Neoplatonism - Plotinus

    Plotinus lived during th thurd century crisis. Therefore a live of a common Roman Egyptian was full of chaos and wars, people were confused and philosophy started to melt together with religion. Due to not only the financial cost of the wars people were forced to move out of cities, were hungry and poor. Historians assume that whole third of the population died during this painful time period. 

    Luc Ferry (as interpreted in the 15th episode of Philosophize This! podcast) says that we have been rewarded with an unique ability to reason and also to look in the past, therefore regret, and to the future, therefore be anxious. Both philosophy and religion are ways how to cope with fear of death, which to him is rather a fear of irreversibility. However they both use utterly different ways.

    Christianity says that death is followed by a hopefully happy life on another level and our whole being is just a part of God´s providential care which is designed to lead the whole word in the good direction and therefore everything that happens to us is just God giving us signs. Philosophy, on the contrary, tries to cope with all the bad just with what had been given to us by nature (ming, ability to reason and think). A salvation without religion, without giving our responsibility to a higher, perfect and eternal being. Philosophers often make a point that it is pointless to worry about things that are external to us and therefore cannot be affected by us in any matter. It is also a huge part of philosophy to try and understand where we are, so we´re able to act properly.

    Another important question is who are we? Te body? Just a soul? Knowledge? Well, Potinus and his peers viewed it just as Christians and thought about themselves just as consciousness and soul was for them a part of their physical body, just as an arm or an ear. So we were a trapped spirit in a flawed body in a flawed world full of imperfections.

    To enlighten what we were to the others, and maybe to even understand it better themselves, neoplatonists wrote a lot about the distinctions between the perceived, physical, world and the real world (in Platon´s Themaeus the world of forms). So they were quite certain there somewhere is a higher realm of existence. And right in that world lied the center of their interests. In contrast to the previous philosophers, who tried to deal with the problems of the bodily world- Because this world was just a inferior copy to them.

    Finally I´m getting to the core thought - why does evil exist in a wold created by perfect creator? The answer is - it does not, since evil is just an absence of goodness. Plotinus divided the world into three parts - the one, intellect and soul. Intellect represents the world of forms, the perfect pattern to everything. And all things involved in the world of forms have one thing in common - the unity and that is The One, the beyond being quality. Soul is our flowed perception of things, imperfect and that creates the evil, the void of goodness, because it is imperfectly transmitted into our world, the physical one, the one we all live in. And if Plotinus is right and the amount of unity a thing possesses, the more real it is, then the intellect (the world of forms) is more real than the physical and the physical merely exists. Plotinus defines people as pure intellect with an individual soul, which creates and organises the physical world and serves as a mediator between the world of  forms and the our one. 

    There always has to be a certain amount of unity, of goodness, so anything, even evil, can exist. Therefore something completely devoid of goodness is incapable of being (Voldy must have body, hands etc to chase HP all round the world). 

    As humans we should feed our inteleczt and try to understand the world of forms as well as possible, since the purpose of intellect is to reason and think. Because then we will understand that we are connected to the intellect and that our ambitions and emotions are irrelevant and should not be acted upon. B understanding how distant from the one we are, we will understand the creation of flaws and try to reduce the our ones by the intellect.