Tripping with Plotinus

M. D. Usher explores Moin Mir’s “Travels with Plotinus: A Journey in Search of Unity.”

By M. D. UsherSeptember 14, 2025

• Philosophy & Religion

• Memoir & Essay

IN 1960, A RESTIVE John Steinbeck, his best work behind him, took a road trip in search of an America he felt he no longer knew or understood. The result, Travels with Charley, published in 1962, purported to be a nonfiction report of conversations with the people he had met and of the places he had seen.

The titular Charley is a 10-year-old standard poodle with a lisp who answers only to French. Charley serves as both sidekick and sounding board for Steinbeck’s camper-van voyage of discovery, an affable Sancho Panza to the quixotic Don. To amplify the wry suggestion that he might be tilting at windmills in this adventure, Steinbeck christens his converted camper contraption “Rocinante,” after the Don’s trusty steed. Charley—“a mind-reading dog” and “born diplomat”—like Cervantes’s Sancho, is drawn with good humor and utter believability as he carries out his doggy business over the course of the monthslong trip.

An investigative journalist subsequently retraced Steinbeck’s steps and determined that the writer had invented a good deal of his material, including the itinerary, which is hardly surprising, seeing that Steinbeck was a novelist by trade and was interested in things more important than facts. Today we would classify Travels with Charley as creative nonfiction, a recognized genre all its own, with specific expectations and rules. One of those expectations, on any reckoning, is plausibility. As Aristotle once defined this natural law of narrative, a work of the imagination is never a matter merely of recounting actual events; rather, such a work captures “the kinds of things that might occur and are possible when probability and necessity are taken into account.” This is why, Aristotle says, imaginative literature—poetry—is so much more philosophical than history: it concerns tendencies and patterns in human behavior, what is likely to happen given certain conditions, not what did happen.

Moin Mir’s new book Travels with Plotinus: A Journey in Search of Unity takes as its unlikely sidekick and sounding board the Egyptian-born Platonist philosopher Plotinus (204–70 CE), author of the voluminous Enneads, whose singular pursuit of the metaphysical “One” informs Mir’s multicontinent search for the elusive unity supposedly undergirding the world. In 243 CE, Plotinus joined Roman Emperor Gordian III’s campaign to check Persian encroachment on Roman territories in the east. According to the philosopher’s ancient biographer Porphyry of Tyre, his student and literary executor, Plotinus, already pushing 40, enlisted in the campaign for the opportunity it presented of meeting with Persian and Indian sages, to deepen his understanding of monistic philosophy. As things turned out, the young Gordian was assassinated or otherwise dispatched on the field of battle at the Euphrates. The army turned tail and Plotinus never reached Persia, much less India, fleeing for his life to Antioch before eventually reaching Rome to found a school there.

This bit of historical fact (one of the precious few we possess about the life of Plotinus) poses a very practical problem for Mir, who must imagine—indeed, invent—the footsteps he seeks to retrace. And therein lies the main shortcoming of this otherwise congenial travelogue for contemplatives: so far as its sidekick (who is billed as its main attraction) is concerned, the book fails Aristotle’s plausibility test at every turn. Almost everything Mir says about Plotinus and his Greco-Roman context is cut from whole cloth. It would be uncharitable to this well-intentioned book to enumerate the many impossibilities, outright errors, and historical naivete it contains. Perhaps it is already uncharitable to say even that. A few examples, though, must suffice to suggest the nature of the problem, setting its extent to the side.

First, however, let me say that one of the book’s strengths lies in its forays into Islamic concepts of unity, like tawhid, explored at length during Mir’s travels in Muslim-dominant countries. But even here, no mention is made of major Islamic thinkers like al-Farabi (ca. 870–950) and Avicenna (ca. 980–1037) who were influenced by Plotinus directly through Neoplatonic treatises translated from Greek into Arabic and mistakenly transmitted as works of Aristotle. It seems a missed opportunity.

Another misstep concerns Sicily. Contrary to Mir’s confident, unqualified assertion, Plotinus never set foot on the island. Granted, he sent his student Porphyry there to recover from a nervous breakdown, but Plotinus himself was almost bedridden with illness at the time, dying two years later in Campania, the mainland region surrounding Naples, while Porphyry was still away. In fact, while Porphyry was staying in Sicily, at Lilybaeum, he requested, and Plotinus sent—from Rome—his final nine treatises for editing. Thus, the whole premise of Mir’s fourth chapter, his Sicilian Journey, is null and void. And so are puzzling inferences like this:

His hero, Plato, had sailed to Sicily three times in search of inspiration and so it is not surprising that Plotinus did the same. In Sicily he was constantly on the move, reading Plato and Aristotle, riding into tiny villages and speaking with simple farmers, writing in orchards, and observing worldly affairs from a distance.

Again, there is zero evidence that Plotinus ever went to Sicily, at any time, for any reason. Smaller details, too, will annoy discriminating readers. No, Plotinus would never have delivered philosophical discourses from the Rostra in the Roman Forum, which was a place for politics and litigation, not the Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. Plotinus’s “school” at Rome was an intimate salon of insiders that probably met at the house of a widow named Gemina, and his teaching technique, Porphyry says, utilized a Q and A format. And neither Gordian nor any other emperor or Roman military commander would have marched to the steps of the Pantheon to deliver a rousing harangue to the army before embarking on an expedition. Not only was the Pantheon never used for this purpose, but Roman legions were also never stationed at Rome. The forces Gordian assembled to attack the Persians were already deployed and encamped on the Danube and marched to Syria from there.

We have, moreover, no idea whether, in search of Upanishadic wisdom, “Plotinus would have walked up to a bare-chested hermit with a flowing snowy beard siting under a tree and gently asked him if he could become his disciple,” as Mir assures us, or whether “Plotinus would have been utterly bewildered by monkey sightings in the Indian jungles.” It seems more silly than idle to speculate with such matter-of-fact specificity. Relatedly, the credulity on display in reproducing as fact the Historia Augusta’s caricature of the Roman imperial usurper Maximinus Thrax as an eight-foot-tall giant who guzzled seven gallons of wine and gorged himself on 40 pounds of meat per day is truly remarkable.

Passages like these do not inspire confidence, failing to recreate a realistic picture of the ancient world in which Plotinus lived. The problem stems from inadequate research and the use of unreliable sources. Mir lists Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between the years 1776 and 1789, as his sole historical source for the Greco-Roman side of things (and the abridged Penguin edition at that), crediting it in his preface as “immensely helpful.” The only two sources consulted for Plotinus’s philosophy are outliers too (Lloyd Gerson’s translation of the Enneads excepted). This results in some fundamental misunderstandings of Plotinus’s thought. Not that Plotinus is easy to construe, mind you. But he is usually intelligible enough to know what he is not saying.

And yet the minutiae of Neoplatonic philosophy prove irrelevant to the task at hand as the instances of unity (and disunity) Mir perceives during his travels are mostly generalizing allegories with no close connection to Plotinian teaching. He often quotes a passage from the Enneads out of context and then misapplies it to his own frame narrative. Sometimes the misunderstandings are of Plotinus’s words, not his meaning. The term “art,” for example, which inspires a long disquisition on Cézanne, means simply “technique” or “method” in the passage Mir quotes, with no reference whatsoever to painting or any other form of fine art.

Although Mir is not a reliable guide to history or philosophy, Travels with Plotinus brims with a confessional sincerity often absent from contemporary writing. And as a travelogue, the book often shines. The best bits are descriptions of the author’s interactions with flesh-and-blood people in the present day—his guides, hosts, taxi drivers, and cheerful strangers. Memorable moments include his encounter with volunteers being lowered into gigantic bronze cauldrons to stir porridge at a soup kitchen for the poor near the shrine of Moinuddin Chishti, a medieval Sufi saint in Ajmer, Rajasthan; an evening meal and conversation in the desert at the home of Mir’s Bedouin guide in Saqqara, Egypt; his observation, from his rental car window at a kebab shop in Bursa, Turkey, of a caravan of fellow Muslim refugees—Syrians, Shiite Afghans, Rohingya from Myanmar, and Uyghurs from China; and a game of cricket with some Bangladeshi boys in Sicily. The book’s black-and-white photographs are exquisite too. Although no credits are given, most appear to have been taken by the author. If so, they show genuine talent.

“It was a great idea, but someone should have intervened before he got too far along.” If books had epitaphs, and not epigraphs, such would be a fitting verdict on Travels with Plotinus. It’s painful to chisel those words onto this page as I was really rooting for this book. Mir is clearly an earnest, compassionate observer of humanity. Perhaps most disappointing is the fact that Plotinus’s philosophy does in fact have much to offer our fractured, fractious world. During his lifetime, as Mir duly notes, Plotinus resisted having his portrait painted and never spoke about his background or family. The disinterest suggests that Plotinus would not have been a fan of the identity politics that drive us apart these days. In fact, in his most famous and widely read essay, “On Beauty” (Enneads 1.6, tr. Stephen MacKenna), he ingeniously turns the very idea of a portrait on its head:

Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smooths there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendour of virtue.

The idea of self-actualization as a process of subtraction of material, as one effects in sculpture, seems an aesthetic—indeed an ethos—for our own time, an age of excess and overreach, quite possibly on the brink of political collapse and environmental catastrophe. “Close your eyes,” Plotinus beckons to his readers across the ages. “Awaken another way of seeing and use that instead. Everyone has this capacity, but few put it to use.”

That is a trip with Plotinus that I, for one, would like to take.