The One

Hen (ἕν), the One, is for plotinus the first principle from which everything else emanates or descends. It is also called the Good, “indicating the sublimatio tendency, because in this terminology, as ‘the Good,’ it is stripped of its opposite” (Edinger 1999, citing Armstrong). The One is beyond being, beyond intellection, beyond the duality that intellection requires: “What has no prior and no external accompaniment could have no intellection, either of itself or of anything else” (Enneads V, on the impossibility of the One thinking itself).

Plotinus argues that multiplicity requires a prior unity: “for the manifold, there must be The One, that from which the manifold rises; in all numerical series, the unit is the first” (Enneads). Without the One, the many would be “disjointed items, each starting at its own distinct place and moving accidentally to serve to a total.”

The One is the source of nous and, through Intellect, of psyche-plotinian. It remains itself unmoved, giving rise to all without diminution: “as long as it exists it produces; but it exists for ever; so, therefore, do its products” (Enneads). The soul’s highest movement is the flight of the alone to the alone — epistrophe, the return of soul through Intellect back to the One.

In the Lineage the One is the direct philosophical precursor to what Jung names the self — the center and totality of the psyche, the archetype of wholeness beyond all opposites.

Relationships

• nous
• psyche-plotinian
• epistrophe
• self
• plato

Primary sources

• enneads (Plotinus 270)
• edinger-psyche-in-antiquity-book-one (Edinger 1999)