Based on the double nature of Soul, Anthony speaks of the unit soul as a double knower. He uses the terms "insight " (as used by PB) and "understanding" as synonyms for Plotinus' two kinds of knowing.
Anthony on the Double Knower
For Plotinus the unit soul or mind was a double knower. That is, it had self-cognition, undifferentiated being-consciousness, which included cognition of its source or origin. The lower knower or secondary phase that is the faculty of understanding and reasoning would evolve by its journey through the cosmic circuit which provided the circumstances, situations, and events that would educe its potential and make it actual through experience., 1984 0104 Astronoesis, p. 232
When there is that awareness that is knowing, and it knows its own Selfhood, then we say insight. . . . When we say that it is not aware of its own Selfhood but only knows the external--whether that external is the ideas or the rational processes or perception of the sensible world--then we say that it is the faculty of understanding or the reasoning faculty or the reasoning soul. . . . One faculty can be referred to as the higher knower and the other as the lower knower. (transcript, 6/29/83)
Insight gives you the actual recognition . . . the mystical perception . . . that the perceiver and what is perceived have for their substratum consciousness. But intuition is reasoning upon objects . . . understanding of the reason-principles. With these two faculties you could find within yourself those attributes which are reflections from the Intellectual-Principle. (, 7/6/83)
One is Self-knowing and the other is other-knowing. Knowing-knowing and knowing-the-other. . . . They are not meant as a hierarchy. It's better to think of them as two aspects of the soul (I AM). (, 7/6/83)
…When we speak about the double knower, [including the most exalted states of mystical philosophic insight] we're not dividing the knower: We're speaking about two different aspects of one and the same I AM. (12/7/83)
"Of course, in Plotinus there's an enormous treatment of the need to understand, for the Soul to understand that it has intrinsic self-cognition and that it also has the faculty of critically understanding its own activity, that is, understanding the world. For Plotinus, these two were required in order to call yourself a philosopher. You couldn't possibly separate them in his discourses." (audio below)
Knowing, Willing, Feeling- and Insight
Intuition, reasoning, understanding are being used in the same way by different authors as the faculty of the reasoning soul by which it understands, interacts with the World-Idea (which soul has manifested). At the most basic level, intuition is modalized as absolute Knowing, Willing, and Feeling. They all operate silently.
Feeling developed to the utmost (or willing or knowing) will become intuitive. It won’t then operate as we know it in the discursive intellect.
When you have a real intuition, knowing some idea, a real aesthetic perception or appreciation, it will be silent, calm. This is what Plotinus refers to as reasoning about the objects, or the reasoning faculty in the soul, which is an image of the Intellectual-Principle, having the ideas unrolled and separate. Intuition does not apply to Mind itself, but arises in the soul’s relation to the World-Idea. 7/20/83)
That phase of the soul which seeks embodiment… is the phase which must develop this understanding. This reembodying soul is a witness of experience, is the Overself as associated with the states and processes of manifestation. [Living Wisdom pl 259-260]
Now the combination of these two--the experience of one's center of being and the experience of one as just being--is what Plotinus referred to as the "We." (transcript, 2/15/84)
At the most basic level, intuition is modalized as absolute Knowing Willing and Feeling. They all operate silently. When you have a real intuition, knowing some idea, a real aesthetic perception or appreciation, it will be silent, calm. This is what Plotinus refers to as reasoning about the objects, or the reasoning faculty in the soul, which is an image of the intellectual principle, having the ideas unrolled and separate. 7/6/83
For the sage, there can be direct perception of the substratum reality as well as the operation of the understanding simultaneously, at any of the levels of ideation. In order to know anything about the contents of the World-Idea, or in order to articulate and formulate what insight delivers, the sage too will need to use understanding. So knowing, willing, and feeling are going to be needed as well as insight.
…Three levels of understanding the World-Idea are referred to as Intellection (intuition at its heights), reasoning, and sense. Correspondingly, the perceiving subject at these three levels is termed the spiritual subjectivity, psychical subjectivity, and bodily subjectivity. (7/6/83)
LR: Can this light of reason be contacted through other functions besides the thinking function?
AD: Yes. When we say a reason principle is objective to these functions, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a cognitive thing. For instance, think of your feeling function giving the reasons involved in a situation their proper weight or evaluation in terms of their felt value. Many people feel the value of a situation, and if they have a highly developed feeling function, they’re usually correct. They’ve made contact with the substratum reason principles, and given them the proper weight; they know they have to act according to the way revealed by that feeling function.
As a matter of fact, I would go a little further. To understand a reason principle only on a cognitive basis, and ignore the other aspects of willing and feeling, is not to really understand that object. LW 122
knowledge must be applied to the facts of experience and to the yet unresolved picture of the world. The mind must make its own that which it knows. Knowledge must be lived or it becomes a source of infection Astronoesis
It does require this very serious attentative reflection and affection for these things, so that if you have regard for what was said tonight, ``the unperceived Perceiver'' you won't sleep. But if you have no affection, no true concern, then you'll sleep very soundly. (laughter) And if I said that, for instance, you cannot have any objective relations with the unperceived Perceiver, you'd get up and you'd start drinking coffee on top of it! Because you don't WANT to go to sleep now. 1/18/84
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