Enneads VI 7: How the Multiplicity of the Ideal-Forms Came into Being, and upon the Good

[sdi]

This tractate is extremely long, and feels to me more like two, one following on from the other. I have broken up my summary in two to help keep it more manageable!

VI 7: How the Multiplicity of the Ideal-Forms Came into Being, and upon the Good

How the Multiplicity of Ideal-Forms Came into Being [§1–16]

We have a conundrum: you have senses; these senses are only of use in the sensible realm; these senses must be patterned on Ideas; but the sense-Ideas must themselves be of no use, since one does not need senses of any kind in the Intellectual realm. The obvious answer to this problem is "Providence:" the Intellect is applying forethought so that our bodies are not devoid of what they need. But this would imply that Intellect is "looking downward" towards body, which we have elsewhere discounted. So what gives?

Our position is that, being in the unitary and infinite Intellectual realm, all souls possess all potentials. This is because a soul isn't specifically an angel-soul or a human-soul or a horse-soul; the soul is one fundamental thing, and rather the form it takes it a reflection of it's "level" within Soul itself: a soul may take on a human body if it is at a human level, but if that soul becomes so degraded as to no longer be worthy of that level, it might take on a horse body as it no longer has the strength, the light, the essential power to take on a higher. Thus the soul must have the capacity for all the life forms of which it may take.

Returning to the question of senses, the soul's capacities must include the imaginative capacities which act in response to the senses: the visionary capacity, the auditory capacity, the tactile capacity, and even capacities of which we cannot conceive. These must have use in the Intellectual. But the soul must also contain the patterns of physical forms themselves: the eye-Idea, the ear-Idea, the skin-Idea, and so on.

But what purpose does the eye-Idea serve in the Intellectual, where one does not need it to see? What purpose do skin-Idea serve in the Intellectual where there is no boundary between anything? Such questions are missing the point: the purpose they serve in the Intellectual is not to serve the individual; they exist because they can exist. In the Intellectual, their purpose is to satisfy completeness, since the Intellect must contain all that can be.

Thus, in the sensible world, the body simply takes out of the vastness of the soul the forms appropriate to its level and needs: here eyes, there wings, here gills, there hooves. In this we see that manifest providence of the Intellect: the One pours down upon it so abundantly that even It, the mighty Intellect, cannot keep it all together as One but expresses it in tremendous diversity. But all this diversity is Good, in that it is the Good made diverse.

On the Good [§17–42]

But why is the Good, good? Because everything pursues it's own good, even here in our world (if only haltingly and meanderingly); by induction, this process can only terminate if its last step in circular and the ultimate Good pursues only itself. So the Good is good to everything, but indirectly; the closer something is to the Good, the more it participates in the Good, and this is the way by which we may call some things Better than others.

And what of evil? As we have said, evil is the negation of all that is good, and so since good is, evil is not. Thus while we might suppose that evil desires the absence of good, this is not correct: evil is not able to desire anything.

One might say that good, obtained, results in pleasure; but we reject this: especially so in the case of bodily pleasure, for in the same way that True Beauty must be much more beautiful than bodily beauty, we might say that True Pleasure must be much more pleasant than bodily pleasure. No, we say that the Good is that which is desirable for its own sake, and we desire It because we cannot help but desire It, much like falling in love.

I gather than while Plato, Plotinus, and Porphyry assert that the soul can reincarnate into all kinds of things (depending on how focused or dissipated they are); Sallustius and Proclus vehemently disagree with them. (My personal inclination is to side with Plotinus here, but my angel suggests that there are, in fact, different categories of souls. So I suppose my not-deeply-considered position is somewhere in between the two camps.)

§22 and §31–35 feature Plotinus at his best again, caught up in rapture of the Highest.

Plotinus displays a cute rhetorical flourish in §38. We have said that the One, being Good, transcends duality and thus cannot be predicated. Thus, how can we say that the Good is good? Plotinus points out that the only way this is possible is if the subject and object are the same: that is, we are really saying "the Good is the Good," which is no different than simply saying "the Good is," which is, in fact, the only statement about the One that can be made.