Original language: Greek.
Plotinus was born in Egypt (at that time, part of the Roman Empire) and spent most of his life in Rome. The Enneads was compiled by his student Porphyry, probably soon after Plotinus’s death in 270 AD.
I read the Penguin Classics abridged edition of The Enneads, published in 1991. The translation, by Stephen MacKenna, was published between 1917 and 1930. The abridgement, introduction and notes are by Irish classicist John Dillon.
There is a very good biographical sketch of translator Stephen McKenna, by Dillon, based on E.R. Dodds’s 1936 memoir. McKenna had a difficult life. He was refused entry to London University, which ended his academic career and left him with a chip on his shoulder. He was plagued by money problems and mental health issues. The translation of Plotinus was his life’s work. He wanted to abandon it several times, but was repeatedly sustained and convinced to continue by his ever-patient patron, Sir Ernest Debenham (of the supermarket chain). He was of Irish descent and sympathized with Irish nationalism during a peripatetic life.
McKenna’s introduction is reproduced in this edition. I fell in love with the guy. He sees off the pedants with a few choice words.
"He [McKenna is referring to himself] has arrogated to himself almost the entire freedom of a philosophic writer in English who uses his words with an absolute loyalty, of course, to his thought but with never a moment's scruple as to the terms in which he happened to convey or indicate a given notion five pages back. In other words the present translator has not thought of his probable readers as glossary-bound pedants but as possessed of the living vision which can follow a stream of thought by the light of its vivid movement." (p. xxix).
Now to Plotinus’s text.
Plotinus is against fun. He’s against pleasure. He’s against sex. He is too strict. Reason is great, thinking is great, but the body is important to human beings too. A lot of what Plotinus says is crazy, and I don’t agree with it.
In Plotinus’s time, philosophers could make pronouncements on what we call today science. Philosophy had an enormous ambit in those days. Matter, the universe, ethics. There’s lots of astronomy here. Plotinus denied the existence of atoms. He said everything is endlessly divisible. He believed in reincarnation. He believed the universe had always existed.
He believed the stars were gods. He believed in the existence of a human soul.
A great passage from Plotinus and an example of the felicity of MacKenna’s translation:
The tune of an incantation, a significant cry, the mien of the operator, these too have a natural leading power over the Soul upon which they are directed, drawing it with the force of mournful patterns or tragic sounds; for it is the reasonless soul, not the will or wisdom, that is beguiled by music, a form of sorcery which raises no question, whose enchantment, indeed, is welcomed, though not demanded, from the performers. (p. 328)
Admiring pursuit of the external is a confession of inferiority. (p.348)
Plotinus is considered a neo-Platonist, but he leaned on and learned from many prior philosophers, not just Plato. He reinterpreted Plato and applied and extended Plato’s concepts in new ways of his own.
Last thoughts on Plotinus
500 pages of bullshit.
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