ABSTRACT
Does Plotinus have an aesthetics and/or a philosophy of art? If we start from a naïve conception of aesthetics as a philosophical discourse on beauty – its nature, our experience of it, our interest in it, our judgements concerning it – the Enneads provide ample evidence for an a rmative answer. Plotinus discusses beauty in many contexts, including two treatises explicitly dedicated to it, On Beauty, I.6[1], and On Intelligible Beauty, V.8[31], and he does so because he considers beauty an essential characteristic of reality and our experience.1 e importance Plotinus attaches to beauty is indicated by the wide extension he attributes to the term: every object of human experience, including natural things, animals and human beings, technological products, works of art, moral and cognitive practices and their results, can be appreciated from the point of view of beauty.2 is usage re ects common ancient Greek linguistic habits, but even the proper philosophical objects of Plotinus’ thought (the One, the Intellect, the Soul, or the universe as a whole), which obviously transcend ordinary experience, are approached systematically through their relation to beauty and deployed to provide a metaphysical account of the presence of beauty in the sensible world.3
