Summary: Plotinus Ennead 1, Tractate 1

[readoldthings]

Plotinus began-- if you can remember this long ago-- by asking about "pleasure and distress, fear and courage, desire and aversion-- where have these affections and experiences their seat?" 

Coming to the end of this tractate, we have the beginning of our answer.

The Soul, for Plotinus, is something that never enters into incarnation in the material world. The Soul exists, instead, in the world of Forms. Our individual Souls are forms, and they participate in the Universal Soul, which our translator sometimes renders Soul Itself. What is that? Well, if your body is a red object, your soul is the Color Red as it exists prior to any red objects. And Soul Itself is Color Itself, as it exists prior to any individual colors?

With me so far?

The experiences that we have in the world are the experiences of the Couplement of Soul and Body. Again, this Couplement doesn't exist by Soul descending into the material world. Instead, the Soul acts like a lantern, emitting a beam of light which illuminates the body as the lantern illuminates a wall. The Couplement is the illuminated wall.

All of our experiences in the material world are experiences of the illuminated wall. Our various material faculties are all powers of the soul refracted down through the couplement, "like images caught in a mirror," descending from sense-perception all the way down to the urge toward procreation.

We are thus hybrid beings, consisting of a Soul which is beyond the material world, and a set of faculties which allow us to act in the material world and which allow the material world to act upon us.

The consequences of this are as follows:

1. It is our choice where we direct our attention. In childhood, the lower faculties naturally dominate. Over the course of a lifetime, we gain the capacity to turn more and more toward the highest things-- if we choose. But we must choose.

2. On the other hand, our Soul Itself is blameless when it comes to our sinful acts. But we still must be purified of them. Plotinus mentions the possibility of descent into the Lower World after death, and of reincarnation as an animal.

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3. This is not in Plotinus's work. It certainly seems to me, though, that considering the Soul as an ideal-form (like The Color Red) is another bit of evidence in favor of reincarnation. Consider-- we can discern the existence of the color red by the fact that there is a multitude of red objects. From this we can infer that there is something called "red," by which the red objects exist. If there was only-- not just one red object, but only one possible red object, anywhere in the entire universe, wouldn't it be harder to imagine a form of red? Wouldn't that object in fact BE the form of red-- since there is only one of it in existence or possible, and it cannot in any way be divided (because then there would be more than one of it)? Similarly, it seems that if our Souls are forms, then there must be more than one object animated by that form. These objects-- our bodies-- will then be separated in time rather than in space.

...And that's all for now. Join us next time, when we move on to the second tractate of the First Ennead!