/lit/ - Literature

yes i would like to know how it looks inside since it's semi-self published

>>16420266
Do you wager this is good, anon? I want to stop being a pleb too, I'd love to learn the joys of Neoplatonism.

>>16420266
Post those pics OP.

There's a review by Shorey on jstor that you can view for free, he's pretty critical of the translation but said that it can mostly be trusted for a general read

>>16420334
I prefer it in some instances when he uses a personal pronounon instead of it when Plotinus is obviously talking about a who (in greek 'he/him' a 'it' are the same word)

>>16420317
hold on

>>16420317

there are 50 pages of notes, all in the end of the book, 30 pages of commentaries by porphyry, 30 pages on the sources and influences of plotinic ideas

>>16420387

>>16420387
>there are 50 pages of notes, all in the end of the book
rip
guess I ain't buying this
FUCK
U
C
K
ENDNOTES
N
D
N
O
T
E
S

>>16420362
how did this nigger live recentely? he should ne dead for at least a millenium. That is M years if any other of you freaky niggers is still alive

>>16420362
OP delivered, based.
also
>He never bathed
KEK

the paper is OK, i thought it would be bible paper. Almost 800 pages, line spacing is OK, font size is comfortable, but there is virtually no margin on the outer end of the pages

>>16420405
>Life of Plotinus, and Order of His Writings
>By Porphyry
>(Written when about 70 years of age, see 23.)

>>16420397
it's not great, but you can just stick another bookmarker there at the end.
After reading infinite jest, i stopped caring about it.

>>16420334
will read it, thanks

>>16420310
yes, for what i've read about it, and in the short skim i did through it, it is very worth it, plotinus influenced everyone, directly or not, specially the religions and theologians.
Maybe you should look it up if you'd want to read an abridged version or the full one, i'm an autist when it comes to religion/platonism/mysticism, so i got the entire thing

>>16420266
don't

Plotinus and Porphyry is all you need. I’ll fight all of you if I have to

Contemporary with the Christian Origen, and a fellow pupil of Ammonius Saccas, was the last great pagan philosopher, Plotinus.

After a brief military career Plotinus settled in Rome and won favour at the imperial court. He toyed with the idea of founding a Platonic Republic in Campania. His works were edited after his death in six groups of nine treatises Enneads) by his disciple and biographer Porphyry. Written in a taut and difficult style, they cover a variety of philosophical topics: ethics and aesthetics, physics and cosmology, psychology, metaphysics, logic, and epistemology.

>>16421110
The dominant place in Plotinus’ system is occupied by ‘the One’: the notion is derived, through Plato, from Parmenides, where Oneness is a key property of Being. The One is, in a mysterious way, identical with the Platonic Idea of the Good: it is the basis of all being and the standard of all
value, but it is itself beyond being and beyond goodness. Below this supreme and ineffable summit, the next places are occupied by Mind (the locus of Ideas) and Soul, which is the creator of time and space. Soul looks upward to Mind, but downward to Nature, which in turn creates the physical world.
At the lowest level of all is bare matter, the outermost limit of reality. These levels of reality are not independent of each other. Each level depends for its existence and activity on the level above it. Everything has its place in a single downward progress of successive emanations from the One. This impressive and startling metaphysical system is presented by Plotinus not as a mystical revelation but on the basis of philosophical principles derived from Plato and Aristotle.

>>16421060

>>16421120
Plotinus’ school in Rome did not survive his death, but his pupils and their pupils carried his ideas elsewhere. A Neoplatonic tradition throve in Athens until the pagan schools were closed down by the Christian emperor Justinian in 529. But it was Christians, not pagans, who transmitted Plotinus’ ideas to the post-classical world, and foremost among them was St Augustine of Hippo, who was to prove the most influential of all Christian philosophers.

What's Plotinus like? Anyone got any good exerpts from him?

In reaction to the mortalism of the Epicureans, Stoics, and later Peripatetics, Plotinus set out, in Plato’s footsteps, to prove that the individual soul is immortal. He sets out his case in one of his earliest writings, Ennead 4. 7 (2), On the Immortality of the Soul. If the soul is the principle of life in living beings, it cannot itself be bodily in nature. If it is a body, it must be either one of the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, or a compound of one or more of them. But the elements are themselves lifeless. If a compound
has life, this must be due to a particular proportion of the elements in the compound: but this must have been conferred by something else, the cause that provides the recipe for and combines the ingredients of the mixture. This something else is soul

Plotinus argues that none of the functions of life, from the lowliest form of nutrition and growth to the highest forms of imagination and thought, could be carried out by something that was merely bodily. Bodies undergo change at every instant: how could something in such perpetual flux remember anything from moment to moment? Bodies are divided into parts and spread out in space: how could such a scattered entity provide the unified focus of which we are aware in perception? We can think of
abstract entities, like beauty and justice: how can what is bodily grasp what is non-bodily? (4. 7. 5–8). The soul must belong, not to the world of becoming, but to the world of Being (4. 8. 5).

>>16421144
§5.2.1.The One is all things and is not one thing. For it is the principle of all things, but is not those things, though all things are like it, for they did, in a way, find their way back to the intelligible world, or rather they are not there yet but will be.
How, then, do they arise out of a simple One, given that there is neither apparent variegation nor any doubleness whatsoever in that which is self-identical?
In fact, it is because there was nothing in it that all things came from it; and, in order that Being should exist, it is itself not Being, but the generator of it. Indeed, this is, in a way, the first act of generation. Since it is perfect, due to its neither seeking anything, nor having anything, nor needing anything, it in a way overflows and its superabundance has made something else. That which was generated reverted to it and was filled up and became what it is by looking at it, and this is Intellect. The positioning of it in relation to the One produced Being; its gazing upon the One produced Intellect. Since, then, it positions itself in relation to the One in order that it may see, it becomes Intellect and Being at the same time. Intellect, then, being in a way the One and pouring forth abundant power, produces things that are the same as it – Intellect is, after all, an image of the One – just as that which is prior to it in turn pours forth.
And this activity, arising from the substantiality of Intellect, belongs to Soul, which becomes this while Intellect remains still. For Intellect also came to be while that which was before it remained still. But Soul does not remain still when it produces; rather, being moved, it generated a reflection of itself. It looked to the intelligible world from where it came to be, it was filled up, and it proceeded to another and contrary motion, generating a reflection of itself, namely, sense-perception and nature as it is found in plants. Nothing of what is before it is separated or cut off. For this reason, the Soul from above also seems to extend down to plants, for Soul does, after all, extend down in a definite manner, since there is life in plants. Of course, not all of Soul is in plants, but it comes to be in them because of the way it is; it advanced all the way down to them, producing another real existent by its procession and its desire for what is inferior to it. And since the part of Soul prior to this was dependent on Intellect, it leaves Intellect alone to remain by itself.

>>16421193
Kek it's like middle ages hegel

>>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.

Philosophical theology in the ancient world culminates in the system of Plotinus. It is thus summed up by Bertrand Russell: ‘The metaphysics of Plotinus begins with a Holy Trinity: The One, Spirit and Soul. These three are not equal, like the Persons of the Christian Trinity; the One is supreme, Spirit comes next, and Soul last.’8 The comparison with the Christian Trinity is inescapable; and indeed Plotinus, who died before the church councils of Nicaea and Constantinople gave a definitive statement of the relationships between the three divine persons, undoubtedly had an influence on the thought of some of the Church fathers. But for the understanding of his own thought it is more rewarding to look backwards. With some qualification it can be said that the One is a Platonic God, Intellect (a more appropriate translation for nous than ‘spirit’) is an Aristotelian God, and Soul is a Stoic God.

The One is a descendant of the One of the Parmenides and the Idea of Good in the Republic. The paradoxes of the Parmenides are taken as adumbrations of an ultimately ineffable reality, which is, like the Idea of the Good, ‘beyond being in power and dignity’. ‘The One’, it should be stressed, is not, for Plato and Plotinus, a name for the first of the natural number series: rather, it means that which is utterly simple and undivided, all of a piece, and utterly unique (Ennead 6, 9. 1 and 6). In saying that the One and the Good (Plotinus uses both names, e.g. 6. 9. 3) is beyond being he does not mean that it does not exist: on the contrary it is the most real thing there is. He means that no predicates can be applied to it: we cannot say that it is this, or it is that. The reason for this is that if any predicate was true of it,
then there would have to be a distinction within it corresponding to the distinction between the subject and the predicate of the true sentence. But that would derogate from the One’s sublime simplicity

>>16421198
he is ~200 years before middle ages

Because the One is unknowable, it is also ineffable. How then can we talk about it, and what is Plotinus doing writing about it? Plotinus puts
the question to himself in Ennead 5, 3. 14, and gives a rather puzzling answer.

>We have no knowledge or concept of it, and we do not say it, but we say
>something about it. How then do we speak about it, if we do not grasp it. Does
>our having no knowledge of it mean that we do not grasp it at all? We do grasp it,
>but not in such a way as to say it, only to speak about it.

The distinction between saying and speaking about is puzzling. Could what Plotinus says here about the One be said about some perfectly ordinary
thing like a cabbage? I cannot say or utter a cabbage; I can only talk about it. What is meant here by ‘say’, I think, is something like ‘call by a name’ or
‘attribute predicates to’. This I can do with a cabbage, but not with the One. And the Greek word whose standard translation is ‘about’ can also mean
‘around’. Plotinus elsewhere says that we cannot even call the One ‘it’ or say that it ‘is’; we have to circle around it from outside (6. 3. 9. 55).

>>16421253
>With some qualification it can be said that the One is a Platonic God, Intellect (a more appropriate translation for nous than ‘spirit’) is an Aristotelian God, and Soul is a Stoic God.
this does indeed sum it up perfectly, unfortunately people have no grasp of Stoic metaphysics or theology, so "stoic" god means nothing, One should rather say: 'Spinozian God'.

Any statement about the One is really a statement about its creatures. We are well aware of our own frailty: our lack of self-sufficiency and our
shortfall from perfection.

In knowing this we can grasp the One in the way that one can tell the shape of a missing piece in a jigsaw
puzzle by knowing the shape of the surrounding pieces. Or, to use a metaphor closer to Plotinus’ own, when we in thought circle around the One we grasp it as an invisible centre of gravity. Most picturesquely, Plotinus says:

It is like a choral dance. The choir circles round the conductor, sometimes facing him and sometimes looking the other way; it is when they are facing him that they sing most beautifully. So too, we are always around him—if we were not we would completely vanish and no longer exist—but we are not always facing him. When we do look to him in our divine dance around him, then we reach our goal and take our rest and sing in perfect tune.

We turn from the One to the second element of the Plotinian trinity, Intellect (nous). Like Aristotle’s God, Intellect is pure activity, and cannot
think of anything outside itself, since this would involve potentiality. But its activity is not a mere thinking of thinking—whether or not that was
Aristotle’s doctrine—it is a thinking of all the Platonic Ideas. These are not external entities: as Aristotle himself had laid down as a universal
rule, the actuality of intellect and the actuality of intellect’s object is one and the same. So the life of the Ideas is none other than the activity of
Intellect. Intellect is the intelligible universe, containing forms not only of universals but also of individuals.

Despite the identity of the thinker and the thought, the multiplicity of the Ideas means that Intellect does not possess the total simplicity which
belongs to the One. Indeed, it is this complexity of Intellect that convinced Plotinus that there must be something else prior to it and superior to it.
For, he believed, every form of complexity must ultimately depend on something totally simple. The intellectual cosmos is, indeed, boundlessly rich.

"In that world there is no stinting nor poverty, but everything is full of life, boiling over with life. Everything flows from a single fount, not some special kind of
breath or warmth, but rather a single quality containing unspoilt all qualities, sweetness of taste and smell, wine on the palate and the essence of every aroma,
visions of colours and every tangible feeling, and every melody and every rhythm that hearing can absorb."

This is the world of Being, Thought, and Life; and though it is the world of Intellect, it also contains desire as an essential element. Thinking is indeed
itself desire, as looking is a desire of seeing. Knowledge too is desire, but satisfied desire, the consummation of a quest. In
the Intellect desire is ‘always desiring and always attaining its desire.

How does Intellect originate? Undoubtedly Intellect derives its being from the One: the One neither is too jealous to procreate, nor loses anything by what it gives away. But beyond that Plotinus’ text suggests two rather different accounts. In some places he says that Intellect emanates from the One in the way that sweet odours are given off by perfume,
or that light emanates from the sun. This will remind Christian readers of the Nicene Creed’s proclamation that the Son of God is light from light. But elsewhere Plotinus speaks of Intellect as ‘daring to apostatize from the One’. This makes Intellect seem less like the Word of the Christian Trinity, and more like Milton’s Lucifer.

>>16421060
You need Iamblichus and Damascius unless you think sitting in your room and thinking is the peak of spiritual growth.

From Intellect proceeds the third element, Soul. Here too Plotinus talks of a revolt or falling away, an arrogant desire for independence, which took the form of a craving for metabolism. Soul’s original sin is well
described thus by A. H. Armstrong:

"It is a desire for a life different from that of Intellect. The life of Intellect is a life at rest in eternity, a life of thought in eternal, immediate, and simultaneous possession of all possible objects. So the only way of being different which is left for Soul is to pass from eternal life to a life in which, instead of all things being present at once, one thing comes after another, and there is a succession, a continuous series, of thoughts and actions."

This continuous, restless, succession is time: time is the life of the soul in its transitory passage from one episode of living to the next. Soul is the immanent, controlling element in the universe of nature, just as God was in the Stoic system, but unlike the Stoic God Soul is incorporeal. Intellect was the maker of the universe, like the Demiurge of
the Timaeus, but Soul is intellect’s agent in managing its development. Soul links the intelligible world with the world of the senses, having an inner element that looks upwards to Intellect and an external element that looks
downwards to Nature. Nature is the immanent principle of development in the material world: Soul, looking at it, sees there its own

>>16421348
they became uglier and uglier by each generation.

>>16421272
Everything we say about the one is actually about the Monad and Indefinite as Intellect. Or as Being-Life-Intellect. The cycle of Nous is in-fact the infinite circuit of Soul in trying to grasp the One. This all culminates in the Three Henads of Damascius, or the 'shining forth as three' of Proclus.

>28.1 All Things Are a Symbol for the One
Now the One is all things before all things and is known and knower, and it is each of the other things, not in the way that I am talking about them, and not in the way that each thing is itself, for these things are all in a state of differentiation, and they are mutually discriminated from each other, but rather as One that co-exists with each of the things that are distinct in a manner unique to that with which it coexists. For example, the one of humanity is more truly humanity and the one of the soul more truly soul, and the one of the body is more truly body. And in this way, too, the one of the sun and the one of the moon are more truly moon and more truly sun, and yet the One is none of these things that have become distinct, than which the One more truly is, but rather it is One as seated before each thing. Thus please, if you will, refer even the one that coexists with each thing and appears as parceled out, to the universal, undivided, absolute One. For perhaps the One is not even divided, but remains the same for all things and for each thing as unique to it, not divided into it, since the existence of all things in the One does not require division.
Does the One know? No: knowledge belongs to differentiation. So then is the One not known? This too is a mark of differentiation, if the following is true, namely, that “knows” is opposed to “is known.” None of these predicates accords with that, nor yet does the designation “One” accord with that, nor the designation “all things.” For these things all imply opposition and they divide our consciousness. For if we look at the simple, that is, at the One, we completely dissolve the vast and complex totality of the One. And yet if we conceive of all things together simultaneously, we obscure the One and the simple. The (I 81) reason is that we are ourselves divided and that we focus on discreet characteristics, and, although we nevertheless yearn for any knowledge of the One, we tend to confuse everything, thinking that we might in this way get hold of that great nature. Nevertheless by keeping watch over the plurality of all things which is [an aspect of the One that] is present together with the confi ned uniqueness of the One, and by taking joy in the simple and the first, with a view to the mark of the highest principle, in this way surely we can apply the [designation] “One” to that reality as a kind of symbol of its simplicity, as in fact weapply the [designation] “all things” as a symbol of its containing all things, whereas we can neither conceive or name that which is before or above the One and all things.

Plotinus’ theological system is undoubtedly impressive: but we may wonder whatever kind of argument he can offer to persuade us to accept
it. To understand this, we have to explore the system from the bottom up, instead of looking from the top down: we must start not with the One, but
with matter, the outermost limit of reality. Plotinus takes his start from widely accepted Platonic and Aristotelian principles. He understands Aristotle as having argued that the ultimate substratum of change must be something which possesses none of the properties of the changeable bodies
we see and handle. But a matter which possesses no material properties, Plotinus argued, is inconceivable.
If we dispense with Aristotelian matter, we are left with Aristotelian forms. The most important such forms were souls, and it is natural to
think that there are as many souls as there are individual people. But here Plotinus appeals to another Aristotelian thesis: the principle that forms are
individuated by matter. If we have given up matter, we have to conclude that there is only a single soul.

Soul governs the world wisely and well, but the wisdom that it exercises in the governance of the world is not native to it, but must come from outside. It cannot come from the material world, since that is what it shapes; it must come from something that is by nature linked to the Ideas that are the models or patterns for intelligent activity. This can only be a
world-mind or Intellect.

We have already encountered the arguments whereby Plotinus shows that Intellect cannot be the ultimate reality because of the duality of subject and object and because of the multiplicity of the Ideas. Thus, at the end of our journey, we reach the one and only One.

Plotinus’ theology continued to be taught, with modifications, until Western pagan philosophy came to an end with the closure of the school of Athens. But his influence lived on, and lives on, unacknowledged, through the ideas that were absorbed and transmitted by his first Christian readers. Most important of these was Augustine, who read him as a young man in
the translation of Marius Victorinus. The reading set him on the course which led to his conversion to Christianity, and his Confessions and On the Trinity contain echoes of Plotinus on many a page. In the last days of his life, we are told, when the Vandals were besieging Hippo, he consoled himself with a quotation from the Enneads: ‘How can a man be taken seriously if
he attaches importance to the collapse of wood and stones, or to the death—God help us—of mortal creatures?’

>>16421374
>>16421348
>>16421321
>>16421312
who are you quoting?

>>16421361
>behold Christendom in all its glory

>>16421361
>>16421427
>Aurelian and Julian and Diocletian absolute chads in a sea mouth-breathers and fatties

>>16421427
he cute!

Who tf is plotinus xD

>>16421539
some old dead white guy

Did Plotinus ever talk about the gods?