Title aside, I just want to type out some of the Plotinus' ideas in my own words, and with the use of discursive reasoning seek the multiplicity in unity.
The one thing that I really like about Plotinus is his use of relata and relations. He talks about how we can come to understand universals and particulars through a homogeneous unity. The individual is presented against this unity as an alterity, but an alterity that is only distinguishable through the possession of something denied to universal (I want to call this concept/Plotinus wants to call this Genera). What is this something that makes the particular stand out from the whole? I would guess it is the relationship between the subject and the object, the way in which the relata and relations make particulars and universals distinguishable only through the other. I can't have a concept of dog if I have only experienced one dog, but at the same time I can't understand dog without that first particular dog experience that is eventually supplemented by more dog experiences leading to a dog concept. There is a potential problem in this understanding of relata and relation based on a holistic view.
Things can only become individuals by means of how they relate to other things, but how could there be any objective relation at all? Maybe Plotinus would posit the One as the solution, but then that would make this issue an ontological one. Perhaps it is an epistemological issue. We can only grasp what things are through relations and through our subjective experience. This epistemological issue seems to have a strong footing in phenomenology, especially that of Merleau Ponty, in the sense that our knowledge or conception of the truth is limited to our ability to grasp the truth at a given time. This ability to grasp the truth is perhaps synonymous to our ability to grasp the One, but taking into account individual differences among people, different capacities would deny any Absolute, One, or graspable Totality. Where phenomenology went "wrong", in breaking things down to their essential structures and examining things in the "lived world", the Phenomenologist doesn't take into account Plotinus' ideal world and the sensible world as a unity and they are thus estranged. If the ideals are just useless simulacra symbolizing objects in the world, then the phenomenologist did not go wrong at all, they just took the good part (sensible world) and did away with the ideals. Perhaps Plotinus' whole system is, to quote Paul Elmer More, "a meaningless answer to an impossible question raised by a gratuitous hypothesis." But at the same time, a big part of me loves everything he says and can truly see how things become individuated through relations. The problem might be an ontological one instead of epistemological, or both problems are irrelevant and there is no raison d'etre (I've never studied French but it makes it sound more philosophical) of objective relation.
I was thinking that the diagram of the one, intellect, soul could be easily appropriated to the centralized power of Disney World and the layout of the maps, if we conceive of both as a sort of brain.
Somewhat random aside--Adventureland is Frontierland are located on the left side (masculinity) and Fantasyland and Tomorrowland are located on the right (femininity). What this has to do with Plotinus, I haven't figured it out, but you can force anything if you use enough discursive reasoning.
This is clever.
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