The Symposium: Philosophy Community of Chicago

Today we read Plotinus' Enneads, 1.1: What is the human being?
"Know thyself: these were the two words inscribed on the entrance to the Oracle of Delphi. Philosophia begins with this injunction—and so Plotinus begins where we all must necessarily begin: with oneself. Who am I? What am I?

Human experience contains many different facets: bodily sensation, emotion, conscious and subconscious thought, memory, intuition, and more. Which of these aspects are more essential, and which are more peripheral? Can we establish a meaningful priority among these manifold aspects of the self?"

Plotinus calls our intrinsic experience of consciousness psuche, which we usually translate as ‘soul’. We should be careful to understand Plotinus’ use of this word however. The meaning of ‘the soul’ has been filtered through centuries of theological and philosophical interpretations which we today often unknowingly assume: the individual soul as a Cartesian ego, or as some kind of vague, ghostly, ether substance, etc. As we go further on in the Enneads, what the word Soul means for Plotinus will become clearer...

For Plotinus it is a given that Soul is not to be centrally identified with the material body itself. Yet it is undeniable that there is some sort of relation between Soul and body.

How does Soul and body interact? Where do our various kinds of human experiences arise?
Plotinus offers three schematic alternatives:
[1] within Soul alone, disconnected from the body, or
[2] in some kind of combination of Soul and body, or
[3] something entirely other than Soul or body:

Plotinus applies these same three alternatives in relation to our experience of sensations, affections, discursive reason, etc. After a cursory examination of these three possibilities, Plotinus opts for structure number [2], which indicates an overlapping of Soul and body, but which also, crucially, shows a significant degree of independence of the two. It is in this sense that Plotinus speaks of a ‘lower’ part of Soul and a ‘higher’ part, which correspond to that part of Soul which overlaps with the animate body (the lower) and that which is independent of body (the higher). With this model in mind, we can now more clearly locate, ontologically, where sensation, emotions, thought, and so on, properly reside.

This overlapping of Soul and body reveals a key principle to understanding Plotinus’ thought, guiding his entire philosophy: the principle of participation."
The above summary came from this now-deleted blog and video (attribution to plotinianlight)

Summary videos (highly recommended if unable to read):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy2hwezmV88

https://youtu.be/MMjlLyXejlM?si=gpWYVodpq9R5Ja0H

READING: ~13 pages (pick a translation)
• Guthrie Translation: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/42933/42933-h/42933-h.htm#b_53
(From Project Gutenberg) [begins 1191]
• McKenna Translation (preferred): http://classics.mit.edu/Plotinus/enneads.1.first.html
• Loeb (Armstrong): https://nobledoctrine.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/armstrong1.pdf (starts p.95)
I recommend keeping alternate translations nearby.

Audiobook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vEehojdtqg
Librivox Audio https://ia903101.us.archive.org/17/items/enneads_-plotinus_1806_librivox/enneads_01_plotinus_128kb.mp3 is