Beauty...
How is this for a philosophical reflection upon beauty?
"It is impossible to talk about bodily beauty if one, like one born blind has never seen and known bodily beauty. In the same way, it is impossible to talk about the "luster" of right living and of learning and of the like if one has never cared for such things, never beheld the "face of justice" and temperance and seen it to be "beyond the beauty of evening or morning star." Seeing of this sort is only done with the eye of the soul. And, seeing thus, one undergoes a joy, a wonder, and a distress more deep than any other because here one touches truth.
Such emotion all beauty must induce-- an astonishment, a delicious wonderment, a longing, a love, a trembling that is all delight. It may be felt for things invisible quite as for things you see, and indeed the soul does feel it. All souls, we can cay, feel it, but souls that are apt for love feel it especially. It is the same here as with bodily beauty. All perceive it. Not all are stung sharply by it. Only they whom we call lovers ever are..."
From The Essential Plotinus
"It is impossible to talk about bodily beauty if one, like one born blind has never seen and known bodily beauty. In the same way, it is impossible to talk about the "luster" of right living and of learning and of the like if one has never cared for such things, never beheld the "face of justice" and temperance and seen it to be "beyond the beauty of evening or morning star." Seeing of this sort is only done with the eye of the soul. And, seeing thus, one undergoes a joy, a wonder, and a distress more deep than any other because here one touches truth.
Such emotion all beauty must induce-- an astonishment, a delicious wonderment, a longing, a love, a trembling that is all delight. It may be felt for things invisible quite as for things you see, and indeed the soul does feel it. All souls, we can cay, feel it, but souls that are apt for love feel it especially. It is the same here as with bodily beauty. All perceive it. Not all are stung sharply by it. Only they whom we call lovers ever are..."
From The Essential Plotinus
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