Plotinos: Complete Works, v. 3: In Chronological Order, Grouped in Four PeriodsPlotinus
Philosophy
Plotinos: Complete Works, v. 3: In Chronological Order, Grouped in Four Periods
Plotinus
Plotinus
Essences ("beings") therefore cannot exist without an actualization
of Intelligence. By this actualization, after having produced some
("being"), Intelligence always produces some other one, somehow
carrying out the career which it is natural for veritable Intelligence
to carry out within itself; this career is that of the beings, of
which each corresponds to one of its evolutions, (or, it roams around
among beings, so that through its roaming around these beings unite
and form.) Since Intelligence is everywhere identical, its evolutions
imply permanence, and they make it move around the "field of truth"[97]
without ever issuing therefrom. It occupies this whole field, because
Intelligence has made itself the locality where its evolutions
operate, a locality which is identical with what it contains. This
field is varied enough to offer a career to be fulfilled; if it were
not universally and eternally varied, there would be a stopping-place
where variety would cease; and, were Intelligence to stop, it would
not think; and if it had never stopped, it would have existed without
thought (or, it would not exist). This however, is not the case;
therefore thought exists, and its universal movement produces the
fulness of universal "Being." Universal "Being," however, is the
thought that embraces universal Life, and which, after each thing, ever
conceives some other; because, since that which within it is identical
is all so different. It continually divides and ever finds something
different from the others. In its march, Intelligence ever progresses
from life to life, from animated (beings) to animated (beings); just
as some traveller, advancing on the earth, finds all that he travels
through to be earth, whatever variations thereof there may have been.
In the intelligible world, the life whose field one traverses is always
self-identical, but it is also always different. The result is that
(this sphere of operations) does not seem the same to us, because in
its evolution, which is identical, life experiences (or, traverses)
things which are not the same. That however does not change this life,
for it passes through different things in a uniform and identical
manner. If this uniformity and identity of Intelligence were not
applied to different things, Intelligence would remain idle; it would
no longer exist in actualization, and no more be actualization. Now
these different things constitute Intelligence itself. Intelligence is
therefore universal, because this universality forms its very nature.
Being thus universal, Intelligence is all things; there is nothing in
it which does not contribute to its universality; and everything is
different, so as to be able still to contribute to totality, by its
very difference. If there were no difference, if everything in it were
identical, the being of Intelligence would be diminished, inasmuch as
its nature would no more co-operate towards its harmonic consummation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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