Moments of Truth

Why is Plotinus relevant to a study of marginality? On the one hand, moderns have marginalized the Platonic tradition. On the other, it is our “common sense” that—on Plotinus's account at least—distracts us from the real, and better, world. We could have learned the same lesson even from modern naturalistic science, which seems to show that we live on the margins, in a universe far older, grimmer and more mysterious than we can easily imagine, but from our ordinary point of view it is the universe aloft that is of marginal concern. But the vision which Plotinus hoped to awaken—a vision that he acknowledged was likely to be momentary, and speedily forgotten—is of a wilder world than the modern—and Stoic—theory of a natural, material world. I attempt to give a credible account of this Plotinian perspective, drawing on comparisons both with modern materialistic science and with the “sudden enlightenment” of Zen Buddhism

Aesthetics · Art · Buddhism · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Literature · Materialism · Naturalism · Theology · Classical Philosophy and Thought · History · Philosophy · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought