Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to elucidate the concept "life" in Plotinus' Enneads. Such a study is necessitated by the dearth of quality research on zoe and by the significant extent to which this notion is bound up with all levels of reality in Plotinus' system. Thus to understand "life" is to understand better what "to be real" means as well as to appreciate more fully Plotinus' entire world view. ;Analysis of the first key text, IV, 7 , 8$\sp5$-11, provides one of the study's central insights into Plotinus' view of life: self- kinesis. Since kinesis is primarily cognition, self- kinesis is self-cognition. To be alive, then, is to be efficiently causing one's own cognition. ;The second key text, VI, 9 , 9, indicates that Nous is perfect life because Its self- kinesis which is intellection is Its very nature and essential act. Its self-originated and loving movement from active dynamis to energei marks the generation of Its content: the Forms, which themselves are also intellects and lives. ;The third key text, III, 8 , 8; 10, makes obvious that each level of reality below the One is real because it is Its logos. Soul is fully animated when it contemplatively turns back to the multiplicity of intelligibles in Nous. Life on the human level may be expressed in terms of its two extreme manifestations: the serious man, whose life involves contemplation, and the man of action, whose life consists of external activity. ;The fourth key text, VI, 7 , 13; 15; 17; 18, further explains life in terms of the Platonic megista gene . ;Finally, the fifth key text, I, 4 , 3-4, explains that eudaimonia, the good state of one's inner reality, is identical with the attainment of the One by those beings which have life superabundantly . ;From this study emerge several insights, principal among them that life in itself is primarily a self- kinesis which is cognition and that life in its most perfect state is sheer active power for intellection that is identified with the prohodos of Nous