In the end Protagoras won: in our world man is more than ever the measure of all things, as the sophist of the fifth century BC taught. Impossible today to talk about beauty, beautiful for whom? A canon is now equivalent to an intolerable fascist constraint, in the cosmic sense of the word. The idea of unity has given the podium of value par excellence to that of multiplicity, sanctioning a colossal reversal of perspective, the end of a millenary order. The so-called strong thought, on the other hand, in the last centuries has often been hammered with good reason: the ancient columns, or at least those that were considered such, seemed to no longer hold up. This is to say that in the era of light nets a champion of love for the One like Plotinus, for whom good (form) and not man, is the measure of all things, is doubly difficult.
In this salmon enterprise, Davide Susanetti, a Greek scholar of the University of Padua, comes to our aid, who has just sent to the press “Plotinus, the beauty, the soul, the one” (Feltrinelli, pp. 304) a streamlined anthology of the Enneads which collects the two books on Beauty and the one on Good or one. The help starts with the beautiful translation that allows a more enjoyable reading of the text than the canonical versions. Susanetti, as in her previous works in search of a perspective to revitalize the ancient word, dedicates in the introduction some dense pages on the mystical-experiential dynamics of Neoplatonism.
The contemplative ascent from the many to the one has its model in the Platonic Symposium and some relatively recent studies (such as that of Christina Schefer on the influence of mystery rites in Plato) have tried to further shorten the distance between the founder of the Academy and the Neoplatonists six centuries later re-evaluating Platonic religiosity. At the end of the path that, through worldly beauty, leads to ultra-worldly beauty and culminates in the One, there is no reasoning for Plotinus but an ultimate experience. It is this experience that is the foundation of philosophy and not vice versa, exactly as it happens in yoga. It is the reason why in the oriental traditions it is so important, beyond the philosophical and practical texts, the chain of teachers, of gurus, of those who testify to the truth and embody it. In this sense, truth is an existential modality that cannot be sold or bought, contradictory beyond contradictions (coincidentia oppositorum) and certainly not a theory. It is essentially incommunicable, it is spoken of only by negation (the famous “neti neti”, neither this nor that of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the learned ignorance of Cusano).
Plotinus insists that the culmination of knowledge and being, that is, the one, the source of all multiplicity is “a marvelous and strange thing that precedes the intellect” and which nevertheless is not “a” being (otherwise it would constitute a an attribute that can be referred to something else. ”An observation that seems an impossible gloss to Heidegger’s critique of Western metaphysics.