/lit/ - Literature

If the world's so evil why do gnosticcels care about it so much? Maybe because they're copers that can't even identify with the Intellect and are stuck as composites (they probably take constipation medicine, too).

One must know the power and divinity of Monad himself.

>the fanboy of Platon is called Plotinos
Who writes this shit?

>>19574975
>And imagine how many times Plato must have farted while writing a masterpiece like The Republic.
If the soul has untwined itself from the matter, is it really the soul which is farting, or the incidental matter which happened to compose the corporeal body many recognize erroneously as "Plato"?

Plotinus had severe hemorrhoids. He made no secret of this. Yet he still enrolled in the Roman legions, tried to make it to Persia, failed and risked his life in many endeavors. The soul is naturally impure insofar as it is intertwined with the matter.

my ancient greek course starts in 2 weeks and I'm very excited

>tfw reading books with terms such 'z generation', 'ai', 'internet of things', 'multipolar', 'agenda'
>tfw not using the solitude that you have been forced up by society for your own personal development. Instead you consume media


the coin of a fragmented and dysfunctional society has to sides...now you are alone, now you are isolated. Read the great minds of the past and grow. This century can be brigth for oneself.

what would you add? where would you suggest going from here? Personally, I would suggest St. Augustine as Pseudo-Dionysius as follow-ups

Is Neoplatonism just western Buddhism?

>>18049922
Three kinds of men offer themselves to our examination - the philosopher, the musician (aka artist), and the lover.

The musician allows himself to be easily moved by beauty, and admires it greatly; but he is not able by himself to achieve the intuition of the beautiful. He needs the stimulation of external impressions. The musician is sensitive to the beauty of the voice and of harmonies. He avoids all that seems contrary to the laws of harmony and of unity, and enjoys rhythm and melodies in instrumental and vocal music. After these purely sensual intonations, rhythm and tunes, he will surely in them come to distinguish form from matter, and to contemplate the beauty existing in their proportions and relations. He will have to be taught that what excites his admiration in these things, is their intelligible harmony, the beauty it contains, and, in short, beauty absolute, and not particular. He will have to be introduced to philosophy by arguments that will lead him to recognize truths that he ignored, though he possessed them instinctively. Such arguments will be specified elsewhere.

The musician can rise to the rank of the lover, and either remain there, or rise still higher. Charmed with the beautiful objects that meet his views, he falls into an ecstasy. He must therefore be taught not to content himself with thus admiring a single body, but, by reason, to embrace all bodies that reveal beauty; showing him what is identical in all, informing him that it is something alien to the bodies, which comes from elsewhere, and which exists even in a higher degree in the objects of another nature. He will be shown that beauty is found in the arts, the sciences, the virtues, all of which are suitable means of familiarizing the lover with the taste of incorporeal things. He will then be made to see that beauty is one, and he will be shown the element which, in every object, constitutes beauty. From virtues he will be led to progress to intelligence and essence, while from there he will have nothing else to do but to progress towards the supreme goal.

The philosopher is naturally disposed to rise to the intelligible world. He rushes thither without needing to learn to disengage himself from sense-objects, as do the preceding men. His only uncertainty will concern the road to be followed, all he will need will be a guide. He must therefore be shown the road; he must be helped to detach himself entirely from sense-objects, himself already possessing, as he does, the desire, being since a long while already detached therefrom by his nature. For this purpose he will be invited to apply himself to mathematics, so as to accustom him to think of incorporeal things, to believe in their existence. Being desirous of instruction, he will learn them easily; as, by his nature, he is already virtuous, he will need no more than promotion to the perfection of virtue. After mathematics, he will be taught dialectics, which will perfect him.

stop having sex

> there are still people who unironically identify as "gnostics" despite being utterly BTFO by based Plotinus 1700 years ago

Explain yourselves.

>>17696347
Been delving into Neoplatonism lately. It really solves all the issues I had with platonism and seems like the metaphysical system which is most plausible in my opinion. Wish Plotinus was easier to read but what can you do.

Explain Plotinus' Daimon to me.
How can something be a part of me and simultaneously be a different entity?

>>17636456
>she goes and buys me an abomination of a book, "The Little Book of Alpaca Philosophy"
that's fucking adorable, anon. stop being an insecure faggot.

Is Plotinus the final boss of Greek philosophy?

Not just chronologically, but based on his ability to assimilate the useful parts of the rival traditions of the Stoics and Aristotle into a Platonic framework, making his system a final culmination of all that had come before.

According to Plato and Plotinus did matter get created by the Demiurge or did it exist and he just works it

>>17500981
to once again gain intimacy with the One within us

Is his thought still tenable in the Modern age?

>>15363040
>‘Consider sense-knowledge: its objects seem most patently certified, yet the doubt returns whether the apparent reality may not lie in the states of the percipient rather than in the material before him; the decision demands intelligence or reasoning. Besides, even granting that what the senses grasp is really contained in the objects, none the less what is thus known by the senses is an image: sense can never grasp the thing itself; this remains forever outside.

…The only way to this is to leave nothing outside of the veritable Intellectual-Principle which thus has knowledge in the true knowing (that of identification with the object), cannot forget, need not go wandering in search. At once truth is there, this is the seat of the authentic Existents, it becomes living and intellective: these are the essentials of that most lofty Principle; and failing them where is its worth, its grandeur?

…Thus veritable truth is not accordance with an external; it is self-accordance; it affirms nothing other than itself and is nothing other; it is at once existence and self-affirmation.’

Plotinus, The Enneads (Abridged), Trans., Stephen MacKenna, Penguin, London, 1991, V.5.1-2