The Willing of the Good

In Ennead VI 8 [39], Plotinus address the question of whether or not the first principle of all the Good or One, can be said to have free will (βούλησις). In this paper, I address the remarkable argument in chapter 7 according to which Plotinus holds that unless it is true that the Good had free will, it makes no sense whatsoever to say that we human being have free will. Although Plotinus devotes the first six chapters of the treatise to an analysis of human free will, it turns out that we need to establish the free will of the Good in order to establish our own.