We customarily divide in science, gravitating down, down, down.
It may be as well for science also to combine. That is, to do both operations: dividing and combining , "until it has reached perfect Intellection." This state is known as "Dialectic" by Plotinus in his powerful chapter of that name, in his book, THE ENNEADS (1991).
"Is Dialectic, then, the same as Philosophy?
"It is the most precious part of Philosophy. We must not think of it as the mere tool of the metaphysician : Dialectic does not consist of bare theories and rules: it deals with verities; Existences are, as it were, Matter to it, or at least it proceeds methodically towards Existences, and possesses itself, at the one step, of the notions and of the realities.
"Untruth and sophism it knows, not directly, not of its own nature, but merely as something produced outside itself, something it recognizes to be foreign to the verities laid up in itself; in the falsity presented to it, it perceives a clash with its own canon of truth. Dialectic, that is to say, has no knowledge of propositions--collections of words--but it knows the truth and, in that knowledge, knows what the schools call their propositions: it knows, above all, the operation of the Soul, and, by virtue of this knowing, it knows, too, what is affirmed and what is denied, whether the denial is of what was asserted or something else, and whether propositions agree or differ; all that is submitted to it, it attacks with the directness of sense-perception and it leaves petty precisions of process to what other science may care for such exercises."
P.27-28

Saturday, August 27, 2016
DIVIDE AND COMBINE, THE ENNEADS....
We customarily divide in science, gravitating down, down, down.
It may be as well for science also to combine. That is, to do both operations: dividing and combining , "until it has reached perfect Intellection." This state is known as "Dialectic" by Plotinus in his powerful chapter of that name, in his book, THE ENNEADS (1991).
"Is Dialectic, then, the same as Philosophy?
"It is the most precious part of Philosophy. We must not think of it as the mere tool of the metaphysician : Dialectic does not consist of bare theories and rules: it deals with verities; Existences are, as it were, Matter to it, or at least it proceeds methodically towards Existences, and possesses itself, at the one step, of the notions and of the realities.
"Untruth and sophism it knows, not directly, not of its own nature, but merely as something produced outside itself, something it recognizes to be foreign to the verities laid up in itself; in the falsity presented to it, it perceives a clash with its own canon of truth. Dialectic, that is to say, has no knowledge of propositions--collections of words--but it knows the truth and, in that knowledge, knows what the schools call their propositions: it knows, above all, the operation of the Soul, and, by virtue of this knowing, it knows, too, what is affirmed and what is denied, whether the denial is of what was asserted or something else, and whether propositions agree or differ; all that is submitted to it, it attacks with the directness of sense-perception and it leaves petty precisions of process to what other science may care for such exercises."
P.27-28