/lit/ - Literature

Why is the idea that evil is the absence of good more commonplace than the idea that good is the absence of evil? The latter seems way more intuitive to me.

Even though it is generally impermissible to take one's one life "by force", is it acceptable to allow oneself to die through self-neglect according to Plotinus?
As evidence for this being the case, we can see from his own personal conduct that he refused medical treatment. On the opposing side, he states that suicide is not proper 'while opportunity for intellectual advancement remains'.

There's something very based about Ancient Greece as regards new thinkers and the development of new thought. You would just go and pay your instructor to learn philosophy, and then when it was your time to shine, you'd just pull a bunch of unverifiable assertions out of your ass about higher spiritual plains.
>and how is that based?
Its based because that's all that is really going on psychologically today in most humanities, heuristics and the need to make a name for yourself, but which is masked with a lot of cherry-picking evidence and the discovery of "new facts". Every new wave of tenure seeking goons is going to overturn factually shaky fields like psychology, history, and philosophy. But at least the Greeks were up front about it.

>>22317775
!= AMERICAN ONE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOQKK_dvxJU

>>22296483
>>Intellektual Anschauung just doesn't exist ok. but- IT JUST DOESN'T OK.
absolutely demolished by picrel

I have never witnessed actual, meaningful philosophical discussion on this shitty board.
Why do you think that is ?

>>21948859
>An illusion of an illusion is still an illusion.
>and it's still changing
>And they're qualitatively different from one another.

You couldn't explain this without contradicting yourself even more than you already have. How can they be qualitatively different from the One other than through negation? Where would such knowledge be derived?

>>21257023
>>21257325
For me, it's Neoplato.

>>21002503
>>21002376
The worldview of the ancients, sages, and mystics is therefore diametrically opposed to ours. For moderners, something exists only if it can be weighed, touched, measured, tasted, felt, smelt, heard, or the like. Anything else is held to either be an illusion, a figment of the imagination, or the like. But for the ancients, emotions and thoughts were just as “real” — no more nor less real — as the physical, sensate body and its sensations. We think, we feel, and these are no less real than our physical senses — hence, their recourse to the division of reality into different realms, a subtle psychic world just as there may be a causal abstract intellectual world, corresponding to the Forms of Plato, which both animate and manifest through the physical sensate world in the form of life itself.

As we today believe that somehow consciousness and life arose somehow from blind, inconscient matter, so, conversely, did the ancients believe that if life and consciousness are in us, they must therefore somehow be residing in and inherent in the nature of the universe itself, and therefore our own lives and consciousnesses have been derived from a greater source of consciousness and life. This cannot be “seen” as with the eyes or “proven” as in a laboratory, because the body of the One is everything seen, heard, felt, tasted, touched, experienced, felt, or thought about. It IS both what you are seeing and “where” you are seeing from, the seer, the seen, and the seeing. Hence, such a doctrine of non-duality and of monism cannot be “proved” or “disproven” in a lab, it is clearly not “strictly empirical,” but, for Plotinus and his like, can be intuited, known, meditated on, which is a recourse to higher faculties of cognition, a level of consciousness prior to and transcendent above dependence on the physical world and senses.

II.9

He ruined Platonism. Undescended soul is a stupid concept that Plotinus himself admits is a deviation from traditional Platonism. Plato is much closer to Proclus and Iamblichus, who didn't hate themselves or the world, and didn't wish for Buddhist style annihilation.

So I've read maybe over half of plato including The Republic, I've read Aristotle's Metaphysics and Nicomachean Ethics and Aquinas's commentary on De Anima, and Sextus Empiricus's outlines of skepticism/pyrrhonism. but now I feel like there is just a huge gap between plato and aristotle and Plotinus that other philosophers should fill. There's Cicero, but De Officiis is practically the only philosophical work of his that is intact and I think I've had enough of that kind of stuff after nicomachean ethics, and there's Lucretius but that's barely philosophy and Epicurus is pretty much an afterthought as far as I'm concerned. There's Philo but he is also fragmentary and idk if there's any point in reading him. Am I just supposed to go into the Enneads? Or is there anything specific from say, Origen or Tertullian that I should read even though that is more religious than philosophical?

the ancient Hegel?

Why didn't anybody in middle Platonism come up with a decent systematization of Platonism before Plotinus? Were middle platonists really so stupid they conflated the One with the Intellect and couldn't explain the generation of evil without incurring duality?

You have my One

>>19353083
Both

How was he so completely correct?

>Dear Gnostics, if this world is full of evil, why don't you just all off yourselves?

My reading of Plotinus has convinced me that I should venerate those who were virtuous in action and mind. Suggest some itt

What do you think of neoplatonic metaphysics?
Do you think it has any merit?

I've seen people make threads about how it could be the closest idea to truth humans have come up with. Are those people just schizos?

>doesn't know if he wants monistic or theistic union
>doesn't know if he wants emanationism or creationism
>doesn't know if he wants to allow memories in the afterlife
>ultimately decides he doesn't want memories, voiding the need and purpose for his forms of individuals

Was he retarded, or did Porphyry fuck up his oeuvre, like Eutochius implied by publishing his own edition of Plotinus' Enneads?

>>18360391
Come again?