| Phi 220 Spring 2016 |
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Although I have assigned you one full tractate and part of another, we will be able to discuss only a few passages drawn from this material; you are directed to these passages in the notes below. The translation you are reading is famous, but it is far from literal; at the end of these notes, I offer some hints for sorting through the many capitalized words. Another source of help with that is the editors’ introduction to these selections (HK 139-41).
Porphyry, who organized Plotinus’s works into the Enneads, reported that I 6 was written first among those he collected; and it is one of the best known. Here is a brief synopsis provided by another translator:
What is it that makes things beautiful? We will start our enquiry by considering the beauty of bodies. The Stoic view that it is entirely a matter of good proportion will not do (ch. 1). It is due to the presence of form from the intelligible world (ch. 2) and we recognise and appreciate it by our inward knowledge of intelligible form (ch. 3). The beauty of virtue (ch. 4). It is the beauty of true reality in its transcendent purity, and its opposite, moral ugliness, is due to admixture with body (ch. 5). We attain to it by purifying ourselves (ch. 6). The supreme and absolute beauty, the Good (ch. 7). The way to it (ch. 8). The power of inner sight and how to develop it (ch. 9). (A. H. Armstrong, tr., Plotinus, vol. 1, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966, p. 231.)
The passages we will focus on in our discussion of the two selections are these:
• The nature of beauty
• Ennead I, 6.1 (from “Almost everyone ..”), HK 141f. Here Plotinus criticizes a commonly held theory of beauty before offering his own alternative. Which of his criticisms seems to you the most damaging?
• Ennead I, 6.2-3, HK 142-4. This is Plotinus’s own account of beauty. Formulate it for yourself and think of the two examples of the architect and the beauty of color.
• Beauty, evil, and goodness
• Ennead I, 6.5 (from “If a man ...”), HK 146f. Think through these connections between matter, ugliness, and evil.
• Ennead I, 6.9 (from “Withdraw into ...”), HK 150. This passage exhibits a number of ideas, among them the basis of our love of beauty, the connection between beauty and goodness, and the difference between beauty and the Good or One.
• Beauty and the One
• Ennead VI, 7.33, HK 166f. This incorporates aspects of both the previous groups of passages. Notice the echoes of the Symposium in the next-to-last paragraph.
In our discussion, I’ll suggest that we focus on the beginning of the assignment—on the theory of beauty Plotinus criticizes, his criticisms of it, and the alternative he offers.
• In the summary quoted above, Armstrong associates the view Plotinus criticizes with the Stoics (a philosophical school that became important after Aristotle’s death and whose influence began to wane only a century or so before Plotinus) but something like it can also be found in Aristotle (see, for example, the passage from Metaphysics XIII on HK 96). What can be said in favor of this conception of beauty and how might someone sympathetic to it respond to Plotinus’s arguments against it?
• Think, too, both sympathetically and critically, about Plotinus’s own view, which associates beauty with a unification or an “indivisible exhibited in diversity” (HK 144).
• On the whole, which of the two approaches seems the better way of articulating your own understanding of beauty?
Plotinus’s metaphysical system and issues of translation
Plotinus’s general metaphysics has 4 levels (see also HK 140 of the editors’ introduction):
• the One or the Good,
• a divine Intellect which thinks Platonic Ideas or Forms,
• soul (both a world-soul and souls of individual bodies), and
• matter (which is the contrary to all intelligibility and goodness and so amounts to an existent evil).
In this translation (by Stephen MacKenna), there can be a wide variety of vocabulary all pointing to the same level. Much of it—e.g., “Intellectual-Principle,” “Ideal-Form,” “Divine-Thought,” “Ideal-Principle”—refers in one way or another to the second level. On the other hand, you needn’t assume that every word MacKenna capitalizes is an explicit reference to an element of Plotinus’s metaphysical system; other translators regard many of these as cases where Plotinus uses Greek words in their ordinary senses rather than as special technical vocabulary of his philosophy.