/lit/ - Literature

>>21607318
3.6 The Impassivity of the Unembodied

Feelings/emotions are not states, they are 'actions upon experience'
- states exist in the body, not judgments
- vice has no positive existence, it has no presence, it's the lack of virtue
- however, false judgments are positive, real things

2
How can the Soul possess emotions without being changed?
- Memories can be actualized from latent states, but aren't merely stored impressions
- change implies a share in Matter

The Soul is the actor of feelings/states, which only provoke changes in the body

How to explain the change from timidity to daring in the initiative faculty (I suppose this is an Ideal-Principle)?
- No change in the Soul, just a failure to actualize that Reason-Principle in good measure

Soul has nothing imported into it, it is unchanged in substance and essence
3
Likes and Aversions?

They do not change the soul, they are it's acts

4 Affective phase of the Soul
The Soul's affections, like pleasure, pain, fear, happiness, are caused by the Soul's 'affective phase' when stimulated by SPs or independently

An ideal form's nature is to be an activity(energeia)

5 Why stress the impassivity in the Soul?
"Philosophy's task is like that of a man who wishes to throw off the shapes presented in dreams, and to this end recalls to waking condition the mind that is breeding them"

6 Matter is also incorporeal, however, it is passive

Matter can host all variety of qualities, such as cold heat, etc. but does not change in itself

9 Cold has no positive qualities, it is the negation/absence of heat (this seems to be true in thermodynamics/energy theories)

Only qualities which are contraries can act on one another, not qualities like sweetness upon color

Matter brought to order in a composite must lose it's nature in the supreme degree, though it does not lose it's character

12 Plato uses the metaphor of golds poured into moulds to show how matter can participate in material bodies while being unchanged

13 Matter is the receptacle and nurse of all generation (created things)

14 As if there would be no reflection if mirrors didn't exist, there would be no reality at all if Matter did not exist

Matter is destitute of the Good, so it is constantly striving after something to fill/join it

17 Magnitude is an Ideal-Principle

Absolute Magnitude is not Matter
- Magnitude is an Ideal-Principle, and when combined with Matter, becomes mass with extension
- Magnitude is absolute when considered in itself (just the Ideal-Principle
- Magnitude is inherent "in each Ideal-Principle--that of a horse or anything else"

Pure Idea lets us perceive reality, but perceptible reality is false since matter is a non-existent
- Matter destitute of power, has no Act of it's own

Symbolic interpretation of Hermes as the generative Intellectual Principle, Mother the receptacle/Matter (though women do more than contain a baby, they also feed it. Matter does nothing more than hold Ideas as in material bodies)