MacKenna-Plotinus: intellections

The question still remains to be examined in the matter of the intellections - whether these are to be assigned to the Soul - and as to Pure-Pleasure, whether this belongs to the Soul in its solitary state. Enneads   I,1,2

We cannot hold its self-intellections to be acts of memory; this is no question of something entering from without, to be grasped and held in fear of an escape; if its intellections could slip away from it [as a memory might] its very Essence [as the Hypostasis of inherent Intellection] would be in peril. Enneads IV,3,25

This explains, also, another fact: the soul is unfailingly intent upon intellection; only when it acts upon this image-taking faculty does its intellection become a human perception: intellection is one thing, the perception of an intellection is another: we are continuously intuitive but we are not unbrokenly aware: the reason is that the recipient in us receives from both sides, absorbing not merely intellections but also sense-perceptions. Enneads IV,3,30

If sensation is apprehension by means of the soul’s employment of the body, intellection cannot be a similar use of the body or it would be identical with sensation. If then intellection is apprehension apart from body, much more must there be a distinction between the body and the intellective principle: sensation for objects of sense, intellection for the intellectual object. And even if this be rejected, it must still be admitted that there do exist intellections of intellectual objects and perceptions of objects not possessing magnitude: how, we may then ask, can a thing of magnitude know a thing that has no magnitude, or how can the partless be known by means of what has parts? We will be told "By some partless part." But, at this, the intellective will not be body: for contact does not need a whole; one point suffices. If then it be conceded - and it cannot be denied - that the primal intellections deal with objects completely incorporeal, the principle of intellection itself must know by virtue of being, or becoming, free from body. Even if they hold that all intellection deals with the ideal forms in Matter, still it always takes place by abstraction from the bodies [in which these forms appear] and the separating agent is the Intellectual-Principle. For assuredly the process by which we abstract circle, triangle, line or point, is not carried through by the aid of flesh or Matter of any kind; in all such acts the soul or mind must separate itself from the material: at once we see that it cannot be itself material. Similarly it will be agreed that, as beauty and justice are things without magnitude, so must be the intellective act that grasps them. Enneads IV,7,8

Once more, then; the Intellectual-Principle is a self-intent activity, but soul has the double phase, one inner, intent upon the Intellectual-Principle, the other outside it and facing to the external; by the one it holds the likeness to its source; by the other, even in its unlikeness, it still comes to likeness in this sphere, too, by virtue of action and production; in its action it still contemplates, and its production produces Ideal-forms - divine intellections perfectly wrought out - so that all its creations are representations of the divine Intellection and of the divine Intellect, moulded upon the archetype, of which all are emanations and images, the nearer more true, the very latest preserving some faint likeness of the source. Enneads V,3,7

Next, the intellections would be impressions, that is to say not native act but violence from without: now how is such impressing possible and what shape could the impressions bear? Intellection, again, becomes at this a mere handling of the external, exactly like sense-perception. What then distinguishes it unless that it deals with objects of less extension? And what certitude can it have that its knowledge is true? Or what enables it to pronounce that the object is good, beautiful, or just, when each of these ideas is to stand apart from itself? The very principles of judgement, by which it must be guided, would be [as Ideas] excluded: with objects and canons alike outside it, so is truth. Enneads V,5,1

Not by its thinking God does God come to be; not by its thinking Movement does Movement arise. Hence it is an error to call the Ideas intellections in the sense that, upon an intellectual act in this Principle, one such Idea or another is made to exist or exists. No: the object of this intellection must exist before the intellective act [must be the very content not the creation of the Intellectual-Principle]. How else could that Principle come to know it: certainly not [as an external] by luck or by haphazard search. Enneads V,9,7

But why are they not at man’s level of reason: why also the difference from man to man? We must reflect that, since the many forms of lives are movements - and so with the Intellections - they cannot be identical: there must be different lives, distinct intellections, degrees of lightsomeness and clarity: there must be firsts, seconds, thirds, determined by nearness to the Firsts. This is how some of the Intellections are gods, others of a secondary order having what is here known as reason, while others again belong to the so-called unreasoning: but what we know here as unreasoning was There a Reason-Principle; the unintelligent was an Intellect; the Thinker of Horse was Intellect and the Thought, Horse, was an Intellect. Enneads VI,7,9

There is infinity in Intellectual-Principle since, of its very nature, it is a multiple unity, not with the unity of a house but with that of a Reason-Principle, multiple in itself: in the one Intellectual design it includes within itself, as it were in outline, all the outlines, all the patterns. All is within it, all the powers and intellections; the division is not determined by a boundary but goes ever inward; this content is held as the living universe holds the natural forms of the living creatures in it from the greatest to the least, down even to the minutest powers where there is a halt at the individual form. The discrimination is not of items huddled within a sort of unity; this is what is known as the Universal Sympathy, not of course the sympathy known here which is a copy and prevails amongst things in separation; that authentic Sympathy consists in all being a unity and never discriminate. Enneads VI,7,14