Radical Apophasis. Todd Ohara

Although I cannot engage the fine details of Plotinus’s view here, it will be beneficial to note a couple of the following conceptual and interpretive ambiguities. First, Plotinus’s view implies a distinction between something like an empirical, embodied self/soul versus a real, non-embodied self/soul which is ultimately rooted in the One. Second, is the movement of simplification that culminates in a mystical union with the One merely regressive, in that one sheds the inessential and arrives at the essential and real? What then would be that which is essential and real with respect to the self/soul: the individual soul or its being grounded in the One?