Tropik

📖 - Parmenides — On Nature - Fragment 10

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

And you shall know both the nature of the aether and all
The signs in the aether, the destructive works
Of the splendid sun's pure torch, and whence they came-to-be,
And you shall learn the wandering works
Of the round-eyed moon, and its nature,
And you shall also know the surrounding sky,
Whence it grew and how Necessity did guide and shackle it
To hold the limits of the stars.

Source: Parmenides of Elea, Fragments, tr. David Gallop (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 78-79. This fragment was found in Clement, Miscellanies, V,14, 138.

📖 - Plotinus — Enneads §2.1.1

Sun, 09 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

:: Of Origins & Ends

§2.1.1. When we say that the cosmos, although it has a body, has both always existed and always will exist, if we should refer the cause of its everlasting existence to the will of god, first, although we might possibly be saying something true, we would not be providing any clarity. Next, the transformation of the elements and the destruction of the living beings on earth preserve their respective forms. This will perhaps suggest that the same thing is occurring in the case of the universe, too, since the will of god is capable of this – even though a body is always fleeing and in flux – that is, capable of placing the identical form at one time in one thing and at another time in another, and consequently of always preserving its unity in form, though not its unity in number. For why would some things possess everlastingness in this way only in form, while the things in the heavens and heaven itself possess individual everlastingness?

📖 - Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph — The Deepest Night of the Past

Sun, 09 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

:: Of Origins & Ends

Man must be granted an essence outside and above the world; for how could he alone, of all creatures, retrace the long path of developments from the present back into the deepest night of the past, how could he alone rise up to the beginning of things unless there were in him an essence from the beginning of times? Drawn from the source of things and akin to it, what is eternal of the soul has a co-science/con-sciousnes [Mitt-Wissenschaft] of creation.

Because this essence holds time enveloped, it serves as a link that enables man to make an immediate connection with the most ancient past as well as with the most distant future. Man often sees himself transported into such wonderful relations and inner connections through precisely this innermost essence, such as wehn he encounters a moment in the present as one long past, or a distant event, as if he himself were witness to it.

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Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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