April 23, 2013

Hymn to the Muses


"There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know." - Donald Rumsfeld The Wise.

Title: Hymn to the Muses. YouTube Video Description - [Channel: alchemistra. Published on April 24, 2011]:
Proclus Diadochus
(8 Feb. 412 - 17 Apr. 485)

What is not in us is not on the level of our knowledge; what is not on the level of our knowledge is unknowable by our faculty of knowledge; so then the transcendent Forms are unknowable by our faculty of knowledge. They may, then, be contemplated only by divine Nous. This is so for all Forms, but especially for those that are beyond the noeric gods; for neither sense-perception, nor cognition based on opinion, nor pure reason, nor noeric cognition of our type serves to connect the soul with those Forms, but only illumination from the noeric gods renders us capable of joining ourselves to those noetic-and-noeric Forms, as I recall someone saying under divine inspiration. The nature of those Forms is, then, unknowable to us, as being superior to our intellection and to the partial conceptions of our souls. And it is for this reason, indeed, that the Socrates of the Phaedrus, as we said before, compares the contemplation of them to mystic rites and initiations and visions, ...

Music: "Dionysus", Jocelyn Pook, from the Untold Things CD, 2001.