of especial value here, examining the nuance of various terms found in Plotinus' work - all told, the best single volume edition of the Enneads. Thanks to John Dillon's endeavours, an economically priced, abridged version of Mackenna's work is available in p/back. Dillon's comments are well worth taking into account. A.H. Armstrong's translation (with the Greek text) is available in separate volumes, but the Larson/Mackenna version - with plentiful notes, cross references etc., is the best buy for the general reader who wants to devote some time to the idioms used by Plotinus. Nobody finds Plotinus an easy read, but as the other reviews testify, those who allow Plotinus' intuitions to play upon their minds, and read between the lines, will find their vision enlarged. It is no small thing to discover that our microcosmic selves participate in the life of the divine energeia - embodying some-thing of its power, enabling us to share in the life of the whole - to feel and know that we are at one with it. Like the Yi-Ching, the Upanishads, or Prajnaparamita, Plotinus' is one of those seminal influences, providing the pinnacle of insight for a whole civilisation. Wells may be forgotten or blocked over, but the water is always there to drink.

27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The most important book I have read! In a the "perfect" ed., March 30, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Plotinus: The Enneads (LP Classic Reprint Series) (Hardcover)

There is no other book that I have come across that contains all I need for the rest of my life! The Enneads is a veritable treasure and guide. I love the Larson edition because it is using MacKenna's poetic translation and compares it with four other translations, using unobstrusive endnotes. Also, the appendix by Anthony Damiani is probably the best piece on Plotinus' philosophy that I have ever read. I cannot too highly recommend this book for its beauty, rapture and yet deep rationality. It's philosophic poetry at its best!

43 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A River of Thoughts, September 6, 2000

By 

Margaret Magnus (Francestown, NH USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Plotinus: The Enneads (LP Classic Reprint Series) (Hardcover)

It seems to me that the previous reviewer just doesn't like books in this genre at all... Why review a Western - even the best Western ever written - if you hate Westerns?

Anyway, I think most people who likes the writings of Rudolf Steiner, Jacob Boehme, Plato, Meister Eckhart, Madame Blavatsky, Manly Hall and the like will value this book. It's in an intellectual style, so although what he thinks is similar to what Krishnamurti or Joseph Campbell think, the style will put some people off... I personally can take either style depending on my mood, and find a certain kind of precision is won by addressing things to this extent from the intellect and another kind of poetic or musical precision is lost in this intellectual style. But then I'm basically a very nerdy sort of person trying to disguise myself as a citizen. I think just by reading a sentence here or there from the book, you can judge in a few moments whether the style and content are for you.

Plotinus is a mystic. He believed the transcendent realm to be more REAL than this material realm. He believed the material realm to emanate from the transcendent realms... or to be more accurate, he didn't BELIEVE this, but he SAW this through mystical insight. And this book is just a series of some of his notes regarding the nature of things from the perspective of this higher consciousness.

I just read this book for the first time a couple weeks ago at the local university library, and it immediately fell in with my favorite books. I'm the sort of person that spends a couple months preoccupied with a certain range of questions, and when I reach a certain level of clarity about them, my curiosity drifts to something else. Plotinus struck me as a wellspring of perspectives on the kinds of issues that interest me... something I'll keep returning to.

If you will indulge me, let me offer a case in point... recently I have found myself interested in the question of what the relationship is between events that happen sequentially in time and the general laws of nature which govern them. My brother is a nuclear physicist. I was telling him about a couple premonitory experiences I had, and he started musing about how the current laws of physics would have to be modified account for travel backward in time... I didn't follow what he said entirely, but he did mention that the only major physical law which presumed that time moved in one direction was the second law of thermodynamics. He said that the big problem with backward motion in time was that there would have to be some kind of constraints to prevent obvious paradoxes... like you go back before you were born and kill your mother. He said that perhaps stronger constraints could be applied to the wave function to allow for this. ??? Then we started discussing how a lot of people are uncomfortable with the 'counter-intuitiveness' of quantum theory. Our tendency is to ask which particle hit which particle when, and from the perspective of QED, that question makes no sense. You just have to calculate probablities over all possible paths and not ask what exactly happened - who the guilty party is, so to speak. We like a knee-bone-connected-to-shin-bone sort of outlook.

This whole range of questioning concerns (to my mind) the nature of the relationship between motion in time and general laws which govern it. In order to 'explain' or understand certain kinds of phenomena in nature, you have to back away one step from the specifics and fly up into the realm that transcends them. This was Plotinus' specialty.

Well, a couple days later, I ran across Plotinus in the library and in the 4th Ennead, I found a whole range of questioning that joggled my thinking relative to this in some way I can't define. I saw, for example, that this is similar to the linguist deSaussure's distinction between langue and parole. (I'm a linguist.) A whole range of questions on the structure of language might be profitably viewed from this perspective.

So I can't say, "Read this book because it's fun and it will help you build a better bridge." But I'm absolutely convinced that the guy was for real, that he spent a lifetime patiently wandering through certain realms which seem the most irrelevant to us, but are in fact the most relevant... that he was unquestionably an expert in what he did.

An example of Plotinus writing to give you a flavor:

"No doubt the task of the soul in its more emphatically reasoning phase is intellection: but it must have another as well, or it would be indistinguishable from the Intellectual Principle. To its quality of being intellective, it adds the quality by which it attains its particular manner of being... It looks toward its higher and has intellection toward itself and it conserves its particular being, toward its lower and orders, administers, governs."

(Website removed)