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Translated by Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page.
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» Contents of this Ennead
THE SIXTH ENNEAD: 1) ON THE KINDS OF BEING, 2) ON THE KINDS OF BEING ΙΙ, 3) ON THE KINDS OF BEING ΙΙΙ, 4) ON THE INTEGRAL OMNIPRESENCE OF THE AUTHENTIC EXISTENT, 5) ON THE INTEGRAL OMNIPRESENCE OF THE AUTHENTIC EXISTENT ΙΙ, 6) ON NUMBERS, 7) HOW THE MULTIPLICITY OF THE IDEAL-FORMS CAME INTO BEING: AND UPON THE GOOD, 8) ON FREE-WILL AND THE WILL OF THE ONE, 9) ON THE GOOD, OR THE ONE
This Part: 52 Pages
At the earliest activity and earliest intellection, it can be preceded by no act or intellection: if we pass beyond this being and this intellection we come not to more being and more intellection but to what overpasses both, to the wonderful which has neither, asking nothing of these products and standing its unaccompanied self.
That all-transcending cannot have had an activity by which to produce this activity — acting before act existed — or have had thought in order to produce thinking — applying thought before thought exists — all intellection, even of the Good, is beneath it.
In sum, this intellection of the Good is impossible: I do not mean that it is impossible to have intellection of the Good — we may admit the possibility but there can be no intellection by The Good itself, for this would be to include the inferior with the Good.
If intellection is the lower, then it will be bound up with Being; if intellection is the higher, its object is lower. Intellection, then, does not exist in the Good; as a lesser, taking its worth through that Good, it must stand apart from it, leaving the Good unsoiled by it as by all else. Immune from intellection the Good remains incontaminably what it is, not impeded by the presence of the intellectual act which would annul its purity and unity.
Anyone making the Good at once Thinker and Thought identifies it with Being and with the Intellection vested in Being so that it must perform that act of intellection: at once it becomes necessary to find another principle, one superior to that Good: for either this act, this intellection, is a completing power of some such principle, serving as its ground, or it points, by that duality, to a prior principle having intellection as a characteristic. It is because there is something before it that it has an object of intellection; even in its self-intellection, it may be said to know its content by its vision of that prior.
What has no prior and no external accompaniment could have no intellection, either of itself or of anything else. What could it aim at, what desire? To essay its power of knowing? But this would make the power something outside itself; there would be, I mean, the power it grasped and the power by which it grasped: if there is but the one power, what is there to grasp at?
Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-greece/plotinus/enneads-6c.asp?pg=1
