I tender Plotinus' objections to the Gnostics as evidence for this view. The conflict between views of a natural good and a flawed creation concern the expectations of the future, for all who live. — Paine
concern the expectations of the future, for all who live. — Paine
As I understand it, the basic drift is that he wouldn’t countenance their claim that matter was evil. — Wayfarer
With regard to Plotinus’ contemporaries, he was sufficiently exercised by the self-proclaimed Gnostics to write a separate treatise, II 9 (‘Against the Gnostics’) attacking their views. These Gnostics, mostly heretic Christians…were sufficiently close to Platonism, but, in Plotinus’ view, so profoundly perverse in their interpretation of it, that they merited special attention. The central mistake of Gnosticism, according to Plotinus, is in thinking that Soul is ‘fallen’ and is the source of cosmic evil. As we have seen, Plotinus, although he believes that matter is evil, vociferously denies that the physical world is evil. It is only the matter that underlies the images of the eternal world that is isolated from all intelligible reality. The Gnostics ignore the structure of Platonic metaphysics and, as a result, wrongly despise this world. For Plotinus, a hallmark of ignorance of metaphysics is arrogance, the arrogance of believing that the elite or chosen possess special knowledge of the world and of human destiny. The idea of a secret elect, alone destined for salvation – which was what the Gnostics declared themselves to be – was deeply at odds with Plotinus’ rational universalism.
Knowledge presupposes some kind of union, because in order to become the thing which is known we must possess it, we must be identical with the object we know. But this possession of the object is not a physical possession of it. It is a possession of the form of the object, of that principle which makes the object to be what it is. This is what Aristotle means when he says that the soul in a way becomes all things. Entitatively the knower and object known remain what they are. But intentionally (cognitively) the knower becomes the object of his knowledge as he possesses the form of the object.
— Aquinas Online, Cognition in General
This theme of 'union' in some ways echoes the idea of union in many different schools of the perennial philosophy. This is what is lost in the transition to modernity, particularly with the advent of Cartesian dualism and the separateness of mind and matter. — Wayfarer
Although this inability to realize the Good seems apparent, I'm reluctant to admit it, because it seems defeatist, and I think this might be what you allude to when you say: "concern the expectations of the future, for all who live. — Janus
There are questions which we could never get over if we were not delivered from them by the operation of nature. — Kafka, Reflections, 54
These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands.
they are not original with me,
If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or
next to nothing,
If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they
are nothing,
If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.
This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the
water is,
This is the common air that bathes the globe. — Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 17
Only when identity is understood as a derived modification of difference can the concept of union free itself from Platonic dogmatism and metaphysical presuppsitons. — Joshs
I wonder how he distinguishes "These Gnostics, mostly heretic Christians" from the other varieties — Paine
I think Kafka gave this some thought. In his Reflections, [a collection of aphorisms]. this one is an affirmation through negation of a sort:
There are questions which we could never get over if we were not delivered from them by the operation of nature.
— Kafka, Reflections, 54 — Paine
But perhaps the true antipode to the gnostics is Walt Whitman:
These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands.
they are not original with me,
If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or
next to nothing,
If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they
are nothing,
If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.
This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the
water is,
This is the common air that bathes the globe.
— Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 17 — Paine
Only when identity is understood as a derived modification of difference can the concept of union free itself from Platonic dogmatism and metaphysical presuppsitons.
— Joshs
Where does that critique come from? What's the theory behind it? — Wayfarer
In accordance with Heidegger's ontological intuition, difference must be articulation and connection in itself; it must relate different to different without any mediation whatsoever by the identical, the similar, the analogous or the opposed. There must be a differenciation of difference, an in-itself which is like a differenciator, by virtue of which the different is gathered all at once rather than represented on condition of a prior resemblance, identity, analogy or opposition.
When the identity of things dissolves, being begins to revolve around the different. That which is or returns has no prior constituted identity: things are reduced to the difference which fragments them, and to all the differences which are implicated in it and through which they pass.
In fact what I think undermines Buddhist nominalism (although this is a digression) is that the Buddha himself is a universal kind. That is why Buddhism uniquely believes that Buddhas are a class of being, even if at the same time each one is a particular individual. (I've tried that out on Buddhist forums and it didn't go down well.) — Wayfarer
I propose that universals such as the principles of logic and natural numbers have an ontological status that transcends individual cognitive processes. They are not mind-dependent in the sense that they do not rely on being conceived by any particular mind to exist. Instead, these universals are fundamental aspects of the fabric of reality that reason can discern and understand. — Wayfarer
But how can number and logic be aspects of the fabric of reality when what we think of today as number and logic were invented bit by bit over the course of cultural history? — Joshs
I guess that debate would focus on whether number and logic were invented or 'discovered'. — Tom Storm
It is sometimes said that the natural numbers are objectively real, but I don’t agree. I think they’re ‘transjectively’ real - the same for all who can count, but only perceptible to one capable of counting. — Wayfarer
…without accepting the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the wholly invented world of the unconditioned and self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world through numbers, people could not live.” (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil)
In order to arrive at the concept of the number unit, one must turn away from the meaningful world of continually changing senses by inventing a new notion, that of the empty, context and content-free particularity, a particularity which can be returned to again and again as ‘same thing different time’ because it has no content, stands for nothing other than a placemark. — Joshs
I wonder if there is a confusion here between counting and conceptualising counting. In many cultures counting begins with the human body, and the names for certain numbers correspond to different parts of the body - hence, digits. Some of the names for numbers have magical or (un)lucky qualities, or associations with non-numbers.
Then it would be in algebra, the generalisation of counting, that one arrives at 'same thing different time'. But perhaps this is what you meant. — mcdoodle
Like other empirical knowledge, we invent these schemes and then discover their usefulness in our dealings with the world. The fact that we find them useful does not make them part of the fabric of reality, any more than our other invented technologies are a part of the fabric of reality. — Joshs
To say that numbers are the same for all who can count is merely to say that all who can count have already invented the concept of identical sameness, since counting depends on that concept. We have become so accustomed to the idea that the notion of repeated identicality is built into the universe that we forget how peculiar an invention it was, the imposition of a subjective idealization onto our experience ofnthe world that precisely ignores , prescinds from , the fabric of reality in order to create the illusion of pure difference in degree that is not at the same time a difference in kind. — Joshs
They are the same for all who can count because that is the meaning of numeric unit, ‘same thing different time’. There is no experience in nature that conforms to ‘same thing different time’. In order to understand the empty, generic concept of ‘same thing different time’, one must start by noticing multiplicities, and then separating out particulars within such multiplicities. — Joshs
As regards the contention that number is invented, this doesn’t account for the consilience between mathematics and nature, the subject of Eugene Wigner’s well-known essay The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences. By abstracting from the observable and measurable properties of objects and their relations, many things have been discovered that would be otherwise unknowable. Wigner can't explain it, but he also doesn't attempt to explain it away. — Wayfarer
stroll into unfamiliar worlds; worlds strange to us but known to other creatures, manifold and varied as the animals themselves. The best time to set out on such an adventure is on a sunny day. The place, a flower-strewn meadow, humming with insects, fluttering with butterflies. Here we may glimpse the worlds of the lowly dwellers of the meadow. To do so, we must first blow, in fancy, a soap bubble around each
creature to represent its own world, filled with the perceptions which it alone knows. When we ourselves then step into one of these bubbles, the familiar meadow is transformed. Many of its colourful features disappear,
others no longer belong together but appear in new relationships. A new world comes into being. Through the bubble we see the world of the burrowing worm, of the butterfly, or of the field mouse: the world as it appears
to the animals themselves, not as it appears to us. This we may call the phenomenal world or the self-world of the animal.
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