Plato Change Quotes

Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.

A sensible man will remember that the eyes may be confused in two ways - by a change from light to darkness or from darkness to light; and he will recognise that the same thing happens to the soul.

Reality is created by the mind. We can change our reality by changing our mind.

Everything changes and nothing remains still.

Let the tutor not merely require a verbal account of what the boy has been taught but the meaning and the substance of it: let him judge how the child has profited from it not from the evidence of his memory but from that of his life. Let him take what the boy has just learned and make him show him dozens of different aspects of it and then apply it to just as many different subjects, in order to find out whether he has really grasped it and make it part of himself, judging the boy's progress by what Plato taught about education. Spewing up food exactly as you have swallowed it is evidence of a failure to digest and assimilate it; the stomach has not done its job if, during concoction, it fails to change the substance and the form of what it is given.

Nowadays, in modern technological culture, sometimes we hear people complain that nothing feels real anymore. Everything in the modern world is plastic or digital or virtual. But I say, that was always life! That is life itself! Plato discussed that things in this life are only shadows of forms. So this is what I mean by the changing and unreal feeling of life.

Plato found mathematics very absorbing because mathematical states never change.

The beginning is the most important part of the work.” Plato

Eventually you ascend the stairs to the street. You think of Plato's pilgrims climbing out of the cave, from the shadow world of appearances toward things as they really are, and you wonder if it is possible to change in this life. Being with a philosopher makes you think.

Plato would hardly need to change a single word of his myth of the cave. Our knowledge would not be able to furnish an answer to his anxiety, his disquietude, his "premonitions." The world would remain for him, "in the light" of our "positive" sciences, what it was - a dark and sorrowful subterranean region - and we would seem to him like chained prisoners. Life would again have to make superhuman efforts, "as in a battle," to break open for himself a path through the truths created by the sciences which "dream of being but cannot see it in waking reality." [1] In brief, Aristotle would bless our knowledge while Plato would curse it.

Too much freedom seems to change into nothing but too much slavery, both for private man and city.

whether in battle or in a court of law, or in any other place, he must do what his city and his country order him; or he must change their view of what is just:

Plato's point is that we can never have true knowledge of anything that is in a constant state of change. We can only have opinions about things that belong to the world of the senses, tangible things. We can only have true knowledge if things that can be understood with our reason.

If our best-educated citizens have no idea how to answer these basic questions, we will struggle to build a democracy that can solve the problems we face, whether they are what to do about climate change, the world’s poor, the problems of Australia’s Indigenous people, or the prospect of a future in which we can genetically modify our offspring. An education in the humanities is as valuable today as it was in Plato’s time.

There are six canons of conservative thought: 1) Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems. A narrow rationality, what Coleridge called the Understanding, cannot of itself satisfy human needs. "Every Tory is a realist," says Keith Feiling: "he knows that there are great forces in heaven and earth that man's philosophy cannot plumb or fathom." True politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which ought to prevail in a community of souls. 2) Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems; conservatives resist what Robert Graves calls "Logicalism" in society. This prejudice has been called "the conservatism of enjoyment"--a sense that life is worth living, according to Walter Bagehot "the proper source of an animated Conservatism." 3) Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, as against the notion of a "classless society." With reason, conservatives have been called "the party of order." If natural distinctions are effaced among men, oligarchs fill the vacuum. Ultimate equality in the judgment of God, and equality before courts of law, are recognized by conservatives; but equality of condition, they think, means equality in servitude and boredom. 4) Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked: separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all. Economic levelling, they maintain, is not economic progress. 5) Faith in prescription and distrust of "sophisters, calculators, and economists" who would reconstruct society upon abstract designs. Custom, convention, and old prescription are checks both upon man's anarchic impulse and upon the innovator's lust for power. 6) Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress. Society must alter, for prudent change is the means of social preservation; but a statesman must take Providence into his calculations, and a statesman's chief virtue, according to Plato and Burke, is prudence.

The beginning is the most important part of the work

Nothing taught by force stays in the soul.

The artistry of the writing is meant to stir the whole of our person, since it’s the whole of that person who must feel the force of philosophy and be changed as a consequence.

Everything changes and nothing remains still. PLATO, Cratylus

Lead us, Evolution, lead us Up the future's endless stair; Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us. For stagnation is despair: Groping, guessing, yet progressing, Lead us nobody knows where. Wrong or justice, joy or sorrow, In the present what are they while there's always jam-tomorrow, While we tread the onward way? Never knowing where we're going, We can never go astray. To whatever variation Our posterity may turn Hairy, squashy, or crustacean, Bulbous-eyed or square of stern, Tusked or toothless, mild or ruthless, Towards that unknown god we yearn. Ask not if it's god or devil, Brethren, lest your words imply Static norms of good and evil (As in Plato) throned on high; Such scholastic, inelastic, Abstract yardsticks we deny. Far too long have sages vainly Glossed great Nature's simple text; He who runs can read it plainly, 'Goodness = what comes next.' By evolving, Life is solving All the questions we perplexed. Oh then! Value means survival- Value. If our progeny Spreads and spawns and licks each rival, That will prove its deity (Far from pleasant, by our present, Standards, though it may well be).

To put it simply, for Plato change equals death and decay. Since the body is the location of death and decay, the human body and all bodies were found lacking. Plato found change so problematic that he imagined divine power existing totally apart from the changing world, as we have seen. God not only did not have a body; he was also separate from all bodies. This is the first theological mistake.

for the man of war must learn the art of number or he will not know how to array his troops, and the philosopher also, because he has to rise out of the sea of change and lay hold of true being, and therefore he must be an arithmetician.

Why is this painful journey so indispensable to the acquisition of true wisdom?…It is as if the mind were a squeamish organ that refused to entertain difficult truths unless encouraged to do so by difficult events. “Happiness is good for the body,” Proust tells us, “but it is grief which develops the strengths of the mind.” These griefs put us through a form of mental gymnastics which we would have avoided in happier times. Indeed, if a genuine priority is the development of our mental capacities, the implication is that we would be better off being unhappy than content, better off pursuing tormented love affairs than reading Plato or Spinoza. (Proust writes) A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and more vital than does a man of genius who interests us.

Plato, in his famous fight against the ancient Sophists, discovered that their “universal art of enchanting the mind by arguments” (Phaedrus 261) had nothing to do with truth but aimed at opinions which by their very nature are changing, and which are valid only “at the time of the agreement and as long as the agreement lasts” (Theaetetus 172). He also discovered the very insecure position of truth in the world, for from “opinions comes persuasion and not from truth” (Phaedrus 260). The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.

And now an hour, maybe, has passed. And they are both drunk: Kenny fairly, George very. But George is drunk in a good way, and one that he seldom achieves. He tries to describe to himself what this kind of drunkenness is like. Well - to put it very crudely - it's like Plato; it's a dialogue. A dialogue between two people. Yes, but not a Platonic dialogue in the hair-splitting, word-twisting, one-up-to-me sense; not a mock-humble bitching match; not a debate on some dreary set theme. You can talk about anything and change the subject as often as you like. In fact, what really matters is not what you talk about, but the being together in this particular relationship. George can't imagine having a dialogue of this kind with a woman, because women can only talk in terms of the personal. A man of his own age would do, if there was some sort of polarity: for instance, if he was a Negro. You and your dialogue-partner have to be somehow opposites. Why? Because you have to be symbolic figures - like, in this case, Youth and Age. Why do you have to be symbolic? Because the dialogue is by its nature impersonal. It's a symbolic encounter. It doesn't involve either party personally. That's why, in a dialogue, you can say absolutely anything. Even the closest confidence, the deadliest secret, comes out objectively as a mere metaphor or illustration which could never be used against you.

And now an hour, maybe, has passed. And they are both drunk: Kenny fairly, George very. But George is drunk in a good way, and one that he seldom achieves. He tries to describe to himself what this kind of drunkenness is like. Well - to put it very crudely - it's like Plato; it's a dialogue. A dialogue between two people. Yes, but not a Platonic dialogue in the hair-splitting, word-twisting, one-up-to-me sense; not a mock-humble bitching match; not a debate on some dreary set theme. You can talk about anything and change the subject as often as you like. In fact, what really matters is not what you talk about, but the being together in this particular relationship.

A sensible man will remember that the eyes may be confused in two ways—by a change from light to darkness or from darkness to light; and he will recognize that the same thing happens to the soul. When he sees it troubled and unable to discern anything clearly, instead of laughing thoughtlessly, he will ask whether, coming from a brighter existence, its unaccustomed vision is obscured by the darkness, in which case he will think its condition enviable and its life a happy one; or whether, emerging from the depths of ignorance, it is dazzled by excess of light.

By the end of the eleventh century,” Edmond said, “the greatest intellectual exploration and discovery on earth was taking place in and around Baghdad. Then, almost overnight, that changed. A brilliant scholar named Hamid al-Ghazali—now considered one of the most influential Muslims in history—wrote a series of persuasive texts questioning the logic of Plato and Aristotle and declaring mathematics to be ‘the philosophy of the devil.

he says that when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.

Human beliefs about the gods have changed, and laws should change with them.

Reality is created by the mind. We can change our reality by changing our mind.” – Plato

δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης. -You cannot step twice into the same river.

That was how you saw it,” Plato corrected. “Things rarely change in our environment. When we see things differently, it is usually we who have changed.

The good man,” says Plato, “is the only excellent musician, because he gives forth a perfect harmony not with a lyre or other instrument but with the whole of his life.

When the modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.

They next proceed to make a law which fixes a sum of money as the qualification of citizenship; the sum is higher in one place and lower in another, as the oligarchy is more or less exclusive; and they allow no one whose property falls below the amount fixed to have any share in the government. These changes in the constitution they effect by force of arms, if intimidation has not already done their work.

Finally, note that strong partnerships are often based on contrasting rather than coinciding strengths, so you’ll want to avoid the comfortable trap of seeking someone too similar to yourself. In Plato’s Republic, guards were taught by poets. Views contrary to your own are always helpful, as sometimes you will see truth in them and effect change, and, if not, you will be stress-testing and ultimately strengthening your own convictions.

The newest song which the singers have,' they will be afraid that he may be praising, not new songs, but a new kind of song; and this ought not to be praised, or conceived to be the meaning of the poet; for any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole State, and ought to be prohibited. So Damon tells me, and I can quite believe him;—he says that when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them. Yes,

The being of God is being-itself. The being of God cannot be understood as the existence of a being alongside others or above others. If God is a being, he is subject to the categories of finitude, especially to space and substance. Even if he is called the “highest being” in the sense of the “most perfect” and the “most powerful” being, this situation is not changed. When applied to God, superlatives become diminutives. They place him on the level of other beings while elevating him above all of them. Many theologians who have used the term “highest being” have known better. Actually they have described the highest as the absolute, as that which is on a level qualitatively different from the level of any being - even the highest being. Whenever infinite or unconditional power and meaning are attributed to the highest being, it has ceased to be a being and has become being-itself. Many confusions in the doctrine of God and many apologetic weaknesses could be avoided if God were understood first of all as being-itself or as the ground of being. The power of being is another way of expressing the same thing in a circumscribing phrase. Ever since the time of Plato it has been known - although it often has been disregarded, especially by the nominalists and their modern followers - that the concept of being as being, or being-itself, points to the power inherent in everything, the power of resisting nonbeing. Therefore, instead of saying that God is first of all being-itself, it is possible to say that he is the power of being in everything and above everything, the infinite power of being.

As researchers of the paranormal, we must understand there are ways to change the rhythm of time within us, ways to change the beat. These ways have been known since the beginnings of civilization, and possibly much earlier. And these ways would require no more effort than simply recognizing the secret rhythms of things. Moreover, we may learn to beat with them and begin to perceive a different kind of space, and ultimately discover an altogether different conception of reality…

Like his teacher Plato, and Plato’s teacher Socrates before him, Aristotle liked to walk as he reflected; so have many important philosophers since, including Nietzsche, who insisted that “only ideas gained through walking have any worth at all.

There's folly in her stride that's the rumor justified by lies I've seen her up close beneath the sheets and sometime during the summer she was mine for a few sweet months in the fall and parts of December ((( To get to the heart of this unsolvable equation, one must first become familiar with the physical, emotional, and immaterial makeup as to what constitutes both war and peace. ))) I found her looking through a window the same window I'd been looking through She smiled and her eyes never faltered this folly was a crime ((( The very essence of war is destructive, though throughout the years utilized as a means of creating peace, such an equation might seem paradoxical to the untrained eye. Some might say using evil to defeat evil is counterproductive, and gives more meaning to the word “futile”. Others, like Edmund Burke, would argue that “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men and women to do nothing.” ))) She had an identity I could identify with something my fingertips could caress in the night ((( There is such a limitless landscape within the mind, no two minds are alike. And this is why as a race we will forever be at war with each other. What constitutes peace is in the mind of the beholder. ))) Have you heard the argument? This displacement of men and women and women and men the minds we all have the beliefs we all share Slipping inside of us thoughts and religions and bodies all bare ((( “Without darkness, there can be no light,” he once said. To demonstrate this theory, during one of his seminars he held a piece of white chalk and drew a line down the center of a blackboard. Explaining that without the blackness of the board, the white line would be invisible. ))) When she left she kissed with eyes open I knew this because I'd done the same Sometimes we saw eye to eye like that Very briefly, she considered an apotheosis a synthesis a rendering of her folly into solidarity ((( To believe that a world-wide lay down of arms is possible, however, is the delusion of the pacifist; the dream of the optimist; and the joke of the realist. Diplomacy only goes so far, and in spite of our efforts to fight with words- there are times when drawing swords of a very different nature are surely called for. ))) Experiencing the subsequent sunrise inhaling and drinking breaking mirrors and regurgitating just to start again all in all I was just another gash in the bark ((( Plato once said: “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” Perhaps the death of us all is called for in this time of emotional desperation. War is a product of the mind; only with the death of such will come the end of the bloodshed. Though this may be a fairly realistic view of such an issue, perhaps there is an optimistic outlook on the horizon. Not every sword is double edged, but every coin is double sided. ))) Leaving town and throwing shit out the window drinking boroughs and borrowing spare change I glimpsed the rear view mirror stole a glimpse really I've believed in looking back for a while it helps to have one last view a reminder in case one ever decides to rebel in the event the self regresses and makes the declaration of devastation once more ((( Thus, if we wish to eliminate the threat of war today- complete human annihilation may be called for. )))

The Socratic dialogue was a spiritual exercise designed to produce a profound psychological change in the participants, and because its purpose was that each person should understand the depth of his ignorance, there was no way that anybody could win. Plato

And further, God should not be regarded as older than His creations by any period of time, but rather by the peculiar property of His own single nature. For the infinite changing of temporal things tries to imitate the ever simultaneously present immutability of His life: it cannot succeed in imitating or equalling this, but sinks from immutability into change, and falls from the single directness of the present into an infinite space of future and past. And since this temporal state cannot possess its life completely and simultaneously, but it does, in the same manner, exist forever without ceasing, it therefore seems to try in some degree to rival that which it cannot fulfill or represent, for it binds itself to some sort of present time out of this small and fleeting moment; but inasmuch as this temporal present bears a certain appearance of that abiding present, it somehow makes those, to whom it comes, seem to be in truth what they imitate. But since this imitation could not be abiding, the unending march of time has swept it away, and thus we find that it has bound together, as it passes, a chain of life, which it could not by abiding embrace in its fullness. And thus if we would apply proper epithets to those subjects, we can say, following Plato, that God is eternal, but the universe is continual.

If the hope of progress is an illusion, how—it will be asked—are we to live? The question assumes that humans can live well only if they believe they have the power to remake the world. Yet most humans who have ever lived have not believed this—and a great many have had happy lives. The question assumes the aim of life is action; but this is a modern heresy. For Plato contemplation was the highest form of human activity. A similar view existed in ancient India. The aim of life was not to change the world. It was to see it rightly.

We need a rebirth of true democracy, followed by a transition to the meritocracy associated with Plato’s Republic. We need the most talented in charge, not the richest. We need a Sparta of the mind, a nation led by mental warriors who can change the world with their genius.

These forays into the real world sharpened his view that scientists needed the widest possible education. He used to say, “How can you design for people if you don’t know history and psychology? You can’t. Because your mathematical formulas may be perfect, but the people will screw it up. And if that happens, it means you screwed it up.” He peppered his lectures with quotations from Plato, Chaka Zulu, Emerson, and Chang-tzu. But as a professor who was popular with his students—and who advocated general education—Thorne found himself swimming against the tide. The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon. In this climate, being liked by your students was a sign of shallowness; and interest in real-world problems was proof of intellectual poverty and a distressing indifference to theory.

Then no motive can be imagined why God should lie? None whatever. Then the superhuman and divine is absolutely incapable of falsehood? Yes. Then is God perfectly simple and true both in word and deed; he changes not; he deceives not, either by sign or word, by dream or waking vision. Your thoughts, he said, are the reflection of my own. You agree with me then, I said, that this is the second type or form in which we should write and speak about divine things. The gods are not magicians who transform themselves, neither do they deceive mankind in any way. I grant that.

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates expresses great fear about democracy because it is, in his mind, synonymous with freedom. The result is tyranny. But modern times have brought us a different understanding of democracy as an ideal. It is how to give the appearance of democracy yet deny it in practice, ensuring that democracy in its false form gives consent by the people to a small group, the oligarchs. This is accomplished through a combination of the people’s silence and a rigged system that changes a working democracy of public participation and deliberation to a charade.

This image of eternity is what we have come to call "time", since along with the creation of the universe he devised and created days, nights, months, and years, which did not exist before the creation of the universe. They are all parts of time, and 'was' and 'will be' are created aspects of time which we thoughtlessly and mistakenly apply to that which is eternal. For we say that it was, is, and will be, when in fact only 'is' truly belongs to it, while 'was' and 'will be' are properties of things that are created and that change over time, since 'was' and 'will be' are both changes.

During World War I, a play would have had short shrift here which showed up General Pershing for a coward; ridiculed the Allies’ cause; brought in Uncle Sam as a blustering bully; glorified the peace party. But when Athens was fighting for her life, Aristophanes did the exact equivalent of all these things many times over and the Athenians, pro-and anti-war alike, flocked to the theatre. The right of a man to say what he pleased was fundamental in Athens. “A slave is he who cannot speak his thought,” said Euripides. Socrates drinking the hemlock in his prison on the charge of introducing new gods and corrupting the youth is but the exception that proves the rule. He was an old man and all his life he had said what he would. Athens had just gone through a bitter time of crushing defeat, of rapid changes of government, of gross mismanagement. It is a reasonable conjecture that he was condemned in one of those sudden panics all nations know, when the people’s fears for their own safety have been worked upon and they turn cruel. Even so, he was condemned by a small majority and his pupil Plato went straight on teaching in his name, never molested but honored and sought after.

I am a man and what I have to recapture is the whole past of the world, I am not responsible only for the slavery involved in Santo Domingo, every time man has contributed to the victory of the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act. In no way does my basic vocation have to be drawn from the past of peoples of color. In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving some black civilization unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of any past. My black skin is not a repository for specific values. Haven’t I got better things to do on this earth than avenge the blacks of the 17th century? I as a man of color do not have the right to hope that in the white man there will be a crystallization of guilt towards the past of my race. I as a man of color do not have the right of stamping down the pride of my former master. I have neither the right nor the duty to demand reparations for my subjugated ancestors. There is no black mission. There is no white burden. I do not want to be victim to the rules of a black world. Am I going to ask this white man to answer for the slave traders of the 17th century? Am I going to try by every means available to cause guilt to burgeon in their souls? I am not a slave to slavery that dehumanized my ancestors. It would be of enormous interest to discover a black literature or architecture from the 3rd century B.C, we would be overjoyed to learn of the existence of a correspondence between some black philosopher and Plato, but we can absolutely not see how this fact would change the lives of 8 year old kids working the cane fields of Martinique or Guadeloupe. I find myself in the world and I recognize I have one right alone: of demanding human behavior from the other.

What I am saying is this: There is internal evidence in at least one of my novels that another reality, an unchanging one, exactly as Parmenides and Plato suspected, underlies the visible phenomenal world of change, and somehow, in some way, perhaps to our surprise, we can cut through to it. Or rather, a mysterious Spirit can put us in touch with it, if it wishes us to see this permanent other landscape. Time passes, thousands of years pass, but at the same instant that we see this contemporary world, the ancient world, the world of the Bible, is concealed beneath it, still. there and still real. Eternally so.

Of old the saying, “Nothing too much,” appeared to be, and really was, well said. For he whose happiness rests with himself, if possible, wholly, and if not, as far as is possible,—who is not hanging in suspense on other men, or changing with the vicissitude of their fortune,—has his life ordered for the best.

When the mind’s eye is fixed on objects illuminated by truth and reality, it understands and knows them, and its possession of intelligence is evident; but when it is fixed on the twilight world of change and decay, it can only form opinions, its vision is confused and its opinions shifting, and it seems to lack intelligence.

It seems as if many church people have been living in Plato’s cave. They think the church enterprise is about “me.” What is at stake is my salvation. The me-and-my-salvation individual “does church” by making a fair exchange of time and money for eternal assurances. But the effect of teaching the fate of the individual soul downplays the beginning of God’s restoration now. It teaches that the important stuff comes later and that “going to heaven” is the benchmark of Christian life. Yet, the Christian life is so much more than any one person’s long-term survival. It is about the world’s future; it is about our hope turning our heads and hearts toward the world.

nature, rather than a concept beyond nature—such as god or gods—is the fundamental basis of our analysis of our affairs and our decisions. This was the single most important difference between Aristotle and his teacher, Plato, who believed that humans needed to find answers to the problems of existence in an invisible world of intangible ideas

The Harmony of the World is the continuation of tye Cosmic Mystery, and the climax of his lifelong obsession. What Kepler attempted here is, simply, to bare the ultimate secret of the universe in an all-embracing synthesis of geometry, music, astrology, astronomy, and epistemology. It was the firat attempt of this kind since Plato, and it is the last to our day. After Kepler, fragmentation of experience sets in again, science is divorced from religion, religion from art, substance from form, matter from mind. The work is divided into five books. The first two deal with the concept of harmony in mathematics; the following three with the applications of this concept to music, astrology, and astronomy, in that order.

For Plato and Socrates, the philosopher is one who lives according to virtue and reason, cultivating the pleasures of the soul and intellect and not the pleasures and passions of the baser desires of the body. The key to this path is grasping first that there are absolutes—absolute truth, goodness, beauty, and other aspects of life. These are universal forms that are recollected from our past lives and ultimately harken back to the One, or the monad, from which all things mysteriously emanated. We, as humans, “see” truly through the soul, and seeing with this higher, awakened eyesight allows us to peer into the higher realm of existence where truth is eternal, not subject to the chaotic flux and temporal finitude and change of this life.

But the ultimate truth is that they aren't dead, those people. The writers of books do not truly die; their characters, even the ones who throw themselves in front of trains or are killed in battle, come back to life over and over again. Books are the means to immortality: Plato lives forever, as do Dickens, and Dr. Seuss, Soames Forsyte, Jo March, Scrooge, Anna Karenina, and Vronsky. Over and over again Heathcliff wanders the moors searching for his Cathy. Over and over again Ahab fights the whale. Through them all we experience other times, other places, other lives. We manage to become much more than our own selves. The only dead are those who grow sere and shriveled within, unable to step outside their own lives and into those of others. Ignorance is death. A closed mind is catafalque.

From Plato with his Utopianism, confident in the power of man to change his state, and Aristotle with his insistence upon the supremacy of reason and proven fact, right down to the constructive effort and science of today we have seen the human mind feeling its way to creative freedom. And always the forces of instinctive conservatism, of privilege and dogmatic authority has resisted or prevented that advance.

Our desire to segregate the mind’s cogitations from the body’s exertions reflects the grip that Cartesian dualism still holds on us. When we think about thinking, we’re quick to locate our mind, and hence our self, in the gray matter inside our skull and to see the rest of the body as a mechanical life-support system that keeps the neural circuits charged. More than a fancy of philosophers like Descartes and his predecessor Plato, this dualistic view of mind and body as operating in isolation from each other appears to be a side effect of consciousness itself. Even though the bulk of the mind’s work goes on behind the scenes, in the shadows of the unconscious, we’re aware only of the small but brightly lit window that the conscious mind opens for us. And our conscious mind tells us, insistently, that it’s separate from the body.

Biographers are not usually as explicit as philosophers such as Plato, Wittgenstein, Austin, or Moore on questions of the existence of an essential self, the extent to which a life can be lived according to a philosophical system, or the relation between acts and emotions. That is not their job – unless they are writing the Life of a philosopher. But biography is bound to reflect changing and conflicting concepts about

The three greatest metaphysicians who ever existed - Plato, Aristotle and St.Thomas Aquinas - had no system in the idealistic sense of the word. Their ambition was not to achieve philosophy once and for all, but to maintain it and to serve it in their own times, as we have to maintain it and to serve it in ours. For us, as for them, the great thing is not to achieve a system of the world as if being could be deduced from thought, but to relate reality, as we know it, to the permanent principles in whose light all the changing problems of science, of ethics and of art have to be solved. A metaphysics of existence cannot be a system wherewith to get rid of philosophy, it is an always open inquiry, whose conclusions are both always the same and always new, because it is conducted under the guidance of immutable principles, which will never exhaust experience, or be themselves exhausted by it. For even though, as is impossible, all that which exists were known to us, existence itself would still remain a mystery. Why, asked Leibniz, is there something rather than nothing ?

It is the inattentive reader who loses my subject, not I. Some word about it will always be found off in a corner, which will not fail to be sufficient, though it takes little room. I seek out change indiscriminately and tumultuously. My style and my mine alike go roaming. A man must be a little mad if he does not want to be even more stupid, say the precepts of our masters, and even more so their examples. A thousand poets drag and languish prosaically; but the best ancient prose — and I scatter it here indiscriminately as verse — shines throughout with the vigor and boldness of poetry, and gives the effect of its frenzy. To poetry we must certainly concede mastery and preeminence in speech. The poet, says Plato, seated on the tripod of the Muses, pours out in a frenzy whatever comes into his mouth, like the spout of a fountain, without ruminating and weighing it; and from him escape things of different colors and contradictory substance in an intermittent flow. He himself is utterly poetic, and the old theology is poetry, the scholars say, and the first philosophy. It is the original language of the Gods.

Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good; for one of two things—either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others. Now if death be of such a nature, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead abide, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this?

I said that Aristotle was not by temperament deeply religious, but this is only partly true. One could, perhaps, interpret one aspect of his religion, somewhat freely, as follows: God exists eternally, as pure thought, happiness, complete self-fulfilment, without any unrealized purposes. The sensible world, on the contrary, is imperfect, but it has life, desire, thought of an imperfect kind, and aspiration. All living things are in a greater or less degree aware of God, and are moved to action by admiration and love of God. Thus God is the final cause of all activity. Change consists in giving form to matter, but, where sensible things are concerned, a substratum of matter always remains. Only God consists of form without matter. The world is continually evolving towards a greater degree of form, and thus becoming progressively more like God. But the process cannot be completed, because matter cannot be wholly eliminated. This is a religion of progress and evolution, for God's static perfection moves the world only through the love that finite beings feel for Him. Plato was mathematical, Aristotle was biological; this accounts for the differences in their religions.

Would you not say that peace is the greatest desire of true soldiers? Do we not have the most to lose from war? And businesses, most of them except military and oil ones, most of them have a vested interest in peace and prosperity. You cannot sell a house to a war refugee living in a tent, can you? Really hard tto sell an iPhone to a shattered victim. Businesses and corporatoons run this country. So yuou have to approach them with logic. Emotional appeals to the hippies of this world will not change minds. Stick to logic. - Shane Gibson, candidate for Governor, THE PLATOS ASCENSION BRIEF.

Then it is impossible that God should ever be willing to change; being, as is supposed, the fairest and best that is conceivable, every God remains absolutely and for ever in his own form. That necessarily follows, he said, in my judgment. Then, I said, my dear friend, let none of the poets tell us that ‘The gods, taking the disguise of strangers from other lands, walk up and down cities in all sorts of forms;’ and let no one slander Proteus and Thetis, neither let any one, either in tragedy or in any other kind of poetry, introduce Here disguised in the likeness of a priestess asking an alms

Epigrams These four Epigrams were published—numbers 2 and 4 without title—by Mrs. Shelley, "Poetical Works", 1839, 1st edition. To Stella From the Greek of Plato Thou wert the morning star among the living, Ere thy fair light had fled;— Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving New splendour to the dead. Kissing Helena From the Greek of Plato Kissing Helena, together With my kiss, my soul beside it Came to my lips, and there I kept it,— For the poor thing had wandered thither, To follow where the kiss should guide it, Oh, cruel I, to intercept it! Spirit of Plato From the Greek Eagle! why soarest thou above that tomb? To what sublime and star-ypaven home Floatest thou?— I am the image of swift Plato's spirit, Ascending heaven; Athens doth inherit His corpse below. NOTE: _5 doth Boscombe manuscript; does edition 1839. Circumstance From the Greek A man who was about to hang himself, Finding a purse, then threw away his rope; The owner, coming to reclaim his pelf, The halter found; and used it. So is Hope Changed for Despair—one laid upon the shelf, We take the other. Under Heaven's high cope Fortune is God—all you endure and do Depends on circumstance as much as you

The crux of past political utopias is that voluntary participation was never intended. Almost all of the classic utopian ideas are basically totalitarian, starting with Plato and his philosopher kings to Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat and going right up to the current idea of a Great Transformation because of climate change.7 An enlightened minority gets its way, regardless of whether everyone or anyone else thinks it's a good idea or not. If this minority is replaced by a democratic majority, only the number of people who are being governed against their will changes, not the principle behind the scheme.

The internal disunion of human nature, the schism of the soul, leads to the schism of the ruling class. And as with Heraclitus, war, class war, is the father and promoter of all change, and of the history of man, which is nothing but the history of the breakdown of society. We see that Plato’s idealist historicism ultimately rests not upon a spiritual, but upon a biological basis; it rests upon a kind of meta-biology of the race of men. Plato was not only a naturalist who proffered a biological theory of the state, he was also the first to proffer a biological and racial theory of social dynamics, of political history.

Jesus, Confucius, Mohammed, Buddha, Mahavira, Guru Nanak, Plato, Socrates, Marx, and many others, have conveyed approaches to life that were captured in books such as the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, the Talmud, the Quran, the I Ching, the Five Books and Four Classics, the Analects, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Brama Sutras, Meditations, Republic, Metaphysics, The Wealth of Nations, and Das Kapital. These, together with the discoveries of scientists, artists, politicians, diplomats, investors, psychologists, etc., all encountering their realities and adapting to them in their own ways, are what determines a people’s culture.

I remember his words," recalled Amnon. "He said, 'There is nothing we can do in philosophy. Plato solved too many of the problems. We can't have any impact in this area. There are too many smart guys and too few problems left, and the problems have no solutions.'" The mind-body problem was a good example. How are our various mental events—what you believe, what you think—related to our physical states? What is the relationship between our bodies and our minds? The question was at least as old as Descartes, but there was still no answer in sight—at least not in philosophy. The trouble with philosophy, Amos thought, was that it didn't play by the rules of science.

Plato’s term for soul-suture: “the fastening of heaven.” Rumi’s term: “the cord of causation.” Plotinus’s: “our tutelary spirit, not bound up with our nature, not the agent in our action, belonging to us as belonging to our soul, as the power which consummates the chosen life.” And American poets have discovered this magic, too! Denise Levertov speaks of a thread, finer than spider’s silk, that pulls at her, keeps her company, guides her. William Stafford speaks of a thread we can follow as it pierces things that change, yet itself never changes. That these spirit threads, as Plotinus says, aren’t ours, that they’re the soul’s own unbreakable extensions, is why they have the

Hippias: There I cannot agree with you. Socrates: Nor can I agree with myself, Hippias; and yet that seems to be the conclusion which, as far as we can see at present, must follow from our argument. As I was saying before, I am all abroad, and being in perplexity am always changing my opinion. Now, that I or any ordinary man should wander in perplexity is not surprising; but if you wise men also wander, and we cannot come to you and rest from our wandering, the matter begins to be serious both to us and to you." The Dialogues of Plato (428/27 - 348/47 BCE), translated into English with analyses and introductions by B. Jowett, M.A. (Master of Balliol College Regius Professor of Greek in the niversity of Oxford Doctor in Theology of the University of Leyden) ევდიკე, სოკრატე, ჰიპია: „ჰიპია: არ ვიცი, როგორ დაგეთანხმო ამაში, სოკრატე. სოკრატე: საქმე ისაა, რომ არც მე შემიძლია დავეთანხმო ჩემს თავს, ჰიპია. მაგრამ ამ ჩვენი ახლანდელი მსჯელობიდან, გინდა თუ არა, ასე გამოდის. როგორც წეღან მოგახსენე, ამ საკითხთან დაკავშირებით თავგზააბნეული ვაწყდები აქეთ-იქით და ვერაფრით ერთ აზრზე ვერ შევჩერებულვარ. თუმცა ჩემი, ან სხვა - ჩემსავით უბირი კაცის დაბნეულობა რა მოსატანია, თუკი თქვენ - ბრძენკაცნიც ჩემსავით დაბნეულნი დაბორიალობთ. აი, სწორედ ეს არის ჩვენთვის საშიში, ვინაიდან თქვენგან სულ ამაოდ მოველით საშველს. რაკიღა არ შეგიძლიათ ამ გაჭირვებიდან გამოგვიყვანოთ“ (პლატონი, დიალოგები (ძველბერძნულიდან თარგმნა, წინათქმები და კომენტარები დაურთო ბაჩანა ბრეგვაძემ), ჟურნ. „საუნჯე“, N6, 19..)

Hard science ... is ultimately self-corrective, and wiser, in a way, than the scientists who pursue it; in the end it is apt to lead us to the truth, if only we have 'eyes to see'. But science itself cannot give us this vision: science as such cannot interpret its own findings; and neither, I would add, can modern philosophy. What is called for, I maintain, is a grounding in the traditional metaphysical doctrines of mankind: the very tenets that have been decried since the Enlightenment as primitive, pre-scientific, and puerile. Strange as it may seem to modern minds, these teachings ... derive ultimately 'from above': from the Center of the circle, if you will. Originally formulated in the language of myth, they have served as a catalyst of metaphysical vision down through the ages; neither Plato, nor Aristotle, nor Aquinas invented their own doctrines: all have drunk from this spring—except, of course, for the pundits of modernity, who have rejected that heritage. By now, to be sure, one knows very well to what destination modernity leads: we have, after all, entered the disillusioned and skeptical era of postmodernism. The argument against the traditional wisdom has now run its course, and the way to the perennial springs is open once more. The time is ripe for a new interpretation of scientific findings based upon pre-Cartesian principles; what is called for is a radical change of outlook, a veritable metanoia. Whether the doctrines of science will conduce to human enlightenment or to the blighting of our intellect hangs in the balance.

Either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man (...) will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others. Now if death be of such a nature, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night

In the immortal parable of the Cave, where men stand in their chains backs to the light , perceiving only the play of shadows on the wall, unaware that these are but shadows, unaware of the luminous reality outside the Cave-in this allegory of the human condition, Plato hit an archetypal chord as pregnant with echoes as Pythagoras' Harmony of the Spheres. But when we think of Neoplatonism and scholasticism as concrete philosophies and precepts of life, we may be tempted to reverse the game, and to paint a picture of the founders of the Academy and the Lyceum as two frightened men standing in the self-same Cave, facing the wall, chained to their places in a catastrophic age, turning their back on the flame of Greece's heroic era, and throwing grotesque shadows which are to haunt mankind for a thousand years and more.

Birds were made by transformation: growing feathers instead of hair, they came from harmless but light-witted men, who studied the heavens but imagined in their simplicity that the surest evidence in these matters comes through the eye. Land animals came from men who had no use for philosophy and paid no heed to the heavens because they had lost the use of the circuits in the head and followed the guidance of those parts of the soul that are in the breast. By reason of these practices they let their forelimbs and heads be drawn down to the earth by natural affinity and there supported, and their heads were lengthened out and took any sort of shape into which their circles were crushed together through inactivity. On this account their kind was born with four feet or many, heaven giving to the more witless the greater number of points to support, that they might be all the more drawn earthward. The most senseless, whose whole bodies were stretched at length upon the earth, since they had no further need of feet, the gods made footless, crawling over the ground. The fourth sort, that live in water, came from the most foolish and stupid of all. The gods who remolded their form thought these unworthy any more to breathe the pure air, because their souls were polluted with every sort of transgression; and, in place of breathing the fine and clean air, they thrust them down to inhale the muddy water of the depths. Hence, came fishes and shellfish and all that lives in the water: in penalty for the last extreme of folly they are assigned the last and lowest habitation. These are the principles on which, now, as then all creatures change one into another, shifting their place with the loss or gain of understanding or folly.

A fact, once discovered, leads an existence of its own, and enters into relations with other facts of which their discoverers have never dreamt. Apollonius of Perga discovered the laws of the useless curves which emerge when a plane intersects a cone at various angles: these curves proved, centuries later, to represent the paths followed by planets, comets, rockets, and satellites. One cannot escape the feeling [wrote Heinrich Herz] that these mathematical formulae have an independent existence and an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we are, wiser even than their discoverers, that we get more out of them than was originally put into them. This confession of the discoverer of radio-waves sounds suspiciously like an echo of Kepler, echoing Plato, echoing Pythagoras: 'Methinks that all of nature and the graceful sky are set into symbols in geomatriam.

The communism of the ruling caste of his best city can thus be derived from Plato’s fundamental sociological law of change; it is a necessary condition of the political stability which is its fundamental characteristic. But although an important condition, it is not a sufficient one. In order that the ruling class may feel really united, that it should feel like one tribe, i.e. like one big family, pressure from without the class is as necessary as are the ties between the members of the class. This pressure can be secured by emphasizing and widening the gulf between the rulers and the ruled. The stronger the feeling that the ruled are a different and an altogether inferior race, the stronger will be the sense of unity among the rulers. We arrive in this way at the fundamental principle, announced only after some hesitation, that there must be no mingling between the classes.

There is a third premise of the recovery movement that I do endorse enthusiastically: The patterns of problems in childhood that recur into adulthood are significant. They can be found by exploring your past, by looking into the corners of your childhood. Coming to grips with your childhood will not yield insight into how you became the adult you are: The causal links between childhood events and what you have now become are simply too weak. Coming to grips with your childhood will not make your adult problems go away: Working through the past does not seem to be any sort of cure for troubles. Coming to grips with your childhood will not make you feel any better for long, nor will it raise your self-esteem. Coming to grips with childhood is a different and special voyage. The sages urged us to know ourselves, and Plato warned us that the unexamined life is not worth living. Knowledge acquired on this voyage is about patterns, about the tapestry that we have woven. It is not knowledge about causes. Are there consistent mistakes we have made and still make? In the flush of victory, do I forget my friends—in the Little League and when I got that last big raise? (People have always told me I'm a good loser but a bad winner.) Do I usually succeed in one domain but fail in another? (I wish I could get along with the people I really love as well as I do with my employers.) Does a surprising emotion arise again and again? (I always pick fights with people I love right before they have to go away.) Does my body often betray me? (I get a lot of colds when big projects are due.) You probably want to know why you are a bad winner, why you get colds when others expect a lot of you, and why you react to abandonment with anger. You will not find out. As important and magnetic as the “why” questions are, they are questions that psychology cannot now answer. One of the two clearest findings of one hundred years of therapy is that satisfactory answers to the great “why” questions are not easily found; maybe in fifty years things will be different; maybe never. When purveyors of the evils of “toxic shame” tell you that they know it comes from parental abuse, don't believe them. No one knows any such thing. Be skeptical even of your own “Aha!” experiences: When you unearth the fury you felt that first kindergarten day, do not assume that you have found the source of your lifelong terror of abandonment. The causal links may be illusions, and humility is in order here. The other clearest finding of the whole therapeutic endeavor, however, is that change is within our grasp, almost routine, throughout adult life. So even if why we are what we are is a mystery, how to change ourselves is not. Mind the pattern. A pattern of mistakes is a call to change your life. The rest of the tapestry is not determined by what has been woven before. The weaver herself, blessed with knowledge and with freedom, can change—if not the material she must work with—the design of what comes next.

At the same time, it must be admitted that, unless words, to some extent, had fixed meanings, discourse would be impossible. Here again, however, it is easy to be too absolute. Words do change their meanings; take, for example, the word 'idea'. It is only by a considerable process of education that we learn to give to this word something like the meaning which Plato gave to it. It is necessary that the changes in the meanings of words should be slower than the changes that the words describe; but it is not necessary that there should be no changes in the meanings of words. Perhaps this does not apply to the abstract words of logic and mathematics, but these words, as we have seen, apply only to the form, not to the matter, of propositions. Here, again, we find that logic and mathematics are peculiar. Plato, under the influence of the Pythagoreans, assimilated other knowledge too much to mathematics. He shared this mistake with many of the greatest philosophers, but it was a mistake none the less.

The three greatest metaphysicians who ever existed - Plato, Aristotle and St.Thomas Aquinas - had no system in the idealistic sense of the word. Their ambition was not to achieve philosophy once and for all, but to maintain it and to serve it in ours. For us, as for them, the great thing is not to achieve a system of the world as if being could be deduced from thought, but to relate reality, as we know it, to the permanent principles in whose light all the changing problems of science, of ethics and of art have to be solved. A metaphysics of existence cannot be a system wherewith to get rid of philosophy, it is an always open inquiry, whose conclusions are both always the same and always new, because it is conducted under the guidance of immutable principles, which will never exhaust experience, or be themselves exhausted by it. For even though, as is impossible, all that which exists were known to us, existence itself would still remain a mystery. Why, asked Leibniz, is there something rather than nothing ?

At the end of the process a decisive defeat in war may bring a final blow, or barbarian invasion from without may combine with barbarism from within to bring the civilization to a close. Is this a depressing picture? Not quite. Life has no inherent claim to eternity, whether in individuals or in states. Death is natural, and if it comes in due time it is forgivable and useful, and the mature mind will take no offense from its coming. But do civilizations die? Again, not quite. Greek civilization is not really dead; only its frame is gone and its habitat has changed and spread; it survives in the memory of the race, and in such abundance that no one life, however full and long, could absorb it all. Homer has more readers now than in his own day and land. The Greek poets and philosophers are in every library and college; at this moment Plato is being studied by a hundred thousand discoverers of the "dear delight" of philosophy overspreading life with understanding thought. This selective survival of creative minds is the most real and beneficent of immortalities.

Concepts of memory tend to reflect the technology of the times. Plato and Aristotle saw memories as thoughts inscribed on wax tablets that could be erased easily and used again. These days, we tend to think of memory as a camera or a video recorder, filming, storing, and recycling the vast troves of data we accumulate throughout our lives. In practice, though, every memory we retain depends upon a chain of chemical interactions that connect millions of neurons to one another. Those neurons never touch; instead, they communicate through tiny gaps, or synapses, that surround each of them. Every neuron has branching filaments, called dendrites, that receive chemical signals from other nerve cells and send the information across the synapse to the body of the next cell. The typical human brain has trillions of these connections. When we learn something, chemicals in the brain strengthen the synapses that connect neurons. Long-term memories, built from new proteins, change those synaptic networks constantly; inevitably, some grow weaker and others, as they absorb new information, grow more powerful.

To be a human is to have a soul, Socrates and Plato tell us. Our soul is our true essence, our true identity. It is the soul that actively seeks to unlock the mysteries of the world, including the truth about reality. Reality turns out to have a dual nature. Yes, Socrates said, the world is one of constant change and flux: as Heraclitus said, that’s the visible world around us. In Socrates’s and Plato’s terms, it’s the world of Becoming. But there is also a realm of Permanence that Parmenides described, a higher reality that we grasp not through our senses, but through our reason alone. This is the world of Being, which is divine, “the realm of the pure and everlasting and immortal and changeless,” just as Socrates told visitors in his prison cell.10 Our soul serves as the essential bridge between these two worlds. Like Being, it is (Socrates says) immortal and rational. But it also dwells in the world of Becoming, because of its adherence to the body. On one side of the bridge lies a world of error and illusion; on the other, of wisdom and truth. Yet for most people—indeed, for all but a very few people—that bridge has been washed out.

Cicero thought, is never; besides, it is vitiated by the false assumption of equality. The best form of government is a mixed constitution, like that of pre-Gracchan Rome: the democratic power of the assemblies, the aristocratic power of the Senate, the almost royal power of the consuls for a year. Without checks and balances monarchy becomes despotism, aristocracy becomes oligarchy, democracy becomes mob rule, chaos, and dictatorship. Writing five years after Caesar’s consulate, Cicero cast a dart in his direction: Plato says that from the exaggerated license which people call liberty, tyrants spring up as from a root . . . and that at last such liberty reduces a nation to slavery. Everything in excess is changed into its opposite. . . . For out of such an ungoverned populace one is usually chosen as leader . . . someone bold and unscrupulous . . . who curries favor with the people by giving them other men’s property. To such a man, because he has much reason for fear if he remains a private citizen, the protection of public office is given, and continually renewed. He surrounds himself with an armed guard, and emerges as a tyrant over the very people who raised him to power.68

The purely philosophical influences on Plato were also such as to pre-dispose him in favour of Sparta. These influences, speaking broadly, were: Pythagoras, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Socrates. From Pythagoras (whether by way of Socrates or not) Plato derived the Orphic elements in his philosophy: the religious trend, the belief in immortality, the other-worldliness, the priestly tone, and all that is involved in the simile of the cave; also his respect for mathematics, and his intimate intermingling of intellect and mysticism. From Parmenides he derived the belief that reality is eternal and timeless, and that, on logical grounds, all change must be illusory. From Heraclitus he derived the negative doctrine that there is nothing permanent in the sensible world. This, combined with the doctrine of Parmenides, led to the conclusion that knowledge is not to be derived from the senses, but is only to be achieved by the intellect. This, in turn, fitted in well with Pythagoreanism. From Socrates he probably learnt his preoccupation with ethical problems, and his tendency to seek teleological rather than mechanical explanations of the world. 'The Good' dominated his thought more than that of the pre-Socratics, and it is difficult not to attribute this fact to the influence of Socrates.

In a move that is at odds with what I am calling the Unmooring thesis, Heidegger wants to show that modern philosophy is the “logical” consequence of Plato’s humanistic legacy. For Kant, as for the Greeks, [A5] thinking (as Logos—forms of judgment—categories—reason) gets the upper hand in establishing the perspective for interpreting beings as such. Additionally, following Descartes’s procedure, thinking as “thinking” comes to dominate; and beings themselves become [A1] perceptum (represented) or object, in accordance with the same [legacy] historical reason. Therefore thinking cannot get to a [ICS] ground of Da-sein; i.e., the question of the [A2] truth of be-ing is unaskable here.45 The Greeks allowed thinking to get “the upper hand” in the correct ascertainment of the Forms until it came to dominate interpretation completely, eliminating A2 Unconcealment Truth (rendering it “unaskable”) and radically altering man and Being. The very essence of man itself changes, in that man becomes subject. . . . Man becomes that being upon which all that is, is grounded as regards the manner of its Being and its truth. Man becomes the relational center of that which is as such. But this is possible only when the comprehension of what is as a whole changes. (Heidegger, QT 128; see also 151; Heidegger, PR 76–77)

Again, if there is to be change of change and becoming of becoming, we shall have an infinite regress. Thus if one of a series of changes is to be a change of change, the preceding change must also be so: e.g. if simple becoming was ever in process of becoming, then that which was becoming was also in process of becoming, so that we should not yet have arrived at what was in process of simple becoming but only at what was already in process of becoming in process of becoming. And this again was sometime in process of becoming, so that it is not yet in process of becoming in process of becoming. And since in an infinite series there is no first term, here there will be no first stage and therefore no following stage either. On this hypothesis, then, nothing can become or be moved or change. Again, if a thing is capable of any particular motion, it is also capable of the corresponding contrary motion or the corresponding coming to rest, and a thing that is capable of becoming is also capable of perishing: consequently, what is in process of becoming in process of becoming is in process of perishing at the very moment when it is in process of becoming in process of becoming; since it cannot be in process of perishing when it is just beginning to become or after it has ceased to become; for that which is in process of perishing must be in existence.

August 8th START WITH WHERE THE WORLD IS “Do now what nature demands of you. Get right to it if that’s in your power. Don’t look around to see if people will know about it. Don’t await the perfection of Plato’s Republic, but be satisfied with even the smallest step forward and regard the outcome as a small thing.” —MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 9.29.(4) Have you ever heard the expression “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough”? The idea is not to settle or compromise your standards, but rather not to become trapped by idealism. The community organizer Saul Alinsky opens his book Rules for Radicals with a pragmatic but inspiring articulation of that idea: “As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be—it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be.” There is plenty that you could do right now, today, that would make the world a better place. There are plenty of small steps that, were you to take them, would help move things forward. Don’t excuse yourself from doing them because the conditions aren’t right or because a better opportunity might come along soon. Do what you can, now. And when you’ve done it, keep it in perspective, don’t overblow the results. Shun both ego and excuse, before and after.

In about 1980, he says, at a time when he was still struggling to articulate his own vision of a dynamic, evolving economy, he happened to read a book by the geneticist Richard Lewontin. And he was struck by a passage in which Lewontin said that scientists come in two types. Scientists of the first type see the world as being basically in equilibrium. And if untidy forces sometimes push a system slightly out of equilibrium, then they feel the whole trick is to push it back again. Lewontin called these scientists "Platonists," after the renowned Athenian philosopher who declared that the messy, imperfect objects we see around us are merely the reflections of perfect "archetypes." Scientists of the second type, however, see the world as a process of flow and change, with the same material constantly going around and around in endless combinations. Lewontin called these scientists "Heraclitans," after the Ionian philosopher who passionately and poetically argued that the world is in a constant state of flux. Heraclitus, who lived nearly a century before Plato, is famous for observing that "Upon those who step into the same rivers flow other and yet other waters," a statement that Plato himself paraphrased as "You can never step into the same river twice." "When I read what Lewontin said," says Arthur, "it was a moment of revelation. That's when it finally became clear to me what was going on. I thought to myself, "Yes! We're finally beginning to recover from Newton.

Goodness and Reality being timeless, the best State will be the one which most nearly copies the heavenly model, by having a minimum of change and a maximum of static perfection, and its rulers should be those who best understand the eternal Good. In the second place: Plato, like all mystics, has, in his beliefs, a core of certainty which is essentially incommunicable except by a way of life. The Pythagoreans had endeavoured to set up a rule of the initiate, and this is, at bottom, what Plato desires. If a man is to be a good statesman, he must know the Good; this he can only do by a combination of intellectual and moral discipline. If those who have not gone through this discipline are allowed a share in the government, they will inevitably corrupt it. In the third place: much education is needed to make a good ruler on Plato's principles. It seems to us unwise to have insisted on teaching geometry to the younger Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, in order to make him a good king, but from Plato's point of view it was essential. He was sufficiently Pythagorean to think that without mathematics no true wisdom is possible. This view implies an oligarchy. In the fourth place: Plato, in common with most Greek philosophers, took the view that leisure is essential to wisdom, which will therefore not be found among those who have to work for their living, but only among those who have independent means or who are relieved by the State from anxieties as to their subsistence. This point of view is essentially aristocratic.

Men are not content with a simple life: they are acquisitive, ambitious, competitive, and jealous; they soon tire of what they have, and pine for what they have not; and they seldom desire anything unless it belongs to others. The result is the encroachment of one group upon the territory of another, the rivalry of groups for the resources of the soil, and then war. Trade and finance develop, and bring new class-divisions. "Any ordinary city is in fact two cities, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, each at war with the other; and in either division there are smaller ones - you would make a great mistake if you treated them as single states". A mercantile bourgeoisie arises, whose members seek social position through wealth and conspicuous consumption: "they will spend large sums of money on their wives". These changes in the distribution of wealth produce political changes: as the wealth of the merchant over-reaches that of the land-owner, aristocracy gives way to a plutocratic oligarchy - wealthy traders and bankers rule the state. Then statesmanship, which is the coordination of social forces and the adjustment of policy to growth, is replaced by politics, which is the strategy of parts and the lust of the spoils of office. Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle. Aristocracy ruins itself by limiting too narrowly the circle within which power is confined; oligarchy ruins itself by the incautious scramble for immediate wealth. In rather case the end is revolution. When revolution comes it may seem to arise from little causes and petty whims, but though it may spring from slight occasions it is the precipitate result of grave and accumulated wrongs; when a body is weakened by neglected ills, the merest exposure may bring serious disease. Then democracy comes: the poor overcome their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing the rest; and give to the people an equal share of freedom and power. But even democracy ruins itself by excess – of democracy. Its basic principle is the equal right of all to hold office and determine public policy. This is at first glance a delightful arrangement; it becomes disastrous because the people are not properly equipped by education to select the best rulers and the wisest courses. As to the people they have no understanding, and only repeat what their rulers are pleased to tell them; to get a doctrine accepted or rejected it is only necessary to have it praised or ridiculed in a popular play (a hit, no doubt, at Aristophanes, whose comedies attacked almost every new idea). Mob-rule is a rough sea for the ship of state to ride; every wind of oratory stirs up the waters and deflects the course. The upshot of such a democracy is tyranny or autocracy; the crowd so loves flattery, it is so “hungry for honey” that at last the wiliest and most unscrupulous flatterer, calling himself the “protected of the people” rises to supreme power. (Consider the history of Rome). The more Plato thinks of it, the more astounded he is at the folly of leaving to mob caprice and gullibility the selection of political officials – not to speak of leaving it to those shady and wealth-serving strategists who pull the oligarchic wires behind the democratic stage. Plato complains that whereas in simpler matters – like shoe-making – we think only a specially-trained person will server our purpose, in politics we presume that every one who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state.

Again you must learn the point which comes next. Every circle, of those which are by the act of man drawn or even turned on a lathe, is full of that which is opposite to the fifth thing. For everywhere it has contact with the straight. But the circle itself, we say, has nothing in either smaller or greater, of that which is its opposite. We say also that the name is not a thing of permanence for any of them, and that nothing prevents the things now called round from being called straight, and the straight things round; for those who make changes and call things by opposite names, nothing will be less permanent (than a name). Again with regard to the definition, if it is made up of names and verbal forms, the same remark holds that there is no sufficiently durable permanence in it. And there is no end to the instances of the ambiguity from which each of the four suffers; but the greatest of them is that which we mentioned a little earlier, that, whereas there are two things, that which has real being, and that which is only a quality, when the soul is seeking to know, not the quality, but the essence, each of the four, presenting to the soul by word and in act that which it is not seeking (i.e., the quality), a thing open to refutation by the senses, being merely the thing presented to the soul in each particular case whether by statement or the act of showing, fills, one may say, every man with puzzlement and perplexity. [...] But in subjects where we try to compel a man to give a clear answer about the fifth, any one of those who are capable of overthrowing an antagonist gets the better of us, and makes the man, who gives an exposition in speech or writing or in replies to questions, appear to most of his hearers to know nothing of the things on which he is attempting to write or speak; for they are sometimes not aware that it is not the mind of the writer or speaker which is proved to be at fault, but the defective nature of each of the four instruments. The process however of dealing with all of these, as the mind moves up and down to each in turn, does after much effort give birth in a well-constituted mind to knowledge of that which is well constituted. [...] Therefore, if men are not by nature kinship allied to justice and all other things that are honourable, though they may be good at learning and remembering other knowledge of various kinds-or if they have the kinship but are slow learners and have no memory-none of all these will ever learn to the full the truth about virtue and vice. For both must be learnt together; and together also must be learnt, by complete and long continued study, as I said at the beginning, the true and the false about all that has real being. After much effort, as names, definitions, sights, and other data of sense, are brought into contact and friction one with another, in the course of scrutiny and kindly testing by men who proceed by question and answer without ill will, with a sudden flash there shines forth understanding about every problem, and an intelligence whose efforts reach the furthest limits of human powers. Therefore every man of worth, when dealing with matters of worth, will be far from exposing them to ill feeling and misunderstanding among men by committing them to writing. In one word, then, it may be known from this that, if one sees written treatises composed by anyone, either the laws of a lawgiver, or in any other form whatever, these are not for that man the things of most worth, if he is a man of worth, but that his treasures are laid up in the fairest spot that he possesses. But if these things were worked at by him as things of real worth, and committed to writing, then surely, not gods, but men "have themselves bereft him of his wits".

If I say the bad news, I can win applause over the planet: Man is the scourge of the planet, and he was born a scourge, just a few thousand years ago. But the news I am bringing is much different: Man was NOT born a few thousand years ago and he was NOT born a scourge. For this news I am condemned. Man was born MILLIONS of years ago, and he was not more a scourge than lions and hawks or squids. He lived AT PEACE with the world…for MILLIONS of years. That doesn’t mean he was a saint. That doesn’t mean he walked the earth like a buddha. It means he lived as harmlessly as a hyena or a shark or a rattlesnake. It is not MAN who is the scourge of the world. It’s a single culture. One culture out of hundreds of thousands of cultures. OUR culture. We don’t have to change HUMANKIND in order to survive. We only have to change a single culture. It is not an easy task, but it is not an impossible one. Here is my good news: WE ARE NOT HUMANITY. Can you feel the liberation in these words? I’m sure they seem bizarre, whisper them to yourself. I want you to understand what these four words are. They are a summary of all that was forgotten during the Great Forgetting. I mean that quite literally. At the end of the Great Forgetting, when the people of our culture began to build civilization in earnest, those four words were unthinkable. We forgot that we are a single culture and came to think of ourselves as humanity itself. All the intellectual and spiritual foundations of our culture were laid by people who believed absolutely that we are humanity itself. Socrates believed it. Plato believed it. Buddha believed it. Confucius believed it. Moses, Hesus, Thomas Aquinas, Copernicus, Hume, Marx, Kant, they all believed it. Why would it be such a bad thing if we were humanity? If we were humanity itself, then all the terrible things we say about humanity would be true- and that would be very bad news. If we were humanity itself, then all our destructiveness would belong not to one misguided culture but to humanity itself. But we are not humanity. We are just one culture, out of hundreds of thousand that lived their vision on this planet and had a song. It is not humanity that needs changing, it is just us.

The difference between Plato’s theory on the one hand, and that of the Old Oligarch and the Thirty on the other, is due to the influence of the Great Generation. Individualism, equalitarianism, faith in reason and love of freedom were new, powerful, and, from the point of view of the enemies of the open society, dangerous sentiments that had to be fought. Plato had himself felt their influence, and, within himself, he had fought them. His answer to the Great Generation was a truly great effort. It was an effort to close the door which had been opened, and to arrest society by casting upon it the spell of an alluring philosophy, unequalled in depth and richness. In the political field he added but little to the old oligarchic programme against which Pericles had once argued64. But he discovered, perhaps unconsciously, the great secret of the revolt against freedom, formulated in our own day by Pareto65; ‘To take advantage of sentiments, not wasting one’s energies in futile efforts to destroy them.’ Instead of showing his hostility to reason, he charmed all intellectuals with his brilliance, flattering and thrilling them by his demand that the learned should rule. Although arguing against justice he convinced all righteous men that he was its advocate. Not even to himself did he fully admit that he was combating the freedom of thought for which Socrates had died; and by making Socrates his champion he persuaded all others that he was fighting for it. Plato thus became, unconsciously, the pioneer of the many propagandists who, often in good faith, developed the technique of appealing to moral, humanitarian sentiments, for anti-humanitarian, immoral purposes. And he achieved the somewhat surprising effect of convincing even great humanitarians of the immorality and selfishness of their creed66. I do not doubt that he succeeded in persuading himself. He transfigured his hatred of individual initiative, and his wish to arrest all change, into a love of justice and temperance, of a heavenly state in which everybody is satisfied and happy and in which the crudity of money-grabbing67 is replaced by laws of generosity and friendship. This dream of unity and beauty and perfection, this æstheticism and holism and collectivism, is the product as well as the symptom of the lost group spirit of tribalism68.

Thales signaled a major change in Greek thinking and world thinking. A new, rational way of understanding reality was born, as opposed to one tied to myth or religious ritual—as still prevailed in two much older civilizations, Egypt and Babylon. It was a major shift, and a radical one. Quite suddenly, Greeks of the sixth century BCE lost faith in the ancient legends about the origins of the world told by Homer, Hesiod, and other early poets; about how Uranus had fathered the Titans with Mother Earth and how the Titans fought and lost to Zeus and the other gods for dominance of the world. They no longer seemed believable; they even seemed deliberately misleading (one reason Plato bans poets from his Republic). Instead, the question that every Greek sage before Socrates wanted to answer was: “What is real about reality?” More specifically, what is the stuff from which everything else in the world is made?

Michelangelo’s ceiling was finished in 1512. The next year a church council officially endorsed Ficino’s doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The world seemed on the verge of a final reconciliation of ancient philosophy and Christian theology, exactly what Raphael had made visible in his frescos in the Stanze. Instead, a chain of events was about to abruptly change the direction of European thought once again—a chain that started virtually outside the Stanze’s doors.

His first breach with the Church did not come with his famous Ninety-five Theses, which he posted on the Wittenberg church door on October 31, 1517. It came almost two months earlier, on September 4, when he published another set of theses, Disputation Against Scholastic Theology, which are less well-known but nearly as explosive. They asserted that a Christianity founded on the spiritual power of God’s grace—in effect Christianity in its Platonized form as received from Saint Augustine—and the view of law and nature derived from Aristotle could never be reconciled. “The whole Aristotelian ethic,” Luther wrote, “is grace’s worst enemy.” And so as the tidal wave of Reformation overwhelmed the heart of Europe and changed its religious and cultural contours forever, it also swept Aristotle almost out of sight.

This was all the average Platonist needed to hear. He didn’t care about “saving the appearances,” as Aristotelians did—that is, making sure that everything we see and perceive has some explanation in our general theory. The Platonist knows appearances can deceive, because matter changes. Soccer balls come and go; they get run over or get stolen. However, the geometry describing their behavior, whether spinning on their axis or at rest, lasts forever.

The Florentines of the generation of 1402, men like Bruni and Alberti, had wanted to use the rediscovery of the ancient Greeks and Romans to change the world. Marsilio Ficino wanted to use it to change the self.

Yet they also could not forget the devastating critique of the papacy and the church hierarchy unleashed in the previous century. That critique would surface in the works of the devotio moderna’s most sophisticated offspring, Erasmus of Rotterdam.2 It would reach critical mass in 1517, when the storm over papal indulgences forced these devoted and sober citizens to realize that the Church was either too timid or too arrogant to change, or both. The resulting explosion would be the Reformation. It would knock the schoolmen’s Aristotle off his throne and open a new era for the European mind.

Not since the days of Athens and Sparta had Europe seen an era of violent civic pride like the one that covered the Italian peninsula in the age of Dante and Marco Polo. But then the trend changed. The days of affluence and confidence ebbed away. The coming of the Black Death in 1348, which killed off at least one-third of Italy’s population, was the coup de grâce. The wars became more desperate and the mercenary captain or condottiere, who led a city’s army to plunder its neighbors, more necessary.

The actors in this sexual revolution bore a closer resemblance to Plato's "huge strong beast" that could be easily tamed by clever guardians than Nietzsche's independent Supermen impelled solely by their own inner dynamic.

The work Aquinas did in the next sixteen years changed the face of Western Christianity and philosophy.

Aquinas’s God is not Aristotle’s Prime Mover. He is a beneficent Creator and creative Architect, a composite figure from Scripture and Plato’s Timaeus. However, Aquinas’s God shares one important characteristic with Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover: He is the ultimate source of all movement and change. “Whatever is done by nature must be traced back to God as its first cause.”25 In fact, we live in a world blessed by the very act of creation. Quoting Aristotle again, “Nature creates nothing in vain”—and neither does God.

Although Paul was a Jew, he devoted himself to preaching to non-Jews—that is, to the Gentiles. The secret of his success was crafting a message that resounded with the deepest emotional needs of a sprawling empire, including its finest minds. Here are the answers, he proclaimed, for which you have been searching all your life. Here is a sense of belonging, in an empire where the bonds of community and traditional identities were dissolving. Here is a permanence, in a world where bewildering change had become the rule. Here is a sense of moral purpose, where all other institutions seemed to have lost their way. Above all, Paul’s Christian message replaced the prevailing pessimism among Rome’s governing classes with a message of hope and confident expectation.

The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness.... This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.” —Plato

The words of Anaximander quoted in the first chapter of this book invited us to think of the world “according to the order of time.” If we do not assume a priori that we know what the order of time is—if we do not, that is, presuppose that it is the linear and universal order that we are accustomed to—Anaximander’s exhortation remains valid: we understand the world by studying change, not by studying things. Those who have neglected this good advice have paid a heavy price for it. Two of the greats who fell into this error were Plato and Kepler, both curiously seduced by the same mathematics.

And the Sibyl and Hystaspes said that there should be a dissolution by God of things corruptible. And the philosophers called Stoics teach that even God Himself shall be resolved into fire, and they say that the world is to be formed anew by this revolution; but we understand that God, the Creator of all things, is superior to the things that are to be changed. If, therefore, on some points we teach the same things as the poets and philosophers whom you honour, and on other points are fuller and more divine in our teaching, and if we alone afford proof of what we assert, why are we unjustly hated more than all others? For while we say that all things have been produced and arranged into a world by God, we shall seem to utter the doctrine of Plato; and while we say that there will be a burning up of all, we shall seem to utter the doctrine of the Stoics: and while we affirm that the souls of the wicked, being endowed with sensation even after death, are punished, and that those of the good being delivered from punishment spend a blessed existence, we shall seem to say the same things as the poets and philosophers; and while we maintain that men ought not to worship the works of their hands, we say the very things which have been said by the comic poet Menander, and other similar writers, for they have declared that the workman is greater than the work.

The transformative, active side of the feminine principle accents the dynamic elements of the psyche that urge change and transformation. This active side of the feminine is similar to that divine madness of the soul described in Plato's Phaedrus, which invokes primeval forces that take us out of the limitations and conventions of social norms and the reasonable life. Eros in this sense produces ecstasy, a liberation from the conventions of the group. . . . Ecstasy may range from a momentary being taken out of oneself to a profound enlargement of personality.

According to Plato, the cessation of evil requires the rule of the philosophers, of the men who possess the highest kind of human knowledge, i.e., of science in the broadest sense of the term. But this kind of knowledge like, to some extent, all scientific knowledge, is, according to Plato, the preserve of a small minority: of the men who possess a certain nature and certain gifts that most men lack. Plato presupposes that there is an unchangeable human nature and, as a consequence, a fundamental structure of the good human society which is unchangeable. [...] These defects in Plato’s system are remedied by the prophets precisely because they lack the idea of science and hence the idea of nature, and therefore they can believe that men’s conduct toward one another can undergo a change much more radical than any change ever dreamed of by Plato.

For Plato, the character of true deity is not merely goodness, but also oneness. Although Plato nowhere explicitly draws the conclusion from that oneness, it points to the proposition that God also represents perfection. Being perfect, the supreme God is also without passions, since passions involve change from one mood to another, and it is in the nature of perfection that it cannot change. This passionless perfection contrasts with the passion, compassion and constant intervention of Israel’s God, despite the fact that both the Platonic and the Hebrew views of God stress transcendence. There is a difficulty in envisaging how Plato’s God could create the sort of changeable, imperfect, messy world in which we live – indeed, have any meaningful contact with it.

You can tell people they are wrong by a look or an intonation or a gesture just as eloquently as you can in words—and if you tell them they are wrong, do you make them want to agree with you? Never! For you have struck a direct blow at their intelligence, judgment, pride and self-respect. That will make them want to strike back. But it will never make them want to change their minds. You may then hurl at them all the logic of a Plato or an Immanuel Kant, but you will not alter their opinions, for you have hurt their feelings.

Did you ever see one of these ghouls?” I asked Syrus. “No, my lord, but I know lots of folks who did.” There was no conversation during the rest of that leg of the trip. My rational mind simply refuses to acknowledge the existence—even the possibility of the existence—of creatures such as Syrus described. My uncle, in his Natural History, gave accounts of fantastic creatures such as the Dog-headed people, the Cynocephali, who supposedly live in the mountains of India, but he had never seen them. He simply reported what he had found in his reading. I doubt that he had ever seen the Umbrella-foot tribe either. They supposedly lie on their backs in hot weather and shade themselves with their huge feet. He describes the Choromandae, a forest tribe with hairy bodies, gray eyes, and teeth like a dog’s. They don’t speak but give off a horrible scream. But, even amidst those monstrosities and others, he never mentions creatures that could change their form. Earlier writers pass on all sorts of improbable things. It’s a rule, I think, that the farther away—in distance or time—the writer is from what he’s describing, the more fantastic his descriptions become. Plato’s accounts of Atlantis come to mind. Stories get garbled as they are passed from place to place, or from one generation to the next, and translated. Herodotus claims there are ants as big as dogs in India. Like my uncle, he had never been that far east and likely had no idea what he was talking about. But, like Syrus, they “know lots of folks.” But “lots of folks” can be completely wrong.

MY LOVE, The day Prometheus breathed life into the new me, was the day you arrived in a little box. A shiny, futuristic black box, Pandora's box, despite my doubts I couldn't help but open it to finally meet you. Doubts, because I was happy with who I was, with who I saw looking at me through the eyes of others I presented myself to in everyday life. But I was seduced by the worlds that were promised to me if I let you into my life, who I would be with you in my pocket. As soon as the lid came off and I swiped my fingers over your radiant surface for the first time, the world and I were bursting at the seams. What a creation we were together, to what sized we grew! My brain an encyclopedia, my body an unerring compass, my eyes and ears reaching infinitely with you as an extension of myself. Through you, I, the cyborg, could enter bewilderingly virtual spaces in which I was presently absent, meanwhile absently present in the material world of boring train rides, waiting lines, and mindless chit chats with others. I felt invincible, transformed into a citizen of the world because of you, an intellectual of unimaginable proportions for the vast sea of knowledge you allowed me to surf on, a public speaker and influencer of significance because my words and visual snippets of my days could be launched into the world with the flick of a finger, likes enticing and confirming me. How intoxicating! How wonderfully, pleasantly, intoxicating! But I can't help but sometimes lie awake at night, my internal clock slowing down with your seductive blue light illuminating my face with 2, 457, 600 (1920×1080) LED suns. In those moments, as my eyes are captivated by your glow, I can't help thinking about the time before you arrived, and how I sometimes miss my low definition self. You were always there, sometimes it feels like we are in fact one — finally reunited with my other Plato's half, fused into not a circle but a perfect black rectangle. Through your eyes I see the world and myself in Ultra-HD, my pixel density has never been so high. But you are sometimes vicious, my dear — a viper, a temptress, when then again with sweet codes you reflect my most beautiful self, and I cannot help but love me through your gaze, then again with suffocating algorithms you fragment my self and blow it up to grotesque self-distortions, hurling me into an endless me-loop, that eventually disgusts and alienates me. In those moments you are a distorting mirror, a frightening black box, a black hole that swallows my attention in ways I can't see through. I see my old self disappearing in the vague, dark reflection of myself, with double chin and dull eyes, which I sometimes catch in your black glass when your suns stop dazzling me for a split second. And I can't help but wonder if my 'self' in times of its digital recombination, in which the 'I' is a fragmented multitude of pixels that never fully touch at their sides, a simulacrum, maybe has lost some of its aura. But in the morning all is forgotten, my love, all is well. As soon as we merge back into one, as soon as I, panicked, reach for my pocket on the train, only to discover with a glow of relief that you were there after all, I can't imagine an "I" without you. Artificial by nature my self resides within your screen, I would be lost without you.

Intimacy with the Lord without distraction would also mean greater availability for the service of the Lord, his people, and his kingdom, as the Christian experience of millennia has shown. Reflection and Application (7:25–35) This passage, along with Jesus’ commendation of celibacy (Matt 19:12), forms the Magna Carta of the consecrated life. It is primarily a declaration of independence and freedom. The great good of charity, the love of God, which alone outlasts the changing scenery of this world, is worth committing oneself to in celibate consecration as a state of life. If Paul coincides with Plato in saying that the figure of this world is passing away, he does not make the philosophical principle of the changeableness of temporal things the main motive for his praise of virginity. Rather, we are living in a segment of time marked at either end by the Christ event. In the resurrection, which is behind us, the glorious consummation of salvation is forecast and guaranteed. Thus we are living in a new kind of time, because its goal as well as its beginning has been revealed. So radically has the meaning of time been changed that unnecessary involvement in essentially transitory states can be a curtailment of freedom. Virginity, then, is the visible symbol of Christ’s lordship over time.

Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything. —plato

The Greek period inspired the greatest flowering of knowledge in human history, producing the forefathers of the entire Western intellectual tradition, including Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras and Euclid. It changed the world in ways both subtle and profound.

On this particular page of tomorrow’s history, ideal conditions only half be, and sadly, I’ll never see the places my dreams see. My mortal deficiencies prevent me from sitting with Guru Gobind’s Warrior-Poets and Plato’s Philosopher-Kings. Nothing is gained by wanting social change. In today’s day and age, against the grain, the trolls of suffering and pain become friends and enemies. But what else am I to do? It’s the furthermost purpose. Besides, I’m forever built like this. It’s in my cultural genetics—genes designed behind a veil of ignorance and given by the Khalsa’s consciousness. One ally and it’s the Universe. Check the history, an anomaly. Starry-eyed and standing. I ask—is anyone else with eyes starry?

Among Plato's successors, the most remarkable thinker to pick up this strain of argument is Plotinus. He offers little to those who would pin him down to rational argument. His intricately defined system combines ideas owed to both Plato and Aristotle. He categorizes our world in terms of four hierarchical steps, each of which is subtended between two quantities that have no existence of their own. At the upper end there is the abstract quantity he calls the One, or the Good. It cannot be described by any sequence of positive terms. Every other existence can be so described, but the One the Good, cannot; we'll leave that to Plotinus. Now to the lower end of our range of observation: That is where we find matter miserable, contemptible, poor to the degree that it, again, has no existence of its own. But it contains a potential for all physical phenomena. We might say that it is fighting for its existence: "Its Essence can be described in some measure by such images as utter poverty, constant want, perennial longing for making its appearance in the realm of reality." In and by itself, matter is shapeless; as Plotinus says: "The very idea of matter implies absence of form." As a result, it will not make its appearance in the real world. If, however, it does show up, that must be due to its having taken on a specific form, to its having changed. This feature of Plotinus's matter- its ability to take on shapes notwithstanding its own lack of all shape-reminds us of Aristotle's Materia Prima. Matter, according to Plotinus, is the carrier of all properties of bodies. This includes all physical extent: "Absolute matter must take its magnitude, as every other property, from outside itself." Plotinus also mentions a different form of matter, a form tied to the spiritual world-but I will not discuss this here. "Matter," he says, "is understood to be a certain base, a recipient of Form-Ideas...There is, therefore, a matter accepting the shape, a permanent sub stratum....The matter must be...ready to become anything....Matter, not delimited, having in its own nature no stability , swept into any or every form by turns, ready to go Here, There, and Everywhere becomes a thing of Multiplicity: driven into all shapes, becoming all things....The distinctive character of Matter is unshape, the lack of qualification and form....Matter is therefore nonexistent." The concept of existence is rooted deep in Plotinus's mystical thinking. It can be rationally approached only to the extent that thing's immutable were distinguished by the ancient philosophers from things that are subject to transformation, change, passing.

He, too, was unable to escape the yearning for changelessness in a world of change, which Plato had so elegantly embodied in his theory of forms. The concluding Book of his Physics aims to show that motion, like time, "always was and always will be"-"an immortal never-failing property of things that are, a sort of life as it were to all naturally constituted things." Which set the stage for Aristotle's God-the Unmoved Mover. This may have been as much a deference to common sense-the prevalent views of his community-as to logic or evidence. The Unmoved Mover was his name for the most divine being accessible to man. Since the activity of God was thought, it was also man's highest faculty. "That which is capable of receiving the object of thought, is mind, and it is active when it possesses it. This activity therefore rather than the capability appears as the divine element in mind, and contemplation the pleasantest and best activity. If then God is for ever in that good state which we reach occasionally it is a wonderful thing-if in a better state, more wonderful still. Yet it is so. Life too he has, for the activity of the mind is life, and he is that activity. His essential activity is his life, the best life and eternal. We say then that God is an eternal living being, the best of all, attributing to him continuous and eternal life. That is God." Even in describing the Unmoved Mover, Aristotle makes activity his ideal.

after two years of sitting through philosophy classes he announced that philosophy was a dry well. “I remember his words,” recalled Amnon. “He said, ‘There is nothing we can do in philosophy. Plato solved too many of the problems. We can’t have any impact in this area. There are too many smart guys and too few problems left, and the problems have no solutions.’” The mind-body problem was a good example. How are our various mental events—what you believe, what you think—related to our physical states? What is the relationship between our bodies and our minds?

In the Laws Plato makes clear that moral virtue in respect to sexual desire is not only necessary to the right order of the soul, but is at the heart of a well-ordered polis. The Athenian speaker says, I had an idea for reinforcing the law about the natural use of the intercourse which procreates children, abstaining from the male, not deliberately killing human progeny or “sowing in rocks and stones”, where it will never take root and be endowed with growth, abstaining too from all female soil in which you would not want what you have sown to grow. This law when it has become permanent and prevails—if it has rightly become dominant in other cases, just as it prevails now regarding intercourse with parents—confers innumerable benefits. In the first place, it has been made according to nature; also, it effects a debarment from erotic fury and insanity, all kinds of adultery and all excesses in drink and food, and it makes men truly affectionate to their own wives: other blessings also would ensue, in infinite number, if one could make sure of this law. (838-839)

no leaders who are so thoroughly enlightened. Thus, what Plato offers is not realism; it is idealism of the first order.

I found that the very people who said that mankind was one church from Plato to Emerson were the very people who said that morality had changed altogether, and that what was right in one age was wrong in another. If I asked, say, for an altar, I was told that we needed none, for men our brothers gave us clear oracles and one creed in their universal customs and ideals. But if I mildly pointed out that one of men’s universal customs was to have an altar, then my agnostic teachers turned clean round and told me that men had always been in darkness and the superstitions of savages.

Plato reminds us of a simple truth that has not changed in thousands of years: “To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils. And surely it is the most blameworthy ignorance to believe that one knows what one does not know.

We must remind ourselves, to be sure, that Plato was himself an artist, a poietes. His Republic was an invention. So were the theory of forms and the idea of the Good. Since all veiling is self-veiling, we cannot help but think that behind the rational metaphysician, philosophy's great Master Player, stood Plato the poet, fully aware that the entire opus was an act of play, an invitation to readers not to produce the truth but to take his inventions into their own play, establishing the continuity of his art by changing it.

The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself. Plato (428 BC – 348 BC)

Reality turns out to have a dual nature. Yes, Socrates said, the world is one of constant change and flux: as Heraclitus said, that’s the visible world around us. In Socrates’s and Plato’s terms, it’s the world of Becoming. But there is also a realm of Permanence that Parmenides described, a higher reality that we grasp not through our senses, but through our reason alone. This is the world

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle. Plato (428 BC – 348 BC)

In about 585 BCE, a man named Thales amazed his fellow Milesians by correctly predicting an eclipse of the sun. A few years earlier or later (the record is scanty and unclear), Thales also made a trip to Egypt, where he calculated the height of a pyramid by measuring the length of its shadow at the same time of day that his own shadow equaled his actual height.1 With these two feats, Thales signaled a major change in Greek thinking and world thinking. A new, rational way of understanding reality was born, as opposed to one tied to myth or religious ritual—as still prevailed in two much older civilizations, Egypt and Babylon.

Instead of stability, Heraclitus said, there is only change: ceaseless, relentless, and without end. In the desperate watercourse of existence, any notion we have of permanent or fixed values, even of our own body, is pure illusion. Instead, everywhere we look, everything we see is in constant flux and change.

Heraclitus is supposed to have said, while his most famous sayings of all, “All things change” (Panta rhei) and “You cannot step into the same river twice,” make him the father of relativism:

His name was Parmenides, and in answer to Heraclitus’s claim that everything changes, Parmenides countered by arguing that nothing changes. Far from permanency being an illusion, as Heraclitus claimed, it is change that is the illusion.

Evolution” is not a bad word for the version of nature that Aristotle brings to the philosophical table.14 It is a world in which all things, puppies, men, plants, and animals, are constantly altering and changing, a nature in which all of us emerge from something and grow into something else without losing our identities, either as individuals or as part of a class of individuals (so even if Rover grows up to look nothing like his earlier puppy self, he is still Rover).

For Aristotle, our visible world is not an illusion or a pale imitation of something else. It is substantial in a literal sense: it is real, and therefore worth knowing on its own terms. This is a crucial point, which Plato missed in two ways. First, Plato’s theory of knowledge leaves out the possibility of change. Back at the Academy, Aristotle’s teacher constantly stressed that true Reality is by definition changeless and eternal. In fact, Aristotle was able to answer, change is part of what makes the world what it is and what allows form to reach its full potential. There are no mature dogs without puppies; no men and women without boys and girls; and no certain knowledge that doesn’t take those facts into account.

For Aristotle, nature is no insubstantial mystery, just as no system is entirely static. Like the puppy and like us, systems naturally incorporate change. Aristotle’s term for nature’s built-in bias toward change and motion is energeia; he also uses the word dynamis, which translates as “power.” Aristotle’s worldview is dynamic.

Aristotle’s theory of the mean seems simple-minded; or to quote Bertrand Russell again, common sense pedantically expressed. However, if we change the word mean to proportion, we get closer to what Aristotle must have meant—and large parts of his Ethics as well as his Politics make more sense. The mean represents not so much a literal middle point as striking a balance between conflicting impulses and choices, and seeing our way through to the other side.

The philosopher no longer reflects on the good and true, using his intellect to understand them; he has become one with them. The reality he had contemplated is no longer outside him. He and it are one. This henosis, however, cannot be commanded or willed, although the philosopher works daily preparing the ground for it. He must be patient and allow it to happen. It is not exactly a kind of grace, as Plotinus does not believe that the One does anything; it does not bestow this union. But it is always present, always available, just as the stars are always present; it is only the proximity of the sun that obscures them. The philosopher must make himself a worthy vessel for the presence of the One by emptying himself of coarse matters. Or, to change the metaphor, he must quiet the racket within himself so that the sacred silence can be heard. It is solitary work, with no aim other than itself. Unlike Plato, Plotinus did not dream of philosopher kings, but of teachers who, like the One itself, radiate their knowledge and wisdom so that those who are drawn to the philosophical life and are capable of it may be guided in their quest.

There is no old age like anxiety,” said one of the monks I met in India. “And there is no freedom from old age like the freedom from anxiety.” In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding that they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place. Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one. Americans spend billions to keep themselves amused with everything from porn to theme parks to wars, but that’s not exactly the same thing as quiet enjoyment. The beauty of doing nothing is the goal of all your work, the final accomplishment for which you are most highly congratulated. The more exquisitely and delightfully you can do nothing, the higher your life’s achievement. You don’t necessarily need to be rich in order to experience this, either. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair. Without seeing Sicily one cannot get a clear idea of what Italy is. “No town can live peacefully, whatever its laws,” Plato wrote, “when its citizens…do nothing but feast and drink and tire themselves out in the cares of love.” In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real. The idea that the appreciation of pleasure can be an anchor of one’s humanity. You should never give yourself a chance to fall apart because, when you do, it becomes a tendency and it happens over and over again. You must practice staying strong, instead. People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that’s holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. They break your heart open so new light could get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you had to transform your life. The Zen masters always say that you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water. Your treasure—your perfection—is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the busy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart. Balinese families are always allowed to eat their own donations to the gods, since the offering is more metaphysical than literal. The way the Balinese see it, God takes what belongs to God—the gesture—while man takes what belongs to man—the food itself.) To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy. Even smile in your liver. Practice tonight at hotel. Not to hurry, not to try too hard. Too serious, you make you sick. You can calling the good energy with a smile. The word paradise, by the way, which comes to us from the Persian, means literally “a walled garden.” The four virtues a person needs in order to be safe and happy in life: intelligence, friendship, strength and (I love this one) poetry. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. Once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.

Who is it who watches the birds and stars and changing seasons, who predicts eclipses and propounds theories about fire and water, and who tames horses and trains dogs but greets other men as creatures like himself? Socrates’s answer was astonishing. As far as we know, it was without precedent.7 It was that this “I” was a soul, something existing apart from my body, which was the true seat of normal waking intelligence and moral character: “my” fundamental identity, in fact. The word Socrates used for this soul, psyche, or “breath,” was a common one in Greek.

Reality turns out to have a dual nature. Yes, Socrates said, the world is one of constant change and flux: as Heraclitus said, that’s the visible world around us. In Socrates’s and Plato’s terms, it’s the world of Becoming. But there is also a realm of Permanence that Parmenides described, a higher reality that we grasp not through our senses, but through our reason alone. This is the world of Being, which is divine, “the realm of the pure and everlasting and immortal and changeless,” just as Socrates told visitors in his prison cell.10 Our soul serves as the essential bridge between these two worlds. Like Being, it is (Socrates says) immortal and rational. But it also dwells in the world of Becoming, because of its adherence to the body. On one side of the bridge lies a world of error and illusion; on the other, of wisdom and truth. Yet for most people—indeed, for all but a very few people—that bridge has been washed

Reality turns out to have a dual nature. Yes, Socrates said, the world is one of constant change and flux: as Heraclitus said, that’s the visible world around us. In Socrates’s and Plato’s terms, it’s the world of Becoming. But there is also a realm of Permanence that Parmenides described, a higher reality that we grasp not through our senses, but through our reason alone. This is the world of Being, which is divine, “the realm of the pure and everlasting and immortal and changeless,” just as Socrates told visitors in his prison cell.10 Our soul serves as the essential bridge between these two worlds. Like Being, it is (Socrates says) immortal and rational. But it also dwells in the world of Becoming, because of its adherence to the body. On one side of the bridge lies a world of error and illusion; on the other, of wisdom and truth. Yet for most people—indeed, for all but a very few people—that bridge has been washed out.

Our daily experience of this world is almost nothing like Plato's world of universal and perfect forms and ideas; it is always filled with huge diversity, and variations on every theme from neutrino light inside of darkness, to male seahorses that bear their young, to the most extraordinary flowers that only open at night for no one to see. Jesus had no trouble with the exceptions, whether they were prostitutes, drunkards, Samaritans, lepers, Gentiles, tax collectors, or wayward sheep. He ate with outsiders regularly, to the chagrin of the church stalwarts, who always love their version of order over any compassion toward the exceptions. Just the existence of a single mentally challenged or mentally ill person should make us change any of our theories about the necessity of some kind of correct thinking as the definition of “salvation.” Yet we have a history of excluding and torturing people who do not “think” right.

Extreme freedom can’t be expected to lead to anything but a change to extreme slavery, whether for a private individual or for a city.

Buddhism with all its developments was only a restatement, although from a new standpoint and with fresh terms of intellectual definition and reasoning, of one side of its experience and it carried it thus changed in form but hardly in substance over all Asia and westward towards Europe. The ideas of the Upanishads can be rediscovered in much of the thought of Pythagoras and Plato and form the profoundest part of Neo-platonism and Gnosticism with all their considerable consequences to the philosophical thinking of the West,

In my books, The Origins of the Fourth World War as well as The Fool and His Enemy, I argue that we are experiencing a civilization-altering spiritual/intellectual change. A New Religion is now displacing traditional Christianity and its adjunct in classical pagan teachings (i.e., Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Cicero, etc.). The New Religion inverts the terms of man’s existence. The New Religion inverts sexuality, rank order, economic principles and morality. The elimination of Christianity as the ruling religion today is strikingly similar to the elimination of paganism as the ruling religion during the fourth century (insofar as it portends the outright destruction of civilization itself). J.R. Nyquist

The concept of this ineffable Creator God permeated the thought of Plato, for example, who sought to replace Hesiod's perverse concepts of the Creation with a more reasonable one, based no doubt upon philosophical concepts far more ancient than Hesiod's and certainly far more profound: “Let us therefore state the reason why the framer of this universe of change framed it at all. He was good, and what is good has no particle of envy in it; being therefore without envy, he wished all things to be as like himself as possible. This is as valid a principle for the origin of the world of change as we shall discover from the wisdom of men...”9 Note the echo from Genesis: “And God saw that it was good.

Cicero thought, is never; besides, it is vitiated by the false assumption of equality. The best form of government is a mixed constitution, like that of pre-Gracchan Rome: the democratic power of the assemblies, the aristocratic power of the Senate, the almost royal power of the consuls for a year. Without checks and balances monarchy becomes despotism, aristocracy becomes oligarchy, democracy becomes mob rule, chaos, and dictatorship. Writing five years after Caesar’s consulate, Cicero cast a dart in his direction: Plato says that from the exaggerated license which people call liberty, tyrants spring up as from a root . . . and that at last such liberty reduces a nation to slavery. Everything in excess is changed into its opposite. . . . For out of such an ungoverned populace one is usually chosen as leader . . . someone bold and unscrupulous . . . who curries favor with the people by giving them other men’s property. To such a man, because he has much reason for fear if he remains a private citizen, the protection of public office is given, and continually renewed. He surrounds himself with an armed guard, and emerges as a tyrant over the very people who raised him to power.68 Nevertheless, Caesar won; and Cicero thought it best to bury his discontent in melodious platitudes on law, friendship, glory, and old age. Silent leges inter arma, he said—“laws are silent in time of war”; but at least he could

speak of this terrain as a primeval and unsettled wilderness—yet this continent had been continuously inhabited by human cultures for at least ten thousand years. That indigenous peoples can have gathered, hunted, fished, and settled these lands for such a tremendous span of time without severely degrading the continent’s wild integrity readily confounds the notion that humans are innately bound to ravage their earthly surroundings. In a few centuries of European settlement, however, much of the native abundance of this continent has been lost—its broad animal populations decimated, its many-voiced forests overcut and its prairies overgrazed, its rich soils depleted, its tumbling clear waters now undrinkable. European civilization’s neglect of the natural world and its needs has clearly been encouraged by a style of awareness that disparages sensorial reality, denigrating the visible and tangible order of things on behalf of some absolute source assumed to exist entirely beyond, or outside of, the bodily world. Some historians and philosophers have concluded that the Jewish and Christian traditions, with their otherworldly God, are primarily responsible for civilization’s negligent attitude toward the environing earth. They cite, as evidence, the Hebraic God’s injunction to humankind in Genesis: “Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it; and rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and all the living things that creep on earth.”1 Other thinkers, however, have turned toward the Greek origins of our philosophical tradition, in the Athens of Socrates and Plato, in their quest for the roots of our nature-disdain. A long line of recent philosophers, stretching from Friedrich Nietzsche down to the present, have attempted to demonstrate that Plato’s philosophical derogation of the sensible and changing forms of the world—his claim that these are mere simulacra of eternal and pure ideas existing in a nonsensorial realm beyond the apparent world—contributed profoundly to civilization’s distrust of bodily and sensorial

Think of the new conception of time, Digital Presentism, like real-time streaming of progressively generated content in immersive virtual reality. We’re all familiar with online music streaming, too: When you stream music online, every bit is discretely rendered, interpreted and finally interwoven into your unitary experiential reality. Only with Digital Presentism 'music' is also being created in 'real time' as if right from your mind... Since time can’t be absolute but is always subjective, Digital Presentism revolves around observer-centric temporality. What we call ‘time’ is a sequential change between static perceptual 'frames,' it’s an emergent phenomenon, 'a moving image of eternity' as Plato famously said more than two millennia ago.

Socrates, whose life Plato deemed beautiful, seemed to know how to live. Somehow his intuitions led him to lead an exemplary life, but others’ intuitions, just as forceful, can lead to terrible lives. Is there any way to tell, from the inside, which intuitions are reliable and which aren’t, some inner quality of feeling? Or if there isn’t such an inner sign tagging the good intuitions from the bad, shall we only rely on intuitions that the majority of those around us accept? That’s not what Socrates did, and that’s not what many of the moral figures we most revere—such moral revolutionaries as William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Bertha von Suttner, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.—did. They challenged the intuitions of their societies and, eventually, changed those societies so that intuitions themselves changed. But if there’s no way to tell, from either the inside or the outside, which intuitions can be trusted, why should we trust them at all? But then can we actually eliminate them? Aren’t we, at certain points of our reasoning, including our moral reasoning, required to fall back on intuitions?

though Plato does make one of the characters in his mammoth Laws dialogue allege

When Thompson hit seventy, he decided to change his lifestyle completely so that he could live longer. He went on a strict diet, he jogged, he swam, and he took sunbaths. In just three months’ time, Thompson lost thirty pounds, reduced his waist by six inches, and expanded his chest by five inches. Svelte and tan, he decided to top it all off with a sporty new haircut. Afterward, while stepping out of the barbershop, he was hit by a bus. As he lay dying, he cried out, “God, how could you do this to me?” And a voice from the heavens responded, “To tell you the truth, Thompson, I didn’t recognize you.

Contentment = An acceptance of the present Fulfillment = A progressive realization of your potential Satisfaction = Contentment + Fulfillment Enjoyment = Pleasure + Love Happiness = Satisfaction + Enjoyment

Reality is created by the mind. We can change our reality by changing our mind . . . —Plato

When modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state always change with them. —Plato

Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.  The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you’ve ever been. The one constant in our lives is change. Daniel Gilbert

The beginning is the most important part of the work. —Plato

It seems as if historicist ideas easily become prominent in times of great social change. They appeared when Greek tribal life broke up, as well as when that of the Jews was shattered by the impact of the Babylonian conquest. There can be little doubt, I believe, that Heraclitus’ philosophy is an expression of a feeling of drift; a feeling which seems to be a typical reaction to the dissolution of the ancient tribal forms of social life. In modern Europe, historicist ideas were revived during the industrial revolution, and especially through the impact of the political revolutions in America and France. It appears to be more than a mere coincidence that Hegel, who adopted so much of Heraclitus’ thought and passed it on to all modern historicist movements, was a mouthpiece of the reaction against the French Revolution.

[Plato's] achievements are impaired by his hatred of the society in which he was living, and by his romantic love for the old tribal form of social life. It is this attitude which led him to formulate an untenable law of historical development, namely, the law of universal degeneration or decay. And the same attitude is also responsible for the irrational, fantastic, and romantic elements of his otherwise excellent analysis. On the other hand, it was just his personal interest and his partiality which sharpened his eye and so made his achievements possible. He derived his historicist theory from the fantastic philosophical doctrine that the changing visible world is only a decaying copy of an unchanging invisible world. But this ingenious attempt to combine a historicist pessimism with an ontological optimism leads, when elaborated, to difficulties. These difficulties forced upon him the adoption of a biological naturalism, leading (together with ‘psychologism’, i.e. the theory that society depends on the ‘human nature’ of its members) to mysticism and superstition, culminating in a pseudo-rational mathematical theory of breeding. They even endangered the impressive unity of his theoretical edifice.

This ground-plan, conceived by a great architect, exhibits a fundamental metaphysical dualism in Plato’s thought. [...] In politics, it is the opposition between the one collective, the state, which may attain perfection and autarchy, and the great mass of the people—the many individuals, the particular men who must remain imperfect and dependent, and whose particularity is to be suppressed for the sake of the unity of the state (see the next chapter). And this whole dualist philosophy, I believe, originated from the urgent wish to explain the contrast between the vision of an ideal society, and the hateful actual state of affairs in the social field—the contrast between a stable society, and a society in the process of revolution.

For Hegel, attempts to change the world through philosophy will misfire. They will recapitulate what they struggle against. This is because philosophy cannot transcend the material conditions of its own time. When we propose an alternate future, we do so within the terms presently available to us. Even Plato's ideal republic, as Hegel sees it, was not an alternative to Greek society at the time but an expression of its internal logic. The possibilities that we conceive are possibilities determined by the prevailing symbolic structure, not challenges to that structure. Philosophers that give practical political advice almost inevitably express the hidden logic of the system they attempt to contest.

A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers. Plato (428 BC – 347 BC)

I found that the very people who said that mankind was one church from Plato to Emerson were the very people who said that morality had changed altogether, and that what was right in one age was wrong in another.

All began to change in the reverse direction and grow more tender. The white hair of the elderly began to grow black; the cheeks of the bearded to grow smooth, and one and all to return to the season of bloom that they had left behind them. Young men’s bodies grew smoother and smaller day by day and night by night till they reverted alike in mind and body to the likes of a newborn infant, and then dwindled right away and were clean lost to sight.

As Palmer observes: “Plato warned in his Republic that changes in the modes and rhythms of popular music inevitably lead to changes in society at large,”[100] and this originary moment of rock and roll seems to be one of the clearest cases in musical history of a fundamentally new rhythmic, and thus affective, mode catalyzing an equally fundamental cultural transformation.

But who is he, my protagonist? Jacob? Marusya? Genrikh? Me? Yurik? No. No one, in fact, who is conscious of an individual existence, of birth and an anticipated, and unavoidable, death. Not a person at all, one might say, but a substance with a certain chemical makeup. And is it possible to call a “substance” something that, being immortal, has the capacity to transform itself, to change all its fine, subtle little planes and angles, its crooks and crevices, its radicals? It is more likely an essence that belongs neither to being nor to nonbeing. It wanders through generations, from person to person, and creates the very illusion of personality. It is the immortal essence, written in code, that organized the mortal bodies of Pythagoras and Aristotle, Parmenides and Plato, as well as the random person one encounters on the road, in the streetcar, on the metro, or in the seat next to you in an airplane. Who suddenly appears before you, and calls up a familiar, dim sensation of a previously glimpsed outline, a bend or a curve, a likeness—perhaps of a great-grandfather, a fellow villager, or even someone from the other side of the world. Thus, my protagonist is essence itself. The bearer of everything that defines a human being—the high and the low, courage and cowardice, cruelty and gentleness, and the hunger for knowledge. One hundred thousand essences, united in a certain pattern and order, form a human being, a temporary abode for each and every person. This is, in fact, immortality. And you, a human being—a white man, a black woman, an idiot, a genius, a Nigerian pirate, a Parisian baker, a transvestite from Rio de Janeiro, an old rabbi from Bnei Brak—you, too, are just a temporary abode.

Xenophon appears to present Cyrus’ transformation of Persia no less sympathetically than he presented the old Persia that Cyrus transformed. Moreover, the changes brought about by Cyrus could hardly have taken place, or been defended by him, if there had not been grave defects in old Persia. In presenting Cyrus’ career, Xenophon could not help calling attention to those defects. This means, however, that he was forced to stress what Plato and Aristotle allowed themselves only to hint at: the defects of classical republicanism in its highest or most exalted form. He thus took an important step in the direction of Machiavelli’s much less sympathetic critique, a favor Machiavelli acknowledged in many appreciative remarks.

Oh, my dear Apicata, how you have changed since we last met!" Apicata didn't respond, or if she did we couldn't hear her. "Apicata has been studying philosophy," Aelia said, trying to be conversational. "Apicata, recite for us some Plato, will you?" I could hear a waver in her voice, although it was slight. I wondered if Apicius could hear it too. "Yes, Mother." She was as obedient as you would ever hope a well-educated Roman child to be. She cleared her throat and her voice rang out in a loud, clear tone. "From his Republic: 'The man who finds that in the course of his life he has done a lot of wrong often wakes up at night in terror, like a child with a nightmare, and his life is full of foreboding; but the man who is conscious of no wrongdoing is filled with cheerfulness and with the comfort of old age." Oh, I could not have had more pride than I did then. Our little bird had spread her wings and let her voice take flight. I wished I could see the look on Sejanus's face. There was silence, then a brief flurry of applause. "Lovely, my dear!" Aelia crowed, clearly pleased with her daughter's choice of words. "Oh, Sejanus, I'm sure you would be even more delighted by her poetry.

Everything changes and nothing stands still. Heraclitus of Ephesus, as quoted by Plato in Cratylus (360 BCE)

Once a free people have reached this point, Machiavelli concluded, there is no hope left. Their empire may expand, as Rome’s did under the emperors. The wealth can continue to pour in. The arts may flourish; the political factionalism makes for dramatic entertainment, while people ignore the underlying rot. But such a society is doomed, unless a major crisis forces a change in its thinking.

better off pursuing tormented love affairs than reading Plato or Spinoza.

Necessity is the mother of reinvention. —what Plato should have said

Socrates: It is not being seen because it is a thing seen but on the contrary it is a thing seen because it is being seen; nor is it because it is something led that it is being led but because it is being led that it is something led; nor is something being carried because it is something carried, but it is something carried because it is being carried. Is what I want to say clear, Euthyphro? I want to say this, namely, that if anything is being changed or is being affected in any way, it is not being changed because it is something changed, but rather it is something changed because it is being changed; nor is it being affected because it is something affected, but it is something affected because it is being affected.

Around the first century, an Alexandrian Jew named Maria the Jewess developed the field of alchemy, to the extent that she is now regarded as the first alchemist of the Hellenistic and therefore Western world. Alchemy was rooted in both chemical science and philosophy and had grand aims such as turning metals into gold, finding a universal cure and ultimately a route to immortality. Maria is not as well-known as she might have been had any of her complete works survived. We only know about her from a fourth-century Egyptian alchemy encyclopaedia and some later Arabic translations, though her influence on Alexandria’s alchemists continued for centuries. Variously referred to as Miriam the Prophetess, the Sister of Moses and the Daughter of Plato, Maria theorised about the nature of colour and was able to make purple pigment. She also hypothesised about the sexuality of metals, which she believed had genders that had to be paired effectively. Maria also invented laboratory equipment such as a distiller and a furnace, developing versions of which are still used in chemical labs now. Most notably, she invented a double boiler, also known as a water bath, which allows substances to be heated at different paces; its name in French, bain-marie (Mary’s bath), commemorates its creator.

Don’t worry about it. You should read Plato’s dialogues. The conduct and language of the disciples of Socrates are surprisingly loose. That’s the way a dialogue is supposed to be.

In developing formal logic, Aristotle took Greek mathematics as his model. Like his predecessors Socrates and Plato, Aristotle was impressed with the rigor and precision of geometrical proofs. His goal was to formalize and generalize those proof procedures and apply them to philosophy, science, and all other branches of knowledge. Yet not all subjects are equally amenable to formalization. Greek mathematics achieved its greatest successes in astronomy, where Ptolemy's calculations remained the standard of precision for centuries. But other subjects, such as medicine and law, depend more on deep experience than on brilliant mathematical calculations. Significantly, two of the most penetrating criticisms of logic were written by the physician Sextus Empiricus in the second century AD and by the legal scholar Ibn Taymiyya in the fourteenth century. Sextus Empiricus, as his nickname suggests, was an empiricist. By profession, he was a physician; philosophically, he was an adherent of the school known as the Skeptics. Sextus maintained that all knowledge must come from experience. As an example, he cited the following syllogism: Every human is an animal. Socrates is human. Therefore, Socrates is an animal. Sextus admitted that this syllogism represents a valid inference pattern, but he questioned the source of evidence for the major premise Every human is an animal. A universal proposition that purports to cover every instance of some category must be derived by induction from particulars. If the induction is incomplete, then the universal proposition is not certain, and there might be some human who is not an animal. But if the induction is complete, then the particular instance Socrates must have been examimed already, and the syllogism is redundant or circular. Since every one of Aristotle's valid forms of syllogisms contains at least one universal affirmative or universal negative premise, the same criticisms apply to all of them: the conclusion must be either uncertain or circular. The Aristotelians answered Sextus by claiming that universal propositions may be true by definition: since the type Human is defined as rational animal, the essence of human includes animal; therefore, no instance of human that was not an animal could exist. This line of defense was attacked by the Islamic jurist and legal scholar Taqi al-Din Ibn Taymiyya. Like Sextus, Ibn Taymiyya agreed that the form of a syllogism is valid, but he did not accept Aristotle's distinction between essence and accident (Hallaq 1993). According to Aristotle, the essence of human includes both rational and animal. Other attributes, such as laughing or being a featherless biped, might be unique to humans, but they are accidental attributes that could be different without changing the essence. Ibn Taymiyya, however, maintained that the distinction between essence and accident was arbitrary. Human might just as well be defined as laughing animal, with rational as an accidental attribute.

If they could lay hands on the man who was trying to set them free and lead them up, they would kill him.” (Paragraph 29, Line 10) This is one of the more intriguing lines from the first half of the essay, and it gains special significance, falling as it does just before the page break that separates the first half from the second half. The violence invoked here helps amplify the resistance to change that can be a wise ruler’s most strident enemy. Because the transition from light to dark was so difficult and disorienting, the difficulty in communicating across that transition can be dangerous, even deadly, which ups the stakes of the essay significantly, despite the hypothetical nature of it thus far.

Since, for Plato, all objects in the physical world change over time (e.g., a rock will erode and become sand), but ideas (the idea of a rock) are ultimate and enduring, then the realm of ideas is more real than the realm of objects.

Socrates: It is not being seen because it is a thing seen but on the contrary it is a thing seen because it is being seen; nor is it because it is something led that it is being led but because it is being led that it is something led; nor is something being carried because it is something carried, but it is something carried because it is being carried. Is what I want to say clear, Euthyphro? I want to say this, namely, that if anything is being changed or is being affected in any way, it is not being changed because it is something changed, but rather it is something changed because it is being changed; nor is it being affected because it is something affected, but it is something affected because it is being affected.

In Aristotle’s cosmology, De Caelo, the heavens originated at the Moon, which he considered the boundary of the realm of perfection. To Aristotle, perfection did not mean the divine or a deity, the way Plato or religious people thought about it. Perfection to Aristotle meant the perfect ideal of something. Everything below the Moon was in the realm of change, corruption, and imperfection. The Moon and beyond were perfect. He explained away the Moon’s mottled appearance by arguing that it was contaminated by Earth.

Preparing an artful and persuasive speech is a great deal of work. For me, kairos is also a matter of whether to speak at all. You shouldn’t speak if: you have nothing worth saying; you are unsure and keep changing your mind; you are not the best or most qualified person to speak on this subject; you are speaking out of some deep-seated grievance; you are speaking only or mostly to further your own interests; speaking won’t make a difference. In his Ethics, Aristotle says that the virtuous or great-souled man (megalopsychos) ought ‘to be sluggish and hold back except where great honour or a great work is at stake, and to be a man of few deeds, but of great and notable ones.’ Remember that speech is a divine instrument. When someone goes around giving lots of little, loud speeches, you can be sure that they are an idiot.

The philosophical camp known as realists believes that universals (like greenness, chairness, heapness, and so on) actually exist in reality and are independent of the mind. This line of thinking follows from the theory of forms developed by the classic Greek philosopher Plato, in which Plato drew a distinction between two realms of reality: physical objects that we can perceive with our senses and the realm of ideas, which we can only grasp through our intellect and reason. Since, for Plato, all objects in the physical world change over time (e.g., a rock will erode and become sand), but ideas (the idea of a rock) are ultimate and enduring, then the realm of ideas is more real than the realm of objects.

Politics on Plato’s terms becomes prescriptive, a series of formulae for shaping man and society into what they should be rather than accepting things as they are. Politics on Aristotle’s terms will be largely descriptive, in which the more we discover about human nature, the more we recognize our powerlessness to effect real change.

Our universe is a remarkably coherent domain. This calls for explanation, and now we have an explanation. The explanation is that our universe is “in-formed” by the wider and deeper dimension: the Kosmos. That the Kosmos would be an “in-forming” domain beyond space and time is a long-standing insight; it is present in Plato’s philosophy. According to Plato, the world of forms and ideas is the higher (or deeper) reality, the reality of the Kosmos; the physical/material furnishings of the world are but its reflections.