/lit/ - Literature

>>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.

>>19953788
Dear god thank you for this thread - based truthposter anon I kneel to your effortposting and bump in your honor. Please expand on your theories. I have studied qualia on a superficial level coming from an ancient philosophy background and the irreduceability of qualia to material elements has been outlined since ancient philosophy ESPECIALLY when it comes to the context of memory, with Platonic recollection being mostly in line with what you are saying here (there's a lot of stuff in Aristotle's De Anima and Plotinus). I would like to expand on the Neoplatonic take on what you are saying and I will try to put together an effortpost as well. Meanwhile, can I please ask you to provide a small bibliography? I am extremely curious about this specific topic.

>>18532169
Trust me, if someone is disrespecting Plato and Plotinus, that's you. They know exactly what I'm talking about, which is why they were both skeptic of writing.
Plato kept his esoteric thought unwritten, and likely only hinted at it in dialogues, also because he knew that everything in the sensible world is subject to decay - including art. Plotinus never wanted to write in the first place, and his work only came to us because he had a very intelligent, extremely autistic editor - Porphyry, who is regarded as the best editor of the ancient world, a total exception in that he ordered his work both thematically and cronologically. Why? Because he cared about the work of his master. But Plotinus, for as much as he is innovative, was clearly as "deserving" of survival as the best work of Aristotle, which are lost.
Yet you, much like Critias in the first part of the Timaeus, wanting at all costs to prove that there is an historical continuity between his family, i.e. his own knowledge and human worth, and the lost city of Atlantis, prefer to believe the lie that things survive in time because of quality, when Plato himself made very clear that even the most advanced civilizations can be destoyed in the time of a day (and today more than ever!) and that historical survival of quality is a chimera. What survives, in the Timaeus, is human beings, and the capacity to think within them. This thing alone can, ciclically, uncover some "timeless" intellectual value. But no matter how good, quality is not made to survive in the sensible world.
Read your Plato better.

OF COURSE from a Neoplatonic perspective heterosexuality makes no sense, as does the idea of gender in general, whether it depends from my body or not, because it is as clear as day that if my identity is not my body but is instead my soul then neither gender intended as socially constructed ideas around sex nor as biological sex, insofar as it is something that pertains primarily body and not mind, should have any relevance for me, for I am not any of these things but the eye overlooking these things and demiurgically shaping these things, namely, I should not identify with my body or any contingent identity based in sensible reality because I am the overlooker of such identities, and as the overlooker of these identities mine is the power to shape them however I please, mine is the power to say that I will impose over sensible reality the power of mind alone, for mind is prior to matter and mind has power upon it, thus it is only natural for me to take power over it and determine by myself how to dress, and use my body, and express my sexuality: engaging in these activities means to state the power of mind over matter and its will to shape matter into the most beautiful, fitting form - for beauty and fitting form are the dominion of the mind - and non-binarism is not a condition you discover about yourself but is the basic condition from which we all start and to which we must return, namely, that of a genderless overlooker of genderized identities, among others, much like that of bodyless overlooker of bodily realities, the perspective of the sculptor in the sentence "never stop sculpting your own statue", an invitation, yes, to subtract from your contingent identities the overlooker of such identities that is your soul, but also an invitation to understand that soul is the shaper of identities, including gender and sex.

>>17568613
Plato and Plotinus

>>17154843
>https://4chanlit.fandom.com/wiki/Recommended_Reading/Non-fiction#Philosophy
/lit/ is full of useful reccomendation if you want to start reading actual books instead of garbage. Pic related is your starting point if you want to think instead of being a screaming monkey in a rightwing/leftwing echo-chamber. Here are also some of my personal favorites:

>Heraclitus - Fragments
>Parmenides - Fragments
>Plato - Apology, Euthyphro, Crito, Phaedo
>Aristotle - Nichomachean Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, Prior & Posterior Analytics, Metaphysics
>Epicurus - Letter
>Lucretius - On the Nature of Things
>Epictetus & Marcus Aurelius
>Plotinus Enneads (if not whole, at least Lloyd P. Gerson - The Plotinus Reader)
>Porphyry - Sentences

>Descartes - Discourse on the Method, Dissertation on First Philosophy
>Goethe - Theory of Color
>Spinoza - Ethica
>Hume - Treatise on Human Nature
>Kant - Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of the Faculty of Judgement

>Nietzsche - On the Meaning of Truth in the Extra-Moral Sense, Zarathustra, Genealogy of Moral, Gay Science, Ecce Homo
>Heidegger - Being and Time
>Wittgenstein - Tractatus, On Certainty

>>17042559
truly the escape in solitude to the solitary

>>17019289
>your personality isn't part of you

>>16990209
>>16990216
read the Enneads from beginning to end

>>16971285
Anon how about you examine the only true object that you can actually examine - yourself? Elaborate on the source of your discomfort. You will discover that the you that is discomforted is but a contingent identity, and that your true you is the you overlooking all identities, which is untouched, un-disgusted, and unchanged. Yes, in the sensible realm people may like buttfucking each other, but isn't Intellect fragmenting itself in time and space and becoming Soul the biggest buttfuck of all? Isn't it better, instead of focusing on such matters, to dive into yourself and go back to the ultimate source of all being? The untouchable, unbuttfuckable One?

>>16952929
Plotinus was the last philosopher I read about three years ago, and I never came back to philosophy books. Incidentally, literature became infinitely more fun to read after Plotinus

>…it is said, by Plotinus himself, that he was breastfed until the age of eight. When he got thirsty he went to his wet nurse and bared her breasts in order to suck; he finally stopped after she rebuked him harshly.
Why did Porphyry feel this anecdote was worth preserving for all of time in a homage to his most respected teacher?

>Try to raise the divine in yourselves to the divine in the All
;__;

>>16469465
Both

Almost all the Ancients had the idea that you had to read Aristotle's logical works (Organ on) before reading Plato. Then once you've started Plato you'll have to go back and forth between him and Aristotle again, like reading Aristotle's Political works before Republic and Laws (and you should read Laws before Republic), or Aristotle's ethical works before Plato's metaphysical works (Theaetetus-Sophist-Statesman, Parmenides, Philebus, Republic, Timaeus, Philebus).

Something like...
>Alcibiades I, "Last Days of Socrates" dialogues, minus Phaedo but plus Ion.
Since these are so simple, you can also add here any of the dialogues not mentioned later in this list.
>Aristotle's Organon
>Euthydemus, Protagoras
>Lysis, Symposium
Aristotle's Politics and Plato's Laws-Epinomis
>Cratylus, Theaetetus, Meno
>Aristotle - Physics, De Anima,
>Republic, Timaeus-Critias
>Sophist, Statesman
>Aristotle - Metaphysics
>Parmenides
>Philebus, Phaedrus, Phaedo (yes)

>>15288553
So where are they, why weren't they preserved?

Aristotle isn't canonical. He's but a springboard of reason, a tool of the Philosophers. And he was more often wrong than right.

>>14855149
It's simple.
Satan doesn't exist and his existence making God evil proves the illegitimacy of the Hebrews as unique among the peoples.
>>14855113
The Will to create (the greatest of all Virtues, if not the greater cause of virtue itself) does not happen to what's already perfect, therefore creating and creation is what makes God self-perfect.
This too disproves the Christian—the world is eternal. Infinite is also the number of times you've "escaped" becoming and freely descended again. For to stagnate even in heaven is to not be like the One. We are our own effluence of power.

>>14780786
While you circle round through the power of God, playing with pure images, we enter into the abyss of infinity as one. And when you tried to destroy us we instead reshaped what you are—taking on your words like theater—now we keep you playing by the door with the Forms thinking you won and we have you speak our language. While we, gods, still remain within the Adytum of God.

>>14753880
>I doubt it.

>>14706616
>the immanence of God goes directly against Jewish esoteric thought
Where did you get this idea? Esoteric Jewish thought =/= Judaism proper, he was excommunicated because he was critical of orthodox Judaism, which has nothing to do with what I'm talking about.

>Where do you get Spinozan infinite substance
Many Monist thinkers in the Middle Ages, Hindu thinkers going back thousands of years, hell you can find similarity between this and Neoplatonism to an extent.

I am not going to find the specific Maimonides passage since it doesn't exist and I never claimed that it did. I said that Spinoza misunderstood Maimonides system of Aristotelian/NP Judaism. This is a general misconception on Spinoza's part which leads to him copying what might be called a groundwork for a different metaphysics and using it as the end for his own while shoving in a number of rationalist era dogmas, which Kant and Hume would satisfactorily shoot down not long after.

>>14669631

>>14559391
sounds like the calvinist "invisible church". [A] tradition is the visible structural element of a school/church/faith.
[The Tradition] subsists within [a] tradition, playing pretend with it to survive. Speaking through allegory with apparent and unapparent exegesis (the apparent here being nothing but cover up). Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite is the prime exemplar of this.
It's not because there are any actual secret doctrines, no knowledge is inherently hidden "just because", it's because it has been dangerous throughout history to speak them that we turn to parables and secrecy.
But the traditions of Sunni or Shia Islam have nothing to do with "The Tradition". In Islam Muhammad spoke to the lowest man, there are no intentional esoteric dimensions in the Quran.
Again, like Pseudo-Dionysius, the Philosophers of the Tradition under Islam solely used the Quran as protection from the Quran; talking nicely about the "prophet" to survive.