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Plotinus: The Enneads (LP Classic Reprint Series)

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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.

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!

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)

_The Enneads (the Nines) is the greatest surviving work of spiritual philosophy of late antiquity. Here we have expounded Plotinus' interpretation of the perennial philosophy. We are shown that the material world has a spiritual origin, for all of creation emanates down from the divine Source, through the various levels of manifestation, to our own world. Moreover, we are shown that mankind's ultimate goal is to turn away from the distractions of this lower material creation and seek union with this divine Source (God, the One, the Good.)

_While Plotinus critised the Gnostic sects of his day, it is obvious that his own idea of intuitive intellectual knowledge, where subject and object unite in perfect understanding, is pure gnosis. The main disagreement seems to have been on the nature of the material world: The Gnostics held it to be inherently evil, while Plotinus saw it as simply lower and inferior, yet basically good.

_There is great wisdom in this book for those who can penetrate the traditional intuitive mindset. This only to be expected since Plotinus studied the perennial philosophy at the great library of Alexandria for over a decade. There is also the fact that Plotinus admitted to three episodes of enlightenment, epiphany, or cosmic consciousness in his life. Like all true masters, he was more of a reciever of timeless divine truths than an originator of anything new and contrived.

The sixth head of the Platonic Academy, Archesilaus (318-242 BC) was "the first to meddle with the system handed down by Plato (Diogenes Laertius, 4.6)." This meddling, Diogenes informs us, entailed a drastic shift in emphasis in which eristic skepticism was employed as the pre-eminent methodological approach to all philosophical inquiry. Thus with Archesilaus begins the Middle Academy, which fortuitously only lingered on until the advent of Antiochus of Ascalon (130-68 BC), who restored the school to something of its former glory, during the term known as the Middle-Platonic era. But with Plotinus (204-270 AD), upon whom the spirit of Plato descended so graciously, the Divine Philosophy found its fullest expression at last. Even St. Augustine, who did not sway from criticizing Plotinus in the City of God, remarked that "Plato should be thought of as coming to life again in Plotinus (Contra Academicos, 3.18.40)." And Eunapius, writing over a century after Plotinus' passing, tells us that "altars in honor of Plotinus are still warm, and his books are in the hands of educated men, more so than the dialogues of Plato (Lives of the Philosophers, pg. 353, LCL)." Porphyry also testified that in a celebrated oracle of Apollo, that Plotinus, postmortem, was apotheosized and enlisted among the ranks of Plato and Pythagoras in the celestial sphere of the Immortals (Life of Plotinus, 23). Such was his fame and such is his enduring legacy!

Now we owe this present collection of `Enneads' [=nines] to Plotinus' beloved student Porphyry, who collected and edited these sublime and terse philosophical discourses for posterity. (1.) The first series of `Enneads' Porphyry grouped contains moral and ethical treatises, (2.) the second, those on Natural Philosophy [Physics], (3.) the third, on the World and the operation of Fate, Providence, Eternity and Time, (4.) the fourth, elucidates the nature of the Soul, (5.) the fifth (6.) and sixth `Enneads' constitute various metaphysical treatises.

A summation some of the main tenets of Plotinus' philosophy goes as follows: Transcending all being is the One and the Good, the self-contained primal principle, which maintains the order and unity of all things and bestows all goodness, being Goodness and Unity itself. Attendant upon the One, is the secondary principle [or hypostasis], the Primal Intellect, in which thrive all Forms and Ideas that constitute the Authentic Existences, both actually and potentially. Attendant upon the Divine Intellect, is the tertiary hypostasis, Primal Soul, which emanates from the Intellect and the One. While extending into the Material-Cosmos, the All-Soul is transmutted into World-Soul, which distributes Rational Soul to all beings, gives Form to Matter, and is the herald of Nature within the Sense-World. The World-Soul, therefore, distributes all things from, and restores all things to, the three primary Hypostases, as in a circle. The World-Soul is positioned at the epi-center of the Cosmos and is its Limit and is the furthest extension of the Divine in the universe. Man is a micro-cosmos, and in the Hierarchy of Being, is positioned midway between the Divine Intellect and the Material-World. As an intellective soul (offspring of God), man may incline towards the Triad [One, Intellect, Soul], thus freeing his true-self from the fetters of the body, by practicing the practical, purificatory and contemplative virtues. Or, contrarywise, he may incline to the lower-self, which is attached to Nature and Matter and, ever alienating himself from the Triad, he becomes that which his soul was a personification of on earth; and this phase continues, in a series of graded re-births, until the soul deigns and learns to live virtuously and aspire to the blessed Triad, its native abode. Thus rewards and punishments for the soul differ accordingly to the exercise of virtue relative to each soul during embodiment. It is hoped that this brief outline will illuminate something of the essence of Plotinus' stellar philosophy.

Overall, Plotinus' Enneads are the most perfect and faithful systemization of his master Plato's thought. From the labyrinthine exchange of dialectic argumentation inherent to the Dialogues, Plotinus has uncovered the single mind of Plato. He has also lifted the veil of mystery from the Platonic myths and has disclosed their true meaning. The Enneads are a living testimony to the beauty and veracity of the deathless Platonic philosophy.

In Stephen MacKenna's classic edition, we have the most readable translation of the Enneads. The prose is very poetic, artful and vigorous, making this volume a most enjoyable and fulfilling read. Contained in Mackenna's version is the Life of Plotinus by Porphyry, an appendix providing a Suggestive Outline of Plotinian Metaphysics and meanings to various key passages from all existing English versions where indicated.

This book will be welcomed by students and scholars of Greek philosophy, by Christian theologians and classicists, or anyone venturing on the "hunt for true being (Plato, Phaedo 66C)."

"...thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind, and with thy whole strength. This is the first commandment."

-Mark 12:30 (first century A.D.)

Many of us have read this quotation from the Bible. Some of us even try to live it. In the Roman Empire's tumultuous third century A.D., Plotinus took the concept of loving God with "thy whole mind" to its philosophical neoplatonic conclusion. He taught the use of the mind to restore personal harmony through ecstatic contemplation. In his time and place he had a receptive audience.

Plotinus's philosophy, as summed up here in "The Enneads" by his pupil, Porphyry of Tyre, is a demanding and inspired exposition of a brilliant human mind tying to discern the nature of God, "The One."

Scholars debate whether Plotinus was a Christian. Some facts corroborate that he was. Ammonius Saccas was his teacher in Alexander. Ammonius was also the teacher of Origen, the great Christian Doctor of The Church. Origen and Plotinus coexisted in Alexander during their years of intense philosophical inquiry. If not a Christian, he certainly was influenced by it and absorbed many of the key elements of Christian theology. Of course, this goes both ways; there is evidence of neoplatonism in Christianity as well.

One quote:

"Thus the Supreme as containing no otherness is ever present with us; we with it when we put otherness away. It is not that the Supreme reaches out to us seeking our communion: we reach towards the Supreme; it is we that become present. We are always before it: but we do not always look: thus a choir, singing set in due order about the conductor, many turn away from that center to which all should attend; let it but face aright and it sings with beauty, present effectively.

We are ever before the Supreme-cut off is utter dissolution; we can no longer be-but we do not always attend: when we look, our Term in attained; this is rest; this is the end of singing ill; effectively before Him, we lift a choral song full of God."

-Volume 9.8

Although Jesus Christ did not have a direct role in his philosophy, the parallels in his thinking are evident. Hopefully, this may spark your interest to become even more fully acquainted with the Roman world of the Third Century and one of its principle philosophers.

"Withdraw unto yourself, and look." (1.6.9 Look into the Third Century A.D. They are interesting times.

If you are seriously interested in Plotinus, you really want this book. It was put together with special care, by a team of people who cared, and it offers the "best" translation of Plotinus along with scads of footnotes comparing other translations.

Since Plotinus is one of the most difficult of all philosophers, you need all the help you can get. THIS book should be your central reference, however.

The care extends to the typesetting and the binding. This is a great hardbound book which should last for decades if not centuries.

Readers of mine may notice that I rarely speak of fiction and prefer
the term "imaginative literature." Plotinus, by trade, was a
philosopher, and some of the greatest in his profession, apart from
unusual powers of reasoning, are not exactly conspicuous for their
imagination. But others did great and displayed fertile imagination
and linguistic felicity. Even if totally refuted in a strictly
philosophical sense, their work remains to be a source of inspiration
and a joy to read.

Plotinus began publishing in the advanced
age of 49. His work became the hidden nursery of Christian theology;
something he certainly didn't intend. The Christian apologist
Tatian, in his address "Against the Greeks," expressed an
increasingly popular sentiment when he said: "I am not to worship
God's creation made for our use. The Sun and the Moon were made on
our account. How then shall I worship my own ministers?" Plotinus,
usually never shrill, replied in strong terms:

"Human
temerity is only too willing to accept such grandiloquent ravings. The
simple folks hear: 'People whose worship is inherited from
antiquity are not His children - you are!' So you address the
lowest of men as brothers, but you deny this courtesy to the Sun and
disown your ties with the Cosmos?" Plotinus created the last great
synthesis of antique philosophy. It combined Plato's theory of Ideas
with a doctrine of emanation, a constant flux of creative energy from
the primeval One through several agencies all the way down to humans,
animals, and matter in various states of lesser reality.

In
this vision even the polytheistic pantheon participates in the
ultimately undivided unity of the cause for our
existence. Plotinus' reasoning is not difficult to follow, but for
us modern semi-barbarians, his discerning subtlety often seems to
verge on empty verbiage. However the basic premise is endearingly
simple: "It is unity that makes a being. The members of every plant
and animal form a unity; separation means loss of existence."
History has been written by the victorious, so our views reflect the
dim opinions of paganism's worst enemy; but let me assure you, in
their days, the Pagans had the better thinkers on their side.


So, once in the saddle, Christians went on the offensive. Egged on
by their bishop, Alexandria's mob flayed alive the philosopher
Hypathia in her own lecture-hall, because she was a mathematician, a
philosopher, a pagan, and - what in the eyes of her Christian
opponents was her worst sin - a woman. Two centuries later, Emperor
Justinian, the bigot, switched off the lights, and drove Athen's
last philosophers into exile. It took a treaty with foreign powers,
that the last pagan intellectuals got permission to go home to their
families and end their lives in peace and darkness.

Plotinus
was always honest about the possibility to actually get it wrong:
"Consider sense knowledge: its objects seem most patently artified,
yet the doubt remains whether the apparent reality may not lie in the
states of the percipient rather than in the material before him."
He even seems to have anticipated the modern concept of gravity: "The
heavens, by their nature, will either be motionless or move by circle;
all other movement indicates outside compulsion."

In a
series of papers from 1969-1978, Professor Robert Fischer (not the
chess-champion) made explicit reference to Plotinus' description
of his mystical ecstasy. Based on controlled experiments with
mind-enhancing substances, Fischer mapped out an ascending continuum
of nervous arousal that bridges the state of meditative torpor on one
end with the surrender to white hot hysteria on the other. Such
ecstasy occurs when amphetamine or LSD or some kind of prayer
discipline breach the amnesic state boundaries, that structure our
layers of memory, and causes an overload of data which freezes the
mental "hard drive."

In Plotinus' own words:
"Abandon the duality of seer and seen, and count both as one, so that
he in its vision does not distinguish, nor even imagines a duality. He
has changed, does no longer own himself, but belongs to the One, a
center in sync with the center. He will behold a solitary light
suddenly revealing itself - not from some perceived object, but pure
and self-contained. We must not enquire its origin, for there is no
"origin." The primal One does not come on cue, it is not
like one who enters, but who is eternally present. Like one who has
entered the temple's inner sanctuary and left the images behind,
the self is perfectly still and alone. This is liberation from the
alien that besets us here ..."

Plotinus enjoyed this
experience only four times in the five or six years that his
biographer Porphyry knew him. Given the choice, I am not quite sure,
whether I really would like to relinquish my distance as separate
observer, but it is a noted fact, that everyone who ever
"returned" from the bright light of such schizoid stupor (which
includes so called "near death experiences") did so with deep
regret. It is a fact of our empirical existence, though not effected
by some numinous sky hook, as Plotinus would like us to think. Still,
the most fantastic of all philosophies could actually be the most
realistic description of the intellect and its evolution, to date.


"The Universe is organized, effective, complex, lavish, but
it cannot be at once symbol and reality. As we look upon the world,
its vastness and beauty and the order of its eternal march, and think
of the gods seen and hidden, and the life of animal and plant, let us
ascend to its archetype, to the yet more authentic sphere of unsoiled
intelligence. That archetypal world is the true Golden Age, age of
Kronos, who is the Intellectual-Principle, the exuberance of the
One." Paganism at its best.

Plotinus is a philosopher worth digesting but not in this 19th century indigestible translation by Stephen MacKenna. Book publishers often use old translations regardless of quality, so that they can go to print without paying the long-dead translator.
A good translation reads smoothly and clearly, as if the book had been originally written in English. It should not sound like this stilted gobbledygook from MacKenna in III.2.14 (p 149):
"In this demand for more good than exists, there is implied a failure to recognize that the form allotted to each entity is sufficient in itself; it is like complaining because one kind of animal lacks horns." Whaaaat????
Could MacKenna be trying to say something like: "All forms are perfect as created. Demanding something better than exists is like saying an animal without horns is inferior to one with horns."
Don't buy this inferior Penguin version of Plotinus but keep shopping.

If you adore the intellect and see in it the only way to the highest, purest, and most divine knowledge, than this is your book--but it isn't mine. Page after page of speculation about the higher realms open only to a mind freed from the crude considerations of the flesh....I kept hoping that Plotinus would realize his vision and disappear before finishing, but it didn't happen.