Intelligible Beauty

Intelligible beauty — the beauty proper to nous and ultimately to the-one — is the central topic of Enneads I.6, the treatise On Beauty, and is elaborated again in Enn. V.8, On the Intelligible Beauty. plotinus‘s thesis breaks decisively with the classical proportion-of-parts definition that descends from Polykleitos and Aristotle: beauty is not a relation among material parts but the recognition by the soul of its own kindred Form in what it perceives.

Plotinus presses the argument by counter-example: “Whence shone forth the beauty of Helen, battle-sought; or of all those women like in loveliness to Aphrodite; or of Aphrodite herself; or of any human being that has been perfect in beauty… ?” (Enneads, in this recon’s chunks). The beauty cannot be in the matter, since matter is by itself “the mere Matter of beauty” — the formless recipient. It must be in the form that has subdued matter and “given the form he desired.”

The treatise’s culminating doctrine is preserved in Sharpe and Ure’s quotation from Enn. V.8.9: the gods of the intelligible realm, “blending into a unity, distinct in powers but all one God in virtue of that one divine power of many facets. More truly, this is the one God who is all the gods; for, in the coming to be of all those, this, the one, has suffered no diminishing.” Intelligible beauty is the beauty of the polycentric unity of the intelligible cosmos.

For the Lineage this is the philosophical source of two later movements. First, the Renaissance Neoplatonic aesthetic of Ficino and the Italian humanists, in which beauty is the visible trace of the divine and the proper occasion for the soul’s ascent. Second, james-hillman‘s archetypal aesthetics — the doctrine that the anima mundi is the soul’s self-display in visible forms, that beauty is the sign of soul-presence in the world. Hillman’s “poetic basis of mind” descends through Vico and Ficino directly to Plotinian Enn. I.6.

Relationships

• nous
• the-one
• anima-mundi
• world-soul
• forms-eidos

Primary sources

• enneads (Plotinus 270, esp. I.6 and V.8)
• Archetypal Psychology (Hillman 1983)
• Philosophy as a Way of Life (Sharpe and Ure 2021)