Enneads VI 8: On Free-Will and the Will of the One

My friends, we have come upon the penultimate tractate! I did not expect that reading Plotinus would be such an undertaking, such an initiation—and yet here I am, different than when we started.

But I am premature. Let us finish, first:

VI 8: On Free-Will and the Will of the One

Will is the capacity to pursue one's desires. We hold that the exercise of free will is good and, therefore, the Intellect is the only thing with utterly unconstrained free will, being the only Being in unfettered contact with the One. The gods and other Intellectual beings possess free will to the degree they participate in the Good, but this freedom is subject to their peculiar natures. The human, being amphibious, possesses free will to the degree that they participate in the Intellectual and subject their passions to wisdom, but does not possess free will as they are subject to the passions and demands of the sensible. So an animal or even a man who has entirely subjected himself to the bodily passions possesses very little freedom. But since all things participate of the Good, all things possess at least a little free will, however tiny.

But the One transcends all this. It cannot be said to be free because It cannot be said to be anything at all. It cannot be said to possess will because It cannot be said to possess anything at all. It is far too august to discuss: we can merely remain silent in our awe.

Poor Plotinus! From §13 on, he attempts in various ways to express the inexpressible, but always he comes back to "It is, and there's no more to be said."

I return to Plotinus' analogy that the One is light, the Intellect is the Sun, and the Soul is the Moon. We can say what the Moon is. We can even approximately say what the Sun is, though our understanding of it is slight. But light? What is light? We haven't the slightest idea, and the more we try to figure it out, the more confused we become. All the rules break when you get to light, and all you can really do is see it.