From: Scott Roberts (jse885@earthlink.net)
Date: Mon Aug 23 2004 - 06:00:44 BST
DMB et al,
Then why did Plotinus call that first principle "nous"? Why did Franklin
Merrell-Wolff call his mystical experience "noetic" (among other things)?
Pirsig calls DQ "pre-intellectual". Plotinus calls the first emanation from
the One Intellect. We have two different metaphysics here.
Here's Plotinus:
"In a certain sense, no doubt, all lives are thoughts -- but qualified as
thought vegetative, thought sensitive, and thought psychic.
What, then, makes them thoughts?
The fact that they are Reason-Principles. Every life is some form of
thought, but of a dwindling clearness like the degrees of life itself. The
first and clearest Life and the first Intelligence are one Being. The First
Life, then is an Intellection and the next form of Life is the next
Intellection and the last form of Life is the last form of Intellection.
Thus every Life is of this order; it is an Intellection." [Enneads III.8.8,
translation by Stephen McKenna]
Pirsig, meanwhile, says that when the biological evolved out of the
inorganic there was no intellect (or at least, if Paul is right that the
MOQ does not consider time as fundamental, intellect wasn't involved in the
process, which would be bizarre if that were the case).
I think Borchert and Wilber, based on the quotes you gave, wish to make
Plotinus fit the modern ideas people have of mysticism, which are
unfortunately shared by Pirsig. They are, I think, trying to disassociate
mysticism from philosophy and theology, but this has only been a problem
with modern philosophy, not ancient or medieval. It became a problem when
people started thinking that thinking was something that just human beings
did. That nature had no spirit, so to speak. Now the modern mystical
interpreter wishes to re-endow nature with something God-like, which is
legitimate, but having forgotten, or misinterpreted the ancients (as I
think Borchert is doing -- notice the use of the phrase "creative Spirit"
and not "Intellect" or "Reason-Principle"), can think only of something
"undifferentiated" or "pre-intellectual" behind it all.
Of course, discursive reason cannot deduce mystical truth (which nobody
ever disputed), but since Plotinus used the word nous for the first
emanation from the One, we should take him as saying that our intellect is
a limited version of that same Intellect, and so is our way back. Not by
using it for deducing, but by purifying it. (This shouldn't be taken to
imply that this is the only path. In Hinduism it is called jnana yoga, and
is only one of several yogas.). One might say that the One, True Philosophy
(that is, the one that might actually work to bring us to wisdom) would be
using the intellect to purify itself.
- Scott
> [Original Message]
> From: David Buchanan <DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org>
> To: moq_discuss@moq.org <moq_discuss@moq.org>
> Date: 8/21/2004 6:46:47 PM
> Subject: RE: MD Plotinus, Pirsig and Wilber
>
> Scott, Paul and all:
>
> Scott Roberts said:
> Plotinus says that Intellect DOES guide everything, while Pirsig is saying
> that it doesn't guide evolution.
>
> dmb says:
> Again, you're confusing labels with contents. They share the same view
even
> if they use different words to describe it. Concluding his description of
> Plotinus' view, Bruno Borchert writes...
>
> "Plotinus was fond of using the illustraton of the midpoint. Consider a
> universe with the Sun at its center, and elinimate the Sun while kepping
the
> light-source. Each being, including each man and women, is a universe of
> this sort. The midpoint in each thing is the same creative Spirit.
> Everything flows from this Spirit and everything has a tendency to become
> one with the One again. This tendency is a cosmic stream, an impulse, a
> cosmic eros, which Plotinus calls insight. Thus, for him, mystical insight
> is not something that has to be bestowed, it is a discovery of what
> everything is. It is not an intellectual pursuit, but obedience to the
> deepest law of nature: an ardent desire to be at one with existence and so
> to become complete."
>
> dmb continues:
> The "creative Spirit" described here is what Pirsig calls DQ. Its the
cosmic
> stream out of which all things flow and toward which all things strive.
Its
> this mystical kind of evolutionary view that they share, and is not to be
> confused with Darwinism. Plotinus' cosmic eros is what guides evolution,
and
> that's miles away from Pirsig's intellectual level of static qualtiy.
Bruno
> Borchert even takes the time to translate Plotinus' ancient terms in a
> related case, one that express one of Plotinus' cental concerns. Plotinus
> puts it something like this...
>
> "Often when I awake from the body to myself and step from otherness into
> myself, I behold a most wondrous beauty. It is then that I believe most
> strongly in my belonging to a higher destiny... I don't know how it can be
> that the soul once got into my body, considering what the soul is in
itself,
> as it has now revealed itself to me even though I am in the body."
>
> Borchet explains...
>
> "We think of it as the connection between mystical self-awareness and the
> self-consciousness of everday life, between the 'true I' and the ego, but
> Plotinus did not have this terminology at his disposal."
>
> dmb says:
> Plotinus speaks of body and soul, but thanks to guys like Bruno we can see
> that Plotinus refers to the distinction between the static social and
> intellect patterns that make up the ego self and the Dynamic reality
> revealed in a mystical experience. All this talk of spirit, body and soul
> can give one the false impression that is bible-babble or worse, but
Wilber
> defends Plotinus's heirarchical system as being based on experience, not
> faith...
>
> "Scholars usually take Plotinus's system to be primarily a form of
> philosophy of 'metaphysics': the various levels, particularly the higher
> ones, are imagined to be some sort of theoretical contructs that are
> deduced, logically or postulated, speculatively, to account for existence
> and manifestation. But in fact these systems are, through and through,
from
> top to bottom, the results of actual comtemplative apprehensions and
direct
> developmental phenomenolgy. The higher levels of these systems connot be
> experienced or deduced RATIONALLY, and nobody from Plotinus to Aurobindo
> thinks they can. However, AFTER THE FACT, of direct and repeated
> experiential disclosures, they can be rationall reconstructed and
presented
> as a 'system'. But the 'system', so called, has been discovered, not
> deduced, and checked against direct experience in a community of the
> like-minded and like-spirited. (Its no accident that Inge refers to
> Plotinus's spiritality as being based on 'experimental verification'. -
> 'faith begins as an experiement and ends as an experience.) Not a single
> component of these systems is hidden to experience or nestled safely away
in
> a 'metaphysical' domain that cannot be checked cognitively with the
> appropriate tools... In short, they follow all three strands of valid
> knowledge accumulation - and one can 'dismiss' these higher levels of
> development only on the same grounds that the Churchmen refused to look
> through Galileo's telescope; dogmatic stubbornness tells them that there's
> nothing to see." Ken Wilber
>
> Thanks,
> dmb
>
>
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