/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.19983656]

Why are so many westerners ignorant of the philosophical work that forms the basis of their civilization? Everyone knows Plato and Aristotle but the percentage of people who recognize Plotinus and the school of Neoplatonism that has defined western thought for over 1,500 years is in the single digits. Why? It is the greatest fusion of mysticism with rational logic ever devised and western men are turning to fucking Buddhism for connection to the spiritual, a philosophy that denies the vitality of man in favor of pure nihilism.

[Anonymous No.19983661]

You haven't the slightest fucking idea what you're talking about. This is your brain on wikipedia summaries.

[Anonymous No.19983665]

>>19983656
What do I read after Plotinus’ Enneads?

[Anonymous No.19983670]

>>19983665
Elements of Theology by Proclus

[Anonymous No.19983675]

>>19983661
My Neoplatonism shelf is bigger than your whole library.

[Anonymous No.19983678]

>>19983670
What are the best editions of the enneads and the elements of theology?

[Anonymous No.19983680]

>>19983675
>he has a cumbersome physical library
the hallmark of a pseud

[Anonymous No.19983683]

>>19983675
my dick is bigger than yours
bung pseud

[Anonymous No.19983686]

>>19983678
Enneads- Lloyd Gersons translation in the OP. Failing that the Penguin edition is serviceable, but it's abridged so it's missing a few chapters, most importantly the one on Act and Potency

Elements of Theology - I have the Oxford Press edition. It's in English and Greek. I haven't read any others.

[Anonymous No.19983696]

Christiany co-opted the spiritual/mystical aspects of Plotinus but then denied them by saying that only Jesus could become one with the godhead. Because of this great crime, Christianity only managed to produce a handful of mystics (e.g. Theresa de Avila, Meister Eckhart, Giordano Bruno), many of whom were persecuted as heretics.

Buddhism and Hinduism had no such qualms so they have a signficant head start when it comes to investigating christ consciousness/rigpa/samadi/moksha/satori etc through contemplative and meditative sciences.

What a grand spiritual tradition we would've see in the west were it not for Christianity.

[Anonymous No.19983700]

>>19983696
true

[Anonymous No.19983726]

>>19983696
>only Jesus could become one with the godhead
What? Jesus IS the Godhead, this is not some Arian heresy. Christianity never denied the possibility of beatific vision.

[Anonymous No.19983879]

>>19983726
Christianity is spiritual cuckoldry. The only thing you’re going to become one with is Jamal’s BBC.

[Anonymous No.19983882]

>>19983879
Christianity is the truth. That's the sole reason it won over paganism.

[Anonymous No.19983884]

>>19983665
Probably re-read the Enneads. It seems very dense to me, maybe you're galaxy brained but I'm not absorbing it on one reading.

[Anonymous No.19983904]

>>19983696
The Torah may very well be Hellenistic in origin.

[Anonymous No.19983905]

>>19983882
Christianity 'won' because it specifically catered to the uneducated masses.v2whh

[Anonymous No.19983911]

>>19983656
>complains about westerners being ignorant of philosphical traditions
>is even more ignorant himself
Based retard I guess?

[Anonymous No.19983912]

>>19983884
It is very dense. Plotinus is Plato's Aristotle. The density and difficulty is probably worse than Metaphysics.

[Anonymous No.19983913]

>>19983905
How did Augustine single handedly destroy every single pagan philosopher then? For being uneducated country bumpkins it sure is weird that Christians dominated Pagans in rhetoric so thoroughly that it ceased to be within a few generations of Christianity being legalized.

[Anonymous No.19983917]

>>19983913
Augustine's philosophical prowess goes down in flames the second he converts to Christianity and has to account for all the contradictory dogmatism. See his attempts to reconcile free will

[Anonymous No.19983933]

>>19983882
>sonnenrad iconography
lmfao you are a sentient meme

[Anonymous No.19983937]

>>19983696
>Christiany co-opted the spiritual/mystical aspects of Plotinus but then denied them by saying that only Jesus could become one with the godhead
This the root problem of Christiany imo, and sets it apart from all the other Traditions

[Anonymous No.19983946]

>>19983933
>Sonnenrad was used at a prominent European, Christian court originally
I don't see any contradiction.

[Anonymous No.19983959]

>>19983665
>>19983670
This. And Confessions of St. Augustine.

[Anonymous No.19984005]

Esoterics are a cope.

[Anonymous No.19984011]

>>19984005
Plotinus is only esoteric if you're a retard

[Anonymous No.19984209]

>>19983917
Keep coping, retard

[Anonymous No.19984214]

>>19983959
yawn

[Anonymous No.19984236]

I read Plotinus, AMA

[Anonymous No.19984243]

>>19983696
>Christiany co-opted the spiritual/mystical aspects of Plotinus but then denied them by saying that only Jesus could become one with the godhead.
I think Aquinas is dead on in this - in this lifetime you can't comprehend God though you can partake in some of his essence, because of our fallen nature. That being said, perfect comprehension of the Godhead belongs to Christ alone - I think this is an issue relating to pride. The core issue with believing total unity with the Godhead is that it's just not possible for humans - you eat, sleep, and otherwise.

[Anonymous No.19984340]

>>19984236
how do you pronounce this niggas name?

[Anonymous No.19984351]

>>19984340
PLOH TIE NUHS

[Anonymous No.19984352]

>>19984351
danke shon

[Anonymous No.19984359]

>>19984340
Πλοτίνος
PLOH TIN NOSS
if you want to actually pronounce it properly and not like an anglo

[Anonymous No.19984362]

>>19983959
You don't need to read a single christian "platonist", it's a pure waste of time.

[Anonymous No.19984363]

>>19983665
being and time (unironically)

[Anonymous No.19984367]

>>19984352
>>19984359
Yes make sure you pronounce it this way in English conversation to let everyone know you are pedantic and gay

[Anonymous No.19984379]

>>19984367
Why are you anglos like this?
One can see it clearly in sports. Everybody in the world makes an effort to pronounce people`s names the way they are being pronounced in the their respective languages, meanwhile feel entitled to butcher whatever name to meet their own weird pronouncing standards

[Anonymous No.19984382]

>>19984379
>>19984367
>forgot a you*

[Anonymous No.19984397]

>>19984379
Names are words and all words are pronounced according to the rules and conventions of the language in which they are spoken. I refuse to switch languages in the middle of a sentence because it is ugly and a failure to recognize the nature of words.
And no, not an anglo and english isn't my first language.

[Anonymous No.19984830]

>>19983656
that book has got to be the most rare DLC of the greeks ever
gorillion hours of gameplay achievement

[Anonymous No.19984861]

>>19984236
Do you have cool psychic powers like the Buddhas do? What cool shit do you have in your wheelhouse mythos that the Buddha does or doesn't?
I'm not knocking you man I would do what you're doing if I had the time unobstructed. It's just that Buddhism is a huge presence and Plotinus is a "literally who?"

[Anonymous No.19984892]

>>19984861
You might have to practice theurgy to obtain psychic powers, I'm not sure. Just studying the philosophy you can achieve visions of the intelligible world. That makes it worth it in my mind.

I don't know much about Buddhism but the people I've spoken to who do are friendly to neoplatonic ideas

[Anonymous No.19984923]

As far as I can tell, mysticism is indistinguishable from schizo ramblings. I don't understand why this nonsense was ever taken seriously.

[Anonymous No.19985320]

>>19983959
so close and then you included a hack like campbell instead of eliade

[Anonymous No.19985360]

>>19985320
>t. confirmed for having not read the four volume tour-de-force Masks of God
filtered

[Anonymous No.19985372]

>>19984379
nobody says Plato "PLEH TOH"

[Anonymous No.19985391]

>>19983882
Refuted by Celsus (pbuh), Porphyry (pbuh), and Julian Augustus (pbuh). And by the way, your "whatever converts the most people must be true" framework is actively killing off Christianity.

[Anonymous No.19985402]

>>19983913
As Julian observed, christers were being educated in pagan rhetoric and philosophy as more elites converted to the religion of the masses and continued to have their children schooled. His attempts to ban this were cut short, but any of your famous pre-medieval theologians worth their salt had been a Hellene and ported over his platonism to the embarassingly fideist religion in order to make an "apology" for it to his former peers

[Anonymous No.19985416]

>>19983656

The Catholic Church literally murdered people for centuries for smoking these memes and trying to understand the wisdom of the ancients unfiltered through Aquinas.

[Anonymous No.19985508]

>>19984892
The Buddhism most similar to Neoplatonism is probably Yogacara, which is mostly preserved in the non-Gelug schools of Tibet, and to some extent included in the root texts of Chan/Zen (e.g. the Lankavatara Sutra). Tantra regardless of school is similar to theurgy as well. A major difference would be that matter or substance are done away with in Yogacara so you just have consciousness to be purified into non-duality or non-differentiated absoluteness. At the highest levels the texts, especially of Asanga/Maitreya[natha] argue there is no transformation at all of what underlies, since it is 'empty' of those discursive notions, so the change or transformation is effectively of ignorance into wisdom. Ultimately finds expression, among other things, as there being neither one nor many. The neoplatonists are more fond of triads or trinities e.g. body/mind/soul but I am not sure of the exact workings out of their path to the One and would need a refresh. Potentially the Sarvastivada abhidharma was closer to Neoplatonism but the major source for what they believed is a Yogacara philosopher, Vasubandhu, who had converted away from it. Would be something to cross reference if interested

[Anonymous No.19985777]

>>19985508
Never heard of Yogacara, looks interesting.
The tough thing about Plotinus is that when talking about substance you always have to qualify which kind or which level of substance you're referring to. Intelligible substance for example is not the underlying subject of attributes, obviously. But this also means that it isn't appropriately expressed by discursive notions. Matter and substance are done away with in the One. But that's just in the One, so these are preserved elsewhere, right? But the essence of all things is in a way the power of the One. So it gets more complicated. Lower levels of being still are, and are the expression of higher levels, and are therefore the completion of higher levels. But lower levels, in comparison to the higher, are illusions to be done away with.
As Parmenides says: "Thou must needs learn all things, as well the unshakeable heart of well-rounded truth as the opinions of mortals in which there is no sure trust."

[Anonymous No.19985860]

>>19985777
>But lower levels, in comparison to the higher, are illusions to be done away with.
From the Buddhist pov both levels ultimately have to go; discrimination gets eliminated. Though might be fair to say higher levels are the outflow of greater progression or maturation on the path taught by that system, i.e. power of creating and manifesting phenomena to instruct others in perfection of wisdom

[Anonymous No.19986207]

>>19985860
I guess that's the thing I don't get in what I've encountered in Buddhist thinking. Distinctions are not eliminated. They can be relativized, they can change, they can solidify, they can be that by which we look beyond them, and whether real or illusory, whatever that means, they are always there. The philosophical intuition of Plotinus is never to eliminate, but to understand and to integrate into the whole.
But like you said, sometimes it can be hard to distinguish metaphysical doctrine from methodological or even pedagogical steps.

[Anonymous No.19986374]

>>19985416
No they didn't. Point to a single example of a person killed by the Catholic Church for reading the Enneads. Marcillio Ficino actually translated it and wrote a commentary, retard.

[Anonymous No.19986380]

>>19983905
>screencap of greentext
Nigga really?

[Anonymous No.19986411]

>>19986374
>point to an example
ok buddy, here you go
*kills you*
;3

[Anonymous No.19986418]

>>19986374
Tell me what happened to Giordano Bruno. I want 10 sons like him in return for your symbolic sin.

[Anonymous No.19986419]

>>19986418
>>19986374
forgot pic

[Anonymous No.19986685]

>>19986418
>>19986419
Bruno means nigger in Latin.

[Anonymous No.19986833]

>>19986419
Bruno was a new age crank who was rightfully executed for disturbing the peace of the realm. Also Bruno never even read the Enneads, try again.

[Anonymous No.19986837]

>>19986418
>According to historian Mordechai Feingold, "Both admirers and critics of Giordano Bruno basically agree that he was pompous and arrogant, highly valuing his opinions and showing little patience with anyone who even mildly disagreed with him." Discussing Bruno's experience of rejection when he visited Oxford University, Feingold suggests that "it might have been Bruno's manner, his language and his self-assertiveness, rather than his ideas" that caused offence.
Basically just like Galileo it was his autism that did him in. Ficino lived 100 years before Bruno and his Platonism was accepted just fine (though not his Astrology)

[Anonymous No.19986856]

>>19986837
Lmao

[Anonymous No.19986925]

>>19983680
>physical library (probably large)
>cumbersome
LOL. Don't even bother posting wrists. Was it hard work making that substandard post?

[Anonymous No.19986998]

>>19983665
Porphyry>Iamblichus>Proclus>Dionysius the Areopogate>Bible

[Anonymous No.19987394]

>>19984362
This

[Anonymous No.19987398]

>>19984362
Christian Platonists managed the impossible. They made a bunch of Jewish myths respected as an intellectual religion.

[Anonymous No.19987402]

>>19986837
So...everyone was too Reddit around him.

[Anonymous No.19987412]

>>19987398
By cannibalizing pagan history.

[Anonymous No.19987685]

>broke
the middle ages declined intellectually because of Christianity
>woke
the middle ages did not decline intellectually
>bespoke
the middle ages declined intellectually because Aristotlean Scholasticism stamped out Neoplatonism

[Anonymous No.19987692]

>>19987685
The Latin West was never Platonist. Proclus was only translated into Latin during Aquinas time

[Anonymous No.19987694]

>>19986837
I started reading Ficino's commentary on Plato expecting it to be filled with Christian force-fitting but there's almost none of it; I would think it was entirely pagan and straight from antiquity if I hadn't already known it was written in the Renaissance.

I feel like Ficino is getting an uptick in popularity and is turning into one of those writers everyone reads about on Wikipedia but no one actually fucking reads.

[Anonymous No.19987697]

>>19987694
I don't get what your point is.

[Anonymous No.19987705]

>>19987692
>Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius and Eriugena weren't Neoplatonists
Do you think that they weren't real Neoplatonism, or that Neoplatonism stopped being Platonic?

[Anonymous No.19987723]

>>19987705
Augustine's brand of Platonism was very different to Pseudo-Dionysius and obviously Augustine had a far greater influence over western theology than Dionysius did. Psudo-Dionysius was basically Proclus with a few Christian twists while Augustine took what he needed from Platonism but also took a lot from Aristotle.

[Anonymous No.19987728]

>>19983656
>mysticism
no one cares schizo

[Anonymous No.19987752]

>>19983912
Who is Aristotle's Plato?

[Anonymous No.19987772]

>>19987752
I'd say himself, but we've lost all of Aristotle's dialogues, and Plato seems not to have ever written down his doctrine in non-dialogue form.

[Anonymous No.19987845]

>>19983656
Love Plotinus and he was right about everything, but there's nothing more annoying than a Platonic shill babbling about "tradition". Both Plotinus and Plato knew the term was meaningless. Re-read the fucking Timaeus. Re-read the Critias. Why is the Atlantis account put in the mouth of a despicable character? Why does everything in his story reeks of argument from authority and is presented as highly unreliable? Plato was the first "traditional" thinker to undermine the concept that the "basis" for civilization are to be found in some remote past writing or thought: everything has to be re-discovered every time through individual research, because Atlantis (civilization) routinely gets destroyed and changed, but mind is a-temporal and only through individual research WITHIN the mind one can find the truth. And that is why he writes dialogues and wastes so much time depicting the practice of philosophical research as conversation between few humans rather than a speech given to many: the latter is always lost, as civilization is lost, but thinking (conversation with yourself, or with others) is not, as long as humans exist.
So stop telling people to read fucking Plotinus to know "the basis of their civilizations" and go talk to them about the relevant ideas in Plotinus.