Enneads by Plotinus the Neoplatonist

Contents

1. Τί τὸ Ζῷον καὶ τίς ὁ Ἄνθρωπος Treatise 1.1 (What Is the Living Thing, and What Is Man?)

   Do pleasures, pains, fears and desires belong to the psychē, to the psychē using a body, or to a compound of both? Opening the First Ennead, the treatise keeps the psychē itself unaffected, gives feeling to the living compound and places the true man in the reasoning part above it. Near the end it reads Homer's Heracles, his image in Hades and he himself among the gods, and it closes on nous as a part of us towards which we rise.

2. Περὶ Ἀρετῶν Treatise 1.2 (On Aretai)

   Since evils haunt this place, we must flee it, and the flight, as Plato says, is to become like god. But does god have the civic aretai, practical wisdom, courage, temperance and justice? Plotinus answers with a higher grade of aretē that purifies and turns us towards nous. The sage keeps the civic kind but leaves the life they serve for the life of the gods, for the likeness is to them, not to good men.

3. Περὶ Διαλεκτικῆς Treatise 1.3 (On Dialectic)

   Three kinds of person are fitted for the ascent to the Good: the musician, the lover and the born philosopher, each led upward from beauty in sounds, in bodies or in learning. Dialectic, using Plato's division, is the purest part of nous and of practical wisdom; the logic of propositions and syllogisms is left to another art. The close ranks dialectic and sophia above practical wisdom and the aretai that come by birth, which they bring to completion.

4. Περὶ Εὐδαιμονίας Treatise 1.4 (On Well-Being)

   If living well means doing one's proper work unhindered, animals and even plants might be said to live well. Plotinus weighs pleasure and freedom from disturbance as ends and sets the good life in the perfect life of nous, which the good man keeps whatever befalls him: sacrifice at the altar, lack of burial, captivity, daughters dragged away. His body he tends like a musician's lyre, and lays it aside when it can no longer be played.

5. Εἰ τὸ Εὐδαιμονεῖν Χρόνῳ παρατείνεται Treatise 1.5 (On Whether Well-Being Increases with Time)

   A man happy for longer is not happier, this short treatise argues. Happiness is a present state of the psychē; memory of past happiness adds nothing, and more time only scatters what is one. The life that is truly good is measured by eternity, not by time, and good deeds do not increase it, since happiness comes from the disposition within, not from what one does or what befalls one.

6. Περὶ τοῦ Καλοῦ Treatise 1.6 (On Beauty)

   Beauty is chiefly in what is seen, but also in what is heard, in ways of life, in learning and in aretē. Plotinus rejects the common view that it is symmetry and good colour and finds it in form; the ugly psychē is one fouled by mixture with the body, like a man plunged in mud, and purification restores it. No eye sees the sun without becoming sunlike, and the ascent ends at the Good, source of beauty.

7. Περὶ τοῦ Πρώτου Ἀγαθοῦ καὶ τῶν Ἄλλων Ἀγαθῶν Treatise 1.7 (On the First Good and the Other Goods)

   The good for each thing is its proper activity, but the Good itself is beyond ousia, activity and thought, and all things turn to it as lines to a centre and light to the sun. This brief treatise of the First Ennead then asks whether life is a good and death an evil, and answers that death is the greater good, while through aretē the psychē is already in the good, separating itself from the compound.

8. Περὶ τοῦ τίνα καὶ πόθεν τὰ Κακά Treatise 1.8 (On What Evils Are and Whence They Come)

   To learn whence evils come, one must first say what evil is. Everything up to nous and psychē is fair, so evil is no form but the absence of all good: the last thing, after which nothing more can come, which is matter. Plotinus answers the objection that the forms of bodies, not their matter, make us vicious, and ends with evil bound in fine fetters, like prisoners in gold, hidden from the gods.

9. Περὶ Εὐλόγου Ἐξαγωγῆς Treatise 1.9 (On Reasoned Departure from Life)

   Should one drive the psychē out of the body? Only a paragraph long, this treatise answers no: forcing the body's release is violence done in passion, and each holds rank hereafter by the state in which it leaves. Departure at the onset of madness, which may never touch the good man, would be a necessity of circumstance, not a free choice; drugs that hasten death are perhaps no help to the psychē; while progress is still possible one must not depart.

10. Περὶ τοῦ Οὐρανοῦ Treatise 2.1 (On the Heavens)

    How can the cosmos, a body, last for ever? Not merely in form, the way man and horse persist while individuals pass, but as this very heaven with its sun and stars. Opening the Second Ennead, Plotinus weighs Plato's account in the Timaeus of the fire and earth in the stars, and argues that the heaven loses nothing, needs no nourishment, and keeps its circuit according to its physis.

11. Περὶ τῆς Κυκλοφορίας Treatise 2.2 (On the Heavenly Circuit)

    The heaven moves in a circle because it imitates nous. This short piece asks whether the motion belongs to psychē or to body, and argues that the psychē of the All, present everywhere, runs round the god and embraces him as best it can. Our own bodies, earthy and drawn in straight lines, cannot follow; the All, like nous, both moves and stands still.

12. Περὶ τοῦ εἰ ποιεῖ τὰ Ἄστρα Treatise 2.3 (Whether the Stars Are Causes)

    Astrologers say the planets cause poverty and wealth, health and sickness, ugliness and beauty, even vice and aretē, as if angry with men or pleased by their places and aspects. Plotinus answers that the movement of the stars signifies what is to come but does not cause everything, that their influence is weakened in those who receive it, and that the world is an image forever in the making, with nous as maker above the psychē of the All.

13. Περὶ Ὕλης Treatise 2.4 (On Matter)

    All agree that matter is a substrate and receptacle of forms, but they part over what it is: some make it body and even god, others bodiless, and some posit a second matter in the intelligible world. Plotinus defends that intelligible matter, argues that sensible matter has no magnitude and is grasped by a thought that thinks it without thinking, and ends by calling it evil: poverty of practical wisdom, aretē, beauty and form.

14. Περὶ τοῦ Δυνάμει καὶ Ἐνεργείᾳ Treatise 2.5 (On What Exists Potentially and Actually)

    Bronze is potentially a statue, water potentially bronze. Plotinus asks what it is to be dynamei, and how that differs from existing energeiai or from energeia itself; in the intelligible world all is energeia, and the psychē is the dynamis of what it brings about. Matter alone is potentially everything and actually nothing, a phantom whose existence lies in not existing, and it must stay dynamei if it is to stay matter.

15. Περὶ Ποιότητος καὶ Εἴδους Treatise 2.6 (On Poiotēs and Form)

    Is to on different from ousia, if ousia is to on joined with motion, rest, sameness and otherness? The question leads to poiotēs: whether whiteness in a swan or heat in fire completes an ousia or merely belongs to it. Plotinus concludes that what completes an ousia is form and activity, and that only what is never another thing's form but always comes to it from outside is poiotēs pure and simple.

16. Περὶ τῆς διʼ Ὅλων Κράσεως Treatise 2.7 (On Complete Mixture)

    Total blending, in which each of two bodies passes through the whole of the other, is the subject. Plotinus sets those who explain mixture as juxtaposition, and those who mix only the poiotētes, against its defenders, and tests the views on water soaking through wool or a papyrus roll. He ends by asking whether corporeality is all the poiotētes together with matter, or a forming logos that makes body.

17. Περὶ Ὁράσεως ἢ πῶς τὰ Πόρρω Ὁρώμενα Μικρὰ φαίνεται Treatise 2.8 (On Sight, or Why Distant Objects Appear Small)

    Distant things look smaller, and great distances look short. This brief study of vision suggests that at a distance only colour arrives, its form stripped of detail, so that magnitude, seen only incidentally, cannot be measured part by part. It rejects the theory of the smaller visual angle, pointing to a mountain that fills the whole field of sight and to the sky, which looks far smaller than it is.

18. Πρὸς τοὺς Γνωστικούς Treatise 2.9 (Against the Gnostics)

    Against those who add archai beyond the One, nous and psychē, this treatise defends the order of the cosmos and the goodness of its maker. Plotinus turns on a doctrine that despises the world and its stars while its adherents claim that they alone can contemplate and alone escape at death. He writes for his pupils, out of regard for friends who held these views before they became his friends.

19. Περὶ Εἱμαρμένης Treatise 3.1 (On Heimarmenē)

    Does everything that happens have a cause, and if so, what is left to us? Plotinus reviews the accounts that make all depend on atoms and their swerve, on a single psychē running through all things, or on the movement of the heavens. His own answer: all things are signified and caused, but a psychē acting by right logos acts of itself, and only what hinders it comes from outside.

20. Περὶ Προνοίας Πρῶτον Treatise 3.2 (On Pronoia I)

    That the universe is no work of chance is plain; the hard question is how pronoia orders it, when some deny it and others blame a wicked craftsman. Since the cosmos had no beginning in time, its pronoia is that it is made after nous. The treatise defends the whole, with its biting animals and men who do wrong by their own act, and ends on the image of a play in which the logos gives each actor a part.

21. Περὶ Προνοίας Δεύτερον Treatise 3.3 (On Pronoia II)

    Taking up the questions left open by the first book on pronoia, this sequel answers that the logos of the whole embraces bad and good alike as its parts, as one kind holds horses that bite and fight each other. Pronoia comes down from the source unequally, by proportion, as through a single living thing; the close pictures the whole as a great tree, its branches, fruit and leaves all hanging from one root.

22. Περὶ τοῦ Εἰληχότος ἡμᾶς Δαίμονος Treatise 3.4 (On Our Allotted Daimōn)

    The psychē generates down to plants and, below them, the formless that becomes body. Who, then, is the daimōn allotted to each of us? Plotinus reads Plato's myth of the lots and the patterns of lives as the choice each makes of its own character; the daimōn is the power just above the one at work in us. With it the psychē boards the universe as a ship, and the Spindle sets it in its seat.

23. Περὶ Ἔρωτος Treatise 3.5 (On Love)

    Love may be a god, a daimōn or an affection of the psychē. Starting from the desire for beauty, chaste in some and ending in shameful acts in others, Plotinus asks how Love can be the cosmos, as some say, if Plato's Love is barefoot and homeless, and how gods differ from daimones. Love, born of Poros and Penia, is an activity directed at the good, mixed with the lack that matter brings.

24. Περὶ τῆς Ἀπαθείας τῶν Ἀσωμάτων Treatise 3.6 (On the Impassibility of the Bodiless)

    Sensations are not affections but activities and judgements; can the psychē, then, stay unaffected even by vice and false opinion? Plotinus argues that the bodiless cannot be affected: first the psychē, then matter, which takes on every form and is not altered by it, since an altered matter would no longer be matter. The treatise ends on the ancients' figure of matter as mother of all things, female only so far as to receive and never able to generate.

25. Περὶ Αἰῶνος καὶ Χρόνου Treatise 3.7 (On Eternity and Time)

    Eternity and time seem clear until one tries to define them. Plotinus first defines eternity, the model, as the life of what truly is, all at once, then turns to time, its image, and rejects the views that it is motion, the extension of motion, or its number or measure. Time is the life of psychē passing from one state of life to another, present alike in every psychē and one in all.

26. Περὶ Φύσεως καὶ Θεωρίας καὶ τοῦ Ἑνός Treatise 3.8 (On Physis, Contemplation and the One)

    Playfully at first, Plotinus proposes that everything, animals, plants and the earth that bears them, longs for contemplation. Physis makes by contemplating, and action is a weaker contemplation; the ascent runs through psychē to nous, which is one with its objects. Beyond nous stands what needs neither thought nor fulfilment, the Good, which begot nous as a fair son and is neither nous nor its fullness.

27. Ἐπισκέψεις Διάφοροι Treatise 3.9 (Miscellaneous Investigations)

    A set of short notes. The first takes the Timaeus passage where nous sees the forms in the living creature itself and asks whether the intelligible is distinct from nous; others ask how the many come from the One, which is everywhere and nowhere, how psychē is to nous as sight to what it sees, and why the Good, beyond thought, does not think itself.

28. Περὶ Οὐσίας Ψυχῆς Πρῶτον Treatise 4.2 (On the Ousia of the Psychē I)

    Having shown that the psychē is not a body, a harmony, or an entelecheia as that is usually meant, Plotinus takes another route to what it is. Bodies are divisible and nous undivided; the psychē is both, divided among bodies yet whole in each part. Were it divided like a body, the part in a finger would feel alone and each of us would have many psychai. He finds this in the Timaeus mixture of undivided and divided ousia.

29. Περὶ Οὐσίας Ψυχῆς Δεύτερον Treatise 4.1 (On the Ousia of the Psychē II)

    In a single paragraph: in the intelligible world are the true ousia, nous and the psychai, all undivided; here psychai are divided among bodies. Yet the psychē does not come down whole, for some part of it stays above, and even here it is divided without division, giving itself whole to the whole body and whole in every part, like a line running from a centre.

30. Περὶ Ψυχῆς Ἀποριῶν Πρῶτον Treatise 4.3 (On Difficulties about the Psychē I)

    Under the god's command to know oneself, Plotinus opens a long inquiry into the difficulties about the psychē, beginning with whether ours are parts of the psychē of the All; they are sisters, not parts. He follows the descent of psychai into bodies under a universal law, the misfortunes that strike the good, and memory: which psychē remembers, why the good one is rightly called forgetful, and how Heracles' image in Hades would tell of his deeds.

31. Περὶ Ψυχῆς Ἀποριῶν Δεύτερον Treatise 4.4 (On Difficulties about the Psychē II)

    Memory comes first: a psychē in the intelligible world, where all thought is timeless, keeps no memory of its earthly life, not even that it once did philosophy. Plotinus then asks what the psychē of the cosmos and the stars perceive, whether the earth hears euchai, and how euchai and magic act through the sympathy of the whole. He ends with psychai moved, like the stars, to higher or lower stations, their punishments a cure for the whole.

32. Περὶ Ψυχῆς Ἀποριῶν Τρίτον ἢ περὶ Ὄψεως Treatise 4.5 (On Difficulties about the Psychē III, or On Sight)

    Taking up a question deferred earlier, whether anything could be seen if nothing, not even air, lay between the eye and its object, Plotinus argues that the medium is not affected on the way and that vision works through the sympathy of a single living whole. He tests the same question on hearing and on light, and closes by dismissing a supposed second cosmos, governed by a wholly different psychē, as a hypothesis that contradicts itself.

33. Περὶ Αἰσθήσεως καὶ Μνήμης Treatise 4.6 (On Sense-Perception and Memory)

    Sense-perceptions are not impressions stamped on the psychē like a signet ring in wax, Plotinus argues, for sight grasps its object out where it lies, at its distance and in its full size, as with the sky. Memory too is a strengthened power, not a retained imprint: so children, attending to few things, remember well, and practice improves recall. The short treatise ends by rejecting the picture of letters written on tablets.

34. Περὶ Ἀθανασίας Ψυχῆς Treatise 4.7 (On the Immortality of the Psychē)

    Whether each of us is immortal turns on what a human is: the body is composite and perishes, so the man himself is the psychē. Most of the treatise refutes those who make the psychē a body, with arguments from the undivided sweetness of honey and from powers that have no bulk, and sets aside the psychē as harmony or as entelecheia. For readers who want evidence from the senses, it ends with oracles that bid the living appease the wronged dead.

35. Περὶ τῆς εἰς τὰ Σώματα Καθόδου τῆς Ψυχῆς Treatise 4.8 (On the Descent of the Psychē into Bodies)

    Plotinus opens with his own experience, often waking out of the body into himself to contemplate the divine, and then wondering how he came down again. Heraclitus, Empedocles and the Pythagoreans spoke in riddles, and Plato seems to speak two ways, calling the body a prison in the Phaedo yet praising the cosmos in the Timaeus. His answer: the psychē sheds its wings in caring for one body, lives an amphibious life between two worlds, and never wholly descends.

36. Εἰ αἱ Πᾶσαι Ψυχαὶ Μία Treatise 4.9 (Whether All Psychai Are One)

    If one psychē is whole in every part of a body, are mine and yours, and all psychai, one? The obvious objection, that each would then feel what another feels, is answered: what is the same in different bodies need not share their affections. Calling on god's help, Plotinus explains how one psychē gives rise to many and stays whole, like a seed with many powers, or a science present entire in each of its theorems.

37. Περὶ τῶν Τριῶν Ἀρχικῶν Ὑποστάσεων Treatise 5.1 (On the Three Primary Hypostases)

    Through audacity and the wish to belong to themselves, psychai forget their father, god, like children taken from their parents and raised far away. To remind them, Plotinus sets out the three primary realities: the psychē that gives the cosmos life, the nous it images, and the One, from which nous comes as radiance from the sun. He finds the doctrine in Plato, and ends by bidding the psychē listen inward, as one waits for a longed-for voice.

38. Περὶ Γενέσεως καὶ Τάξεως τῶν μετὰ τὸ Πρῶτον Treatise 5.2 (On the Origin and Order of the Things after the First)

    Opening with the paradox that the One is all things and none of them, this short treatise traces the procession: the One overflows, what it produces turns back to it and becomes what is and nous, and nous produces psychē, which gives rise to sensation and to the growth of plants. Asked where a plant's psychē goes when its root is cut, Plotinus answers that nothing here is in place: it is one long life stretched out.

39. Περὶ τῶν Γνωριστικῶν Ὑποστάσεων καὶ τοῦ ἐπέκεινα Treatise 5.3 (On the Knowing Hypostases and What Is Beyond)

    Can something wholly simple know itself, or must whatever thinks itself be many? Plotinus argues that self-knowledge belongs properly to nous, which is identical with what it thinks, while the psychē reaches nous by inference; beyond both stands the One. The last chapters ask how the One is reached: not in speech but in a sudden light, like a god who enters a house when called, and the treatise ends in a two-word command: take everything away.

40. Πῶς ἀπὸ τοῦ Πρώτου τὸ μετὰ τὸ Πρῶτον, καὶ περὶ τοῦ Ἑνός Treatise 5.4 (How What Is after the First Comes from the First, and on the One)

    Whatever comes after the First must come from it, Plotinus argues, and the First must be simple, single, beyond ousia and beyond all speech and knowledge. He explains its production by the double activity of anything perfect, one activity that is the thing itself and another that goes out from it, as heat goes out from fire; so the One, remaining as it is, gives rise to nous, in which thinking and existing are the same.

41. Ὅτι οὐκ ἔξω τοῦ Νοῦ τὰ Νοητὰ καὶ περὶ Τἀγαθοῦ Treatise 5.5 (That the Intelligibles Are Not outside the Nous, and on the Good)

    True nous can never err, and its knowledge needs no demonstration; but if the intelligibles lay outside it, it would grasp only images of them, as sense does. Plotinus therefore places the intelligibles within nous, so that its truth agrees with nothing but itself. He then turns to the Good beyond it, which nous sees as an eye sees its own light when the lids are closed, and ends by showing that the Good is unmixed with all things and above them.

42. Περὶ τοῦ τὸ ἐπέκεινα τοῦ Ὄντος μὴ νοεῖν, καὶ τί τὸ πρώτως νοοῦν καὶ τί τὸ δευτέρως Treatise 5.6 (On the Fact that What Lies beyond What Is Does Not Think)

    Thinking another thing and thinking oneself differ, yet anything that thinks must be both one and two, thinker and thought. What lies beyond ousia therefore cannot think: it is simply one. Plotinus compares the three levels to light itself, the sun, and the moon that borrows the sun's light, and concludes that it is no defect in the One not to know itself or other things, since it gives them the Good, which is more than knowledge.

43. Εἰ καὶ τῶν Καθέκαστά εἰσιν Ἰδέαι Treatise 5.7 (On Whether There Are Ideas of Particulars)

    Is there a form of each individual? If the psychē of Socrates is always Socrates there must be a Socrates-itself; if it becomes Pythagoras or another in turn, perhaps not. Plotinus argues that individuals differ by their logoi and not by matter alone, that the world's cycles repeat so that the logoi needed in each period are finite, and he tests the claim on twins and on animals born in litters.

44. Περὶ τοῦ Νοητοῦ Κάλλους Treatise 5.8 (On Intelligible Beauty)

    Beauty does not come from matter: of two blocks of stone, only the one that art has shaped into a statue is beautiful, the form having been in the sculptor's art first. Plotinus climbs from art and the living world to the intelligible, where wisdom is held whole, as in the Egyptian sacred signs. He reads the myth of Cronus as nous set between a greater father and a lesser son, and names the psychē of the universe Aphrodite.

45. Περὶ Νοῦ καὶ τῶν Ἰδεῶν καὶ τοῦ Ὄντος Treatise 5.9 (On Nous, the Forms and What Is)

    Three kinds of people open the treatise: those who stay with sensation, like birds too heavy to fly; those who rise a little and fall back into action under the name of aretē; and a divine kind who see the light above and stay there, as if home from long wandering. Plotinus then argues that nous is the real beings, source of the logoi in seeds and of the sciences, and denies forms to what comes from decay or dirt.

46. Περὶ τῶν Γενῶν τοῦ Ὄντος Πρῶτον Treatise 6.1 (On the Kinds of What Is I)

    Aristotle's ten categories are the chief target here. Plotinus asks whether they apply alike to intelligible and sensible things, and works through them one by one, ousia, quantity, poiotēs, relation, place, time, acting, undergoing, position and having, before turning to the four kinds of the Stoics, which he finds no more satisfactory. Those who made the principles infinite or finite, bodies or bodiless, are left for separate inquiry.

47. Περὶ τῶν Γενῶν τοῦ Ὄντος Δεύτερον Treatise 6.2 (On the Kinds of What Is II)

    Having examined the ten categories and the Stoics' four, Plotinus sets out his own account, which he presents as Plato's: the primary kinds of the intelligible are the five of the Sophist, to on, motion, rest, sameness and otherness. The one is not a further kind, nor are poiotēs and quantity primary there. The treatise ends with this world as an image of the complete intelligible one, as a painting or a reflection in water imitates what stands before it.

48. Περὶ τῶν Γενῶν τοῦ Ὄντος Τρίτον Treatise 6.3 (On the Kinds of What Is III)

    Turning from the intelligible to the sensible, Plotinus asks whether the same kinds hold here, and only by analogy, and divides the sensible world as one divides the voice into its letters. Sensible ousia proves a gathering of poia with matter and quantity, more a poion than a true ousia; quantity, poiotēs, motion and relation are examined in turn, and acting and undergoing are reduced to kinds of motion.

49. Περὶ τοῦ τὸ Ὂν Ἓν καὶ Ταὐτὸ Ὂν ἅμα πανταχοῦ εἶναι Ὅλον Πρῶτον Treatise 6.4 (On the Presence of What Is, One and the Same, Everywhere as a Whole I)

    The psychē is present everywhere in the universe, and the question is how, without spreading out with its body. Plotinus argues that what truly is has no place: body comes to a psychē already there and finds it whole in every part, and things share in it without cutting it up. The treatise ends on what going to Hades means: the image may go to a worse place, while a psychē freed by philosophy stays wholly in the intelligible.

50. Περὶ τοῦ τὸ Ὂν Ἓν καὶ Ταὐτὸ Ὂν ἅμα πανταχοῦ εἶναι Ὅλον Δεύτερον Treatise 6.5 (On the Presence of What Is, One and the Same, Everywhere as a Whole II)

    Starting from the common conviction that the god in each of us is one and the same, Plotinus argues that what truly is stays wholly present everywhere at once. The form of fire shapes all fire without dividing itself. The close turns to the reader: you grow by letting go of the rest, for it was you who turned away; Homer's gods visit cities in every guise, but the cities, earth and heaven turn to that one god.

51. Περὶ Ἀριθμῶν Treatise 6.6 (On Numbers)

    Is plurality a falling away from the One, and the unlimited a complete falling away, so that the unlimited is evil, and we too when we are many? From this question Plotinus turns to how number exists in the intelligible world, whether units are anything apart from the one, and how the procession fits each multitude to a number. It ends with Parmenides, right to call what is one, and with existence as what the cosmos, every psychē and every nous desire.

52. Πῶς τὸ Πλῆθος τῶν Ἰδεῶν ὑπέστη, καὶ περὶ Τἀγαθοῦ Treatise 6.7 (How the Multitude of the Forms Came into Being, and on the Good)

    When the god sent psychai into becoming he gave them eyes and the other senses: did he foresee their need, calculating as a craftsman does? Plotinus answers that nothing in the intelligible world is worked out by calculation, since the why of each thing lies within what it is. The second half asks why we do not stop at nous: the psychē desires the Good beyond it, and Plato's king of all is read as that Good.

53. Περὶ τοῦ Ἑκουσίου καὶ Θελήματος τοῦ Ἑνός Treatise 6.8 (On the Voluntary and the Wish of the One)

    Freedom, what is in our power, is first defined for humans: Plotinus finds it not in action, which depends on circumstance, but in nous and aretē. He then asks whether the notion carries over to the gods and to the One, meets a bold argument that the One simply happened to be as it is, and answers that it is what it wishes to be, its wish and its existence the same, so that it alone is truly free.

54. Περὶ Τἀγαθοῦ ἢ τοῦ Ἑνός Treatise 6.9 (On the Good or the One)

    Everything owes its existence to unity: an army, a chorus, a house or a ship ceases to be what it is once its unity is lost, and so do health, beauty and aretē. Neither psychē nor nous is the One, which needs nothing, not even a place; union with it is like a chorus singing in tune around its leader. It ends with the life of gods and godlike men, the flight of the alone to the alone.