Portrait · Awakening · c. 250–270
Plate · Generated interpretation
The Flight of the Alone
A philosopher in Rome writes of a turning inward that is also a going up, until there is no longer a pair of seer and seen.
- Rome, of the seminars Porphyry later edited
- Third-century Roman Empire
One lamp. Do not yet decide whether anyone is looking.
Listen · Eve
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Porphyry of Tyre comes to Rome in 263, the tenth year of Gallienus. Plotinus, born in Egypt, has been teaching there since about 244. For ten years he wrote nothing. Then he wrote. Amelius has already been at the seminars for years. The rooms admit questions. The talk, Amelius later tells Porphyry, is often without order. Plotinus is fifty-nine. Porphyry will stay six years, then leave for Sicily. After the death in 270 he will cut and arrange the treatises into six nines, the Enneads.
Porphyry says his master’s Greek was crabbed, the handwriting often a problem of failing eyes. The seminars were spoken. The books are an editor’s gift and an editor’s violence: some longer arguments were split to make the nines. In the Life, Porphyry says Plotinus attained union with the One four times in the years they were together. That report is a student’s claim, not a measurement. Plotinus, in a treatise, says the flight of the alone to the Alone. MacKenna’s English made the line famous. It is not a slogan for isolation. It is a technical end of a metaphysics: the soul turns toward Intellect, nous, and, at the limit, toward the One, where seer and seen are no longer a pair.
Enneads, ed. Porphyry. Armstrong’s Loeb and MacKenna are English doors. Perseus holds Greek. The Life of Plotinus is Porphyry’s, not a lab notebook. VI.9 is the usual door for the One. Distinguish Plotinus from later Christian uses of him. Augustine will read him. That is a later chapter.
The flight of the alone to the Alone.
Hildegard’s light and this ascent are not one inner glow. Four times, if Porphyry is right, is still not a method one can run in a morning. Nous is not consciousness as a laboratory word. Translating it so is a convenience with a cost.
Whether union ends the knower, or completes the knower, is a live fight among readers. The One is not mist.
Whether union ends the knower, or completes the knower, is a live fight among readers.
A word
Greek. Intellect, intellective seeing. Not a tidy English mind or consciousness.
Distant echoes
Echo
Late Meiji / early Taishō Japan · Kyoto, on the page
Before I hear the bell
Nishida wants the event before I and bell. Plotinus wants the end of seer and seen. Two undividings, two centuries, two systems.
Echo
Twelfth-century Syria · Aleppo
Things are lights
Suhrawardī ranks lights. Plotinus ranks the One, Intellect, Soul. Two metaphysics of degree, not one glow.
One question remains
Awakening · What changes when consciousness recognizes something differently?
If the seer and the seen fall away, what, if anything, was the knowing for?