Plotinus: The Philosopher Who Founded Neoplatonism

A man who did not speak of himself

By historians’ reckoning, Plotinus was born in Egypt in 204 CE; the exact place is unknown, because he himself never spoke of it. Porphyry, his student and biographer, recounts that Plotinus could never be persuaded to say where he came from, who his family was, or where exactly he was born: a silence Porphyry presents as a deliberate trait of his teacher. At twenty he turned to philosophy, beginning a training that would carry him far from Egypt.

The years with Ammonius Saccas, in Alexandria

Plotinus moved to Alexandria in his mid-twenties and spent some time attending the lectures of several philosophers, none of whom truly won him over. At twenty-eight he heard Ammonius Saccas for the first time and, according to Porphyry, recognized in him the teacher he had been looking for. He remained his student for eleven full years, a long apprenticeship that shaped the thinking he would later build his own work on, later gathered into the Enneads.

Worked example: anyone who reads that Plotinus “studied in Alexandria” often pictures something brief, like a university course. The eleven years spent beside Ammonius Saccas describe instead an apprenticeship almost as long as an entire teaching career in the ancient world.

An expedition that ended in Mesopotamia

At thirty-nine Plotinus left Ammonius Saccas to join Emperor Gordian III’s military expedition into Persia, apparently intending to meet the philosophers of that country directly. The plan did not go as expected: Gordian III was killed in Mesopotamia, and the expedition never reached its goal. According to Porphyry, Plotinus only managed to get back safely to Antioch with great difficulty, before setting out again toward Rome.

The Rome school and Porphyry’s arrival

At forty, under the reign of Emperor Philip the Arab, Plotinus settled in Rome, where he already had notable social connections. There he opened a school of philosophy, teaching without pause for more than a quarter of a century, until he died alone in Campania in 270 CE. When Plotinus had already been teaching for twenty years, a young student arrived in Rome from Greece, Porphyry, who would become the most prominent of his disciples: he spent six years at the teacher’s side, by his own account, and Porphyry himself recalls that Plotinus’ expression seemed to glow with thought while he lectured, and that he welcomed questions from his audience as readily as he answered them. It was Porphyry who, after his teacher’s death, gathered and arranged his writings into the Enneads.

The One, the principle from which everything flows

At the center of Plotinus’ teaching, in Rome as earlier in Alexandria, stands the One. It coincides with the absolute Good, yet it is neither being nor essence: according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, it is not one thing among others but what grounds the existence of everything else. From the One, through a process the tradition calls emanation, the Intellect arises, described as the first reality born from it; from there the rest of reality follows. It is this principle, more than the biography of the man behind it, that gives shape to the philosophical movement that would take the name of Neoplatonism — a doctrine that picks up and reworks themes already present in the tradition running from Socrates onward.