This treatise is listed as first in Porphyry’s chronological ordering of the Enneads. Although the work has frequently served as a relatively accessible introduction to Plotinus’ difficult systematic thought, there is no reason to believe that Plotinus intended it as such. The work focuses on the nature of physical beauty and its relation to moral and intellectual beauty. It relies heavily on Plotinus’ understanding of Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus. Treatise 5.8 (31), ‘On the Intelligible Beauty’, provides a companion argument. One central theme of this work is the inseparability of aesthetic and ethical considerations. Beauty is here presented as hierarchically ordered manifestations of a property of intelligible reality, namely, its attractiveness to us.
§1. What is the nature of beauty and what causes things to be beautiful? Criticism of the Stoic view.
§2. Something is beautiful owing to the presence of intelligible form.
§3. The beauty of shapes, colours, and sounds and the means to their recognition.
§4. The beauty of virtue.
§5. The relation between the beauty of virtue and the intelligibles.
§6. The process of purification leading to the recognition of intelligible beauty.
§7. The ascent to the Good.
§8. The method of ascent.
§9. The development of interior sight through the practice of virtue.