Termo: Plotinus – Armstrong

Now this Animate might be merely the body as having life: it might be the Couplement of Soul and body: it might be a third and different entity formed from both. Enneads: I. I. 5 Let us take first the Couplement of body and Soul. How could suffering, for example, be seated in this Couplement?…

But if the mingled strand of life is to us, though entwined with evil, still in the total a good, must not death be an evil? Evil to What? There must be a subject for the evil: but if the possible subject is no longer among beings, or, still among beings, is devoid of life……

But it is the theory of the most rigid and universal Necessity: all the causative forces enter into the system, and so every several phenomenon rises necessarily; where nothing escapes Destiny, nothing has power to check or to change. Such forces beating upon us, as it were, from one general cause leave us no resource…

VI. 7. 9 (Armstrong Selection and Translation from the Enneads) (In the world of Noûs are the Forms of all things that exist in the world of the senses, even irrational animals (and nonliving things), but they are all alive and intelligent There, living thought-realities in the Divine Intellect, and each is in a sense…

Eternity and Time; two entirely separate things, we explain “the one having its being in the everlasting Kind, the other in the realm of Process, in our own Universe”; and, by continually using the words and assigning every phenomenon to the one or the other category, we come to think that, both by instinct and…

Is it any explanation to say that desire is vested in a Faculty-of-desire and anger in the Irascible-Faculty and, collectively, that all tendency is seated in the Appetitive-Faculty? Such a statement of the facts does not help towards making the affections common to the Couplement; they might still be seated either in the Soul alone…

VI. 8. 15 (Armstrong Selection and Translation) (We know that the One is altogether outside the realm of chance because we are aware of something in ourselves which transcends chance by the power of Its light; and when we attain to that and become it and put away all else we are more than free,…

Geometry and arithmetic are, we shall maintain, of a twofold character; in their earthly types they rank with Sensible Quality, but in so far as they are functions of pure Soul, they necessarily belong to that other world in close proximity to the Intellectual. This, too, is in Plato’s view the case with music and…

For it is to the Gods, not to the Good, that our Likeness must look: to model ourselves upon good men is to produce an image of an image: we have to fix our gaze above the image and attain Likeness to the Supreme Exemplar. Enneads: I. II. 7 We must, therefore, lay down the…

Habit is an Act directed upon something had (some experience produced by habit) and binding it as it were with the subject having (experiencing), as the Act of production binds producer and product. Enneads: VI I. 9

We teach that Virtue is not the Absolute GoodGood and Beauty, because we know that These are earlier than Virtue and transcend it, and that it is good and beautiful by some participation in them. Now as, going upward from virtue, we come to the Beautiful and to the Good, so, going downward from Vice,…

The upholder of Happening must be asked how this false happening can be supposed to have come about, taking it that it did, and how the happening, then, is not universally prevalent. If there is to be a natural scheme at all, it must be admitted that this happening does not and cannot exist: for…

III. 2. 2 (Armstrong Selection and Translation from the Enneads) (From the unity of Noûs proceeds the conflicting diversity of the visible universe, in which the principle of unity manifests itself by bringing about a harmony of contending opposites.) It is like the logos in a seed, in which all the parts are together in…

V. 7. 1 (Armstrong Selection and Translation from the Enneads) (There are Forms of individuals; our personalities have eternal principles in the intelligible world. Arguments drawn from reincarnation and the Stoic doctrine of eternal recurrence do not serve to disprove this. We are made individuals by form, not matter. We must not be afraid of…

As a beginning, what is the origin of the Ideas in general? It is not that the thinking principle thought of each Idea and by that act of thought procured their several existences; not because Justice and Movement were thus thought did they come to be; that would imply that while the thought is later…

That archetypal world is the true Golden Age, age of Kronos, who is the Intellectual-Principle as being the offspring or exuberance of God. For here is contained all that is immortal: nothing here but is Divine Mind; all is God; this is the place of every soul. Here is rest unbroken: for how can that…

Existing explanations of Time seem to fall into three classes: Time is variously identified with what we know as Movement, with a moved object, and with some phenomenon of Movement: obviously it cannot be Rest or a resting object or any phenomenon of rest, since, in its characteristic idea, it is concerned with change. Of…

IV. 4. 33 (Armstrong Selection and Translation from the Enneads) (The great dance of the universe.) The movement of the universe is not casual, but goes according to the logos of its living organism; there must therefore be a harmony of action and experience, and an order which arranges things together, adapting them and bringing…

The organs of touch are at the ends of the nerves, which also have the power of moving the living creature; it is there that the soul offers itself in that capacity. The nerves start in the brain (enkephalos) and it is there that people locate the principles of perception, impulse and of the whole…

VI. 2. 21 (Armstrong Selection and Translation from the Enneads) (How Noûs is many as well as one: we find number in the infinite extent of its powers, quality in its glorious beauty, quantity in the continuity of its activity; and from these with the help of the great Categories of Sameness and Otherness (see…