Tradition and Personal Achievement in the Philosophy of Plotinus

TLDR

Plotinus’s Enneads serve as a pivotal nexus in Western thought, synthesizing eight centuries of Greek philosophy and inspiring thinkers from Augustine to T. S. Eliot.

Abstract

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.