SOURCE: “Plotinus' Metaphysics,” in Plotinus on Sense-Perception: A Philosophical Study, Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 10-22.

[In the following excerpt, Emilsson explores the concept of hierarchy in Plotinus's picture of reality.]

The most striking feature of Plotinus' philosophy, and of Neoplatonism generally, is its hierarchical picture of reality. This is also the feature that is most baffling for modern readers. In Plotinus' philosophy we come across a hierarchy of three so-called hypostases” that are called “the One”, “Intellect” and “Soul”, followed by matter at the bottom. Similar ideas characterize the writings of the other Neoplatonists. We are told that reality is somehow constituted by this hierarchy, an idea which we presumably find quite puzzling. If we look for arguments for it as such, we do not find any: it seems to be taken for granted. And if we encounter something that looks like an argument for some part of the hierarchy, we feel that it invariably presupposes the general picture.

As a first step towards approaching the Neoplatonic hierarchy, let us consider the ideas of a principle and of a hierarchy of principles. Let us suppose that there is a need to explain in general terms some phenomenon that is taken to be a fact of common experience. This may lead to the supposition of a level of entities or properties or forces, that are taken to be “behind” or “above” the ordinary phenomena, such that by supposing these entities, properties or forces to be there, an explanation has been given of the ordinary phenomenon that needed explanation. At this point we have already divided reality into two levels, the level of ordinary experience and a “more basic” level. We may say that this is the limiting case of a hierarchy, if we take a hierarchy to be anything stratified, such that its strate come in an order of dependence. Normally, however, we reserve the word “hierarchy” for structures only that have more than two strata.

To divide reality into different levels in this way is a common practice in the sciences. For instance, the molecular, the atomic and the subatomic levels of chemistry and physics can be interpreted as a kind of hierarchy. The various principles posited by the ancient thinkers—Empedocles' Love and Strife, the Limit and the Unlimited of the Pythagoreans, the Active and the Passive of the Stoics, to name a few—are also good examples of this. The strata in the Neoplatonic hierarchy are principles in the same sense as those just mentioned. Principle (archê) is in fact a term that the Neoplatonists used alternatively with “hypostasis” to refer to a stratum in the hierarchy of being. But explanations or principles do not always form hierarchies. The ancient Greek thinkers were often satisfied with an account of the phenomena as a result of the synthesis of two or more independent (and hence not hierarchically ordered) principles. Hierarchies arise if there is a need to account for some features of the principles that have been posited themselves, and this is done by positing new principles. Such hierarchies of explanations are not unfamiliar. In ancient philosophy the most notable pre-Neoplatonic example is to be found in Plato's theory of Forms. The realm of Forms, that is itself a principle or a set of principles postulated to account for the sensible world, is itself stratified: in the Republic the Form of the Good functions as a principle of the other Forms. As one might expect, the Neoplatonic hierarchy is a development of that suggested by Plato.

The Neoplatonic hierarchy is a hierarchy of unity. The distinguishing feature of each stratum is its degree of unity and the strata are ordered in terms of increasing degrees of unity. This needs explanation. Let us start by considering the notion of unity as such.

Unity is a key notion in Plotinus' metaphysical tradition.¹ The Pythagoreans, the Eleatics, Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics are all concerned with it. Plotinus' notion of unity draws on all these sources. While it would be wrong to suggest that all these philosophers were always concerned with unity in exactly the same sense or with exactly the same questions about unity, I think that their concerns with unity are not altogether disparate either. Plotinus' stand is to maintain the ultimate unity of the notion of unity while also insisting on keeping its species distinct. Plotinus accomplishes this by holding that all unity except that of the One is by participation in the One while different things participate in the One in different ways.² This enables him to see his predecessors as talking about the same thing when they talk about unity though not necessarily as talking about the same species of unity.

The Greek thinkers tended to take the notion of unity to be intimately connected with that of being. This line of thinking began with the Pythagoreans and the Eleatics and it is firmly ingrained in Plato and the Old Academy and Aristotle.³ Glossing over details and simplifying the matter somewhat, I think it is fair to say that the connection between unity and being is as follows: whatever is said to be must possess some degree of unity. In order to see the point of this we must realize that “being” is here used in a somewhat restricted sense. What is excluded are accidental collections of things. Consider a set consisting of e.g. the Empire State Building, Fidel Castro and the number 2. There is no denial that this set exists and hence has being in the sense of existence. But it does not have being in the sense that we are after. It does indeed contain members that have being in this sense but it does not have being as such in itself. It is tempting to express this by saying that merely accidental sets do not make up a thing. We are therefore concerned with being in the sense according to which only something which is a thing or an entity has being. Let us be prepared to give a generous interpretation to the word “thing” so that we might count as things not only horses and tables and the like, but also armies, the number 4 and the Beautiful Itself. It is perhaps obvious by now that the criterion of whether something has being in the sense we are after is in fact unity: we are going to count as having being that and only that which is in one way or another unified. This may seem to make the point about the connection between unity and being uninteresting and almost trivial. But that is all right, because the point is fairly trivial and was, I believe, taken to be obvious by the ancient philosophers. However, a lot can be said that is not trivial about how “things” are unified so as to make up beings, and a lot of nontrivial questions can be asked about the subject. For example, there is intuitively a difference between the ways in which an army, a horse and the Beautiful are each one thing. And obviously there arise various questions from the fact that most of the things we treat as unities are in fact also composite and many.

Given that being implies some sort of unity of that of which being is predicated, we can distinguish different entities by the different kinds of unity that they possess.⁴ We have, for instance, as the limiting case “things” like heaps. A pile of stones has unity in a way dispersed stones do not.⁵ The heap has spatially adjacent parts and is therefore spatially continuous. We can therefore say that it is spatially or locally one in the sense that all its parts occupy one continuous part of a space. On the other hand, a heap lacks various other varieties of unity. It is not one in motion, i.e. one part of it may move without the other parts moving, and it lacks definite shape and internal structure. By contrast, an individual stone is one in motion. According to Plotinus the unity of bodies, of which individual stones are a good example, consists in the spatial unity of a set of qualities: a given colour, a shape and a hardness, say, are all together in the same part of space and accompany each other in motion (cf. VI.2.4).

Living beings possess a higher degree of unity than inorganic bodies. The bodies of living beings are organized as if with the accomplishment of certain ends in view.⁶ This organization reveals a more perfect unity than that proper to mere bodies. For the functioning of the parts of a living being must be understood with reference to the living being as a whole: the cat's claws, for example, are not merely hard and sharp extrusions from the cat's toes. A full account of the claws must include a reference to the role the claws perform in the cat's life. Thus, in the case of organisms we have a different part-whole relationship: an account of a part must make reference to other parts and to the whole.

An idea that plays a central role in Neoplatonism and which is likely to strike modern readers as highly peculiar is the view that the sensible world as a whole is one spatially finite living being. Such a view is by no means an idiosyncrasy of the Neoplatonists but was widespread in antiquity in one form or other.⁷ It is important not to be misled here. The concept of life involved is presumably not quite the ordinary one, though it is not altogether different from it. For example, to say that the visible universe as a whole is one living being is not to suggest that it procreates its own kind or is in all respects just like any ordinary living being. The attribution of life to the cosmos as a whole is grounded in claims about the unity of its parts, i.e. the regular patterns in the visible cosmos were seen to be harmonious and rational in the same way as the activities of the parts of an ordinary living being. This was taken to imply some unifying principle which operates throughout the cosmos and regulates and coordinates the behaviour of its parts.

These considerations show how it could be claimed that in the things of ordinary experience there are various degrees of unity and that to these different degrees of unity there correspond different degrees of being or “thinghood”. We have also seen how the sort of unity a thing possesses may serve as the guide or criterion of important distinctions we want to make and do ordinarily make: how unity in general may be taken to be the mark which distinguishes entities from non-entities, how a special sort of unity is a characteristic of bodies, and how another and more perfect sort of unity is a characteristic of living things. Plotinus rejects all attempts to account for the unity of things in terms of the properties of their constituents (see iv.7.1-5). Here he is again in agreement with the mainstream of Greek metaphysics, the atomists being in this respect as in many others a notable exception. Let us consider his reasons. First, for Plotinus such an explanation from the constituent parts would have to be in terms of the four elements or in terms of the atoms of ancient atomic theory. Plotinus finds both unacceptable because there is no way to give a convincing account of how the mere composition of the elements or atoms could give rise to the organic unity living things possess. For in itself the composition would be hazardous and one would have to assume in addition to the elements and their properties some principle explaining how the material is arranged in an organized manner (see iv.7.2-3). Secondly, Plotinus has a more general reason for thinking that organic unity cannot be explained in terms of bodily constituents, namely disbelief in emergent properties. For, as we have seen, it is precisely the feature of a more perfect unity than bodies possess which distinguishes organisms from mere bodies. Plotinus cannot accept that something which lacks the crucial feature to be explained should give rise to this feature: add a body to a body and you will get a body.

The foregoing considerations suggest that Plotinus would propose some sort of transcendent principles to explain the unity that there is to be found in the sensible cosmos. And so he does. But before we consider these higher principles, I want to mention one important aspect of Plotinus' hierarchical explanations.

It is an underlying assumption of Plotinus' thought that the explanation of any feature must be in virtue of something that possesses the feature in question in a “more perfect” way than the thing to be explained. This kind of an assumption is no innovation of his. In Plato's theory of Forms each Form is a supreme example of that of which it is a Form.⁸ The same idea is to be found in the ancient theories of the elements, according to which each element possesses some basic properties. Other things' possession of these properties is in turn explained in terms of the presence in them of the elements that naturally have the properties in question. Again, the same sort of assumption seems to be implicit in the Aristotelian doctrine that the actualization of any feature must be caused by something that already has the feature actually. Glossing over differences, we can describe the idea common to Plotinus' philosophy, the theory of Forms, the elemental theories and Aristotle's doctrine of actualization by saying that each attempts to explain properties of things by postulating the presence of something that by virtue of itself has the property at issue. In modern parlance: the ultimate explanatory principles necessarily have the properties whose contingent presence in other things they are supposed to explain.

Given this, the unity of individual things and the visible cosmos as a whole must be explained in terms of a principle that has unity as a necessary property. Ultimately this leads to the supposition of a principle characterized as pure unity which Plotinus calls the One or the Good.⁹ I say “ultimate” because, as we shall see, there are intermediate principles in between the One and the sensible world.¹⁰

Let me explain what is meant by pure unity. According to Plotinus every item with the exception of the One is in some respect or other a composite. This means in effect that these other things are characterized by multiplicity as well as by unity. But according to the underlying assumption noted above, the principles of explanation must possess the properties that they explain in such a way that their own possession of them is self-explanatory. In the case of things that are composite and multiple, unity will always appear as an imposed feature: in so far as they are composite their being one is always a case of unity being imposed on something else which is not one.¹¹ Hence, in every case of a composite thing the fact that it is one has to be accounted for: it is one by virtue of the presence in it of something else which is one, not by virtue of itself. It is evident that if we go along with this line of thinking, we will in the end have to posit a principle that by itself possesses unity; and it follows that this principle cannot be a composite in any respect. This in turn means that the One is not a “one something”.¹² Considered in itself it is sheer unity. In so far as the notion of property or attribute presupposes a distinction between the subject that has the property and the property itself, it would even be wrong to say that the One is one.¹³ Now, what can be said about an “entity” that satisfies such requirements? Quite wisely Plotinus answers “nothing at all.”¹⁴ The One cannot be positively described by discourse nor can its nature be apprehended by thought. This is so because thought necessarily involves the union of subject and predicate and as we have seen there cannot be a question of such union in case of the One (see v.3.10).

The One therefore accounts for the unity of things. But the things of ordinary experience are not characterized by unity alone. Since every item other than the One is also characterized by multiplicity, a full ontological analysis must take multiplicity into consideration.

Now, things are multiple in more than one way. An analysis of things in the sensible world reveals that they are composed of forms and matter. The latter does not have any positive features by itself (since in that case it would have form and already be a composite). But it is necessary to posit matter as the receptacle of form and as that which underlies change.¹⁵ Thus, the Plotinian matter is a kind of a combination of the Aristotelian prime matter and Plato's receptacle.¹⁶ Plotinus insists that matter is to be distinguished from magnitude, as magnitude implies determinacy whereas matter is indeterminate (cf. II.4.11-12). Nevertheless it is clear that he thinks matter is responsible for the dispersion of things in space. It is as if the union with matter is responsible for the fact that the forms of sensible things become extended (cf. II.4.12, 1-7). As a principle responsible for the spatial features of things, matter is a principle of multiplicity. For spatiality implies divisibility: any spatial item is made up of infinitely many distinct parts, and it is a characteristic of things in space that each of them occupies a separate place different from that of any other such thing.¹⁷

The forms that enter into union with matter are already diverse: there are obviously many different kinds of things in the world. This diversity is not due to matter but is grounded in the diversity of the forms themselves. In order to distinguish it from the diversity of spatial dispersion, let us call it “diversity of being”. As we noted above, every sensible thing is a composite of form and matter. When we say of a sensible thing that it is, say, a man, we are referring to such a composite. In a similar way as in the case of unity above, an account of the property of being a man will in the end be in terms of something which necessarily has this property, something which is a man by virtue of itself. It is a fundamental assumption of Plotinus' metaphysics that nothing which fails to satisfy this sort of requirement can have being in the full sense of that term. For such entities are not really what they are said to be: what they are, they are by participation, and what they are said to be is predicated on something else. Now, it is in virtue of its form that we say of a composite (of form and matter) that it is a man, and hence one might think that this form which enters into union with matter would satisfy the requirement of being a man by virtue of itself. This, however, is not so. For in Plotinus' view the forms in matter are partners in a union with matter and do not have an independent existence (IV.2.1, 47-53; VI.4.1, 17-24). The form of the sensible man, even when considered in itself in isolation from its underlying matter, is nonetheless spatially dispersed and hence is contaminated in the sense that it has features that the union with matter is responsible for. But if we think away these features of the sensible form that matter is responsible for, we are no longer presented with a sensible form but with a form that is an object of thought. Thus, in Plotinus' view the sensible forms as such are not the real things themselves but rather some sort of images or manifestations of the real things that are uncontaminated by union with matter.¹⁸ Therefore, in order to account for the diversity of being as well as for true being itself, Plotinus posits another realm of forms, the model of which is of course the Platonic Forms, whereas historically the forms in matter derive from Aristotle's notion of immanent forms (“Forms” with an initial capital is used to refer specifically to the Platonic forms whether in Plato or in Plotinus).¹⁹ The ultimate elements of this realm are the five greatest forms or kinds (gene) of Plato's Sophist: being, motion and rest, identity and difference. All other Forms derive from an interpenetration of these.

The realm of Forms differs from the sensible world in that it is nonspatial and atemporal, and as such it is more unified than the sensible world.²⁰ The realm of Forms is the structure of the universe. It contains the essences of things and shows how these essences are ordered. This order reveals the necessary connections between things. One who has grasped the realm of Forms is in a position to see how every being is a necessary part of the whole and why it is such as it is—in the realm of Forms “the why it is” is the same as “the what it is”.²¹ He has seen the world from the viewpoint of eternity.

One sign of Aristotelian influence on Plotinus is the fact that Plotinus often refers to the realm of Forms as the Intellect (nous) and to the Forms as the intelligibles (ta noêta). In Plotinus' view the Forms exist as the objects of thought of a divine intellect (hereafter called the Intellect). The history of how the Platonic Forms came to be identified with the objects of a divine intellect is both complicated and obscure. It certainly started long before Plotinus, whose role in it is to bring to a completion a pre-existing tendency.²² That such a development took place is however perfectly understandable. In Plato it is a central idea that the Forms are objects of thought rather than of sense-perception. And in the Timaeus the Forms are described as the objects of the thought of a divine demiurge. Thus, already in Plato we find the notion of the Forms as the objects of the thought of a divine mind. In Plotinus this idea has been carried a step further. While the Timaeus 28 A suggests that the forms exist independently of the demiurge, and that they are something already present that the demiurge can inspect, in Plotinus the Forms are internal to the Intellect. As Armstrong has admirably shown, the crucial antecedent of this idea is to be found in Alexander of Aphrodisias' interpretation of Aristotle's texts on God and the active intellect.²³ In outline: Alexander identifies the God of Metaphysics XII—whose activity is described as the thinking of itself and is said to be identical with its objects—with the active intellect of De Anima. In Plotinus we find this idea Platonized: the objects of the Intellect's thinking have become the Platonic Forms.

We have now said something about the One, matter, forms in matter and the realm of Forms. There still remains one hypostasis in Plotinus' hierarchy to be commented on, the Soul. In many respects the Soul is the most complex of the Plotinian hypostases. This is due to the multiplicity of its functions. Soul is responsible for a great variety of functions that may seem to have very little to do with one another. In part this is to be explained by the fact that Plotinus and his precedessors saw as kindred some things that we nowadays take to be quite distinct, and partly by the fact that by Plotinus' time the word psychê had become an extremely loaded term in the philosophical literature. Plotinus draws on many different sources and tries to extract from them a unified view.

Since I deal with Soul at some length in the next chapter I shall not dwell on it here. Let it suffice to say that as a member of the hierarchy of being, the Soul has the function of linking the Intellect and the sensible world. Plotinus divides the world into two basic categories, the intelligible (to noêton) and the sensible (to aisthêton). Their names suggest that they are distinguished by their different modes of apprehension. But in effect the sensible is very often equated with the physical, i.e. with bodies and features of bodies. Thus, spatiality is really the formal distinguishing feature: the sensible can be identified with the spatial, the intelligible with the nonspatial. In any event, the One and Intellect are a purely intelligible realm whereas the Soul is described as the last of the intelligibles and as being in touch with the sensible (IV.6.3, 1-12). Using Aristotelian terminology we can say that the soul is the efficient cause of the sensible world, the Intellect its formal cause (cf. v.9.6).

Plotinus has three main ways to describe priority and dependence in the hierarchy. Two of them are familiar from Plato: participation and the model-image relation. A lower stratum is said to participate in a higher one, and the higher is said to be a model for the lower or to generate the lower as an imperfect image of itself. The third way, emanation (eklampsis, proodos), is peculiar to Neoplatonism.²⁴ Plotinus uses an analogy of the Sun to illustrate it. The One is like the Sun (or any other source of light), the other hypostases are like the rays flowing from it. They are characterized by diminishing power the further they are removed from their source. This analogy is not successful in all respects. But one reason why Plotinus was fond of it is that he took it to be a characteristic of sources of light that they are in no way diminished by the light they emit. It is an important feature of the One and the other hypostases that they lose nothing by emanation.

It must be emphasized that the causal language used to describe the relations between the strata in the hierarchy is not to be taken to imply temporal priority. Rather the acts from the higher to the lower are to be conceived of as contemporaneous and time itself is explained as an aspect of the increasing division or fragmentation as we go further down in the hierarchy. A kindred point to be made is that the language of “higher” and “lower” is purely metaphorical (cf. VI.4 passim).

An important aspect of the Plotinian system which has already been hinted at but which deserves special notice is the fact that the same entities may exist on different levels of the hierarchy. For example, the intelligible man is in some sense the same entity as the sensible man. It is true that Plotinus often makes the point that the image is other than the model, thus suggesting a distinction. This however does not alter the point. For while in one sense the model and the image are in fact distinct, in another sense they are not. I shall not here attempt to pin down each of these senses, but shall rely instead on a Plotinian analogy which illustrates the idea clearly enough for the present purpose. Plotinus sometimes compares the relation of the seed and the fullgrown plant to the relation between the being of an entity on lower and higher levels.²⁵ The idea is that the parts and the properties of the fullgrown plant already exist in the seed but are not yet unfolded: they are there somehow all together, and only later will they develop into distinct parts and properties. We are supposed to think of the relation between the intelligible man and the sensible man in similar terms, except of course in this case the “development” is not a temporal sequence.

When Plotinus is concerned with the levels between the Intellect and forms in matter, the idea that the same things are present on different levels is often expressed in terms of forms existing in different states of division. We have already mentioned two kinds of forms: the Platonic Forms on the level of Intellect and the forms in matter deriving from Aristotle, which are often identified with qualities. Here, Plotinus and his Platonist predecessors are not simply operating with an ambiguity. They take the Aristotelian forms to be images or ontological descendants of the Platonic Forms.²⁶ On the level of soul in between the transcendent and the immanent forms, there are intermediate forms characterized by intermediate stages of unity. This point will be of great importance to us later, because the notion of form is central to Plotinus' views on perception. We shall therefore have to consider his accounts of perception in the light of the metaphysical doctrine of forms at different stages of unity.

The foregoing indicates that all the Plotinian principles are to be conceived of on a hierarchical model: the One, being the ultimate source of virtually everything else in the universe, is at the top; matter, the unqualified receptacle of sensible forms, at the bottom. Plotinus thus wants to maintain monism: matter too, being the image of intelligible matter, stems from the One (II.4.4, 7-9). But in effect matter functions in Plotinus' system as the principle invoked to account for the opposites of what the One and the higher principles are supposed to account for. Thus one is sometimes under the impression that Plotinus' system is really a dualistic system positing the One and matter as two opposite principles.

Two of the Neoplatonic principles, Intellect and Soul, bear names which may seem to fit only living beings. What lies behind this? Is the Neoplatonic hierarchy at bottom simply an anthropomorphic picture of reality according to which the world at large and its rule is modelled upon a human being? There is no doubt that the notion of a divine intellect is originally anthropomorphic: the regular, rational patterns in nature are explained by presuming a superior mind that designs them as a human craftsman designs his artifacts. But this idea is by no means unique to Neoplatonism; it is a recurrent theme, found, for example, in the views of Anaxagoras, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and the whole of Christian theological philosophy. Thus the label “anthropomorphic” does not capture anything specially characteristic of Neoplatonism. Furthermore, even if Plotinus' philosophy and Neoplatonism generally are in their origins and perhaps at heart, anthropomorphic, they are not naively so. First, the psychological notions they employ in describing the principles of the world have been so refined that they are often barely recognizable as notions belonging to human psychology. To take one example, neither the One nor the Intellect deliberates or chooses to make the world in this way rather than that. In this respect traditional Christian conceptions of God are considerably more anthropomorphic than Neoplatonism. Secondly, if the ideas of the principles of Intellect and Soul have their origins in human psychology, in the full-blown system the order of explanation is reversed: human and animal psychic faculties are explained in terms of the principal Soul and Intellect.

One might be tempted to suppose that the Neoplatonic hierarchy is a sort of logical construct, that it represents the relations between the basic concepts these philosophers use to describe the world. While I think that this description is true as far as it goes, it is surely incomplete and misleading. For it is unquestionable that the Neoplatonists thought that their principles exist in the nature of things and not merely as theoretical constructs in the minds of philosophers. Their attitude towards their principles is in this respect more like the modern position according to which the physical sciences deal with a reality that is more real than the reality of everyday experience and which is itself stratified into more and less basic levels.

But of course the Neoplatonic hierarchy is for the most part intended to account for quite different things than modern science. It is not easy to characterize what it is meant to explain without recourse to very abstract, rather unilluminating philosophical jargon. Something has already been said about the Neoplatonists' concern with the notions of unity, multiplicity and being. In part this concern takes the form of a conceptual analysis of these notions and their connections. But the analysis is never a mere disinterested conceptual inquiry into everyday concepts, because the Neoplatonists attempt to present a certain Weltanschauung through their analysis. Plotinus' philosophy is an attempt to discuss ultimate questions about the world and man's place in it. What are the reasons for being? How are we, as knowing subjects, related to the world and its causes? The crucial element in Plotinus' answers to these questions is the idea that there is a viewpoint from which the diversity of things—including the distinctions between subject and object, knower and known—do not exist. The hierarchy is supposed to explain how this is possible, and also how diversity and the subject-object distinction arise.

Notes

1. A good account of unity in Neoplatonism is to be found in R. T. Wallis, The Neoplatonists (London, 1972), chap. 1.

2. See e.g. v.5.4, 28-37 and vi.2.11, 5-11.

3. In Metaphysics 1003b 22-34 Aristotle says that being and unity imply each other and that there are as many species of being as there are of unity, cf. ibid. 1053b 24-1054a 19. Merlan suggests that Aristotle's identification of unity with being permits the substitution of “unity” for “being” in Aristotle's definition of metaphysics as the study of being qua being and that Aristotle's Metaphysics is to be interpreted as Academic in character (P. Merlan, From Platonism to Neoplatonism, 3rd edn rev. [The Hague, 1968], 162-4). Whether or not we accept Merlan's views as an accurate interpretation of Aristotle, there is no doubt (as Merlan also claims) that Plotinus and other Neoplatonists took Aristotle's Metaphysics as the work of a Platonist, even if a somewhat aberrant one.

4. In general Plotinus maintains that unity and being go hand in hand and that a certain degree of being corresponds to a certain degree of unity (see e.g. vi.6.13 and iv.9.1). An exception is the One itself, which is beyond being. That a certain degree of being corresponds to a certain degree of unity in sensible things is however denied at vi.2.11, 14-16.

5. The Stoics systematically distinguished between different levels of unity in bodies (SVF 2, 366-8). Plotinus' views on the degrees of unity have to some extent been influenced by these Stoic distinctions, cf. especially vi.9.1, 10-14. Graeser is however probably right in warning against overestimating Stoic influence in this and similar passages (see A. Graeser, Plotinus and the Stoics [Leiden, 1972], 72-4).

6. I say “as if”, because I do not want to imply that living bodies have literally been designed or planned by anyone. That is not really the Neoplatonists' view: planning and designing are temporal processes, but the principles responsible for the teleology in the sensible world are atemporal (see vi.7.2, 21-58 and 3, 1-9).

7. The view that the sensible world is an organism is prominent in Plato and the Stoics, see e. g. Pol. 269 d-270a; Phil. 30 a; Tim. 30 b, 34 a-37 c; SVF 2, 633-45. Plotinus' primary source for this view is of course the Timaeus, but his version of it is flavoured with Stoicism.

8. Phaed. 74 d, 100 c; Symp. 210 e6-211 d. The view that each Form is a supreme instance of that of which it is a Form (the so called “Self-Predication Thesis”) has played an important role in recent discussion of the so called Third Man Arguments in Parm. 132 a-b and 132 d-133 a. Plotinus nowhere discusses these arguments explicitly, although he must have been aware of them. Recently S. K. Strange has argued that Plotinus has answers to these arguments that consist in denying that a predicate applies synonymously to the Form and its participants and that the similarity between the Form and its participants is reciprocal: the participants are similar to the Form but not vice versa, cf. Plotinus' Treatise “On the Genera of Being”, 77-83).

9. Plotinus also calls the One the Good, because he identifies the Form of the Good in the Republic with the One. Such an identification gained support from reports of Plato's lecture on the Good. There is no doubt that the legend of Plato's unwritten doctrines had much influence on Plotinus' interpretation of Plato. For the influence of the unwritten doctrines and the Old Academy in general on the Neoplatonic notion of the One, see Armstrong, The Intelligible Universe chaps. 1 and 2; H. J. Krämer, Der Ursprung der Geistmetaphysik (Amsterdam, 1964), chap. 3; Merlan, From Platonism to Neoplatonism and HLGP, Part 1, chap. 2.

10. It took scholars a long time to discover that the main source of Plotinus' One is the first “hypothesis” of Plato's Parmenides, obvious though the matter is once pointed out. The honour of the discovery falls on E. R. Dodds (“The Parmenides of Plato and the Origin of the Neoplatonic ‘One’”, CQ 22 [1928], 129-42) and É. Bréhier, who points out the importance of the first two hypotheses of the Parmenides for Plotinus' first two hypostases in his introductions to several of the treatises of the 5th and the 6th Enneads. Bréhier appears to have arrived at his conclusions independently of Dodds' article: Ennéades 5 was published in 1931, Dodds' article in 1928; but Bréhier's interpretation is already hinted at in his Ennéades 2 (note to ii4.5, p. 59), which appeared in 1924. As both Dodds and Bréhier realize, not only is the first hypothesis of the Parmenides the main source of Plotinus' first hypostasis, the three Plotinian hypostases are based on the Parmenides, counting Parmenides 155 e-157 b as a seperate hypothesis. Later Neoplatonists extended this sort of reading of the Parmenides still further, so that the remaining hypotheses were identified with the lower strata in the Neoplatonic hierarchy (see e. g. Proclus, In Parm., ed. V. Cousin [Paris, 1864], 1089-90). Thus the Parmenides came to be seen as one of the most important Platonic dialogues, presenting the skeleton of Plato's metaphysics.

11. A particularly clear presentation of the One and its relation to what comes after it is given in v.3.15.

12. This is Plotinus' way of expression in v.3.12, 50-1: (if [the One] were one something, it would not be one in itself: for “in itself” comes before “something”).

13. v.4.1, 8-9, vi.9.5, 30ff., cf. Parm. 141 e

14. “We neither grasp it by knowledge nor by intellectual intuition as the other intelligibles … This is why he [Plato] says it can neither be spoken of nor written about” (vi.9.4, 1-3, 11-12). See also v.4.1, 9; v.5.6, 12; and v.5.13, 11 ff. The view that the One is unknowable and ineffable relies of course on Parm. 142 a.

15. For the Platonic and other sources of Plotinus' notion of matter see Merlan in HLGP, 26-7. Plotinus' views on matter are most thoroughly presented in ii.4. and iii.6.6-19.

16. See M. I. Santa Cruz de Prunes, La genèse du monde sensible dans la philosophie de Plotin, Bibliothèque de l'École des Hautes Études, vol. 81 (Paris, 1981), 129-30

17. iv.2.1, 15-17; 64-5; vi.2.4, 18-21.

18. See e.g. i.8.8, 13-16; ii.4.5, 18-20; ii.6.3, 14-20; iii.6.9, 18-19; 12, 25-7; 13, 31-2; v.9.3, 36-7; vi.3.15, 24-36.

19. The Platonists could perhaps find Platonic authority for the adoption of Aristotelian immanent forms along with the transcendent ones in such passages as Timaeus 51 a. There is no certainty as to who introduced immanent forms into the Platonic tradition (cf. J. Dillon, The Middle Platonists [London, 1977], 135-7, 274). But in any event the notion of immanent forms is present in such pre-Plotinian Platonists as Albinus (see Didaskalikos, 155 [Hermann]).

20. The realm of Forms is described as “life that is present in its entirety at once, complete and indivisible in all respects; this life is the eternity that we are seeking” (iii.7.3, 37-8). For Plotinus' views on time and eternity see W. Beierwaltes' commentary on iii.7: Plotin, Über Ewigkeit und Zeit (Enneade iii, 7) (Frankfurt am Main, 1967). For Neoplatonic views on time and eternity see R. Sorabji, Time, Creation and the Continuum (London, 1983).

21. vi.7.2, 11-12 and 19, 17-19. The formula comes from Aristotle's An. Post. 90a 14-18, cf. Met. 1044b 10-15. Aristotle's point is that the cause of an eclipse is identical with its essence. According to Plotinus this holds for everything in the realm of Forms.

22. See A. H. Armstrong, “The Background of the Doctrine ‘That the Intelligibles are not Outside the Intellect’”, Les sources de Plotin, 391-425, and Dillon, The Middle Platonists, 95, 158-9, 254-6.

23. Armstrong, “Background”; see Bruns, 81-91 and 106-13. It should be mentioned here that the authenticity of the treatises constituting the so-called De Anima ii (the “Mantissa”) of Bruns' edition of Alexander's psychological writings has been questioned: see P. Moraux, Alexandre d'Aphrodise: Exégète de la noétique d'Aristote (Paris, 1942), 24-8. Moraux, however, later accepted the Mantissa as authentic: see his “Le De Anima dans la tradition grecque. Quelques aspects de l'interprétation du traité, de Théophraste à Thémistius”, in Aristotle on Mind and the Senses, ed. G. E. R. Lloyd and G. E. L. Owen (Cambridge, 1979), 281-324. R.B. Todd, Alexander of Aphrodisias on Stoic Physics, Philosophia Antiqua 28 (Leiden, 1976) 18-19. Cf. also B. C. Bazán, “L'authenticité du ‘De Intellectu’ attribué à Alexandre d' Aphrodise”, Revue Philosophique de Louvain 71 (1973), 468-87; F. M. Schroeder, “The Potential or Material Intellect and the Authorship of the De Intellectu: A Reply to B. C. Bazán”, Symbolae Osloenses 57 (1982), 115-25; P. Thillet, introduction to the Budé edition of Alexander's De Fato (Paris, 1984), 63-5. Moraux, Todd and Thillet, however, all suppose that the Mantissa treatises stem from Alexander's circle. In this work they are referred to as Alexander's.

24. P. Merlan has pointed out (HLGP, 19) that there is one isolated passage in Plato, Laws 894 A, that speaks of a process resembling emanation. There is, however, no evidence that Plotinus made special use of this passage.

25. IV. 9.5, 9-12; V.1.5, 11-13; V.9.6, 10-14.

26. See J. Fielder, “Plotinus' Copy Theory”, Apeiron 11 (1977), 1-11 and in “Immateriality and Metaphysics”, Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 52 (1978), 96-102.

Works Cited

Armstrong, A. H. The Architecture of the Intelligible Universe in the Philosophy of Plotinus. Cambridge, 1940

“The Background of the Doctrine’That the Intelligibles are not Outside the Intellect’”. In Les sources de Plotin. Geneva, 1960

Bazán, B. C. “L'authenticité du ‘De Intellectu’ attribué à Alexandre d'Aphrodise”, Revue Philosophique de Louvain 71 (1973), 468-87

Beierwaltes, W. Plotin über Ewigkeit und Zeit. Frankfurt am Main, 1967

Bréhier, É. La philosophie de Plotin. Paris, 1928 Chrysippe et l'ancien Stoïcisme. Rev. edn, Paris, 1951

Dillon, J. The Middle Platonists. London, 1977

Dodds, E. R. “The Parmenides of Plato and the Origin of the Neoplatonic ‘One’”, CQ 22 (1928), 129-42

Fielder, J. “Plotinus”’ Copy Theory:, Apeiron 11 (1970), 1-11 “Immateriality and Metaphysics”, Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 52 (1978), 96-102

Graeser, A. Plotinus and the Stoics: A Preliminary Study. Leiden, 1972

Krämer, H. J. Der Ursprung der Geistmetaphysik. Amsterdam, 1964

Merlan, P. From Platonism to Neoplatonism. 3rd edn rev. The Hague, 1968 “Greek Philosophy from Plato to Plotinus”. Part 1 of HLGP. Cambridge, 1970

Moraux, P. Alexandre d'Aphrodise: Exégète de la noétique d'Aristote. Paris, 1942 “Le De Anima dans la tradition grecque. Quelques aspects de l'interprétation du traité, de Théophraste à Thémistius”, in G. E. R. Lloyd and G. E. L. Owen (eds.), Aristotle on Mind and the Senses, 281-324. Cambridge, 1979

Santa Cruz de Prunes, M. I. La genèse du monde sensible dans la philosophie de Plotin. Bibliothèque de l'École des Hautes Études, vol. 81. Paris, 1981

Schroeder, F. M.: “The Potential or Material Intellect and the Authorship of the De Intellectu: A Reply to B. C. Bazán”, Symbolae Osloenses 57 (1982), 115-25

Sorabji, R. “Body and Soul in Aristotle”, Philosophy 49 (1974), 63-89 Time, Creation and the Continuum. London, 1983

Strange, S.K. Plotinus' Treatise “On the Genera of Being”: An Historical and Philosophical Study. Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin, 1981

Thillet, P. Introduction to Traité du Destin by Alexander of Aphrodisias. Paris, 1984

Todd, R. B. Alexander of Aphrodisias on Stoic Physics: A Study of the De Mixtione with Preliminary Essays, Text, Translation and Commentary. Philosophia Antiqua 28. Leiden, 1976

Wallis, R. T. The Neoplatonists. London, 1972

Abbreviations

AGP: Archive für Geschichte der Philosophie

Bruns: Alexandri Aphrodisiensis Praeter Commentaria Scripta minora: De Anima cum Mantissa, ed. I. Bruns. Supplementum Aristotelicum, vol. 2, part 1 (Berlin, 1887)

CQ: Classical Quarterly

DG: Doxographi Graeci, ed. H. Diels (Berlin, 1879, repr. 1958)

D. L.: Diogenes Laertius, Vitae Philosophorum

Ennéades: Plotin: Ennéades, ed. E. Bréhier (Paris, 1924-38)

H-S²: Plotini Opera, ed. P. Henry et H.-R. Schwyzer (Oxford, 1964-82)

HLGP: Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, ed. A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge, 1970)

Le Néoplatonisme: Colloques Internationaux du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Le Néoplatonisme (Paris, 1971)

Les sources de Plotin: Fondation Hardt. Entretiens sur l'Antiquité Classique, vol. 5. Les sources de Plotin (Geneva, 1960)

SVF: Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, ed. J. von Arnim, 4 vols. (Leipzig, 1903-24)