Are Platonists Lonely?

31 August 2026

Are Platonists Lonely?

1.  “This is the life of gods and of godlike and blessed men, deliverance from the things of this world, a life which takes no delight in the things of this world, escape in solitude to the solitary.”

(Plotinus, Ennead VI.9, On the Good or the One, translated by A. H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1988, page 345, ISBN: 9780674995154)

Armstrong has a footnote, on page 344 and 345, to this quote, “These last words, in the common translation ‘flight of the alone to the Alone’, are the only words of Plotinus at all generally known and remembered.  He uses the ‘alone to the alone’ formula elsewhere in the Enneads when speaking of our encounter with the Good (1.6.7.8; VI. 7. 34.7) It is in fact a fairly commonplace Greek phrase, generally, but not always in a religious context.  The closest parallel to Plotinus’ use of it is in Numenius fr. 2 . . . See E. R. Dodds ‘Numenius and Ammonius in Les Sources de Plotin . . . It does tell us something important about the mysticism of Plotinus, but can be misleading if considered in isolation from the rest of his writing about the spiritual life and Porphyry’s account of Plotinus as he knew him.”

It’s interesting that the ‘alone to the Alone’ seems to have been displaced by the use of ‘solitary’ and ‘solitude’ in recent translations such as this Armstrong quote, and others; see below.

2.  “This is the way of life of gods, and divine, happy human beings, the release from everything here, a way of life that takes no pleasure in things here, the refuge of a solitary in the solitary.”

(Plotinus, The Enneads, Ennead VI.9: On the Good or the One, translated by Lloyd Gerson et al, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2025, page 902 (second edition), ISBN: 9781009604970)

3.  “This is the life of gods and of the godlike and blessed among men, liberation from the alien that besets us here, a life taking no pleasure in the things of earth, the passing of solitary to solitary.”

(Plotinus, The Enneads, VI.9, On the Good or the One, translated by Stephen MacKenna, Larson Publications, 1992, page 709, ISBN: 9780943914558)

There is some confusion about the MacKenna translation.  It appears that in the earliest edition MacKenna uses ‘the alone to the Alone’ phrasing.  In 1917 MacKenna published Ennead I together with a ‘Conspectus’ (a summary or overview of Plotinus) and it is in the Conspectus that the ‘alone’ phrasing is used.  MacKenna may have also used that phrasing when he first published his fifth volume of the complete Enneads in 1930.  But the details are murky.  Here is what I found online at Internet Archive, for MacKenna’s earlier translation:

“This is the life of the gods and of godlike and blessed men, a liberation from the alien that besets us here, a life taking no pleasure in the things of earth, a flight of the alone to the Alone.”

4.  “THE SOUL’S ULTIMATE FATE IS DETACHMENT AND FLIGHT.

“Such is the life of the divinities; such is also that of divine and blessed men; detachment from all things here below, scorn of all earthly pleasures, and flight of the soul towards the Divinity that she shall see face to face (that is, ‘alone with the alone,’ as thought Numenius).”

(Plotinus, Complete Works, Ennead VI.9, Of the Good and the One, translated by Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie, First Edition 1918, Reprinted 2017 by Kshetra Books, Jon W. Fergus editor, page 94, ISBN: 9781974518968)

Both Guthrie and Armstrong reference Numenius as a source for the phrase ‘alone with the alone (or Alone)’.  Guthrie published his edition in 1918 so the Numenius edition Guthrie is referring to is before 1918; but I don’t know the specifics about the source Guthrie uses, though Armstrong does provide more detail.  I suspect that the Numenius translation may be the original source for this phrase, but I’m not sure about that.  Both Armstrong and Gerson indicate that the phrase is used in other places in the Enneads and Armstrong suggests it was used in various religious and non-religious contexts.

4.1  ‘Solitary’ and ‘alone’ overlap, but they also have their differences.  For example, the life of Plotinus was not solitary; neither was the life of Plato.  The house where Plotinus gave his lectures and where his students met, according to Porphyry’s description in The Life of Plotinus was a busy place with people coming and going and even the presence of children who were left in the care of Plotinus when their parents died.  Plato founded an Academy inhabited by students who were guided by Plato and perhaps other teachers as well.

But you can be alone even in the midst of other people.  This is a common observation and something that many people experience. 

4.2  It appears to me that ‘alone’ is a slightly more helpful translation because I think it is easier to link being alone to the inward turning that is at the heart of Platonic practice.  And I think it is easier to explain that this aloneness, this inward turning, is not a negative experience.

5.  The sentence opens by stating whom the sentence refers to, “This is the life of gods and godlike men.”  The opening refers to gods and godlike men.  I read this as indicating that gods and men have the ability to engage in the philosophical ascent to the Good and the One.  I interpret this as putting gods and humans on the same level in terms of their spiritual capacity or potential.  Gods can make the divine ascent if they pursue the path of renunciation and contemplation found in the Platonist tradition.  As I just mentioned, it places gods and humans on the same level.  Humans can ascend to the Good and the One and so can gods.  But most humans will not do so, and most gods will not do so.  This is because most gods and humans are distracted by sensory attractions and mental fabrications and desires.

5.1  My own view is a bit broader than this; I admit it is eccentric.  But I would not confine access to the divine ascent to the Good and the One to gods and humans.  I’ve mentioned this before, but I consider birth as an oak tree to be an auspicious birth because it allows for a contemplative existence and an embodied stability that would bring the oak, or could bring the oak, to the noetic.  In other words, I don’t map spiritual capacity based on evolutionary placement; I mean that just because a creature is more ‘advanced’ from an evolutionary perspective, does not mean that they are inherently more spiritually advanced.  Again, I realize this is a bit eccentric; I offer it for your consideration.

6.  The next phrase reads, “deliverance from the things of this world, a life which takes no delight in the things of this world.”  This sums up the essence of the Platonic Way of Life.  You can read about this in Dialogues like Phaedo.  It is a step by step, gradual path.  First you learn to withdraw from obviously harmful things of this world; you learn this through the system of ethical restraints which, again, are found in Dialogues like Phaedo.  You become a vegetarian, withdraw from harming animals by eating them or sacrificing them for the purposes of misguided rituals.  You refrain from acquiring luxuries.  And so forth.  This process of withdrawing, also often referred to as ‘turning away’, becomes broader and at the same time more subtle.

This is a life that has found the peace of transcendence; even if it is a just glimpse of that reality.  That peace surpasses the ‘delights’ of the things of this world.

Such a journey is slow and takes focus and dedication.  Indeed, it takes many lifetimes. 

7.  The closing phrase is famous, “escape in solitude to the solitary”, or “a flight of the alone to the Alone.”  As I said above, I prefer the ‘alone to the Alone’ over ‘solitude to the solitary’ because I think that ‘solitary’ doesn’t indicate strongly enough that this is an inward, contemplative, journey.  The usage also does not, in my opinion, really align with the lives of Platonists.  I mean by this that neither Plato nor Plotinus were solitaries (and, in addition, neither was Socrates).  There are examples in Platonic history of solitary practitioners (and I suspect that at this time and in this culture the way of the solitary practitioner might be particularly suitable) but the point is that physical solitude does not seem to be required for the ascent to the Good and the One if we go by the biographies of Plato and Plotinus.  And since this is Plotinus we are quoting, I think it is a particularly relevant point.

8.  But the usage of ‘alone’ has its own difficulties because many people equate ‘alone’ with loneliness; hence the title of this post.  I asked this question about Platonists and loneliness because I have heard Platonists mention this, and talk about this, over the years.  This comment about Platonists being lonely, or the Platonic Path being a lonely path, comes from a variety of perspectives; it’s not confined to a particular type of contemporary Platonism.  I think there are a number of reasons why this comes up.

8.1  The first is peculiar to our time and place.  To be a Platonist at this time and in this culture, is to be a stranger in a strange land.  Platonism is not in sync with the broad assumptions and first principles of the world we live in today.  Plato writes in some of his Dialogues about the philosopher who is culturally clumsy and the object of humor, or even derision; so this difficulty is not new.  But I do think the difficulty is more acute today simply because it is difficult to find others who regard Platonism as a spiritual path rather than just another philosophy like empiricism or naturalism or materialism. 

8.2  A second reason is that the specific path of Platonism has a different understanding of what today we call spirituality than is the one widely used.  Today ‘spirituality’ is primarily connected with self-help and is often explicitly oriented towards material goals, such as improving one’s job performance.  In contrast, Platonism is a renunciant tradition and advocates a life lived as simply as possible.  Platonism’s view was, for a long time, actually the dominant view of what spirituality means.  But in modernity terms like spirituality were transformed, often by psychology, into a therapeutic modality which in traditional terms is very far from spiritual commitments.  This is difficult for people to see because the therapeutic model is pervasive.

8.3  It is reasonable that a Platonist in today’s world would feel alone, and that this feeling of being alone would, at times, manifest as loneliness.  That is a natural consequence of the Platonic spiritual path in a culture that is focused on material gain and the cultivation of strife.

9.  But I don’t think that the term ‘alone’ in the sentence that is quoted actually refers to loneliness.  I suspect that the term refers to the way the Good and the One are sufficient unto themselves; that the Good and the One are ‘alone’ in the sense that the Good and the One are not reliant on anything else.  Rather, everything else is reliant on, dependent upon, the Good and the One, upon the transcendental, the transcendental as such. 

In this context the ‘alone’ here refers to the uniqueness of the Good, of the One, of the Eternal.  The Platonic path is a flight of the alone to the Alone because the Good and the One are present within us so that this unique, and eternal, presence is not far away.  I refer to this presence as our soul and it is turning away from that which is sensory to the soul, the presence of the Good and the One in the individual, that is the Platonic journey.

The ‘alone’ is the presence within of the ‘Alone’ that is transcendental and eternal.  Awakening to that presence is the sublime possibility of a human life.