The Philosophy of Historiography by John Lange

Author:John Lange [Lange, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Historiography, Philosophy, Epistemology
ISBN: 9781497616363
Google: O9kqAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-04-01T03:10:08+00:00

7. Plotinus merged with the One.

Plotinus was a definite historical figure, a 3rd Century Roman philosopher and mystic, and the most famous and important figure in the NonChristian Neoplatonic tradition.

In Plato one finds the supreme form to be the form of the Good, and, somehow, it seems the plethora of other forms is dependent upon, and somehow follows from, this ultimate and foundational form. On the other hand, the relation between the form of the Good and the other forms is not spelled out in Plato. Moreover, the supreme form, the form of the Good, is apparently impersonal, sublime, nonconscious, needless and will-less, eternal, imperishable, and unchangeable, rather like, one supposes, the One of Parmenides, to which it may well be philosophically akin. As far as we know, Plato’s relationship to his hypothesized transcendental realities was essentially rationalistic, doubtless humble, admiring, and awestruck, but not mystical. Plato, although denying the accolade of knowledge to matters of perception and other forms of sense experience, and identifying the real with the changeless, with its supposed consequence, necessary truth, took the route to the unraveling of human and cosmic mysteries to be reason, logic, dialectic, geometry and argumentation. As far as we know he did not attempt to approach the real, let alone participate in it, via some sort of immediate contact, in virtue of a sort of transcendental analogue to sense experience, something like an immediate, extranatural perception or touching. The rhapsodies of Plato, one supposes, were more analogous to those which would startle and enthrall the mathematician, silent on his peak in Darien, than those of the saint or mystic, those not of witnessing, recognizing, or inspecting, but those of union, of participation, of sharing.

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