If you think about for example, proportionality and beauty, things like that, these seem to be some kind of representations of a kind of unity.
Peter AdamsonWe do have intellects and Plotinus controversially thought that even though we might not be aware of it, our souls are always connected to the intellect. They never fully descend as he would put it.
Peter AdamsonThere's going to be this realm of Platonic forms and then there's going to be this single mind, the 'nous', which grasps them.
Peter AdamsonJust the way you might look at a painting and see the painting, and the painting is outside you, so this immaterial intellect would see the forms and behold them, as if they were standing before it. And Plotinus said that that can't be right because it falls prey to sceptical objections.
Peter AdamsonWhat the soul is doing is kind of walking through the forms, and so our experience of thinking isn't normally this kind of pure intuitive insight that intellect gets, and that intellect must get right, because it's always identical to its objects, it's always the same as the forms that it's thinking about.
Peter Adamson