Q. I have a question about Ennead I.2, On Virtues. Plotinus argues that the higher virtues are not the same as the civic virtues; though he considers the civic virtues important to establish for the spiritual quest. And Plotinus further states that the ultimate is unlike its emanations (I'm paraphrasing). To understand this I use metaphors like a blueprint for a house. The actual blueprint is not like the house: you can sleep in the house or eat in it, etc. The two, in that sense, are not alike. And absent an intelligence that can interpret the blueprint the house would not come into existence. It is, then, the intelligence as such that transforms the higher virtues (and the forms?) into material actualities. There is a relationship between higher, purificatory, virtues and civic virtues; but not one of likeness. You could say there is a causal relationship, as long as one is not talking about causation in a physical sense.
Another metaphor I think of is music on a page. The page with its notes and additional apparatus are not the music when it is performed. The music is sonic, the music on the page is a visual and material object. Yet the music generates, is the occasion for, the sonic display. And it can be the occasion for numerous such displays and these displays may differ (different singers, different instruments, etc.).
Does this kind of metaphorical understanding fit with your own?
Thanks
A. I have some reservations, frankly, about the metaphors that you ask about for the relationship between the paradigmatic virtues in the noetic realm and the constitutional or civic virtues in this world, and between the Forms and the things here participating in them. I'm afraid that the metaphors of the blueprint and the music score make it sound like the paradigmatic forms are less actual and less fully developed than the sensory manifestations and are static in the sense of not being alive and needing something else to make them alive and real and actualized. Actually, just the opposite is the case. The Forms, be they those of the virtues or any other, are incomparably more real, alive, vivid, actual, dynamic--though in another sense eternal and never changing--than the phantom manifestations participating in or manifesting them to a degree in this world. They live their own eternal life, so to speak, unchanging yet dynamic, in mutual self-definition with the Divine Mind and the other Forms, in a luminous noetic realm sufficient to itself depending only on the higher hypostasis of the Good, independent of and not needing and unconcerned with the lower emanation level of soul and the sensory spatio-temporal world. The phantom reflections of them here are really more dead and dependent and parasitic on the noetic Forms for such half-existence as they have. They only seem so real and usable and actualized to us because we are stuck here and are really only phantoms ourselves as long as we remain in this state as souls stuck transmigrating in individuated sensate existence in space-time. Perhaps, a more effective metaphor or analogy along the lines of those you have suggested would be that of a movie being projected out on a screen. The whole movie is always there in concentrated form all at once and is really there. The projected pictures, illuminated through the light of the Good behind, are unfolded seeming to have a more actualized but fleeting and very impermanent existence to the deceived viewers and at any moment present some but not all of the features possessed in constant and compressed form all the time in the movie reel itself.
Another metaphor might be that of someone seeing actual real objects while awake and seeing them more or less as they actually are, and then going to sleep and dreaming where impressions derived from the waking vision appear in various more or less distorted form in the dreams where they are taken now as real things.
Specifically regarding the virtues, the paradigmatic noetic virtues in nous indeed aren't in the same way as the practical virtues here. It is hard for me to put into words, but they exist there as like self-sufficient, independent yet mutually dependent and reflecting in the architecture of the noetic realm, concentrated, luminous jewel-Ideas of each virtue. Then, when souls at this lower level are practicing the practical virtues here, they are sort of organizing and ordering themselves and things and actions here so that states of soul and actions will occur that in unfolding in space-time will try in a way to reconstruct or reproduce over space and time as best as they can a reflection and approximation of what the actual paradigmatic virtue is in itself in the noetic realm, and these are what are called the constitutional/civic/practical virtues. Of course, most people, almost all, are only groping in the dark and guessing at the real virtues, approximating from other approximations and imperfect reflections in this world to arrive at the approximation of the virtue. The rare (to say the least!) philosophos/Platonist contemplative ascetic will view the actual paradigmatic virtue/Form in the noetic realm in contemplation and try to remember or look to that directly in practicing the practical virtues here and trying to conform them to the Idea itself. Everyone, of course, needs to try their best to practice and know how to practice the practical/civic virtues, including contemplative ascetics, but then the contemplative ascetics further practice the 'purificatory' virtues that involve turning away from this world and renouncing it entirely as best they can and are practices better modeled after their divine noetic paradigms that not only order the soul and actions to try to reflect those paradigms while remaining entirely of and in this world like the civic virtues and those of ordinary people, but order them to turn them from this world back to the noetic realm. Finally, they can, at least in contemplation practice, try to just rest in the contemplation of and union with the divine noetic paradigms themselves. (I like this quote I recently saw from a late 11th/early 12th c. Latin Christian monk Guibert of Nogent who apparently defined vices as "motions of the mind toward earthly things".)
Anyway, I hope this answers your question at least somewhat.
