Enneads III 7: Time and Eternity

[sdi]

III 7: Time and Eternity

Recall from our earlier discussion that the Intellect desires itself and is thus motionless, while Soul desires the Intellect and thus orbits It.

The Intellect is self-complete and unified, needing nothing outside Itself and not being divided into states. Consequently, It has no future or past existence, but always merely Is. Hence we say It is eternal: the only state It possesses is "now" and Its productive Act is timeless.

Soul's productive Act, on the other hand, is Its motion. We have already said that this motion is what generates the Cosmos, but it is also what generates Time: we might say that the cause of the motion is Desire, the motion itself is Time, and what that motion produces is the Cosmos. We hasten to note that despite Time consisting of a succession of states, Soul itself (being the Production of the Intellect) is timeless: It already contains all possible states within It; but from the perspective of an individual soul within Soul, latent states appear to actualize in succession, just as how with individual souls, latent states are seen to actualize, but this does not imply a change in the soul.

We must also note that, just as the Soul has Its Time, individual souls have their own individual times, hence why each soul perceives Time individually. This also accounts for why Space, being a part of the static Intellect, is easily quantified and measured; meanwhile Time, being a part of the mobile Soul—a moving target!—is difficult to apprehend.

(Sorry for being inconsistent in nomenclature: I refer to the ineffable variously as the One and the Good, I refer to the Nous variously as the Intellect or Beauty or the Ideal, and I refer to the highest Soul variously as the World Soul or simply Soul. In my defense, MacKenna is no better.)

Plotinus offhandedly mentions how we can know that our soul is eternal (and therefore divine) in §7. (Talk about burying the lede! But then, I suppose the fourth ennead is about the soul, so perhaps we're just not there yet.)

Time's account of its birth is Plotinus at his best, and can be found in §11.