We may begin with the proposal that if Plotinus invented the individual self, he may also have contributed to the invention of the autobiography in the form of the Confessions of Saint Augustine, a Christian writer who was a reader of the Greek Neoplatonists. We speak of the self in what may be termed the pre-postmodern, Cartesian sense. This self is conscious of itself as well as of other things, and focuses in an individual way on its own experiences and its moral and epistemological tasks. We will argue throughout that Plotinus developed and accepted the idea of the fully embodied self, that his refusal of the flesh has been somewhat overdone, and we speculate that this self may well lie behind Augustine's development of the autobiography, and his own very conscious self-explorations in the Confessions. Plotinus took the ego into history, through his exploration of the self, but because he had no interest in history and specifically the history of human individuals, he took it no further. The true way forward lay in superseding the sphere of history, in going back up to what lay before. Augustine, on the other hand, was ready for the historical self since the early Christian movement had hardened into a church, and this church was beginning to write histories of itself. We know that Plotinus sought to supersede the body, that he was ashamed of the flesh, that he sought to escape otherness, but Plotinus the philosopher never writes anything off. The perfection of the All means that nothing is isolated from being: all matter is impregnated with form (logos), and it is therefore preserved in some way. Nothing can be written off. But on the other side, a religious movement which embraced history may well have felt at home with the idea of ‘one's own self’. And Plotinus’ view of the self, as we shall attempt to show, is very much tied up with being one's own, and being what one possesses.

The idea of the self and its own ranges over, as we have seen, the spectrum of the like and the unlike, the same and the other. Ownness is the idea by which Plotinus integrates the two opposing principles of identity and otherness, in that owning something provides the bridge between selfhood and otherness. But otherness is a key part of Plato's approach to self-knowledge, and consideration of this issue starts with two passages of Plato, both to do with self-knowledge as derived from the other, but the other in a peculiar sense: that other which is a mirror, and which in some sense sends back something of oneself. As is well known, the idea of the mirror as the key to self-knowledge has an extraordinary range in Western philosophy moving on from Plato through to the exegesis of the myth of Narcissus, down to the Neo-Freudian philosophy of Jacques Lacan, who wrote about the mirror-stage traversed by the infant as the key to personal development.

Self-knowledge is a central issue for Plotinus: what is it that has made the souls be ignorant of themselves, he asks. But self-knowledge has a problem about it, in the Greek tradition, in that knowledge usually involves something else. This aporia was developed by Plato in the Charmides, and was taken as a central dilemma by Plotinus who deals with it throughout this treatise, particularly in V.1(10)3, where he responds to the dilemma as posed by the sceptics. He asks whether we have to imagine self-thinking as requiring a complex entity, with one part dedicated to looking at the other parts. In general, Plotinus will take a radical stance on these issues. Any concern with oneself will in the end be about what lies before one, or above, and self-thought will be excluded from the highest form of being.

These words, which are found at the beginning of V.3(49)4 of the Enneads, concern the self and the knowledge of the self. They are found in the course of a discussion on the idea of ‘ours’, of what belongs to us, of what is part of us. They should be read in conjunction with another well-known passage on the self (Enn. VI.4(22)14, 17) which asks the question: who are we, tines de hemeis?

What is ours? This appears to be a very important question in Plotinus, and we will investigate it here and in following chapters, particularly ‘Being and Having’. There can be things which are in us, or which we possess, or which belong to us: these things are ours. But what is ours can also be part of a relationship, or even of a vague or ill-defined connection: my friends, my ideas, my habits. This is the question put by Plotinus in V.3(49)3, 20 ff.: first, the question of what is ours, to hemeteron; and secondly, the most important question of all: is Intellect ‘ours’? Plotinus is investigating the question through a two-pronged series of discussions, dealing on the one hand with what is ours, what is possession, what is the relationship between the self and its contextual environment, and on the other with the supreme principle, the Intellect, and its connection with the beings which lie beneath it. Bertrand Ham, in his highly scholarly commentary, refers to the background in Plato's First Alcibiades, which we have discussed in Chapter 7, and rightly dwells on the differentiation between ‘us’ and ‘ours’, which is developed in the Socratic discussion.

We have seen that memory for Plotinus does not constitute the essence of the self and that in going beyond memory the self begins to develop its true identity. On the theme of forgetting, we have to take account of the passage of Plato's Republic (621C) which refers to the mythical account of the river of forgetfulness, Lethe. This mythical theme evokes the idea of the purification of the soul, which is essential for its immortal future.

Plotinus interprets this passage in IV.3(27)26, 55, and considers the cause of forgetting to be the body itself. ‘The nature of the body, moving and flowing, must be a cause of forgetting, but not of memory’ (l.50). When elements are added to the soul, forgetting begins to develop, but when such additional elements are removed or purged, memory returns. It is probable that the reference to movement and fluidity is an attempt to pick up the reference to the river Lethe, and Plotinus makes the following very clear statement:

There is an issue of translation here, in that the Greek mones has here been translated as ‘stable’ above. Bréhier, for example, once chose to translate as ‘alone’, but the term does refer to the previous sentence, where clearly the notion of stability is involved. Further, we are dealing with a contrast between the stability of memory and the fluid and Lethe-like character of the body.

Being and having in Plotinus are closely linked to ideas about continuity and nearness: between self and essence there is no absolute gap. We are rather dealing with a structure which accentuates proximity. The self exists in a familiar world, which is by nature close. The theme of nearness is an interesting byway in the history of philosophy. In the thought of Heidegger, for example, there emerges from time to time a kind of emphasis on familiarity: the sense that the real is not foreign and thus that the self exists in a world which is close and closely adapted to it; that it lives comfortably in its environment. There is a sense of this in Plotinus, as entities move towards their own reality.

Having, or possession, is important to Plotinus and he conducts an internal dialogue over the issue, particularly in III.8(30). There is a kind of having which involves satiety, but which is not drunk with the experience of this possession: the distinction is made in the exegesis of the story of love in the Symposium. In passing, Plotinus notes that the nectar with which Plenty has become inebriated in the allegory must come from outside. Inebriation represents the infilling of the lower level from the higher, in the case of the principle which has fallen from a higher level, and that kind of possession of something, or infilling, is likened to drunkenness. This is a having which comes from outside and in so doing fills a void. But there is another form of possession which is more perfect, which consists of simple completeness: ‘Intellect possesses itself in satiety, not in drunkenness’.

The student of a tradition always looks for the little changes (the apparently little ones) in order to discover the major areas of innovation and development in that tradition. It is often in the hidden changes that one finds the most significance, since these may point to a moment of great significance: the suppressed moment of crucial innovation. Those who do their work within a tradition in antiquity tend to want to minimise the differences between their own thought and the traditional position: it is preferable to force the meaning of a passage than to admit some departure from orthodoxy. Traditionalism was favoured in antiquity, whilst apparent innovation is favoured in the contemporary era.

With the exegesis by Plotinus of Diotima’s speech in Plato's Symposium, we have a perfect example of interpretation which is forced, in order to preserve the appearance of traditionalism. Plotinus finds himself having to deal with a story which has the form of an allegory of the lover, but he comes to it with an already well-developed philosophical system. Other writings, such as On Beauty (Enn. I.6) for example, put on display the rigorous character of his thoughts on beauty, and on how it can be apprehended. As a Platonist, Plotinus must find inspiration in this little love story, or rather this phenomenology of the lover, but in his capacity as an original thinker, Plotinus cannot always adapt to what had become the text of tradition. We will consider these differences and their significance.

This book owes its development to a number of lectures and seminars, and the attendant discussion, given over the years at the Collège de France, the Sorbonne, the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, the Institut de Philosophie, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and King's College London. I would like to express my grateful thanks for these opportunities to Michel Tardieu, Monique Dixsaut, Philippe Hoffmann, Anca Vasiliu and Richard Sorabji (and David Papineau), as well as to my old friend and interlocutor Annick Charles-Saget. It also owes a great deal to the work and friendship of the late Jean Pépin, to whom I would like to pay tribute as having had an especially important place in my life. My wife, Miranda, has been particularly supportive of me and my work on this project: to her, grateful thanks.

My university, Bond University, has been generous in supporting this work and I would like to acknowledge this.

Lastly, my grateful thanks go to my patient and highly competent executive assistant, Anouschka Bridgman, for all her help with setting up the document, and to my research assistant Trishita Mathew.

In an earlier paper I argued that Plotinus had a particular fascination with the face. This is worth stressing because it is possible to over-emphasise the transcendental, other-worldly Plotinus, hater of the flesh. Possibly we have this image because the very first words of Porphyry's Life of Plotinus point us in this direction: ‘Plotinus, the philosopher who lived in our time, seemed ashamed of being in the body’.

Porphyry continues by saying that he refused to have a painting or sculpture made of himself, indicating in Platonist vein that making an image of what was already an image, was pointless. Amelius, a philosopher in his circle, brought in a famous painter (the meetings were not closed) and he did a sketch from memory, which Amelius helped improve. Porphyry also seems to indicate a certain prudishness, as when a philosopher presented a paper on the necessity of having sexual intercourse with one's teacher in order to progress in virtue, a subject which was robustly debated in Plato's own circle according to the Symposium: Plotinus repeatedly got up to leave. He was well pleased with the refutation. He was seen, according to Porphyry, as trustworthy, morally upright and an example to others. Thus, Porphyry presents him as austere, other-worldly, abstemious, morally pure, and also as hostile to art. This image of Plotinus is profoundly influential and we have carried it into the interpretation of his philosophy, allowing the biography to dominate our understanding of the philosophy.

We have asked the speculative question of why Plotinus failed to write a history of himself, whereas Augustine, the Christian writer, did do so in the form of his own autobiography, the Confessions. Augustine was a reader of Plotinus; both had a robust view of the individual self, and both had a respect for the physical world, and a view of the self as part of it (as we have argued). We set aside Porphyry's remarks about Plotinus seeming to be ashamed of living in the flesh as being psychological commentary, and we have looked at Plotinus’ actual philosophy. Plotinus the philosopher rescues the physical world from the onslaught of the Gnostics.

For Plotinus, the memory also plays a positive role, just as with Augustine, who exclaims over its majestic powers. But in the end for Plotinus the memory is appropriate only to certain phases of being and certain levels of reality, and its value comes from the sphere in which it operates. It is only activated when the soul moves away from perfection. The transcending of the self is the ultimate goal and at that point neither memory, nor thought, nor even self-knowledge, is relevant any more, and so forgetting becomes the goal. ‘The good soul is forgetful.’ For the Christian writer, the reification of human progress and the historicisation of the church meant that this route was impossible, despite the closeness of his view to that of Plotinus. The spiritual discipline lay in remembering.

Insofar as it is a whole, what exists is beautiful, says Plotinus. He takes up the Greek book of Genesis, Plato's Timaeus (37 ff.), in order to demonstrate this point. The demiurge, the creator and craftsman of the Timaeus, is cited in evidence of the proposition that the world is beautiful: the craftsman, we are told, admires his completed work. And this is what the Timaeus says: just as Yahweh, the Hebrew God, sees his completed work to be good in Genesis 1.3 1, so the demiurge ‘was delighted’ (Tim. 37c) when he saw the world alive and moving, a ‘veritable ornament for the eternal gods’. Since he was pleased, Plato says, the demiurge determined to make the world more like its model.

Plotinus does not quite put it like this. He does start with the view that what exists is a thing of beauty, and this is in a way his rejoinder to the Gnostics (see below). But Plotinus says that the demiurge approved his created work in order to point to the beauty of the Idea on which it was based. This didactic activity is somewhat different from the demiurge's spontaneous rejoicing in the Timaeus. Why does Plotinus’ demiurge find it necessary to remind us of Platonic exemplarism at this point? There is a nuance in the interpretation here: Plotinus does not want the demiurge unabashedly admiring the physical world, with quite the same immediate spontaneity of Plato's text. Plotinus’ corrective consists in making the demiurge more other-worldly. The essence of contemplation lies in looking above the world at form and the Intellect. The demiurge is looking in the wrong place.

We have seen that the way up to the beautiful is not through the other, but through one's own. But what of the beauty scattered across the world in images and even in living faces: does it not assist in the voyage of the lover? Does the skill of the artist have anything of the transcendental about it? We will examine Plotinus’ attitude to the beauty around him, with some surprising results.

The rejection of art in the Tenth book of the Republic is well known, and it is always surprising for those who appreciate the thought of Plato. How can this great thinker and sorcerer of language deny that which is apparently part of himself, his own skill as an author? There seem to be two manoeuvres here. On the one hand, he rejects that techne which happens to give his writings their own particular magic, and all their seductive power over us, the readers; on the other, he denies that which obviously exercises an attraction for him and over him, so that we appear to be dealing with a kind of suppression or rejection of an element of his own person. The art of the poet includes Plato among its initiates, as author as well as spectator: he is at once the seducer and the seduced. Perhaps we are dealing with a deliberate irony in relation to himself.

We will begin by explaining the approach and outlook which has led to the writing of this book, and we seek here to raise some of the main themes of the work and to sum up what might be its contribution.

For Plotinus the individual self is placed in a whole, which is the All: this is the world of the self. It has numerous encounters, or touch points within this world – which range from loving to having, for example. This intersecting with its environment is as true for the physical body as it is for the highest reaches of the spirit, at which point the limits of the self are truly explored. The relationship between the self and its ambient reality is many-sided, and it is impossible to draw a single line around the periphery of the self.

‘The Good is gentle and kind and gracious, and is present to anyone as he wishes.’ There is no rigidity about boundaries here, nothing schematic about the limits of the self. The Good may come and go, but this is partly dependent on the wishes of the individual.