/lit/ - Literature

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Platonists believe that the soul is endowed with reason and as such it can just innately gather information about the world. This isn't like inference under a materialist system wherein the brain can process information and find ever more interlinkings between an otherwise set amount of sensory data. Rather, because the soul can move up the ontological hierarchy it can actually gain information about the world that it is embedded in (and it does so via religion, so it has to go up a chain of Gods to eventually reach the Forms and Nous and Sophia and so on). This is because things lower on the ontological hierarchy are "in" things higher up (so matter is inside bodies which is inside a variety of Gods who are inside Zeus who is inside...and so on... which is inside Being). To put it in modern parlance he's basically arguing that you can engage in astral projection by thinking to gain new knowledge.

Also Plotinus, like his teacher Ammonius Saccas, was actually a very devoutly religious man in the "sacrifice cows to Zeus and wrestle for Poseidon" sense and was deeply involved in the local Platonic religious institutions of his day and locale. Plotinus himself was basically a lesser prophet in the religious tradition founded by Ammonius Saccas who was himself seen as a prophet figure by the laymen of the area (he was a "theodidaktos", that is "god-taught", which is a term that the Greeks used to refer to prophets and holymen who founded religious organizations and cults). All of this is to say that Plotinus did actually claim that he was given knowledge by the Gods, he was just claiming that you can also gain that same knowledge by just astrally projecting yourself into the aether and chatting it up with Aphrodite yourself (technically, Platonism rejects "revelation" as a distinct epistemological class that only Jews can access, it's just that "prophets" are people who have access to certain knowledge more easily than others do).