‘First Thought’ and / or ‘Pre–Thinking’ (prôtê ennoia, pronoein, etc.) as Faculty of Transcendental Apprehension in Plotinus and Gnosticism.
This paper will present work in progress tracing the history of the curious conception of “pre–thinking” / “preconception” or “first thought” as both means of apprehending the transcendent principle and as that principle’s own ineffable, primordial self–apprehension. It occurs of course in Plotinus (pronoousa at V.3[49].10.43), in the Anonymous Commentary on the Parmenides (2.20), and Porphyry’s Sententiae (26.13). It is also also ubiquitous in Platonizing Sethianism (in both Zostrianos and Allogenes, where it also seems to be synonymous with the ultimate “primary revelation” of the Invisible Spirit). Prior to this point, it occurs (in the context of knowledge of God) in the Hermetica (where as Hadot noticed, it seems to be related to the Stoic notion of innate conceptions) and in the Neopythagorean Nicomachus, who enigmatically associates the emergent Indefinite Dyad with the protê ennoia (not in the context of mystical apprehension, only in that of ontogenesis). But this also seems to occur in earlier Gnostic systems; there are suggestions of this concept in Irenaeus’ account of Ptolemy’s Valentinianism, and, most interestingly, in the “Pronoia” figure of the Apocryphon of John, and in the eponymous Trimorphic Protennoia, where the “first thought” is, as in Plotinus, associated with mystical apprehension as well as ontogenesis.

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