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The search of the "transcendent realities" dear to Plato, led by Plotinus (205 – 270), this remarkable thinker, is even today, exceptional.
This one was convinced that there is not of physical existence without the coherence of the beings's components, and then, he wondered :
Is it the Soul, is it the Intellect, that enables (assures) this unity knowing that the universe is composed of myriads of singular states, which evolve in harmony ?
He recognized so, out of necessity, the realism (existence) of a unifying entity anterior to the Soul and Intellect.
Let us report his conclusions :
"In short, the One in himself is absolutely first, but the Intellect, the Forms and the Reality are not first …
Thus it is impossible that the One is the Whole, because then he would not be one,
neither that he is the Intellect, because he would be the Whole as the Intellect,
nor that he is the Reality because the Reality is the Whole...
The One is not thus the Intellect, but he is before the Intellect. Because the Intellect is something, which is a part of the beings, but Him, he is not something but before every thing.
And the One is not either, the Reality. Exactly the Reality has in a sense a shape, which is the one of the Reality,
but the One is without shape, even without intelligible shape.
Because the Nature of the One because she is generative of any things, is not these things. Thus we cannot say, neither that He is something, nor that He is qualified or quantified, nor that he is Intellect or soul.
And He is not moved, He is not at rest, He is not in place and in the time …
That is why even when we say that He is cause, it is not to Him that we attribute a predicate, but to ourselves, because that is us who have in us something which comes from Him, while Him He is in Himself." (cf. Treatise 9 – 2, 30 à 45 – 3, 35 à 50).
So, thanks to his remarkable analysises, Plotinus was imagining two "transcendent realities" ; nevertheless, the attributes which he gave to these abstract realities often are confused; we think among others, to the predicates associated to the notions of soul and of intellect.
Fortunately, the understanding of the world and of its dynamics, henceforth authorized by the sciences, enables from removing these ambiguities.
The soul appears today as a spiritual identity and not as an operator,
a spiritual identity which gives evidence of the permanent implication of a creative entity of divine character (of the Divine) in us, ipso facto, in the reality.
As for our understanding of the intellect, it shows itself also very different from the presentiment of the neo-platonic adepts :
"They have to admit that there is another Intellect than intellect which reasons (the intellect which is said the reasonable by Plato and Aristotle ), because the reasonings are in a state of extension and of movement, and that the sciences, which are formal reasons in the soul, have reached a state of demonstration by the fact that the Intellect became cause of the sciences in the soul." (cf. Treatise 9 – 5,10),
because the intellect is not an entity who reasons but a group of faculties of transcendent order which enable reasoning.
In particular, the intellect is not primordial cause of the forms and sciences but, due to its faculties of transcendent order, it enables recognition of the forms and the blooming of the sciences, what is very different !
And the One who is recognized by Plotinus according to his speeches as : the First, the Principle of Everything, Source of life, Cause of the Good, Root of the soul, the God, today,
He finds a new realism that we can express by the notion of "order" ; so, we can henceforth speak, in a credible way, of the order of the universal energy, and of the transcendent order inherent to the creative entity who leads the world, animates us and recognizes herself in the me (I, subject, ego, spirit).
But then, is it not ? :
"inside of us that it is necessary to look for the universal presence of the One....
He is, says Platon, in everything and with all the beings without that they know it. Indeed, that is them who are going outside of him, or rather outside themselves. They cannot thus seize the one that they avoided, and being lost themselves, to look for another, no more than a child, outside of him because he is affected by madness, can know his father. But the one who recognized himself will know where He comes from." (cf. Plotinus – Treatise 9 – 7, 30).
Certainly, all the more :
"that He cannot be object of speech nor object of writing, but if we speak and write, that is for going towards him, to encourage to the vision, by means of our speeches, as if we were indicating the road to somebody who wants to see something. Because the education can lead only up to the road, that until the progress, but the vision itself, it is the one who wants to see, who has to see." (cf. Treatise 9 – 4, 11).
Nevertheless,
how understand the permanent interactions with the beyond the world, more exactly, with the beyonds the world, seeing that the nature of any transcendent reality, as the one of the me (I, ego, subject, spirit), cannot be understood ?
Without any doubt, the answers presuppose of new expressions of numerous concepts and a great semantic rigor. Of very cruel renunciations as perspective, for the philosophers and the theologians !
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