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The importance of Plotinus is not only his own philosophical ideas which are quite interesting, but his historical impact as the founder of neo-Platonism which is the main philosophical tradition of late antiquity.

Peter Adamson

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Peter Adamson
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Plotinus
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Platonism

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There's going to be this realm of Platonic forms and then there's going to be this single mind, the 'nous', which grasps them.
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People often talk about Plotinus' system. The reason they do this is that Plotinus postulated a kind of series or chain of principles, so at the top there's what he called the One. Below the One is what he called Intellect. Below Intellect is Soul, and the effect of the soul is the physical world that we actually live in.
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We do have intellects and Plotinus controversially thought that even though we might not be aware of it, our souls are always connected to the intellect. They never fully descend as he would put it.
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This is in a way the most important thing about soul is that it's a kind of principle which mediates between the universal intellect and the material world.
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What the soul is doing is kind of walking through the forms, and so our experience of thinking isn't normally this kind of pure intuitive insight that intellect gets, and that intellect must get right, because it's always identical to its objects, it's always the same as the forms that it's thinking about.
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The forms are part of the mind, or really are the mind, they're just the contents of this universal night.
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Sometimes clichés are true.
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Plotinus is usually called the Founder of Neo Platonism and what that means is that in this philosophical circle, he was founding a kind of renewed attempt to understand the thought of Plato which however they were combining with the thought of other philosophers, including Aristotle, the Stoics and Pythagoreans and so on.
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When you're seeking after bodily pleasure of food and drink for example, this is going to prevent you from doing what you should be doing which is contemplating.
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Unlike later Neo-Platonists, Plotinus says that our souls are always connected to the universal intellect and that we never really fall away.
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Basically the problem is that if the intellect is looking at or beholding the forms, what it will get is some kind of representation or image of the forms, but it won't actually have the forms, it won't touch them as it were, or it won't incorporate them.
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The body distracts your soul.
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Soul puts the determination or forms or images of forms, into matter.
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Assuming there is an intellect, we're clearly not this universal intellect or we would know it. So that's one function of soul.
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Plotinus is a neo-Platonist, so he would encourage us to go back to Plato.
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This condition of uncertainty and unrest in the Roman Empire might explain why at Plotinus' philosophy encourages us to sort of flee from the physical world and towards the world of ideas.
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In fact one of the things about Plotinus is that he maybe not singlehandedly, but I think more than anyone else, killed off the variety and dissension among the philosophical schools of antiquity.
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The idea is that to grasp an idea like equality or justice, you can't look at the equal and just or unjust things in the world around you, you have to somehow ascend to or maybe remember some kind of idea of equality and justice and this would be a Platonic form, and it would be different from the things that partake in the form.
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If you think about for example, proportionality and beauty, things like that, these seem to be some kind of representations of a kind of unity.
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