Plotinus' Thoughts on Seeing and a Metaphorical Approach

The relationship between the eye and seeing is one of the most studied areas of ancient philosophy. The Aristotelian relationship between the eye and seeing in the context of energeia assigned the eye the most competent and specialized position among the senses. On the other hand, the analogy Plato made between the good, the sun, the light and the eye is a more remarkable point. Plotinus, on the other hand, puts this question in a different focus in the Enneads: Do things that are far away appear to be smaller, and do things that are far removed from us seem to be at a short distance from us, while things that are near appear to be as large as they actually are and to have the distance from us that they actually have? Plotinos tries to find an answer to this question by explaining it in five different ways. As commentators like Kalligas and Armstrong have pointed out, he is close to the fourth explanation, which he compares to the relationship between color and dimness. Through this trace, I will try to transfer the relationship between sight and the visible object to the relationship between thought and what is thought. In this way I will compare the distance between the visible and the sight with the distance between thinking and what is thought. At this point, I would like to focus on the word speculation, which is the scholastic equivalent of the word theoria. Finally, I will conclude that in the noesis activity without sense data, our knowledge of the eidos is most comprehensive and most distant from visible objects

Aesthetics · Analogy · Astronomy · Epistemology · Geometry · Linguistics · Physics · Sight · Speculation · Classical Philosophy and Thought · History · Mathematics · Philosophy

• The "Enneads" of Plotinus

  Paul Kalligas•Enneads of Plotinus, Volume 1…•2015

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