"Plotinus gave exquisitely refined expression to the ancient intuition
that the material order is not the basis of the mental, but rather the
reverse. This is not only an eminently rational intuition; it is perhaps
the only truly rational picture of reality as a whole. Mind does not
emerge from mindless matter, as modern philosophical fashion would have
it. The suggestion that is does is both a logical impossibility and a
phenomenological absurdity. Plotinus and his contemporaries understood
that all the things that most essentially characterize the act of
rational consciousness—its irreducible unity of apprehension, its
teleological structure, the logical syntax of reasoning, and on and
on—are intrinsically incompatible with, and could not logically emerge
from, a material reality devoid of mind. At the same time, they could
not fail to notice that there is a constant correlation between that act
of rational consciousness and the intelligibility of being, a
correlation that is all but unimaginable if the structure and ground of
all reality were not already rational. Happily, in Plotinus’s time no
one had yet ventured the essentially magical theory of perception as
representation. Plotinus was absolutely correct, therefore, to attempt
to understand the structure of the whole of reality by looking inward to
the structure of the mind; and he was just as correct to suppose that
the reciprocity between the mind and objective reality must indicate a
reality simpler and more capacious than either: a primordial
intelligence, Nous, and an original unity, the One, generating,
sustaining, and encompassing all things. And no thinker of late
antiquity pursued these matters with greater persistence, rigor, and
originality than he did."
DB Hart commenting on the new translation of Plotinus's Enneads.
DB Hart commenting on the new translation of Plotinus's Enneads.
