Re: Protagoras vs Socrates
Posted: Fri Nov 27, 2020 9:38 pm
V A
Plato once defined man as a being in search of meaning. .
You explain the search to experience our Source as the need for consolation: to avoid experiencing the question of our mortality. But what if the need to experience objective meaning is more than consolation? This is the essential question for both religion and philosophy. Why do we exist? It is a question needing more than consolation but a quality of consciousness we only have in potential.
https://iep.utm.edu/plotinus/
Protagoras would deny the search and call it imagination. Socrates would say that once we admit we know nothing, we may begin to “understand” something.
Plato once defined man as a being in search of meaning. .
You explain the search to experience our Source as the need for consolation: to avoid experiencing the question of our mortality. But what if the need to experience objective meaning is more than consolation? This is the essential question for both religion and philosophy. Why do we exist? It is a question needing more than consolation but a quality of consciousness we only have in potential.
How do you analyze the ONE as described by Plotinus to determine if it is an illusion or not?Whatever is light of your Source is a belief and when analyzed it is an illusion.
What counts is the psychological issue, not whether the Source is really-real or not.
https://iep.utm.edu/plotinus/
If the ONE is essential reality, it is beyond the abilities of our superficial analysis to comprehend. If we are drawn to our Source by our need for meaning, how do we approach it if the solution is beyond what is revealed by analysis? How can we reason in new way?a. The One
The ‘concept’ of the One is not, properly speaking, a concept at all, since it is never explicitly defined by Plotinus, yet it is nevertheless the foundation and grandest expression of his philosophy. Plotinus does make it clear that no words can do justice to the power of the One; even the name, ‘the One,’ is inadequate, for naming already implies discursive knowledge, and since discursive knowledge divides or separates its objects in order to make them intelligible, the One cannot be known through the process of discursive reasoning (Ennead VI.9.4). Knowledge of the One is achieved through the experience of its ‘power’ (dunamis) and its nature, which is to provide a ‘foundation’ (arkhe) and location (topos) for all existents (VI.9.6). The ‘power’ of the One is not a power in the sense of physical or even mental action; the power of the One, as Plotinus speaks of it, is to be understood as the only adequate description of the ‘manifestation’ of a supreme principle that, by its very nature, transcends all predication and discursive understanding. This ‘power,’ then, is capable of being experienced, or known, only through contemplation (theoria), or the purely intellectual ‘vision’ of the source of all things. The One transcends all beings, and is not itself a being, precisely because all beings owe their existence and subsistence to their eternal contemplation of the dynamic manifestation(s) of the One. The One can be said to be the ‘source’ of all existents only insofar as every existent naturally and (therefore) imperfectly contemplates the various aspects of the One, as they are extended throughout the cosmos, in the form of either sensible or intelligible objects or existents. The perfect contemplation of the One, however, must not be understood as a return to a primal source; for the One is not, strictly speaking, a source or a cause, but rather the eternally present possibility — or active making-possible — of all existence, of Being (V.2.1). According to Plotinus, the unmediated vision of the ‘generative power’ of the One, to which existents are led by the Intelligence (V.9.2), results in an ecstatic dance of inspiration, not in a satiated torpor; for it is the nature of the One to impart fecundity to existents — that is to say: the One, in its regal, indifferent capacity as undiminishable potentiality of Being, permits both rapt contemplation and ecstatic, creative extension. These twin poles, this ‘stanchion,’ is the manifested framework of existence which the One produces, effortlessly (V.1.6). The One, itself, is best understood as the center about which the ‘stanchion,’ the framework of the cosmos, is erected. This ‘stanchion’ or framework is the result of the contemplative activity of the Intelligence.
Protagoras would deny the search and call it imagination. Socrates would say that once we admit we know nothing, we may begin to “understand” something.