Problems Concerning First Principles

and if it exists or does not, he himself is not the one who, having declared in his letters A reference to Plato's Seventh Letter, discussing the limitations of language and writing. that there is nothing indicative of the eidos form/essence among us. Not a trace, not a name, not a discourse, not an opinion, not knowledge; for the intellect nous mind/intellect alone would apply to the forms, which we, who love to engage in dialectic, do not yet possess. But even if we were to propose a cognition, it would be eidetic pertaining to forms, and we would not fit it to the unified and the being. And if we were to propose a cognitive process that is bundled together, it would still be, in relation to the One, unspun and incompatible. And if we were to consider even this as unified, having closed itself into the One itself, it would still only unfold up to the One, if there is any knowledge of the One at all. For this should await us, so that in every way it is ineffable and unknown, so that the One itself is also such. But nevertheless, even now, holding things in this way, we compare ourselves to the distinction of such great things through indications and surmises, and being purified, we are led up to unfamiliar concepts, both through analogies and through negations. We dishonor things among us in comparison to those things, and we are guided toward this, from the less honored things among us to the more honored; for we have spent our time doing these things even now. And perhaps we should posit that the One is in every way ineffable, in such a way that there is not even a "what" that is ineffable about it. The One, then, is such that it escapes every composition of discourse and name and every distinction, as of the known from the knower, conceived in the manner of a winnowing-fan Likely a corruption or metaphorical reference to separating chaff from grain; the original Greek word halones is obscure here., most simple and most comprehensive; and it is not only one, as the property of the one, but as all things are one and before all things it is one; yet it is not the One that is a certain thing among all.

For these pangs are not thus purified toward the simply One, and the one true principle of all things; but it is entirely because the One is surmised by us as one in this way, since it is more immediate and more akin to us, and almost falls short of that one in its totality, that it is more ready for such a surmise. But from the "some-thing,"