5 - Plotinus: The Enneads

Summary

Introduction: text and context

The Enneads of Plotinus (204–70 CE) would, in modern terms, be better entitled The Collected [or even Complete] Works of Plotinus, arranged and introduced by Porphyry of Tyre. By his sometime pupil Porphyry's own account, Plotinus began to write down summaries and expansions of seminar discussion in his early fifties, and continued to write until shortly before his death. Having weak eyes, he could never bear to re-read or revise his work, and his colleagues and students might reasonably have doubted whether every copy had been properly proofread. Thirty years after Plotinus's death, Porphyry produced what then became the definitive edition of the works (wholly superseding the “hundred volumes” of Amelius and the edition of Eustachius). Porphyry chose to ensure that there were precisely 54 treatises, collected in six groups of nine (hence Enneads, from the Greek term ennea), even if he had to divide continuous stretches of philosophical enquiry (sometimes in mid-sentence), or elevate minor notes into treatises to achieve the number. He also took care to provide the order of writing, as far as he could know it. Later scholars have not always agreed that the Porphyrian order is the best approach to Plotinus, but no better arrangement has achieved canonical status, unless perhaps the Arabic version known as The Theology of Aristotle, which carried neo-Platonic thought into the heart of Islam. The Theology consists of edited selections from the treatises contained in Enneads IV-VI (see Adamson 2003).