Selbst

This chapter is devoted to the notion of the ‘self’. The traditional Platonic answer to the question of what ‘we’ truly are has been ‘the (rational) soul’. Plotinus, however, develops a complex theory in which the term ‘we’ can not only refer to the soul or the rational soul, but to the complete human being. For Plotinus, what ‘we’ are is not only a matter of an objectivizing definition of human beings, but of subjective consciousness. The first part of the chapter presents the discussion in scholarship about Plotinus’ ‘theory of self’. The second part analyzes the terminology Plotinus uses to express his complex anthropology and theory of the soul (we/hêmeis, self/autos, etc.). The last part discusses in what sense this novel theory of human consciousness can be productively described as a theory of ‘self’.