Plato | Richibi's Weblog

January 24, 2018

String Quartet no 35 in D minor, Op 42 – Haydn

“Joseph Haydn“ (ca. 1791)

_____________

for, especially, Collin

Haydn’s Opus 42 was written in 1785,
he would’ve been 53, which might
explain his return to a less
ideologically driven music than his
earlier more vociferous compositions,
one gets more conservative, nearly by
definition, as one gets older

there is no vehemence in this quartet,
it is meant to merely delight listeners,
lords and ladies looking to be
impressed, there is no call to arms
here, there’s even a minuet

the final movement, the presto, might
seem urgent, but is rather, I think,
engaging than peremptory, more
entertaining than adamant

there’s only one string quartet in the
Opus 42, usually there are six in
Haydn’s opuses, or opera, the piece
is also terse, a wonderland of
extraordinary music within the span
of, however improbably, just 13
minutes

Haydn seems to be giving us his idea
of the string quartet, a nearly Platonic
proposition, in a nutshell

Plato thought that there was an ideal
string quartet somewhere up there in
an ordering space, a mystical
system of specifically representative
entities, determining the accuracy of
definitions, religions presently
struggle with that, the inflexibility of
their intractable propositions, Haydn
was giving us something to think
about, a string quartet to define the
very ages

note the recurrence of the original
theme always with all of its
permutations

note the rhythmic consistency,
though the several movements are
decidedly, and effectively, divided
according to their strict tempos

note that all, though here and there
a strident note may appear, the
tonality, the key, the modality, is
constant

this will change

but for now we have the very essence
of the Classical Period

and it’s hot

R ! chard

psst: to a friend who’s become impressed
by my choice, incidental of course,
of cellists, I would suggest it has
more to do, perhaps, with its sonority,
the low thrum of their instrument, it
  can really unsettle one’s kundalini,
the sleeping serpent at the base of
the spine, and not so much the
individual cellist, maybe

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April 6, 2017

Aristotle, an objection

“The School Of Athens“ (1510 – 1511)

Raphael

_______

upon reviewing my Socrates, Plato, and
Aristotle from a series of university
lectures I’ve been following, I came upon
a discovery so egregious, I couldn’t
believe I hadn’t seen it before, the old
story of the forest and the trees, I guess

upon hearing that the Oracle at Delphi
had replied that it was Socrates to those
who’d wondered who the wisest man
was, Socrates, abashed, began to seek
out wise men to disprove the Oracle,
but whenever Socrates asked of them
what is virtue, what is justice, what is
knowledge, for instance, the answers
were always inconclusive, they always
seemed to depend on perspective –
virtue, justice, knowledge were in the
eye of the beholder – though Plato
later putting in his own definitions
called them Ideals, a chair partook,
for instance, of an overarching
chairness somewhere, as did indeed
virtue, knowledge and justice, which
inferred another ideal universe
contiguously, of which our own
universe supplied only imperfect
renditions

you can hear the seeds of Heaven and
God already in all of that, way before
Christianity, not to mention Original
Sin

it also suggests an implacable order

Socrates wouldn’t’ve liked that

but Aristotle, with a much more critical
mind than Plato’s, less speculative, more
akin to Socrates’, less autocratic, more
inquisitive, begins to try to define,
nevertheless, abstractions, virtue,
knowledge, justice, as though they
indeed existed as ideals

this is putting the cart before the horse,
I thought, in the form of a revelation

an instance exists in the act of creation,
a physical transformation produces a
flower, the flower doesn’t happen
because of the word

a human example

for surviving an aneurysm once, someone,
to my astonishment, had called me
courageous, I’d been, I thought, only
surviving, not an inch of courage, not
even a millimetre

courage, I surmised, is in the eye of the
beholder, it is not at all a template, an
absolute, in my experience

Aristotle goes on to define a host of
Virtues, indeed 11, which come out as
essentially his Eleven Commandments,
on, in fact, courage, among others, all
essentially, and appropriately, moral,
thereby creating the moral realm of
our Western world

Jesus followed

and of course God and Heaven

which, of course, still prevail despite
sound, sober objections

as though we could know

why is this important

because, I think, we must remember
that our assumptions are only that,
and often they’re based on only what
we’ve been told, which is already a
step away from incorrect
interpretation

in the world of false news, check
your references, check your very
words, our lives, it isn’t too much
to say, I believe, depend on it

not to mention our own personal
moral code, our soul, our purpose
for being, which every wo/man
must oversee for hirself

if one has the courage

Richard

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October 30, 2016

what is poetry

“The Poetess“ (1940)

Joan Miró

_____

when Aristotle “proceeds to declare the
parameters of “Poetry” for the ages“, his
definitions of the various poetic
“manner[s] or mode[s] of imitation”
have already been established, his
categorizations are not unlike Darwin’s
categorizations of the species during
a much later age, Aristotle was a natural
scientist much more than he was our
notion of an abstract philosopher, he
traded in facts rather than in the
esoteric musings that Plato, for
instance, pursued, Virtue, Justice,
the Good, his conclusions were more
verifiable

Kant, incidentally, is also famous for
following a similar form of investigation
as he attempted, nearly, for most,
inscrutably, to categorize the elements
of our faculty of understanding

a side story

Kant had stated that at birth we already
have within our perceptual framework
implicit understanding of space and
time, these are not learned through
experience but are already
incorporated within us, he said

many years ago, coming out of a
week-long coma, not knowing where
I was but alone, at that point even
just my consciousness, cause my
body, were it there, would’ve been
under the immaculate white sheets
I could see that would’ve been
shielding my legs

I looked around, could gather motes
upon rays of light that were entering
from what appeared to be a window
on the right, behind sheer white
curtains stirred by a soft breeze,
whirling the shimmering particles
alive in the light before me like
miniature spinning galaxies moving
at the pace of their own infinity

there was no sound

white walls around me stood utterly
still in the purview of my perception,
a door, also white, stood opposite
me on the opposite wall

where am I, I wondered, could this
be heaven, an afterlife, I might’ve
died, I thought, marvelling, no fear,
regret, nothing other than curiosity,
absorption, fascination

I tried to answer my question, where
am I, two dimensions, I figured
after having watched Terence Stamp
exiled by Marlon Brando to a flat
intergalactic window pane in
“Superman“, I hadn’t excluded this
eventuality, however ingloriously
transcendental, as a possible
outcome, I might be in a world with
only two dimensions, height and
width, no depth yet without more
investigation, experience

ergo, Kant, I concluded, was wrong,
our knowledge of space is not inborn
but a product of time and thought like
everything else

later, the white door on the far wall
opened, and a nurse walked in, also,
incidentally, in incandescent white,
and I understood I was alive

Aristotle suggested that our original
double instincts towards poetry were
our propensity to imitate, children
imitating their parents’ even
idiosyncratic mannerisms, for
instance

and rhythm, repetition, preludes to
order, coherence

those two

poetry, I read, is expression
reflecting the heartbeat, essentially,
in all its myriad representations

Richard

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October 23, 2016

Aristotle on poetry

“Aristotle” (1653)

Luca Giordano

___________

so what’s a poem

in an attempt to get a clearer picture
of what a poem should be, rather
than trust only my own, however
informed perhaps, opinion – though
it must be added that we all bring
something to that word’s definition,
mine no less worthy than yours,
yours no less worthy than mine – I
thought I’d go back to authoritative
sources to see what they might
have said

and it doesn’t get any earlier and
authoritative than Aristotle, writing
in 350 B.C.E., at the height of
Ancient Greek preeminence,
dissecting the term in his
penetrating and perspicacious,
ahem, “Poetics”

“I propose to treat of Poetry in itself and of its various kinds,
noting the essential quality of each, to inquire into the
structure of the plot as requisite to a good poem; into the
number and nature of the parts of which a poem is
composed; and similarly into whatever else falls within
the same inquiry.“, he says in Part 1 of his
magisterial treatise

and proceeds to declare the parameters
of “Poetry” for the ages

“Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes“,
he proceeds, imitation and rhythm

by imitation I think it best to think of
representation, which is another way,
anyway, of saying imitation, but
much more evocative in this instance,
more attuned to our sense of his word

a poem is a representation then, a
reproduction of something other than
itself

while its rhythm is what George
Gershwin‘s got, and by extension, as
you can see from this video, Gene Kelly

and yes, that means that “Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also
and Dithyrambic poetry, and the music of the flute and of the lyre in
most of their forms, are all in their general conception modes of
imitation.”

so, according to Aristotle, is dance

all, therefore, poems

an interesting elaboration about “Tragedy”
states that it should have the three unities
that I grew up with during my French
Canadian upbringing, the unity of time, of
space, and of action the famous French
Classical dramatists, Racine and Corneille,
applied under the aegis of Louis XlV

not to mention “Tragedy’s“ use of iambic
pentameter, Shakespeare’s ubiquitous
beat, a beat that persevered into the very
Nineteenth Century, in France with
Rostand‘s “Cyrano de Bergerac“, for
instance, and into the Twentieth Century
with Eliot‘s “Murder in the Cathedral“,
about the assassination of Archbishop
Thomas Becket at Canterbury in 1170
under Henry the Second‘s own aegis,
all written as poetry

the most famous play to follow the
three unities in the modern era is
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?“,
the play which I think defines the
Twentieth Century, which takes
place overnight somewhere in a
New England college town, mid-
century, at George and Martha’s

though followed closely by O’Neill‘s
“Long Day’s Journey int Night“,
which transpires from morning, one
day in August, 1912, till midnight, at
the home of, unity of space, note,
the dysfunctional Tyrones

so it appears not much has changed
about poetry, Aristotle got a lot of
mileage out of his early definition,
nearly 2500 years

makes you wonder why so much
attention was paid instead to
Plato, his contemporary, the
mystic, who would’ve banned
poetry, he thought it was
subversive

Richard

psst: for a modern day application
of the three unities, watch
“In Treatment“, a television
series, which takes place
in a psychotherapist’s office,
each episode a session,

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August 11, 2016

to Socrates – on monotheism‏

“The Sacrifice of Isaac“ (1598)

Caravaggio

________

by very definition, the inevitable

result of monotheism, Socrates,

is war, if there is one authority it

will eventually be opposed by a

contrary, however picayune,

however trivial, opinion, see the

Protestant Reformation, see Islam,

for instance, now

after which there is disintegration

before Christianity, there were gods,

a pantheon of them symbolically

alive among the rivers, the trees,

the mountains, read Ovid for an

exhilarating description, wars were

waged for territory, not conscience

Judaism, the religion of the Jews,

evolved for their own existence a

deity, Yahweh, who was their one

god, disdainful of foreign others,

an uncharacteristic attitude among

other religions then, becoming one

of the very first monotheistic, and

consequently existentially

compromised faiths, if not the

first

the intent was to rally ideological

support among its adherents so

that they could protect the lands

of Israel and Judah, their ancestral

homes, as they would have it, a

sanctification of the territorial

principle

their Bible, the Torah, a vengeful

work, and the basis for the

Christian Old Testament,

demanded of its followers

unblinking and cruel allegiance,

the sacrifice of Isaac, for instance,

a father required to sacrifice his

own son, however might it ‘ve

been at the last minute averted by

the intercession of an angel sent

by that very Lord

Christ came along to turn the other

cheek

which didn’t last long

indeed Montesquieu, an early

philosopher of the French

Enlightenment, tells of the

King’s librarian of Chinese

texts, who had been converted

to Catholicism in China, but

who was nonplussed upon his

arrival in Christian France to find

that the French did not do onto

others as they would have them

do unto themselves, nor did they,

more catastrophically, turn the

other cheek

for that matter see what Christian

Europe did to the Americans

Christ’s own followers, once they’d

achieved political prominence, after,

admittedly, 300 years of persecution

by the prevailing Roman authorities,

set their own deity, God, on high,

indeed beyond the rivers, the

mountains, the trees into the very

ineffable, the inscrutable abstract,

and squelched any opposition for

the next thousand and some years,

the philosophical underpinnings of

which was the work of your

contemporary, Plato, Socrates, his

ideal of the Ideal

Augustine signed those recalibrated

papers with his “City of God“, it took

the Renaissance to make a dent in its

armour, and another several centuries

to declare the Christian God dead,

Time magazine in the ’60s, on the

heels of Nietzsche‘s nihilistic

pronouncement some 70 years earlier,

that God had exited history

what we are left with, Socrates, is every

wo/man for hirself, therefore the Age of

Human Rights, for better or for worse,

otherwise many of us would’ve been

guillotined, burnt at the stake, stoned

to death, by now

what do you think

I’ll bet I can tell, you think that every

wo/man owes allegiance to what s/he

believes in, even to inexorable death,

however impractical, unfortunate, or

fateful, if your exemplary life has

anything to say about it

cheers

Richard

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August 5, 2016

to Socrates

bust of Socrates

__________

The way to gain a good reputation

is to endeavour to be what you

desire to appear” – Socrates

having lost faith in the natural

philosophers, Thales, Anaximander,

Anaximenes, Socrates, it’s no wonder

you turned to more introspective

speculation, what is virtue rather than

what is the world

but thereby you ran right into the wall

of the word, which had been there from

the very beginning, but so intimate as

to not be able to see the forest for its

trees

what is virtue, you wondered, but

got caught up in the fray of, even

conflicting, opinions, making it

clear that everyone had a different

answer, what could that mean

it could only mean that virtue was in

the eye of the beholder, not as your

disciple Plato would have it, that we

all partook of an ideal Virtue, never

real, a theoretical abstraction merely,

but serving nevertheless as its

authoritative standard

but who would’ve set that standard,

you would’ve asked, never stopping

at so fragile a conclusion, setting the

tone for proper philosophy, however

ill the lesson ‘s since been learned

the proper answer to any and every

question is ultimately another

question, that is the true lesson of

philosophy, an observation, sir, to

build a life on

questions mean you’re learning

thank you, Socrates

Richard

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July 30, 2016

up my idiosyncrasies – Plato‏

“The School Of Athens“ (1510-1511)

Raphael

_____

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,

the Sophists, which claimed it could

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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March 5, 2014

“Meditations”, Book 5 – Marcus Aurelius

“In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present – I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world? Or have I been made for this, to lie in the bed-clothes and keep myself warm? – But this is more pleasant. – Dost thou exist then to take thy pleasure, and not at all for action or exertion? Dost thou not see the little plants, the little birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees working together to put in order their several parts of the universe? And art thou unwilling to do the work of a human being, and dost thou not make haste to do that which is according to thy nature? – But it is necessary to take rest also. – It is necessary: however nature has fixed bounds to this too: she has fixed bounds both to eating and drinking, and yet thou goest beyond these bounds, beyond what is sufficient; yet in thy acts it is not so, but thou stoppest short of what thou canst do. So thou lovest not thyself, for if thou didst, thou wouldst love thy nature and her will. But those who love their several arts exhaust themselves in working at them unwashed and without food; but thou valuest thy own own nature less than the turner values the turning art, or the dancer the dancing art, or the lover of money values his money, or the vainglorious man his little glory. And such men, when they have a violent affection to a thing, choose neither to eat nor to sleep rather than to perfect the things which they care for. But are the acts which concern society more vile in thy eyes and less worthy of thy labour?”

“Meditations“, Book 5, 1

Marcus Aurelius

___________

though Marcus Aurelius produces
a seemingly logical argument in the
first paragraph of his fifth book of
meditations, his premises are not
air-tight

are we meant to “work”, a notion
already roundly infiltrating Christian
ideology, by the “sweat of its brow”,
as it were, at the time of Marcus
Aurelius, with those roots already in
early Stoicism, with Zeno of Citium,
a good 350 years before Christ

this notion is alive and well, indeed
thriving still, in the Protestant Ethic,
where very salvation is achieved
through labour, a consequence of
the Fall, which is to say, the expulsion
from the Garden of Eden

and Utilitarianism, where effort, which
is to say, work, is required to maximize
happiness, minimize suffering

these are profound pathways based
on faith, not necessarily ineluctable,
Epicureanism, an opposite philosophy,
of savouring the moment, though less
purported, less proclaimed, appears
ever flourishing nevertheless in our
voluptuous 21st Century

Marcus Aurelius brings up another
issue tangentially here, though he
expounds on it in later passages,
that of the primacy of either the
person or the community, a central
question of our times, socialism
versus democracy

he favours community, after Plato,
so, incidentally, does Jesus

these are not easy questions to
answer, what, essentially, are the
conditions required before one
starts to smell the flowers, is
smelling the flowers an abomination
when people are cruelly suffering,
dying

how can I help, should I, and when
do I say no to myself

therefore philosophy

your life, indeed your very next step,
depend on it

cheers

Richard

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January 23, 2014

“Meditations”, Book 3 – Marcus Aurelius‏

“If thou workest at that which is before thee, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to distract thee, but keeping thy divine part pure, as if thou shouldst be bound to give it back immediately; if thou holdest to this, expecting nothing, fearing nothing, but satisfied with thy present activity according to nature, and with heroic truth in every word and sound which thou utterest, thou wilt live happy. And there is no man who is able to prevent this.”

“Meditations“, Book 3, 12

Marcus Aurelius

_________

the idea of the virtuous man, or the
interpretation of Marcus Aurelius of
such a person, goes back of course to
Socrates by way of Plato, 427 – 347
B.C., who’s ideal was primarily
political, what to achieve within a
political order, rather than a private
meditation, an advice rather than
a contemplation as in Marcus
Aurelius, 121 – 180 A.D., 550,
not inconsequential, years later

other moral perspectives meanwhile
applied, Epicureanism, for instance,
notably, after which the stranglehold
of Christianity produced not philosophy
but dogma, for a subservient and,
biblically labeled, fallen people,
nearly fifteen hundred years spent
trying to figure out how many angels
fit through the eye of a needle,
essentially, how many irrationalities
could prove the existence, and
authority, of a mandated God

René Descartes inadvertently in this
very quest, but not before 1637, put
an end to that, introduced a new, and
revolutionary, perspective, “I think,
therefore I am“, which put the individual
instead of the Church in the driver’s seat,
this, if it didn’t bring on the Renaissance,
at least gave it a significant push

but because of his famous scientific
method, studies afterwards in what
we now know as the humanities
became more empirical than
specifically moral, how do we
perceive rather than how do we live
according to what is right or wrong,
Nietzsche‘s “Beyond Good and Evil“,
1886, reoriented that investigation,
as it happened, ominously, in an age
where any kind of god had become
irrelevant, Beethoven would be
transformed into a Hitler, an
uncomfortably fateful Übermensch,
Superman

now philosophy is concerned with
language, what do we mean when
we say what do we mean, and can
anybody understand that

our closest moralist, our modern day
Marcus Aurelius, is at present Miss
Manners, whom I wholeheartedly
recommend

as well as, of course, Marcus Aurelius

Richard

psst: Miss Manners‘ question and answer
format, incidentally, is not at all unlike
what Plato does in his Socratic dialogues,
she just has a larger, more flip audience

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April 6, 2013

Nemo – “Ennead I” by Plotinus (17 )‏

Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2013 00:08:23 +0000
To: richibi@hotmail.com
From: comment-reply@wordpress.com
Subject: [New comment] “Ennead I” by Plotinus

Richard,

You wrote, ” should there, in the instance, however, be a One, an Absolute, we would not, nor can anyway ever, from our intrinsically divergent perspectives, be able to, in any meaningful way, know It”

Our opinions are not “intrinsically”, but “accidentally” divergent. If they are intrinsic, they would not be affected by changes in our circumstances. But often times our opinions are affected by external circumstances. Therefore, they are not “intrinsic”. For instance, your story about the color of the wall reminds me of a similar story of how the English chemist John Dalton discovered color blindness. He himself was color blind but never realized it until his mother (or aunt) disagreed with him on the color. Without such a defect, there would be no disagreement.

Truth cannot be a sum of opinions or even an unanimous decision of all people. Why? Because the sum of contrary opinions amount to nothing, and the sum of contradictory opinions only lead to confusion, since people are never unanimous about anything.

To use a classic Platonic analogy: If you have a serious disease and want to be healed. Will you call everyone in from the street, hold a public assembly and have them vote for a treatment of your disease? Of course not. You’ll seek out the specialist in the field and have him examine you and give you the proper diagnosis and treatment. Because he possesses the knowledge, whereas the others don’t. Even a grain of truth is worth more than a boatload of false opinions.

Having said the above, however, I agree that the truth may be multifaceted, like the color of light shining through a prism. Because our senses have their limitations, we can only see part of the spectrum, similarly, our rational faculty may also be limited, and we only see the Truth in part. This is why dialogues such as we’re having are meaningful. That we may see the rainbow, while not losing sight of our own color.

“So please your majesty
That we may wake the king: he hath slept long.”
King Lear Act IV Scene VII

oof, Nemo, again where do I start, I’ll try to

tackle merely Truth here, deconstruct It, so

that we can know what we’re even talking

about

what do you mean by Truth

something corresponds to what it is that

we see, hear, feel, I would think, to be

locked in my head, my spirit, a fundamental

unity, without the support of an underlying

Reality, would be horrible, a profound, and

unbearable, solitude, I don’t want any more

to even try to imagine it, though, in my

youthful invincibilty, I once did, it would

nearly drive me, sometimes, I remember,

crazy

I would try to guess what people would

say in their next breath and found that

mostly I could do it, that mostly I could

get it right, which didn’t do much for an

outside Reality

but, again, babies must learn to separate,

not easily, their suddenly unfamiliar world

from their initially undifferentiated senses,

their identity from what we understand to

be Reality, I’d been merely atavistically

revisiting that fundamental experience

I first fell in love, incidentally, when I met

someone I wasn’t able to preempt, to my

utter fascination, at which point I was

forced to acknowledge not only Reality

but also probably a Heaven, it has

become a condition, I fall in love with

only people from other planets, or, if

you like, dimensions



so, Nemo, I am also subservient to an

ideal, or even an Ideal

but it, or It, is my utter fabrication, though,

manifestly, not an uninformed one

my Truth is that ethereal, a bedrock,

however, of my nevertheless basically

nebulous view of life, made out of,

indeed, thin air

my opinions are therefore entirely

speculative, except for my

understanding of myself

I think, according to Descartes, therefore

I am, and of that, of myself, I am not at

all speculative, for I think, listen

Truth, incidentally, is a function of our

species, assuming that it is a formal

Reality is akin to placing ourselves,

as we once did, at the centre of the

Universe, we were apparently

egregiously wrong about that, it

seems to be generally now agreed,

I suspect an Absolute, or Idealized,

potential Reality, is asking for hubris,

and too often, incidentally, we get it,

see wars, torture, man’s inhumanity

to not only man



about the world which has mathematical

dimensions we are mostly in agreement,

two plus two will always equal four in our

rational construct, and Science seems to

flow pretty smoothly from that

therefore Truth with respect to matter I

will not question, it is the grid we are all

at least comfortable with, like speaking

the same language, despite its even

basic insufficiencies, these fairly easy

mostly to patch up with persistence

and ingenuity

but Plato’s Truth, Ideal, or Absolute, is

of a more noumenal, spiritual, which is

to say, abstract, order, and as such, like

Beauty, is in the eye of the beholder,

Truth is what we think it is

is John Dalton wrong to have seen a

divergent colour, and who could tell

him that his blue was green, his red,

orange, when these were categorically

his impressions, dissent is a matter

merely of concensus

Truth, I believe, is our accommodation,

and is no more than the sum of its

collective parts, the truths that

scientists unearth are Science, not

Truth, Reality, not Wisdom

other worlds would have entirely

different conceptions of the Universe

for being other than we, us

we are assuming we have the answer,

Nemo, to imponderables

therefore, not Philosophy, I insist,

but Art, and metaphorical rather

than categorical imperatives

see Beethoven for that, and / or Proust

Richard

psst: according to these two excellent

          programs,

                  Bernard Williams on Descartes

                  Bernard Williams on Descartes (cont.)

           two parts of an interview with an

           authority on Descartes, I could’ve

           easily been a figment of his

           imagination for sounding nearly

           word for word, to my surprise

           and delight, very much like him

           though he probably wouldn’t,

           by my calculations, therefore,

           have loved me

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Tag: Plato

January 24, 2018

String Quartet no 35 in D minor, Op 42 – Haydn

April 6, 2017

Aristotle, an objection

October 30, 2016

what is poetry

October 23, 2016

Aristotle on poetry

August 11, 2016

to Socrates – on monotheism‏

August 5, 2016

to Socrates

July 30, 2016

up my idiosyncrasies – Plato‏

March 5, 2014

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January 23, 2014

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April 6, 2013

Nemo – “Ennead I” by Plotinus (17 )‏