Transcending the Soul

12 December 2022

Transcending the Soul

“But what Intellect is like is clear from this very fact that it is superior to soul which is of such great excellence.

“But one might see this also from what follows: if someone admires this perceptible universe, observing its size and beauty and the order of its everlasting course, and the gods in it, some of whom are seen and some are invisible, and the spirits, and all animals and plants, let him ascend to its archetypal and truer reality and there see them all intelligible and eternal in it, in its own understanding and life; and let him see pure Intellect presiding over them, and immense wisdom . . . “

(Plotinus, Ennead V.1, Plotinus: Ennead V.3 and V.4: On the Three Primary Hypostases, translated by A. H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1984, pages 21-23, ISBN: 9780674994898)

 

“What the Intellectual-Principle must be is carried in the single word that Soul, itself so great, is still inferior.

“But there is yet another way to this knowledge: Admiring the world of sense as we look out upon its vastness and beauty and the order of its eternal march, thinking of the gods within it, seen and hidden, and the celestial spirits and all the life of animal and plant, let us mount to its archetype, to the yet more authentic sphere: there we are to contemplate all things as members of the Intellectual-  eternal in their own right, vested with self-springing consciousness and life- and, presiding over all these, the unsoiled Intelligence and the unapproachable wisdom.”

(Plotinus, Ennead V.1.3 and V.1.4, translated by Stephen Mckenna and B. S. Page, online scan: http://classics.mit.edu/Plotinus/enneads.5.fifth.html, McKenna and Page published various editions and revisions of this translation from 1917 to 1930.)

 

1.  This is a wonderful presentation of the final stages of the Platonic path.  Plotinus first has us look at the world of the senses and its beauty, a theme Plotinus writes about in several Enneads.  Notice how deities of different types are included are included in the world of the senses rather than in higher dimensions.  And after having taken in all of this one ascends to the archetypal domain, the domain of forms, the domain of Intellect, what Brian Hines refers to as ‘Spirit’, what some Platonists I know refer to as ‘Mind’, the realm of the one-many. 

2.  One of the things I enjoy about Plotinus is how Plotinus sees the sensory world as a gate to the transcendental; first the transcendental forms or archetypes, and finally the ultimate transcendence of ‘unapproachable wisdom’, The Good and The One.

3.  When the things of the world are seen as only material things, they have no meaning.  This is why materialism leads, ultimately, to nihilism.  But in the world as Platonists understand the things of this world, when perceived through the lens of contemplation, are, in a sense, a message from the divine that takes us beyond the display of the senses to their ultimate and eternal source.