/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.22684981]

Why don’t the same arguments he used to show limit and infinity are prior to Being apply to the henads? And how are the henads enumerable if there’s no infinitude and limit before them? I don’t think he explicitly said anywhere that limit and infinity were posterior to he henads, but if they were prior, then surely Being would be also, so they shouldn’t be enumerable and they shouldn’t have infinite potency.

[Anonymous No.22685814]

>>22684981
bump

I have other questions about this book. For example, If the one is imparticipable, but is also pure unity, and everything participates unity, then what they participate when they participate unity must not be the one, but the henads or some other thing superior to them. yet even if I’m participating a henad, then qua participation of unity I’m still participating pure unity, which would mean I’m participating the One, wouldn’t it? I’m just also participating the chacyer of the henad in addition to it.

[Anonymous No.22685822]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ein_Sof

[Anonymous No.22686204]

>>22684981
The Henads are the first and most universal pluralities of the Monad, thus by definition enumerable, and the first and most universal beings before the Demiurge and the most universal interplays between the Forms that gives rise to World Soul. Limit and infinity are prior to Being, but not the Henads, as they exist on the highest paradigm. Remember that every plurality subordinates to unity within one level and that unity results from higher plurality.

[Anonymous No.22686419]

>>22686204
>thus by definition enumerable
But aren’t numbers generated by limit and infinitude? How are the henads countable before numbers exist?
>most universal interplays between the Forms
Don’t the forms come after the henads? Not everything that’s participable is a form I think, or else taxons would be described as having a form at their head instead of an originating monad. I think originating monads are more general than forms. Forms have being.
>but not the Henads, as they exist on the highest paradigm
The problem is that the argument he uses to say infinity and limit are prior to being is something like “being is limited with respect to space, but has infinite potency.” Yet the Henads are also non-spatial and are described as having infinite potency. And also, in the proof that there are a finite number of henads, he says infinity is most unlike the one and that’s why it’s absurd for there to be infinite henads. But in that case infinity should be the last thing that’s ever generated, long after Being. I think he’s using infinite in different senses. He introduces a concept of relative infinity as being infinite because it’s ineffable to lower beings, but then why is Being not only relatively infinite as well.

[Anonymous No.22686700]

OP here, nevermind. I just got to proposition 159. The gods are derived from limit and infinity after all.

[Anonymous No.22686990]

>>22686700
It's been a few years since I read him, but I think you might be correct. Limit and infinity are the preconditions for number so they must precede the Henads, but I don't see how they could precede Nous, since that's the Monad's contemplation of its own object, rendering the conditions required for number. To me, it always made much more sense for the Henads/Gods to proceed from Nous' subject-object cycle. I think it makes more sense if you consider that Proclus thought of number as preceding and pre-required for Intellect, resulting objectively from the first multiplicity of the One, but only realised by Nous upon its own turning. Idk if that makes sense.
Your second question doesn't really make sense to me. My head hurts...
How have you found Proclus so far and what brought you to study him?

[Anonymous No.22687072]

>>22686990
I don't really know if infinitude and limit produce number, I'm just thinking it is because a) that's how it is in Pythagoreanism b) the indefinite dyad produces numbers in Plotinus and infinitude-limit is the only analogue to the indefinite dyad I've found in Proclus, because I somewhat remember the indefinite dyad being the first thing that comes from the One in Plotinus, as a sort of proto-Intellect or proto-subject vs object. Of course this is all made more confusing by the fact that half the time Proclus uses the word nous he isn't even talking about the Plotinian hypostasis but the thing in his being-life-mind triad.
>Your second question doesn't really make sense to me
he says "the one is "obviously" imparticipable." Yet he also says the one is "pure unity" and the very first proposition says "everything participates unity". so that's what's confusing.
>How have you found Proclus so far and what brought you to study him?
I have the book in the OP pic. Although I only just bought that and before I used to read the first edition of it off libgen, but I never got past like proposition 60. I think I'd get more out of him if I re-read Plotinus because I understood nothing when I read him a couple years ago, but I'm too lazy.

The elements of theology I basically have read as a process of elimination as to what exists, at first I was thinking just because everything produces something inferior to it isn't a criteria enough to say what particular kinds of things get produced, but basically by taking for granted that extrinsically moved bodies exist and that orders have to have an originating monad he narrows done what comes into existence from the overflowing of the one. Everything exists by negation, since everything is just a lessening of unity. It's less like things are produced than things are separated out. It all comes together more and more the more you read it. Although I think there are a lot of flaws. In the introduction Dodds says it's a "reductio ad absurdum" of rationalism because it creates a cosmos that exactly mirrors the structure of Greek logic. It's offensive and probably true.

[Anonymous No.22687234]

>>22687072
You need a very strong knowledge of Plotinus to get much out of Proclus. I'm going back to the former with a reading group soon, so I'll probably read him again after.

The way I see it, everything participates in unity, but unity itself is not the One when we refer to the One as the One. Even unity is born of the One, and in this way the One precedes, or rather gives birth to, logic.
>Everything exists by negation, since everything is just a lessening of unity.
I wouldn't say it's a *lessening* as opposed to a *seeming* lessening, in the One's contemplation of its self, a fundamentally different thing. The entire project of neoplatonism is to construct a monistic metaphysics that contains within it the unfolding of multiplicity.

I'm surprised Dodds said that since he was himself an avowed platonist, but I assume he took a more non-discursive stance to things then. I personally don't believe that its a reductio ad absurdum at all, especially if you consider the historic mood and context of Late Antiquity's 'scholasticism.' I take everything Proclus says completely literally and share that sort of worldview, I suppose because it tickles my autism, but it's interesting for me to see other people interested in the work specifically because of the importance it holds for me.

Also, I agree with what you say about how things are not produced so much as "separated out" of the One. If you think about the particular nature of space and time, there's definitely a relationship there. I see this separation or quality of difference as perceived by us as entropy and as what gives rise to the dimension of time.

[Anonymous No.22688223]

bump

[Anonymous No.22688407]

Why trouble yourself with these things when it's all objectively inferior to advaita. As a principle (proclus elements) the greater cannot come from the lesser, and since platonism only came about from advaita then it's inferior paradigmatically.

[Anonymous No.22688903]

>>22687234
I don’t think he even thinks of time as a dimension, because he always talks about space as a substrate but never time. Periodic time is just the mean term between becoming and being.
>>22688407
I’m not one of those people who doesn’t care about anything but how mystical and based something sounds

[Anonymous No.22689118]

>>22688407
>ancient greco roman platonism is axshually derived from crypto-buddhist medieval brahministic reform
This is your brain after taking cock from your guenonian guru

[Anonymous No.22689880]

>>22688903
Oh, I wasn't saying he does. But I see Proclus' view of time in kind of the same way as Leibniz, who is quite possibly the greatest philosopher of time, where the supermonad is omnitemporal and thus does not experience time as unfolding but as something akin to a flat geometrical surface. This notion receives experimental support in Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity where relativistic contractions and dilations of time are real phenomena (that have been well substantiated experimentally). When we think of the past as something that elapses or disappears, such that only the “moving present” can truly be said to exist. To Leibniz and Whitehead, however, this means somehow every event that has ever taken place and will ever have taken place is frozen as an entity for all time because it continues to exist at that moment from some space-time perspective. Kind of like how permanence works in neoplatonism; so this is a place where physics and metaphysics meet.

[Anonymous No.22691345]

bump

[Anonymous No.22692450]

>>22689118
Its chronologically and geographically plausible. Nothing you say will change that fact. If you were intellectually honest you would admit it, unless you can demonstrate otherwise, which i doubt you can.

[Anonymous No.22692459]

>Henads
Dropped

[Anonymous No.22692591]

>>22684981