Plotinus · Philosophy
Plotinus’ vision of all reality flowing out from the One in a great hierarchy - first the Divine Mind (<em>Nous</em>, which contains the Forms), then Soul, then the material world - by a necessary overflow that diminishes the source not at all, like light streaming from the sun.
Having posited the One as the absolutely simple source of all things, Plotinus faced his central task: to explain how the rich, multiple world we know flows out from that perfect unity. His answer is the doctrine of emanation - the vision of reality as a great hierarchy, a ‘chain of being,’ flowing outward and downward from the One through a series of levels, each one a less perfect, more multiple image of the level above it. The key images are of radiation: the One is like the sun, and reality is the light that streams from it, growing fainter as it spreads further from the source; or the One is like a spring, and reality the river that flows from it; or like a centre, and reality the circles that ripple outward. At each stage, something flows out from the level above, ‘turns back’ to contemplate its source, and is thereby constituted as a new, lower level of reality. The whole of existence is this single outflowing from the One.
Plotinus identifies three great levels or hypostases (fundamental realities) in this hierarchy. First and highest is the One itself - the simple source, beyond being. From the One flows the second hypostasis, Nous - the Divine Mind or Intellect, the realm of true Being, which contains the eternal Forms or Ideas (Plato’s Forms) as the objects of its eternal contemplation. From Nous flows the third hypostasis, Soul (the World-Soul) - the principle of life and motion, which mediates between the eternal realm of Mind and the changing world of time. And from Soul proceeds the material world - the sensible cosmos, the furthest and faintest reach of the emanation, where unity is most dispersed and being shades off toward its lower limit. This is the great Plotinian map of reality: One, Mind, Soul, World - a single procession from perfect unity down to material multiplicity, each level flowing from and dependent on the one above.
The first and highest thing to flow from the One is Nous - the Divine Mind or Intellect, the second hypostasis. Nous is the realm of true Being, and understanding it is essential to grasping Plotinus’ whole vision. When the indeterminate power that overflows from the One ‘turns back’ to contemplate its source, it cannot grasp the simple One as simple (for to grasp is to make distinctions); instead, it grasps the One in a multiple way, and in doing so it becomes Nous - a unity-in-multiplicity, the first and least departure from perfect oneness. Nous is Mind eternally thinking, and what it thinks are the Forms (the Ideas) - the eternal, perfect archetypes of all things, which Plato had placed at the summit of reality. In Plotinus, the Forms are the contents of the Divine Mind: the eternal objects of its eternal contemplation. And here lies one of Plotinus’ most profound ideas: in Nous, thought and being are identical. The Forms are not objects outside the Mind that it looks at from a distance; they are the Mind’s own content, and the Mind is the Forms it thinks. Knower and known, subject and object, thought and being, are perfectly united in Nous - there is no gap between the mind and what it knows.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that for Plotinus all reality emanates (flows out) from the One in a descending hierarchy: from the One comes the Divine Mind (Nous, the realm of being and the Forms), from Nous comes Soul, and from Soul the material world - each level a less perfect, more multiple image of the one above, produced by overf…
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