/lit/ - Literature

>>16533390
>Absolute unity is something of which nothing can be said or thought, as all discourse and predication necessarily involves plurality and difference. Absolute unity has no attributes at all. Taken as absolute, unity cannot even be said to be or to participate in beingness (metecheinousias)—it can be characterized only in negative terms.
woah such a revelation, I'm sure none of the Platonists nor Plato himself ever said this.

Well, understand the soul in the same way: When it focuses on something
illuminated by truth and what is, it understands, knows, and apparently
possesses understanding, but when it focuses on what is mixed with
obscurity, on what comes to be and passes away, it opines and is dimmed,
changes its opinions this way and that, and seems bereft of understanding.
>It does seem that way.
So that what gives truth to the things known and the power to know
to the knower is the form of the good. And though it is the cause of
knowledge and truth, it is also an object of knowledge.11 Both knowledge
and truth are beautiful things, but the good is other and more beautiful
than they. In the visible realm, light and sight are rightly considered
sunlike, but it is wrong to think that they are the sun, so here it is right
to think of knowledge and truth as goodlike but wrong to think that either
of them is the good—for the good is yet more prized.
>This is an inconceivably beautiful thing you’re talking about, if it provides both knowledge and truth and is superior to them in beauty. You
surely don’t think that a thing like that could be pleasure.
Hush! Let’s examine its image in more detail as follows.
>How?
You’ll be willing to say, I think, that the sun not only provides visible
things with the power to be seen but also with coming to be, growth, and
nourishment, although it is not itself coming to be.
>How could it be?
Therefore, you should also say that not only do the objects of knowledge
owe their being known to the good, but their being is also due to it,
although the good is not being, but superior to it in rank and power.
>And Glaucon comically said: By Apollo, what a daemonic superiority!