For Plotinus, it seems to me that unity is being, and that could tells us something important about The One. It is by the virtue of unity that beings are beings; he uses a slew of arguments about its role. As soon as we say that something is this or that, then we attribute unity to it.
Ex. A
X is y.
In example a, we’ve attributed unity. Don’t bother with x is; if we can predicate something, then we might know Being, and in turn The One. But as Plotinus wrote, “We can see the totality of things when we look inside.”
For Plotinus, neo-Platonism was about virtue. We practice philosophy so that the soul can turn inwards towards The Divine Intellect and know The One. But although Plotinus has given us a clear path towards the unity, descending in an unbroken succession of stages from The One, The Divine Intellect, and The Forms therein through Soul, he did not write systematically like our charts on the blackboard. Instead, he studied in Alexandria for decades until finally exploding with treatises of his own. Turning inwards seems to be a process.
In Plotinus’s sixth ennead, The One or the Good is beyond the reach of human thought or language, and though we can talk about it, this insistence is to be taken seriously. What we know is that it is the supreme existence, no predicates need-be-applied. It is more, not less than mind. And in this way Plotinus seems to me to be dogmatic at first.
According to the ancient Greeks, the Unity of Virtue is a well-known tenet. And especially with Plato we find that Virtue is the way to The One. In Platonic thought, resurrected in Plotinus, all the apparently different virtues—piety or temperance—refer to different aspects of the same single property. With Aristotle, however, having virtue is a matter of having a character that disposes you to do the right thing in the right way, at the right time, to the right person, for the right reason. More, one needs to know what’s important to discern if the costs are worth suffering for what benefits. In some sense for Aristotle, virtue requires knowledge to reach The One or Nature or Eudaimonia, as he refers to it. Since different virtues concern different spheres of activity, the knowledge most centrally required for one virtue will differ from the knowledge most centrally required for another.
I like discursive reasoning. Reason brings us to knowledge. As Bertrand Russell once said, “philosophic contemplation, when it is unalloyed, does not aim at proving that the rest of the universe is akin to man. All acquisition of knowledge is an enlargement of the Self, but this enlargement is best attained when it is not directly sought.” The One just seems too good to comprehend, or rather, too good to be true. The primary object of Plotinus’s philosophical activity is to bring his own soul and the souls of others by way of The Divine Intellect to union with The One. But is the free will free to choose not to create? Plotinus believes that all must exist in unity; it seems we are already one.
Plotinus realizes in the sixth ennead that The One, the Being of the Particular, is a manifold, and that Unity cannot be a manifold; therefore, there must be distinction between being and unity. He posits: “Above all, unity is The First, but Intellectual Principle, Ideas and Being, cannot be so; for any member of the realm of Forms is an aggregation, a compound, and therefore—since components must precede their compound—is a later. The Unity cannot be the total of all things.”
Unity is paramount to our ascent to The One. But by not correctly identifying the target, we miss that, which is The Good. We should aim for Reason. Those whom existence comes about by chance and automatic action and is held together by material forces have drifted far from the concept of unity and The One.
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