Plotinus

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thinkandmull

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According to wikipedia (not always reliable I know) Plotinus denied that God acted (ergon) with self-awareness “[V.6.6; V. 6.3]” and said instead that God was pure potentiality (dynamis) “[III.8.10]”. I believe those citations of from his major work Enneads. Does anyone have these arguments from him? They are the opposite of what Aquinas says.
 
Remember - it is all about the One… Sort of a super-God in his system, if I recall correctly…
 
midori said:
It’s too late in the evening for me to try to follow Plotinus’ arguments, but have you tried reading them?
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He is difficult to read in places, but at one point he says: “We hold that the ordered universe, in its material mass, has existed for ever and will for ever endure…”
So, this means that he would believe that the Big Bang was not the beginning of the universe. Perhaps he would buy into the idea of a cyclical universe coming from an infinite past and stretching infinitely into the future.
 
Hrmm… that doesn’t sound like the Plotinus I know. 😛

But we unpack his cosmological schema for a second:

If by “God” you are referring to his Conception of “the One,” you might be correct.

The difficulty tends to be with what people correlate the word “god” with.

Plotinus has a string of arguments that forces people to consider the Universe in the following manner.

The One —> The Intellect —> The Soul —> Nature

The Intellect can be correlated to Aristotle’s Conception of a Prime Mover, the One not so much.

The Intellect is supposed to hold all of Plato’s Forms inside of its intelligbile realm. Those Forms are the sum total of everything that Mankind can possiblely understand.

And herein lies the Problem, the One is therefore Unapproachable and Unknowable. We don’t possess the necessary concepts to encapsulate it.

The One (being a Principle of Unity) is according to the Platonic conception of reality, the “most real” thing in Existence, but it emanates the rest of the chain of being automatically and eternally (eternal = Timeless).

So in that particular sense, The One isn’t particularly concerned or perhaps even aware of what it has created.

This is similar to the Divine Mind that Aristotle posits. His Primer Mover is lost in thought, and the only thing it is thinking about is…itself.
 
In which book of the Enneads does he present this forceful string of arguments/
 
thinkandmull said:
In which book of the Enneads does he present this forceful string of arguments/
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The last book of the Enneads has everything on the One, but his chain of argumentation is littered throughout the whole work.

If your looking for something like a formal proof a la Aristotle, you are fresh out of look.

Much like Soren Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, your going to have to read the Enneads from front to back to see how he builds his arguments.

Because, Plotinus doesn’t formulate things from a top-down “birds eye” view if you will, he starts off with everyday experiences and builds upward.

PS: you also misinterpreted me - i didn’t say he had a forceful string of arguments. I said his arguments forces the reader the consider his cosmological viewpoint which is derived mostly from Plato but has elements of Aristotle and Stoicism mixed in to boot.
 
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