Abstract

This dissertation argues that Plotinus' Ennead VI. 9. 3. describes the experience of anxiety in the face of the Nothing in a way that parallels Heidegger's accounts in Being and Time and What is Metaphysics?: it defines a condition of possibility for existence in the dynamic of aletheia, the dynamic of the simultaneous concealment and unconcealment of truth. This common matter of thinking, though articulated differently is found in the larger, shared context of human life described as restlessly active in the well defined roles determined by life's projects and the obsessions such projects demand. Further, both philosophers describe man as forgetful of an alternative way of life and link anxiety to remembering that this alternative is based in a reflective thinking, prior to reason, that philosophy traditionally promotes. ;Plotinus' description of the fallen soul's life in the sensate can be separated from its mystical setting and the exigencies of its metaphysical causes. My analysis of this life creates the three-fold division of the metaphysical, ontological-mystical, and the ontic-existential schemata in which the above convergences are detailed. Though no parallels are found in Heidegger for the metaphysical aspects of Plotinus' thought, I show, in the latter two schemata, that the two philosophies are held together by shared perception of experience and its structures. ;I proceed to show that Plotinus and Heidegger converge, describing of falling as obsessively active, restless, and forgetful of the possibility of transcendence. These parallels in the ontic-existential schema lead the way for a convergence in temporality as a foundational structure of existence. I argue further that Heidegger's two accounts of anxiety, viewed through the discussion of Truth in On the Essence of Truth, show that anxiety is anxious in the face of Ontological Truth. After demonstrating that Plotinus discusses a similar experience, I show that Plotinus' description and its setting in the mystical transport to the One bears the same ontic-existential and ontological-mystical marks as Heidegger's discussion of the attunement to Truth