The present volume is a study of a recondite aspect of Plotinus’ philosophy: his use of tropes of secrecy and silence in his discussions of the nature of his ineffable first principle. Recondite and perhaps obscure, but not unimportant: because Plotinus tells us that the One cannot be spoken of – writes that the One cannot be written about – the tropes of secrecy and silence cast a kind of shadowy paradox over his entire project. Plotinus tells us many things about the One, only to contradict them later, often denying that he can tell us anything about it at all, and if one were to arrive at a clear-cut conclusion from all this, it ought to be that Plotinus, by his own admission, should not be writing. The One, for Plotinus, is utterly ‘silent’ and the philosopher should seek to emulate this silence. And yet, were Plotinus to have kept silent, there would be no one to tell us of the need to keep silent about the One.

It has been noted that reading apophatic language or ‘negative theology’ can be a fairly agonising process, and any work which has apophasis as its theme tends to be agonising in direct proportion to its fidelity to the subject matter. The present work, it is hoped, treads an elusive middle path between self-negating obscurity and facile ‘explanation’ which enables some new insights into Plotinus’ practice of written silence but is also somewhat readable. The goal has been to explore and describe some of Plotinus’ techniques of written silence in an intelligible way without straying too far from the intrinsically mind-bending difficulty of the subject matter. The author craves the reader's indulgence for the many points at which the text falls too far in one direction or the other.

This book also treads a line between over-specialisation and general treatment. The discussion inevitably covers quite a bit of ground which has been treated elsewhere, in the interests of giving a reasonably complete overview of the subject matter. Plotinian specialists may thus find themselves frustrated by a certain amount of well-discussed material being covered (not the three primary hypostases again!), while there is still a danger that novices will find themselves adrift in a strange thought-world.