17.
[The text to which Camus is referring here is Bréhier, La Philosophie de Plotin.—Trans.] 38. Ennead IV, 3, 4.

EnneadIV, 3, 8: “Elle est dans tout le corps qu’elle pénètre, par exemple dans chaque partie différente d’une plante, même dans une bouture qu’on en a séparée: elle est à la fois dans la première plante et dans celle qui en est issue par bouture; car le corps de l’ensemble est un corps unique et elle est partout en lui comme un corps unique.” [Plotinus Ennead 4.3.8, trans. Armstrong, 61.—Trans.] 40. Ennead IV, 4, 3.
[Though Camus’ reference implies that this text is taken from the Enneads, it actually appears to be from Bréhier, La Philosophie de Plotin.—Trans.]

Ennead IV, 3, 8: “L’une est unie actuellement aux intelligibles, une autre n’y est unie que par la connaissance, une autre par le désir; chacune, contemplant des choses différentes, est et devient ce qu’elle contemple.”
[Plotinus Enneads 4.3.8, trans. Armstrong, 57.—Trans.]

individual souls. Plunging into darkness little by little, these souls sink into matter. Here, finally, Plotinian thought is not definitive. For Plotinus, the cause of this fall of the soul is both audacity42 and blindness.43The latter interpretation would seem more orthodox. The soul is reflected in matter, and taking this reflecting for itself, it descends to become united with it, when it should, on the contrary, elevate itself in order to return to its origins.

3) In short, the Plotinian conception of the human soul is closely tied to all that has been said above. The principle that regulates it is this: it is only by its inferior part that the human soul participates in the body. But there is always in it an intelligence directed toward the intelligible world.44But constrained to pilot the weak body through the traps of sensible nature, it fails and forgets little by little its princely origin. From this principle follows the whole of Plotinus’s psychology. First, if the diversity of souls imitates that of the intelligible world,45 their function is purely cosmic, and psychology is still physics. Another immediate consequence is that all knowledge that is not intuitive and contemplative participates in the conditions of corporeal life; reasoned thought is only a weakening of intuitive thought. Conscience is an accident and an obsession. Nothing that constitutes it can belong to the superior part of the soul. Memory itself indicates an attachment to sensible forms. The soul, having arrived at the contemplation of intelligibles, will have no memory of its past lives.46 In this way, there appears a conception of the self, at first sight paradoxical, but very fertile: “There is no point by which it might be able to determine its limits, so as to say: up to that point it is me.”47We see here the connection between this understanding of the soul and the doctrine of conversion. It is through meditation that the soul forgets practical necessities. By closing its eyes, the sight of Intelligence will be born in it. The desire for God will animate it. It will remount the scale of things and beings. And it will recover the procession through a movement of love—which is conversion.

42. Ennead IV, 3, 12; IV, 3, 17; IV, 8, 5.
43. Enneads IV, 3, 13; VI, 7, 7; V, 2, 7.
44. Ennead III, 12, 4, 5.
45. Ennead IV, 3, 14.
46. Ennead IV, 1, 1, 10.
47. Ennead IV, 3, 18 [sic]: “Il n’y a pas un point où on puisse fixer ses propres limites, de manière à dire: Jusque-là c’est moi.”*

Here are noted, therefore, as briefly as possible, the various stages of the procession. But everything here is not equally satisfying. We have not given an exact reflection of Plotinus’s thought. There is no movement in it. We will ask that conversion restore this smooth continuity that leads the soul to the One.

B. Conversion or the Path of Ecstasy

It is in the Soul that is found the principle of conversion. The soul is the desire for God and a nostalgia for a lost homeland. Life without God is only a shadow of life. All beings are striving toward God on the ladder of Ideas and attempt to return to the course of the procession. Matter alone, that great indigent, that positive nothing, does not aspire to God, and in it resides the principle of evil: “It is only left for it to be potentially a sort of weak and dim phantasm: so it is actually a falsity: this is the same as that which is truly a falsity’; this is ‘what is really unreal.’”48 But, creator of mirages, it really exists only in the blindness of souls. The principle of conversion finds its source in the Soul and not in matter. But what is this principle? It is the desire for God. And through this desire is revealed the religious aspect of the Hypostases, considered as stages in the Soul’s journey in the metaphysical region. “[It has the good sense, then, to remain in itself, and would not come to be in another; but] those other things hang from it as if by their longing they had found where it is. And this is ‘Love camping on the doorstep’, even coming from outside into the presence of beauty and longing for it, and satisfied if in this way he can have a part in it.”49

48. Ennead II, 5, 5: “C’est un fantôme fragile et effacé qui ne peut recevoir une forme. Si elle est en acte, elle est un fantôme en acte, un mensonge en act, c’est-à-dire un mensonge véritable, autant dire le réel non-être.”
    [Plotinus Ennead 2.5.5, trans. Armstrong, 169. Unlike the English translation, Camus’ French version of this text does not indicate that the final two phrases of the last sentence are actually quotations from Plato’s Republic (382a) and Sophist (254d), respectively.— Trans.]
49. EnneadVI, 5, 10: “Le désir nous fait découvrir l’être universel; ce désir est l’Éros qui veille à la porte de son aimé; toujours dehors et toujours passionné, il se contente d’y participer autant qu’il le peut.”
    [Plotinus Ennead 6.5.10, trans. Armstrong, 349. Again, the English translation of this text, unlike Camus’, indicates a quotation from Plato Symposium 203c–d.—Trans.]

Desire is in this way frustrated by the world. “So we must ‘fly from here’ and ‘separate’ ourselves from what has been added to us.”50To desire is to love what is absent from us. It is to want to be and to want to be one, because to search for an identity is in a sense to be unified. Beauty itself does not suffice.51
Thus, virtue is no more than a state that one must pass through in order to reach God.52
And nothing is desirable except through the One that colors it.53 The Soul in its wild desire is not content even with Intelligence. “But when a kind of warmth from thence comes upon it, it gains its strength and wakes and is truly winged; and though it is moved with passion for that which lies close by it, yet all the same it rises higher, to something greater which it seems to remember. And as long as there is anything higher than that which is present to it, it naturally goes on upwards, lifted by the giver of its love. It rises above Intellect, but cannot run on above the Good, for there is nothing above. But if it remains in Intellect it sees fair and noble things, but has not yet quite grasped what it is seeking. It is as if it was in the presence of a face which is certainly beautiful, but cannot catch the eye because it has no grace playing upon its beauty.”54

b) This desire of the Soul contaminates Intelligence. To know is still to desire. To say that Intelligence has need of nothing is to say only that it is independent of the sensible world. But it is turned toward the beyond. It has need of the One. “[Intelligence] lived toward it and depended on it and turned to it.”55 Intelligence lacks something, and

50. Ennead II, 3, 9: “Et c’est pourquoi il faut nous enfuir d’ici et nous séparer de ce qui s’est ajouté à nous-même.”
    [Plotinus Ennead 2.3.9, trans. Armstrong, 75. Again the passage includes references to
    Plato: Theaetetus 176a–b and Phaedo 67c.—Trans.]
51. Ennead V, 5, 12.
52. Enneads I, 2, 7; VI, 3, 16; VI, 9, 7.
53. Ennead VI, 7, 22.
54. EnneadVI, 7, 22. Arnou’s translation, Le Désir de Dieu dans la philosophie de Plotin, p. 82: “Mais dès que descend sur elle la douce chaleur de là-haut, elle reprend des forces, elle s’éveille en vérité, elle ouvre ses ailes; et tant qu’il y a quelque chose au-dessus de ce qui lui est présent, elle monte naturallement plus haut, attirée par celui qui donne l’amour; elle dépasse l’Intelligence mais ne peut aller au-delà du Bien, car il n’y a rien audelà. Si elle s’arrête à l’Intelligence, elle voit certes de belles et nobles choses mais elle n’a pas encore tout à fait ce qu’elle cherche. Tel un visage qui, malgré sa beauté ne peut attirer les regards, car il lui manque le reflet de grâce qui est la fleur de la beauté.”
    [Plotinus Ennead 6.7.22, trans. Armstrong, 157.—Trans.]
55. Ennead VI, 7, 16: “Elle vit orientée vers lui; elle se suspend à lui; elle se tourne vers lui.”
    [Plotinus Ennead 6.7.16, ibid., 139.—Trans.]

this is its unity. There is in Intelligence an indigence in relation to itself and from which it suffers and stirs. Plotinian Intelligence is not mathematical Reason. Moreover, as we have seen, it is through a return to and contemplation of the One that Intelligence receives its form. This march toward God is for it, therefore, fundamental. And the intelligible world as a whole moves toward the One.

c)