Plotinos: Complete Works, v. 4: In Chronological Order, Grouped in Four PeriodsPlotinus
Philosophy
Plotinos: Complete Works, v. 4: In Chronological Order, Grouped in Four Periods
Plotinus
Plotinus
35. The incorporeal is that which is conceived of by abstraction
of the body; that is the derivation of its name. To this genus,
according to ancient sages, belong matter, sense-form, when conceived
of apart from matter, natures, faculties, place, time, and surface.
All these entities, indeed, are called incorporeal because they are
not bodies. There are other things that are called incorporeal by a
wrong use of the word, not because they are not bodies, but because
they cannot beget bodies. Thus the incorporeal first mentioned above
subsists within the body, while the incorporeal of the second kind
is completely separated from the body, and from the incorporeal that
subsists within the body. The body, indeed, occupies a place, and the
surface does not exist outside of the body. But intelligence and
intellectual reason (discursive reason), do not occupy any place, do
not subsist in the body, do not constitute any body, and do not depend
on the body, nor on any of the things that are called incorporeal by
abstraction of the body. On the other hand, if we conceive of the void
as incorporeal, intelligence cannot exist within the void. The void,
indeed, may receive a body, but it cannot contain the actualization of
intelligence, nor serve as location for that actualization. Of the two
kinds of the incorporeal of which we have just spoken, the followers of
Zeno reject the one (the incorporeal that exists outside of the body)
and insist on the other (the incorporeal that is separated from the
body by abstraction, and which has no existence outside of the body);
not seeing that the first kind of incorporeality is not similar to
the second, they refuse all reality to the former, though they ought,
nevertheless, to acknowledge that the incorporeal (which subsists
outside of the body), is of another kind (than the incorporeal that
does not subsist outside of the body), and not to believe that, because
one kind of incorporeality has no reality, neither can the other have
any.
RELATION BETWEEN THE INCORPOREAL AND THE CORPOREAL.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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