/lit/ - Literature

>>16037226
>>16037245
Damascius already did this.
about two years ago (before I read Damascius) I also saw as I was listening to Pink Floyd: "HOL' UP" I thought in my mind "this logo is a perfect symbolic analog for Platonism."
But sure enough, Damascius had already played with prisms and light before this, there's also a similar but less direct analogy in Plotinus somewhere.

>Therefore, we speak of the triad in that realm, in the sense that it signifies an undifferentiated multiplicity, and again the dyad signifies the cause of that multiplicity, and the monad is related to these as the One itself, as that which is beyond this very multiplicity. And this is the celebrated intelligible triad, which, wishing to explain by means of different configurations, we are unaware that we render it more complex in our accounts, and especially when we make it an ennead, reckoning it as the complete leader of all things from the first until the lowest, observing it as if in a mirror, and [seeing it] in the third, since it is by nature trimorph, and [seeing] the triadic principles before it that appear to illuminate brilliantly its three ubiquitous forms, as if in a cloud that has three reflecting surfaces, the single color of the sun appears as an apparently polychrome rainbow. And so also Socrates in the Philebus60 was unable to gaze in the face of that One, and clarified its nature by means of the triad stationed at its threshold, as he says, because he caught a glimpse of that triad quivering with the single ray of the henad, in a completely unified [vision].

>>15950854
Plotinus was no rhetorician. Here's Prophets.
Then too Orpheus lifted up his lyre with his left hand and tried out a song.He sang of how the earth, sky, and sea, at one time combined together in a single form, through deadly strife became separated each from the other.

So through discord all things are steered through all.
From the whole are all things, all things from a whole,
all things are one, each part of all, all is one;
For from a single whole all these things came,
and from them in due time will one return,
That's ever one and many...
Often the same will be again, no end
will limit them, ever limited...
For so undying death invests all things,
All dies that's mortal, but the substrate was
And is immortal ever, fashioned thus,
Yet with strange images and varied form
Will change and varnish from the sight of all.

>>14954839
Proclus was a genius, and autistically logical (which is why he's the favorite of modern academics), but while he correctly saw the order of the whole and its beauty, he erred in extreme systematization and "analytic" coherence (being the origin of Scholasticism). Proclus denied the twofold One of Iamblichus, yet he understood that all things are triadic, this is clearly a contradiction: it is here Damascius comes in, he in a way goes (poetically) full circle and returns to Plotinus and Iamblichus.
Where Plotinus mystically named Soul and Nous the One (and each as God), yet One and Many not just One. Damascius ameliorates him: Plotinus spoke of Soul as being the Matter of Intellect, and the Dyad as the Matter of the One. But if the Intelligible domain is beyond division then logically Intelligible Matter is single, thus Plotinus' Soul and his Dyad are fused by Damascius (soul itself becomes "something else"). So now the Infinite/Unlimited/Indefinite Dyad is the One as All things united yet ineffably distinct, named the All-one. Plotinus sometimes called the One the Potential/Power of all things, but this contradicts (on the surface) his saying that the One is "pure Act". We now can see the Limited and Unlimited, yet these are the principles of antithesis even if each is a one/henad, and if we stayed here we'd collapse into Deleuze and Derrida. Thus Damascius enthrones Plato's One-Being/Mixed (like Dionysus and Zeus) and makes Being before Being and truly One, naming him the Unified. The Harmony of all things, equal and before and after the two Principles, now itself a true principle. Here is the Ineffable Triad, the three Henads who together are the One, a One that now we cannot call One for it is greater than even this, thus he is the Ineffable. And now after more than a thousand years, Damascius has returned to the true original doctrines of Pythagoras, Philolaus, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Parmenides and Heraclitus and Plato (these three personifying the three Hhenads of the Absolute One, the Absolute All, and the Absolute Harmony).
>Mone,
>Proodos,
>Epistrophe.

>>14938526
the titanomachy is a lower expression of the sundered One being partition of the Limited from the Unlimited, the titans are fighting the gods, they are just ignorant of the reality that they're merely mirroring an aspect of the Intelligible, that being antitheses of all opposites. Neoplatonism only adds the greater providence of all evil working towards good that is beyond our and their comprehension: whatever error we think we weave into destiny the Fates will compose into beauty and harmony. This is how music works, dissonance producing beauty; each opposite in their absolute selves in a vaccum of themselves (which is only found in the lower spheres) "hates" and fights their opposites, but all oppostes are returned to the original divine Harmony at the end of every cosmic Age/Aeon/Cycle. The conflict of opposites is an illusion in the Intelligible. This is also what Damascius solved in his Unified-One being equal and before and after the Limited-one and Unlimited-One, together being the three Henads. It's also in an Ineffable way the antitheses of himself that sunders Being into the lower spheres; this is symbolized by the sundering of Dionysus, in the eternal event from which all Souls are born (which also makes Jesus' passion a walk in the park).
Likewise the narrative of every Soul is to rebuild Dionysus through Virtue and commence his cosmic rebirth, and to not be virtuous is to sin since you're stalling the coming next Age.

Consequently, Plato’s words concerning the One are overturned from an inner contradiction, for it is near the complete reversal of the first principle, and yet it differs from that because it is absolutely one and because it is all things as the One. But that is also One as well as all things simultaneously, while this is beyond the One and all things, being simpler than both, whereas that transcendent principle is not yet this. To the extent that it has emerged from the Ineffable it is the One, but it is not the determinate one (for this is completely knowable), but rather it is the One-all, nor is it all things as subject to determination (for they are even more knowable, given that they are already a multiplicity); instead, it is the One that is simultaneously all things, which from its nature as the One contains the simple, thoroughly purified from multiplicity, yet from its nature as all things it refuses the determinate and confi ned predicate of the One. And of these characteristics one and all things, each is knowable, and the combination is also knowable, since it consists in the two. But that which is prior to both is what we indicate through that combination, and this is not, in itself, capable of being known, although through the image of the combination it can be known as prior to the combination of the One-many in just the way that the combination of the One-many is after that principle. And if it is acceptable to speak in terms of differentiations, then we can say that the truly knowable is what is contemplated by means of a certain given determination, since it then is by that determination already a form, and as such it is subject to knowledge that defi nes it with an appropriate limitation, and that is why knowledge arises from something differentiated. And yet there is something utterly opposed to this kind of contemplation, because it is entirely Ineffable and eludes any grasp of knowledge. There is also something in between these extremes, and of this, one aspect is on the side of the knowable, which is like the Unifi ed, but just here it escapes the knowledge that determines or attempts to limit it. The other aspect is on the side of the Ineffable, which is like the absolute One or the totality in the mode of the One, which offers only the slightest and most obscure hint about its own nature. And if there is something still in the middle of these, when we have examined the domain of each of these, we shall know it.

no
1/−01≥2≤3>4>5>6>7>8>9>1/+0>1>2>3>4>5>6>7>8>9>1/−01>1>2>3>4>5>6>7>8>9>1/+0>...
therefore the G[o]od