Metaphysics

On Contemplation

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Plotinus

264

On Contemplation — the eighth treatise of the third Ennead — is one of Plotinus's most surprising and original works. He begins with the provocative claim that not only philosophers and rational souls contemplate, but that all of nature — plants, animals, the earth itself — produces through a form of contemplation, however dim and attenuated. Making, in this view, is a weakened form of contemplating: artisans produce externally what the mind cannot hold internally. Plotinus traces this logic upward: Soul contemplates Intellect, Intellect contemplates the One, and the One's own self-sufficiency is the still source from which all this activity flows. Action is the shadow of contemplation; creation is the overflow of vision.