Aspects of right and justice in the work of Plotinus

Abstract

The main purpose of this study is to emphasise the ethical and anthropo­logical dimension of the concept of right (δίκαιο) and justice (δικαιοσύνη) into the philosophical system that Plotinus introduces. According to the leader of the neoplatonic School, the values of right and justice are activated in all sub­stances of soul - Soul, universal hypostasis of soul, individual soul - in which the existence believes and assorts. According to this discrimination, Soul, thing-in-herself as a pure constitution, possesses thinkably the virtue of right and justice. The universal soul, on the other hand, as a bodiless hypostasis, possesses virtues with a thinkable as well as a seamy way at the same time, and so right and justice. At the individual souls, the above mentioned virtues exist in an inferior way and they are activated mainly due to the individual mind. Additionally, they are taken in a double anticipation: a. each virtue that exists in the individual souls - under the terms of the mundanely justice - approaches her corresponding superior without any adscititious interference. b. More specific, each right part of any individual soul comes closer to every­thing that corresponds to it. The above, of course, have a meaning under the preconditions that the authentic origin of right as well as of justice occurs in the greater of Mind, where the procedures of evolution and reduction have no place. All these that are presented here, are placed among the general inten­tion of Plotinus to define precisely the metaphysic versus the physic world, despite the correspondences which recognizes that exist between them.