/lit/ - Literature

>>15975424
He's "the last metaphysician" of the ancient world, his work is a response and revision/critique of the more famous Proclus; who did the same to Iamblichus who did the same to Porphyry who thought he understood Plotinus and Plato correctly, not that he was stupid he just lacked 'the gift'.
You need Plato, basic Aristotle, Egyptian and Mesopotamian myth, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus.
the cheap lazy not very virtuous route is pic related
>it's where I started 1.5 years ago, hehe
Unironically, the greatest key to understand the paradoxes, in Platonism, is the Quantum Uncertainty Principle, superposition. "The One is in a superposition as each thing, but each thing is not each other, thus they are not One."
Plotinus says exactly this but about the One-Being,
>Intellect there is actually not like that; rather, it has all things and is all thingsandispresentwiththemwhenitispresenttoitselfandhasallthings while not having them, for they are not one thing and it another. Nor is each thing separate in it. For each is the whole, and everything is everywhere. Yet they are not mixed up, but each is in its turn separate.
Yet Plotinus himself says that Inellect is 'the One in a way', that it is Simple, that it is the Monad and Dyad, Limited and Unlimited, and that it is a Principle of existence; but he keeps insisting that it is not 'The One', in that it is One-Many. Damascius is he who finally harmonizes Plotinus paradoxes and just admit the anti-logical reality of the One, Plotinus' One is Damascius' Ineffable, and Damascius 'One' is the triad shines forth as Monad Dyad and One-Being/Mixed/Unified.
>>15975486
unlimitedness is itself a finitude, another problem that Damascius and even Proclus addresses is that the reality of being "beyond" is itself a relation and thus a co-dependence, to say that the one is utterly transcendent is to affirm this and that it is not transcendent, but more than mere immanence plus transcendence. You have to affirm the reality of the distinct, the hierarchies of being are in themselves truly divided, but yet at the same time that in he Triad of the One all things are compassed. You cannot even call it One, but Ineffable.