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. Peter Adamson More Quotes by Peter Adamson More Quotes From Peter Adamson I'm sure that Plotinus wasn't that impressed by the Christians. Peter Adamson impressedchristian Unlike later Neo-Platonists, Plotinus says that our souls are always connected to the universal intellect and that we never really fall away. Peter Adamson intellectsoulfall The world around you is some kind of distraction at best, and evil at worst, and you should be turning away from it. Peter Adamson kindevilworld 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. Peter Adamson philosophicalschoolthinking Before the 3rd century you're having several philosophical schools still as a going concern. You have not only the Platonists and the Aristotelians but you have Scepticism, you have Stoicism, you even have a little bit of Epicureanism. And what happens after Plotinus is that everybody becomes a Neo-Platonist. So if we then go forward to the Islamic world for example, Plotinus is immensely influential, and Neo-Platonism becomes at least one major component of mainstream Islamic philosophy as well. Peter Adamson philosophicalislamicphilosophy 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. Peter Adamson soulanimalworld The forms in intellect are some kind of blueprint or model on which the physical world is based, and something needs to come along and shape the matter in accordance with that blueprint. What does that is soul. Peter Adamson souldoeneeds 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. Peter Adamson importantprinciplessoul Sometimes clichés are true. Peter Adamson sometimes 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. Peter Adamson unrestphilosophyideas 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. Peter Adamson principlessoulpeople For Plotinus, what really exists are the Platonic forms, so the true nature or form of things like justice, beauty, maybe numbers, things like that, and these he associates with the intellect because they're the objects of intellect, they are things that intellect can think about. Peter Adamson justicenumbersthinking 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. Peter Adamson philosophicalplatomean 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. Peter Adamson formkindproblem The forms are part of the mind, or really are the mind, they're just the contents of this universal night. Peter Adamson formmindnight The soul is the principle of life, and it's also something much closer to our own awareness and consciousness of our existence because fundamentally for Plotinus what we are is souls, we're not intellects. Peter Adamson consciousnessprinciplessoul 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. Peter Adamson intellectsoulmight The soul must be distinct from intellect because even at its best, what the soul does when it's thinking, is it thinks linguistically, it thinks in a temporarily extended way, so it for example, might go through the steps of an argument chain, as if you were going through a syllogism and seeing that something followed from the premises, whereas intellect simply grasps the forms. Peter Adamson soulexamplethinking 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. Peter Adamson kindsoulthinking The intellect must be different from the soul. Peter Adamson intellectdifferentsoul
