/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14941811]

>Vision consists in contact between the inner light of the eye and exterior light
What the fuck did he mean by this? Are our eyes portable torches according to Plotinus?

[Anonymous No.14941887]

The external world is object-less without a prefigured preference of vision. All shape in the world is a projection of the mind onto formless matter. Light and color is the best analogy of this, first our eyes are limited to the visible spectrum, but then it is our genes that makes us prefer seeing blue red and yellow as distinct prime colors, and orange or purple (and green) as combinations of colors, or other in-between colors, but objectively speaking there's "any color" you want there to be just (draw a line of distinction) and an infinity of color and no color (aka there's only whiteness).
There's infinite distinction and likeness in the world, without reason and intent there is no vision of things.

[Anonymous No.14941914]

>>14941811
Neoplatonists are retards. Don't bother parsing their bullshit.

[Anonymous No.14941917]

>>14941887
t. idealist who read Emerson a couple of times

>>14941811
The same light which reflects of of objects when it hits your hand results in no vision because your hand is not sensitive to light, unlike the eye. When the light hits your eye like a big pizza pie there's awareness, which allows you, as a person/mind to participate in receiving it. Both your awareness and the exterior light are real, but they need to come together to make vision, an "awareness of".

(p.s. in most older texts, especially poetic or esoteric light corresponds to nous, reason, or awareness)

[Anonymous No.14941935]

>>14941917
>When the light hits your eye like a big pizza pie there's awareness
Come on man.

[Anonymous No.14941943]

>>14941811
Read theory incel

[Anonymous No.14941967]

>>14941917
i've never read emerson
the rainbow analogy is in both Plotinus and Damascius, and probably in Proclus too somehwhere.

If, therefore, we also get off the track of that truth as we attempt to chart the intelligible abyss, to see how great and what its nature is, and we are carried toward the lower and divided realities, as we are by necessity dragged along with or dragged down by our own meager nothingness, nevertheless it is necessary to endure missing and drifting from the goal. Otherwise, it is not possible, in our present state, to have any conception concerning these things, and we must be content even if only with a far-off and obscure glance or glimpse or trace suddenly flashing before our eyes, however small and not very luminous, but nevertheless a signpost for us that is an analogue of that superluminous and vast nature. But this much we can accept in our discourse, that it castigates itself and agrees that it is not capable of looking at that unified and intelligible light.
Therefore, we speak of the triad in that realm, in the sense that it signifies an undifferentiated multiplicity, and again the dyad signifies the cause of that multiplicity, and the monad is related to these as the One itself, as that which is beyond this very multiplicity. And this is the celebrated intelligible triad, which, wishing to explain by means of different configurations, we are unaware that we render it more complex in our accounts, and especially when we make it an ennead, reckoning it as the complete leader of all things from the first until the lowest,
>observing it as if in a mirror, and seeing it in the third, since it is by nature trimorph, and seeing the triadic principles before it that appear to illuminate brilliantly its three ubiquitous forms, as if in a cloud that has three reflecting surfaces, the single color of the sun appears as an apparently polychrome rainbow. And so also Socrates in the Philebus was unable to gaze in the face of that One, and clarified its nature by means of the triad stationed at its threshold, as he says, because he caught a glimpse of that triad quivering with the single ray of the henad, in a completely unified vision.

Philebus 65a: let us run it down with three—beauty, proportion, and truth, and let us say that these, considered as one, may more properly than all other components of the mixture be regarded as the cause, and that through the goodness of these the mixture itself has been made good.

[Anonymous No.14942078]

>>14941967
Based larp

[Anonymous No.14942188]

>>14941967
>believing in magic
Neoplatonism was an ideology created by the decadent slave-holding to twart the rise of progressive humanity with oriental mysticism. But it was too coonvoluted. Christianity accomplished that task better, so Neoplatonism was discarded.

[Anonymous No.14942196]

>>14942188
decadent slave-holding class*
thwart*
Whatever incel

[Anonymous No.14942223]

>>14942188
>Neoplatonism was an ideology created

[Anonymous No.14942366]

>>14942223
>that 2000-years-old boomer who still believes in mumbo jumbo

[Anonymous No.14942428]

>>14942366
4000

[Anonymous No.14942471]

>>14941811
People used to think consciousness shot out of the eyes like Superman's heat vision.

Seriously

[Anonymous No.14943918]

>>14941811
The better question is why on earth it matters at all. Who fucking cares?

[Anonymous No.14944039]

>>14942366
>mumbo jumbo
Midwit that got filtered detected.

[Anonymous No.14944209]

>>14944039
>feels > reals

[Anonymous No.14944247]

>>14942188
Christianity succeeded because it boiled Neoplatonism down to the lowest common denominator and so it started appealing to just women and the poor. I wouldn't exactly imply from this that Christianity is superior.

We know from life today what political and societal power a coalition of women and poorfags can wield.

[Anonymous No.14944248]

>>14941811
The people of antiquity had an entirely incorrect conception of how vision works. Most cultures seem to think that vision emanates from the eyes, not the reverse

[Anonymous No.14944286]

>>14944248
Read Aristotle before you spew bullshit