Plotinus on Four Approaches to Enlightenment

Plotinus · Hellenic and Hellenistic Papers Series · 18 pages

Selections from the Enneads in the MacKenna and Page translation, published by Philip Lee Warner for the Medici Society between 1917 and 1930, arranged by the compiler under four headings and closing with suggested reading from this series. The title-page illustration is by Anita Zotkina. The full text of the same translation is held complete elsewhere in this section, and the note here says so.

The four approaches are given as induction, negation, analogy and ecstasy, and each is illustrated from a different part of the Enneads, the first taking up much the greatest share of the file. Induction is represented by the tractate on Beauty, Ennead I, vi, paragraphs 1 to 9, which begins from the observation that beauty addresses itself chiefly to sight but that there is a beauty for the hearing too, in certain combinations of words and in all kinds of music, and that minds lifting themselves above the realm of sense become aware of beauty in the conduct of life, in actions, in character, in the pursuits of the intellect, and in the virtues — with the promise that a loftier beauty still will be brought to light. From there Plotinus asks what it is that gives comeliness to material forms, draws the ear to sweetness in sound, and constitutes the beauty of whatever derives from Soul, and the ascent proceeds by that question. The three shorter sections then set the other methods beside it: negation, which approaches by denying of the One everything that can be said of anything else; analogy, which reasons from what is known upwards; and ecstasy, which is treated last and briefest, as the approach that does not proceed by reasoning at all.

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