Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Philosophers, Intellectuals, Novelists and Musicians

Plotinus [2]

Plotinus says [according to Weber, p. 171]: “Intelligence is the first divine emanation.... Creation is a fall, a progressive degeneration of the divine. In the intelligence, the absolute unity of God splits up into intelligence proper ... and the intelligible world.” Does he mean the separation that begins to take place at Overmind or the Para and Apara Prakriti?

He was speaking of the cosmic mind, I suppose. In these philosophies there is no distinction made between different grades of mind or between intellect and the consciousness beyond the intellectual.

Plotinus says [according to Weber, p. 173]: “The intelligence, too, is creative.... Its emanation or radiation is the soul.... The soul is not, like the intellect, endowed with immediate and complete intuition: it is restricted to the discursive thought, or analysis....

“It is subordinate to the intellect.... There is, at the bottom of all individual souls, but one single soul manifesting itself infinitely in different forms: the soul of the world.” What does Plotinus mean by soul and intelligence in this passage?

I think simply Plotinus in speaking of soul has made a jumble of vital (prāna), manas and soul (φυχή) — while by intelligence he means buddhi (cosmic), but endows the buddhi with the qualities proper to the Intuition and Overmind.

12 October 1933