Plotinus on the Soul

One of my most treasured books is two-volume edition of Dean Inge's Gifford Lectures on Plotinus, and it is perhaps a sign of modern scholarship that his name does not appear in the index or bibliography. Inge approached the subject as much from a spiritual as a philosophical point of view, while here the approach is more philosophical and based on a fairly recent PhD. The reader is taken back to intellectual climate of the third century A.D., influenced by Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, all of whom had their own particular understandings of the soul. In their own way, along with Plotinus, they were concerned with questions of unity and multiplicity, as one appreciates Plotinus' in key categories of the One, the Intellect and the Soul. A central theme is his notion of the hypostasis Soul, introduced as a new entity that is neither a Form nor the soul of an individual. The sense of wholeness and unity pervades his whole philosophy and one should recollect that Plotinus was a mystic as well as a philosopher. We ourselves face both inwards and outwards to the intelligible and sensible worlds, in a sense those of being and becoming. Since Descartes, it is interesting to observe that the notions of soul and life have come apart, partly because we now assert what used to be called the rational soul and not the animal or vegetable souls, unless you are part of the new animism. Perhaps the most arresting idea from Plotinus is that the soul is not in the body, but rather the body in the soul, which is then explained technically through different forms of 'being in'. This book enables readers to understand these subtle ways in which word soul was understood by the ancients and the same time as realising how much richer their spiritual understanding was than the impoverished materialism of today.