Plotinus
204–270 · Greek
Hellenistic Greek philosopher and founder of Neoplatonism, systematizing metaphysics through the One, Intellect, and Soul.
In the record
- Born
- 204, Roman Egypt
- Training
- Self-taught philosopher Ammonius Saccas (11 years); influences include Aristotle, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Numenius of Apamea, Stoics, Neopythagoreans
- Affiliation
- Neoplatonism — founder
Key works
- The Six Enneads (270)
- The Enneads
Sebastian reads Plotinus
Plotinus is where the pneumatic ratio achieves its most rigorous philosophical form — not a symptom of bypass but its systematic justification. The soul, in his account, was never truly fallen; matter is a privation, not a wound; return to the One is always already underway. What Hillman will later call the soul’s *this-ness* — its attachment to the particular, the night-world, the image that refuses to be redeemed upward — Plotinus explicitly devalues. That is not a failure of nerve; it is the argument. Read him, then, as depth psychology’s most formidable antagonist, because the pull of his metaphysics is still legible in every tradition that speaks of the higher self, unity consciousness, or spiritual ascent. Hillman’s entire project of *re-visioning* psychology is unintelligible without Plotinus as the target. Turn to him when you want to understand not merely what Jung inherited from the Neoplatonic current, but why Hillman had to fight so hard to get the soul back down.