Plotinus on the Intelligible Beauty

Plotinus · Hellenic and Hellenistic Papers Series · 16 pages

From Thomas Taylor's translation and commentary, Collected Writings of Plotinus, Volume III of The Thomas Taylor Series, Frome: The Prometheus Trust, first edition 1994, revised 2000 — being Ennead V, viii, pages 41–54. Its companion in this section, “Plotinus on four approaches to enlightenment,” draws on the MacKenna translation instead, and the complete Enneads in that version are held here as well, so the same author appears in two different English voices.

The treatise sets out to show how the soul that contemplates the intelligible world and beholds the beauty of true intellect may also perceive the father of that world, who is superior to intellect. The argument opens with an illustration rather than a definition. Suppose two masses of stone placed side by side, one shapeless and untouched, the other fashioned by art into a statue — of a Grace or a Muse if divine, or if human then not of any particular man but of a figure art has collected out of all beautiful forms. The worked stone appears beautiful at once, and Plotinus presses the question of why: not because it is stone, or the other mass would be beautiful too, but because it possesses the form that art has applied. From this he draws the step the whole piece turns on. The matter did not have the form; the form existed in the thinking artist before it entered the stone, and it was in him not by virtue of eyes and hands but because he was endued with art. The beauty therefore existed in the art more excellently than in the statue, since the form abiding in art does not itself pass into the stone but remains in indivisible union, an inferior form proceeding from it and taking only what the material can receive. The conclusion follows that reason, containing the beauty of art, is a greater and truer beauty than anything it produces — and the ascent continues upward from there.

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