Enneads VI 3: On the Kinds of Being (3)

This tractate is similar to the first one in the series: very technical, and well beyond my comprehension. I gave it the "old college try," but ultimately I'm rather lost—I think I need to study where all this comes from any why—and so this is a gloss at best.

VI 3: On the Kinds of Being (3)

We have discussed what categories are Real—that is, exist in the intellectual world. But what of the sensible world—do the same categories apply? We believe not, as Matter is too distorted and fragmented to admit the possibility of Stability and Identity, but there are analagous categories that seem to fit:

Substance is the reflection of Being in the sensible world, but it not Being itself, as the things of the sensible world are only illusory. It is that which can not be predicated of anything else. (That is, "white" is not substance, because one may reasonably say "X is white," but "Socrates" is substance, because one may not reasonably say "X is Socrates" unless X is Socrates himself.) This may be Matter itself, the Form imposed upon Matter, or any combination thereof.

Relation is any accidental feature of a combined substance (not Matter, as Matter is featureless; and not Form, as Form is governed by the Real categories previously mentioned). While "Relation" is something of a catch-all category, there are three more precise kinds of relations: Quantity, Quality, and Motion. (We notably omit the Aristotelian Time as being measurable and hence a Quantity, and the Aristotelian Space as being a property of something else, and hence a Quality.)

It is essential to be extremely particular in assessing any particular predicate: even the same word may refer to a Substance, a Quantity, or a Quality depending on how it is used.

Several centuries ago when we were working our way through On the Gods and the World, there was some discussion of how "motion," to the Greeks, isn't what we colloquially refer to as "motion," today. Plotinus gives his own definition in this tractate: "the passage from potentiality to realization." (MacKenna kindly translates what we think of motion—that is, movement in space—as "locomotion.")

Some of the later sections in the tractate speak of how Plotinus considers Forms to imbue Matter with qualities—for example, where sensual beauty comes from, given that the Intellectual beauty is not sensual—but I had a very hard time understanding it and will need to return to it some other time.