Reading Plotinus with Hadot: Chapter 1 - Portrait

Plotinus is one of the strangest and most rewarding thinkers in the Western tradition — a philosopher whose work reads less like a system and more like a series of maps for looking inward. Pierre Hadot's Plotinus, or the Simplicity of Vision is the best short introduction there is: lucid, personal, and written by a scholar who saw ancient philosophy as a way of life rather than a set of doctrines.

Every two weeks we'll take a single chapter, listen to it together, and then open it up for discussion. No prior background in philosophy is required — just curiosity and a willingness to sit with ideas that don't always yield on the first pass. Newcomers are welcome to drop in at any point; each chapter stands well enough on its own.

This session — Chapter 1: "Portrait"
We'll start with Chapter 1, "Portrait," which opens on one of the most startling sentences in ancient biography: Porphyry's report that Plotinus "seemed ashamed of being in a body." Hadot builds the whole chapter around a paradox — how do you paint a portrait of a man who refused to have his portrait painted? Plotinus wouldn't sit for sculptors, wouldn't speak about his birthplace or parents, and treated his visible form as a kind of accidental husk. Yet Porphyry, his student, still manages to give us a vivid picture of the philosopher at work in Rome: teaching, arbitrating disputes among his neighbors, taking in orphans, dictating essays in a rush and never going back to revise them. Hadot uses this tension to introduce what will become the central Plotinian move — the real self is not what can be seen from the outside. Everything that follows in the book is an attempt to look, instead, from within.

Format

• We listen to the chapter together (roughly 15 minutes)
• Open discussion follows — questions, reactions, tangents, disagreements all welcome
• Expect to be here about 90 minutes total

Before you come
If you'd like to read or listen ahead, here's the links: Audio/Text