Stephen Toulmin, who was my colleague at Northwestern University for several years, once told me that Neoplatonism is the “secret glue” which holds together the history of western philosophy, and (he didn’t say, but I think) the entire history of the West. (Plotinus was, certainly, the glue which held my career together at its beginnings: my first publication concerned his take on what Plato called “recollection.”)
The main ingredient in Plotinus’ glue was his ambiguous nearness to the monotheism that would win out over the gods of the ancient world, and in so doing would eventually destroy that world itself. The One, the single principle on which Plotinus thinks the whole world depends, often sounds in his writings like the Jewish/Christian God, the Platonic form of the good, and the Roman emperors all rolled into one. Whether it is personified enough to be identified with the biblical God is unclear; but a lot of later philosophers, from Augustine to Avicenna, tried their best.
Plotinus did not set out to be a secret, but I think he did set out to be glue. Whatever his nearness to monotheism, Plotinus was dead set against the various irrationalities he saw in the Judaism and Christianity of his day, and to fight them he made his philosophy into the final summing-up of the Greek philosophical tradition, which by the time he wrote was almost 800 years old. The principles of his unification are simple enough: Plato was right, when understood correctly; Aristotle is generally right when he is compatible with Plato; the Stoics, Skeptics, and other schools are more-or-less right when compatible with the above two.
Plotinus pursues this exhaustively and with much ingenuity, and produces a single hierarchical system structured somewhat like the Rome in which he, North African by birth, lived and taught. There is little in his system, I think, that is true; but his rethinking and harmonizing of a near-millennium of philosophical tradition is stunningly beautiful.
Plotinus also fought the Stoics, whose relatively low rank in his hierarchy meant that they were wrong about many things. In the course of this battle, he recurs somewhere to Plato’s late and surprising suggestion that the forms are changed in being known, and this change in their being is a kind of life (Sophist 248e). This is applied by Plotinus to the intellectual (or formal) realm. For Plotinus, then, the forms (τά νοητά) are not only intrinsically knowable but intrinsically known: being thought (by a suprapersonal Intellect) is a kind of life necessary to the fullness of their Being.
This gets temporalized in the sensory world. A sensory being has its true origin or (as Plotinus has it) its ἀρχή in the Forms. Having gotten its start in the sensible world, i..e having come into being there, a thing becomes an instance of life, pure movement, and takes a variety of distances from its origin (in space, in size, in age, etc.). This movement is thus a προόδος, a “procession.” Being is merely its first stage.
And its last? We might call it, at least in the case of human beings, a complex of death and knowledge, which in the Platonic tradition are closely related. The human soul eventually loses its sensible being, its life, and returns to the forms; Plotinus calls this the ἐπιστροφή, the turning-about. To attain knowledge of the forms is thus to return to their domain, which is also the starting point.
Or, as Plato had it, all philosophy is “practicing death” (Phaedo 803)
The triad being–life–knowledge, moving from origin through procession to turning-about, applies for Plotinus, in varying guises, across the entire sensible world. The cycle of life is one example: the living thing begins as a seed, develops into an organism, and in dying produces new seeds. In that production, what Aristotle would call its “species” (his word is εἶδος, Plato’s habitual word for a form) transfers from one thing (parent) to another (offspring) and in so doing reveals itself to be the enduring and knowable reality, independent of any single sensory embodiment. Humans have knowledge of this; other beings enact it.
Contrary to the Stoics, with their recurrent drawing of definitive boundaries between the (thinking) self and a (purely) material world—between what is “up to us” and what is not—Plotinus thus maintains that knowledge is not independent of being, but constitutes its final realization. As his own philosophy was the final summing-up, and therefore signaled the death, of the Greek philosophical tradition.
It is impossible to overstate how important the Neoplatonic triad being-life-knowledge has been to western philosophy. One example: its association between knowledge and death is adopted in the Preface to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, and is integral to his ensuing discussion of an idealized, and in his view dead, Prussian state.
But there is another kind of place where something like the Plotinian triad appears.
A blues verse has three lines. It begins on the tonic, with a statement:
My baby come a’running, she was holding up her hand.
It proceeds to restate this, on the fourth:
My baby come a’running, she was holding up her hand.
This procession from tonic to fourth continues to the third line, which provides knowledge of what has happened, rising to the fifth and then turning about and returning to the tonic:
Glad to see you Johnny, but I found me a younger man.
The blues is not Stoic: what happens to Johnny is not something outside him, but defines what he is—an elderly reject. The blues is Plotinian–or maybe Plotinus is rethinking a more ancient insight. Maybe he just “gets” the blues.
Plotinus, we know, was an African from Lycopolis, which was probably in Upper (southern) Egypt. The blues is African-American. Both penetrate to the core of the cycle of human life, which began in Africa, proceeded across the earth, and may now be awaiting its deeper understanding—or, perhaps, its death.