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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Short Outline of Plotinus' Realm of Mind & Universal Mind,
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This review is from: Porphyry's Launching-Points to the Realm of Mind: An Introduction to the Neoplatonic Philosophy of Plotinus (Paperback)
This book gets somewhat detailed in semantics and sometimes reminds me of Kantian language, only slightly, in its obscurity. In this, Porphyrys acknowledges his speculations and vague conceptions, which cannot be grasped by imagination. There are instances of sentences that repeat the same word 6 times over in different arrangements that gets confusing and the "One" and universal soul becomes the Kantian "thing in itself," an absolute. Overall, however, the book is not Kantian and relatively understandable.
Some of the points raised are: The "One" is absolute, being everything and nothing, and therefore cannot be conceived by the mind, ultimately, it is a negation. It neither exists nor non-exists, as it is All. There are different levels of reality, the "One" non-changing Mind and true Being and the sensory changing realm of mind. I've been interpreting it through out the book as the moving transitory intelligible/thinking mind and the unchanging perfect intelligence/the consciousness - the soul - which is part of a greater consciousness that makes up the whole. The idea is unity in multiplicity and in this there are differences between parts and faculties. This takes on Plato's transient world of fleeting forms with limits, the Monad and the unlimited world of perfect forms, the Dyad. Four type of virtue to achieve connection with the soul over the mind, To achieve the super-intellectual principle is better viewed by an absence of thought (p.39). For different reasons the soul either turns toward perfection to the producer, or both the producer and the product or to the lower imperfection, the product. The non-discursive intelligence, or consciousness, thinks all thoughts simultaneously, a continuous of movement, an actualization, while the discursive intelligence, the mind, divides as it thinks only from point to point. And this non-discursive intelligence or consciousness perceives the sense object, by intuition (pp. 52-53). Interestingly the individual souls retain their distinctness despite being a part of a much larger universal soul. "Individual souls, as well as the universal Soul, subsist independently of bodies, without the unity of the universal Soul absorbing the manifoldness of individual souls, and without the manifoldness of the latter splitting up the unity of the universal Soul." (p. 61). "Its diversity implies both division and union . . . diversity is born of the development of the power of unity" (pp. 64-65). The soul is neither a body, nor in the body, but is only the cause of the body, because she is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere in the body. (p. 66) The body, Porphyry writes, is actually in the soul. This is about an inward search. When you will have achieved the nature of existence in itself and become assimilated to eternal existence you will seek nothing beyond yourself. If you do not seek anything (including your habitual mind) beyond yourself (your consciousness), "if you shrink within yourself and into your own nature (your consciousness - not mind) you will become assimilated to universal Existence, and you will not halt at anything inferior to it. (p. 67) It's a matter of not being caught up with this life of sensory perception, caught up in what to eat, what to wear, what games to play for sensory desires but instead an inward search of the self, the consciousness apart from the limited sensory mind, then you will discover your true self, the universal existence. Most people do not withdraw into their inner selves, they are ignorant of themselves in this way, they do not know themselves. I've read this by later sages, that to withdraw to the self does not require solipsism, but one can both live in this world and apart in the self simultaneously. It's all about a self-knowledge of a deeper more profound silent self that has nothing to do with the sensory world, nor with discursive doctrinal thinking. With all this said, only a mere segment, it reminds me of what Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D., calls morphic fields, how biologists cannot find proof of information stored in the human brain, but instead he perceives the brain acting as tuners, tuning into what he calls morphic fields in what he calls morphic resonance of existing habitual patterns in a collective, larger information source. In this we are more in tune with the universe as opposed to the common mechanistic Newtonian view of laws that separates us and the Darwinian view that only equates us from molecules. Rather we are in tune with a larger organism. Creativity is our ability to create new patterns/habits that will enter the morphic fields. A great point on yin and yang; how both are actually part of a trinity, where the duality exists within a circle, an absolute, the ground of being, which represents the third element or the whole that contain both. Each ground then becomes part of a larger ground along with its opposite.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Lucid Guide to Plotinian Platonism,
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This review is from: Porphyry's Launching-Points to the Realm of Mind: An Introduction to the Neoplatonic Philosophy of Plotinus (Paperback)
Porphyry's `Launching Points to the Intelligible,' properly known as the `Sententiae,' is a concise and powerful summation of the main principles of Plotinian Platonism. Essentially it is a paraphrase (hence the title the "Sentences") of many of the central doctrines in the `Enneads' and therefore is a good introductory guide for Plotinian and post-Plotinian Platonism, in general. The over-riding theme to the `Sententiae,' however, is primarily ethical and is reminiscent of the Phaedo, as it champions philosophy as a preparation for death through divine gnosis and civic virtue (liberating one's true-self from the body), culminating with the soul's return to the Intelligible World of Ideas. This short, but vigorous guide to neo-Platonism, will indeed serve as a "launching point" for further inquiry and it is recommended, along with the Middle-Platonist, Alcinous' `Handbook' on Plato, for those just becoming affiliated with neo-Platonism.
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