If 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 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 AdamsonPeople often talk about Plotinus' system. The reason they do this is that Plotinus postulated a kind of series or chain of principles, so at the top there's what he called the One. Below the One is what he called Intellect. Below Intellect is Soul, and the effect of the soul is the physical world that we actually live in.
Peter AdamsonIf 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 AdamsonIn fact Plotinus does believe in divine providence, though when he talks about divine providence, he talks about that providence being exercised by the intellect and the soul of the world, rather than the One.
Peter AdamsonThe soul must be distinct from intellect because even at its best, what the soul does when it's thinking, is it thinks linguistically, it thinks in a temporarily extended way, so it for example, might go through the steps of an argument chain, as if you were going through a syllogism and seeing that something followed from the premises, whereas intellect simply grasps the forms.
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