/lit/ - Literature

>>18364585
Soul and Being are both omnipresent, and not just spatially or temporally. The One of the 'Soul Hypostasis' is One and Many; people really struggle with this thought, Soul's manyness is its very simplicity (when talking about Plotinus system). To be blunt and shallow and present myself to petty retorts: an analogy is a "hive mind", a mind of minds; but there's no subservience of will in soul. This all necessitates understanding Freedom and Good, and true slavery; "the virtuous knows no master".
Soul is One the way an army with unbreakable morale is one, but the general is 'the Whole' of the army, "for a whole is greater than the sum of its parts". In a way, every true 'sage' is the crown of Soul; quantity has no meaning here.
If you contemplate true empathy you might get closer, true empathy is the pain of another soul within your own soul, two experiences of a single pain, but there's only one wound and your pain is not illusory nor imitation—so what is it?

>In fact, we have this even though it transcends us. But we have it either collectively or individually, or both collectively and individually. We have it collectively, because it is indivisible and one, that is, every-where identical; we have it individually, because each one of us has the whole of it in the primary part of the soul. We have the Forms, then, in two ways: in the soul, in a way, unfolded and separated, but in Intellect ‘all together’.

And perhaps the most awesome statement by Plotinus:

>Moreover, the primary, secondary, and tertiary things are determined by rank, power, and differentiae, not by their places, for nothing prevents different things from being all together, such as soul and intellect and all sciences, both the major and the derived ones. For the eye sees the colour, and the nose smells the scent, and the other senses sense their different objects that all come from the identical thing, although they are all together, and not separate from each other.
>Does this, then, make the intelligible world variegated and multiple? In fact, the variegated is simple, too, and the many are one, for an expressed principle is one and many, and all being is one. For that which is different is in it itself, and Difference belongs to it, since it certainly could not belong to non-being. And being belongs to unity, which is not separated from being, and wherever being may be, its unity is present to it, and the One-Being is again in itself, for it is possible to be present while being separate.

>>16421144
>>16421193
§5.2.2. There is a procession, then, from the beginning to the end, in which each thing is left in its own place for eternity, and each thing that is generated takes a new inferior rank.9 And yet each one becomes identical with that upon which it follows, so long as it connects itself with it. Whenever, then, Soul comes to be in a plant, it is like another part of it, a part that is most audacious and unintelligent, having proceeded such a long way. And, then, whenever Soul comes to be in a nonrational animal, the power of sense-perception becomes dominant and brings it there. But whenever Soul comes to be in a human being, Soul’s motion is either entirely in the faculty of calculative reasoning, or it comes from Intellect, since an individual soul has its own intellect and a will of its own to think or, generally, to move itself.
Let us actually look into the matter more closely. Whenever someone cuts off the shoots or the tops of plants, where has the soul of the plant gone? Where did it come from? For it has not separated itself spatially. It is, then, in its source. But if you were to cut off or burn the root, where would the soul in the root go? In the soul, for it has not changed place. It could be in the identical place or in another, if it ran back to its source. Otherwise, it is in another plant, for it is not constrained to a place. If it were to go back to its source, it would go back to the power preceding it. But where is that power? In the power preceding it. That takes us back to Intellect, not to a place, for Soul was not in place. And Intellect is even more not in place than Soul, which is not in place either. It is, then, nowhere but in that which is nowhere, and at the same time it is also everywhere. If it proceeded in this way to the upper region, it would pause in the middle before arriving altogether at the highest, and it has a life in a middle position and has rested in that part of itself. These things are and are not the One; they are the One, because they are from it; they are not the One, because it endowed them with what they have while remaining in itself. It is, then, in a way like a long life stretched far out, each of its parts different from those that come next, though it makes a continuous whole. The parts are distinguished by being different one from the other, not because the first is destroyed with the appearance of the second. What, then, is the soul that comes to be in plants? Does it generate nothing? In fact, it generates in that in which it is. We should examine how by taking another starting point.

>>16362048
Another indication of the influence of this part of the Republic on the Plotinian passage is the suggestion that the soul, united to the One, may wish to remain above, a suggestion which has its counterpart in the reluctance of Plato's philosophers to involve themselves in politics (Rep. 519c–520a).
But why then, in Plotinus’ view, would the soul wish to leave its union with the One, descending to political matters, communicating its union to others, as Minos legislated in the image of the divine? Plotinus merely says that the divine contact so ‘fills’ (πληρούμɛνος) Minos that he legislates (7, 25–6). This suggestion of fecundity, of an abundance associated with union with the One and issuing in political activity, is somewhat unclear and requires investigation.
Further light can be shed on the matter if the general relation between knowledge (θɛωρία), action, and production (ποίησις) in Plotinus is considered. In Enn. III 8, Plotinus extends the Aristotelian distinction between knowledge, action, and production beyond the human sphere, so as to apply as a general pattern to all of reality. Aristotle had already done this to the extent that his first principle, divine Intellect, is pure knowledge and that human knowledge and actions, as well as natural processes in general, can be described as imitating in some way divine life.235 In III 8, Plotinus argues that all action and production is subordinate to knowledge as a by-product of knowledge, a secondary activity accompanying knowledge. Thus the transcendent principles that are Intellect and soul are forms of knowledge which give rise to products, i.e. the lower levels of reality. As regards humans, this means that human action and production can result as by-products, secondary effects, of knowledge, or, if not, as inferior substitutes for knowledge:
Men, too, when their power of contemplation weakens, make action a shadow of contemplation (θɛωρία) and reasoning. Because contemplation is not enough for them, since their souls are weak and they are not able to grasp the vision sufficiently, and therefore are not filled (πληρούμɛνοι) with it, but still long to see it, they are carried into action, so as to see what they cannot see with their intellect. When they make something, then, it is because they want to see their object themselves and also because they want others to be aware of it and contemplate it, when their project is realized in practice as well as possible. Everywhere we shall find that making and action are either a weakening or a consequence of contemplation; a weakening, if the doer or maker had nothing in view beyond the thing done, a consequence if he had another prior object of contemplation better than what he made.

>>16189920
>two

because of complete lack of jealousy and unbounded love

Now why did he who framed this whole universe of becoming frame it? Let us state the reason why: He was good, and one who is good can never become jealous of anything. And so, being free of jealousy, he wanted everything to become as much like himself as was possible. In fact, men of wisdom will tell you (and you couldn’t do better than to accept their claim) that this, more than anything else, was the most preeminent reason for the origin of the world’s coming to be.

>>15750238
>simulation
>plato
Having set out all these ordinances to them—which he did to exempt himself from responsibility for any evil they might afterwards do—the god proceeded to sow some of them into the Earth, some into the Moon, and others into the various other instruments of time. After the sowing, he handed over to the young gods the task of weaving mortal bodies. He had them make whatever else remained that the human soul still needed to have, plus whatever goes with those things. He gave them the task of ruling over these mortal living things and of giving them the finest, the best possible guidance they could give, without being responsible for any evils these creatures might bring upon themselves. When he had finished assigning all these tasks, he proceeded to abide at rest in his own customary nature. His children immediately began to attend to and obey their father’s assignment. Now that they had received the immortal principle of the mortal living thing, they began to imitate the craftsman who had made them. They borrowed parts of fire, earth, water and air from the world, intending to pay them back again, and bonded together into a unity the parts they had taken, but not with those indissoluble bonds by which they themselves were held together. Instead, they proceeded to fuse them together with copious rivets so small as to be invisible, thereby making each body a unit made up of all the components. And they went on to invest this body—into and out of which things were to flow—with the orbits of the immortal soul. These orbits, now bound within a mighty river, neither mastered that river nor were mastered by it, but tossed it violently and were violently tossed by it. Consequently the living thing as a whole did indeed move, but it would proceed in a disorderly, random and irrational way that involved all six of the motions. It would go forwards and backwards, then back and forth to the right and the left, and upwards and downwards, wandering every which way in these six directions. For mighty as the nourishment-bearing billow was in its ebb and flow, mightier still was the turbulence produced by the disturbances caused by the things that struck against the living things. Such disturbances would occur when the body encountered and collided with external fire (i.e., fire other than the body’s own) or for that matter with a hard lump of earth or with the flow of gliding waters, or when it was caught up by a surge of air-driven winds. The motions produced by all these encounters would then be conducted through the body to the soul, and strike against it.

Proclus' Henads. A plurality of supraessential beings that "join" together to generate the cosmos as the medium of their interaction. One from Many, not Many from One.

Schopenhauer was a pessimistic neoplatonist
His matter is identical to the platonic receptacle/matter .
His Subject is 'Intellect'.
Together they are Being (presentation).
Above them is the pure Wille, that is the One, as explicated by Plotinus.

>Once more, we must be patient with language; we are forced to apply to the Supreme terms which strictly are ruled out; everywhere we must read "So to speak." The Good, then, exists; it holds its existence through choice and will, conditions of its very being: yet it cannot be a manifold; therefore the will and the essential being must be taken as one identity; the act of the will must be self-determined and the being self-caused; thus reason shows the Supreme to be its own Author. For if the act of will springs from God Himself and is as it were His operation and the same will is identical with His essence, He must be self-established. He is not, therefore, "what He has happened to be" but what He has willed to be.

Nature has only spoken once.
theactofproductionisseentobeinNatureanactof contemplation,forcreationistheoutcomeofacontemplation whichneverbecomesanythingelse,whichneverdoes anythingelse,butcreatesbysimplybeingacontemplation.AndNature,askedwhyitbringsforthitsworks,might answerifitcaredtolistenandtospeak:
>"ItwouldhavebeenmorebecomingtoputnoquestionbuttolearninsilencejustasImyselfamsilentandmakenohabitoftalking.
Andwhatisyourlesson?
>This;thatwhatsoevercomes intobeingismyvision,seeninmysilence,thevisionthatbelongstomycharacterwho,sprungfromvision,amvision-lovingandcreatevisionbythevision-seeingfacultywithinme.Themathematiciansfromtheirvisiondrawtheir figures:butIdrawnothing:Igazeandthefiguresofthe materialworldtakebeingasiftheyfellfrommycontemplation.AswithmyMother(theAll Soul]andtheBeingsthatbegotmesoitiswithme:theyarebornofa Contemplationandmybirthisfromthem,notbytheirActbutbytheirBeing;theyaretheloftierReason Principles,theycontemplatethemselvesandIamborn."

Nietzsche was a "Neo"Platonist.

>>15282316
The odyssey is the telos.
And it is forever. We willingly descend from on high and drink from the river lethe, to forget and empty ourselves, all to experience the beauty and pain, tragedy and joy, of infinite limitation. For our higher selves this existence is merely play, all of it. But it is only by not knowing that it becomes real, and it is real.
Godhood is torment, an utterly meaningless existence. This is also how and why there is otherness, God is the solitary One before all things, pure loving longing, the pure Will to not be alone, to be not himself, becoming each.