/lit/ - Literature

Responding to

>There are no geometric shapes in nature. There's no perfect circle, perfect line, etc. All appearances of such stem from a weakness in eyesight; even a line drawn on a piece of paper with a ruler or compass is not perfect if measured closely enough with a magnifying glass. What appears like a perfect circle or line at a distance only appears that way because our eyes are not strong enough. Consequently, geometry (you) represents nothing besides the weakness of our eyesight.
(nobody has ever thought this before!)
>The forms are the same way. We sit in many different types of chairs, and the idea of a "perfect chair" may arise in our head, but only due to a weakness of perception. The "perfect chair" does not dictate all of the particular chairs; it is all of the particular chairs and our comparison of them that dictate the erroneous notion of the "perfect chair." The forms are merely an expression of a will that is too weak to dominate reality and requires its own mind to fill in and compensate for that insufficiency. (you)
>>what incredible insight (me)
>Insight that you don't seem to understand. What all of it means is that geometry, and by extension the forms, is an error. The entire thing stems from an error in judgement. Nothing is or can be learned through geometry or the forms; they are non-concepts. (you)

>>16340768
>In all of this, Damascius innovates wildly on the language of Plato’s Parmenides. Readers of Plato will recall that in the Third Deduction, the instant is introduced in order to accommodate the conclusions of the First and Second Hypothesis. As the moment between motion and rest, the instant makes possible temporal change itself. For Damascius, this instant has become the inner life of the soul, its nature prior to the activity of thinking a particular thought, and hence, the ground of the soul’s reversion to the realm of Being. Here is another and even more unique solution to the puzzles that Damascius grapples with concerning the soul’s dual membership in the intelligible and temporal orders of being. According to the way that the soul actualizes its essence, it admits of differing identities, as Steel (1978) has shown in his monograph, The Changing Self. In this sense, the various degrees of unreality that are detailed in the subsequent hypotheses of the Parmenides in Damascius’s explication, inasmuch as he designates them as One, Not-One, Not-Being, Not-One, are also configurations of the soul itself:
>>If the soul is divisible and indivisible in its totality, always its summit is more indivisible, its lowest degree more divisible…Therefore according to Parmenides as well, the summit of the soul is sometimes One, sometimes Being, sometimes all the degrees between [One and many], just as its lowest degree is sometimes in a similar way not-One, not-many (In Parm. 11.11–15 Steel).
>Hence the crucial place of the third hypothesis in Damascius’s exposition of the Parmenides is in showing how the life of the soul moves up and down the scale of being. Therefore Damascius understood this dialogue to be an illustration of the complete career of the soul, from the summit to the lowest degree of being. All the while, however, Damascius insists that the soul retains its fundamental reality
and its εἶδος: it never irrevocably forfeits its place within the highest realms of being, however clouded its upward gaze may become.

>It is our task as founders, then, to compel the best natures to reach the study we said before is the most important, namely, to make the ascent and see the good. But when they’ve made it and looked sufficiently, we mustn’t allow them to do what they’re allowed to do today.
What’s that?
>To stay there and refuse to go down again to the prisoners in the cave and share their labors and honors, whether they are of less worth or of greater.
Then are we to do them an injustice by making them live a worse life when they could live a better one?
>You are forgetting again that it isn’t the law’s concern to make any one class in the city outstandingly happy but to contrive to spread happiness throughout the city by bringing the citizens into harmony with each other through persuasion or compulsion and by making them share with each other the benefits that each class can confer on the community. The law produces such people in the city, not in order to allow them to turn in whatever direction they want, but to make use of them to bind the city together.
That’s true, I had forgotten.

Whoever could leave the wheel, most of all, must be within it.

>>16105570
Sorry I just worked out and is "high" from it, the muses have possessed me.
Egyptian religion was Platonism. And that predates, textually, Abraham by a thousand years.

O you eight infinite ones, being veritable infinite ones, l who encircle the sky with your arms, who gather together sky and earth for Geb, Shu fashioned you in chaos, in the Abyss, in darkness and in gloom, and he allots you to Geb and Nut, while Shu is everlasting and Tefenet is eternity.
I am the soul of Shu at the head of the celestial kine, who ascends to heaven at his desire, who descends to earth at his wish. Come joyfully at meeting the god in me, for I am Shu whom Atum fashioned, and this garment of mine is the air of life.
A cry for me went forth from the mouth of Atum, the air opened up upon my ways. It is I who make the sky light after darkness, my pleasant colour is the air which goes forth after me from the mouth of Atum, and the storm-cloud of the sky is my efflux; hail-storms and half-darkness are my sweat. The length of this sky belongs to my strides, the width of this earth belongs to my settlements. I am he whom Atum created, and I am bound for my place of eternity. I am Everlasting, who fashioned the infinite ones, reproduced by the spittle of Atum which issued from his mouth when he used his hand; I his saliva will be made to fall to the earth. Thus said Atum: Tefenet is my living daughter, and she shall be with her brother Shu; 'Living One' is his name, 'Righteousness' is her name.
I live with my two children, I live with my two fledgelings, for I am in the midst of them, both of them follow after my body, and I lie down and live with my daughter Ma'et; one within me and one behind me, I stand up because of them both, their arms being about me.
It is my son who will live, whom I begot in my name. He knows how to nourish him who is in the egg in the womb for me, namely the human beings who came forth from my eye which I sent out while I was alone with Nu in lassitude and I could find no place on which to stand or sit, before On had not yet been founded that I might dwell in it, before the Lotus had not yet been put together that I might sit on it; before I had made Nut that she might be above me, before the first generation had been born, before the Primeval Ennead had come into being that they might dwell with me.

>>15971512
>>15971516
>>15971523
The common element that belongs to the three as triad should be conceived as the one of the triad, but not the arithmetic triad, but that triad as a whole, which just now we reconstructed as the triad of the highest elements, since it was also not an arithmetic monad, but the monad of all things, in which the all is anticipated, just as in the monad all number is anticipated. To say it simply, just as we use the specifically defined for the illustration of that which is beyond form, so we use the arithmetic properties as symbols of the innumerable and entirely indefinite. In fact, we must use an image for the illustration of that which we wish to say, even if we are not able to say it, namely, that the one is the center of all things, whereas the distance from the center is the second principle, which is a flow from the center, and the perimeter and the nal circumference after the distance is a reversion toward the center, the paternal intellect, and the entire thing is one circle or, to speak more in accord with nature, a sphere. And it is clear that it is not a form, but is rather a nature that is more like the One than any form. And what more could one say about the One itself? For this is what gives form to the immaterial circle. To summarize, let us not attempt to count the intelligible on our fingers, nor corrupt it with our distinct ideas, but let us concentrate all thoughts simultaneously, and closing our eyes, open up the one great eye of the soul, by which nothing differentiated is visible, (although it is not the One itself in reality that becomes visible with this eye, but only the Unified, nor is this the Unified that is opposed to the differentiated, but that which also contains the differentiated) and look there with this kind of eye, even if from afar and, as it were, from the outer limits, nevertheless, let us see the intelligible, except that what will appear in us, if one can put it this way, is the simplicity of it, and the plurality of it, and the completeness of it. The intelligible is one, many, and all, to explicate its single nature with three aspects.
And yet how are the one and the many a single nature? Because the “many” are the indefinite power of the One. And how is it One and all? Because “the all” is an activity of the One that embraces all things. But the word “activity” must not be said in the sense of the extension of the power into something outside [the One] nor a power that is an extension of the subsistence remaining within, but again, it is [meant] in the way that we speak of three instead of one. For there is no one name that can be adequate for the clarification of those realities, as we have often given ample evidence.

Because the masculine is the artist.
Subjection, gazing and peering, conduction, construction, arrangement, Will, execution, ACT itself... is the 'masculine'.
The Feminine is object of Will's acting.
The Canvas, the mixing bowl of creation, the formless, the ineffable, the black sun, the objects of our dreams, the dawn, the horizon, our comfort and protection—and all our uncertain anxieties.
Thus 'she' is both the formless and post-formed (the canvas and the art); the art that is all reality, perpetually becoming and ceasing.
The One is beyond being, from him he is willing beinglessness (matter) away from himself (perhaps a transcendent rejection of transsexualism/Androgyny), In-Between is God seated holding all apart and all together, in-between is One-Being, between two nothingless voids.
>If therefore we are “stepping into the void” when we speak this way, then “stepping into the void” also has two meanings, the one falls out of speech into the Ineffable, and the other falls into what has no kind of existence at all. The latter is also ineffable, as Plato says, but in an inferior way, while the former is so in a superior way.
This is also one reason why we can't accept absolute divine simplicity as the sole attribute of the One, if if it is one definition it is has to be simultaneously rejected with 'the Ineffable Triad', and yet affirmed.
Two sides of the Feminine attracting the two sides of the Masculine. But whether there's real actual distinction between absolute matter and the absolute one is another question we don't dare asking, one can postulate that the difference is within the Eye of Apollo's divine Providence (Triad of One-Being, Monad, and Dyad and shine as the One).

>>15927705
>>15928155
NON-DISCURSIVE DIVINE PRESENCE AND RELATIONAL TRANSCENDENCE
>According to Proclus, both ancient Hellenic theology and Pythagorean philosophy stem from the Orphic mystagogy. Consequently, the doctrines of Plato may be regarded as the revelations of Apollo translated into the discursive language of rational dialectic. Since the One is exempt from all things (exeremenon panton), it is ineffable. But if everything (ta panta) is a manifestation or revelation of the Ineffable, this means that, in a certain fundamental respect, being itself is ineffable, in spite of its noetic articulation, sensible crystallization, and visibility. The inevitable conclusion is that the entire hierarchy of being (which includes the graded hierarchy of transcendence and immanence), when regarded as a display of the One, is equivalent to a kind of miraculous divine ‘myth’. This ‘myth’, revealed in the form of the all-embracing and dynamic cosmic agalma (hieratic statue, image, shrine) is analogous to the obscuring power of maya which (in the Trika philosophy of Kashmir), though being an aspect of Parama Shiva, acts as a veil thrown over the supreme ineffable Principle.
>Thereby the Parama Shiva presumably does not ‘experience’ (to use this rather misleading term) the whole of the manifested universe (vishva) as the transcendent oneness, but as the noetic multiplicity. This multiplicity shows itself as the Dionysian fragmentation reflected in the countless mirrors of divine Imagination. The entire hierarchy of paradigms and images shines within the unspeakable unity of the One, this hierarchy itself being nothing but a single unity, unified by Apollo whose full multitude of powers is ‘incomprehensible to us and indescribable’ (aperilepton hemin kai aperiegeton: Proclus In Crat. 97.2–3).5 As Proclus says: Indeed, how could human reason ever become able to grasp all the properties together, not only of Apollo, but of any God at all? (ibid., 97.4–6)

again >>15926416 The One is the principle of Uniqueness, being every uniqueness, the fragmentation of Dionysus isn't a bundle of infinite copies but each are divinely unique and divinely different).
We, Zeus (Helios), are not A-pollo only.

You can't.
Your senses are sensing 'something real', but the organization of your mind that leads to you instinctively seeing a singular object, instead of an indefinite number of disconnected stuffs, is a mere intersubjective phenomenon. Your favorite song is not objectively one single thing, every perceived whole is a construction of an unknowable number of parts, parts we can't even sense which adds to the perception of a whole and classifications.
Imagine if you could see the whole color spectrum or every sub atomic particle, there would no longer be things only the partless whole.

>>15718908
>inferiority and inauthenticity
there's also your issue
Matter is only bad or evil if YOU view it as anything other than the Receptacle of all things, as in: the Indefinite Dyad, she is perfectly good as being what she is. There is Matter at every level
And Giving is the nature of existence, this is also the great error of the foolish moksha and 'liberation' seekers, God is pure Giving; Plotinus even made the implication that the One is nothing other than the Will for Emanation, or rather that his Emanation is all he is, and that is pure Will.
Neoplatonism also believe in the Eternity of the World and cycles.
You can only understand him through paradoxes, being before distinction he is before the distinction of Sameness and Difference, Rest and motion, Being and Becoming; thus naturally he is like and unlike himself. This is how we are and are not the One.