Itself...

All turns on the identity.

The intellectual object is itself an activity, not a mere potentiality, since then it would not be intellectual; it is not lifeless; nor are the life and intellection brought into it as into something naturally devoid of them, some stone or other dead matter;
no, the intellectual object is essentially existent, the primal reality.

As an active force, the first activity, it must be, also itself, the noblest intellection, intellection possessing real being since it is entirely true; and such an intellection, primal and primally existent, can be no other than the primal principle of Intellection:

for that primal principle is no potentiality and cannot be an agent distinct from its act and thus, once more, possessing its essential being as a mere potentiality. As an act—and one whose very being is an act—it must be undistinguishably identical with its act:

but Being and the Intellectual object are also identical with that act; therefore the Intellectual-Principle, its exercise of intellection, and the object of intellection all are identical.

Given its intellection identical with intellectual object and the object identical with the Principle itself, it cannot but have self-knowledge:

its intellection operates by the intellectual act, which is itself, upon the intellectual object, which similarly is itself.

It possesses self-knowing, thus, on every count; the act is itself; and the object, seen in that act-self, is itself.



--Plotinus, Enneads, V. 3. 5.