For Plotinus, what really exists are the Platonic forms, so the true nature or form of things like justice, beauty, maybe numbers, things like that, and these he associates with the intellect because they're the objects of intellect, they are things that intellect can think about.
Sometimes clichés are true.
The importance of Plotinus is not only his own philosophical ideas which are quite interesting, but his historical impact as the founder of neo-Platonism which is the main philosophical tradition of late antiquity.
The forms are part of the mind, or really are the mind, they're just the contents of this universal night.
Plotinus is usually called the Founder of Neo Platonism and what that means is that in this philosophical circle, he was founding a kind of renewed attempt to understand the thought of Plato which however they were combining with the thought of other philosophers, including Aristotle, the Stoics and Pythagoreans and so on.
Before the 3rd century you're having several philosophical schools still as a going concern. You have not only the Platonists and the Aristotelians but you have Scepticism, you have Stoicism, you even have a little bit of Epicureanism. And what happens after Plotinus is that everybody becomes a Neo-Platonist. So if we then go forward to the Islamic world for example, Plotinus is immensely influential, and Neo-Platonism becomes at least one major component of mainstream Islamic philosophy as well.
If you think about for example, proportionality and beauty, things like that, these seem to be some kind of representations of a kind of unity.
The world around you is some kind of distraction at best, and evil at worst, and you should be turning away from it.
The body distracts your soul.
The soul must be distinct from intellect because even at its best, what the soul does when it's thinking, is it thinks linguistically, it thinks in a temporarily extended way, so it for example, might go through the steps of an argument chain, as if you were going through a syllogism and seeing that something followed from the premises, whereas intellect simply grasps the forms.
What the soul is doing is kind of walking through the forms, and so our experience of thinking isn't normally this kind of pure intuitive insight that intellect gets, and that intellect must get right, because it's always identical to its objects, it's always the same as the forms that it's thinking about.
Assuming there is an intellect, we're clearly not this universal intellect or we would know it. So that's one function of soul.
Soul puts the determination or forms or images of forms, into matter.
This is in a way the most important thing about soul is that it's a kind of principle which mediates between the universal intellect and the material world.
The forms in intellect are some kind of blueprint or model on which the physical world is based, and something needs to come along and shape the matter in accordance with that blueprint. What does that is soul.
Plotinus thought that the entire world has a single soul. He also thought that each animal and plant and of course human, has an individual soul.
In fact Plotinus thought not only that soul in general is eternal so that you always have soul, but he thought that each person's soul is eternal.
The body is some kind of image of you, it's kind of something that's just attached to your soul, some kind of outside principle, which doesn't really represent who you really are.
The intellect must be different from the soul.
