Plotinus - Treatis on Beauty:
VFU* StudyDesk update - Tuesday, 10-03-09 4:26 PM
"...My divinity is Beauty and my religion is Freedom..." Swami Sri Baba Nada
The essential Plotinus: representative treatises from the Enneads
Plotinus' chronologically first treatise, ‘On Beauty’ (I 6), can be seen as parallel to his treatise on virtue (I 2).
In it, he tries to fit the experience of beauty into the drama of ascent to the first principle of all. In this respect, Plotinus' aesthetics is inseparable from his metaphysics, psychology, and ethics.
As in the case of virtue, Plotinus recognizes a hierarchy of beauty. But what all types of beauty have in common is that they consist in form or images of the Forms eternally present in Intellect (I 6. 2).
The lowest type of beauty is physical beauty where the splendor of the paradigm is of necessity most occluded. If the beauty of a body is inseparable from that body, then it is only a remote image of the non-bodily Forms.
Still, our ability to experience such beauty serves as another indication of our own intellects' undescended character.
We respond to physical beauty because we dimly recognize its paradigm.
To call this paradigm ‘the Form of Beauty’ would be somewhat misleading unless it were understood to include all the Forms cognized by Intellect.
Following Plato in Symposium, Plotinus traces a hierarchy of beautiful objects above the physical, culminating in the Forms themselves. And their source, the Good, is also the source of their beauty (I 6. 7).
The beauty of the Good consists in the virtual unity of all the Forms. As it is the ultimate cause of the complexity of intelligible reality, it is the cause of the delight we experience in form (see V 5. 12):
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plotinus/
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