When you're seeking after bodily pleasure of food and drink for example, this is going to prevent you from doing what you should be doing which is contemplating.
Peter AdamsonUnlike later Neo-Platonists, Plotinus says that our souls are always connected to the universal intellect and that we never really fall away.
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 AdamsonPlotinus thought that the entire world has a single soul. He also thought that each animal and plant and of course human, has an individual soul.
Peter AdamsonThe soul is the principle of life, and it's also something much closer to our own awareness and consciousness of our existence because fundamentally for Plotinus what we are is souls, we're not intellects.
Peter AdamsonIf you think about even very common examples like, say, something that you would build, like a clock or a car or a group of people trying to accomplish something, it fails when its unity breaks down. So when it stops having a single form, which is functioning all together, then it sort of falls apart into discrete elements.
Peter Adamson