Episode 09: Plotinus on The One idealinthewest.com /episode-9-plotinus-on-the-one Stream Audio When he speaks of The One ( to Hen), we see both sides of Plotinus: the poet as well as the pedant. As pedant, he appeals to the mind while at the same time trying to show the mind’s inadequacy to understand it, much as Socrates did with Glaucon. He realizes the fruitlessness of words to describe it, yet try he must.
Its definition, in fact, could be only ‘the indefinable’: what is not a thing is not some definite thing. We are in agony for a true expression; we are talking of the untellable; we name, only to indicate for our own use as best we may. And this name, The One, contains really no more that the negation of plurality; under the same pressure the Pythagoreans found their indication in the symbol ‘Apollo’ ( “Απολλον,” a=not, pollon=many) with its repudiation of the multiple. If we are led to think positively of The One, name and thing, there would be more truth in silence….”¹ Bust of Plotinus (204/5–270)
(An interesting revelation about Apollo, the sun god, given what we have learned of “the child of The Good.”) Plotinus tries to describe the same unity central to the Indian philosophy of advaita–“not two.” What he is proposing is not even monotheism, since to say “One God” creates a supreme being “out there,” which is separate from us. So like the Zen master with a koan, he tries to short-circuit the discursive mind and perhaps allow the One to appear. But I certainly don’t mean to denigrate his intellectual rigor in insisting on The One being not less than “the untellable.” In his time, and throughout history, much evil was perpetrated by people who took The One to be less; who limited the limitless and created it in their own image. The whole sad history of ethnic and religious conflict is the result of claiming myself to be chosen by the One, and then seeing everyone else as lesser than me. Plotinus explicitly warns against identifying with this duality “The One is absent from nothing and from everything. It is present only to those who are prepared for it and are able to receive it, to enter into harmony with it, to grasp and to touch it by virtue of their likeness to it, by virtue of that inner power similar to and stemming from The One when it is in that state in which it was when it originated from The One.”² The One is one; there is no “other.” And Plotinus is very clear that this unity can be known. In The Descent of the Soul he says: “It has happened often. Roused into myself from my body–outside everything else and inside myself–my gaze has met a beauty wondrous and great. At such moments I have been certain that mine was the better part, mine the best of lives lived to the fullest, mine identity with the divine. Fixed there firmly, poised above everything in the intellectual that is less than the highest, utter actuality was mine.” ³ How could it be that in that state we would wish anyone harm? How could we see anyone else as “other?” Listen further:
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