Lloyd Gerson wrote in his 1994 monograph on Plotinus: “The elements of Plotinus’ thought that can usefully be labeled ‘mystical’ are rather easily isolated from his other epistemological doctrines.” Whether that is true depends heavily on how we understand “mystical”. In any case, Gerson proposes to reconstruct a firmly third-person, objective view of Plotinus’ philosophy. This book is an attempt at something quite different, namely, to see not only Plotinus’ epistemological doctrines but also his metaphysical doctrines as impossible to isolate from the “mystical” or “contemplative”, or, as I have argued here, the first-person, subjective dimension of his philosophy. As a result of such a reconstruction, Plotinus’ philosophy as a whole is contemplative. Everything in it contemplates and everything is contemplation.

This chapter discusses the creation of the intelligible world, which comes to being through the formative activity of the Good on its first product. The Great Kinds are dynamically balanced principles, by virtue of which Intelligible Matter received form as Being, Movement achieves Rest, and Difference is united by Identity, thus establishing Intellect, the One-Many. The three crucial principles of the Plotinian metaphysics are outlined: (1) the principle of the microcosm, (2) the imaging principle, and (3) the principle of the triadic selfhood. In light of the first principle, at all the levels of reality there exist individual beings who exist within and are united with the great principles of reality by virtue of two forms of participation. The notions of vertical and horizontal participation are defined. The imaging principle relates to reality consisting of hierarchies of dynamically produced images of higher archetypes. What is expressed participates vertically in its archetype. The third principle is a triadic intertwining of loving and knowing with selfhood. The “negative” or “potential” aspects of the Great Kinds are described as the metaphysical seeds of evil and fall.

This chapter discusses the famous Plotinian image of the transparent, luminous sphere, appearing in several versions in different treatises. Psychic contemplation is divided into two levels: imaginative and dianoetic. The first corresponds with the level of Nature by virtue of our higher imagination, while the second one corresponds with the level of the World Soul by virtue of our reason. At the imaginative level, we overcome the sense that we are located in our head and experience a sort of the expansion of our self, in which we feel ourselves permeating the whole of the sensible world. At the dianoetic level, we find ourselves to be present everywhere in a completely non-localised and non-extended way. Our reason becomes the transparent sphere in which we see all the sensible world, but this doesn’t mean that we use discursive thinking or that we analyse the world. Reason is an intuitive, “transparent eyeball”, in which we see everything as united and through which we see the sensible qualities in their archetypes, the higher logoi in the World Soul. It is freedom from anything spatial, temporal, and sensible. The world is seen as existing in ourselves, but we are not the world.

This chapter shows that the entire intelligible world in Plotinus has a personal nature. Every real being is a person, not an abstract concept or a dead thing. Moreover, those real beings don’t exist in separation, and they are not autonomous individuals, but form a unified, living whole, an organism or, as Plotinus calls it, a city with a soul. The Forms are sacred statues of the gods, which can be seen through their sensible images. In the end, Plotinus coins a neologism to describe this peculiar vision of reality: παμπρόσοωπόν τι, “being-all-faces”. This grand vision gives a deeper meaning to all the earlier metaphors of statues, reflected images, and faces that I have been elucidating in the book. In a deep unity of the intelligible world, to know and love one’s own face or to know and love the face of another is to contemplate all the other faces that participate in the living city that is reality.

This chapter discusses psychic contemplation as our participation in the contemplation of the World Soul, who creates the sensible world and time. As a result, we see the world as becoming alive and we transcend time by finding in ourselves the peace and rest of Nature, the lower power of the World Soul. The main faculty in ourselves which participates in Nature is imagination (and memory), although Nature herself doesn’t entertain perception, imagination, or memory. When we ascend to this level, we begin to live in the present, mindfully awake to our sensible experience, but also having a sense that we are something different from it. Sensible experience no longer deceives us because we see the sensible world in and through its archetypes, which are the logoi in Nature. Like a geometer who sees the intelligible structure of the square in squared sensible shapes, we intuitively see the essence of things (“what it is”) revealed to us through their qualities (“what it is like”).

This chapter discusses noetic contemplation proper, that is, seeing Intellect as he sees himself by virtue of our vertical participation. We see the entire intelligible world, consisting of the Forms, and we see the unfolding of the Great Kinds, the highest of the Forms in it. Our contemplation of Intellect has an unfolding character, although this doesn’t mean that we see Intellect as being in time. Plotinus shows the limitations of our individual perspective on this and other cosmic principles in contemplation. We see both the unity and the multiplicity of Intellect but in a way that transcends dialectical, discursive, and conceptual thinking. Contemplation doesn’t abolish our ability to think discursively but rather enriches that ability. Dialectical search for the truth is harmonised with a direct, intuitive vision of Intellect. On the one hand, the vision is expressed through dialectic and, on the other, dialectic leads us to and strengthens our intuitive, noetic experience of reality. Philosophy and contemplation become two sides of the same life.

This chapter discusses the way the contemplation of Intellect and the Forms is related to the experience of the sensible world. Despite the traditional view that Platonism espouses “two worlds”, Plotinus mocks the idea of the sensible and the intelligible as being actually two separated realms. Rather, for him there is only one world but seen from different perspectives by different cognitive activities of the soul. What happens in noetic contemplation is not that the Forms are seen apart from their sensible images, but that they are seen in and through their images, having become transparent to their essences. Or, when the experience is mature, it is rather that the sensible things are seen in and through their intelligible archetypes. To explain that phenomenon, Plotinus uses the continuum of dimness and clarity, and claims that perception is dim intellection, while intellection is clear perception. The contemplation of the transparency of the sensible to the intelligible gives rise to the experience of “bodies in Intellect” or the profound unity of the two realms, where the entire reality of the sensible is to be found in the intelligible.

This chapter discusses the first level of noetic contemplation. Both psychic and noetic level are subdivided into two levels, which could be termed contemplation “from below” and “from within” a given macrocosmic level. The first stage of noetic contemplation is looking at Intellect “from below”, that is, from the level of the World Soul and by our faculty of reason. We Intellect “as another” and in a partial way (seeing particular Forms). It is only when we ascend from that phase to noetic contemplation proper that we see, so to speak, our own face or we see the seer, which is our own intellect participating horizontally in Intellect. We also see the Forms through sensible things when we look at the world. Instead of rejecting the sensible, we embrace it, seeing the sensible things better, because now we are seeing them in and through their noetic archetypes. The whole world is within us, but the difference between the seer and the seen is overcome, and we see that we are the world.

This chapter discusses the first level of contemplation, namely, psychic contemplation. The point of departure is Plotinus’ view of perception as a multi-level activity and his claim that we perceive external things by virtue of internal images. In the realm of affective experience, we also co-create our emotions rather than receive them passively. The fall is a distortion of the states of knowing (perceptions) and the states of loving (affects) as well as of the sense of the body, the world, and the self. In the first phases of contemplative ascent, virtues purify our experience of the self, and we begin to overcome the sense of the world as external and our emotional enslavement to it. The result is peace and freedom. The analysis of perception and affective experience shows that for Plotinus contemplation is a natural state of our soul. It is not adding something which is not there but recovering our awareness of what is already going on when we perceive experience affects or relate to our body.

This chapter discusses the fall of the soul as the process in which a microcosmic being cuts himself off from the macrocosmic realms by self-limiting excessive emphasis on the potential elements of his own being: the indefinite “I”, the movement of loving and the difference of knowing. The result of the fall is our exclusive identification with our body, but the body is not necessarily either the cause of it or the embodiment is the result of the fall. In light of the third, triadic principle of selfhood, the fall is described by Plotinus in three ways, as (1) the limitation and fragmentation of the self, (2) the quasi-spatial externalisation of what is known, and (3) the temporalisation of what is loved. The fall of the self results in the sense of the deadness of reality and the reducing of ourselves to a thing among things. The fall of knowing results in seeing everything as external to the seer, while the fall of loving results in feeling that what we desire is not here, but has to be pursued in the future (or is lost forever in the past).

The goal of Plotinus’ philosophy is not a conceptual and discursive description of reality, but the return of the fallen soul to the intelligible world and then to the Good. Because of that he emphasizes not only the practical dimension of philosophy, but also the importance of the individual philosopher who is undertaking the spiritual journey. The thesis of the book is presented: Plotinus’ metaphysics is a balanced combination of two co-existing perspectives: the third-person perspective (an objective,conceptual, scientific account of reality) and the first-person perspective (a subjective, intuitive,contemplative experience of it). This is grounded in the literature (Schwyzer, Hadot, Rappe, Clark,Banner), but this volume goes far beyond the claim that contemplation and spiritual exercises are a significant element of Plotinus’ philosophy. They constitute an entire, key dimension of it.