/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.22904227]

The fact that the "Third Man" argument has been repeated throughout history as if it were in any way effective or profound unironically makes me believe most people who are into philosophy are actual NPCs.

Like the first argument as it's given in Parmenides is probably just a joke (Parmenides asks "Will there not appear some one *large* thing by which all these appear to be large ?", to which the answer is no), and Aristotle's version is pretty much along those lines too.

The "TMA" that Proclus deals with in his commentaries is somewhat "nearer the mark" in terms of posing a real problem on a wrong understanding of platonic realism, but it is not the argument given by detractors anyways, though ironically it is basically the "TMA 2" given in Parmenides (so that we can say that Plato actually understood what a "real-er" objection could be, but nevertheless was unphased by it)

I guess if you're analytically minded like Proclus then yeah you can make that division between the participated and unparticipated term, but you still have to remember that it's little more than a semantic crutch for immediate use in debating non-platonists and that Plotinus' approach of simply pointing out that the sensible world *can be nothing but* the differentiated and discursive apprehension/appearance of true being, and not even acknowledging the midwits who think there is some sort of problem or contradiction with this.

pretty much the same goes for the "one over many" bullshit objections

tl;dr
>ideas have no "features in common" with instances
>the "otherness" of ideas from instances in not the kind otherness instances have between themselves
>there is no contradiction between transcendence and immanence
>ideas cannot not be ontologically prior to instances for reason of intelligibility, potentiality, and finality
k good talk

[Anonymous No.22904233]

that Plotinus' approach is ultimately right*, sorry

[Anonymous No.22904262]

>>22904227
i didnt understand anything you just said.

[Anonymous No.22904285]

>>22904227
It's just an early example of recognizing that self-reference can lead to problems unless done very carefully. The set of all sets is not allowed for a similar reason.

[Anonymous No.22904303]

Also it cracks me up to see fucking zoomers trying for a cheap "gotcha" on a millenia old tradition of universally recognized geniuses who spent their lives pondering those questions.

Like yeah I'm sure Plotinus NEVER thought that there could be an apparent paradox in the idea of fire being all that fires are while being none of them, as he LITTERALLY never tires of repeating lmao. I'm sure he had no solution whatsoever for it, or nothing to say on the matter, and I'm sure his whole philosophy can be shattered to pieces by some zoomer who just watched a video of some other zoomer explaining "aristotle smart plato dumb because le third man le one over many"

like can't they be a little charitable or a little humble and just consider for a moment that they might have missed something important ?

>>22904233
why ?

[Anonymous No.22904308]

>>22904303
meant to reply to >>22904262
kek

[Anonymous No.22904317]

>>22904227
Don't bother anon. I tried too long to get people to realise the true wisdom.

[Anonymous No.22904324]

>>22904317
You cant discuss metaphysics with hylics (you can but its fruitless)

[Anonymous No.22904402]

>>22904324
>>22904317
there has to be a way to make them see the beauty of it all
it's all so simple, so clear, so irrefutable

[Anonymous No.22904495]

>>22904402
Upon examination, you will eventually realise there is no transcendental subject but you. The impulse to enlighten others is nothing more than another acquired dogma that must be shed along the φυγὴ μόνου πρὸς μόνον. You need to cultivate stillness, to watch without intervening. Learning to keep your vision of the self-same Other intact as you move through the world is a potent way of training the awareness and snapping awake from the shallow trance of aimless chatter that most people are in most of the time when they’re not sound asleep.

[Anonymous No.22904689]

>>22904402
Assuming none of you are baiting, and taking a vow of good faith, what exactly should one see? Actually, don't tell me, just point me to where I can find it. Plotinus? Parmenides? Plato? Aristotle? Jesus? Give me some recommendations, I want to understand what any of this means, even if I turn out disagreeing.

[Anonymous No.22904801]

>>22904689
Plotinus is probably the best and clearest.
But it tends to filter a lot of autists who pay too much attention to words and not enough about what is said and not said.
It's like, it's incredibly clear if you understand what he's going for, but if you get too hung up on the fact that he uses negative and affirmative theology indifferently, and the apparent "verticality" of his ontology, you will miss the mark by a gigantic margin
Eriugena is very good also.

[Anonymous No.22904822]

>>22904689
For a more thorough understanding:
Pre-Socratics (Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles) -> Plato (complete) -> Aristotle (Categories, De Anima, Metaphysics) -> Plotinus -> Proclus (hard)
Make sure you go as slow as you need to in order to really gain a concrete understanding. This should take months. After this, you can read more exotic texts like Iamblichus or delve into Christian philosophy with Origen, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Eriugena, and later Scholasticism, or Islamic philosophy if that's your thing.

[Anonymous No.22904833]

>>22904689
Siddhartha Gautama

[Anonymous No.22904842]

>>22904833
he was a hylic masquerading as a serious thinker

[Anonymous No.22904862]

>>22904227
You ever read guys who developed these ideas down the road? I find Aquinas interesting because he seems to bring in some of the good parts of Aristotle and merge them with Platonism. Jensen's "The Human Person," is a good example of a phenomenalogical Thomist approach that relies on the intelligible.

Or there is Hegel's explanation of how the universal grows out of the soil of the particular, which doesn't make it dependent in a way you might think since the "truth is the whole," and "the flower does not refute the bud." I particularly like the application to political philosophy because it explains the role of emergent phenomena and institutions well, the idea that individuals can be accidents while the principles that institutions instantiate are substance.

[Anonymous No.22904866]

>>22904862
I really like this book too, although I think it misses our by skipping over the Neoplatonists and Patristics. In terms of the pragmatic aspects on how to live and the overcoming of disorder in the soul, it's a shame the author doesn't get into Augustine.

[Anonymous No.22904871]

>>22904822
imo Proclus is only "hard" because he was something of an autist who felt the need to "formalize", and created some useless/meaningless distinctions as a result of this
the Enneads strikes me as much richer and I'm inclined to think this indicates Plotinus had a deeper understanding
I'd read Plotinus first to be honest, probably with some secondary litterature, Perl's book is very good. Reading Plato's dialogues without having had any contact with more "systematized" platonism is a sure way of not even understanding the questions that are being raised in my experience, and you'll end up completely misconstruing what is at stake.
Also I disagree that the whole thing should take months. Understanding the basic thrust of platonism can take months, sure, or it can take seconds, depends on you. But really understanding one author and working out the implications along with him takes years.
Took him a whole life to get there and sure he's paved the way, but that doesn't mean you'll blast through it all.
On that view you'd be lucky even to understand one or two authors in your whole life.

[Anonymous No.22904879]

>>22904317
All you can do is try your best for others. I started philosophy with Nietzsche, and this led me to a very negative view of Plato since Nietzsche's Plato is a strawman. And then my interest in the sciences and the more Aristotlean tradition only solidified this view.

It wasn't until actually engaging with Augustine and Bonneventure that I got led back to reconsider Plato that I realized how right he was on most things.

I do recall people pointing out how I was wrong before and now realize it. Sometimes it can take a long time.

[Anonymous No.22904918]

>>22904862
I got to Platonism through Thomism. It's a funny story, I was reading the most neo-thomistic, LARPy stuff you can think of, but all I took away from it for some reason was essentially neoplatonism. Yet I didn't know what to call it, and it was diluted in stuff I didn't care for or about.

Eventually I started reading Plotinus and felt right at home. I'm still convinced that Aquinas was something of a neoplatonist (this is a thesis that one finds in Norris Clarke, Kerr, or even the great Josef Pieper), since otherwise I could have never taken away from it what I took from it, but maybe this was not conscious and he failed in articulating it to its full extent. Maybe he felt he couldn't for some reason, idk. I'm only speculating since I never read Aquinas proper, only passages and extracts.

Thomists (who, on the whole, are insufferable midwits) assure me that there is nothing of the sort in Aquinas and that he is in complete opposition to platonism (which they invariably misconstrue), that God cannot be the One (although these people literally never understand how the One works and "what" it "is" for lack of better words). I don't know. Aquinas is not high on my reading list priorities, so maybe I will never know.

When neoplatonists say that Aquinas was one of them, thomists tend to think we are going for an argument of authority, trying to appropriate him or something, when in reality, we are trying to salvage him, to offer a charitable reading of him, since neoplatonism stands on its own and is true. Whatever.

[Anonymous No.22904932]

>>22904317
>>22904324
>>22904402
Steer normies in the right direction in a positive way instead of trying to bash them over the head with that which then can't understand. Give wisdom sparely and only in moments when people are receptive to hear it, or they will hate you.

[Anonymous No.22904968]

>>22904879
Yeah Plato and platonists are the greatest victims of strawmanning there is. The thing is, it's a very simple idea (it essentially boils down to the convertibility of the transcendentals True, One, Good, Being and thus to a dissipation of false dichotomies such as that between intellect and will, that between instance and form-as-a-glorified-instance), but it's so simple and powerful that it very easily passes for sophistry.

Remember that Porphyry, upon meeting Plotinus for the first time, took him for "a complete fool and a sophist" if memory serves (those would be his own words).
Only after a very long talk with him did he finally understand the astonishing scope and unassaillable veracity of what the master was saying, and immediately thereafter, became his disciple for the remainder of his life.

It's both funny and infuriating that platonism, which towers above all "other schools" in scope, in ambition, in unity, in explicative power, is more often that not relegated to one half of the first page in philosophy 101 type textbooks, written by people who think it rested on a simple misunderstanding and was refuted millenia ago, when in reality it was never even engaged with by anyone outside of it, since to understand it is to accept it.

People like Plotinus and Eriugena are so far above and beyond the preoccupations of most people who think they have "refuted" them that it's enough to make one dizzy. Recently you get people like Lloyd or Hadot who point out that a phenomenological reading of Plotinus is possible, and people behave as if it were a controversial thesis or a new discovery, but in reality it's like "no shit". What did you think he was doing ? And that's not even half of it.

[Anonymous No.22905031]

>>22904801
>>22904822
Thanks guys, and the others as well. This is all too interesting, and the quality of these threads is beyond anything else in /lit/ let alone other "philosophical" places on the internet. There has to be at least something there, and I hope I can come back after a few months or years to discuss it, regardless of the opinion I form :)

[Anonymous No.22905102]

>>22904822
Eriugena is great but hard. Hegel shares a great deal with Eriugena but he is even worse, an absolutely atrocious writer, a fact made worse by the fact that he actually has worthwhile things to say, making you slog through him.

I have not found great secondary literature on Eriugena. Carabine is ok and on LibGen. For Hegel, Houlgate's commentary on the Greater Logic is great and maybe the place to start. Harris's Hegel's Ladder for the Phenomenology is good but not all that easy. Pinkhard's Hegel's Naturalism is a good accessible intro if you keep in mind the Pinkhard is grossly simplifying Hegel and deflating him. It's good because it is simple and short, but also quite incomplete.

Saint Augustine is eminently readable, even on pure literary merit for some of his works. It's important to note that early Augustine is very much working in the tradition of Plotinus, Porphery, and Proclus, but that he goes off in a different, semiotic/dialectical direction later. He does the "cognito ergo sum" a millennia before Descartes in Contra Academicos, Pierce's semiotics in De Dialecta (still not a good place to learn semiotics though), the Lord-Bondsman Dialectic in the City of God before Hegel, and Hegelian dialectical before Hegel in De Trinitate, convincing me that there is nothing new under the sun. But there is a lot of theology mixed in so you might want to stick to Confessions, or City of God if you like classics.

Bonaventure's The Mind's Journey Into God is an absolute classic in the Christian Platonist tradition but I feel like you really have to know the tradition first, then read it. It's super short, and more a perfect capstone recapitulation than instructive, a dessert after dinner if you will.

[Anonymous No.22905109]

Oh, and Sugrue's Great Courses class on the Socratic Dialogues is good. You can tell he absolutely loves Plato, and he gets into the literary merit of the work and symbolism used too, which many pass over.

Never buy from the Great Courses though. That stuff can always be stolen or gotten way cheaper on Amazon, Audible, Wonderium, or wherever else they sell it. IDK why their site charges like $300 for courses and then offers them elsewhere for $7 a month subscriptions or $10 Audible credits.

[Anonymous No.22905158]

>>22904227
If ideas have no features in common with instances, then what causes instances to have the idea in common?

Isn't there a 2nd TMA in the dialogue Parmenides that you forgot to mention?

What's your opinion on the later theory of the forms that appear in dialogues like Sophist? I think that might be related to:
>the "otherness" of ideas from instances in not the kind otherness instances have between themselves
which I could use some unpacking if you could spare it please.

Otherwise I completely agree.

[Anonymous No.22905191]

>>22904918
>I'm still convinced that Aquinas was something of a neoplatonist (this is a thesis that one finds in Norris Clarke, Kerr, or even the great Josef Pieper),

That's not what they say at all. Norris Clarke is constantly critiquing Plotinus and Platonism.

[Anonymous No.22905291]

>>22905158
I did mention it (third paragraph)
short way of putting it is that the ideas are the features.
to try and reply to both questions: to be sure, if we are talking about "instances" in the sense of procline "participated terms", then yes, the instances "have" everything in common (though the term "feature" is then a bit misleading) with the idea since they are nothing but the idea "qua appearing in a differentiated way/lending itself to the discursive"
but if the "instances" are the sensibles and the participated terms are their features, then the ideas don't have the features, they are the features, or rather they are all that the features are.
>What's your opinion on the later theory of the forms that appear in dialogues like Sophist?
I greatly recommend Perl's paper "the presence of the paradigm" (of something like that) as it shows that there really isn't much sense to be made of the idea that Plato somehow changed his view. It should be noted as well that the chronology of the dialogues, which is used to uphold the theory that Plato changed his mind, is itself based on the assumption that he did.

[Anonymous No.22905331]

>>22905191
Yeah I was lumping together some very different views which is why I said "something of" a platonist.
Kerr and Pieper would say it more or less verbatim.
Norris Clarke and Kerr are similar in that they'll say Aquinas is a neoplatonist (Kerr) or has strong neoplatonists elements in his thinking (Norris Clarke), but they will still insist that he nevertheless avoided the "incoherencies" of other or of true neoplatonists, with said incoherencies being, as always, gross misrepresentations (like the idea that Plotinus' One doesn't have Will or Intellect, despite the fact that he clearly expounds on this topic in places like V.4 and VI.8, and not so clearly everywhere else).
Of those I mentioned, only Pieper, I think, unabashedly considers Aquinas a full-on platonist (or a neoplatonist, which means exactly the same thing) and doesn't see a problem with this

[Anonymous No.22905411]

>>22904689
The other guys have dropped good names but I'll reiterate a point that's been made here in passing. If you want to really "get" the platonic tradition you shouldn't just start from the presocratics or plato and work your way up chronologically, it's far better to read a figure who acknowledges the existence of the platonic tradition more openly (such as Plotinus) and then with that in mind to visit the older texts, otherwise you'll probably just be confused about whatever it is that's supposed to constitute this so called tradition in the first place.

The "Studies in Platonism, Neoplatonism and the Platonic Tradition" series offers great secondary literature and a lot of those books are available on libgen. Perl's "Thinking Being" which has been referred to in this thread is a great introductory book to the study of the platonic tradition but I'd also shout out "Platonisms: Ancient, Modern and Postmodern" which sets out neatly some of the ways in which platonism has been thought of in the course of history. I'd at the very least read Steven Strange's essay on Proclus in that book since I believe it to offer help in approaching any historical philosopher who sees themselves as part of the tradition.

But yeah if you just want to dive in to the main stuff pick up the Enneads, De Mysteriis and/or the Anonymous Prolegomena to Platonic Philosophy.

[Anonymous No.22905412]

>>22905331
> fact that he clearly expounds on this topic in places like V.4
What do you mean? I just read Mackenna’s translation of V.4 and didn’t see Plotinus say that the One has intellect or will, he seems rather to say that creation proceeds as an automatic consequence of its nature which he compares to fire having an essence or ‘internal act’ of heat which has the consequence of the secondary act of the outward heat that warms other things.

[Anonymous No.22905468]

>>22905331
>gross misrepresentations (like the idea that Plotinus' One doesn't have Will or Intellect...
>5.6 (24) On the Fact That That Which Transcends Being Does Not Think and on What the Primary Thinking Is and What Is Secondary
You are right about will though, as you mentioned how Plotinus explains in VI.8, but the Intellect does not apply to the One.

[Anonymous No.22905500]

>>22905412
as to V.4 I'm referring mainly to V.4.2
>"The intellectual object (i.e. the One) is self-gathered, and is not deficient as the seeing and knowing principle (i.e. Intellect) must be – deficient, I mean, as needing an object – it is therefore no unconscious thing: all its content and accompaniment are its possession; it is self-distinguishing throughout; it is the seat of life as of all things; it is, itself, that self-intellection which takes place in eternal repose, that is to say, in a mode other than that of the Intellectual-Principle."

and

>"the producer is unchangeably the intellectual object, the product is produced as the Intellectual Act, an Act taking intellection of its source – the only object that exists for it – and so becoming Intellectual-Principle, that is to say, becoming another intellectual being, resembling its source, a reproduction and image of that."
VI.8 (15 through 18 roughly) has equivalent language (calling the One an intellective nature for instance, which for Plotinus means intellect and will, stuff like that) but I won't quote it here in full obviously.
These are the most famous passages and I'm pretty sure V.4.2 at least is actually quoted in a discussion of this specific topic in my edition of Mackenna.

Taking both in conjuction (and the whole of Plotinus' production) we come to this conclusion (and we can look to Hadot's useful phrase calling Plotinus' ontology "levels of the self"): that the One is in a way selfhood itself, both in presence (intellect) and orientation (will) to himself. He is "conscious presence", intentionality, even before there is any one thing to know, to desire, to tend towards, rather "being" Himself "that" through which we know, "that" for the sake of which we desire and so on. This is why it's completely unsurprising that Plotinus calls him intelligible and intellective. (sidenote, for Plotinus, there is very little distinction between intellect and will, as they are, at bottom level, an orientation to the One)

[Anonymous No.22905527]

In the specific issue we are discussing, it becomes apparent (mainly through the second passage from V.4.2) that Intellect, for instance, is nothing but the One looking at himself "from" the things he lends himself to. To stay closer to usual formulations, the One, first as undifferentiated containment of all things, has them in him but is in them wholly also as their condition for being what they are and so of being period (this is a move you see often in Plotinus, and famously in Augustine. aptly enough, it resembles a logical operation called "hypostatic abstraction"). So Intellect is the One seeing things in himself by seeing himself in them and so on. Intellect is One-Many not inasmuch as it's many things "grouped" together arbitrarily or by virtue of "being" in a static sense, as if being were a bare, final category, but it is Intellect and One-Many precisely in being the dynamic perpetual unification of beings (plural) by the fact that they are see-able and seen, their common denominator as effusions from that great "Inner Life" of the One.

On a side note, this is, I think a problem that people who call themselves aristotelians have: they do not understand that Being-Intellect is not final. At least this goes for the ones I've met. Also a lot of people are fixated on the fact that the One is "beyond" Being in Plotinus and so can't be God. This is a misconception, because Plotinus calls Intellect "Being" but, it is not yet being itself (that is the One), but things that are inasmuch as they are unified by the fact that they are (in the sense I tried to articulate)

All of this finds even clearer articulations in Eriugena imo (and is apparently present in church fathers as Well), as when he discusses how the Divine Essence may be said to be created in the things that are (though Plotinus also at one point says that the One "gives itself existence"), or when he insists that no essence (which are the intelligible things) save the Divine Essence (which is not one intelligible thing) is intelligible in itself (which is what people who talk of pure nature and the like fail to understand)

Anyway, post is getting pretty long at it's getting late here

[Anonymous No.22905564]

>>22905527
>On a side note, this is, I think a problem that people who call themselves aristotelians have: they do not understand that Being-Intellect is not final. At least this goes for the ones I've met. Also a lot of people are fixated on the fact that the One is "beyond" Being in Plotinus and so can't be God. This is a misconception, because Plotinus calls Intellect "Being" but, it is not yet being itself (that is the One), but things that are inasmuch as they are unified by the fact that they are (in the sense I tried to articulate)
I'll add that this gives rise to further misunderstandings on their part, like I've had a catholic thomist recently imply that Porphyry calling the One "Being" meant he significantly departed this doctrine. But as I've endeavoured to show, this is simply a matter of personal preference.

[Anonymous No.22905706]

>>22905500
>that the One is in a way selfhood itself, both in presence (intellect) and orientation (will) to himself. He is "conscious presence", intentionality
Would you say then that the position of Plotinus is that the One is characterized by a timeless "act" of self-contemplation, which takes place not as the dyadic act of intellection does, but as one eternal conscious presence that is timelessly aware of itself as such without splitting into known vs knower or subject vs object? And that by the One having "will" that you mean an inherent disposition or its own inner teleology that causes it to automatically produce all secondary things without any thought or decision-making involved, as opposed to a creaturely will that considers an option among many options and then decides to engage in that option?

[Anonymous No.22905976]

>>22905706
>Would you say then that the position of Plotinus is that the One is characterized by a timeless "act" of self-contemplation, which takes place not as the dyadic act of intellection does, but as one eternal conscious presence that is timelessly aware of itself as such without splitting into known vs knower or subject vs object?
yes, the One is that act. but this is because he is the "pattern" after which even the dyadic intellection is modeled. he is both the presence and the horizon to it, which makes it possible at all.
>And that by the One having "will" that you mean an inherent disposition or its own inner teleology
Yeah, kind of. The One is that disposition, as is found in all things. The will of the One is what becomes created in the will of all things.
>that causes it to automatically produce all secondary things without any thought or decision-making involved, as opposed to a creaturely will that considers an option among many options and then decides to engage in that option?
I guess here I would have more of a problem with the phrasing, this disposition having been described as "that of the One" and not just what the One "is", we are now formulating things as though the One was forced by something other than himself (although you did say it was "intrinsic"), the word "automatically" too sort of conveys the meaning of being wholly conditioned by others. But yeah, basically. If you know Maximus and the whole gnomic/natural will thing, it's like the One is natural will itself.
Obviously we can't say creation happens without any thought since creation is a thought, but yeah it happens without deliberation.
All in all, whichever metaphor/analogy helps

[Anonymous No.22906001]

>>22905411
Thank you too anon.

I have a general question, not very in line with the current discussion. Everywhere I hear about Plato's genius, and even more so in threads like these. They set me up for thinking I should read the books expecting a quasi-transcendental experience, and this isn't much voluntary. My question is, therefore, about whether it would be harmful to go into it with such preconceptions, and if so, how to best clear one's head of them?

[Anonymous No.22906076]

>>22906001
not him but as he said, if you start with Plato, you'll get very little
also on the topic of Plato's genius, I don't know
he is said to be a genius because platonism is a "work" of genius. the fact is that this doctrine, as articulated in Plotinus, is absolutely found in Plato. however, whether he came up with anything proper to himself is debated. for all we know, Plato might have been just another in a long line of Platonism. Euclid of Megara or Socrates himself might have held similar views.
what I'm saying is that even if he did come up with it, he might not have been its greatest exponent, and even if he was (as he may have been), his dialogues may not be the best exposition of it, due to the constraints and the aim (which oftentimes is to make you figure it out for yourself without giving you too much)

this is why I much prefer Plotinus, he strove to systematize it all without being an autist about it, his writings leave no doubt as to his meaning, and for what it's worth I think he may have understood more about Plato's thought than Plato himself (as illustrated by small things like his alterations to Plato's sun metaphor and the like)

I have been puzzled by Plato's dialogues, intrigued, amused, I have seen interesting ways of bringing up key points which I already knew from Plotinus, but I have never been in awe or anything, precisely because he gives you very little

[Anonymous No.22906146]

>>22905291
>but if the "instances" are the sensibles and the participated terms are their features, then the ideas don't have the features, they are the features, or rather they are all that the features are.
So it's like saying that red things don't participate in the form of redness, but rather that redness is a form, and redness is a measure of how read something is, correct?

I always felt like the TMA was a problem of confusing labels with the substance behind the labels.

[Anonymous No.22906151]

and participation in redness is a measure of how *red* something is, correct?*
wow I butchered that one, my bad

[Anonymous No.22906158]

>>22906001
Honestly I think going into Plato with such preconceptions could even be beneficial to your understanding of the platonic tradition. This is because later platonists read him exactly like that, you can pick just about any commentary from late antiquity any of Plato’s dialogues and you will not see the commentators talking about simply Plato, he is always addressed as “the Divine Plato”. It could feel LARPy but I think reading Plato with that mindset allows you to better understand the philosophers who based their ideas on him, whether or not it allows for a faithful interpretation of Plato by himself is another matter though. Still, I’d say that for understanding the tradition it’s a good hermeneutic. Just make sure to be already familiar with the tradition before you do that, as has been stressed in this thread.

At the end of the day Plato was one of the greatest geniuses who ever lived, approaching him as such will only force you to ponder his writings more, which is what he most probably wants you to do.

[Anonymous No.22906335]

>>22905976
I find that interesting, I have not heard that explanation of Plotinus given before with reference to the Enneads but it's basically identical to the view of Shankara, who also describes Brahman as having timeless 'auto-awareness' of itself and as being 'conscious presence' itself, while also having an inherent disposition or nature that causes the world-appearance to arise from it, which he also describes as it's 'will' or 'desire' in a figurative sense where it's referring to some inherent drive or teleology that is non-different from Brahman itself and not referring to creaturely will and decision-making.

[Anonymous No.22906739]

>>22906335
Not that anon you're talking to but loosely speaking,

Brahman is Absolute
Atman is Intellect
Jivatman is Living Soul

Atman away from Jiva and Avidya is the Nirguna Brahman but otherwise is the Saguna Brahman.

[Anonymous No.22906802]

>>22906739
No offense, but I'm familiar with Shankara's works and I'd have to disagree, he emphasizes the complete and total identity of Atman with the Nirguna Brahman under any and all circumstances and he would resist saying "Brahman = Absolute and Atman = intellect". He specifies that intellect is non-self (i.e. not the Atman).

The intellective capacity within living individuals is held by Shankara to be the buddhi, and the universal intellect of Neoplatonism as being an intermediatory principle between the One and creatures is more like Hiranyagarbha or the Saguna Brahman.

[Anonymous No.22906856]

>>22904842
Nta, but Gotama was a platonist vedantist par excellence. You've been misled by the millennia of hylic mistranslations and terrible exegesis by zealot monks in the East (whom would consider my view "heterodox" but are exactly who the Buddha is talking about when he says the sangha would not last even 500 years), particularly of the doctrine of anatta (by which what he really meant to show was that the transcendental subject is not grounded in any of the skandhas). You don't have to believe me, but I'd just like to make it clear that Siddhartha did NOT preach that the soul doesn't exist. "Platonism" is Upanishadic and Egyptian knowledge much older than Plato transmitted to the Greeks through Pythagoras (hence the Axial Age) and was already a tradition in total disrepair by the time of the Buddha, hence his revolution against (or rather in) the pre-existing Brahmanism. The profane term "Buddhism" didn't come around until the 16th century, the Buddha in the Pali canon only ever refers to his doctrine as "Brahmayana." If you want to truly understand the Buddha, you'd probably be better off reading Adi Sankara unironically. Actually, a perfect intro to this is any and all of A.K. Coomaraswamy's metaphysical works on Buddhism. You have to understand, what happened to platonism as in >>22904968, happened a thousand times more to "Buddhism" and in the latter's case there's no one to correct it because religionists (who commit grave profanities such as reifying Mara) have a monopoly on it and nobody reads the language of the doctrine itself (Pali) so no discussion is ever to the point and sola Scriptura, but dealt with through dozens of layers of faulty exegesis.

[Anonymous No.22907099]

>>22906146
>>22906151
bump

[Anonymous No.22907102]

>>22904227
what would the "third nigga argument" be?

[Anonymous No.22907111]

>>22906802
Nous = Plotinian Second Hypostasis = "Intellect" in translation =/= Buddhi-Chitta-Ahamkara-Manas unrelated non parallel distinctions as the strawmanned Nous.

All the English terms was translations of Plotinian terms so you can't play this strawmanned pigeonholing game.

All the Sanskrit terms cannot properly be retroactively reinterpret Prakrit terms one for one as well. Citta for Gotama is not the same as Chitta for Sankara.

Hiranyagarbha is similar to the Cosmic Soul distinction of the Plotinian Third Hypostasis of Psyche which are all within Time, but the All Soul as Higher Soul can ascend to the Noetic Hypostasis which is beyond Time and Space. There is no hard distinction between Cosmic Soul from Individual Soul for both are of the same Hypostatic Soul, which the All-Soul is too, also of the same Hypostasis albeit treated as the Higher Soul sometimes but the Summit of the Psyche is the Base of the Nous, and the Summit of that same Nous is the One which has no greater nor lesser.

>>22906856
Gotama according to K.L.W. whom you're paraphrasing is found in the Itivuttaka "Gotama is a TEVIJJAN (Knower/expert in the VEDAS)"-MN, Udana “Gotama is a VEDASOTTHIM (Sage/expert in the Vedas)”- Digha1. Gotama was oft called himself a VEDAGU..........or "(someone) that has gone to the Vedas" "Gotama is a teacher of MONISM (advayavada)".

Plato didn't even exist when Gotama died, Buddhism precedes Platonism by 200 years or so, while Gotama was never referred to as a Vedantin in the Pali Canon (ignoring Abhidhamma commentaries and Buddhaghosa's redactions and ideological retranslations) from what I can figure out but it isn't to say he wasn't knowledgeable of it but at the same time he had made stark criticisms against the Brahmanism of his time, while only a couple out of context verses from some Upanishads had made it into some parts of the Pali Canon, so reading those specific verses in context to its Vedantic source provides no actual context to the recontextualized Buddhic scriptures.

...and I'll stop here and never to post in this thread again. You idiots have fun pretending to know.

[Anonymous No.22907116]

>>22907111
dont forget to call them icchantikas

[Anonymous No.22907283]

>>22907111
Platonism goes back to long before Plato; that's why I put it in scare quotes. Plotinus is just the most concentrated modern greek style (in the sense of post-axial) disquisition of the sophia perennis. Read Uzdavinys.

[Anonymous No.22907565]

>>22906158
Thank you, this makes sense indeed.
>>22906076
Yeah I said Plato specifically but what I meant was the tradition in general. I will keep this in mind also. Thank you.

[Anonymous No.22907917]

>>22906335
I wouldn't know anything about that
But yeah, Plotinus is very often said to come close to something called "advaita", although I've heard some specialists warn that this should not be exaggerated
He was at one point obsessed with going to India or Persia, and joined a military expedition to get there, but the emperor was defeated and the army never got there.
There are those who say he managed to make contact during this expedition.
There are also those who claim his teacher, Ammonius Saccas (who for all we know might have been the first neo-platonist, that is, the first to rediscover the true meaning of Plato after centuries of "middle" platonism) was himself an indian, or a persian. There seems to be no consensus on this.

[Anonymous No.22907920]

>>22907111
>All the English terms was translations of Plotinian terms so you can't play this strawmanned pigeonholing game.
My main objection was your saying that the Atman becomes the Saguna Brahman, the part about intellect I added on after the fact because I had not been exactly sure what you meant and I wondered if you had been making a mistake. For Shankara, the Atman that is present within the embodied and ignorant individual as well as everywhere else is completely and utterly the same as the infinite/omnipresent Parabrahman that is without gunas and which is already free/liberated and this never ceases to be the case and it couldn't because It's nature is immutable anyway. The subtle body and its buddhi/manas/etc are what contemplates the Brahman-Atman in a dyadic fashion like how the Nous contemplates the One but the Brahman-Atman is ever known to Itself directly through It's self-luminosity.

[Anonymous No.22907949]

>>22906146
>So it's like saying that red things don't participate in the form of redness
no this is still correct, because participation is a term that was "invented" to mean precisely that.
obviously it's not participation in the sense you get in pop philosophy videos of the *sensible* instance being a copy, and so the form being a glorified sensible instance, a "golden image" as Plotinus would say, or this insane idea of a "platonic third realm"

>but rather that redness is a form, and redness is a measure of how read something is
it's certainly a measure of "that it is" red, in that the only way something can be red is by participation in it. "measure" is appropriate even in that sense (without getting into the matter of "how" red it is), since you get the pythagorean idea of "mensura", as something given on the one hand and received on the other: Intellect gives measure to the discursive and the sensible. (Pieper, whom I was talking about, gives a really great account of all this, ironically while discussing Aquinas, in the second essay of his small book on Aquinas, "the Silence of St Thomas", you can find it on libgen)

As to *how* red things are: things are only what they are by striving to be what they are. This is not to say, as some people have found very profound, that there can be no meaning to saying that "this" is "that kind of thing", but merely that this is what we mean by participation, this is what the meaning is.

"Red" is maybe not so illuminating, so let me switch examples. To be a man, for instance, is to strive to be a man. This is the meaning of "intentionality" (which is used to speak of "formal causes" but literally means "tending towards") This is the meaning of passages like Phd. 74d9–e
>"When someone, seeing something, thinks that what I now see *wants to be such as some other of beings* but is deficient and is not able to be such as that"
Or elsewhere in Phaedo where Intellect is called "the guide to the soul"
This is also something that is found clearly in Eriugena 1200 years later, in Periphyseon book I, 470b
>"each one of the things that are is moved by a natural desire towards its own essence and genus and species and individuality"
As you can see, it's not "moved by its essence" in the restrictive sense that its essence "provides" its powers (the powers being thought of as a static possession of directionless ability), but in the much stronger sense of its form also being its proximate "final" cause, to use aristotelian lingo.

[Anonymous No.22907950]

This type of idea is all over the place, I just used Plato and Eriugena because they are so far apart.

But even in inanimate things, this is true, because as we have seen, any intentionality, and being, in pointing beyond itself, is dynamic: even the stone "wants" to be something. Not to resemble some "golden image" that would be a perfect stone, but rather in its being wholly consisting in pointing to what is ontologically beyond it, that proximate cause through which it has being.

So it is a measure of "how much" they are what they are not in being a perfect example you can set them over against and compare them with, but in that their being consists wholly in being moved however their essence demands, and not otherwise, for that is evil and non-being.

[Anonymous No.22907960]

>>22907950
This is pretty much what Goethe was getting at in his morphological science.

[Anonymous No.22907994]

>>22907960
Maybe. I think it was in Pieper also (among other places) that I caught a few Goethe quotes, and they struck me (and evidently struck Pieper as well) as having been written by a man who has a keen understanding of, or at least affinity with, classical thought.
Unfortunately if I'm not mistaken he never expounded on his philosophical views

[Anonymous No.22908031]

>>22907994
>a man who has a keen understanding of, or at least affinity with, classical thought
He said as much himself.
>Unfortunately if I'm not mistaken he never expounded on his philosophical views
They're just rather scattered hints and never written down or directly systematised, I suspect, in part, due to the originality and particular character of their flourishing in his genius. His meeting with Schiller, for example, gives insight into his organic platonistic views. I also think Hegel uses his notion of plant morphology at the start of the preface to his phenomenology.

[Anonymous No.22908041]

>>22907994

[Anonymous No.22908460]

>>22908041
well obviously he was not aware of Aristotle's "devastating criticism" that the idea of animal means nothing because animals are either rational on nonrational :)

[Anonymous No.22908726]

>>22907949
>As to *how* red things are: things are only what they are by striving to be what they are. This is not to say, as some people have found very profound, that there can be no meaning to saying that "this" is "that kind of thing", but merely that this is what we mean by participation, this is what the meaning is.
>"Red" is maybe not so illuminating, so let me switch examples. To be a man, for instance, is to strive to be a man. This is the meaning of "intentionality" (which is used to speak of "formal causes" but literally means "tending towards") This is the meaning of passages like Phd. 74d9–e
I think there's a distinction here between things like man and things like red. At least according to Aristotle, man would be a substance, and red would be a quality. And these seem to be two different kinds of universals here. Man refers to a universal that changes through time, while redness is "eternal" in a way.

[Anonymous No.22909732]

>>22907102
so like, there's this one nigga, right? and then there's this second nigga, you feelin me? but both niggas need the third nigga for the link. namsayin'?

[Anonymous No.22909743]

>>22904227
Once you understand the words for it, your argument is still first wasn't the word

[Anonymous No.22910647]

bump

[Anonymous No.22910885]

I consider myself someone who knows a little bit about philosophy although I’ve never had a formal education in it and I suppose I would adhere to the traditional (mis?)interpretation of Platonic philosophy as a dualistic system with the world of Ideas on one side and the material world on the other wherein the material world provides the content which fills the forms taken from the ideal world. It seems to me in several places here that you’re making the argument that it’s not a dualism of form and content but of being and becoming. I suppose I would just like to know if that characterization is correct because this thread has given me quite a bit to think about yet I would like to just get an overview here before thinking about purchasing several $200 books for an introduction. Also, given that my characterization is correct how does the tradition ground that dynamism towards being without becoming circular? I mean, if the drive towards being exists then it would necessarily be the form of said perfect being itself. Would the issue not then be that the perfect being is it’s own deception? I.e perfect being which becoming strives towards is merely the striving of becoming yet this cannot be outwardly accepted because then the system collapses as becoming strives towards becoming which defeats the whole purpose of a dualism.

[Anonymous No.22911516]

>>22910885
>a dualistic system with the world of Ideas on one side and the material world on the other
No. This is wrong. Very, very wrong. But it is the go-to teaching on platonism in academia.
>thinking about purchasing several $200 books for an introduction
What are the books? I'm not sure if I can help you there but it sounds like a bad idea. Everything you need to get an expert understanding of this is literally public domain.
>if the drive towards being exists then it would necessarily be the form of said perfect being itself
I'm not sure what you mean by this? The drive towards being, (epistrophe or reversion,) is a movement towards, not the form of Being itself. Plato does posit a form of the Good, but this is synonymous with the One, meaning no dualism can be incurred from the fact.
>how does the tradition ground that dynamism towards being without becoming circular
It's metaphysical monism anon. It's a system describing the unfolding of transcendental timeless unity into immanent measurable multiplicity. I'm sure you can see why this question is misplaced.

[Anonymous No.22911659]

>>22909732
shieeet dis nigga finna turn dem tables on dem white boys you feel me ?

[Anonymous No.22911665]

>>22910885
>>22911516
you can get even the most expert, niche books for free on libgen, takes 5 seconds

[Anonymous No.22911693]

>>22906856
anon give me your best digs on the modern thai forest understanding of the Buddha
I understood him to be a radical pragmatist.
I.e., it does not even matter if there are things beyond what we perceive. Some things lead to suffering, some out, everything else doesn't matter and is more suffering in a guise. How can someone understand him as a platonist considering the poisoned arrow parable?

[Anonymous No.22911711]

>>22909743
what ?

[Anonymous No.22911754]

>>22911711
Read the last sentence of the opening post

[Anonymous No.22912089]

>>22911754
yeah but I still don't understand
that's the only way the word (the logos) can be first, or rather, first to exist, and in all actuality, second without a first (the first that is beyond being is the One)
unless you mean word in like a "flatus voci" (nominalist) way, in which case yeah, that can't be first obviously

[Anonymous No.22912185]

Gentlemen, what is the patrician way to start with Heraclitus? From what I know he only has a few fragments that survived, and people seem to find it better to get a copy that provides commentary. Do you have any recommendations?

also damn I really ought to learn Greek. Relying on translations icks me to the core

[Anonymous No.22912373]

>>22911516
Maybe I can explain what I meant there better. If Becoming and Being are separated and we take it as a given that Becoming is moving towards Being then that movement itself is necessarily an impetus which Becoming receives from Being. Meaning that within Being itself the movement of Becoming towards Being is contained; because, if it were not then Being would not matter as a reference point as any movement towards it would be abitrary as the movement contained in Becoming would be of and towards Becoming. Therefore, with the movement of Becoming towards Being being contained in Being itself we can quickly see that this movement-towards is the essential part of Being which makes it what it is. For example, if we take a chair and remove its brownness (which, by my understanding of your argument brownness would be considered a way in which we judge things as moving towards the Being of brown) then we still have a chair, same with all other aspects of the chair, except that if we remove the movement of the chair’s Becoming towards the Ideal Being of a chair then the object no longer exists in an intelligible way. The secondary aspects of the chair’s hardness, color, material, etc all rely on being expressed as a Becoming which moves towards Being. Therefore Being is nothing more than a set of Ideal qualia which serve as reference points for the expression of Becoming moving towards Being. Meaning that the essential portion of Being which makes it Being is nothing more than the movement-towards of Becoming. Here we fall into the same problem which I mentioned earlier as Being no longer serves as a reference point as Becoming is of and towards Becoming. You can make the argument that the secondary qualia are still contained in Being but any movement which Becoming takes towards Being has to refer to these qualia by an infinite distance which the reciprocal nature of the movement-towards opens up. Hope this makes my point clearer, I never really learned how to shop-talk philosophy as all I’ve ever done is read it. What I meant by dualism in the last post wasn’t a characterization of his philosophy as a dualism but the effective structural dualism of Becoming opposed to Being which has to be upheld in order that the monism of Being not be confused for the material world.

[Anonymous No.22912513]

>>22911516
>It's metaphysical monism anon
Which secondary source authors are the biggest defenders of that? Is that Gerson’s take?

[Anonymous No.22912908]

Bump

[Anonymous No.22913911]

Bump

[Anonymous No.22914582]

Bump

[Anonymous No.22914641]

>>22912373
The Unity to Being is not the Self-Unity to nothing other. I don't believe in phenomenal forms pre-existing in potentiality. Conflation of memory of participatory forms treated as unparticipatory forms (a self contradiction) as henads (Damascius's version, not Proclean henads) prior to forms for it to be consistent is of the distinction of Unity in relation to All prior to the distinction of a named One and named All. There is a distinct Unity of distinct Unities(of One-All and All-One), as well as the Ineffable which isn't really a One or a Unity, nor is it even a distinction, and there is no differentiation between the Ineffable and the One prior to distinction. One might protest and claim Damascius is wrong if you have a strict Plotinian viewpoint which is also Plato's stance (in Plato's Parmenides) for All as a composition of many things, so speaking of All prior to forms is illogical, for forms are Unities of Diverse things, so the second order forms(mimesis/tithene) are formations of composite forms while the third order form is material bodies. Plato had a tripartite tier of forms in plain sight all along but it took a Pajeet-Anglo(AKC) to bring that insight back into the English speaking world. The Unities are a zeroth order form or sorts, while any negative order is merely a reciprocal of the first, second, third order forms as Nous, Psyche tou Pantos, Pan in that order, which Pan is a sort of 4th hypostasis counting from the zeroth order as the 1st hypostasis as it also contains corporeal being as a composite of Unity and many(forms), for in Plotinus's exegesis of Plato's Parmenides, Nous is One-Many, undifferentiated between One and Many but not a composite of them like how it is in the phenomenal world. The One in the World providing Unity to Many is the differentiated Psyche which is and isn't the One, having the trace of the One of the Nous and the Nous itself, the Psyche tou Pantos has negated itself as means to make All and Matter as means to become a being within All in completing All in filling the remainder with Matter. Plotinus's Ineffable One is in some ways closer to us than it is closer to Nous but in other ways the Nous is closer to the One, for the Psyche cannot go to the One without going through the Nous as none other than the Nous before becoming none other than the One. The Nous that seeks something other than the Self-Unity of course seeks Unity in Many, generates body/matter for the One that sees itself not as the One to embody corporeality, which is why those that seek past the One will not find anything but their spiritual nescience to complete All things, so through the first order Eidos generates the second order Mimesis as individual Psyche grasping onto third order Somatoeides of Agnosis.

[Anonymous No.22914881]

>>22911659
dey aint white dumb ass nigga. dey italian. read a book nigga

[Anonymous No.22916196]

>>22904879
>It wasn't until actually engaging with Augustine and Bonneventure
Yeah there's a high chance this post is 100% a LARP

[Anonymous No.22916211]

Is it safe to download from libgen? I'm always scared of malware

[Anonymous No.22916222]

>>22916211
generally safe, but you could find even more listed books in annas-archive dot org.

[Anonymous No.22916308]

>>22914641
So, if I’m understanding this right the answer would be that the phenomenal world doesn’t properly exist in the first place and that the psyche merely imagines it. The pitfall of Becoming moving towards Becoming is sidestepped by psyche containing a kernel of Being in its own right. Meaning that psyche moves towards being not because it is becoming but because in a small way it is being itself already. Is this what you mean?

[Anonymous No.22916368]

>>22904227
Ideas are prior to instances because the former, in their own moment, will have been wholly self-generated whereas instances must dependent on another - and this can only be the ideas themselves - for their beginning. There is no other adequate way for instances to have actuality.