Plotinus, << ploh TY nuhs >> (205?-270?), was the founder of a school of Greek philosophy known as Neoplatonism. He developed Neoplatonism from the philosophy of Plato (see Neoplatonism ). Plotinus said that the material world is unreal, politics trivial, the body a temporary prison for the soul, and life a journey through a landscape of illusion. Reality lay “yonder” in a solitary perfect being, The One, the source of all truth, goodness, and beauty. He said pure souls may hope to “return” there. Sometimes this return occurred as a mystical vision. Plotinus believed he had experienced such a vision.
Plotinus may have been born in Egypt. He joined a military campaign to the East to try to learn more about Indian philosophy. Plotinus spent the last years of his life teaching in Rome. He disliked writing but dictated 54 lectures in six 9-lecture sets called the Enneads. His pessimism reflects only one side of Plato’s philosophy–that in which philosophy is seen as a consolation or as an escape from the world. But this was the side most appealing to Romans of Plotinus’s time.
