Posted by Giannis Stamatellos on November 04, 1998 at 03:53:38:
Dear friends,
Congradulations from Greece. Today i descover Mrs Baracat email
and after all of your site. The last two years i sudy
Plotinus and i am based to the first Modern Greek
translation of III.7."One Eternity and Time". After
one year translation and comments i will publish
it before Christmas. I have also begun trabslating
V.5 and i have write an article about Plotinus
perception of Nature and some examples of birds.
I am sending you my article and if you can give me
your address i can send you my translation. If anyone
of Plotinus Schollar from your list have done
any work on plotinus i will be greatifull to receive it
in the following address.
Giannis Stamatellos
Heraclidon 42
Thissio 11851
Athens, Greece
...................................................
The birds in Plotinus’ perception of nature: an Introduction
by Giannis Stamatellos
Plotinus (AD 204/5 - 270) was regarded as the first and the most
important Greek Neoplatonic Philosopher. There are two possibilities for
his place of birth, either in Lycopolis in the Delta of Nile or at Upper
Egypt. At the age of 28, in 232, he went to Alexandria to study
philosophy and after remaining unsatisfied for a long time he finally
found and was impressed by the Platonic philosopher Ammonius Saccas,
with whom he remained for eleven years. In 243, he joined the expedition
of Gordian III (see. Porphyrii Vita Plotini ibid.) in order to
familiarize himself with the culture and the philosophy of the East.
Plotinus escaped when Gordian was murdered at the instigation of his
praetorian prefect Philip. At the age of 40 he settled in Rome. Two
years before his death, not being in good health condition, he moved to
Campania, where he wrote his last important treatises. His education,
culture and social background was Greek and this is manifested in his
writings. Plotinus’ biographer and disciple, Porphyry, published his
writings in six sets of nine treatises each, the “Enneads”. The first
three sets concern the physical world and our relation to it, the fourth
concerns the “Soul”, the fifth the “Intellect”, and the sixth the “One”.
Plotinus’ critical thinking was influenced by Plato, Aristotle, the
Stoics and the Pythagoreans. There is no concrete evidence of Oriental
influence. His philosophical system is based on the theory of the three
primary “hypostases” (see. Ennead V.1), the “One”, the “Intellect” and
the “Soul”. The “One”, the first hypostasis, is absolutely transcendent
standing at the top of Plotinus’ Metaphysical system. There is nothing
we can say about the “One”. Any word or any meaning will deduct any
essence from it. From a timeless and automatic process, the “emanation”,
derives the second hypostasis, the “Intellect” or the “infinite dyad”.
All the Forms and the Eternal Life are inside the “Intellect”. The
“Intellect” focuses and depends on the “One” holding the perfect
knowledge, the self-knowledge in a completed and unmoved condition,
always possessing instantly all of its thoughts. The “Soul”, the third
hypostasis, is again dependent on the “Intellect”, thinking discursively
by moving in space and passing from one thing to another. This movement
of Life of the Soul is Time. Plotinus says that the “Soul”, through the
World Soul and the Individual Souls, is responsible for the creation of
the sensible world and our universe.
According to Plotinus, any higher being is present to the lower, giving
the opportunity to the lower, by contemplation, to reach the higher
levels of Intellect. Plotinus’ philosophy is esoteric. By investigating
ourselves we can touch the Intelligible Nature starting from the
contemplation of our own Nature. The Nature creates her beings by an
unconscious process without a logical plan or fatigue. All of her beauty
is the result of her inward harmony. She has full consciousness of
herself and in that way is comparable with the “Intellect”. Nature is at
rest in contemplation of the vision of herself and her contemplation is
silent. Plotinus in his treatise “On Nature and Contemplation”(III.8)
says:
and if anyone were to ask nature why it makes, if it cared to hear and
answer the questioner it would say: “You ought not to ask, but to
understand in silence, you, too, just as I am silent and not in the
habit of talking. Understand what, then? That what comes into being is
what I see in my silence, an object of contemplation has a contemplative
nature. And my act of contemplation makes what it contemplates, as the
geometers draw their figures while they contemplate. But I do not draw,
but as I contemplate, the lines which bound bodies come to be as if they
fell from my contemplation. (III.8.4.1-11 [Armstrong])
However, Plotinus regards that the Earth is a self-sufficient living
organism having a growing power and her own individual soul. Earth is a
closed ecological system using an inside-continuing flaw. The Universe
and the Earth is unchangeable because of this internal flaw within
herself . In his treatise “On difficulties of the Soul II” (IV.4)
Plotinus writes:
One might conjecture from the things, which grow out of it, that the
earth has a growth-soul; but if many animals are visibly produced by the
earth, why should one not say also that is an animal? But since it is so
large an animal, and no small part of the All, why should not one say
that it has intelligence also, and so is a god? For if each of the stars
is a living thing, why should not the earth also be a living thing,
since it is part of the universal living thing? For one must certainly
not say that it is held together from outside by a soul which does not
belong to it, but has no soul within it, as if it was not able to have a
soul of its own as well as the stars. For why should the fiery bodies be
able to have a soul, but not the body of earth? (IV.4.22.15-25
[Armstrong])
In many parts into the Enneads we find Plotinus offering various
examples taken from the Natural world in order to express his
philosophical thought. One of his favourite subjects s the “birds”. In
treatise “Are the stars causes” (II.3), Plotinus confronts the opinion
that the stars are responsible for evil earthly events and that there
are symbols foreshowing the future. The stars have an incidental
communication with us like “the birds of augury, the living beings of
the heavens, having no lot or part with us, may serve incidentally to
foreshow the future, but they have absolutely no main function in our
regard”. (II.3.3.26-28 [Mackenna and Page]).
In the same treatise, in Chapter 7, Plotinus says that indications which
are produced from the movement of the stars are everywhere, like moving
letters perpetually being inscribed on the heavens creating different
results. Everything is full of indications. We must look like the wise
man who can understand one thing from the other, like someone who looks
at an animal and learns from one of its member about another. So, those
indications can not be given and understood without the existence of the
first principle “Order”. The nature of Cosmos has one principle and a
first cause, which extends on everything . What is this comprehensive
principle?
Establish this and we have a reasonable basis for the divination, not
only by stars but also by birds and animals, from which we derive
guidance in our varied concerns. All things must be enchained; and the
sympathy and correspondence obtaining in any closely knit organism must
exist, first, and most intensely, in the All. There must be one
principle constituting this unit of many forms of life and enclosing the
several members within the unity, while at the same time, precisely as
in each thing of detail the parts too have each a definitive function,
so in the All each several member must have its own task - but more
markedly so since in this case the parts are not merely members but
themselves Alls, members of the loftier Kind (II.3.7.14-23 [Mackenna and
Page])
Moreover, in “III.4.2”, Plotinus following fairly close the traditional
School-Platonic theory about animal reincarnation attempts that:
Those who love music but were in other ways respectable turn into
song-birds; kings who ruled stupidly into eagles, if they had no other
vices; astronomers who were always raising themselves to the sky without
philosophic reflection turn into birds which fly high . (III.4.2.24-28
[Armstrong])
In the first chapter of “Quality and form-idea” (II.6), where Plotinus
talks about Quality and the different Realities of the constitutive
elements, writes in line 13 that “The distinction may be seen in the
[constitutive] whiteness of a swan” and concludes in line 21 that “In
the swan the whiteness is not constitutive since a swan need not to be
white: it is constitutive in ceruse, just as warmth is constitutive of
the Reality, fire.” [Mackenna and Page]
Finally, in his early treatise “On Intellect, the forms, and being”
(V.9), which is fifth in Porphyry’s chronological order, Plotinus
discusses in the beginning of his text the three kinds of Philosophers,
Epicureans, Stoic and Platonist. In V.9.1.8-11 where he is criticizing
the Epicurean-school writes:
and those of them who claim rationality make their philosophy, like that
heavy sort of birds who have taken much from the earth and are weighed
down by it and so are unable to fly high although nature has given them
wings (V.9.1.8-9 [Armstrong])
All these examples taken from the natural world suggest that Plotinus
was a philosopher who had meditated on nature and its beings, not in a
phenomenological or experimental but with an insightful and intellectual
way. Having the cope with, on the one hand Plotinus’ metaphysical
thought, and the difficulty of his language on the other, all this
tangible examples offer us the opportunity to grasp his profound
knowledge. I think that there is a need for a comprehensive study on
Plotinus’ perception of Nature, including some the above mentioned
examples, so that it be possible for the reader of the work to
understand not only the basic structure of his thoughts, but also to get
a view of Plotinus’ philosophical profile.
Bibliography
Translations
Plotinus, Ennead II., translated by Kalligas Pavlos (in Modern Greek),
Academy of Athens, Athens 1997
Plotinus, Ennead III., translated by A.H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical
Library, Vol. 442, Harvard Coll. 1967.
Plotinus, Ennead IV., translated by A.H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical
Library, Vol. 443, Harvard Coll. 1984.
Plotinus, Ennead V, translated by A.H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical
Library, Vol. 444, Harvard Coll. 1984.
Plotinus, Ennead VI.1-5., translated by A.H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical
Library, Vol. 445, Harvard Coll 1988.
Plotinus, The Enneads., translated by S. MacKenna and revised by
B.S.Page, illustrated by M.Yankus, New York, The Franklin Library 1983
Articles
Blumental, H. J., “Plotinus in the light of TwentyYears’ Scholarship,
1951-1971”. Rise and Decline of the Roman World, Part II: Principate
Volume 36.1.
Schwyzer, H.-R., “The Intellect in Plotinus and the Archetypes of
C.J.Jung, Kephalaion 214-22.
Emilson E.K., “Plotinus and soul-body dualism”, “Companions to ancient
thought 2, Psychology”, Cambridge University Press 1991
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