multiplicity that it contains in it. Ousia—beingness—will be a derived unity because it gathers together multiplicity. By implication, substantial being cannot in any way be predicated of the one. The henic function later will be ultimate without being subsumptive. For it to be otherwise, the one would have to rule over beings. Yet, as will be seen concerning the arché, nothing could be more foreign to it, since it is itself foreign to beingness.
Faced with the distance opening up between intelligible foundation and ultimate condition, one may be tempted to give up. If the ultimate referent puts attributive logic out of play—what more can one say? To say something, for us, means to modify a grammatical subject by a predicate. Once predication is declared to be inoperative, what remains to be done but fall silent, or break into incantations?
What remains is to understand the one otherwise than by entitative attribution. Now, and this is the sense of what will follow, the other manner of thinking by which Plotinus goes beyond ousiology can best be read when he puts the one to work: as a singular event of union. To do justice to the affinity of the hen with the verb “to be,” one must understand the one as union (hênosis, for ex. En. VI, 1 [42], 26, 27), and union not just as epekeina, going beyond beingness, but also as hapax: occurring in an event.
It is the verbal sense of on—and, more indirectly yet more decisively still for the question of the law, of hen—which relegates all the substantial notions of the one to the rank of derivatives: beingness first, life next.
The full ontological difference, embracing both what served as (metaphysical) foundation and its (phenomenological) condition of possibility, thus includes three terms.21 In the vocabulary of Plotinus they are “beings, substance, one.” In the vocabulary of his fourth century disciple, they are “beings, beingness, to-be.” In these descriptions, the third term is to be understood as a verb: uniting, being, then, following Heidegger, coming-to-presence, phenomenalizing, self-manifesting.
I add these words from the Heideggerian lexicon especially to dispel a misunderstanding. “Union” actually covers a vaster—and on the whole more modest—field of occurrence in Plotinus than does ecstasis. One says that, if he has an “ethics”, it includes three activities: purification at the level of the Soul, being illumined at the level of the Intelligence, and unity in the one. But in the phenomenological sense, unity takes place wherever beings enter into a constellation. “Uniting,” “being,” “coming to presence,” “phenomenalizing,” “self-manifesting,” to which one may add “making a context,” “making a world”—these verbs thus describe one an other. We must recall this semantic network so as not to be mistaken about the con nection made here between the one (as union) and being.
The reading hypothesis according to which the Plotinian one is understood in its otherness will have to be verified textually as well as systematically by placing it together with being in the verbal and thus temporal sense—this hypothesis.
The one as event
The one is to be understood neither as a being (it is mè on) nor as beingness (it is epekeina tès ousias), but as being (to einai). These distinctions allow us to discard an alternative that, in one form or another, preoccupied the Neoplatonists as well