A Note on Numbers (from Twitter)

@cole_tucker: I need to stop letting my mind go all handwavy when discussions about abstract numerals like dyad, hexad etc come up.

@EPButler: It can be hard. The key is recognizing there are original, grounding determinations for numbers. Not all twos are equivalent. I struggled for a long time trying to understand why the intellective order had a heptadic structure. I mean, triads are pretty easy to grasp in their fundamentality, but a number like seven starts to seem as though it must belong to a specific ontology, and not to the system in its elemental sense. And of course modern commentators just treat it all as arbitrary.

But then I realized from reading Proclus closely, that the heptad was the triad with all the relations grounded. So: a triad, with each member doubled because it is discrete, and then a seventh monad for the reciprocal relation of all. This is indeed a speculative expression of the nature of intellective multiplicity as such.

This confirms, by the way, that the intelligible triad is not yet unpacked; it is still really three moments of a unit. There is no "real" triad until the heptad.
(The enneadic development of the triad in the three noetic triads is, of course, only really complete "after" the noeric.)