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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.

Peter Adamson

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Peter Adamson
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More quotes by Peter Adamson

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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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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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Soul puts the determination or forms or images of forms, into matter.
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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 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.
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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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