(The Stoics), like almost everybody, insist that visual beauty consists in the proportion of the parts relatively to each other and to the whole, joined to the grace of colors. If then, as in this case, the beauty of bodies in general consists in the symmetry and just proportion of their parts, beauty could not consist of anything simple, and necessarily could not appear in anything but what was compound. Only the totality will be beautiful; the parts by themselves will possess no beauty; (…)
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Guthrie / Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie
Matérias
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Guthrie-Plotinus: wisdom
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de Castro -
Guthrie-Plotinus: infinite
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroThe same reflections may be made about pain, and one’s feeling of it. When a man’s finger is said to give him pain, this, no doubt, is a recognition that the seat of the pain is in the finger, and that the feeling of pain is experienced by the directing principle. Consequently, when a part of the spirit suffers, this suffering is felt by the directing principle, and shared by the whole soul. How can this sympathy be explained? By relay transmission, (the Stoic) will answer; the (…)
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Guthrie-Plotinus: animals
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de Castro(g.) (The body exerts an uniform action, while the soul exerts a very diverse action.) The following considerations further demonstrate the impossibility of the soul being a body. A body must be hot or cold, hard or soft, liquid or solid, black or white, or qualities differing according to its nature. If it is only hot or cold, light or heavy, black or white, it communicates its only quality to what comes close to it; for fire could not cool, nor ice heat. Nevertheless, the soul produces not (…)
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Guthrie-Plotinus: knowledge
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de Castro(i.) (Souls cannot, as do bodies, lose or gain parts, ever remaining identical.) The body has the faculty of making its organs grow within a definite time and in fixed proportions. From where could the soul derive them? Its function is to grow, not to cause growth, unless the principle of growth be comprehended within its material mass. If the soul that makes the body grow was herself a body, she should, on uniting with molecules of a nature similar to hers, develop a growth proportional to (…)
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Guthrie-Plotinus: animal
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de Castro(e.) (No body could subsist without the power of the universal soul.) Besides no body could subsist without the power of the universal Soul (from Numenius). Every body, indeed, is in a perpetual flow and movement (as thought Heraclitus, in Plato, Cratylus), and the world would soon perish if it contained nothing but bodies, even if some one of them were to be called soul; for such a soul, being composed of the same matter as the other bodies, would undergo the same fate that they do; or (…)
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Guthrie-Plotinus: presence
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroFirst, there are certain objects, such as bodies, whose beauty exists only by participation, instead of being inherent in the very essence of the subject. Such are beautiful in themselves, as is, for example, virtue. Indeed, the same bodies seem beautiful at one time, while at another they lack beauty; consequently, there is a great difference between being a body and being beautiful. What then is the principle whose presence in a body produces beauty therein? What is that element in the (…)
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Guthrie-Plotinus: organism
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroThus Intelligence actually constitutes all beings; it contains them all, but not locally; it contains them as it possesses itself; it is identical with them. All entities are simultaneously contained within it, and in it remain distinct, as many kinds of knowledge may exist within the soul without their number causing any confusion; each of them appears when needed, without involving the others. If in the soul each thought be an actualization independent of other thoughts, so much the more (…)
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Guthrie-Plotinus: seminal
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroThe most irrational theory of all is that an aggregation of molecules should produce life, that elements without intelligence should beget intelligence. Others (like Alexander of Aphrodisia) insist that to produce life these elements must be mingled in a certain manner. That would, however, imply (as thought Gallen and Hippocrates) the existence of a principle which produces order, and which should be the cause of mixture or, temperament, and that should alone deserve being considered as (…)
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Guthrie-Plotinus: essences
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroRestored to intelligence, the soul sees her own beauty increase; indeed, her own beauty consists of the intelligence with its ideas; only when united to intelligence is the soul really isolated from all the remainder. That is the reason that it is right to say that “the soul’s welfare and beauty lie in assimilating herself to the divinity,” because it is the principle of beauty and of the essences; or rather, being is beauty, while the other nature (non-being, matter), is ugliness. This is (…)
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Guthrie-Plotinus: born
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroJust as we could not have spoken of sense-beauties if we had never seen them, nor recognized them as such, if, in respect to them, we had been similar to persons born blind, likewise we would not know enough to say anything about the beauty either of the arts or sciences, or of anything of the kind, if we were not already in possession of this kind of beauty; nor of the splendor of virtue, if we had not contemplated the (“golden) face of Justice,” and of temperance, before whose splendor the (…)
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Guthrie-Plotinus: passions
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroBut reason is not yet satisfied; reason wonders why these veritable beings give the soul which experiences them the property of exciting love, from which proceeds this halo of light which, so to speak, crowns all virtues. Consider the things contrary to these beautiful objects, and with them compare what may be ugly in the soul. If we can discover of what ugliness consists, and what is its cause, we shall have achieved an important element of the solution we are seeking. Let us picture to (…)
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Guthrie-Plotinus: thinking
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroIf, in any sense whatever, the soul were a body, we could not think. Here is the proof. If feeling is explained as the soul’s laying hold of perceptible things by making use of the body, thinking cannot also of making use of the body. Otherwise, thinking and feeling would be identical. Thus, thinking must consist in perceiving without the help of the body (as thought Aristotle). So much the more, the thinking principle cannot be corporeal. Since it is sensation that grasps sense-objects, it (…)
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Guthrie-Plotinus: happiness
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroHis sovereign unity may best be understood by His being self-sufficient; for the most perfect principle is necessarily that which best suffices Himself, and which least needs anything else. Now anything that is not one, but manifold, needs something else. Not being one, but being composed of multiple elements, its being demands unification; but as the One is already one, He does not even need Himself. So much the more, the being that is manifold needs as many things as it contains; for each (…)
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Guthrie-Plotinus: measure
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroBut how shall we train this interior vision? At the moment of its (first) awakening, it cannot contemplate beauties too dazzling. Your soul must then first be accustomed to contemplate the noblest occupations of man, and then the beautiful deeds, not indeed those performed by artists, but those (good deeds) done by virtuous men. Later contemplate the souls of those who perform these beautiful actions. Nevertheless, how will you discover the beauty which their excellent soul possesses? (…)
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Guthrie-Plotinus: attribute
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de Castro(9.) There are men who locate the soul in the body, so as to give her a foundation in some sphere of activity, to account for the various phenomena in the body, such as getting hot or cold, pushing on or stopping, (and the like). They evidently do not realize that bodies produce these effects only through incorporeal powers, and that those are not the powers that we attribute to the soul, which are thought, sensation, reasoning, desire, judiciousness, propriety and wisdom, all of them (…)
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Guthrie-Plotinus: genera
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroThe first principles, therefore, are existence and intelligence, identity and difference, movement and rest. Rest is the condition of identity; movement is the condition of thought, since the latter presupposes the differences of the thinking subject and of the object thought, and because it is silent if reduced to unity. The elements of thought (subject and object) must thus stand in the relation of differences, but also in that of unity, because they form a consubstantial unity, and (…)
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Guthrie-Plotinus: degree
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de Castro(14). It is absolutely necessary to postulate the existence of a nature different from bodies, by itself fully possessing genuine existence, which can neither be born nor perish. Otherwise, all other things would hopelessly disappear, as a result of the destruction of the existence which preserves both the individuals and the universe, as their beauty and salvation. The soul, indeed, is the principle of movement (as Plato thought, in the Phaedrus); it is the soul that imparts movement to (…)
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Guthrie-Plotinus: real
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroReturning to our first consideration, we shall examine the nature of the element of beauty in bodies. It is something perceivable at the very first glance, something which the soul recognizes as kindred, and sympathetic to her own nature, which she welcomes and assimilates. But as soon as she meets an ugly object, she recoils, repudiates it, and rejects it as something foreign, towards which her real nature feels antipathy. That is the reason why the soul, being such as it is, namely, of an (…)
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Guthrie-Plotinus: natural
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroThus, in her ascension towards divinity, the soul advances until, having risen above everything that is foreign to her, she alone with Him who is alone, beholds, in all His simplicity and purity, Him from whom all depends, to whom all aspires, from whom everything draws its existence, life and thought. He who beholds him is overwhelmed with love; with ardor desiring to unite himself with Him, entranced with ecstasy. Men who have not yet seen Him desire Him as the Good; those who have, admire (…)
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Guthrie-Plotinus: exterior
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroThe soul appreciates beauty by an especially ordered faculty, whose sole function it is to appreciate all that concerns beauty, even when the other faculties take part in this judgment. Often the soul makes her (aesthetic) decisions by comparison with the form of the beautiful which is within her, using this form as a standard by which to judge. But what agreement can anything corporeal have with what is incorporeal? For example, how can an architect judge a building placed before him as (…)