Plotinus Quotes on Mind
Plotinus's analysis of mind (nous) in the Enneads gives the second hypostasis of the Neoplatonic system its central philosophical articulation. The Intellect — eternally generated from the One in the timeless act of contemplative reversion through which the One overflows into the manifold of intelligible being — is at once the totality of the eternal Forms and the eternal contemplator of those Forms in which knower and known coincide rather than standing over against one another. The human mind, as the highest activity of the embodied human soul, can ascend through philosophical contemplation to participation in the activity of the universal Intellect, and the famous late doctrine of the undescended part of the soul holds that the highest part of the human soul never wholly descends from the intelligible world even during embodied human life.
Quotes
-
“Withdraw into yourself and look.”
First Ennead, Sixth Tractate, Section 9 -
Attributed to Plotinus:
“We are not separated from the good. We are separated from ourselves.”
-
Attributed to Plotinus:
“Knowledge has three degrees: opinion, science, and illumination.”
-
“Hence, as Narcissus , by catching at the shadow, plunged himself in the stream and disappeared, so he who is captivated by beautiful bodies , and does not depart from their embrace, is precipitated , not with his body, but with his soul, into a darkness profound and repugnant to intellect (the higher soul), through which, remaining blind both here and in Hades, he associates with shadows .”
First Ennead, Book VI, as translated by Thomas Taylor , The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries: A Dissertation (1891) pp. 43-44.