Plotinus

Wilber's View

Plotinus is treated with more unqualified admiration than any other figure in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality — the historical anchor of the book's central metaphysical claim, presented almost entirely through admiring quotation from Plotinus himself and his interpreters (William Inge especially) rather than critique. Where Plato (see wilber-on-plato) gets Wilber's non-dual reading, Plotinus is credited with the first fully systematic statement of it: "the Great Holarchy of Being receives its first comprehensive presentation" in Plotinus, even though the underlying idea traces back to Plato and Aristotle. Wilber builds an entire figure of the book (9-1, "The Great Holarchy according to Plotinus and Aurobindo") directly out of Plotinus's own terms — matter, vegetative life, sensation, image, concept, logical faculty, creative reason, soul, Nous, and the Absolute One — and treats its close match with Sri Aurobindo's independently-derived Indian holarchy as evidence that "the greatest synthesizers of the West and the East are in such fundamental agreement" for a reason: both arrived at their systems through direct contemplative apprehension, not speculation.

That last point is the crux of what Wilber does with Plotinus: he insists Plotinus's system, like Aurobindo's, is not "metaphysics" in the dismissive modern sense but "empirical-phenomenological developmental psychology at its most rigorous," discovered through injunction (a contemplative practice), apprehension (direct experience) and confirmation within a community of practitioners — the same three-strand model of valid knowledge Wilber uses elsewhere to defend contemplative claims generally. Plotinus is also the figure through whom Wilber makes his "way up is the way down" argument: for Plotinus, Ascent (Reflux, or return to the One) and Descent (Efflux, or the One's outflowing into the Many) are the same territory traversed in opposite directions — "for Plotinus, all development is envelopment."

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

From Plato the torch of nonduality, the integrative vision, still intact, passed most notably to Plotinus (205–270 CE), who gave it one of the most complete, most compelling, most powerful statements to be found anywhere, at any time, in any form, ancient or modern, East or West.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 9

It is with Plotinus that the Great Holarchy of Being receives its first comprehensive presentation, although the notion itself, of course, goes back directly to Plato and Aristotle.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 9

"The One in Plotinus," says Inge, "is not unconscious, but superconscious; not infra-rational but supra-rational."

— Inge, quoted in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 9

For Plotinus (and Aurobindo), we find that on the Path of Ascent—or what Plotinus calls Reflux (return)—each successive level goes beyond and yet subsumes or "envelops," as Plotinus says, its predecessors—the familiar concept of development as successive holons… For Plotinus, all development is envelopment.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 9

And thus Plotinus can easily make the nondual leap: "Spirit not only engenders all things; it is all things" (the all-important third line of the Nondual realization: the Many are illusory; the One alone is Real; the One is the Many—Brahman is the World).

— Plotinus, quoted in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 9

Thus, a typical Plotinian statement is (to use Inge's phrasing), "The World-Soul is not in the world; rather, the World is in it, embraced by it and moulded by it." Or again, "The Soul is not in the Body, but the Body is [in the Soul,] enveloped and penetrated by the Soul which created it."

— Plotinus, quoted in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 9

But in fact these systems are, through and through, from top to bottom, the results of actual contemplative apprehensions and direct developmental phenomenology. The higher levels of these systems cannot be experienced or deduced rationally… There is absolutely nothing "metaphysical" about these systems: they are empirical-phenomenological developmental psychology at its most rigorous and most comprehensive.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 9

See Also

• wilber-on-plato — the reading of Plato that Wilber treats Plotinus as systematizing into a complete holarchy
• great-chain-of-being — the traditional picture Plotinus is credited with first fully articulating
• ascent-and-descent — the framework Wilber draws directly from Plotinus's own language of Reflux and Efflux
• freud — contrasted with Plotinus as a figure who saw Ascent and Descent's tension clearly but, unlike Plotinus, never reached the unifying One