readoldthings ([personal profile] readoldthings) wrote 2022-03-15 10:05 pm (UTC)

Re: Nature is lesser?

This is a good comment, and I want to mainly encourage you to keep following these thoughts. If I don't have a good response, it's because I'm honestly of two kinds on the subject.

When you say that you believe that animals and plants have awareness and interiority, I am entirely in agreement. If anything, I would say that I don't "believe" this, because I don't see it as any kind of article of faith. It seems, rather, as the most obvious thing in the entire world, which materialist civilization has literally had to drive itself insane in order to deny.

On the other hand, there is a pessimism toward the material world that you find in almost all of the philosophical systems of late antiquity that we discuss here-- Neoplatonism as well as Christianity, with Sethian Gnosticism and Manichaeism representing the most extreme form of this viewpoint. I personally find Manichaeism repulsive-- when I read about it, I feel like I'm reading about the history of one of those UFO suicide cults-- and I'm not impressed with Gnosticism either. But I am very sympathetic to a view like that of Plotinus. While he wrote about the Beauty of Nature-- and remember that in Platonic thought Beauty is the presence of Divinity, not some kind of arbitrary prettiness-- he also was, according to his student Porphyry, "almost embarrassed to be in a body" and regularly refers to death as "our Liberation." I'm grateful for the lessons and the joys of the material world, and I have to assume that the Creator knew what he was doing when He made it, but I can't say that I'm going to be very sad to leave it behind when the time comes!

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