/lit/ - Literature

>>16037085
If Plotinus defines the one as the Pure Active Will to overflow and freely cause all realities, in truth being the Arche of Multiplicity as the All-one, and even Shankara says his "Brahman" by its very unwilled? nature "shines" Maya from itself, then how could he delude himself to think Unity with the One would be cessation of our own active causing? Wouldn't becoming most like God, as so many says is the purpose of Philosophy, be to also be overflowers? Emanators, co-rulers/creators as Iamblichus says, partakers of "the active powering of all things" if we paraphrase Plotinus. To transcendentally work with the Will of the Good not against him, since he willed us to first be but we willed to be what we are—as if it would be hard for a god, if you reach the Blessed Isles, to simultaneously with their Nous contemplate the Good and energize beauty in the world, it would be effortless for the impulse to overflow that his light engenders is wont to be shared.

>And what about the uneducated who have no experience of truth? Isn’t it likely—indeed, doesn’t it follow necessarily from what was said before—that they will never adequately govern a city? But neither would those who’ve been allowed to spend their whole lives being educated. The former would fail because they don’t have a single goal at which all their actions, public and private, inevitably aim; the latter would fail because they’d refuse to act, thinking that they had settled while still alive in the faraway Isles of the Blessed.
That’s true.
>It is our task as founders, then, to compel the best natures to reach the study we said before is the most important, namely, to make the ascent and see the good. But when they’ve made it and looked sufficiently, we mustn’t allow them to do what they’re allowed to do today.
What’s that?
>To stay there and refuse to go down again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors, whether they are of less worth or of greater. Then are we to do them an injustice by making them live a worse life when they could live a better one? You are forgetting again that it isn’t the law’s concern to make any one class in the city outstandingly happy but to contrive to spread happiness throughout the city by bringing the citizens into harmony with each other through persuasion or compulsion and by making them share with each other the benefits that each class can confer on the community. The law produces such people in the city, not in order to allow them to turn in whatever direction they want, but to make use of them to bind the city together.
That’s true, I had forgotten.