Plotinus’ world-view is, in a sense, very simple; at the same time, it is very difficult to understand and explain. Plotinus is intensely aware of this difficulty, and his work is a series of attempts at clarifying the ramifications of this world-view. The Enneads reflect to some extent the day-to-day disputations of Plotinus’ philosophic seminar, and the reader can often detect the puzzled questions of his students informing the varied approaches Plotinus musters to clarify difficult points, and in his patient, indefatigable attempts to explain these matters one sees the Socratic midwife gently encouraging the truth, bit by bit, into the light of day.

Scholarship, particularly over the course of the last fifty years, has gone a long way toward explaining how Plotinus thinks the world is, and why it is that way. There is a problem prior to the questions of metaphysics, however, which the disciplines of analytic philosophy and the history of ideas have largely failed to address. This is the problem of ineffability and its implications for written philosophy.

Plotinus simply does not believe that reality is fully susceptible to an explanatory account. He has cogent and well thought-out reasons for this belief; the history of philosophy has long since disposed of the anachronistic figure of Plotinus the anti-rationalist, who took refuge in the vague territory of ‘mysticism’, and has brought forth in its stead the more accurate model of a philosopher whose reason led him to place certain aspects of reality outside the scope of thought and language. Analytical philosophy has done an excellent job of delineating the levels of reality in Plotinus’ metaphysics, and a decent job of showing at what points Plotinus believes discourse and thought fall short of reality; we have, as it were, a good map of Plotinus’ world-view, with the borders roughly marked out. The present chapter explores these borders, noting the limits Plotinus places on discourse and on different types of cognition. While recognising these limits, we should also be alive to the power of rhetoric in philosophy; the following chapter will thus proceed to tear down this elegant systematic structure, when we address Plotinus’ writing of the unwritable, in which he repeatedly assails, and passes beyond, these self-erected borders.

Plotinus describes himself, not as an innovative thinker or the founder of any philosophical system, but as an exegete of ‘the ancients’. He tells his readers: ‘Our doctrines are not novel, nor are they modern: they were said long ago, but not openly. Our present doctrines are explanations of those older ones, and the words of Plato himself show that they are ancient.’ It is widely agreed that Plotinus was indeed engaged in exegesis of a philosophic textual tradition owing its greatest debt to the Platonic dialogues, and his work, while usually described as ‘Neoplatonist’, is better described simply as ‘Platonist’. Plotinus would not have understood the term ‘Neoplatonist’, and saw himself as a philosopher in the same tradition as Plato.

But a further aspect of Plotinus’ express view of his philosophical project, encapsulated in the quotation above, is that his doctrines are not presented as ‘Platonist’ doctrines; they are presented as explanations of ancient logoi, stemming from a deeper tradition of which Plato is himself a part, rather than an originator. In other words, Plato is seen as a strong exemplar of the philosophy of the ancients, and by showing that one is in agreement with Plato, one can show that one is in agreement with that philosophy.

An aspect of the problem of ineffability not yet touched upon is the problem of transmission; how might a textual or other tradition discuss, teach, or otherwise transmit knowledge of the unthinkable, the unsayable? One possible answer to this question is suggested by the structures of Platonist philosophy: since the Forms are eternal truths, access to the Forms (and, for Plotinus, access to nous, the location of the Forms) guarantees the philosophic seeker an atemporal, unchanging reservoir of truth upon which he may draw through personal philosophic anagôgê. This method of accessing the truth is insisted upon by Plotinus, and much in the Enneads may be read as detailed instructions for attaining to this type of knowledge; the texts of Plato and other great philosophers would then be the textual concomitant of this philosophic truth. But texts transmit knowledge; what tradition can transmit that which transcends knowledge and speech?

The present volume is a study of a recondite aspect of Plotinus’ philosophy: his use of tropes of secrecy and silence in his discussions of the nature of his ineffable first principle. Recondite and perhaps obscure, but not unimportant: because Plotinus tells us that the One cannot be spoken of – writes that the One cannot be written about – the tropes of secrecy and silence cast a kind of shadowy paradox over his entire project. Plotinus tells us many things about the One, only to contradict them later, often denying that he can tell us anything about it at all, and if one were to arrive at a clear-cut conclusion from all this, it ought to be that Plotinus, by his own admission, should not be writing. The One, for Plotinus, is utterly ‘silent’ and the philosopher should seek to emulate this silence. And yet, were Plotinus to have kept silent, there would be no one to tell us of the need to keep silent about the One.

It has been noted that reading apophatic language or ‘negative theology’ can be a fairly agonising process, and any work which has apophasis as its theme tends to be agonising in direct proportion to its fidelity to the subject matter. The present work, it is hoped, treads an elusive middle path between self-negating obscurity and facile ‘explanation’ which enables some new insights into Plotinus’ practice of written silence but is also somewhat readable. The goal has been to explore and describe some of Plotinus’ techniques of written silence in an intelligible way without straying too far from the intrinsically mind-bending difficulty of the subject matter. The author craves the reader's indulgence for the many points at which the text falls too far in one direction or the other.

This book also treads a line between over-specialisation and general treatment. The discussion inevitably covers quite a bit of ground which has been treated elsewhere, in the interests of giving a reasonably complete overview of the subject matter. Plotinian specialists may thus find themselves frustrated by a certain amount of well-discussed material being covered (not the three primary hypostases again!), while there is still a danger that novices will find themselves adrift in a strange thought-world.