Plotinus' Last Words

[TheAdlerian]

I did my Pizza cartoon, in part, to make the point that he could have been looking for some unfound element of life.

I have often wondered if christian monks tampered with Greek texts to insert “divine” indeeds in order to stop them from being burned.

[Nick_A]

What did Plotinus mean by “Still I’m waiting for you?"

I don’t know but my guess is that it means something similar to the title of the book including letters and essays by Simone Weil called “Waiting for God”.

I recently read that the word "waiting"is not the best translation of the French “attente” which is more closely related to the word “attention” and contemplation.

Perhaps something similar is true in the phrases Still I’m waiting for you.

These thoughts are taken from an article on Simone Weil:

I’m intrigued by her emphasis on “waiting” as a form of creative attention. Is she describing a spiritual practice, an ethic for everyday life?

For want of a better word, “waiting” is the one used to translate the French word “attente”. And “attente” is more closely related to “attention”, than is the English “waiting”. And “attention” is synonymous with “contemplation”. Thus does the soul that remains in its place, “waiting; not motionless, nor shaken or displaced by any shock from without”, thus does this soul bear spiritual fruit from “the seed of divine love thrown into” it. For we have here to guide us the analogy of what takes place when we become aware of a truth. The mind remains in the state of suspension essential to contemplation." Attention is linked to desire. It is not linked to the will, but to desire. (Or more exactly to consent: attention is consent. That is why it is linked to the good)." The very density of these formulations points out that we are entering the mystical area, that for which the soul was made when it was created by God. For Simone, “all the various kinds of attention are merely degraded forms of religious attention. It is only when we think of God that we can think with the maximum of attention”.

From the following link it appears that Plotinus favored contemplation:

iep.utm.edu/p/plotinus.htm#SSH2b.i

iii. Contemplation

Once the individual soul has, through its own act of will – externalized through dialectic – freed itself from the influence of Being, and has arrived at a knowledge of itself as the ordering principle of the cosmos, it has united its act and its thought in one supreme ordering principle (logos) which derives its power from Contemplation (theoria). In one sense, contemplation is simply a vision of the things that are – a viewing of existence. However, for Plotinus, contemplation is the single ‘thread’ uniting all existents, for contemplation, on the part of any given individual existent, is at the same time knowledge of self, of subordinate, and of prior. Contemplation is the ‘power’ uniting the One, the Intelligence, and the Soul in a single all-productive intellectual force to which all existents owe their life. ‘Vision’ (theoria), for Plotinus, whether intellectual or physical, implies not simply possession of the viewed object in or by the mind, but also an empowerment, given by the object of vision to the one who has viewed it. Therefore, through the ‘act’ of contemplation the soul becomes capable of simultaneously knowing its prior (the source of its power, the Intelligence) and, of course, of ordering or imparting life to that which falls below the soul in the order of existence. The extent to which Plotinus identifies contemplation with a creative or vivifying act is expressed most forcefully in his comment that: “since the supreme realities devote themselves to contemplation, all other beings must aspire to it, too, because the origin of all things is their end as well” (III.8.7, tr. O’Brien). This means that even brute action is a form of contemplation, for even the most vulgar or base act has, at its base and as its cause, the impulse to contemplate the greater. Since Plotinus recognizes no strict principle of cause and effect in his cosmology, he is forced, as it were, to posit a strictly intellectual process – contemplation – as a force capable of producing the necessary tension amongst beings in order for there to be at once a sort of hierarchy and, also, a unity within the cosmos. The tension, of course, is always between knower and known, and manifests itself in the form of a ‘fall’ that is also a forgetting of source, which requires remedy. The remedy is, as we have seen, the exercise of virtue and dialectic (also, see above). For once the soul has walked the ways of discursive knowledge, and accomplished, via dialectic, the necessary unification, it (the soul) becomes the sole principle of order within the realm of changeable entities, and, through the fragile synthesis of differentiation and unity accomplished by dialectic, and actualized in contemplation, holds the cosmos together in a bond of purely intellectual dependence, as of thinker to thought. The tension that makes all of this possible is the simple presence of the pure passivity that is Matter.

So the question for me becomes if philosophizing is the same as contemplation. As of now I do not believe it is. If I’m right, which is Plotinus advocating?

[Bill_Patterson]

@Dunamis

@thirst4metal

Is the All an imagined level of totality that is unreachable and infinite?

Plotinus most definitely sees it as reachable. And it even in someways appears inevitable, in this thinking. It is the natural pursuit of beauty through growing understanding.

Does Plotinus imagine that we have strayed from the All?

The moral dimension of “straying” seems to be missing. There is a certain sense of the fragmentation of the One into Mind and all the gradations down into matter, in a primordial sense. And in many ways Plotinus is modeling his thought on Plato’s creation myth as told in the Timaeus. But there is no retention of personal identity in the All, for the All is both divine and One.

I find it helpful in these particular issues to read Plotinus (ca 250 a.d.) together with the hermetic fragments (written ca. 150 a.d.), which were also drawing on the same traditions Plato drew on, particularly the Tabula Smagardina and the Divine Pymander. Plotinus’ All could be seen as the hermetic “cosmic fire” (and Emerson’s Over-Soul, though that has a more narrowly defined meaning still), so that the human being living in creation is always a bit of the All, even when it has wrapped itself in shadow and materiality (to use the language of Pymander). The hermetics see the process of death and transfiguration as return to the cosmic fire by returning the self’s personal accumulations to the “seven governors” who rule such things (it’s not clear to me whether they are supposed to administer or create these aspects of the material world, but still . . .), so that death and transfiguration is a process of revealing the divinity that was there all along, becoming one’s self.

So far as I can tell, Emerson’s Over-Soul comes directly from the same neoPlatonic traditions, but in a post-Cartesian way, Over-Soul is conceptualized as the totality, all that truly is, and humans are tendrils of Over-Soul that have intruded into time. Leaving time (dying) shucks off all the aspects that are time-bound but leave the essential quiddity untouched.