Plotinus (c. 205–270 CE), the Alexandrian-Roman founder of Neoplatonism, occupies a position of considerable importance within the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as a historical predecessor, a philosophical resource, and an anticipatory voice for concepts that depth psychology would later formalize. Edinger treats him as the culminating figure of ancient Greek psychology, reading the Enneads as a pre-Jungian cartography of the Self: the Plotinian triad of the One, Intellect, and Soul maps onto the Self before it had been discovered as a psychological category, while the fourth hypostasis — Nature or hyle — anticipates the psychological quaternity. Most significantly, Edinger and Jung both invoke Plotinus's 'Ninth Tractate' of the fourth Ennead as an ancient witness to the collective unconscious and synchronicity. Hillman appropriates Plotinus as a precursor of archetypal psychology, noting structural parallels with Jung in the doctrines of multiple consciousness, unconscious action, and universal soul. Sharpe and Ure situate Plotinus within the philosophy-as-a-way-of-life tradition, emphasizing the Enneads' account of mystical union with the One as the culminating spiritual exercise of Neoplatonic practice. Dihle examines Plotinus on will, freedom, and the ethical concept of tolma. The central tension in the corpus is between reading Plotinus psychologically — as a naïve phenomenologist of the deeper psyche — and reading him philosophically, as a metaphysician of transcendence whose relationship to body and matter remains genuinely ambivalent.
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20 substantive passages
The philosophy of Plotinus is an account of an ordered structure of living reality, which proceeds eternally from its transcendent First Principle, the One or Good, and descends in an unbroken succession of stages from the Divine Intellect and the Forms therein through Soul with its various levels of experience and activity
Edinger, via Armstrong, presents Plotinus's hierarchical metaphysics as a naive pre-Jungian description of the Self's structure, with the two movements of procession and return mapping onto psychological individuation.
Edinger, Edward F., The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999thesis
Hillman regards Plotinus, Ficino and Vico as precursors of archetypal psychology... man can act unconsciously, can be partially conscious and partially unconscious at the same time. For Plotinus, like Jung, there is one universal psyche.
Samuels reports Hillman's explicit identification of Plotinus as a Southern-tradition precursor of archetypal psychology, noting structural parallels with Jung in the doctrines of unconscious action and a universal soul.
Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis
Whether Dorn also knew Plotinus is questionable. In his fourth Ennead Plotinus discusses the problem of whether all individuals are merely one soul... I mention Plotinus because he is an earlier witness to the idea of the unus mundus.
Edinger transmits Jung's explicit citation of Plotinus's fourth Ennead as an ancient precedent for both the collective unconscious and the concept of the unus mundus.
Edinger, Edward F., The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999thesis
Now are we to hold similarly that your soul and mine and all are one, and that the same thing is true of the universe, the soul in all the several forms of life being one soul, not parcelled out in separate items, but an omnipresent identity?
Edinger quotes Plotinus's fourth Ennead to demonstrate that Plotinus's doctrine of the soul's omnipresent unity anticipates Jung's concept of the collective unconscious and synchronicity.
Edinger, Edward F, The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One Early Greek Philosophy thesis
The philosophy of Plotinus is an account of an ordered structure of living reality... There are two movements in Plotinus's universe, one of outgoing from unity to an ever-increasing multiplicity and the other of return to unity and unification.
Edinger frames Plotinus's dual movement of procession and return as a pre-psychological account of the Self, before the concept of the Self had been formally discovered.
Edinger, Edward F, The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One Early Greek Philosophy thesis
Lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-encentered; beholding a marvellous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine
Sharpe and Ure present Plotinus's autobiographical account of mystical ascent from the Enneads as the paradigmatic description of philosophy as a spiritual exercise aimed at union with the One.
Matthew Sharpe and Michael Ure, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021thesis
each of the stages of Plotinus's Neoplatonic metaphysics, in this light, corresponds to different 'levels of inner life', in Hadot's formulation: within this framework, the experience Plotinus describes for us consists in a movement by which the soul lifts itself up to the level of divine intelligence
Sharpe and Ure, following Hadot, argue that Plotinus's metaphysical stages are simultaneously stages of inner spiritual transformation, making the Enneads a manual for contemplative ascent.
Sharpe, Matthew and Ure, Michael, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021thesis
Plotinus's texts on this unitive experience strain against the limits of language. Alongside a language of love and desire, we read metaphors of intoxication, inspiration, madness, flight, illumination and initiation into the mysteries (epopteia).
Sharpe and Ure analyze the linguistic and rhetorical strategies Plotinus employs to convey the ineffable union with the One, linking it to mystery-religion vocabulary.
Matthew Sharpe and Michael Ure, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021supporting
In unitive experience with the One, Plotinus explains, knower and known, seer and seen, consciousness and its object become fused. Such union cannot be achieved by our own efforts. It comes to the initiate by 'chance' or 'good fortune'
Sharpe and Ure emphasize the involuntary, grace-like quality of Plotinian mystical union, in which the subject-object distinction collapses and which cannot be produced by deliberate effort.
Sharpe, Matthew and Ure, Michael, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021supporting
For Plotinus, in this entirely true to Plato's doctrine, the visible universe was good, an essential part of the nature of things, not the result of any fall or error but of the spontaneous expansion of the divine goodness to fill all possible being
Edinger contrasts Plotinus's affirmation of the visible world as a spontaneous overflow of divine goodness with the Gnostic condemnation of matter, while noting Plotinus's residual ambivalence about matter as darkness.
Edinger, Edward F., The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999supporting
Armstrong says in regard to Plotinus' attitude: His attitude to the visible universe was utterly opposed to that of the Gnostics... Plotinus was not quite clear on that question; he fluctuated.
Edinger, citing Armstrong, identifies Plotinus's attitude toward matter and incarnation as genuinely ambivalent, distinguishing him from the Gnostics while acknowledging an unresolved tension in his doctrine.
Edinger, Edward F, The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One Early Greek Philosophy supporting
Plotinus, without quite realizing it, is presenting us with a quaternity, although he talks only about a trinity, and his trinitarian thinking was so definite that many of the Christian theologians took it over and assimilated it into the Christian Trinity.
Edinger argues that Plotinus unconsciously presents a psychological quaternity through the addition of Nature as a fourth hypostasis, and that his explicit trinitarianism was appropriated by Christian theology.
Edinger, Edward F., The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999supporting
Not a few men and women of position in Rome, on the approach of death, had left their boys and girls, with all their property, in his care, feeling that with Plotinus for guardian the children would be in holy hands.
Edinger, via Porphyry's biography, establishes the biographical and personal dimensions of Plotinus as a spiritual authority whose household became a center of philosophical and religious life.
Edinger, Edward F., The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999supporting
With Plotinus's conception of philosophy as a transcendent initiation, we also see how close the pagan thought of the later Imperium had drawn to the Christian religion which would soon supplant it.
Sharpe and Ure situate Plotinus at the threshold between Neoplatonic philosophy and Christian religion, noting that his successors, led by Iamblichus, moved beyond contemplation toward theurgic ritual.
Matthew Sharpe and Michael Ure, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021supporting
The Athenian and Syrian Neoplatonists who succeeded Plotinus would in fact 'place beyond philosophy what they call "hieratics"': that is to say, sacred operations, the strict observance of rites and sacraments desired by the gods.
Sharpe and Ure contrast Plotinus's contemplative path with the theurgical turn of later Neoplatonism, marking him as the last major figure for whom philosophical contemplation alone sufficed for union with the One.
Sharpe, Matthew and Ure, Michael, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021supporting
According to Plotinus, it is the inexhaustible wealth and the goodness of the One rather than the will to use its power to which the world owes its existence... Plotinus rejects the doctrine that a superior being turns downwards to create an inferior one.
Dihle examines Plotinus's doctrine that creation proceeds from the goodness and overflow of the One rather than from will or deliberate act, with implications for the theory of voluntary agency in late antique philosophy.
Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, 1982supporting
This concept, which has far-reaching consequences in the theory of ethics, is called tolma by Plotinus, a term already used in Gnosticism and earlier Platonism and has important voluntar[istic implications].
Dihle identifies Plotinus's use of tolma — audacity or self-assertive will — as a key ethical concept linking Neoplatonic and Gnostic thought, with consequences for the history of the concept of will.
Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, 1982supporting
He discovered the difference between self-cognition and self-consciousness... But the problem of will does not seem to be one of his favorite psychological topics. The doctrine of the difference between hekousion (voluntarily) and eph' hēmin (in our power)... has not been formulated in terms of volition.
Dihle credits Plotinus with important distinctions in the theory of self-consciousness and cognition while noting that he did not develop a full theory of will, leaving the priority of cognition firmly established in his ethical thought.
Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, 1982supporting
Plotinus connects the term adespoton not only with choice (helesthai) and with what is upto us (eph' hēmin) and voluntary (hekousion), but also with boulēsis, one of the words conventionally translated as 'will'.
Sorabji examines Plotinus's contribution to the philosophical vocabulary of voluntary action, freedom, and will, situating him in the transition from Stoic to Neoplatonic and Christian theories of moral agency.
Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000supporting
Plotinus (205–270) had studied in Alexandria under Origen's old teacher Ammonius Saccus and had later joined the Roman army, hoping that it would take him to India, where he was anxious to study.
Armstrong provides a brief biographical note on Plotinus, locating him within the Alexandrian intellectual milieu shared with Origen and tracing his trajectory toward Rome.