Metaphysics

The Immortality of the Soul

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Plotinus

263

In this treatise — the seventh of the fourth Ennead — Plotinus examines the nature of the soul and the arguments for its immortality. Against materialist accounts that reduce the soul to a harmony of bodily elements, he argues that the soul is a self-subsistent reality: it is self-moving, its activity is not reducible to any physical process, and it belongs by nature to the intelligible world rather than the material. The soul cannot perish as bodies perish because it is not composed of parts that can be separated. Death is not the soul's destruction but its release — a return, however gradual and difficult, toward the intelligible from which it originally descended.