I have written here before about Henry James' novel, THE SACRED FOUNT. Today I'll discuss one detail in it. James offers up a protracted discussion between two characters, each speaking in oddly cryptic fashion, in which they seem to end up stumbling accidentally into a Platonic metaphor -- indeed THE Platonic metaphor, of wisdom as an escape from the darkness of a cave. The unnamed first-person narrator is talking here to Ford Obert. They had first run into each other at the train station at the start of this weekend gathering. Obert is sometimes called "Obert RA," signifying in British usage that he is a member of the Royal Academy. Near the end of the book, Obert has caught up again with narrator to say that he has been thinking about the question they had discussed earlier (to wit, the way the life force can seemingly flow from one member of a couple to another, enervating one and energizing the other). He has found it illuminating. I...
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More than a year ago, someone asked the following question on Quora: "Is there any way to reconcile Plato and Aristotle? I like them both. How strong is the schism between them?" There is much with which I could quarrel in the framing of the question, aside from vagueness. The personal-sounding note, as if the question had gone to school with them both and retained some fondness for their memory. No ... he didn't. They are the collective names given to sets of writings and the systems of ideas we think we find therein. We can understand and appreciate them. The word "like" sounds wrong. "How strong is the schism?" Again, the wording is off. But this is the Trump era, and the predicate "strong" is ubiquitous. My quibbles notwithstanding, two Quorans offered answers to this question at the time. I was one of them. But I won't quote my own answer today. I'll give you a good chunk of the other one, which frankly is...
His name is Plato and we all know in the ghetto That messin with my boy is gonna getcha laid-low. He'll blow your mind, he be really stylin' He's got the mike and got all of the Big Abstractions flying. He's laying down now how it ain't real in the cave, Joe. He's planning our escape so we can look out at the sun yo. He knows how we can make ourselves a truly perfect city, Just kick out all the poets who are trying to make things pirty. Just kick out the musicians who are making us feel pity, And let the wise ones rule, eating cheezburgers with kitty. ------------------------ And yes, I AM ashamed of myself, Thank you for asking.
Plotinus wrote that, yes, the sensible world is a mere imperfect copy of the intelligible world, but he also wrote against the pessimism of the gnostics, against the idea that the sensible world is a bad thing. He wrote thus: “what more beautiful image could there be? After the fire of the intelligible world, what better image of it could there be than our fire? What earth, outside of the intelligible earth, could be better than ours?" In short: yes, we live in a cave looking at shadows, but the cave is not at all a bad place to be. Those who aren't philosophers (most of the species, on Plotinian premises) can never get outside the cave, but that doesn't make their fate too dire. They get to look at all those fascinating shadows on the wall. Meanwhile for those few who can sometimes get out of the cave and look at the real world ands even glimpse the sun, those times are of necessity brief. We'll have to return to the cave. We can resign ourselves to th...
"The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space. It was thus that Plato left the world of the senses, as setting too narrow limits to the understanding, and ventured out beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of the pure understanding. He did not observe that with all his efforts he made no advance...." I don't know German, so of course I have no idea what the original passage as Kant composed it would sound or feel like to someone who does. But Kant's prose has a reputation for, um, Teutonic heaviness. Yet unless his translators have given him a huge gift, this passage shows that he had a light poetic side. It seems to me to speak with great concision to the similarity/difference of Kant and Plato. They are both philosophers who distinguish between the apparently (or provisionally) real world on the one hand and the really real world on the oth...
A participant in Yahoo!Answers asks: "Who is the best atheist philosopher? Out of Bertrand Russell, Nietzsche, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Democritus, etc. who is the greatest/best atheist philosopher of all time?" I answered thus: ----------------------------------------------- Since you've said "etc." I guess we can move beyond your list. I have to answer: George Santayana. A word of bias acknowledged: I'm a Jamesian pragmatist in philosophy myself, and I find reasonable an act of "will to believe" in a God whose existence I can not prove, as part of my effort to lead a productive and satisfying life on earth. But you didn't ask for best fideist. You asked for best atheist. And Santayana, who was something of a protégé of James, became that. He combined Plato in matters of value with Democritus in matters of existence, a fascinating combination. Here's a quote: "Now I was aware, at first in...