Peter Adamson Quotes
The world around you is some kind of distraction at best, and evil at worst, and you should be turning away from it.
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.
Assuming there is an intellect, we're clearly not this universal intellect or we would know it. So that's one function of soul.
The forms are part of the mind, or really are the mind, they're just the contents of this universal night.
Plotinus thought that the entire world has a single soul. He also thought that each animal and plant and of course human, has an individual soul.
In fact Plotinus thought not only that soul in general is eternal so that you always have soul, but he thought that each person's soul is eternal.
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.
The body is some kind of image of you, it's kind of something that's just attached to your soul, some kind of outside principle, which doesn't really represent who you really are.
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.
We do each have an intellect but there's a universal intellect which is the same for everybody, as it were. And this single intellect is grasping the platonic forms.
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.
Unlike later Neo-Platonists, Plotinus says that our souls are always connected to the universal intellect and that we never really fall away.
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.
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.
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.
