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Title: Plotinus: The Enneads by Stephen MacKenna, Plotinus ISBN: 0-943914-55-8 Publisher: Larson Pubn Pub. Date: August, 1992 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $65.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.2 (5 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Arguably the greatest mind in Western culture
Comment: Plotinus ought to be read and digested by anyone who asks the ultimate question. Ultimately, his words point to a central experience - and presuppose that we wish to tread the same way. Western philosophy has had a lot of 'stick' in recent years, an inevitable reaction - given the fact that since the 18th c., much if not most Western philosophy has become a head trip - a tangle of knots. Modern philosophers like Heidegger have located the problem further back - with Platonism, and it has become a common place to see all Western philosophy as chopped logic, resulting in a fragmented perception of reality.
Everything Plotinus says - points to a crowning experience, what he termed 'henosis' - realising a state of 'at-onement.' Hence, any idea of identifying Plotinus use of the term 'Nous' (translated as 'intellect' in English) with its narrower, modern equivalent, would be a fatal misunderstanding. Plotinus leaves no room for distinctions between the knower and the known, presenting a marked parallel with Buddhist intuitions. Given the extensive influence that Buddhism has exerted upon western culture in recent years, it would be a crime to ignore the fruit-ful parallels afforded by Plotinus.
More to the point, a reading of Plotinus raises some serious questions about the verdict of people like Heidegger - when it comes to the history of Western philosophy. Moreover, it would not do to whinge about the Christian refutation of 'pagans,'as if the Church ignored Plotinus. His ideas influenced the early Church fathers - an influence that continued with people like Aquinus, Augustine - Eckhart etc.Hence, Heidegger's view of Western philosophy/theology as a kind of degeneration and fragmentation of 'Being' - is open to question, and one wonders why a whole generation of scholars like him, have persistently ignored what philosophers like Plotinus had to say. It is not all 'bad news.' A certain kind of 'Platonism' may well amount to what Nietzsche called 'the palest and thinnest ideas of all,' but by the same token, another form of it helped shape the intuitions of Meister Eckhart, and inspired Renaissance thinkers like Ficino. W.Y. Evans-Wentz, the noted American scholar-gypsy, a Rhodes scholar who sat at the feet of eminent Tibetan Lamas, and helped pave the way for a Western absorption of Buddhist ideas, held Plotinus in great esteem - seeing a perennial philosophy in the best of Western and Oriental civilisation.Hence, the Paul Brunton foundation endeavoured to promote a proper study of Plotinus' thought.
Stephen Mackenna's translation of the Enneads was a labour of love, and gave his life to the task. It taxed Mackenna's strength, some portions of the text being completed by people like B.S. Page. The Larson edition is of especial value here, examining the nuance of various terms found in Plotinus' work - all told, the best single volume edition of the Enneads. Thanks to John Dillon's endeavours, an economically priced, abridged version of Mackenna's work is available in p/back. Dillon's comments are well worth taking into account. A.H. Armstrong's translation (with the Greek text) is available in separate volumes, but the Larson/Mackenna version - with plentiful notes, cross references etc., is the best buy for the general reader who wants to devote some time to the idioms used by Plotinus. Nobody finds Plotinus an easy read, but as the other reviews testify, those who allow Plotinus' intuitions to play upon their minds, and read between the lines, will find their vision enlarged. It is no small thing to discover that our microcosmic selves participate in the life of the divine energeia - embodying some-thing of its power, enabling us to share in the life of the whole - to feel and know that we are at one with it. Like the Yi-Ching, the Upanishads, or Prajnaparamita, Plotinus' is one of those seminal influences, providing the pinnacle of insight for a whole civilisation. Wells may be forgotten or blocked over, but the water is always there to drink.
Rating: 5
Summary: the ultimate sky-hook
Comment: Readers of mine may notice that I rarely speak of fiction and prefer
the term "imaginative literature." Plotinus, by trade, was a
philosopher, and some of the greatest in his profession, apart from
unusual powers of reasoning, are not exactly conspicuous for their
imagination. But others did great and displayed fertile imagination
and linguistic felicity. Even if totally refuted in a strictly
philosophical sense, their work remains to be a source of inspiration
and a joy to read.
Plotinus began publishing in the advanced
age of 49. His work became the hidden nursery of Christian theology;
something he certainly didn't intend. The Christian apologist
Tatian, in his address "Against the Greeks," expressed an
increasingly popular sentiment when he said: "I am not to worship
God's creation made for our use. The Sun and the Moon were made on
our account. How then shall I worship my own ministers?" Plotinus,
usually never shrill, replied in strong terms:
"Human
temerity is only too willing to accept such grandiloquent ravings. The
simple folks hear: 'People whose worship is inherited from
antiquity are not His children - you are!' So you address the
lowest of men as brothers, but you deny this courtesy to the Sun and
disown your ties with the Cosmos?" Plotinus created the last great
synthesis of antique philosophy. It combined Plato's theory of Ideas
with a doctrine of emanation, a constant flux of creative energy from
the primeval One through several agencies all the way down to humans,
animals, and matter in various states of lesser reality.
In
this vision even the polytheistic pantheon participates in the
ultimately undivided unity of the cause for our
existence. Plotinus' reasoning is not difficult to follow, but for
us modern semi-barbarians, his discerning subtlety often seems to
verge on empty verbiage. However the basic premise is endearingly
simple: "It is unity that makes a being. The members of every plant
and animal form a unity; separation means loss of existence."
History has been written by the victorious, so our views reflect the
dim opinions of paganism's worst enemy; but let me assure you, in
their days, the Pagans had the better thinkers on their side.
So, once in the saddle, Christians went on the offensive. Egged on
by their bishop, Alexandria's mob flayed alive the philosopher
Hypathia in her own lecture-hall, because she was a mathematician, a
philosopher, a pagan, and - what in the eyes of her Christian
opponents was her worst sin - a woman. Two centuries later, Emperor
Justinian, the bigot, switched off the lights, and drove Athen's
last philosophers into exile. It took a treaty with foreign powers,
that the last pagan intellectuals got permission to go home to their
families and end their lives in peace and darkness.
Plotinus
was always honest about the possibility to actually get it wrong:
"Consider sense knowledge: its objects seem most patently artified,
yet the doubt remains whether the apparent reality may not lie in the
states of the percipient rather than in the material before him."
He even seems to have anticipated the modern concept of gravity: "The
heavens, by their nature, will either be motionless or move by circle;
all other movement indicates outside compulsion."
In a
series of papers from 1969-1978, Professor Robert Fischer (not the
chess-champion) made explicit reference to Plotinus' description
of his mystical ecstasy. Based on controlled experiments with
mind-enhancing substances, Fischer mapped out an ascending continuum
of nervous arousal that bridges the state of meditative torpor on one
end with the surrender to white hot hysteria on the other. Such
ecstasy occurs when amphetamine or LSD or some kind of prayer
discipline breach the amnesic state boundaries, that structure our
layers of memory, and causes an overload of data which freezes the
mental "hard drive."
In Plotinus' own words:
"Abandon the duality of seer and seen, and count both as one, so that
he in its vision does not distinguish, nor even imagines a duality. He
has changed, does no longer own himself, but belongs to the One, a
center in sync with the center. He will behold a solitary light
suddenly revealing itself - not from some perceived object, but pure
and self-contained. We must not enquire its origin, for there is no
"origin." The primal One does not come on cue, it is not
like one who enters, but who is eternally present. Like one who has
entered the temple's inner sanctuary and left the images behind,
the self is perfectly still and alone. This is liberation from the
alien that besets us here ..."
Plotinus enjoyed this
experience only four times in the five or six years that his
biographer Porphyry knew him. Given the choice, I am not quite sure,
whether I really would like to relinquish my distance as separate
observer, but it is a noted fact, that everyone who ever
"returned" from the bright light of such schizoid stupor (which
includes so called "near death experiences") did so with deep
regret. It is a fact of our empirical existence, though not effected
by some numinous sky hook, as Plotinus would like us to think. Still,
the most fantastic of all philosophies could actually be the most
realistic description of the intellect and its evolution, to date.
"The Universe is organized, effective, complex, lavish, but
it cannot be at once symbol and reality. As we look upon the world,
its vastness and beauty and the order of its eternal march, and think
of the gods seen and hidden, and the life of animal and plant, let us
ascend to its archetype, to the yet more authentic sphere of unsoiled
intelligence. That archetypal world is the true Golden Age, age of
Kronos, who is the Intellectual-Principle, the exuberance of the
One." Paganism at its best.
Rating: 5
Summary: The most important book I have read! In a the "perfect" ed.
Comment: There is no other book that I have come across that contains all I need for the rest of my life! The Enneads is a veritable treasure and guide. I love the Larson edition because it is using MacKenna's poetic translation and compares it with four other translations, using unobstrusive endnotes. Also, the appendix by Anthony Damiani is probably the best piece on Plotinus' philosophy that I have ever read. I cannot too highly recommend this book for its beauty, rapture and yet deep rationality. It's philosophic poetry at its best!
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Title: The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus by Lloyd P. Gerson ISBN: 0521476763 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 13 August, 1996 List Price(USD): $33.00 |
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Title: Pseudo Dionysius: The Complete Works (Classics of Western Spirituality) by Colm Luibheid, Paul Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysiu ISBN: 0809128381 Publisher: Paulist Press Pub. Date: January, 1988 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision by Pierre Hadot, Micahel Chase, Michael Chase ISBN: 0226311945 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: March, 1998 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Plato Complete Works by Plato, John M. Cooper, D. S. Hutchinson ISBN: 0872203492 Publisher: Hackett Pub Co Pub. Date: May, 1997 List Price(USD): $48.50 |
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Title: The Consolation of Philosophy (Penguin Classics) by Boethius, Victor Watts ISBN: 0140447806 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: May, 2000 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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