  This conflicted state or duality of personhood is explained by the nature of cognition, including rational desire.  Rational agents are capable of being in embodied states, including states of desire, and of being cognitively aware that they are in these states.  So, a person can be hungry or tired and be cognitively aware that he is in this state, where cognitive awareness includes being able to conceptualize that state.  But Plotinus holds that the state of cognitive awareness more closely identifies the person than does the non-cognitive state.  He does so on the grounds that all embodied or enmattered intelligible reality is an image of its eternal paradigm in Intellect.  In fact, the highest part of the person, one’s own intellect, the faculty in virtue of which persons can engage in non-discursive thinking, is eternally ‘undescended’.  It is eternally doing what Intellect is doing.  And the reason for holding this is, based on Plotinus’ interpretation of Plato’s Recollection Argument in Phaedo (72e-78b), that our ability to engage successfully in embodied cognition depends on our having access to Forms.  But the only access to Forms is eternal access by cognitive identification with them.  Otherwise, we would have only images or representations of the Forms.  So, we must now be cognitively identical with them if we are going also to use these Forms as a way of classifying and judging things in the sensible world.