up my idiosyncrasies – Plato
by richibi
“The School Of Athens“ (1510-1511)
_____
he sounds just like you, my friend said,
who’d bought me the works of Plato,
for C***mas maybe, or my birthday, or
maybe just because he knew I’d very
much appreciate them
we were reading him together, as is
always my inclination, his Meno
according to my calculations,
Socrates was doing most of the
talking, with Meno, a Sophist
acolyte, a school of philosophy then,
prove anything by using the right
arguments
lawyers, of course, ensued, politicians
and rhetoric, the art of proving anything
by using the right arguments
philosophy had reached a structural,
indeed an existential, impasse, why,
they therefore wondered, philosophy
wherein it entered a phase of moral
speculation, Stoicism, Epicureanism,
Scepticism, Cynicism, and can you
blame them, theories about the
stars, the moon, the world, even
matter itself, had become so
questionable, was it fire, air, water,
atoms, at its source, who knew
I thought so too, I said, and told
him that Plato’s were the first
texts I studied in philosophy when
I entered university, that’s where I
learned to talk like that, philosophy
from the scratch, as my German
teacher would’ve said, which is to
say, from its very beginnings,
whence I could view, I figured, the
evolution of received wisdom in
Western culture
I was young then, the young have
such dreams
my father had been agnostic, ever
asking questions, though we were
being raised Catholic, my sister
and I, on account of our mother
tongue, our entire community,
having been historically linked
with that religion, and cause my
parents wanted us to be educated
in French
an existentialist crisis would
eventually follow, I intuited, as
indeed it did, so I majored in
philosophy
Socrates taught me to ask
questions, that no one had
all the answers
Plato, usurping his master’s voice,
created the paradigm for our present
version of a Divinity, and Its Paradise
there is an ideal version of any
item we might consider, he spouted,
an ideal table, for instance, exists
of which every material table is an
imperfect example
to virtue, love, beauty, truth, he
applied the same principle, which
early erudite Catholics, Augustine,
Thomas Aquinas, for instance, and
others, despite rejecting all of the
other Greek cultural achievements,
appropriated in order to bolster their
impression of God, the ideal of the
Ideal
this lasted uncontested for just
over a thousand years
for a thousand years our salvation
had been extraterrestrial,
supranatural, this, our very,
perhaps only, existence, an
imperfect reflection of somewhere
else an ideal, a mere simulacrum,
we were, a metaphor
Socrates had only asked questions,
what is virtue, what is justice, what
is beauty, truth
Plato presumed to have known the
answers
Aristotle is making a comeback,
whose method, in opposition to
his contemporaneous forebear,
was much more like Charles
Darwin‘s, working from the facts,
which proved then, and are
proving still now, to be multifarious,
diverse, astonishing, and nearly
enough to make you believe in
God/dess again, this time, however,
through the back door
or in a multiplicity, a panoply, a
very pavilion, even, of natural
deities, otherwise known as
angels, for better or for worse
God/dess bless, or angels
Richard
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