In a message dated 2/27/02 1:15:47 PM GMT Standard Time,
beasley@austarnet.com.au writes:
<< Squonk raises an interesting point in his quote from Plotinus. While I
would
like to have seen more of the context, I am assuming that to Plotinus beauty
is a distraction from the good. It seems that Plotinus is viewing beauty as
a quality of the egoic self, the pursuit of which only maintains the
illusory "pleasure mixed with pain" which is characteristic of the usual
state of humanity. For the mystic, though, pursuit of the good or the true
leads to a different source of values, where beauty is not specifically
discriminated, possibly because the mystic perception no longer
discriminates good and bad in the way required to describe the beautiful and
the ugly. If this is so, and I am keeping an open mind on it, then beauty is
a fundamentally flawed candidate for a 5th level. >>
Hello John,
I would not suggest beauty is 5th level myself.
I feel beauty to be the immediate awareness of a static quality, which
happens to be rather close to DQ.
I feel Plotinus may agree?
For him, beauty is active when one looks towards the unity of intellect, and
by looking: so that which looks is brought into being.
For Plotinus, issues of symmetry are by the by; for a symetrical statue is
not as beautiful as a living human; it is the form of the living that is
beautiful beacause it is more 'being' than a statue.
The ontology would appear to be that which is closer to the unity of one is
more real.
Pltotinus referes to the One as beauty beyond beauty.
All the best,
Squonk.
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