Enneads VI 2: On the Kinds of Being (2)

[sdi]

Sheesh, you guys: here I am, quitting my job so I can both parent and study philosophy properly, and then I get so sick that I can't do either! I'm still something of a mess but slowly chipping away at the brain fog: luckily, this tractate is much easier than the prior one, and can be understood in terms of Plotinus' metaphysics on its own, without necessary recourse to prior writers. (Of course, I imagine I'd get much more out of it if I was familiar with Aristotle, but...)

VI 2: On the Kinds of Being (2)

So after dismissing the predominant views of what is Real, what is our view? We find five categories of things:

• Being must self-exist before anything else can have existence.

• Motion and Stability are how the Intellect has intellection: it is one Being, and thus stable in Its totality, but It has many Motions as that one Being attempts to apprehend every aspect of Itself.

• Identity and Difference are inherent in the very discussion of one and many: for how are we to distinguish many from one unless each of these has some individual identity and has some difference between them?

All five of these must arise together. Being is, in a sense, inherently fundamental and primary, but Being cannot Be without the other four, and so those "secondaries" are also fundamental. In this way the Intellect is a plurality in a unity.

Some of Aristotle's categories, such as Quantity, Quality, and Relation, cannot be fundamental categories since they are all conditional on identity and difference: one cannot count things or differentiate their qualities or relate things to each other unless they are different. Hence these categories must be secondary, and thus in a sense illusory: they are not self-existent. Others, such as Magnitude, Place, and Time, are even more illusory, being conditional upon the secondary categories. Various other proposed categories, such as Unity or Goodness or Beauty, are found to either be identical to one of the five already proposed or subsequent to them, depending on how the terms are used.

It occurs to me that the five Real categories are reflected, at a much lower level, as the elements: Being corresponds to "spirit," and the other four correspond to the classical elements.

For sightseeing: §20–23 describes how the purely-potential Intellect unfolds into the purely-actual intellects. §21, in particular, is beautiful, and it seems to me that it must be inspired by one of Plotinus' ecstatic visionary experiences, as it reads very much like some of the transcendent NDE's I've read about, but with a great deal more intellectual rigor.

Comments

[boccaderlupo]

Hope you are on the mend over there!

I'm woefully behind on the Enneads, and much of them are beyond me, but your summaries of these are helpful in terms of getting the lay of the land.

Axé!