#and plato's republic the classic of greek philosophical thought

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

you might have been asked this question before but ive been curious for a while about what would have happened when gertrude was there when jon originally gave his statement? would anything change ?

Honestly she probably would have killed him.

Like, it feels mean to say? It would have been more out of mercy than anything.

If Jon had come to her with only a Leitner, she would have taken care of the Leitner and sent him home. She doesn't normally intervene on behalf of the Statement givers, but they also aren't usually eight, and it isn't unheard of for Gertrude to intervene for the random unlucky souls who cross her path. She intervened on behalf of Jack Barnabas, and she told the monster pig dude how to handle his problem. It's selective when she intervenes, but I think if it's just a little boy scared by a book, she would help.

The thing about Gertrude is that I don’t I think she is or ever has been heartless; I just think she’s brutally practical.

One of the most interesting tidbits about her is that she looked for Eric Delano for months after he went missing, but wasn’t close enough to know that he had quit ages before he actually died. She avenged Sarah’s death by seeking out someone she had never, ever let herself meet before that moment, but she did this right after sacrificing Michael without hesitation. She seemed genuinely fond of Gerry, but she still bound him to a book.

I think that, at the end of the day, it wouldn’t be that she wouldn’t want to save Jon. It would just be that she would realize that she couldn’t.

If he had just arrived with a Guest for Mr. Spider, I think Jon would have walked away remembering her fondly as the brusk but ultimately nice old lady who had her assistant make him a cup of tea and taught him how to burn a Leitner. But he didn’t just come because of A Guest for Mr. Spider. He came because of Tommy Bradstaff.

Gertrude’s shown to be more wary of the Web than pretty much any other entity. She got tricked by them way back when she defeated her first ritual, and I don’t think she forgets. I also don’t think she would have thought it was ever a good idea to voluntarily set herself in a competition with the Mother of Puppets. Jon's eight and scared and she'd want to help him, but she also would have immediately recognized that saving him comes with a very high price tag and a very low chance of success.

I do think Gertrude would have at least tried to think of a way to save him. I just think she would have ultimately come to the conclusion that there wasn’t one.

And it’s just practicality, right? That’s the big difference between her and Jon in nhthcth. It doesn’t matter how badly she wishes she could help; she’ll accept when she can’t. But when she can, she usually racks up a very big win. Jon will wildly intervene without even considering his chances. Like, there's a reason why the Eye led him to Danny Stoker that night--it's not conscious the way humans are or the spiders are, but even pavlov's dogs learned association, and the Eye seems to be capable of that kind of low-level consciousness. When Jon finds Eric Delano's statement in canon, it's because he listened to the tapes the Eye didn't want him to hear. That implies the Eye is at least partially able to make connections based on its own impulses and desires.

Jon's its special little boy who has been resolutely fucking starving himself for almost two decades. He went and joined the eldritch version of AA with Daisy in an attempt not to feed the Eye other than when absolutely strictly necessary, and the Eye's never been happy with his starvation diet. But the one sure-fire way to get Jon to forget his sense and start ripping statements out of avatars is to shove some poor schmuck being eaten in his line of sight.

It’s pretty directly stated in nhthcth that danny isn’t the first victim of another entity he’s tried to snatch, even if he’s never gotten as involved with a pair of victims as the stoker brothers. And honestly—he almost didn’t get super involved with them either. Like, when he was trying to duck out after the initial fight at the theatre, long term involvement would have only made it worse for them. Most of the time, the absolute best chances come from "hope that they've forgotten you existed and won't come back for round two. if that fails maybe just hop continents and it will be too inconvenient for them to track you down again. buy guns." There's a pretty high mortality rate with people who hang around him, and he's not exactly expecting these random male model brothers to manage this world long-term.

If Jon’s hadn’t straight up passed out, he would have called Daisy to come pick him up and bitched to her about fucked up clowns being a problem now. He’d feel vaguely mad at himself when nikola skinned both Danny and Tim, because it’d be just another case of him trying to help and just increasing the body count, which is what happens most of the time.

I think Mike described him like someone who kept putting half dead birds in boxes and feeling disappointed when he opened the lid and saw they’d croaked. It's not unheard of for the people he helps to make it, but it's also not exactly often either. And that’s not even really to say he’s any less powerful or capable than gertrude was—honestly, between him and Daisy? They’re sort of a powerhouse duo. Like, people are afraid of hunters. At one point Dekker says that he was going up against something that would require a hunter to kill, and that while he knew a few, he would never actually risk consulting one. Amateur lobotomy it is. And Daisy is the sort of hunter that can kill other hunters. Jon’s this absolute muppet of a human being rolling up to soul-rending horror like “this is Daisy :) she is my best friend :)” and then they turn around and the Avatar of Fucking Them Up is standing there breathing too heavy and blatantly fucking insane. It’s like if kermit the frog kept bringing the fucking terminator to social events.

And Jon isn’t exactly a slouch either. Like, he’s keeping himself as weak as he can, and he’s still strolling into other entities' domains, feeding on them, and just... walking away again. These are people who are extremely used to being the human equivalent of a great white shark, more powerful and deadly than anyone else in any room they're in, but they've got this extremely distressed looking twink curb stomping them when he has reached the absolute breaking point of his Victorian Fatigue. this man keeps coming into their homes and one-shotting them after weakening himself to the point of being on death's door. jon on his own makes other avatars twitchy, but the Jon and Daisy Buddy Cop is honestly kind of one that the other avatars are somewhat actively afraid of.

Like, they'll dunk on Jon (where daisy can't see), because he's jon and he's ridiculous and pathetic at all times, but people are secretly pretty careful to toe the line of shit jon will put up with. Mike will be smarmy with Jon because he knows Jon will let him get away with it, but he also knows that if he fucks around too hard jon will put him through a psychic paper shredder and daisy will bury his corpse in the woods. It's not a secret that Daisy and Jon are strolling around feeding on and blatantly fucking murdering things like them, but none of these self-serving assholes have managed to handle a pretty active threat to their longevity. that's more because they can't than because they won't.

And still, Gertrude is pretty universally regarded as a force of nature, but Jon's still getting told that a seven percent success rate is a bit generous.

Gertrude is Gertrude Robinson, and she's the baddest bitch around, and that has a huge bit to do with her success rate. But it would be a mistake to say that the number of battles she picked didn't have something to do with why she's more successful. Like--Gertrude's going for quantity over sentiment. She'll save the world, but the individual people in it? Those aren't the fights she has ever prioritized, at the end of the day.

Almost all of the statements Jon in canon recorded were from her tenure, and Jon's follow ups usually concluded with "and then they horribly died." Gertrude was casually eating a fucking sandwich in her office and watching while Jane Prentiss decided that she couldn't be saved and went off to cram her forearm in a spooky wasp nest. She didn't help Jane. She didn't explain what was happening. She didn't try to intervene. She ate her sandwich, and she let Jane leave, and I think that at least in part she would have agreed with Jane's assessment. There wasn't any saving her, and that's a judgment that always precludes Gertrude's help.

Gertrude wins as often as she does because she picks her battles carefully. She delivers maximum damage to maximum effect, and she doesn't spin her wheels on things she knows are a waste of resources. She came right on the heels of an archivist who died because he burned through his resources and his luck, and her tenure has been marked by her being smart enough to be cautious.

I think Jon would have given her his statement. I think she would have been nice to him. I think she would have allowed herself to feel sorry for him, and sorry that he was so young, and sorry that it was too late.

I think that she would have considered what the web could have planned for him, and she would have considered how painful a fate was waiting for him if he met the End the Spider probably had planned for him. And I think she would have decided it would be crueler to let him meet it.

Gertrude in nhthcth specifically has always had a weird, twisted mercy when it came to Jon. She never manipulated him, is the thing. Elias made sure that what he did to Jon had long past the point of no return by the time Gertrude ever caught wind of his existence. As far as she was ever concerned, Jon was beyond saving from the day they met, which meant there was no point in trying. She was never going to offer him the mercy of trying to help him.

But she could have played him and she didn't. And I think that's about the most merciful action that Gertrude Robinson would have been capable of.

She knows about Agnes, okay? better than anyone. she's been bodily hauling the world as they know it through a decade of apocalypse attempts. She took one look at Jon and realized that elias had made him to wear the watcher's crown, but also that she couldn't kill him without completely alienating her resources to stop much sooner apocalypses.

But she sort of knew from the day they met that she may have to one day kill him, if only to stop him from wearing the crown. It wasn't set in stone, but it was a very significant possibility.

In chapter 24, Jon reached out to gertrude for absolutely any comfort possible, and she actually could have given it to him. She could have strung him along with false hope, or just given him a shoulder to cry on. Someone other than elias to love.

And she would have done that knowing that she was actively planning how to kill him when the time came. And she's definitely not above that kind of manipulation. Jon's extremely vulnerable when he comes to her, and he already thinks of her as a source of hope. Stringing him along and being his only source of comfort and support would give her an enormous advantage over him that she normally wouldn't ignore. But if he did die by her hands one day, as she knows he probably will, he'd finally go to his end after a very painful life being murdered by the only person that he thought loved him after he lost Gerry. Gertrude sort of uncharacteristically gave up that advantage to spare him from that final betrayal. She'd never sacrifice the world for him, she could have loved him like her own son and she would still kill him without hesitation, and she won't lie to herself about that fact either. It's a weird, twisted act of mercy to have it be turning the cold shoulder to a little boy begging for help, but in her mind, it was the most merciful option open to her.

And I kind of like the idea of Jonathan Sims in nhthcth always demanding the most painful acts of mercy of Gertrude that she's ever contemplated. Because the thing is, if she had been the one to take his Statement that day, she's almost definitely would have decided that Jon couldn't be saved. Not when the thing after him was the Web. And once she decides that, she has two options: let him meet the End waiting outside of those doors, or handle it herself.

And the thing is, her MO is to go for the former. It's not like she's mercy killing everyone who shows up and tells her of the fate worse than death that's most likely to befall them--hell, to take the risk of mercy killing is borderline out of character to her. If it were anyone else, she wouldn't have done it.

But Jon was eight. He was begging her for help that she couldn't give. And the Web has never been merciful. Either it was lying about wanting him for itself and he was going to be killed in the most slow, horrifying way possible, or it wasn't and he wasn't even going to get the mercy of death. Like, if a horrible, tragic fate is inevitable for him, Gertrude has to at least contemplate if there's an option that's more merciful than the rest.

Even giving him a less painful death is dangerous for Gertrude, but I think that's more of a price she'd be willing to contemplate. Like, killing another entity's victim is another way of snatching a meal from them. She had to at least entertain the risk that the Web would have some kind of retribution for it. But she would also entertain the fact that Jon's only sitting in the Archives because the Web let him get that far, that it wanted him to give its Statement to her, and ultimately decide that the risk is one she's willing to shoulder.

I think she would have made sure it didn't hurt. I think she would have made it quick, and made sure he didn't know it was happening. but I don't think she would have ever saved Jon the way he wanted to be saved.

If I’m being extremely generous (and self indulgent) and trying to come up with a world where she would go on a crusade to save him, and probably assuming some kind of off screen character arc that’s completely made her change her entire approach to life, I think she’d bring him to Agnes Montague.

If Jon could ever have a chance way back when he was eight, I think it would have been Agnes. Agnes is the direct opposite of the Web. She's the demigod messiah of the entity of Fucking Up All Your Life Plans. In canon, she's the one that Gertrude went to when she did need to go after the Web. If she had decided to try for him and needed to come up with an option to save him, she'd go to Agnes.

That being said, getting to that decision is just still really unlikely. For all of the above reasons and because of the difficulties Agnes poses. Even if they're in like, lesbian soul love, they've never met in person, and she doesn't really know if Agnes will help. It may attract the Lightless Flame's attention, and Jon may just end up burnt to death instead of filled with spiders. A lot of ways it could go wrong and give Jon a worse fate. It's the sort of Hail Mary play Gertrude never really did.

That line is in the summary because I thought it said everything about what the reader needed to know for Jon in nhthcth. (Also, I just thought it sounded nice.)

Jon in nhthcth is sort of defined by the fact that he has never gotten past who he was in the moment that James Wright locked him in Gertrude's office. It's one of the two cornerstones of everything he became.

The other cornerstone, of course, is Gerry.

Jon has spent his entire life trying to figure out a way that he could have been anything but what he is. It's been a decade and change, but he's never, ever been able to let go of what happened to him. And that feels at least a little off.

Maybe it's the idea that time heals all wounds, maybe it's the idea that Stockholm Syndrome should have kicked in eventually, maybe it's the evil god eating parts of his personality, maybe it's the idea that it's probably exhausting to eternally be struggling against a fate that you met when you were fucking eight. Even if he never becomes okay with what happened to him, he probably should have at least accepted it and moved on to some measure. Like, this has been his reality for almost his entire life. No matter how terrible it was, people usually adapt and acclimate to what happens to him.

One of the core traits of Jon in nhthcth was always supposed to be that Jon just didn't for some reason.

Like, Jon has not even passed the threshold of accepting what happened to him. It's all these years later, and he's desperately replaying what happened and trying to come up with the version that has him going home at the end. Even if you don't accept your current situation, you probably should have stopped trying to figure out what you could have done differently when you were eight, no matter how terrible what happened is.

At the end of the day, even with all he knows, Jon just has never understood why he couldn't have been saved.

He knows there's no Light Side at the end of the day. This isn't some big battle of Good Against Evil--it's just a series of Bad inconveniencing Other Bad because what Other Bad wants is not in the interest of what Bad wants. There's no ancient secret order battling the dark--there's just a lot of people stopping each other from ending the world because they want to be the ones to do it, and also like, Gertrude Robinson and her good-time buddy That One Random Priest. If you're looking for someone to save you in the TMA world, there just isn't really anyone.

And that's part of why Jon goes in after Danny Stoker. It's part of why he keeps undertaking the world's most half-assed rescue attempts. Trying to save Danny when his entire life has indicated that's impossible and probably going to make things worse is a deeply irrational thing to do. He probably should have learned when to walk away by now.

But a part of him is still eight, and a part of him has spent his entire life going over the worst thing that ever happened to him and trying to figure out the way to make it different.

It takes a specific sort of person to keep undertaking herculean efforts in a desperate, wild attempt to save people that he knows are as good as dead. And I think that sort of person once was someone who was as good as dead. He saves Danny Stoker because a part of him is still desperately trying to find the person who could have done the same for him.

In the end, he became the thing he once needed most in the world, which was a chance. I don't think he's realized that fact. And I don't know if he'd find it comforting if he did.

The other thing about that sentence is that it's completely and utterly pointless.

Like. It's been eighteen fucking years. At a certain point, you have to decide it doesn't matter anymore, and clinging to the question of whether someone could have saved you just doesn't help anything. But one of the other core traits of Jon in nhthcth was that he was someone who just simply did not care if what he was doing was practical or had any chances of succeeding.

He's designed to be so stubborn in it that it's almost ridiculous, and more than a little comical but it's honestly borderline sad to me. Here Jon is, making it his life's fucking mission to hold the title of World's Shittiest Employee. He is going to make his hostage situation inconvenient for everyone. He's not doing fucking paperwork; he's only here because elias kidnapped him. He can't get away, but he's going to be the absolute most unmanageable nightmare alive.

It does absolutely nothing to help him.

He doesn't think anyone in the Institute is ever going to help him. He doesn't think he's going to force Elias's hand into letting him go by racking up the most HR complaints in Institute history. It doesn't actually help him in any way to do the vast majority of what he does--it actively hurts him, actually. There's no one in the Institute who wants to help him, because they see him as a nuisance. When he causes Elias too much trouble, Elias punishes him for it. It'd be better from a consequentialist perspective to have settled into some kind of facade of normalcy, but he hasn't. Because playing along, going along with the facade as an Institute employee--he'd have to at least implicitly admit that what happened to him isn't relevant anymore. Sure, Elias kidnapped him and fed him to an ancient, primordial hunger from the dawn of civilization, but by god, he has his monthly staff meeting to get to, and that's too important to make a fuss about the first thing.

It's kind of sad, because while the Institute didn't know the entire picture, nineteen-year old Martin almost immediately said "wow, that blatantly unstable child sure does act like he's being severely abused." Elias had to feed him a story about an entirely different abuser to dodge the world's most needed CPS visit, and Martin still almost turned around and reported Elias literally the same afternoon. Yeah, Elias had a story for the institute to explain jon's Everything, but they really didn't have to buy it.

Like, willful ignorance absolutely played a role in it. Part of it was Elias was their boss and nobody wanted to be the one to accuse him of child abuse. It was easier to accept his lies at face value and not stick their neck out for him. Part of it was just that Jon's never been a very likable victim for them. He wasn't some tearful damsel they could swoop in and save--he smoked too much and was angry and loud about it. And once they made that initial decision to ignore their misgivings, the chances of anyone breaking that pattern got extremely low. No one wants to admit to themselves that they ignored a little kid in an extremely abusive household just because his abuser was their boss and they didn't like the kid all that much. Martin kind of hit Jon like a grenade when he first joined up and actually gave a shit if he was okay.

Of course, this all means that Jon's spent the past decade or so being told by everyone who could see him hurting that his upset at the soul-crushing pain he was in was inconvenient to them and it's rude of him to be so loud about it, could he do that somewhere else, because it really doesn't matter. and he's still there saying "it does matter. it matters to me."

Just--doing pointless things because if he doesn't then they stop mattering and they have to matter somehow defines so much of what he does.

When he was a little boy, Gerry told him that the clothes you wore were meant to be things that make you feel like you, that were who you were or wanted to be, and Jon decided that the parts of him that he loved were made up of other people. It's been fourteen years since he told him that, and out of all the people he's tried to make himself with, Daisy is the only one he still has in his life. He wears the secondhand clothes of people who he lost without anyone else caring to preserve a self that people are actively trying to kill. The fact that he feels more like him when he wears Gerry's coat only matters to the extent that he lets it. He makes pointless interventions on behalf of people he knows he probably can't save, because if he doesn't, then he fact that they needed help to begin with didn't matter. It only mattered whether they could have been saved; needing to be saved doesn't factor in.

I basically wanted him to be the opposite of Basira. Basira was the world's most polite hostage in Season 3. Martin had to actually ask her if she was aware she was in a hostage situation. Her entire thing was that there was no point in getting upset at something you couldn't change--you either got on as best you could or you found a way to change it anyway. That's the exact opposite to nhthcth Jon's approach to life--the Web even pokes fun at him for it in chapter 9. A spider's prey thrashes itself to death trying to get out of its web. Jon's just--flailing like a fly struggling against a web. Gertrude always conserved her resources and energy for where it would matter most, but he exhausts himself on things he knows wouldn't succeed. It doesn't make any practical sense, but there's something viscerally human about it still.

And the last thing that sentence tells you about Jon is that he is someone who has to believe in the lightning strike.

The thing is? Jon knows about pretty much everything this post discussed. No one really knew Gertrude, but if there was someone who did, it was him. He's been hanging around her since he was a little kid. It's been stated that she personally tried to teach him to some degree, though, and we've seen that she's stated to his face that she would not have tried to save him if she had been the one to take his statement. She never really represented a chance at things having gone differently to begin with.

But he still thinks of her specifically when he tries to find the version of himself that isn't this. Because even if she was never really a chance, she was still the biggest chance he had.

Jon was eight. He knew jack all when this started, and he was going up against the most dangerous entity there was. He was never going to come up with a place to go to that wasn't the Magnus Institute, and he was never going to outsmart the Web on his own. Gertrude Robinson was the only one who he ever had a snowball's chance of crossing paths with who wasn't like, actively evil.

There's basically nil chance of her having had some kind of midlife crisis right before he showed up and deciding that this is the one she must save and damn the consequences. There's an even smaller chance of her actually pulling it off and saving him from the Web. But that was the biggest chance he had, and he can't help but cling to it.

Sometimes, you have to beat the odds. Sometimes, lightning strikes.

If you believe in the idea of the multiverse, and that everything that can happen will happen, there is a Jon out there in some far-off universe who walked into the Magnus Institute and met Gertrude Robinson instead of James Wright. There is a Gertrude Robinson who, against all odds, decided that Jon was worth the costs of saving him, who fought tooth and nail to save him and won. It's a fairytale he tells himself, but the idea of someone kind enough to put him in a car so they could drive all about, go on adventures, and find places with rain was also a fairytale he once heard, and it still happened. Gerry was his lightning strike.

And that's really the crux of it. In order for Jon to have loved Gerry the way he did, he had to be someone who would bank everything on odds that were a lot smaller than being struck by lightning. Jon needs to be the type of person who will believe in chances that barely exist, because if he doesn't, he could have never made he decisions he had to make to stay by Gerry's side.

Gerry Keay was not Gertrude Robinson, and he definitely was not anywhere near her caliber when he was the little boy who tried to take Jon and run. They live in a world that tears into your soul, that Marks you in a way that cannot be removed and that never, ever lets you go. It's monsters eating other monsters, and they were both very small and very damned from the get-out. The chances of Jon Sims and Gerry Keay saving each other were always so much smaller than the chances of Gertrude Robinson saving him, and he knew it. If he couldn't believe that there was at least a chance that Gertrude would have saved him, then he couldn't believe that he and Gerry ever had a chance of finding their way home.

We still don't know where Gerry is in 2013, why he isn't there, but we know that Daisy saw him with Jon in 2011, kicking each other under the table for making ill-timed jokes to a monster who wanted to kill them. They first ran in 1999. That's twelve years of betting everything on odds south of a lightning strike. It takes specific kinds of people to do that. It takes people who will take the worst odds possible because they're the only ones they have.

There's no power of love or friendship or hope in that universe, but I think Jon and Gerry wanted to believe that they could love each other to the point of survival. They were looking at a world where, in the whole span of human history, love had not made a lick of difference to the things they faced, and they were asking to be the exception. Wondering if Gertrude Robinson would have saved him... it's hardly the most improbable thing Jon's ever let himself believe.

#nhthcth #tma #the magnus archives #jon sims #gertrude robinson #gerry keay #the continuing adventures of me answering asks after my adhd meds have worn off #babygirl i will answer questions no one even asked #me answering asks when unmedicated is just me reaching the end and realizing i went off on every tangent known to man #i will forge bold new paths into terrains no one ever fucking asked about #i already typed it it's too late now here have my info dump #i want you all to know that there's a half answered ask in my drafts and i found a way to have tangents about death note the iconic anime #and plato's republic the classic of greek philosophical thought #did the ask have absolutely anything to do with either of those things #no #i'm like this in real life too you could not plot a conversation with me on a map

[yvain]

Philip Sidney wrote a Defence of Poesie in 1595. Percy Shelley wrote a Defence of Poetry in 1821. Why, we might ask, does literature have to defend itself?

In part, it's Plato's fault. His famous exiling of poets from a well-ordered republic, on the grounds that they offered doxa, or opinion, rather than logos, or reason/discourse, instantiated an unhappy split between what we now call art and what we now call science. For Plato, the classic Greek poets—Homer and the tragic dramatists—whose work had formed the basis of a Greek education (paideia) depicted in their work all manner of deleterious behavior: murder, incest, cruelty, cowardice, treachery, strong passions out of control. Poetry thus weakened moral character and potentially influenced both actor/performer and audience. Since poetry in this period meant oral poetry, whether epic or dramatic—not the reading and study of written texts—the possibility of such emotional effects, rather than a rational assessment and distance, was, he thought, strong. If a schoolchild memorized Homer on the wrath of Achilles, what he learned was wrath, not poetry.

From the perspective of a modern educational system, where poetry is far less central than it was to the ancient Greeks, Plato's insistence on the dangers of poetry and poets may seem either quaint or excessive. But that is because we have so diminished the importance of literature (and music and art) over the years.

Both in Republic, where he describes what he regards as an ideal education for guardians and citizens of Athens, and elsewhere in his dialogues, Plato emphasizes the role of poetry and music on the one hand, and physical training on the other, as the key elements for training the soul and the body. In his own academy, Plato taught a different kind of learning, one based upon dialectics and philosophical reasoning, with the claim that literature should serve a moral and social function and should teach cultural elements like goodness, grace, reason, and respect for law.

This instrumental view of literature (Plato's poetry includes epic, tragedy, and other modes of imaginative writing), which demands that it do some good in the world, is, I will argue, part of the difficulty that literary study has wrestled with from its beginnings to the present. What is often called "the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry," the idea (voiced from the side of philosophy since Plato) that literature needs to make us better people, is now partnered with and augmented by a more modern set of questions about why we should read and study literature in a world increasingly global, economic, technological, and visual. Are the blandishments of the rhapsodes and interpreters and sophists, the orators, still dangerous? Still seductive? Does literature threaten society, or does it help to build society's values and institutions? Or are these the wrong questions and the wrong justifications for literature and its readers?

Marjorie Garber, The Use and Abuse of Literature

#literature #fiction #marjorie garber #plato #readings #*

[history-of-europe]

Introduction into the Philosophy of Ancient Greece

Ever wondered how the intellectual currents of Ancient Greece, spanning from the 8th century BC to the 5th century AD, have left an enduring imprint on our understanding of the world? The cultural blossoming of Ancient Greece and Rome during this era left an indelible mark on Europe, North Africa, and West Asia, with classical philosophy emerging as a guiding force in Western intellectual thought.

At the heart of Western philosophy lies the foundational work of visionaries like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Their monumental contributions to metaphysics, ethics, politics, and epistemology laid the groundwork for a profound exploration of knowledge. These foundational ideas not only defined the philosophical discourse of their time but also laid the groundwork for the development of Western thought in subsequent centuries.

Socrates, often regarded as the trailblazer, engaged in philosophical dialogues that challenged conventional wisdom. His famous assertion, "the unexamined life is not worth living," encapsulates the essence of his philosophical mission. Building on Socratic foundations, Plato expanded and systematized these ideas in "The Republic," where he delved into the nature of justice, the role of individuals, and the structure of an ideal society.

Aristotle, a student of Plato, further enriched Greek philosophy with his extensive contributions to metaphysics and ethics. In "Nicomachean Ethics," Aristotle explored the nature of virtue and the pursuit of the good life, emphasizing the crucial role of moderation. These philosophical insights provided a comprehensive framework that not only shaped the intellectual discourse of their time but also influenced subsequent generations.

Beyond the well-known triumvirate, exploring the lesser-known philosophers adds layers of richness to the philosophical discourse of Ancient Greece. Thales of Miletus, often considered the first Western philosopher, introduced a revolutionary idea—that natural phenomena could be explained without resorting to divine intervention. This departure from mythological explanations paved the way for a more rational understanding of the natural world.

Pythagoras, renowned for the Pythagorean theorem, seamlessly integrated mathematics with philosophy, highlighting the interconnectedness of different fields of knowledge. His emphasis on the harmony of the cosmos not only influenced mathematical thought but also contributed to a holistic understanding of the universe.

Heraclitus, with his doctrine of change and the concept of "logos," challenged the prevailing notion of a static world. His emphasis on perpetual change and the interconnectedness of opposites fostered a dynamic worldview that resonates with modern ideas of complexity and evolution.

Democritus, often hailed as the "father of modern science," put forth the revolutionary atomic theory, suggesting that all matter is composed of indivisible particles called atoms. This early atomic theory laid the groundwork for future scientific inquiries into the nature of matter, demonstrating the interdisciplinary nature of Greek philosophical thought.

Some of the greatest works produced during this period include Plato's dialogues, such as "The Symposium" and "Phaedo," which cover a wide array of topics, providing profound insights into ethics, politics, metaphysics, and epistemology. Aristotle's "Metaphysics" also stands as a profound contribution, shaping our understanding of reality and existence.

Distinctive philosophical schools, each with its unique characteristics and areas of focus, emerged during this period. Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism represented diverse approaches to philosophical inquiry. The Academy, founded by Plato, and the Lyceum, established by Aristotle, were influential centers of learning that emphasized knowledge and empirical observation.

The philosophy of Ancient Greece emphasized the pivotal role of reason and rational inquiry in understanding the world, contributing to the richness and diversity of Greek philosophical thought. This emphasis on critical thinking and logical analysis spanned a wide variety of subjects, providing a comprehensive understanding of the human experience.

This influence extended beyond the classical period, leaving an indelible mark on subsequent civilizations, including the Roman Empire and the Renaissance. The principles of justice, virtue, and governance articulated by Greek philosophers became foundational elements in the development of Western political thought.

The legacy of ancient Greek philosophy is not confined to the annals of history but continues to resonate in modern thought. The transition from mythological beliefs to rational inquiry, initiated by Greek philosophers, marked a pivotal moment in human intellectual evolution. This transition emphasized logic and reason as the primary means of understanding the world, laying the groundwork for the scientific method and shaping our contemporary approach to knowledge and understanding.

While the well-known figures of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle dominate the narrative, it's crucial to recognize the significant contributions of lesser-known philosophers like Thales, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Democritus. These diverse perspectives enriched the philosophical discourse of the time, highlighting the multifaceted nature of Greek philosophy.

Moreover, the dynamic interaction between philosophy and other fields, such as science, art, and politics, underscores the interdisciplinary nature of Greek philosophical thought. The philosophical schools, each with its distinctive principles, reflect the nuanced and evolving intellectual environment of Ancient Greece.

In exploring the legacy of Greek philosophy, it becomes evident that its impact extends far beyond the borders of classical antiquity. The ideas introduced by ancient Greek philosophers continue to shape our understanding of morality, reality, and knowledge in the modern world. The intellectual landscape they cultivated serves as a testament to the timeless pursuit of wisdom and the enduring quest for a deeper understanding of our existence.

#greece #classical antiquity #philosophy #ancient greece

[skonnaris]

Famous historical figures

A list of famous people throughout history. These famous historical figures are chosen from a range of different cultures and countries. They include famous spiritual figures, politicians and writers who have helped to shape human history.

BCE

Sri Ramachandra (c. 5114 BCE) Rama was a model king of Ayodhya who lived according to the dharma. He went to Sri Lanka to fight Ravana who had captured his wife, Sita. Rama is considered an incarnation of Vishnu in Hindu mythology.

Sri Krishna (c. BCE) – Spiritual Teacher of Hinduism. Sri Krishna gave many discourses to his disciple Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. These discourses were written down in the Bhagavad Gita.

Ramses II (1303 BCE – 1213 BCE) – Ramses or Ramesses was the third Egyptian Pharaoh, ruling between 1279 BC – 1213 BC. Ramses the Great consolidated Egyptian power, through military conquest and extensive building.

Homer (8th Century BC) Homer is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Two classics of Greek literature. His writings form a significant influence on Western literature.

Cyrus the Great (600 – 530 BC) was the founder of the Persian (Achaemenid) Empire. Cyrus conquered the empires of Media, Lydia and Babylonia, creating the first multi-ethnic state which at its peak accounted for around 40% of the global population.

Lord Buddha (c 563 – 483 BC) Spiritual Teacher and founder of Buddhism. Siddhartha was born a prince in northern India. He gave up the comforts of the palace to seek enlightenment. After attaining Nirvana, he spent the remainder of his years teaching.

Confucius (551 – 479 BC) – Chinese politician, statesman, teacher and philosopher. His writings on justice, life and society became the prevailing teachings of the Chinese state and developed into Confucianism.

Socrates (469 BC–399 BC) – Greek philosopher. Socrates developed the ‘Socratic’ method of self-enquiry. He had a significant influence on his disciples, such as Plato and contributed to the development of Western philosophy and political thought.

Plato (424 – 348 BC) – Greek philosopher. A student of Socrates, Plato founded the Academy in Athens – one of the earliest seats of learning. His writings, such as ‘The Republic’ form a basis of early Western philosophy. He also wrote on religion, politics and mathematics.

Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) – Greek philosopher and teacher of Alexander the Great. Aristotle was a student of Plato, but he branched out into empirical research into the physical sciences. His philosophy of metaphysics had an important influence on Western thought.

Alexander the Great (356 – 323 BC) – King of Macedonia. He established an Empire stretching from Greece to the Himalayas. He was a supreme military commander and helped diffuse Greek culture throughout Asia and northern Africa.

Archimedes (287 B.C – 212) Mathematician, scientist and inventor. Archimedes made many contributions to mathematics. He explained many scientific principles, such as levers and invented several contraptions, such as the Archimedes screw.

Ashoka (c 269 BCE to 232 BCE) – One of the greatest Indian rulers. Ashoka the Great ruled from 269 BC to 232 BC he embraced Buddhism after a bloody battle and became known for his philanthropism, and adherence to the principles of non-violence, love, truth and tolerance.

Julius Caesar (100 – 44 BC) As military commander, Caesar conquered Gaul and England extending the Roman Empire to its furthest limits. Used his military strength to become Emperor (dictator) of Rome from 49 BC, until his assassination in 44BC.

Augustus Caesar  (63 BC-AD 14) – First Emperor of Rome. Caesar (born Octavian) was one the most influential leaders in world history, setting the tone for the Roman Empire and left a profound legacy on Western civilisation.

Cleopatra (69 -30 BC) The last Ptolemaic ruler of Egypt. Cleopatra sought to defend Egypt from the expanding Roman Empire. In doing so, she formed relationships with two of Rome’s most powerful leaders Marc Anthony and Julius Caesar.

AD

Jesus of Nazareth (c.5BC – 30AD), Jesus of Nazareth, was a spiritual teacher, and the central figure of Christianity. By Christians, he is considered to be the Messiah predicted in the Old Testament.

St Paul (5 – AD 67) – Christian missionary. St Paul was Jewish and a Roman citizen who converted to Christianity. His writings and teachings did much to define and help the spread of Christianity.

Marcus Aurelius (121 – 180) – Roman Emperor and philosopher. He is considered the last of the five good Emperors. His Meditations are a classic account of Stoic philosophy.

Emperor Constantine (272 – 337) First Roman Emperor to embrace Christianity. He called the First Council of Nicaea in 325 which clarified the Nicene Creed of Christianity.

Muhammad (570 – 632) Prophet of Islam. Muhammad received revelations which form the verses of the Qur’an. His new religion unified Arabia under the new Muslim religion.

Attila the Hun (5th Century) Ruler of the Huns who swept across Europe in the Fifth Century. He attacked provinces within the Roman Empire and was Rome’s most feared opponent.

Charlemagne (742 – 814) – King of Franks and Emperor of the Romans. Charlemagne unified Western Europe for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire. He provided protection for the Pope in Rome.

Genghis Kahn (1162 – 1227) – Leader of the Mongol Empire stretching from China to Europe. Genghis Khan was a fierce nomadic warrior who united the Mongol tribes before conquering Asia and Europe.

Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204) – The first Queen of France. Eleanor influenced the politics of western Europe through her alliances and her sons Richard and John – who became Kings of England.

Saladin (1138 – 1193) – Leader of the Arabs during the Crusades. He unified Muslim provinces and provided effective military opposition to the Christian crusades.

Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274) Influential Roman Catholic priest, philosopher and theologian.

Marco Polo (1254 – 1324) Venetian traveller and explorer who made ground-breaking journeys to Asia and China, helping to open up the Far East to Europe.

Johann Gutenberg (1395 – 1468) – German inventor of the printing press. Gutenberg’s invention of movable type started a printing revolution which was influential in the Reformation.

Joan of Arc – (1412-1431) – French saint. Jean d’Arc was a young peasant girl who inspired the Dauphin of France to renew the fight against the English. She led French forces into battle.

Christopher Columbus (1451 – 1506) – Italian explorer who landed in America. He wasn’t the first to land in America, but his voyages were influential in opening up the new continent to Europe.

Leonardo da Vinci ( 1452 – 1519) – Italian scientist, artist, and polymath. Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper. His scientific investigations covered all branches of human knowledge.

Guru Nanak (1469 – 1539) Indian spiritual teacher who founded the Sikh religion. Guru Nanak was the first of the 10 Sikh Gurus. He travelled widely disseminating a spiritual teaching of God in everyone.

Martin Luther (1483 – 1546) – A key figure in the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther opposed papal indulgences and the power of the Pope, sparking off the Protestant Reformation.

Babur (1483 – 1531) – Founder of the Moghul Empire on the Indian subcontinent. A descendant of Genghis Khan, he brought a Persian influence to India.

William Tyndale (1494 – 1536) – A key figure in the Protestant Reformation. Tyndale translated the Bible into English. It’s wide dissemination changed English society. He was executed for heresy.

Akbar (1542 – 1605) – Moghul Emperor who consolidated and expanded the Moghul Empire. Akbar also was a supporter of the arts, culture and noted for his religious tolerance.

Sir Walter Raleigh (1552 – 1618) – English explorer who made several journeys to the Americas, including a search for the lost ‘Eldorado.’

Galileo Galilei (1564 -1642) – Astronomer and physicist. Galileo developed the modern telescope and, challenging the teachings of the church, helped to prove the earth revolved around the sun.

William Shakespeare (1564- 1616) English poet and playwright. Shakespeare’s plays, such as Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello have strongly influenced English literature and Western civilisation.

Rene Descartes (1596 – 1650) Dubbed the father of modern philosophy, Descartes was influential in a new rationalist movement, which sought to question basic presumptions with reason.

Oliver Cromwell (1599 – 1658) – British Parliamentarian. Cromwell led his new model army in defeating King Charles I and creating a new model of government.

Voltaire (1694 – 1778) – French philosopher. Voltaire’s biting satire helped to create dissent in the lead up to the French revolution.

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) – English mathematician and scientist. Newton laid the foundations of modern physics, with his laws of motion and gravity. He made extensive scientific investigations.

Eighteenth Century

Catherine the Great (1729 – 1796) – Russian Queen during the Eighteenth Century. During her reign, Russia was revitalised becoming a major European power. She also began reforms to help the poor.

George Washington (1732 – 1799) – 1st President of US. George Washington led the American forces of independence and became the first elected President.

Tom Paine (1737- 1809) English-American author and philosopher. Paine wrote‘Common Sense‘ (1776) and the Rights of Man (1791), which supported principles of the American and French revolutions.

Thomas Jefferson (1743- 1826) 3rd President of US. Author of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson passed laws on religious tolerance in his state of Virginia and founded the University of Virginia.

Mozart (1756 – 1791) – Austrian Music composer. Mozart’s compositions ranged from waltzes to Requiem. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest musical geniuses of all time.

Nineteenth Century

William Wilberforce (1759 – 1833) – British MP and campaigner against slavery. Wilberforce was a key figure in influencing British public opinion and helping to abolish slavery in 1833.

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769 – 1821) – French military and political leader. Napoleon made France a major European power and meant his Napoleonic code was widely disseminated across Europe.

Simon Bolivar (1783 – 1830) – Liberator of Latin American countries. Bolivar was responsible for the liberation of Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela and Colombia.

Abraham Lincoln (1809 – 1865) 16th President of US. Lincoln led the northern Union forces during the civil war to protect the Union of the US. During the civil war, Lincoln also promised to end slavery.

Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882) – Developed theory of evolution. His book ‘The Origin of Species’ (1859) laid the framework for evolutionary biology and changed many people’s view of life on the planet.

Karl Marx (1818 – 1883) Principle Marxist philosopher. Author of Das Kapitaland The Communist Manifesto. (with F.Engels) Marx believed that Capitalist society would be overthrown by Communist revolution.

Queen Victoria (1819 – 1901) – Queen of Great Britain during the Nineteenth Century. She oversaw the industrial revolution and the growth of the British Empire.

Louis Pasteur (1822 – 1895) – French chemist and Biologist. Pasteur developed many vaccines, such as for rabies and anthrax. He also developed the process of pasteurisation, making milk safer.

Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910) – Russian writer and philosopher. Tolstoy wrote the epic ‘War and Peace’ Tolstoy was also a social activist – advocating non-violence and greater equality in society.

Thomas Edison (1847 – 1931) – Inventor and businessman. Edison developed the electric light bulb and formed a company to make electricity available to ordinary homes.

Twentieth Century

Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900) – Irish writer. Wilde’s plays included biting social satire. He was noted for his wit and charm. However, after a sensational trial, he was sent to jail for homosexuality.

Woodrow Wilson (1856 – 1924) – President of US during WWI. Towards the end of the war, Wilson developed his 14 points for a fair peace, which included forming a League of Nations.

Mahatma Gandhi (1869 – 1948) – Indian nationalist and politician. Gandhi believed in non-violent resistance to British rule. He sought to help the ‘untouchable’ caste and also reconcile Hindu and Muslims.

V. Lenin (1870-1924) – Born in Ulyanovsk, Russia. Lenin was the leader of Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution in 1917. Lenin became the first leader of the Soviet Union influencing the direction of the new Communist state.

The Wright Brothers (Orville, 1871 – 1948) – developed the first powered aircraft. In 1901, they made the first successful powered air flight, ushering in a new era of air flight.

Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965) Prime Minister of Great Britain during the Second World War. Churchill played a key role in strengthening British resolve in the dark days of 1940.

Konrad Adenauer (1876-1967) – West German Chancellor post world war II. Adenauer had been an anti-nazi before the war. He played a key role in reintegrating West Germany into world affairs.

Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955) – German / American physicist. Einstein made groundbreaking discoveries in the field of relativity. Einstein was also a noted humanitarian and peace activist.

Ataturk (1881-1938) – founder of the Turkish Republic. From the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, Ataturk forged a modern secular Turkish republic.

A Little History of the World

A Little History of the World: Illustrated Edition at Amazon – by E. H. Gombrich

John M Keynes (1883 – 1946) Influential economist. Keynes developed a new field of macroeconomics in response to the great depression of the 1930s.

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882 – 1945) US President (1932-1945) Roosevelt led the US through its most turbulent time of the great depression and World War II.

Adolf Hitler (1889 – 1945) Dictator of Nazi Germany. Hitler sought to conquer Europe and Russia, starting World War Two. Also responsible for the Holocaust, in which Jews and other ‘non-Aryans’ were killed.

Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) – First Indian Prime Minister. Nehru came to power in 1947 and ruled until his death in 1964. He forged a modern democratic India, not aligned to either US or the Soviet Union.

Dwight Eisenhower (1890 – 1969) – Supreme Allied Commander during the Normandy landings of World War II. Eisenhower also became President from 1953-1961.

Charles de Gaulle (1890- 1970) French politician. De Gaulle became leader of the ‘Free French’ after the fall of France in 1940. Became President after the war, writing the constitution of the 5th Republic.

Chairman Mao (1893 – 1976) Mao led the Chinese Communist party to power during the long march and fight against the nationalists. Mao ruled through the ‘cultural revolution’ until his death in 1976.

Mother Teresa (1910-1997) – Catholic nun from Albania who went to India to serve the poor. Became a symbol of charity and humanitarian sacrifice. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

John F. Kennedy (1917 – 1963) – US President 1961-1963. J. F.Kennedy helped to avert nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis. He also began to support the civil rights movement before his assassination in Dallas, November 1963.

Nelson Mandela (1918 – ) The first President of democratic South Africa in 1994. Mandela was imprisoned by the apartheid regime for 27 years, but on his release helped to heal the wounds of apartheid through forgiveness and reconciliation.

Pope John Paul II (1920 – 2005) – Polish Pope from 1978-2005. Pope John Paul is credited with bringing together different religions and playing a role at the end of Communism in Eastern Europe.

Queen Elizabeth II (1926 – ) British Queen from 1952. The second longest serving monarch in history, Elizabeth saw six decades of social and political change.

Martin Luther King (1929 – 1968) Martin Luther King was a powerful leader of the non-violent civil rights movement. His 1963 speech ‘I have a dream’ being a pinnacle moment.

14th Dalai Lama (1938 – ) Spiritual and political leader of Tibetans. The Dalai Lama was forced into exile by the invading Chinese. He is a leading figure for non-violence and spirituality.

Mikhail Gorbachev (1931 – ) Leader of the Soviet Union. Oversaw transition from Communism in Eastern Europe to democracy. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.

Muhammad Ali (1942- ) American boxer. Muhammad Ali had his boxing license removed for refusal to fight in Vietnam. He became a leading figure in the civil rights movement.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan. “Famous historical people”, Oxford, UK. www.biographyonline.net, 18/12/2013. Published  1 March 2018. Last updated 7 July 2019

[togglesbloggle]

So, @argumate is up to some more prosocial atheistic trolling.  As is usual with such things, the conversation isn’t particularly elevated, but it does make me nostalgic for the old bbc days.  So I thought I’d be the Discourse I’d like to see in the world.  This is the post that kicked things off; correctly noting Platonism as a philosophical foundation underpinning most versions of Abrahamic faiths.  And it’s probably the most useful place for me to target also, since hardly anybody just identifies as a Platonist but most westerners are one.  So, without further ado, a halfhearted and full-length defense of Platonism:

Well, strike that.  A little bit of ado.

I’m not a Platonist myself, so this is a devil’s advocate type of thing.  Or maybe you could call it an intellectual Turing test?  As I discuss here, my philosophical commitments are mostly to skepticism, and for instrumental reasons, to reductionist materialism.  That combo leaves me some wiggle room, and I find it fairly easy to provisionally occupy a religious mindset, so I can generally read and enjoy religious polemics.  I also have a fairly deep roster of what are often called ‘spiritual experiences’; I’m probably in the set of people that are by nature predisposed to religion.  I am not religious, and I approve of Argumate saying things like ‘God is not real’ a lot.  This is in no way a retread of the arguments in The Republic or Plato’s other writings; you can go read those if you want, but I’m going to play around with stuff that I think is better suited to this audience.

Attention conservation notice: yikes.  This got pretty long.

Anyway, on to the argument.  Argumate’s main point is pretty clear, I think: ‘forms’ in the Greek sense are a function and product of the perceiving mind.  Birds don’t conform to bird-ness; instead brains naturally produce a sort of bird-ness category to make processing the world easier, and to turn a series of wiggly and continuous phenomena into a discrete number of well-modeled objects.  Basically, we impose ‘thing-ness’ on the wavefunction of reality.  And there are some good reasons to think that it might be true!  Our understanding of categories gets a lot sharper when reality conveniently segregates itself, and whenever that boundary gets a little blurry, our ability to use categories tends to break down.  If the recognition of animal-ness came from contact with a higher plane of reality, you wouldn’t necessarily expect people to get confused about sponges.

But.  While there’s certainly plenty of support for Argumate’s position, it doesn’t strike me as anything near self-evident, or necessarily true.  So what I’ll argue is that Platonism isn’t obviously false, and that if we ever converge on a true answer to the question of our reality, then that truth could plausibly be recognizably Platonist.  My opening salvo here is, predictably enough, mathematics.

‘Mathematical Platonism’ is a whole other thing, only distantly related to Classical Platonism, and I only really mean to talk about the latter.  But nonetheless, mathematics really actually does appear to be a situation where we can simply sit in a chair, think deeply, and then more or less directly perceive truths.  Basic arithmetic can be independently discovered, and usefully applied, by almost anybody; ‘quantity’ comes naturally to most humans, and the inviolable laws of quantity are exploited just as often.  It’s also very hard to argue that these are ‘mere’ linguistic conventions, since fundamental natural behaviors like the conservation of mass depend on a kind of consistent logical framework.  In most chemical reactions, the number of atomic nuclei does not change, and the atoms added to a new molecule are perfectly mirrored by the loss of atoms in some reactant; this remains true in times and places where no thinking mind exists to count them.

There are a lot of debates about what math is, fundamentally.  But inevitably when we study math, we’re studying the set of things that must be true, given some premise: we’re asking whether some proposition is a necessary consequence of our axioms.  The so-called ‘unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics’ suggests that the phenomena that Argumate mentions- hotdogs and birds and whatnot- are observed only within the auspices of a sort of super-phenomenon.  Loosely speaking, we can call this super-phenomenon self-consistency.  

We treat phenomena as having a natural cause.  Platonism, at its crunchy intellectually rewarding center, represents a willingness to bite the bullet and say that self-consistency also has a cause.  Plato himself actually provided what might be the most elegant possible answer!  Basically, posit the simplest thing that meets the criterion of being A) autocausal and B) omnicausal, and then allow the self-consistency of the cosmos to follow from its dependence on (in Platonist terms, its emanation from) that single, unitary cause.  The universe is self-consistent for the very straightforward reason that there’s only one thing.  Any plurality, to the extent that plurality is even a thing, happens because ‘the only real thing’ is only partially expressed in a particular phenomenon.  To skip ahead to Lewis’ Christian interpretation of all this, you’d say that humans and moons and hotdogs are distinguished from God not by what they have, but by what they lack.

And for present purposes, I do want to take a step back and point out that this does feel like a reasonable answer to a very important question.  Materialism fundamentally has no answer to the question of self-consistency and/or the presence of logic and order, and that is (for me) one of its least satisfying limits.  We’ve got things like ‘the origin of the universe’, sure.  But we probe the Big Bang with mathematical models!  That’s a hell of an assumption- namely, that even at the origin of our universe, self-consistency applies.  It’s not like materialism has a bad explanation.  It just remains silent, treats the problem as outside the domain.  If we’re adopting the thing for utilitarian reasons, that’s fine.  But if we’re treating materialism as a more comprehensive philosophy, a possible approach to the bigger questions, then it’s a painful absence.  In that domain, far from being self-evidently true (in comparison to Platonism), materialism doesn’t even toss its hat in the ring!

Which, uh, gets us to the stuff about Forms and shadows in Plato’s Cave and all that- the intermediate form of existence between the omnisimple core of Platonism and the often chaotic and very plural experience of day-to-day life.  And frankly, we’re not especially bound to say that the forms are exactly as Plato described them, any more than atomism is restricted to Democritus.  Whether there is some ‘bird-ness’ that is supra- to all extant birds might be contestable; however, it’s easier to wonder whether ‘binary tree’ is supra- to speciation and the real pattern of differences between organisms that we map using Linnaean taxonomy.

But, this is an attempted defense of Platonism and not Toggle’s Version of Platonism that He Invented Because it’s Easier, so I’ll give it a try.  Fair warning to the reader, what follows is not fully endorsed (even in the context of a devil’s advocate-type essay), except the broader claim that it’s not self-evidently false.  And on the givens we came up with a couple paragraphs ago, this is a reasonable way to tackle what necessarily follows.  So let me see how far I can defend a very strong claim: in a self-consistent (or: mathematical) cosmos, beauty cannot be arbitrary.

Remember that Plato never argued that his Forms were arbitrary, or even fully discrete as such; their apparent plurality, like our own, emanates from the unitary Thing What Exists.  And so, bird-ness is treated as a contingent thing, not an absolute.  It’s just not contingent on human experience.  And so for us to believe in ‘bird-ness’ is to believe that there exists some specific and necessary pattern- a Form- which any given material bird must express.

Let’s take an obvious example: any flying bird will, for fairly simple aerodynamic reasons, tend to be symmetrical.  Usually, this means two wings.  In theory, you could… have one in the middle?  Maybe?  Even that seems rather goofy to try to imagine, but you could probably get away with it if you were extremely creative biologically.  And if we see a bird with only one wing (without a prosthetic or other form of accommodation), then we will tend quite naturally to recognize that something awful is in the process of happening.

A fully materialist explanation of our reaction here would say: we think of the one-winged bird as problematic because A) we have been socialized to recognize and appreciate two-winged birds, and spurn deviations from that socialization, or maybe B) because natural selection has given us a set of instincts that recognize when a body plan has failed in the past, so things like ‘being crippled’ or ‘being sick’ are recognizable.  

Platonism, I think, would offer a third option, that C) we recognize (as emanations of The Real Thing) that a one-winged bird body is insufficiently reflective of The Real Thing, and that accordingly it lacks the ability to keep existing.  Plato had some… basically magical ideas, about how Forms are recognized, but here I’ll point out that ‘deduction’ is a completely serviceable kind of magic for our purposes.  It is, after all, our direct experience of the self-consistency of the cosmos, which follows from the fact that we are ourselves an expression of that same self-consistency; it meets the criteria.  

Materialists, obviously, would agree that deductive reasoning could allow a person to recognize the problems inherent in a one-winged bird, but as I said a few paragraphs up, their(/our) explanation of this process is rootless.  “Yes, logic and a few high-confidence assumptions let you assume that a bird with only one wing is in trouble,” they might say.  And we might ask- “what makes you so sure?”  And then the materialist must respond, “Well, let me be more clear.  It always worked in the past, and my Bayesian priors are strongly in the direction of the method continuing to bear fruit.”  True enough, but it’s not an explanation and doesn’t pretend to be.  The universe just does this weird thing for some reason; it works ‘by magic’.  So why not call it that?  Theurgy for all!

So, consider.  We recognize (deductively, let’s say for the sake of argument) that a one-winged bird is on the road to becoming nonexistent, absent some change in circumstances.  It may keep going for a little while, but it’s not in homeostasis.  And if we reasonably admit this very basic duality to our thinking- things which can persist, and things which cannot- then we start to recognize a sort of analogy between physical phenomena and mathematical propositions.  A lemma can be right or wrong, albeit sometimes unprovably so.  Basically, it can follow- or not- from the axioms we’re working with.  And in a softer but very real sense, that one-winged body plan is wrong analogously to the lemma’s wrongness.  Not ‘wrong’ as in ‘counter to cultural norms’, but ‘wrong’ as in ‘unstable given the premises, given the Thing That Exists Most’.  Look up research on fitness landscapes, if you’re so inclined- actual biological research isn’t totally unacquainted with the notion.  There exists a surprisingly discrete ideal or set of ideals, both for flying birds as a whole and subordinately for any given flying bird species.  And we have discovered this using magic.

Insofar as beauty is something to be admired, or pursued, or is otherwise desirable, then our sense of beauty must necessarily correlate with those abstract, and dare I say supra-real, qualities which allow things to persist, and which can therefore be understood deductively.  And that set of qualities does, effectively, meet the Platonic criterion of a ‘form’.

The immediate materialist objection is: hey, wait a minute.  The supposed ‘objective’ criterion of a bird is contingent, not absolute!  It follows from the strength of gravity, the thickness of the atmosphere, the availability of food sources, and on and on.  This is one of the most important reasons why genetic drift and speciation happens in the first place, because the ‘ideal’ bird depends on an environment that’s in constant flux.

True enough.  But!  How do you think the atmosphere got there?  It’s an old trick in religious discourse, but in this case I think a valid one.  The rightness of the bird depends on the atmosphere, the rightness of the atmosphere depends on the planet, the rightness of the planet depends on the solar system, and ultimately it all depends on that necessary self-consistency which (we proclaim) implies our unitary Most Real Thing.  This does mean that we can’t really think of Platonic forms as wholly discrete objects, unconnected to one another and without internal relation among themselves- unfortunately, that’s part of the original Plato that I don’t see as defensible, even with maximum charity.  But there’s such a thing as a ‘ring species’, and if we admit Platonic Forms of that type, a kind of dense network of paths being traced through higher-dimensional spaces that correspond to the shadow of That Than Which There Is No Whicher, then it’s more than salvageable.  It’s both satisfying to imagine and, I think, quite consistent with the spirit of the original philosophy.

One thing this doesn’t mean.  Even if we were to accept all of this, we aren’t obliged to resign ourselves to the lot of that one-winged bird.  Indeed, if anything this gives us a rich language by which to justify a prosthetic wing or other form of accommodation: we can talk about ‘making the bird whole’, and can see how our compassion for that bird might lead us to create the conditions of homeostasis once again.  But it does mean that if we take a position on the merits of existence- if we’re in favor- then we don’t treat a one- and two-winged bird as coequal scenarios.

Anyway, this has gone on hideously long already for what’s basically an intellectual exercise, so I won’t dive into immortal souls or any of the other ancillaries.  I mostly want to reiterate that, far from being obviously false, I do think that (some forms of) Platonism are quite defensible, and can provide coherent answers to questions that I A) care about very deeply and B) can’t resolve to my own satisfaction.  Of course, it is not obviously nor trivially true, either.  But one can be Platonist without being willfully wrong.

[ruminativerabbi]

Chanukah 5781

Among President Lincoln’s most famous addresses is surely the one he gave in 1858 as part of his campaign to be elected to the Senate by the people of Illinois and in which he referred to the nation as a “house divided against itself” with respect to the slavery issue that at the time was, indeed, tearing the fabric of American nationhood asunder. Lincoln lost that election (Stephen A. Douglas was elected instead to a second term), but that image of the American republic as a house falling in on itself that cannot endure unless all of its walls and its foundation are somehow brought into alignment has become an enduring image, one cited over the years in countless contexts to describe situations as no less untenable than a house attempting somehow sturdily to exist while its walls go to war with each other.

Lincoln didn’t invent the image. It appears twice in the New Testament, once (in the Gospel of Mark) just as Lincoln used it and once (in the Gospel of Matthew) as a “kingdom divided against itself.” Augustine, bishop of Hippo, whose Confessions was once one of my favorite books, wrote about his conversion experience in similar terms, describing the state of his inner self in the years leading up to his embrace of Christianity as the psychic equivalent of a “house divided against itself.”  Whether Lincoln read the Confessions, I don’t know. (For more on Lincoln’s reading habits, click here.) But I can’t imagine he didn’t know Thomas Paine’s 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, truly one of the most important documents in all American history, in which the author uses that exact phrase witheringly to describe the English Constitution the Colonials were about to reject as the law of their land.

Whether or not there were Jewish roots to the expression used by the authors of the Gospels mentioned above, I don’t know. (I haven’t found any exact parallels.) But the concept itself—that there is a line beyond which dissent (including the kind that engenders fiery, passionate debate) becomes not a healthy sign of intellectual vibrancy but a harbinger of impending disaster—that surely was widely understood in Jewish antiquity. Indeed, the Chanukah story—or at least its backstory—is specifically about that notion. Yes, the famous tale about the miracle jug of oil has surely won in the court of public opinion. I’ve written about that story in several places (click here for one example), but the more sober historical sources written in ancient times by contemporaries or near-contemporaries tell a different story. And, indeed, it is precisely the story of a house divided against itself.

For most moderns, the period in question—the centuries between the death of Alexander in 323 BCE and the rise of the Roman Empire towards the end of the first century BCE—is one of relative obscurity. (For a dismal account of the degree to which American high school students are shielded from learning anything of substance about ancient history, click here.) And that reality pertains for most Jewish moderns as well, even despite the fact that those centuries were precisely the ones that witnessed the transformation of old Israelite religion into the earliest versions of what we today would call Judaism.

There’s a natural tendency to imagine that kind of transformation as a kind of slow, ongoing metamorphosis that leads from Point A to Point B. But the reality was far more complicated. And the single part of that reality that was the most fraught with spiritual tension, internecine strife, and the real potential for internal schism was the great task laid at the feet of the Jewish people by Hellenism, the version of Greek culture that became—in the very centuries under consideration—a kind of world culture that no sophisticated individual would turn away from merely because he or she wasn’t personally of Greek origin. This was the culture that brought the masterpieces of Greek theater, the classics of Greek philosophy, the masterworks of Homer and Hesiod, and the whole concept of athletics to the world. Opting out was not an option—not for anyone who wished to be thought of as a citizen of the modern world.  (The ancients thought of themselves as modern people, of course—just as do we. And that thought will sound just as amusing to people living 2500 years in the future as it does to us with respect to people living 2500 years ago!)

And thus was the stage set for the internal schism that was the “real” background to the Chanukah story.

The Hellenists—eager to be modern, to embrace world culture, to eschew provincialism, and to take their place among the educated classes of their day—wished to embrace all of it. If the Greeks were repulsed by the idea of circumcision, then they were against it too. If the Greeks believed that Homer, Plato, and Euripides existed at the absolute apex of culture, then they wanted to spend their days immersed in the sagas, dialogues, and dramas associated with those individuals, and with dozens of other classic authors as well. If the absolute monotheism of traditional Jewish belief was deemed incompatible with the more sophisticated theological stance espoused by the greatest Greek philosophers, including Socrates himself, then they wished to see the masters of the Temple in Jerusalem reform the worship service there to reflect that stance. In other words, they wanted so desperately to be modern that they lost confidence in the value of their own traditions.

Their opponents, the traditionalists, were no less committed to the all-or-nothing approach: just as the reformers wanted all of it, they themselves wanted none of it. They were repulsed by the theater and by the gymnasium. They refused even to consider the possibility that Sophocles and Aeschylus might well have had something valuable and profound to say about the human condition. The dismissed the Homeric epics as mere storytelling hardly worth the time to consider at all, let alone to study seriously and thoughtfully.  And they were certainly not interested in altering the procedures in place for centuries in the Temple to suit a new set of standards imported from Greece. Or anywhere.

The ancient history books, the First and Second Books of the Maccabees primarily but others as well, tell this story in detail. The internal debate among Jewish people had reached the boiling point. And by the time King Antiochus IV finally decided to intervene, the schism had become not merely passionate but violent. The nation was wholly divided against itself. And, as Lincoln would have commented, the nation, now fully divided against itself, was not going to stand for long. Or at all!

After Alexander the Great died, his generals divided up his kingdom. One general, Seleucus, became master of most of the Middle East. Ptolemy became master of Egypt. Israel passed back and forth many times between the Seleucid and Ptolemaic empires, ending up finally as part of the former. And that is why King Antiochus, the Seleucid emperor, was involved in the first place. How, when, and why he intervened is a story unto itself. But that he sought to restore order to a province in his empire that had reached the boiling point is the underlying fact worth considering. Nor is it that difficult to imagine why he would have favored the reformers over the traditionalists: he too was a committed Hellenist who saw one side as aligned with his own beliefs and one side espousing views inimical to them. That he was unexpectedly defeated by a ragtag group of guerilla warriors under the leadership of the Maccabee brothers was, depending on who was telling the story, a miracle or a calamity. That we remember it as the former is an excellent example of how the victors win the right to tell the tale: the losers would have told it entirely differently…but those who survived were eventually swallowed up into a people eager to remember the story positively and in as satisfying a way possible. That’s what losers lose most of all, I suppose: the right to frame the narrative.

I love Chanukah. Even as a child, I liked it—primarily the gelt and the latkes, but also the whole nightly ceremony of lighting the menorah that belonged to my father’s parents before it belonged to my parents and which is at this very moment sitting on our dining room table on Reed Drive. As I’ve grown more sophisticated in my understanding of ancient Jewish history, however, the message underlying all that fun has become more serious in my mind, more monitory, more cautionary. The Jewish people was ultimately weakened, not strengthened by the Maccabees’ victory—which led first, and within a few decades, to the Maccabees’ descendants illegitimately proclaiming themselves kings of Israel, and eventually to the Roman invasion that ended Jewish autonomy in the Land of Israel for millennia. Had the Jews of the time been able to compromise, they would perhaps have created a stronger, more inclusive kind of Judaism open to new ideas…and who knows where that would or could have led? We remember the Maccabees’ victory enthusiastically by framing the story as an “us against them” story featuring a harsh king and his innocent victims. But that’s only one way to tell the story. I understand perfectly well why we’ve always favored the story line that features brave Jewish warriors resisting the domination of a foreign tyrant. But I also see an alternate plot line hiding just behind the preferred narrative, one that features a house collapsing in on itself that needed outside intervention precisely because warring groups within the Jewish people couldn’t engage in meaningful dialogue and learn from each other. That doesn’t ruin Chanukah for me. Just the opposite, actually: it turns the holiday into a thought-provoking opportunity to consider the nature of Judaism in the context of history—and that is something I don’t ever pass up. Who would?

#Chanukah

[eternal-echoes]

Hellenism

This is Matthew Arnold's name for the Greek spirit. Even when political Hellas (Greece) died, its spirit was preserved in a Roman body, so that we can meaningfully use the single term "classical" for both Greek and Roman culture.      

The Greeks, to put it very simply, thought and talked more than anyone else. Luke, writing Acts, has to explain to his non-Greek audience this strange Greek behavior: "All the Athenians and the foreigners who were there spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing" (17:21). The most important word in their language was logos, which meant (among other things) "word, language, discourse, thought, reason, or intelligible truth". Thus John begins his Gospel with the astonishing claim that the logos which the Greeks searched for, the Truth, existed as God and with God "in the beginning" and "became flesh" as Jesus, the Jesus who said, "I AM the Truth."  

The kind of truth these thinking, talking, and searching Greeks thought, talked, and searched the most about was the truth about virtue. Socrates, the greatest of them, one of the two or three men in the history of this planet who made the greatest difference and the greatest contribution to all subsequent ages, thought about almost nothing else. Each of his dialogues is a quest for the truth about some particular virtue.    

We can contrast the Hellenic and the Hebraic minds as Matthew Arnold does, by contrasting theory with practice, intellectualism with voluntarism, the centrality of thought with the centrality of will, choice, and action. The Greeks represented virtue in theory, thinking about virtue; the Hebrews represented virtue in practice. For Socrates and Plato, right thinking is virtue. Virtue is knowledge and knowledge is virtue. If we only know what is good, we will do it. The will, choice, and action necessarily follow thinking. We always choose what we think is profitable to us. If our thoughts are right, our choices will be right. Thus philosophical wisdom is the prescription for a moral utopia, as Plato set out in his Republic.   

- Peter Kreeft, Spiritual History 101

#Christianity #Peter Kreeft #Matthew Arnold #reactionary #traditionalism #history #quotes #theism #Socrates #Plato #virtue #philosophy

[uploadedyudkowsky]

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Brave New World, I offer a list of the top 100 most important books of all time.

Note that some of the lists contain books that are required reading in some disciplines, and so are not listed. This list is written as an attempt to fill that role, rather than a list of the 100 most important books.

100. Plutarch's Lives of the English Kings, Vol. II

A short introduction to political history by the great ancient Greek historian. It's short, but still worth reading.

99. Plato's Republic

A good primer to how to think about human nature, ethics, and freedom.

98. E. T. Jaynes's Big Picture eXtensions

A five-volume collection of E. T. Jaynes's work on evolutionary psychology, covering e.g. cooperative thanatophobia and incest avoidance.

97. Likelihood-Instruction books 1-4

Several booklets for teaching the Bayesian probability theory course.

96. E. T. Jaynes's Bayesian Creed

A 2-volume set of lectures on the core tenets of Bayesianism. (E. T. Jaynes died in 1995.)

95. Michio Kaku's The Anime Study Guide to Stats

A well-researched summary of the anime/manga science-fiction field. Lots of source material for students to use, and excellent links to several prominent online articles.

94. Tooby and Cosmides's The Psychological Unity of Humankind

A collection of essays by a variety of philosophers on the nature of right and wrong. An original approach to metaethics, with many issues that have been studied since the 1970s.

93. Dretske, Kahneman, and Tversky: The Friendship Hypothesis

A look at why, at the end of the day, people do what they do. I don't think the book is meant as a precise explanation of how to play the Prisoner's Dilemma, but it's an interesting look at how other humans think. It's based on the theory that people's rationalist functions aren't exclusively the product of training or genetics, but rather are a byproduct of having a shared cognitive architecture. A good way to see this from an evolutionary perspective is to see how the evolutionary algorithms have affected human mating patterns.

92. Evolution's Foresight: Science's Second Look

A unique look at how scientists make sense of the universe, showing how the traditional, one-sided view of evolution, was developed long before any scientist realized the system could produce novel designs for building complicated machines. It also discusses how scientists, in many fields, are motivated by the hope of creating a new mind - a chance to create an intelligence that might be smarter than themselves.

91. Behemoth: The Growth of Intelligent Societies

If you thought Moby-Dick was the best book on "The Evolutionary Connection", this is the book for you. Behemoth is a work of science fiction, but it does a marvelous job of describing how a growing intelligence, as opposed to a narrow, narrow-minded culture, can look at the world and do something useful. The book's main idea is that the future we want is an intelligence that's larger and more complex than itself, but that's something that tends to take a long time to do.

90. Three Laws of Robotics

One of the few classic textbooks that considers AI in terms of rules, rather than an abstract machine that manipulates inputs and outputs on the basis of its rules. This book is really worth a read for anyone wanting to understand the world of AI.

89. Eric Drexler's Self-Improvement

A collection of talks by Drexler on the virtues of self-reliance and the importance of optimizing your own capabilities.

88. Against Chance

Drexler's exploration of the problem of cognitive selection pressure.

87. Solomonoff Induction: Issues and Problems

Solomonoff induction is an interesting problem. Dennett's Second Law of Robotics contains a chapter on Solomonoff induction.

86. Why Other People Are the Way They Are

A rather dour look at the problem of subjectivism, which gives you a sense of the quality of philosophy written in the last 30 years or so.

85. Jaron Lanier's Media Psychology

One of the earlier major attempts to consider the media effect, and how it is actually happening. I disagree with a lot of the specific suggestions, but the general idea of what to do about it is still sound.

84. Collected Poems of Jaron Lanier

One of the first attempts to put the philosophical ideas into the words of a Nobel laureate, if not a poet.

[brother-hermes]

THE PARADOX

In Platos classic, the Republic, he gives a beautiful analogy for how we relate to and understand the world we live in. He tells his pupils of a cave where an ogre ties up a few prisoners. Their heads are stuck facing the wall with a giant fire burning behind them. A pathway runs between them and the fire. As figures cross this pathway they see the Shadows dancing on the wall in front of them. Having painted this picture Plato begins his speculations. Wouldn't the prisoners mistake the images dancing on the wall as reality? What did they come to accept their view is the only one that is real? What would happen if one managed to escape the cave?

Our Escapee would undoubtedly note the figures scurrying back and forth along the path between the fire and the Prisoners on the way out the cave. Once outside they'd discover a whole new world and realize how backwards their view had actually been. Plato speculates that this prisoner would shy away from the brightness of the Sun being temporarily blinded before re-entering the cave to tell his friends what he saw.

Let's do some speculation of our own. How do you think the friends of our escaped prisoner would react? Would they be accepting of his new truth or label him a Madman? Would they even have the language to explain or comprehend each other? How backwards and strange would this nuview sing to the ones still in the cave? Would they vomit all over the floor like Neo freshly unplugged from The Matrix?

Yes. In Platos typical paradoxical fashion, our hero goes outside to look in. Understand, the cave represents the physical world of the senses and our philosopher/escapee is stepping into the dazzling Radiance of the mind. Like all the great Mystics wishing to help us, our philosopher really, really wants his friends freed from their limited thinking. He wants them to open their eyes and see how much more to life there is beyond the mundane existence inside the cave.

How does one go about freeing themselves in captivity? Greek philosophy unearthed a treasure-trove of studies that deal in abstractions, from geometry to the movements of celestial bodies and even harmonics, the study of sound. See, Plato believed the real power of all these disciplines lies in their ability to move the soul out of the ever-changing world of The senses into the eternal world of the mind. He saw abstract thought as a Gateway through which our souls connect to the Divine.

Mystics from all cultures have always agreed that true spirituality applies sort of backwards logic; at least at first. The world we experience doesn't exist as it seems and only the inner self can awaken to the true nature of reality. What all this means is the interior life has to be experienced firsthand as it is nearly impossible to explain the profound spiritual experiences one enjoys along the way.

MYSTICISM HAS TO BE LIVED. Let that marinate.

Like and share if you agree.

#tumblr #writers on tumblr #writers on life #greek philosophy #philosophy #plato #allegory of the cave #inner freedom #inner transformation #inner peace #innerwisdom #inner self #self awareness #self transformation #like #like and follow #like and comment #like and share #followme #mysticism #free yourself #free your mind #true freedom #spiritual journey #spiritual practice #spiritual awakening #spirituality #spiritualpath #wisdom #esoteric wisdom

[art-of-manliness]

Podcast #496: What Plato’s Republic Has to Say About Being a Man

Plato’s Republic is a seminal treatise in Western political philosophy and thought. It hits on ideas that we’re still grappling with in our own time, including the nature of justice and what the ideal political system looks like. But my guest today argues that The Republic also has a lot to say about manliness, character development, and education in our current climate of safe spaces and trigger warnings.  His name is Jacob Howland. He’s a professor of philosophy at the University of Tulsa and the author of the recent book Glaucon’s Fate: History, Myth, and Character in Plato’s Republic. We begin our conversation with an outline of Plato’s Republic and how it combines literature and philosophy. Jacob then makes the case that in The Republic, Socrates was attempting to save the soul of Plato’s politically ambitious brother, Glaucon, and why he thinks Socrates failed. Along the way we discuss what Socrates’ attempt to save Glaucon can teach us about andreia or manliness and what it means to seek the Good in life. We end our conversation discussing the way The Republic teaches us of the need to possess not only physical courage, but the courage to think for oneself and stand up for one’s beliefs — a courage that is tested in a time like our own, where it can feel difficult to ask hard questions and wrestle with thorny issues.  Show Highlights * What made Plato stand out among other Greek philosophers? * What makes Plato’s works so readable  * A primer on Plato’s aims and philosophy * The general outline of The Republic * The connections between Plato and pop culture (like Tolkien and The Matrix)  * Why Plato created imaginary cities to use for thought experiments  * Why Glaucon, Plato’s brother, plays a starring role in The Republic * Socrates idea of manliness, and how it differed from the classic Greek ideal * The subtle way Socrates gets his point across  * What ancient philosophys say about masculinity in our modern world  * The importance of being playful  * Is it harder to ask hard questions in our modern world? * What it means to be a fully flourishing human being  Resources/People/Articles Mentioned in Podcast * Howland’s The Republic: The Odyssey of Philosophy * The Republic  * The Symposium  * A Primer on Plato * Socrates * Xenophon * The Spartan Regime * The Allegory of the Cave * What the Ancient Greeks and Romans Thought About Manliness * Plato’s Idea of Greek Manliness * Hector and Achilles: Two Paths to Manliness * Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics * AoM series The Spartan Way * The Iliad * Courage vs Boldness * The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper * Ring of Gyges Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!) Listen to the episode on a separate page. Download this episode. Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice. Recorded on ClearCast.io Podcast Sponsors Stitcher Premium. You can listen to “Wolverine: The Lost Trail” right now and only on Stitcher Premium. For a free month of Stitcher Premium, go to wolverinepodcast.com and use promo code “manliness.” Headspace. Hundreds of guided meditation sessions that you can do in just 5-10 minutes. Increase your happiness, focus, and mindfulness throughout your day. Go to headspace.com/manliness to get a free one month trial.  Saxx Underwear. Everything you didn’t know you needed in a pair of underwear. Visit saxxunderwear.com and get $5 off plus FREE shipping on your first purchase when you use the code “AOM” at checkout. Click here to see a full list of our podcast sponsors. Read the Transcript Coming soon! The post Podcast #496: What Plato’s Republic Has to Say About Being a Man appeared first on The Art of Manliness. http://dlvr.it/R26ddK

[philosophysblog]

Plato was an Athenian philosopher during the Classical period in Ancient Greece, founder of the Platonist school of thought, and the Academy, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. . He is widely considered the pivotal figure in the history of Ancient Greek and Western philosophy, along with his teacher, Socrates, and his most famous student, Aristotle.[ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . #plato #platoquotes #ancient #ancientphilosophy #ancientgreece #historybooks #republic #history #history360 #quotes #books #bookstagram #book #philosophy #athens (at Athens, Greece) https://www.instagram.com/p/B935ZEenqhM/?igshid=6ga6cymwugov

#plato #platoquotes #ancient #ancientphilosophy #ancientgreece #historybooks #republic #history #history360 #quotes #books #bookstagram #book #philosophy #athens

[kayjacquelinex-blog]

Art and ideas

Art isn’t defined. Who really knows the true meaning of Art? Art can be an expression, representation or form, ranging from a variety of human activities. The word Art is related to the Latin word “ars” meaning, art, skill, or craft. But art is subjective, and its definition has changed throughout history and in various cultures. The question of what art is has been debated for centuries among philosophers. “What is art?” the most commonly asked question in the philosophy of aesthetics, means “how do we determine what is defined as art?” Or; this implies many subjects, two of which the essential nature or art or the social vacuum all arts seems to be sucked into today.

By asking these questions to a variety of ages you can receive a dozen of different opinions; what people justify as art today can never be answered. Art is a social fabric, we keep copying and repeating centuries of art forms into our own interpretations, indulging into today’s society and making sure we are justifying ourselves to show the world; ‘yes this Art’. But who can and can’t say what Art is? No one created Art this isn’t Britain’s got talent, we don’t have to justify to a panel of judges that our talent is there it is obvious that Art is a cluster definition.

By exploring the idea of ‘prehistoric art’ suggests how cultures communicate with one another; this can be shown through the use of cave paintings. While the paintings created during this time period are generally considered as the beginning of what we consider art now, the Paleolithic people themselves did not create these cave paintings for pleasure; it is thought that the procedure was more ritualised rather than simply for fun.

Throughout this movement the Greeks specialised in architecture and sculpture, marble sculptures were created to portray the ‘idol body’, which represented to society how beauty was portrayed. Having this creativity had its consequences, after the founding of the Roman Republic in 500BCE the Romans started coming into contact with the flourishing Greek cities of southern Italy ‘borrowing’ sculptures. Furthermore not only did art in the Roman Empire draw Greek influence, but to the East, Alexandre the Great’s conquests facilitated centuries of contact. Greco-Buddhism also dominated and had major influence on the eastern art world. Having these pieces of ‘art’ could have be seen to show authority and territory. Art was seen as a religious statement, spreading propaganda for the religious agenda.

Classical antiquity refers to a time that covers a long period of cultural history that focuses upon the study of ancient Greece from the first recorded fragments of epic poetry in the 7th/8th century BCE through to the fall of Rome in the 5th century CE. The Greek philosopher Plato was responsible for the key ideas of art, Plato however had little time for mimesis (mimesis meaning to imitate) He thought it a third rate ‘appearance’. He then created a metaphor which was an indistinct expression of the truth. Plato’s theories had a major impact upon the emergence of abstract art in the early part of the twentieth century.

In the duration of the 14th century The Renaissance emerged in Italy which was the (re-birth) rediscovery of Greco-Roman culture. If the medieval period was built upon an understanding of Christianity, the Renaissance adopted a much more Humanist philosophy which imagined men as the equal of all things. Although most of the creative output was religious, some artists painted pagan works with Graeco-Roman mythological themes. However, the Catholic Church in Rome and beyond remained a major patron of the arts. While the church commissioned artists and artisans, this then bought into the introduction of ‘copy rights’ however this didn’t get fully established for another two centuries.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was one of the most influential of the early theorists toward the end of the 18th century. He was considered a formalist in terms of his philosophy, which meant that he believed that art should not have a concept but should be judged alone on its formal qualities that the content of a work of art is not of aesthetic interest.

During the eighteenth century, The Enlightenment was an intellectual current that galvanized Europe during the course of the 18th Century. The intellectuals of the Enlightenment felt themselves to be part of a great movement representing the highest aspirations and possibilities of mankind. They believed in argument, criticism, and debate. ‘Enlightenment was a desire for human affairs to be guided by rationality rather than by faith, superstition, or revelation; a belief in the power of human reason to change society’ (Outram, 1995, p.3) Classicists believed art should aim at noble simplicity and calm grandeur. After the enlightenment occurred, society recognised their own identity; many thinkers such as Voltaire gained his independence and had freedom within his own mind. Instead of following religion or culture artists went against and used science and theory to create different representations of art. Nature was glorified, and spirituality and free expression were celebrated. Artists, themselves, achieved a level of notoriety and were often guests of the aristocracy.

Our modern conception of Art originates from the end of the eighteenth century, Shiner’s thesis points to lacombe’s portable dictionary of Fine Arts (1752) the difference between Artists and Artisan; becoming two separate activities. When Shiner analysed the difference between the two his work became more established, whilst more key ideas emerged (festivals, academies, public concert halls – other sources of art)  

An idea is never an original idea, it has and always will be taken from a previous artist/source of inspiration. To create an art piece we first need to start with an idea, an inventive, individual idea that then expands in a variety of directions. This will then lead to the mind connecting ideas together with the use of experimental planning for it to be finalised as ‘art’. Everyone’s judgment is different; depending on the angle of the piece it could have strong/weak connections with anything historical.

I believe there are many expectations to what we define at art today, every artist feels some sort of pressure to originate their work from somebody else’s. However any idea/movement of any period of time has transformed the observed and lived events of human lives into ideas that have shaped the cultural history we have inherited.  These ideas in turn produced the context for civilized living, for the making and understanding of art.

#artandideas

[bluewatsons]

Bryan W. Van Norden, Western philosophy is racist, aeon (2017)

Mainstream philosophy in the so-called West is narrow-minded, unimaginative, and even xenophobic. I know I am levelling a serious charge. But how else can we explain the fact that the rich philosophical traditions of China, India, Africa, and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas are completely ignored by almost all philosophy departments in both Europe and the English-speaking world?

Western philosophy used to be more open-minded and cosmopolitan. The first major translation into a European language of the Analects, the saying of Confucius (551-479 BCE), was done by Jesuits, who had extensive exposure to the Aristotelian tradition as part of their rigorous training. They titled their translation Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, or Confucius, the Chinese Philosopher (1687).

One of the major Western philosophers who read with fascination Jesuit accounts of Chinese philosophy was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). He was stunned by the apparent correspondence between binary arithmetic (which he invented, and which became the mathematical basis for all computers) and the I Ching, or Book of Changes, the Chinese classic that symbolically represents the structure of the Universe via sets of broken and unbroken lines, essentially 0s and 1s. (In the 20th century, the psychoanalyst Carl Jung was so impressed with the I Ching that he wrote a philosophical foreword to a translation of it.) Leibniz also said that, while the West has the advantage of having received Christian revelation, and is superior to China in the natural sciences, ‘certainly they surpass us (though it is almost shameful to confess this) in practical philosophy, that is, in the precepts of ethics and politics adapted to the present life and the use of mortals’.

The German philosopher Christian Wolff echoed Leibniz in the title of his public lecture Oratio de Sinarum Philosophia Practica, or Discourse on the Practical Philosophy of the Chinese (1721). Wolff argued that Confucius showed that it was possible to have a system of morality without basing it on either divine revelation or natural religion. Because it proposed that ethics can be completely separated from belief in God, the lecture caused a scandal among conservative Christians, who had Wolff relieved of his duties and exiled from Prussia. However, his lecture made him a hero of the German Enlightenment, and he immediately obtained a prestigious position elsewhere. In 1730, he delivered a second public lecture, De Rege Philosophante et Philosopho Regnante, or On the Philosopher King and the Ruling Philosopher, which praised the Chinese for consulting ‘philosophers’ such as Confucius and his later follower Mengzi (fourth century BCE) about important matters of state.

Chinese philosophy was also taken very seriously in France. One of the leading reformers at the court of Louis XV was François Quesnay (1694-1774). He praised Chinese governmental institutions and philosophy so lavishly in his work Despotisme de la China (1767) that he became known as ‘the Confucius of Europe’. Quesnay was one of the originators of the concept of laissez-faire economics, and he saw a model for this in the sage-king Shun, who was known for governing by wúwéi (non-interference in natural processes). The connection between the ideology of laissez-faire economics and wúwéi continues to the present day. In his State of the Union address in 1988, the US president Ronald Reagan quoted a line describing wúwéi from the Daodejing, which he interpreted as a warning against government regulation of business. (Well, I didn’t say that every Chinese philosophical idea was a good idea.)

Leibniz, Wolff and Quesnay are illustrations of what was once a common view in European philosophy. In fact, as Peter K J Park notes in Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon (2014), the only options taken seriously by most scholars in the 18th century were that philosophy began in India, that philosophy began in Africa, or that both India and Africa gave philosophy to Greece.

So why did things change? As Park convincingly argues, Africa and Asia were excluded from the philosophical canon by the confluence of two interrelated factors. On the one hand, defenders of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) consciously rewrote the history of philosophy to make it appear that his critical idealism was the culmination toward which all earlier philosophy was groping, more or less successfully.

On the other hand, European intellectuals increasingly accepted and systematised views of white racial superiority that entailed that no non-Caucasian group could develop philosophy. (Even St Augustine, who was born in northern Africa, is typically depicted in European art as a pasty white guy.) So the exclusion of non-European philosophy from the canon was a decision, not something that people have always believed, and it was a decision based not on a reasoned argument, but rather on polemical considerations involving the pro-Kantian faction in European philosophy, as well as views about race that are both scientifically unsound and morally heinous.

Kant himself was notoriously racist. He treated race as a scientific category (which it is not), correlated it with the ability for abstract thought, and – theorising on the destiny of races in lectures to students – arranged them in a hierarchical order:

‘The race of the whites contains all talents and motives in itself.’

‘The Hindus … have a strong degree of calm, and all look like philosophers. That notwithstanding, they are much inclined to anger and love. They thus are educable in the highest degree, but only to the arts and not to the sciences. They will never achieve abstract concepts. [Kant ranks the Chinese with East Indians, and claims that they are] static … for their history books show that they do not know more now than they have long known.’

‘The race of Negroes … [is] full of affect and passion, very lively, chatty and vain. It can be educated, but only to the education of servants, ie, they can be trained.’

‘The [Indigenous] American people are uneducable; for they lack affect and passion. They are not amorous, and so are not fertile. They speak hardly at all, … care for nothing and are lazy.’

Those of us who are specialists on Chinese philosophy are particularly aware of Kant’s disdain for Confucius: ‘Philosophy is not to be found in the whole Orient. … Their teacher Confucius teaches in his writings nothing outside a moral doctrine designed for the princes … and offers examples of former Chinese princes. … But a concept of virtue and morality never entered the heads of the Chinese.’

Kant is easily one of the four or five most influential philosophers in the Western tradition. He asserted that the Chinese, Indians, Africans and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas are congenitally incapable of philosophy. And contemporary Western philosophers take it for granted that there is no Chinese, Indian, African or Native American philosophy. If this is a coincidence, it is a stunning one.

One might argue that, while Kant’s racist premises are indefensible, his conclusion is correct, because the essence of philosophy is to be a part of one specific Western intellectual lineage. This is the position defended by D Kyle Peone in the conservative journal The Weekly Standard. Peone, a postgraduate in philosophy at Emory University in Georgia, argued that, because ‘philosophy’ is a word of Greek origin, it refers only to the tradition that grows out of the ancient Greek thinkers. A similar line of argument was given here in Aeon by Nicholas Tampio, who pronounced that ‘Philosophy originates in Plato’s Republic.’

These are transparently bad arguments (as both Jay Garfield and Amy Olberding have pointed out). For one thing, if the etymology of a term determines which culture ‘owns’ that subject, then there is no algebra in Europe, since we got that term from Arabic. In addition, if philosophy starts with Plato’s Republic, then I guess the inventor of the Socratic method was not a philosopher. My colleagues who teach and write books on pre-Socratic ‘philosophers’ such as Heraclitus and Parmenides are also out of jobs.

Peone and Tampio are part of a long line of thinkers who have tried to simply define non-European philosophy out of existence. In What is Philosophy (1956), Martin Heidegger claimed that:

The often-heard expression ‘Western-European philosophy’ is, in truth, a tautology. Why? Because philosophy is Greek in its nature; … the nature of philosophy is of such a kind that it first appropriated the Greek world, and only it, in order to unfold.

Similarly, on a visit to China in 2001, Jacques Derrida stunned his hosts (who teach in Chinese philosophy departments) by announcing that ‘China does not have any philosophy, only thought.’ In response to the obvious shock of his audience, Derrida insisted that ‘Philosophy is related to some sort of particular history, some languages, and some ancient Greek invention. … It is something of European form.’

The statements of Derrida and Heidegger might have the appearance of complimenting non-Western philosophy for avoiding the entanglements of Western metaphysics. In actuality, their comments are as condescending as talk of ‘noble savages’, who are untainted by the corrupting influences of the West, but are for that very reason barred from participation in higher culture.

It is not only philosophers in the so-called Continental tradition who are dismissive of philosophy outside the Anglo-European canon. The British philosopher G E Moore (1873-1958) was one of the founders of analytic philosophy, the tradition that has become dominant in the English-speaking world. When the Indian philosopher Surendra Nath Dasgupta read a paper on the epistemology of Vedanta to a session of the Aristotelian Society in London, Moore’s only comment was: ‘I have nothing to offer myself. But I am sure that whatever Dasgupta says is absolutely false.’ The audience of British philosophers in attendance roared with laughter at the devastating ‘argument’ Moore had levelled against this Indian philosophical system.

It might be tempting to dismiss this as just a joke between colleagues, but we have to keep in mind that Indian philosophy was already marginalised in Moore’s era. His joke would have had an exclusionary effect similar to sexist jokes made in professional contexts today.

The case of Eugene Sun Park illustrates how Moore’s intellectual descendants are equally narrow-minded. When Sun Park was a student in a mainstream philosophy department in the US Midwest, he tried to encourage a more diverse approach to philosophy by advocating the hiring of faculty who specialise in Chinese philosophy or one other of the less commonly taught philosophies. He reports that he found himself ‘repeatedly confounded by ignorance and, at times, thinly veiled racism’. One member of the faculty basically told him: ‘This is the intellectual tradition we work in. Take it or leave it.’ When Sun Park tried to at least refer to non-Western philosophy in his own dissertation, he was advised to ‘transfer to the Religious Studies Department or some other department where “ethnic studies” would be more welcome’.

Sun Park eventually dropped out of his doctoral programme, and is now a filmmaker. How many other students – particularly students who might have brought greater diversity to the profession – have been turned off from the beginning, or have dropped out along the way, because philosophy seems like nothing but a temple to the achievement of white males?

Some philosophers will grant (grudgingly) that there might be philosophy in China or India, for example, but then assume that it somehow isn’t as good as European philosophy. Most contemporary Western intellectuals gingerly dance around this issue. The late Justice Antonin Scalia was an exception, saying in print what many people actually think, or whisper to like-minded colleagues over drinks at the club. He referred to the thought of Confucius as ‘the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie’.

To anyone who asserts that there is no philosophy outside the Anglo-European tradition, or who admits that there is philosophy outside the West but thinks that it simply isn’t any good, I ask the following. Why does he think that the Mohist state-of-nature argument to justify government authority is not philosophy? What does he make of Mengzi’s reductio ad absurdum against the claim that human nature is reducible to desires for food and sex? Why does he dismiss Zhuangzi’s version of the infinite regress argument for skepticism? What is his opinion of Han Feizi’s argument that political institutions must be designed so that they do not depend upon the virtue of political agents? What does he think of Zongmi’s argument that reality must fundamentally be mental, because it is inexplicable how consciousness could arise from matter that is non-conscious? Why does he regard the Platonic dialogues as philosophical, yet dismiss Fazang’s dialogue in which he argues for, and responds to, objections against the claim that individuals are defined by their relationships to others? What is his opinion of Wang Yangming’s arguments for the claim that it is impossible to know what is good yet fail to do what is good? Does he find convincing Dai Zhen’s effort to produce a naturalistic foundation for ethics in the universalisability of our natural motivations? What does he make of Mou Zongsan’s critique of Kant, or Liu Shaoqi’s argument that Marxism is incoherent unless supplemented with a theory of individual ethical transformation? Does he prefer the formulation of the argument for the equality of women given in the Vimalakirti Sutra, or the one given by the Neo-Confucian Li Zhi, or the one given by the Marxist Li Dazhao? Of course, the answer to each question is that those who suggest that Chinese philosophy is irrational have never heard of any of these arguments because they do not bother to read Chinese philosophy and simply dismiss it in ignorance.

The sad reality is that comments such as those by Kant, Heidegger, Derrida, Moore, Scalia and the professors that Sun Park encountered are manifestations of what Edward W Said labelled ‘Orientalism’ in his eponymous book of 1979: the view that everything from Egypt to Japan is essentially the same, and is the polar opposite of the West: ‘The Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, “different”; thus the European is rational, virtuous, mature, “normal”.’ Those under the influence of Orientalism do not need to really read Chinese (or other non-European) texts or take their arguments seriously, because they come pre-interpreted: ‘“Orientals” for all practical purposes were a Platonic essence, which any Orientalist (or ruler of Orientals) might examine, understand, and expose.’ And this essence guarantees that what Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern or other non-European thinkers have to say is, at best, quaint, at worst – fatuous.

Readers of this essay might be disappointed that my examples (both positive and negative) have focused on Chinese philosophy. This is simply because Chinese philosophy is the area in non-Western philosophy that I know best. To advocate that we teach more philosophy outside the Anglo-European mainstream is not to suggest the unrealistic goal that each of us should be equally adept at lecturing on all of them. However, we should not forget that Chinese philosophy is only one of a substantial number of less commonly taught philosophies (LCTP) that are largely ignored by US philosophy departments, including African, Indian, and Indigenous philosophies. Although I am far from an expert in any of these traditions, I do know enough about them to recognise that they have much to offer as philosophy.

Just read An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme (1987) by Kwame Gyekye, or Philosophy and an African Culture(1980) by Kwasi Wiredu, or Philosophy in Classical India (2001) by Jonardon Ganeri, or Buddhism as Philosophy (2007) by Mark Siderits, or Aztec Philosophy (2014) by James Maffie, or the writings of Kyle Powys Whyte at Michigan State University on Indigenous environmentalism. Many forms of philosophy that are deeply influenced by the Greco-Roman tradition (and hence particularly easy to incorporate into the curriculum) are also ignored in mainstream departments, including African-American, Christian, feminist, Islamic, Jewish, Latin American, and LGBTQ philosophies. Adding coverage of any of them to the curriculum would be a positive step toward greater diversity.

I am not saying that mainstream Anglo-European philosophy is bad and all other philosophy is good. There are people who succumb to this sort of cultural Manicheanism, but I am not one of them. My goal is to broaden philosophy by tearing down barriers, not to narrow it by building new ones. To do this is to be more faithful to the ideals that motivate the best philosophy in every culture. When the ancient philosopher Diogenes was asked what city he came from, he replied: ‘I am a citizen of the world.’ Contemporary philosophy in the West has lost this perspective. In order to grow intellectually, to attract an increasingly diverse student body, and to remain culturally relevant, philosophy must recover its original cosmopolitan ideal.

#critique #academia #philosophy #racism #criticism #eastern philosophy #western canon #xenophobia

[healthnotion]

Podcast #496: What Plato’s Republic Has to Say About Being a Man

Plato’s Republic is a seminal treatise in Western political philosophy and thought. It hits on ideas that we’re still grappling with in our own time, including the nature of justice and what the ideal political system looks like. But my guest today argues that The Republic also has a lot to say about manliness, character development, and education in our current climate of safe spaces and trigger warnings. 

His name is Jacob Howland. He’s a professor of philosophy at the University of Tulsa and the author of the recent book Glaucon’s Fate: History, Myth, and Character in Plato’s Republic. We begin our conversation with an outline of Plato’s Republic and how it combines literature and philosophy. Jacob then makes the case that in The Republic, Socrates was attempting to save the soul of Plato’s politically ambitious brother, Glaucon, and why he thinks Socrates failed. Along the way we discuss what Socrates’ attempt to save Glaucon can teach us about andreia or manliness and what it means to seek the Good in life. We end our conversation discussing the way The Republic teaches us of the need to possess not only physical courage, but the courage to think for oneself and stand up for one’s beliefs — a courage that is tested in a time like our own, where it can feel difficult to ask hard questions and wrestle with thorny issues. 

Show Highlights

What made Plato stand out among other Greek philosophers?

What makes Plato’s works so readable 

A primer on Plato’s aims and philosophy

The general outline of The Republic

The connections between Plato and pop culture (like Tolkien and The Matrix) 

Why Plato created imaginary cities to use for thought experiments 

Why Glaucon, Plato’s brother, plays a starring role in The Republic

Socrates idea of manliness, and how it differed from the classic Greek ideal

The subtle way Socrates gets his point across 

What ancient philosophys say about masculinity in our modern world 

The importance of being playful 

Is it harder to ask hard questions in our modern world?

What it means to be a fully flourishing human being 

Resources/People/Articles Mentioned in Podcast

Howland’s The Republic: The Odyssey of Philosophy

The Republic 

The Symposium 

A Primer on Plato

Socrates

Xenophon

The Spartan Regime

The Allegory of the Cave

What the Ancient Greeks and Romans Thought About Manliness

Plato’s Idea of Greek Manliness

Hector and Achilles: Two Paths to Manliness

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics

AoM series The Spartan Way

The Iliad

Courage vs Boldness

The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper

Ring of Gyges

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Recorded on ClearCast.io

Podcast Sponsors

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The post Podcast #496: What Plato’s Republic Has to Say About Being a Man appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Podcast #496: What Plato’s Republic Has to Say About Being a Man published first on https://mensproblem.tumblr.com

[gochoppedstudentearthquake-blog]

What are the requirements to get admission into management engineering Attention Required, Cloudflare

What can I do to prevent this in the future? Please complete the security check to access typesofengineeringdegrees.org. Why do I have to complete a CAPTCHA? Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Cloudflare Ray ID: 45cfada396a18f21 • Your IP : 178.214.255.253 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. Idealism is directly traced back to Plato, with concepts of the idealistic perspective influencing education today. Keywords: Antithesis; Dialectic; Idealism; Intrinsic Motivation; Mentoring; Paideia; Perennialism; Reason; Seminar; Thesis; Universal Truth. Plato (427 BC-347 BC) is considered to be the father of educational philosophy. He founded the Academy in Athens in 387 BC and wrote a number of philosophical works including The Republic , which outlines Plato's utopian society and presents his thoughts about political and educational issues (Gutek, 2009). The keystone of the text promotes the classic tradition of reason within education whereby education becomes the process of "perfecting those natural powers of intellect which all people have" (Wingo, 1965, p. Plato was the student of Socrates (469 BC-399 BC), a Greek philosopher who emphasized paideia , education in the broadest sense, including "all that affects the formation of character and mind" (LoShan, 1998, p. Plato's philosophy is a direct reaction to the state of flux of the Athenian culture during his time. Nash, Kazamias, and Perkinson (1965) point out that Plato lost faith in the existing forms of Athenian government and the foundations of its society. Sophists, a new group of traveling lecturers, promoted individualism rather than a communal culture, which led to a relativism that threatened to destroy the communal culture (Knight, 1998). Barrow (1976) suggests that their method was "to give public lectures for high fees, limiting education to the rich and excluding the poor" (p. To Plato, the Sophists were superficial instructors who lacked solid pedagogical techniques (Powers, 1996).... View more ...

[republicstandard]

A Brief Exploration Of “Fat Shaming” in Hellenic Culture

Touched by Graecophiles

I remember studying ancient Greece, though only vaguely, in several different lessons in school. We learnt about the Greek pantheon, the architecture, the philosophers, the technological innovations and my personal favourite: the warrior state, Sparta. It turns out though that in recent years we have discovered through observation of the evidence that there was so much more to them than that that we should all learn from: they were tolerant, multicultural, pacifist, kind and yes, even sexually promiscuous!

Or were they? And, if so who cares?

I’ll tell you who cares: the left. In recent years, I have noticed an increasing amount of commentary on Hellenic culture coming out of neo-Marxist magazines which has been echoed in conversations I have had with liberals during this time. Ancient Athens has become a liberal shrine, a shining star of sleaziness within the vast sky of chivalry, nobility, piety and valour that is recorded history.

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I call this new phenomenon Graecophilia.

It is, prima facie, no surprise to see why a cultural Marxist would become a Graecophile. Athens was indeed the first society to tolerate, encourage and even institutionalize homosexuality in the form of paedophilia, translated as “boy love”. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong and the Guardian have since miraculously discovered bisexual Neanderthals; perhaps it is only a matter of time. The nudity, the aristocratic alcoholism and the hedonistic decadence of the upper classes within ancient Athens contemporary to its brightest intellectual and political achievements (which we will touch on later) have ignited within lefties a feeling of the best of both worlds: seemingly being conservative and liberal at the same time; simultaneously, in their eyes, having permission to admire tradition, as long as the tradition is sufficiently degenerative and continue being perverts with a clear conscience.

Please take a (brief) look at this article, entitled “Classics for the people – why we should all learn from the ancient Greeks” from the Guardian.

The Guardian, amongst others “news outlets” I will refrain from directly scrutinising due to wanting to write an article, not a book, have begun to print these articles lauding the Ancient Greek culture as something we “can all learn from” on a regular basis. Here’s just one more example, entitled “Laid bare: the sex life of the ancient Greeks in all its physical glory” to cringe over before we get stuck in.

Eros, the god of love and the great loosener of limbs, was many things: irresistible, tender, beautiful, excruciating, maddening, merciless and bittersweet. There was no position, no touch, no predilection too outre to pay homage to him. From the affectionate embrace to group sex, love came in many forms. "The Greeks were anything but prudes," said Nicholaos Stampolidis, director of the Museum of Cycladic Art, "Theirs was a society of great tolerance and lack of guilt."

The above articles from The Guardian point at ancient Greek culture, and state that “classics should be enjoyed by everyone, not just the privileged few.” If you can stomach the above saccharine swill, you’ll gather exactly what I’m talking about when I outline the problem of Graecophilia. According to the genius that wrote the above article, we could learn a lot from ancient Greece, as they

“often freely intermarried with other peoples; they had no sense of ethnic inequality that was biologically determined, since the concepts of distinct world “races” had not been invented.”

I think the term she was looking for was “invaded”, not “intermarried with”, but who am I, a scholar of Greek history, to disagree with Edith Hall and her ability to pervert the evidence to get her liberal readers drooling. Forget that Greece, as every other principality in history has, violently fought off foreigners in defence of their own culture, probably most famously in the Battle of Thermopylae, an effort which was ultimately unsuccessful, as the population of Helots (foreign subjugated peasants) became unsustainable and resulted in an uprising that collapsed Sparta. Here’s another gem from the article:

“They tolerated and even welcomed imported foreign gods.”

Oh yes, of course, the “cultural tolerance” card. Forget that the very reason that the philosopher Socrates was sentenced to death was his “belief in strange Gods” as can be read about in The Trial of Socrates, either by Xenophon or Plato. I thought Edith Hall, the woman who wrote this article, was all for reading the classics? So much for that… In summary, the above articles, as just a small sample of many, highlight this slippery slope of reverence for a principality that was in actuality drowned eventually by its multiculturalism, gluttony, lust diversity and indiscipline. We risk heading down a route of reverence for a culture which in of itself, whilst responsible for a number of intellectual achievements, is not in any sense a model society or indeed one we can learn very much from unless we, as I will later outline, adopt all of its philosophy as one cohesive entity rather than cherry pick. As a traditionalist, it does pain me to say it, but not all the ways of the past should again be proudly trodden as they once were, and certainly not without careful study and understanding. The issue goes far beyond the microscopic one of “fat shaming” that we will discuss now, but ties into the much broader issue of an emergence of Graecophilic liberals who, with little education in the classics, wish to praise Athens as a kind of ancient liberal microcosm.

What about physical fitness? Surely if Edith Hall’s studious reporting is anything to go by the Greeks were just as tolerant of the overweight as they were of everything else, and good on them for doing so! Unfortunately for Edith, this is not the case and the Greeks were big into what we know now to be fat shaming.

“Fat shaming”: A brief fatground and preamble

For those who are fortunate enough not to have come across the term before, I’ll provide a brief extract from the Wikipedia page on “Anti-fat bias”:

Anti-fat bias refers to the prejudicial assumption of personality characteristics based on an assessment of a person as being overweight or obese. It is also known as "fat shaming." Anti-fat bias leads people to associate individuals who are overweight or obese with negative personality traits such as "lazy", "gluttonous", "stupid", "smelly", "slow", or "unmotivated." This bias is not restricted to clinically obese individuals, but also encompasses those whose body shape is in some way found unacceptable according to society's modern standards (although still within the normal or overweight BMI range).

Well, what do you know? A fat person who is lazy? Certainly not. All the fat people I know are high-intensity career people who even fit in time after work to go for a jog, raise a family and cook a healthy, moderately sized evening meal. And I can’t for one moment imagine why people would draw a line between being fat and gluttony. How ridiculous.

Although I knew it existed, I generally laughed off the idea of “fat shaming” as another moronic, hipster idea of such triviality that it would soon fade into the liberal backwater and be forgotten about by the socialist goldfish brains. However, I’ve seen the idea or, if you can call it a movement, gradually start to expand in size like the women that read The Independent. Being exposed to the this video and the support it received for glorifying obesity was the final straw for me to write an article on this issue.

What shocked and angered me even more than a) The idea that this could be considered poetry, and b) Just how little the leviathan on the video realised it was hurting itself and setting a dangerous example for others was the lack of any criticism within the comments section. There seemed to be no one coming to aid of common sense or possessing an iota of independent thought; the comment section was quite simply a chromosomal wasteland. I knew I had to write a rebuttal and the issue of Graecophilia was also playing on my mind, so I thought I would amalgamate the two ideas into an unlikely combined article.

Already fairly well versed in the topics involved, I still knew I had to read hard if I was going to sufficiently rebut the movements: liberal Graecophilia and anti-“fat shaming” that had been imposed upon me. I picked up a copy of The Republic by Plato, some texts referencing Lycurgus, Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle and read some supporting texts I could find on the web, including looking in depth at some important studies on obesity, all of which I hope are sufficiently referenced throughout for further reading.

I’ll first start off my rebuttal by clearly stating my argumentative position which is that firstly, it is intellectually degenerative to in of itself condemn “fat shaming” but doubly that to do so while attesting that ancient Greece is something we should all learn from, and that “all, not just the privileged few” should study the Greek classics is hypocritical and is a cherry picking of the elements within Greek society deemed worthy of learning from; and that of course to simultaneously venerate and criticise a culture is impossible. I will then finally briefly outline why cherry picking cultural elements does not work and inevitably leads to the adopter’s destruction. In the next passage I’m going to be providing mainly a body of information and evidence in support of the afore-stated logical discourse, in that Greek society was indeed “fat shaming”. Greek culture being anti-“fat shaming”: Fat chance!

Homeric Era and Prehistoric Greece:

Let us begin with the element of a society that one it holds most dear: its religion. Greek religion belonged/belongs to the proto Indo-European family of religious traditions, along with Celtic, Slavic, Iberian and Norse paganism as well as Hinduism. Gods were, of course, as is the way in more mainstream religions such as Christianity, idealized role models who served as the perfect standard towards which the common folk should strive. We know of the Greek’s religion through many pieces of evidence both archaeological and textual, but probably the best collection of texts in reference to the Gods are Theogeny, Works and Days by Hesiod and The Illiad and the Odyssey by Homer.

Within the Greek mythos was the demi-God Heracles, son of Zeus and Alcmene, a mortal woman. Heracles was venerated in every Greek city state, predominantly Sparta, where he was considered to be the ancestor of all Spartan people and the reason for their exceptional strength. I need not go into detail about the kind of figure that Heracles was, as you the reader will already surely be aware, but what I will state is that Heracles was not only respected for his strength, but worshipped, especially also in Thebes where he was said to have been in born.

Heracles was not the only “ripped” figure in Greek mythology who was a role model for the people. Pretty much all of the Gods and indeed Goddesses possessed awesome physiques. Now think for a moment, if they were tolerant of obesity and slothfulness, wouldn’t there be at least one fat God or a story about the twelve main courses of Hercules rather than a tale of tremendous physical endurance?

Spartan Society and Lycurgus’s Constitution

Particularly in Sparta, men and women alike would engage in intense exercise regardless of their prospective or future occupational pursuit. It was required of all young men to undergo physical training in a school know as the Agoge from age 7, in aid of cultivating physical virtues in connection with their believed sportive ancestry. The Spartans also advocated a eugenics program to weed out the lazy and unfit in honour of their “tolerance” towards the morbidly obese. Still feel like learning from the classics, Edith?

To confirm my point with evidence, in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, the Greek Plutarch visited Sparta to collect since extinct sources which were significantly older to reconstruct a history of the philosophies of the Spartan people from 900BC to the erosion of Sparta in the 3rd century BC. He was particularly interested in the Spartan legal institution, brought in by the philosopher Lycurgus. In his biographical account Sayings of the Spartans, Plutarch writes:

Lycurgus, the lawgiver, wishing to recall the citizens from the mode of living then existent, and to lead them to a more sober and temperate order of life, and to render them good and honorable men (for they were living a soft life). He reared two puppies of the same litter; and one he accustomed to dainty food, and allowed it to stay in the house; the other he took afield and trained in hunting. Later he brought them into the public assembly and put down some bones and dainty food and let loose a hare. Each of the dogs made for that to which it was accustomed, and, when the one of them had overpowered the hare, he said, "You see, fellow-citizens, that these dogs belong to the same stock, but by virtue of the discipline to which they have been subjected they have turned out utterly different from each other, and you also see that training is more effective than nature for good." But some say that he did not bring in dogs which were of the same stock, but that one was of the breed of house dogs and the other of hunting dogs; then he trained the one of inferior stock for hunting, and the one of better stock he accustomed to dainty food. And afterwards, as each made for that to which it had become accustomed, he made it clear how much instruction contributes for better or worse, saying, "So also in our case, fellow-citizens, noble birth, so admired of the multitude, and our being descended from Heracles does not bestow any advantage, unless we do the sort of things for which he was manifestly the most glorious and most noble of all mankind, and unless we practice and learn what is good our whole life long."

So, in essence, what it was that Lycurgus was trying to teach was that environmental conditioning was important for developing character, and that it is possible for a person of poor initial potential to perform better than a person with a high potential given the adequate discipline and training. In this example, the unconditioned, IE the fat, are the dogs who were given “dainty food” which turned out poorly for them when they had to catch a hare, i.e., do something useful!

The Socratic School: Socrates, Xenophon, Aristotle and Plato.

Though of course of great interest to those who love to learn about European history and culture, liberals will likely turn their nose up at the examples I have used so far, so let us turn to something a little more “high brow” and look at the Socratic school of philosophy. I think this was more of what Edith of the Guardian had in mind.

An interesting fact about Socrates, and one that people often forget to mention, is that Socrates was a military veteran. Not only well versed and trained in matters of the mind, he was a well conditioned soldier in his youth and fought in at least three conflicts during the Peloponnesian War between the state of Athens and its allies and the forces of Sparta. Socrates made several points throughout the Socratic dialogues alluding to the importance of physical fitness not merely to personal excellence but to the flourishing of the state. I think the best one can be found in Plato’s The Republic, a book discussing the ideal state wherein an entire chapter is dedicated to the importance of physical exercise in a citizen’s excellence and in turn a flourishing society. I will leave you the reader to go and enjoy The Republic in your own time and briefly touch upon a passage from Memorabilia by Xenophon, a student of Socrates. In the book, Socrates is having a discussion with another one of his students, Epigenes, and notices that Epigenes is in poor condition for a young man, starting the following dialogue:

Socrates: You look as if you need exercise, Epigenes. Epigenes: Well, I’m not an athlete, Socrates. Socrates: …Why, many, thanks to their bad condition, lose their life in the perils of war or save it disgracefully: many, just for this same cause, are taken prisoners, and then either pass the rest of their days, perhaps, in slavery of the hardest kind, or, after meeting with cruel sufferings and paying, sometimes, more than they have, live on, destitute and in misery. Many, again, by their bodily weakness earn infamy, being thought cowards. Or do you despise these, the rewards of bad condition, and think that you can easily endure such things? And yet I suppose that what has to be borne by anyone who takes care to keep his body in good condition is far lighter and far pleasanter than these things. Or is it that you think bad condition healthier and generally more serviceable than good, or do you despise the effects of good condition? And yet the results of physical fitness are the direct opposite of those that follow from unfitness. The fit are healthy and strong; and many, as a consequence, save themselves decorously on the battle-field and escape all the dangers of war; many help friends and do good to their country and for this cause earn gratitude; get great glory and gain very high honors, and for this cause live henceforth a pleasanter and better life, and leave to their children better means of winning a livelihood. I tell you, because military training is not publicly recognized by the state, you must not make that an excuse for being a whit less careful in attending to it yourself. For you may rest assured that there is no kind of struggle, apart from war, and no undertaking in which you will be worse off by keeping your body in better fettle. For in everything that men do the body is useful; and in all uses of the body it is of great importance to be in as high a state of physical efficiency as possible. Why, even in the process of thinking, in which the use of the body seems to be reduced to a minimum, it is matter of common knowledge that grave mistakes may often be traced to bad health. And because the body is in a bad condition, loss of memory, depression, discontent, insanity often assail the mind so violently as to drive whatever knowledge it contains clean out of it. But a sound and healthy body is a strong protection to a man, and at least there is no danger then of such a calamity happening to him through physical weakness: on the contrary, it is likely that his sound condition will serve to produce effects the opposite of those that arise from bad condition. And surely a man of sense would submit to anything to obtain the effects that are the opposite of those mentioned in my list. Besides, it is a disgrace to grow old through sheer carelessness before seeing what manner of man you may become by developing your bodily strength and beauty to their highest limit. But you cannot see that, if you are careless; for it will not come of its own accord.

As the preceding passage outlines, physical proficiency was, and I believe for good reason, considered to be an essential element of self-mastery irrespective of the occupation, age or intention of the person exercising and it was a disservice to oneself to be in poor physical condition. Those who were in good physical fitness were of more use to their family, friends and the state and Socrates believed (correctly, as I will explain later) that a person with suboptimal physical fitness is also inevitably intellectually suboptimal. If Socrates was truly as intelligent as we can from inference assume, and if we indeed “should all learn the classics” then it would be unwise not to follow the advice of such a decorated thinker and military veteran in ignoring, ipso facto, the leftist objection to fat shaming. Either that, or we ought to disavow the Greek culture altogether.

Ok, enough with references to these high-brow authors, how do we know that they were representative of the people? The general masses may have thought differently, and been more progressive. I hardly think so. To briefly summarise the form of occupation for 90% of citizens -excluding women, children and the small minority of pensioners- was in manual labour. It can be surmised that the majority of individuals worked in agriculture with others working in mining, sculpture, craftwork and the military and were by extension in good physical condition if not underweight. Only a small minority of jobs, often up at the top of the class ladder, were sedentary enough for it to even be possible for a person to become fat even if they wanted to. It must be then stated that fat statesmen and judges were certainly not a rarity though, but were often the subject of mocking in Greek comedies and also the world’s oldest joke book, Philogelos. I suppose you could call that “institutionalized fat shaming”.

Some basic science behind the benefits of physical fitness and “fat shaming.”

Now we have briefly explored fat shaming in ancient Greece, and we have learnt that the heffalumps over at the Guardian are the ones who think there is so much to learn from ancient Greece, let us examine Socrates’ main argument alongside some contemporary studies and see if they still stand (fat pun not intended):

Socrates: … it is matter of common knowledge that grave mistakes may often be traced to bad health. And because the body is in a bad condition, loss of memory, depression, discontent, insanity often assail the mind so violently as to drive whatever knowledge it contains clean out of it.

Socrates drew a parallel between bad health and a poor intellect, as does this study from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden:

The study, which including 1.2 million young adults, noted an increase in cognitive performance amongst the group who regularly exercised. I am not a biologist, but I would hypothesis that this link is likely as a result of a) An increase in the release of stimulating endorphins and b) the ability to supply the brain with adequate oxygen due to better cardiovascular fitness.

This study from Allergan Inc., a gastric band company, also supports Socrates’ argument. According to the study, obesity has a hindering effect on the US economy to the tune of $73.1 billion per year as a result of absenteeism.

Just doing a small amount of cursory research and applying common sense, it is easy to determine that Socrates was right: fat people are a drain on the economy, they have lower IQs than people who exercise, have a higher rate of unemployment in the West (likely as a result of the only obese people in the third world being drug barons) and are five times more likely to be diagnosed with depression. No doubt though that as usual the left will make up unscientific excuses for all of these phenomena.

They can come up with all the excuses they want, but this article by Milo Yiannopolous, entitled “Science proves it: Fat-shaming works” has elegantly checkmated them all:

"[I]f people feel shit about themselves, they’re more likely to change. A landmark study by obesity experts in 2014 found that a “desire to improve self-worth” was one of the most important motivating factors encouraging people to lose weight. What does this tell us? That encouraging fatties to “love themselves,” as the fat acceptance movement does, is the worst possible message you could send people if you want them to lose weight."

We would all, of course, wish for a society that is as intelligent as possible, so why, then, as the Socrates noticed, should we advocated a society in which the body is malnourished (or “overnourished”) and in turn so is the brain? If we conservatives choose to be derogatory to the very cause of that which left and right alike consider to be negative, IE suboptimal intelligence, then where is the issue? Where is the logic in sparing an individual’s feelings in exchange for a long term illness? Not telling an overweight person they are doing themselves harm is akin to encouraging someone not telling a to go and get their cough checked out. Though at least for most smokers this will only be precaution, whilst a fat person risks death at every moment.

I hope you can take away a number of facts, both historical and scientific, with you to wage war against cellulite and liberal Graecohiles. As we have determined, the Greeks did not think very highly of obesity at all, and were not as tolerant as Edith Hall from The Guardian would like to deceive you into believing.

We’ve also taught another valuable lesson: you cannot have your cake and eat it too. Either “the classics are for all to learn from” or they’re not. Edith may as well write an article now entitled “Greeks were bigots; shove your classics up your arse”.

It is, of course, intellectually bankrupt to unquestionably revere, accept or even revile aspects of a culture without an understanding of the cultural and political diaspora that surrounds them and ergo the reasons why such a custom was an aspect of the culture in the first place. This is the dangerous route down which students of Greek history are beginning to descend down as fragments of culture ought not to be analysed without a perception of the whole. The irony is that it is more often than not conservatives who are accused of employing a “pick and choose” mentality on issues such as immigration or Islam, in which we are “picking on specific cases”. Well, perhaps it is time that the left pick and choose. Pick and choose what your stance is on Hellenic culture! As conservatives, we would do will to carefully study and value the wisdom bestowed upon us by those who came before, as long as we are firstly always aware of the context within which behaviours existed and hence gain a full understanding of a philosophy within is context, and even more importantly remain vigilant in adopting elements of culture independently of the context within which they originated as this inevitably results in incompatibility and cultural dissonance, like trying to run a new piece of software on a computer that’s hardware was never built to run it in the first place.

We need to dispel the idea that we can cherry pick different aspects of different cultures and ideas and blend them together to create an amazing modern concoction of philosophy. Well, by that logic, the city of London should be a paradise by now, should it not? Oh dear.

This issue goes far deeper than the regressive left’s new-found and hypocritical reverence of Hellenic culture, despite their rejection of aspects of this culture such as fat shaming where it feels convenient, this issue permeates all current affairs -and in actuality perennial thought- as the concept of cherry picking aspects of a culture is dangerously wide-spread.

A subject for another day, I will briefly touch upon the example of democracy in order to prove my point: there are very few people in the modern West that would disagree with the idea of democracy, but in actuality it is plain to see that democracy often does not adequately function as an electoral system because it was taken out of its original context: ancient Athenian morality and theology. Within this context, democracy functioned more efficiently due to the moral education of Athenian citizens and the theological values imbued within the system that made it possible for the masses to make objectively “correct” electoral decisions. Democracy has been taken out of this context and implemented into an intellectually and morally bankrupt society and hence cannot function efficiently.

If you can’t accept Greek philosophy on fat shaming, you quite simply can’t praise Athens for its tolerance of homosexuality, its politics or its theology, because they belong within the same self-contained cultural Jenga tower. You take one piece out, the entire thing falls apart into nonsense. It is nigh on impossible to symbiose ideas and mannerisms from different geopolitical, religious and cultural contexts without producing psychological dissonance, as globalisation has taught us and in turn informed us of the pattern generally. Ergo, to take, for example, some Athenian ideas irrespective of their context would be doomed to failure; in many ways, ironically, this was one of the things which caused Athens’ eventual downfall!

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I will leave with this final remark, I believed fittingly, from the Greek poet Hesiod’s Works and Days:

“I mean you well, Perses, you great idiot, and I will tell you. Look, badness is easy to have; you can take it by handfuls without effort. The road that way is smooth and starts here beside you. But between us and virtue the immortals have put what will make us sweat. The road to virtue is long and goes steep up hill, hard climbing at first, but the last of it, when you get to the summit (if you get there) is easy going after the hard part.”

Do not ever be afraid of causing offense, ,making jokes or living your life on the side of truth. Tell a person that they are doing harm to themselves with a clear conscience as long as you do it for the right reason: the encouragement of health and wellbeing.

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