The Enneads of Plotinus: THE SIXTH ENNEAD: FIRST TRACTATE: Section 20

This is a passage of ancient Greek philosophical prose — almost certainly from Plotinus's *Enneads* — working within the Aristotelian tradition of the Categories. It investigates the metaphysical relationship between Action and Passion (activity and passivity) as modes of motion and change, asking whether a single motion can simultaneously belong to both categories or must be assigned to one. The central puzzle is whether an alteration — rubbing, imparting whiteness, conferring beauty, teaching — is properly classified as Action (proceeding from an agent) or Passion (received by a patient), and whether these are in fact two distinct motions or one motion viewed from two angles. The author proposes that a single motion is Action insofar as it proceeds from an object and Passion insofar as it bears upon another, without thereby becoming two separate events. Concrete examples drive the argument: rubbing involves counter-rubbing; a swan may be white from birth or grow white; copper gains beauty as tin deteriorates; a learner receives an Act that becomes their own. The learner example is particularly distinctive — the author denies that learning is analogous to being struck, insisting it involves genuine acts of apprehension and recognition on the learner's part, complicating the passive/active binary. The perspective is notably Plotinian in pressing Aristotelian category-theory toward questions about how a simple, unified Act can be both given and received without fracturing into duality — a concern with ontological simplicity characteristic of Neoplatonism.

The Enneads of Plotinus: THE SIXTH ENNEAD: FIRST TRACTATE: Section 20

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