Whats the difference between gnosticism and neo-platonism

[Anonymous No.16578111]

[Anonymous No.16578116]

>>16578111
take your meds

[Anonymous No.16578138]

[Anonymous No.16578318]

Now, it looks as though the other so-called virtues of the soul are akin
to those of the body, for they really aren’t there beforehand but are added
later by habit and practice. However, the virtue of reason seems to belong
above all to something more divine, which never loses its power but is
either useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way
it is turned. Or have you never noticed this about people who are said to
be vicious but clever, how keen the vision of their little souls is and how
sharply it distinguishes the things it is turned towards? This shows that
its sight isn’t inferior but rather is forced to serve evil ends, so that the
sharper it sees, the more evil it accomplishes.

Absolutely.

However, if a nature of this sort had been hammered at from childhood
and freed from the bonds of kinship with becoming, which have been
fastened to it by feasting, greed, and other such pleasures and which, like
leaden weights, pull its vision downwards—if, being rid of these, it turned
to look at true things, then I say that the same soul of the same person
would see these most sharply, just as it now does the things it is presently
turned towards.

Probably so.

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 e
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 520
in whatever direction they want, but to make use of them to bind the
city together.

That’s true, I had forgotten.

[Anonymous No.16578379]

>>16578111
no difference at all. but they have little to do with plato too.