Lesley-Anne Williams

This chapter explains why it is possible for Plotinus to appreciate the beauty of bodies, including human bodies, even while he was personally ashamed of his own embodiment. It accomplishes this task first by introducing distinctions between body, matter, form, soul, and entelechy that are made in Plotinus’ arguments with the philosophies of materialism, simple hylomorphism, and Gnosticism. For Plotinus, body is distinguished from matter because a body is formed matter. Since form is inherently good in his philosophy, bodies—as formed matter—cannot be evil. Plotinus’ writings seek to harmonize Platonic and Aristotelian accounts of form as found in bodies. Aristotelianism is especially important for him when it comes to his account of the soul as an immanent form in the body, but he follows Plato in having an account of soul in body that is not restricted to this immanent form. He also follows Plato in believing that the beauty of form in bodies can potentially turn the soul towards the Good while simultaneously acknowledging that human embodiment in particular can distract a soul from contemplating the One. These distinctions found in Plotinus’s treatises are then used in the last part of the chapter in order to interpret Porphyry’s stories concerning his teacher’s disconcerted preoccupation with embodiment. It is argued that Plotinus refused to sit for a portrait not because he objected to the imitation of bodily things for their own sake, not because he repudiated art or even bodies per se.