Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments

[xxi] Implicit in that acknowledgement is a further debt, to the inventers and sustainers of the Word Wide Web, which serves — in addition to its practical advantages — as a working image, eikon aei eikonizomene (“an image always reimagining itself” [“Un'immagine che perennemente si riproduce”1)]; after II.3 [52].18, 17), of the Plotinian Intellect.

Part I: Prolegomena

1. Why Read Plotinus?

2. How to Read Plotinus?

3. Theories about Metaphor

4. Dialectic

Part II: Metaphorically Speaking

5. Naked and Alone

6. On Becoming Love

7. Shadow Plays and Mirrors

8. Reason Drunk and Sober

9. Dancing

10. Remembering and Forgetting

[122] It is forgetting that is more significant for Plotinus than this-wordly use of the art of memory. Heracles's shadow might recall his earthly life, but Heracles himself does not remember it IV.3 [27].27.2)

[…]

[128] But the chief point of his art was to go naked into the shrine, beyond the statues, beyond our internal heroes. “Memory can play no part in well-being” (V.8 [31].10, 14). “We must certainly not attribute memory to God, or [to] real being or Intellect” (IV.3 [27].25, 13-4). Purification is a waking up from inappropriate images (III.6 [26].5, 23ff.), as dreams dissolve and are forgotten. But in the heavens, he says, we may still remember enough to recognize our friends, “by they characters and the individuality of their behaviour” (IV.4 [28].5, 20), even if they have spherical bodies (i.e., even if they are stars), and even if neither they nor we have any memory of our lives below. Nor do they need to speak. “For here below, too, we can know many things by the look in people's eyes when they are silent; but There all their body is clear and pure and each is like an eye, and nothing is hidden or feigned, but before one speaks to another that other has seen and understood” (IV.3 [27].18, 19-24).3)

11. Standing Up to the Blows of Fortune

Part III: The Plotinian Imaginary

12. Platonic and Classical Myths

13. Spheres and Circles

14. Charms and Countercharms

15. Invoking Demons

16. Images Within and Without

17. Fixed Stars and Planets

18. Waking Up

Part IV: Understanding the Hyposteses

19. Matter

20. Nature

21. Soul

22. Nous

23. The One

Part V: The Plotinian Way

[296] [The quotation is not from Isaiah 12.6 but from Isaiah 11.6].

Bibliography
Index of Passages from the Enneads
Index of Names and Subjects

Stranamente ignora KALLIGAS 2014, sia nella bibliografia che nell'indice.

1)
Cfr. Platone, Tim., 92c7.
2)
After Homer, Odyssey 11.601ff.; see also IV.3 [27].32, 24-5; I.1 [53].12, 32-40.
3)
Plotinus may have recalled the stories of how pantomimes conveyed their meanings so lucidly that even a skeptical Cynic, after watching an unaccompanied performance of the scandalous story of Ares and Aphrodite, exclaimed, “This is not seeing, but hearing and seeing, both: 'tis as if your hands were tongues!” (Lucian, “On Pantomime”, 256).