From: Dan Glover (daneglover@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Aug 15 2004 - 18:13:38 BST
Hello everyone
>From: "Scott Roberts" <jse885@earthlink.net>
>Reply-To: moq_discuss@moq.org
>To: moq_discuss@moq.org
>Subject: RE: MD Plotinus, Pirsig and Wilber
>Date: Sat, 14 Aug 2004 22:22:59 -0600
>
>A major difference between Pirsig and Plotinus, is that the latter held
>that the world emanated from Intellect (nous), via Soul, and our job is to
>make the return journey, whereas with Pirsig, there is only the upward
>journey, with intellect something to be cast off. The Plotinian Intellect
>plays approximately the same role as the MOQ's DQ, but since the MOQ sees
>the intellect as only another level of static pattern, the two philosophies
>become very different. The MOQ is nominalist and empirical, while
>neo-Platonism is neither.
Hi Scott
Yes there seem to be major differences between Plotinus and Robert Pirsig
but I think the philosophies of each are similiar in many ways too. I've
taken the liberty to cut and paste a couple of what I feel to be pertinent
sections from Plotinus' Six Enneads:
From the Third Ennead:
We are like people ignorant of painting who complain that the colours are
not beautiful everywhere in the picture: but the Artist has laid on the
appropriate tint to every spot. Or we are censuring a drama because the
persons are not all heroes but include a servant and a rustic and some
scurrilous clown; yet take away the low characters and the power of the
drama is gone; these are part and parcel of it. (
http://classics.mit.edu/Plotinus/enneads.3.third.html )
Doesn't this remind you of the brujo in LILA? And how RMP says it's hard to
tell the degenerates from the Dynamic individuals that a society needs to
survive and thrive?
This section seems to especially pertain to Ant's viva voce question:
There exists a Principle which transcends Being; this is The One, whose
nature we have sought to establish in so far as such matters lend themselves
to proof. Upon The One follows immediately the Principle which is at once
Being and the Intellectual-Principle. Third comes the Principle, Soul.
The One is all things and no one of them; the source of all things is not
all things; all things are its possession- running back, so to speak, to it-
or, more correctly, not yet so, they will be.
But a universe from an unbroken unity, in which there appears no diversity,
not even duality?
It is precisely because that is nothing within the One that all things are
from it: in order that Being may be brought about, the source must be no
Being but Being's generator, in what is to be thought of as the primal act
of generation. Seeking nothing, possessing nothing, lacking nothing, the One
is perfect and, in our metaphor, has overflowed, and its exuberance has
produced the new: this product has turned again to its begetter and been
filled and has become its contemplator and so an Intellectual-Principle. (
http://classics.mit.edu/Plotinus/enneads.5.fifth.html )
Notice how Plotinus describes the One as nothing -- seeking nothing,
possessing nothing, lacking nothing. Compare that to RMP describing Dynamic
Quality as equivilant to Buddhist nothingness. Also "its exuberance has
produced the new" is very similiar to RMP's Dynamic Quality being new and
always something of a surprise.
Thank you for your comments,
Dan
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