> On Jan 24, 2017, at 1:30 PM, Edwina Taborsky <tabor...@primus.ca> wrote: > > Would you say that agapasm is a 'drive towards unity' or is it a 'feeling' of > attraction to Otherness, and an action of the development of some, just some, > commonalities. That is, agapasm requires diversity of matter, for 'love' > exists only within an attraction to the Not-Self and the 'power of sympathy' > towards this otherness 6.307.
Think they end up being the same thing. For the Proclus strain of neoPlatonism you have that move away from unity which creates a gap. So there is something other to the not-self or the lack. In Plotinus it’s a bit more complex since matter as absolute private is Other and the One as absolute unity is also pure Other. Iamblicus and Proclus disagreed with Plotinus on the nature of matter. Plotinus is following Aristotle a little more closely here. The full quote you reference is useful. (Emphasis mine) The agapastic development of thought is the adoption of certain mental tendencies, not altogether heedlessly, as in tychasm, nor quite blindly by the mere force of circumstances or of logic, as in anancasm, but by an immediate attraction for the idea itself, whose nature is divined before the mind possesses it, by the power of sympathy, that is, by virtue of the continuity of mind; and this mental tendency may be of three varieties, as follows. First, it may affect a whole people or community in its collective personality, and be thence communicated to such individuals as are in powerfully sympathetic connection with the collective people, although they may be intellectually incapable of attaining the idea by their private understandings or even perhaps of consciously apprehending it. Second, it may affect a private person directly, yet so that he is only enabled to apprehend the idea, or to appreciate its attractiveness, by virtue of his sympathy with his neighbors, under the influence of a striking experience or development of thought. The conversion of St. Paul may be taken as an example of what is meant. Third, it may affect an individual, independently of his human affections, by virtue of an attraction it exercises upon his mind, even before he has comprehended it. This is the phenomenon which has been well called the divination of genius; for it is due to the continuity between the man’s mind and the Most High. Later (315) The agapastic development of thought should, if it exists, be distinguished by its purposive character, this purpose being the development of an idea. We should have a direct agapic or sympathetic comprehension and recognition of it by virtue of the continuity of thought. His later paper “On Signs” is useful to expand these ideas from “Evolutionary Love.” Again emphasis mine. A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen. “Idea” is here to be understood in a sort of Platonic sense, very familiar in everyday talk; I mean in that sense in which we say that one man catches another man’s idea, in which we say that when a man recalls what he was thinking of at some previous time, he recalls the same idea, and in which when a man continues to think anything, say for a tenth of a second, in so far as the thought continues to agree with itself during that time, that is to have a likecontent, it is the same idea, and is not at each instant of the interval a new idea. (CP 2.228) He doesn’t really speak in terms of love there. But you can see the parallels to how he describes agapism in “Evolutionary Love.” Beauty in the way neoPlatonists conceive of it is wrapped up with all this. Beauty for Peirce you might recall is making firstness intelligible. Again this is right out of Proclus. This issue ends up being how you represent iconicity. For Peirce what we mean by beauty is the greek kalos. For Proclus kalos is the call of Being. This triadic structure in Proclus emanation theory is tied to this. His “Elements of Theology” really is an important context for Peirce here. When you remember what an idea is for Peirce this love is caught up with determining in signs the original form which often is manifest either via the unconscious or via a kind of quasi-revelatory form. Again this is pretty standard in the more religious form of neoPlatonism such as written of by Iamblicus and Proclus. For Peirce I think it depends upon the time time frame. In the very early more Kantian Peirce you still have these neoPlatonic ideas with Being and Matter being the unthinkable limits. In the later Peirce it gets a bit trickier. However in general Peirce sees matter as pure determination not pure place. So love makes signs seek to fully represent their object.
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