/lit/ - Literature

Any statement about the One is really a statement about its creatures. We are well aware of our own frailty: our lack of self-sufficiency and our
shortfall from perfection.

In knowing this we can grasp the One in the way that one can tell the shape of a missing piece in a jigsaw
puzzle by knowing the shape of the surrounding pieces. Or, to use a metaphor closer to Plotinus’ own, when we in thought circle around the One we grasp it as an invisible centre of gravity. Most picturesquely, Plotinus says:

It is like a choral dance. The choir circles round the conductor, sometimes facing him and sometimes looking the other way; it is when they are facing him that they sing most beautifully. So too, we are always around him—if we were not we would completely vanish and no longer exist—but we are not always facing him. When we do look to him in our divine dance around him, then we reach our goal and take our rest and sing in perfect tune.

We turn from the One to the second element of the Plotinian trinity, Intellect (nous). Like Aristotle’s God, Intellect is pure activity, and cannot
think of anything outside itself, since this would involve potentiality. But its activity is not a mere thinking of thinking—whether or not that was
Aristotle’s doctrine—it is a thinking of all the Platonic Ideas. These are not external entities: as Aristotle himself had laid down as a universal
rule, the actuality of intellect and the actuality of intellect’s object is one and the same. So the life of the Ideas is none other than the activity of
Intellect. Intellect is the intelligible universe, containing forms not only of universals but also of individuals.