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Tradition and Personal Achievement in the Philosophy of Plotinus1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2012

E. R. Dodds
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Extract

The collected philosophical essays of Plotinus—to which we still unfortunately give the senseless and unplotinian title Enneads—constitute a nodal point in the evolution of Western ideas. In this book converge almost all the main currents of thought that come down from 800 years of Greek speculation; out of it there issues a new current, destined to fertilize minds as different as those of Augustine and Boethius, Dante and Meister Eckhart, Coleridge, Bergson, and Mr. T. S. Eliot. And the historian cannot but ask himself what is the secret of this transmutation by which the old is taken up in the new and given a fresh direction and significance. Such a question admits of no complete answer and none is offered here. The present paper seeks merely to illustrate a few aspects of the problem for the benefit of readers who are not deeply versed in Plotinus. It omits much that a Plotinian specialist would rightly think important; and it uses broad terms where an expert might well insist on the need for qualification.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Roman Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 1-2 , November 1960 , pp. 1 - 7
Copyright
Copyright © E. R. Dodds 1960. Exclusive Licence to Publish: The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies

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Footnotes

1

A paper read at the Third International Congress of Classical Studies, September, 1959.

References

2 Sext. Emp. Pyrrh. Hyp. I, 235.

3 Numenius fr. I Leemans, apud Eus. Prep. Evang. 14, 5, 728 d.

4 cf. CQ 22 (1928), 129 ffGoogle Scholar.

5 Numenius apud Procl. in Tim. III, 103, 28 (= test. 25 Leemans). cf. my paper in Les Sources de Plotin (Entretiens Hardt, tome 5).

6 Theiler, W. in Recherches sur la tradition platonicienne (Entretiens Hardt, tome 3) 78Google Scholar.

7 de Gandillac, M., La Sagesse de Plotin 27Google Scholar.

8 Trouillard, J., La Purification plotinienne 11, 125 ff.Google Scholar; cf. Armstrong, A. H., ‘Salvation, Plotinian and Christian,’ Downside Review 1957, 126 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Crouzel, H., Bull. de litt. ecclés. (Toulouse), 1956Google Scholar.

9 Bréhier, E., La Philosophie de Plotin 91Google Scholar.

10 Stenzel, J., Metaphysik des Altertums 191 (quoted by H. C. Puech, Bull, de l'Assoc. Budé no. 61, 46)Google Scholar.

11 Freud in fact recognized that knowledge of the Unconscious might be gained through mystical experience. ‘Certain practices of the mystics may succeed in upsetting the normal relations between the different regions of the mind, so that, for example, the perceptual system becomes able to grasp relations in the deeper layers of the ego and in the id which would otherwise be inaccessible to it’ (New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. Sprott, 106).

12 On the history of these terms see the important paper by H.-R. Schwyzer in Les Sources de Plotin.

13 cf. Puech, l.c. 45.

14 Bradley, F. H., Appearance and Reality (first edition) 160Google Scholar.

15 Armstrong, A. H., Architecture of the Intelligible Universe in the Philosophy of Plotinus 46Google Scholar.

16 Cary, Joyce, An American Visitor (Carfax edition) 151Google Scholar.

17 Huxley, Aldous, The Perennial Philosophy 27Google Scholar.

18 Paul Friedländer has overlooked this in the contrast which he draws between ‘Platonism’ and ‘mysticism’ (Plato 1, 77 ff., English ed.) and is thus led to exaggerate the difference of outlook between Plotinus and Plato.