Theoria

Theoria (θεωρία) — contemplation — is for plotinus not merely one activity among others but the generative principle of the cosmos itself. Nature creates by contemplating: “the act of production is seen to be in Nature an act of contemplation, for creation is the outcome of a contemplation which never becomes anything else” (Enneads III.8). Being does not act first and contemplate afterward; contemplation is the act by which every level of reality gives rise to the next.

This makes theoria not a retreat from the world but the metaphysical fact that produces the world. Every hypostasis contemplates what is prior to it and, in that contemplation, generates what is posterior. nous contemplates the-one and produces psyche-plotinian; Soul contemplates Intellect and produces Nature; Nature contemplates Soul and produces the sensible world.

For the individual soul, theoria is the vehicle of epistrophe. The contemplative ascent passes through beauty — “disciplined to this pitch, established in beauty” (Enneads V.5) — through Intellect, and at its limit into unitive experience with the One. Plotinus’ language for this experience exhausts itself in superposition: “metaphors of intoxication, inspiration, madness, flight, illumination and initiation into the mysteries (epopteia)” (Sharpe and Ure 2021).

In the Lineage, Plotinian theoria is the direct precursor to what Jung names active-imagination — the turning of attention inward as the generative act by which the psyche discovers its own contents. It is also the ancient philosophical ground of what the archetypal post-Jungians call soul-making.

Relationships

• epistrophe
• the-one
• nous
• active-imagination
• mundus-imaginalis

Primary sources

• enneads (Plotinus 270)
• philosophy-as-way-of-life (Sharpe and Ure 2021)