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MacKenna-Plotinus: ordering principle

quinta-feira 1º de fevereiro de 2024, por Cardoso de Castro

  

The ordering principle is twofold; there is the principle known to us as the Demiurge and there is the Soul of the All; we apply the appellation "Zeus" sometimes to the Demiurge and sometimes to the principle conducting the universe. Enneads   IV,4,

Now, apartness may be explained as simply differentiation: but how account for priority unless on the assumption of some ordering principle arranging from above, and in that disposal necessarily affirming a serial order? There must be such a principle, or all would exist simultaneously; but the indicated conclusion does not follow unless order and ordering principle are distinct; if the ordering principle is Primal Order, there is no such affirmation of series; there is simply making, the making of this thing after that thing. The affirmation would imply that the ordering principle looks away towards Order and therefore is not, itself, Order. Enneads IV,4,

But how are Order and this orderer one and the same? Because the ordering principle is no conjoint of matter and idea but is soul, pure idea, the power and energy second only to the Intellectual-Principle: and because the succession is a fact of the things themselves, inhibited as they are from this comprehensive unity. The ordering soul remains august, a circle, as we may figure it, in complete adaptation to its centre, widening outward, but fast upon it still, an outspreading without interval. Enneads IV,4,