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Is Plotinus a Platonist?

Professor John P. Anton,

University of South Florida

I

t has been noted that Plotinus has repeatedly, as we shall see, acknowledged

his indebtedness to Plato. A question still remains: is Plotinus a Platonist? To

begin with, we need to clarify what is meant by “Platonist” and whether Plato himself

was the originator of this type of thinker. If so, we need to know whether Plotinus

understood by Platonism a basic doctrine initiated by Plato and later on adopted by

various thinker, namely the theory of Forms.1 If we accept this doctrine as basic and

central, then to call someone a “Platonist” requires that we show that this thinker has

accepted the theory of Forms without reservations. If that cannot be shown to be the case

although other features of Plato’s thought have been accepted and even further

developed, what then is it that makes one a Platonist? Given these questions, we may ask

“What is it that makes Plotinus a Platonist?” Stated in another way, the question is: What

can be said about Plotinus’ attachment to Platonism?

Plato died in 347 BCE and Plotinus was born in 204 CE. By adding the years that

passed for Plotinus reach maturity the time that separates our two philosophers amounts

to just about six centuries. The chain of events that took place during this long interval is

a very complex story. Some scholars call it “Greco-Roman,” while others prefer the term

“Hellenistic.” It is difficult to think of all the radical changes, political, military, cultural,

religious, historical in the Mediterranean scene, especially the philosophical ideas and

scientific developments. The variety and impact of changes on the affairs of the people,

whether as groups or as individuals defies label. To speak of a “Hellenistic age” with

reference to what has been called “Hellenistic philosophy” in contrast to “Classical”

1 Gilbert Ryle, “Plato,” in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (New York, 1967, VI, 320). Ryle

argues that the “Platonism” identified as the theory of from has a lesser place in the Dialogues than has

been often claimed by various interpreters.

I



philosophy hardly discloses their differences and discontinuities in the diverse modes of

thought that emerged with the changes.

As labels they are merely convenient terms, and the same goes for Neoplatonism

as a subspecies of Hellenistic philosophy, a term intellectual historians in the nineteenth

century proposed to cover the period that commenced with Plotinus. But does the latter

term suggest that we are dealing with a special type of Platonism? I ask the question

because like many others had once thought that Plotinus was a true Platonist but avoided

the issue of what it meant to call someone a true Platonist.2 If the criterion is to ascertain

whether it means someone who extends and builds on Plato’s philosophy, then all we can

say is that one is philosophizing in the Platonic tradition. In that case we are dealing

perhaps with an original philosopher. If such is the case of Plotinus, even the term

“Neoplatonist” does not him justice. I will try to show that in a serious sense Plotinus is

not a Platonist and this despite Plotinus’ insistence that he is but a follower as well as an

interpreter of Plato. Plotinus, just as Plato did, responded to the problems of his own

times and was influenced by the then current doctrines. Their respective quests flourished

in two different worlds, and so did the views they sought to establish. Conflating their

ways of responding to their worlds minimizes the discontinuities that separate them as

philosophers. Plotinus’ fascination with the contemplative ideal is neither Plato’s main

concern nor is it Aristotle’s. Actually it was rooted in the Egyptian soil and culture.3

2 Thus in my “Plotinus’ Conception of the Functions of the Artists,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art

Criticism,” Fall 1967, p. 97.3 E. Bré hier observes: “There arose, especially in Egyptian soil, a new type of contemplative, as different

from the philosopher of the Hellenic tradition as from the practitioners of religions. A work such as that of

Plotinus is unintelligible if one attempts to connect it directly with the Greek tradition, no less than if one

sees it as part of the religion of the mysteries.” The Philosophy of Plotinus, tr. J. Thomas (University of

Chicago Press, 1958), p. 3. Further down, Bré hier also notes that “Plotinus was devoted to Greek

philosophy with his whole heart and mind. But the problems which he posed were such as Greek

philosophy had never considered. They were, properly speaking, religious problems. Hence his effort to

adapt Greek philosophy to points of view which were foreign to it, resulting in a profound transformation

of Hellenism and a constraint imposed on Greek philosophy to make it say what it was perhaps not capable

of saying” (p. 19).



II

Plato is the only Platonist, if we want to be precise. After Plato a great variety of thinkers

who profited from the study of his dialogues, imitated them, even produced works they

then peddled under his name. Many pseudo-platonica had re-worked Plato’s themes,

sometimes extending them beyond recognition. More importantly, these imitations tried

to revitalize classical themes to the point of producing extravagant reformulations of

Platonic doctrines. Stating it somewhat differently, the temptation to “platonize” hardly

ever ceased, whether as interpretations of Plato or as pseudo-platonica. This temptation to

platonize perhaps makes Whitehead’s dictum at least mildly understandable, to wit, that

after Plato all philosophy may be read as footnotes to Plato.

If we were to take the dictum literally, the list should include Aristotle, Epicurus

and the Stoics, aside from the middle and later Academy. But to stay with the so-called

“Neoplatonists” we are tempted to ask: What sort of footnotes to Plato do they make?

Particularly, what kind of footnotes do Plotinus’ Enneads project? To ask the question

differently, how does Whitehead’s dictum make sense in Plotinus’ case? By calling him

either a Platonic or Neoplatonic footnote, the result would be to scale him down to an

intellectual imitator, if not to an operatic singer of a philosophical opus. Trying to prove

Whitehead right is hardly rewarding. There are more substantive issues to consider. If

Plotinus is in some sense a neo-platonising thinker, he is one who chooses and picks

significant topics from Plato’s dialogues and even borrows, although to a lesser degree,

from other Greek thinkers to put them to new and different uses. What Plotinus did is

quite understandable.

By the time we come to the third century CE, we enter a world radically different

from the one Plato addressed and sought to understand. In fact the period in which

Plotinus lived was so different that one should even hesitate to call it “Hellenistic.”

Scholars with an abundance of good will and prone to seeing unsuspected continuities,

have called this period “the last flowering of Hellenic culture.”4 The facts, however,

suggest differently, but that is another story. It is best to return to Plato and Plotinus.

4 Dillon, J. and L. Gerson, eds. Neoplatonic Philosophy, (Hackett 2004), p. ix.



III

I will try to make the point “why Plotinus is not a Platonist” clear despite the fact that he

was signally indebted to Plato’s dialogues for thematic material and exegetic technique.

To say that Plotinus is not a Platonist is by no means original, as O’Meara and others

have noted. Porphyry, Plotinus’ own devoted late companion, had insisted that the

master’s “interpretation of Plato was hardly orthodox.”5 Nor had Longinus, Porphyry’s

teacher in Athens, accepted Plotinus’ approach, insisting that Plotinus had plagiarized

Numenius. Leaving aside the old quarrels about the correct interpretation of Plato of this

or that passage in the dialogues, my view is that Plotinus made Plato peripheral to his

own philosophy, a move that justifies my saying that he was not a Platonist. A most

serious consequence of Plotinus’ stance is his novel casting of the role and function of

philosophia.

I will try to support my position by bringing up three fundamental items: Political

Theory, Cosmology, and the recasting of the role of Nous, all comprising a radical

outlook on the principles on which Plotinus built his metaphysics of hypostatic being.

Plotinus’ ethics of escape to contemplation leaves hardly any room for political

eros. As one interpreter has put it, “Plotinus is Plato diminished,” and in effect “a Plato

without politics.”6 A native of Lycopolis (city of light or city of the wolf?) in Egypt,

moved to Alexandria, where he learned from Ammonius Sakkas how to become a

spiritual traveler, then to Rome, the Eternal City as capitol of a vast empire that could not

be a polis to foreigners even to its own plebs. The empire was not destined to become a

polis. Plotinus knew it. His vision of a Platonopolis remained a philosopher’s dream; still

he cherished the hope for a Platonic polis. But his disciples, friends and interlocutors bore

little resemblance to Socrates’ companions in or out of the dialogues. Anyway, the

Roman Council voted down his proposal to build the Platonopolis somewhere nearby in

Campania. Did the pax romana ever made Plotinus and other like him citizens? Unlike

5D. J. O’Meara, Plotinus, (Oxford, 1995), p. 7. 6W. Theiler, “Plotin zwischen Platon und Stoa” in Les Sources de Plotin, Entretiens sur l’ antiquité

classique 5 (Geneva, 1960), 67.



Plato, this gifted metoikos from Egypt had no city of his own to cherish and protect from

corruption. His philosophic quest wavered between the vastness of the empire and the

closed circle of his intimate friends, leaving him with but one thing on which to exercise

his ethics, though not his politics: his own soul. His was a soul cast in a mold different

from Plato’s conception of the human psychē, a soul suited to seek peace and truth in

transcendent speculations, not the polis.

Given his circumstances, one can understand why Plotinus did not work out a

political theory, aside from the prospect of proposing a way of life that could challenge

the institutions that Rome stood for as the protector of her ideals. But Plotinus’ way of

life was never viewed as a threat to the status quo, although it ruined the estate and

possessions of the Senator Rogatianus “who had so detached himself from the things of

this world what he had given up his wealth, dismissed his servants, and renounced his

titles.7 But Plotinus had great affection for poor Rogatianus. In the absence of a viable

political theory, Plotinus had no choice but to redesign the nature and functions of the

virtues, now recast to fit novel ethical ends in the service of the contemplative life in

preparation for the union with the One.

Plato, when writing the Republic, was highly critical of his own polis, his and

Socrates’ polis, Athens. Plotinus never visited Athens; no doubt it was too late to find

there the climate of culture in which Plato lived when the quest for the just citizen filled

the entire text of the Republic. Plotinus had no such political world of his own to

consider, to criticize, and to perchance to reform. All that was left for him to do was the

expanding of ethics, in fact a view of ethics that had already become divorced from

political life. Dominic J. O’Mera correctly notes, as I see it, that

His [Plotinus] is an ethic of escape from the world. In this respect, we might

conclude, Plotinus is not faithful to Plato, who is concerned with improving our

present lives, elaborating for this purpose a political philosophy in the Republic

ēand in the Laws.8

7 Zethus, in his Life of Plotinus, 7. 31-46.8 Op. cit. 108.



Platonism may be called a special way of life, but it was a political way of life in

a polis for the polis and the politai. As such, the polis may be regarded as a cosmos to be

explored, understood and improved by way of reason and dialectic. This way of life was

not what Plotinus considered adequate to the human endowment and purpose. He read

Plato mainly to understand his thinking on the psychē but his aim was to widen the orbit

of the Hellenic polis and lift the contemplative above the limits Plato had envisaged and

beyond what Aristotle had understood as νόησις νοήσεως. The Plotinian polis, if a polis

at all, now supplanted as the totality of the hypostases, had to become accessible to the

newly transformed powers of a different conception of the human soul. This new soul,

once unencumbered by limits and measure, has a destiny of its own: to reach out to the

One, alone, leaving behind the burden of the body, all for the identity with the One, even

for a brief moment, union with Unity itself, beyond plurality, even beyond reason itself.

IV

Plotinus was not a Platonist, being neither a politēs nor a critic of the diverse types of

constitution as with Plato’s Socrates in the Republic. He remained a visionary of an

unrealizable and impractical Platonopolis, with hardly any place for it even between the

Plato’s Republic and Augustine’s City of God. He could only use Plato to borrow a ladder

to climb above Beauty, above all Forms, including the Form of the Good, and finally

touch the One, ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας, ἐπέκεινα τοῦ νοός.

Paradoxically enough, Plotinus never kicked the ladder of love. He had no choice

in the case of the ascent but to accept the ladder as the means to slide down to his bodily

existence. The idealization of the climbing process leads us beyond the Republic, even

beyond the ἀναβαθμοί, the lovable steps on the erotic ladder of the Symposium. The

reader is quickly alerted to a miscast similarity between the ascent to Beauty in the

Symposium and Plotinus’ascent to the One, the supreme hypostasis, the One beyond

Beauty. There is no Diotima in the Enneads. Plotinus is not casting his own self in the

mold of Socrates. Nor is the inevitable descent, the return from the One, comparable to

the return to the Cave. For Plotinus, Plato’s Cave is an allegory of another allegory, the

latter picturing a new Odyssey and a new, spectacular cosmic nostos.



Nor is Plotinus a Platonist when his new dialectic and reconstituted Eros leave

behind both the Republic and the Symposium to enter the world of the Timaeus only to

transform what was left of the Pythagorean cosmos into the infinite domain of the One.

Here, once again, Plotinus is not a Platonist. He becomes himself: original and restless

path-finder, responding to a world that was no longer bearing the defining properties of

the Hellenic way of life. A new conception of the human psychē was steadily emerging

along with the commingling of the many winds of doctrine from the East and the West,

the South and the North. This new type of psychē, articulated without the lucidity of the

philosophical language of the Greek thinkers, demanded a recasting of the tasks of

reason. It has been described as representing “the last stand of enlightened Hellenic

Paganism against the onslaught of Eastern religious thought.”9 This is more flattery than

well earned compliment.

This novel conception of the human psychē, not especially suited to the old

political nature of humankind, to speak with Aristotle, allowed a powerful redesigning of

the functions and uses of the virtues. Plotinus recast them to suit novel ethical ends and

particularly the highest end of the transcendent vision and union with the One. The

distant echo of the quest of excellence in Plato’s Republic, tied to defining the just

citizen, proved replaceable with a set of different assignations in the service of a mystical

teleology. The virtues, although Greek in sound and appearance, are not the excellences

Socrates and his companions sought to inculcate in the future guardians through a

vigorous educational program to purge the politeia of its blemishes. The radical

redesigning of the virtues to serve the ideal of the contemplative life makes Plotinus’

ethical theory more suited to being a prelude to the coming surge of the religious conduct

than as a new way to prevent the downswing of the then current political morality.

The student who is interested in Plotinus’ theory of virtues could do no better than

to place it in the context of his ontic hypostases as axiological hierarchies. The special

case of sophia provides the pivotal point, so central to the soul’s journey. The new

meaning this virtue shifted to being an instrument for understanding the goal of the return

9 Robert M. Helm, “Platonopolis Revisited,” in Neoplatonism and Contemporary Thought, vol. II. R.

Baine Harris, ed. Albany, (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002), p. 82.



to the One. It also redefined philosophia as the love of a new wisdom whose mission is to

sustain the desire for the great ascent. With Plotinus, sophia must perform radically new

tasks, beyond what Plato and Aristotle, and definitely beyond what the Stoics expected.

In due course, it will become the wisdom of a conception of philosophy in the service of

theology after the emerging religious culture will have won the day. Once again, Plotinus

is not a Platonist. Rather, he is at once original and a spokesman for the cultural

developments that have in the making through the rising of various dynamic axiological

elements coming together in the blending of East and West.

V

The place of honor that the grades of Beauty in the Symposium or the realms of becoming

and being in the Divided Line of the Republic occupied, Plotinus granted to the

hypostatic emanations of the One, the ultimate source of all being and all values. As such,

the One, understood as being beyond being, epekeina tēs ousias, outshines even Plato’s

ultimate Good. This One emanates and sustains the cosmic hierarchies, being the sole

demiurgic power and progenitor of all with the exception of evil.

I would like to conclude this brief paper on what I think constitutes Plotinus’

major departure away from the Hellenic conception of Intelligence and its place in human

affairs. It is hardly surprising that Plotinus altered the doctrines he extracted from Plato’s

Parmenides and the Timaeus, whether Plato had endorsed them or not. The pertinence of

what two strangers, one from Elea and another from Locroi, said in these dialogues

respectively—but not Socrates—became paramount in Plotinus’ design of his speculative

cosmology. As many scholars have noted, a critical issue, though not the only one, is the

way Plotinus assigned to the Platonic Forms a new status to accord with the principle of

the second hypostasis.10 Briefly put, Plato has Timaeus narrate a likely mythos, one that

Socrates did not say he took at its face value. Plato, the author, refrained from granting it

10 Bré hier aptly notes the following: “In Plotinus we no longer behold the Demiurge of the Timaeus, which

brings about the creation of the sensible world according to an ideal model. There is no longer the

dialectical construction of Ideas whose principles are found in the Philebus and the Sophist, any more than

there is the geometrical construction of the elements in the Timaeus, both of which bring in ideal

operations which hinder, arrest, and retard contemplation.” Ibid. p. 4.



more than a prominent place in that dialogue. But in elevating the story from mythos to

truth, Plotinus turned the mythos into a goldmine. The crucial issue, seen from Plato’s

stance, is the place of the Forms in the cosmos. Plato never put the Forms in the Nous of

the demiourgos. As this divine craftsman decides to create the entities that will fill the

cosmos, he needs perfect models. The Forms in their absolute separateness are not to be

disturbed. The demiourgos will work only with the best attainable images of the Forms.

This is what Timaeus narrates, not Socrates.11 But Plotinus, working with a religious

tradition that goes back to Philo and others, placed the Forms in the divine Nous, the first

emanation of the One, where both perfect plurality and perfect unity converge. This move

was decisively non-Hellenic. The Timaeus was not just interpreted; it was used beyond its

original setting. This conception of Nous as the host of the Forms, the Intelligibles,

Porphyry was quick to detect but he was soon advised to retract.12 Nevertheless by so

doing, Plotinus brought forth a new and different assignment to what was steadily

acquiring a prominent place in the history of intellectual culture: philosophia as

contemplative metaphysics.13

By starting a new type of speculative philosophia, Plotinus made the final step

beyond the classical tradition of sophia. Paul Shorey called him “the first and greatest of

the Neoplatonists.”14 Whatever term one prefers to use it should be treated as a

suggestive or figurative expression. To say more is to mislabel the place of Plotinus in the

11 As F. M. Cornford writes, “Timaeus speaks dogmatically but without any appeal to authority, and we

regard his doctrine simply as Plato’s own.” Plato’s Cosmology (London, 1937), p. 3. He quotes

Wilamowitz, Platon I, p. 591, who also held this to be the case. So did Plotinus who then altered the

independence of the Forms granting them residence in the Divine Intellect, clearly a non-Platonic stance.12 Life of Plotinus 18. Enn. V. 5 “That the Intelligibles are not outside the Intellectual Principle” and VI. 7

“How the multiple of Ideas exist.” 13 J. H. Randall, Jr. credits Plotinus with a third and new type of metaphysics, the other two being Plato’s

and Aristotle’s. As a new type, Plotinus’ own reaches back to Plato’s quest for the Whole and transforms it

into the search for the Absolute, the true Being, beyond all plurality and appearances. This version of

metaphysics becomes the prototype of rational theology by centering its quest on the divine as the only

Real. See his Nature and Historical Experience (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), pp. 124ff. 14 Paul Shorey, Platonism Old and Modern, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1938), p. 30.



history of philosophy. Negatively stated, we can at least try to keep matters straight by

insisting that regardless of family resemblances, Plotinus was not a Platonist.

is plotinus a platonist? - philosophein.web.auth.grphilosophein.web.auth.gr/t2/1 anton.pdf · is...

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