Enneads I iii: On Dialectic (Revised)

[sdi]

Rereading Enneads I iii "On Dialectic," I think my previous summary was more-or-less fine, and have limited myself to making minor edits directly on that post (mostly by making my terminology consistent).

One thing that struck me is that I had thought Plotinus only described two paths—the aesthete and the philosopher—but upon rereading, it's clear that he's describing three (drawn from the Phædrus, which I have not yet studied): the ἐρωτικός ["lover"], the μουσικός ["sophisticate, man of the world"], and the φιλόσοφος ["philosopher"]. (MacKenna's translation is my preferred one in general, but in this case Armstrong's was clearer.) His discussion of the first two are very similar, and he singles out the philosopher as "better" than them (which is typical of Platonism), but all three are without doubt considered separately: I no longer think I'm being the least bit original in likening the three goddesses contending for the apple to the three broad paths upward.

It seems to me that the last step, from abstraction to Truth, is the hard one—the vision of the Good is something we can only cultivate ourselves in preparation for (and this is what Dialectic is supposed to be about), and not something we can undertake directly. But then—I have not yet attained, and maybe I will think differently once I get there.