The Enneads

Overview

Seven hundred pages, and the first thing to understand is that Plotinus did not write a book. He wrote fifty-four separate essays over seventeen years in Rome, responding to questions raised in his seminar, in a hand his pupils found almost illegible, with eyesight so poor that he never re-read what he had written. He was fifty when he started. Porphyry, his student, collected the essays after his death, cut some into pieces, grouped them by subject into six sets of nine because he liked the numbers, and prefaced the whole with a biography that is the only reason we know anything about the man.

So the arrangement is not an argument, and the order is not a reading order. Treatises repeat, refer to problems raised elsewhere, and sometimes start in the middle. Porphyry’s numbering, a Roman numeral for the Ennead and an Arabic one for its position, is how everyone cites them, and knowing that V.1 means the first treatise of the fifth Ennead is the only technical thing you need.

The style is difficult in a particular way. Plotinus is not obscure by choice; he is trying to describe things he thinks language is not built for, and he does it by piling up images, retracting them, and starting again. He also writes as if the reader were in the room, breaking off to answer an objection nobody has stated. Reading him is more like overhearing thinking than following an exposition.

The argument

The three hypostases. Everything in the system depends on three levels, set out most compactly in V.1.

At the top is the One, also called the Good. It is not a being; it is what being comes from, and Plotinus is uncompromising about the consequences. It has no parts, no qualities, no thought, no will in our sense, and strictly speaking no name, so that even calling it one is a concession. What can be said is negative, and the tradition of negative theology that runs through Dionysius and the mystics begins here.

From the One comes Intellect. Not by decision, since deciding would introduce a before and after into something with neither, but by a kind of overflow: whatever is perfect produces, as fire gives heat and snow gives cold, without losing anything. Intellect is the level where thinker and thought are the same thing. Plato’s forms live here, and Plotinus insists, against a debate in his own school, that they are not outside Intellect but are its content, each one a living mind containing all the others from its own angle.

From Intellect comes Soul, which is the level of time, sequence and discursive reasoning. The upper face of Soul contemplates Intellect; the lower face, which Plotinus calls nature, organises and animates the visible world. Below Soul is matter, the last faint edge of the procession, which has no form of its own and is close to nothing at all. In I.8 he identifies it with evil, which sits awkwardly with the rest of his system and has been argued about ever since.

The return. The descent is only half the picture. Every level also turns back toward what produced it, and for human beings this turning is the whole point of philosophy. Plotinus’ most striking claim, and the one that separates him from later Platonists, is that a part of each soul never came down at all and is still up there contemplating. The ascent is therefore not a journey somewhere else but a change in what you are attending to.

The route is described in several treatises. Civic virtue first, which orders the ordinary life; then purification, detaching from the body’s demands; then dialectic and contemplation, which is thinking that has stopped moving from premise to conclusion; and finally something beyond thought, since the One is not an object and cannot be known the way anything else is known. Porphyry reports that in the six years he was with him, Plotinus reached this union four times.

The treatises worth knowing by name. I.6, On Beauty, is the most famous and the easiest, and contains the image of carving your own statue. I.8, on the nature and source of evil. III.7, on eternity and time, which defines time as the life of soul moving from one state to another and is the finest thing in the collection after I.6. III.8, on nature and contemplation, where even the growth of a plant is described as a kind of dim contemplating. IV.8, on the descent of the soul, which opens with Plotinus describing his own experience of waking from it. V.1, on the three primary hypostases, the nearest thing to a summary. VI.8, on the freedom and will of the One. And VI.9, on the Good or the One, which Porphyry placed last and which ends with the flight of the alone to the alone.

How to read it

Do not read it through. Nobody does, and the arrangement does not reward it. Read I.6 first, complete. It is fifteen pages, it is beautiful, and it contains the whole system in miniature: the ascent from bodily beauty to the beauty of souls to the Good, and the instruction to work on yourself as a sculptor works on stone.

Then read V.1 for the structure, IV.8 for the soul’s situation, and III.7 on time if you want the hardest and best argument.

Read Porphyry’s Life first or early. It is short, it explains the arrangement, and it supplies the human facts: the man who was ashamed of being in a body, who would not sit for a portrait, who took in orphans and audited their accounts carefully, and who died in Campania telling a friend he was trying to bring back the god in himself to the divine in the all.

MacKenna’s translation is a Victorian performance in its own right, and it takes liberties. Read it for the sound and check any sentence you plan to rely on against Gerson’s Cambridge edition.

Read Augustine’s Confessions VII alongside, where he describes what these books did to him. It is the single best piece of evidence for why a difficult Greek metaphysician mattered so much for so long.

The common misreading is to treat Plotinus as a mystic who despises the world. He wrote an entire treatise attacking people who did, and his universe is good, beautiful and worth attending to, all the way down.

Questions it raises

• If the One is beyond being and beyond thought, how can anything true be said about it, including that it exists?
• Emanation is said to happen without choice, loss or change. Is that an explanation of how multiplicity arises from unity, or a restatement that it does?
• Part of the soul is said never to have descended. If so, why do we not notice, and what exactly is doing the ascending?
• Matter has no form and is called the source of evil. Can something that is almost nothing be responsible for anything?
• Plotinus argues that beauty is not symmetry. Is his counter-example, a single colour or note, decisive?
• Union with the One is beyond thought and beyond speech. What can a philosophy say about a goal it defines as unsayable?