Philosophy & Poetry

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Re: Philosophy & Poetry

Postby sMartins » Wed Nov 23, 2022 12:33 pm

PLATO

Thinking about how our whole culture is indebted to this technology, which is the alphabet, also helps us to understand what is happening to us, with a transformation of technology.
I don't think we are all going to be informed today about what is happening in the war by reading the newspapers, but mostly by going home and turning on the television, how's it going? let's see a little bit, let's not read a little bit but let's see a little bit.
So there are two things that are extraordinary in this discourse, which are food for thought because it involves all of us.

The first, which I have already mentioned, is that the alphabet is an extraordinary tool, one of mankind's greatest technological inventions, so extraordinary that in its lifetime, now thousands of years old, it can be said that it has not changed in essence at all. Already at the time of the Greeks, in the 7th-6th centuries BC, it was almost perfect, it was born so perfect, it can be said, that we have never felt the need to change it again until today, although today things are beginning to look a little different.
That's the first extraordinary thing, you have to understand what this instrument has done, because an instrument changes things, the world view and the way people are, the way people talk. An Egyptian pharaoh could not speak like Themistocles or Plato, because he did not read, and he did not write.

But the second thing, the one we are going to talk about and for which I have so far done nothing more than make a framework for understanding the nature of the discourse we are going to make.

The second question is a very intriguing one, as some would say, intriguing why? Because we are going to refer to the greatest Greek philosopher, indeed to the one who can safely be said to have initiated philosophy, to have invented philosophy, which is Plato.
Now many of you will think of the Presocratics, yes all right, but the Presocratics are wise men who do not know that they are philosophers, who are not yet really philosophers, they will be taken on board by Plato and Aristotle as the forerunners of philosophy, as the first thinkers, even though in reality they are not but they are of the first wise men, the first sages, the first scientists even, as we would say today.
It is Plato who invents philosophy, who gives this word philosophy, which perhaps the Pythagoreans were already using, perhaps, who gives this word philosophy a meaning, a meaning that has since come down to here. And which has a cognitive, scientific but also political and social meaning.
This man, Plato, who is undoubtedly one of the greatest writers in the entire history of mankind, some consider him to be the greatest writer we have ever had in the West, and who wrote an endless quantity of dialogues, an endless quantity, especially for the ancient world, but also for our times it would be an impressive production, thousands and thousands of pages, and to be noted it is the first written work that has remained to us, everything that was written before has not reached us.
This means that what Plato wrote was so relevant, quantitatively but above all qualitatively, that, you have to imagine it (you have to imagine concreteness when doing philosophy, not abstract ideas that are of no use), you have to imagine that for millennia, centuries and centuries, thousands of human beings transcribed manually, patiently word by word the thousands of thousands of pages that Plato had written, this happened.
Men of the most different ages, different situations, men who lived in incomparable worlds, imagine a monastery of 1000 AD rather than an Athens before Christ, 1400 years difference, completely different world, one was Christian, the others were pagans, people dying of hunger, people persecuted by the barbarians, people dying of leprosy, people dying of the plague, very difficult situations, people who lived an average of 40 years, spent their nights transcribing Plato, Plato and Aristotle of course. Huh?
There had to be something exceptional? Indeed there was something exceptional.
We, I would say, can't even open our mouths, can't even say a word on the rational plane that is not indebted to Plato and Aristotle, but to Plato in particular.

So, Plato, who was certainly one of the greatest writers in the history of mankind, said that philosophy is not done with writing, and that writing is a dangerous instrument, indeed, in one of his dialogues, the Phaedrus, he tells a whole story where there is a supposed inventor of writing who presents his invention to Pharaoh, and Pharaoh says: no, look, let's leave it alone, because this instrument will corrupt men and make them all forgetful, it will be a tragedy, a catastrophe.
But how? This man who condemns writing has spent his life writing and we have spent centuries copying him, this is truly an extraordinary question, why? What did he want to say? What was there and what was behind it?

Plato condemns writing, there is no doubt about it, he says it openly, he being a writer.
Plato condemns writing, so he poses a relevant question between philosophical wisdom and writing and says there is no relationship between the two, or there is a very vague and in any case dangerous relationship.
However, since then, none of this has been spoken of.
Here is the extraordinary thing.
Aristotle, for example, doesn't give a damn about all that, he writes his treatises, his lectures, his works, and doesn't raise any issues about writing.

Everyone forgets about it, everyone just uses it and only very rarely does the question of writing re-emerge in the history of philosophy.
Last edited by sMartins on Mon Nov 28, 2022 10:17 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Philosophy & Poetry

Postby sMartins » Thu Nov 24, 2022 1:06 pm

THE JOURNEY TO SYRACUSE

Everyone forgets about it, everyone just uses writing, only very rarely does the question of writing re-emerge in the history of philosophy.
In short, it remains an underground issue, as if Plato had raised it, or as if I were to say to you, being, let's say, a television programmer: television is one of the greatest harms humanity can suffer, one of the greatest catastrophes that can happen to us is to use television to train us, and then I, who say that, am someone who builds televisions.
Here Plato says something like this about writing.
After that there is no more talk about it, we come to the century that has just ended, the 20th century, when another kind of writing begins, when telematic writing begins, when the computer age begins, and then the subject of writing again becomes central to the philosophers' thinking, we go back to Plato and we ask ourselves: what is the answer to this enigma?
Why does Plato condemn writing, even though he uses it? Even though he uses it so manifestly? You know, Plato's dialogues are really masterpieces, masterpieces of writing, of finesse of writing, not written just for the sake of it but written with the awareness of the first great writer of mankind, or at least of the West.
So with an attention, a care, a talent, and yet there was this condemnation, why this condemnation? What meaning did it have in Plato's eyes? This condemnation that would seem paradoxical, absurd and even incomprehensible in some ways?

To get to the heart of the matter, we will take as an example of Plato's condemnation of writing, not so much the dialogue in Phaedrus or other places, which are complex, but a very simple place, one of his letters.

Tradition has left us some of Plato's letters, and these too have been copied for centuries and centuries while the storm raged outside, for centuries and centuries they have been copied, transcribed, of course the earliest transcriptions we do not have, the earliest codices date back about 1000 years, further back we have lost everything, we simply have the result of this transcription work.
Here, we have some of Plato's letters preserved, of course there have been scholars who have doubted they were Plato's, because how do you know they are Plato's? Cause tradition say they are? However, there is now quite a consensus that the seventh letter is indeed authentic, written by Plato.
And what does Plato say about the seventh letter? His journey to Syracuse.

So, imagine the situation, we must always try to imagine the situation, we must see it as if it were a story told on film and so we must try to put ourselves in the skin, as much as we can, of these real figures.

Plato is in his sixties, a venerable age for those times.
A sea voyage from Athens to Sicily is quite a risk, not just a risk but an enormous effort.
Well, Plato undergoes this fatigue because, he says, he does not want to appear in the eyes of others and his friends, in particular, as someone who talks a lot but does little.
What does it mean that he talks but does not do? What is Plato referring to?
Plato is referring to the fact that, for him, the task that philosophy, this science of his, the task that the philosopher must give himself is very simple and very arduous, the philosopher must build the just city, the peaceful city, the virtuous city. This is philosophy for Plato.
Everything we know about Plato, the ideas, the hyperuranium, are meaningless things if we do not put them back into the fire of this passion. It is to take note of the fact that human life is terrible, that it is violent, that it is unjust, that it is persecutory, that everywhere there is mourning, violence, death, when will all these crimes end? This is Plato's question.
His answer is: there will be no peace among men, there will be no justice on earth, there will be no life worth living until philosophers become rulers of the state, or rulers of the state become philosophers.
This is his great vision, this is his great insight, this is what philosophy is worth doing, this is what he taught his disciples, and one of his disciples, whose name was Dion, and who was Syracusan, called him to Syracuse.
Dion lets his teacher, Plato, who is in Athens and sixty years old, know that a young man has taken power in Syracuse, he is the new tyrant as they said at the time, tyrant means absolute ruler.
This new tyrant is called Dionysius and this young tyrant seems interested in philosophy, it's a great opportunity, you see?

It's a great opportunity, yeah, it's as if they were to tell us that maybe the UN is interested in philosophy, and then all the philosophers would be urged to say, yes, let's see if there can be a universal philosophy, a vision of justice that somehow imposes itself on the earth, ends the aggression, the wars, the violent deaths, the children dying from bombs or because they don't have medicine, or because they are starving, let's see if we can stop this horror, huh?

Plato precisely says: at that point I was faced with a situation, eh, how should I say, of necessity, what did I do? I answer Dion saying I don't care? I'm too old, I'm not coming? I'm tired, I don't feel like it?
No, I set out to sea as not to appear as one who talks but does not do. I set out to sea, full of doubts, full of uncertainties and not very optimistic about the outcome of the enterprise, I feared, he says, that Dionysius was one of those young men who are infatuated with philosophy, as with a thousand other things, but in a very superficial way and who have no desire to really do the philosophical exercise, I feared this by going to Syracuse and I had immediate proof of it.

Here, the seventh letter begins like this, with this proof.
Plato arrives, Dionysius is full of curiosity: 'the great master has arrived', Dion's master, let's see what he has to say and so Plato talks to him for a whole night, talks to him about philosophy.
Dionysius listens and the next morning he comes up with a nice piece of writing, Plato looks at him and thinks: he hasn't understood anything, worse, he thinks he has understood and this is the worst thing that can happen to philosophy because, he says, this science of mine is not written down.

Let us read how Plato expresses himself, we are reading Plato, huh?


"And when [340b] I arrived, I deemed that I ought first of all to gain proof of this point,—whether Dionysius was really inflamed by philosophy, as it were by fire, or all this persistent account which had come to Athens was empty rumor. Now there is a method of testing such matters which is not ignoble but really suitable in the case of tyrants, and especially such as are crammed with borrowed doctrines; and this was certainly what had happened to Dionysius, as I perceived as soon as I arrived. To such persons one must point out what the subject is as a whole, [340c] and what its character, and how many preliminary subjects it entails and how much labor. For on hearing this, if the pupil be truly philosophic, in sympathy with the subject and worthy of it, because divinely gifted, he believes that he has been shown a marvellous pathway and that he must brace himself at once to follow it, and that life will not be worth living if he does otherwise. After this he braces both himself and him who is guiding him on the path, nor does he desist until either he has reached the goal of all his studies, or else has gained such power as to be capable of directing his own steps without the aid of the instructor. It is thus, [340d] and in this mind, that such a student lives, occupied indeed in whatever occupations he may find himself, but always beyond all else cleaving fast to philosophy and to that mode of daily life which will best make him apt to learn and of retentive mind and able to reason within himself soberly; but the mode of life which is opposite to this he continually abhors. Those, on the other hand, who are in reality not philosophic, but superficially tinged by opinions,—like men whose bodies are sunburnt on the surface —when they see how many studies are required and how great labor,49 [340e] and how the orderly mode of daily life is that which befits the subject, they deem it difficult or impossible for themselves, and thus they become in fact incapable of pursuing it; [341a] while some of them persuade themselves that they have been sufficiently instructed in the whole subject and no longer require any further effort.

Now this test proves the clearest and most infallible in dealing with those who are luxurious and incapable of enduring labor, since it prevents any of them from ever casting the blame on his instructor instead of on himself and his own inability to pursue all the studies which are accessory to his subject.

This, then, was the purport of what I said to Dionysius on that occasion. I did not, however, expound the matter fully, nor did Dionysius ask me to do so; [341b] for he claimed that he himself knew many of the most important doctrines and was sufficiently informed owing to the versions he had heard from his other teachers. And I am even told that later on he himself wrote a treatise on the subjects in which I then instructed him, composing it as though it were something of his own invention and quite different from what he had heard; but of all this I know nothing. I know indeed that certain others have written about these same subjects; but what manner of men they are not even themselves know.50 But thus much I can certainly declare [341c] concerning all these writers, or prospective writers, who claim to know the subjects which I seriously study, whether as hearers of mine or of other teachers, or from their own discoveries; it is impossible, in my judgement at least, that these men should understand anything about this subject. There does not exist, nor will there ever exist, any treatise of mine dealing therewith. For it does not at all admit of verbal expression like other studies, but, as a result of continued application to the subject itself and communion therewith, it is brought to birth in the soul on a sudden,51 as light that is kindled [341d] by a leaping spark, and thereafter it nourishes itself."


SOURCE:Plato, Letters
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Re: Philosophy & Poetry

Postby sMartins » Mon Nov 28, 2022 11:48 am

THE HUMAN PROBLEM

What does Plato want to tell us? What does he mean by 'my science is like a fire that is lit on a hill (that leaps up)'? That it is prepared, we have read, by dialogues, it is prepared by the fact that we talk about it together, in a group. We talk about these things and at a certain point science ignites, knowledge ignites.
Here, this cannot be written about, he says, I will never write about this and if anyone says I have written about it, they are wrong, they are lying or have not understood anything.
But he has written thousands and thousands of pages, what did he want to say?

On this of course opinions may differ, there may be many considerations, certainly the first is that Plato was in a situation, let us say, of mediation, of passage.
Plato came from a humanity that did not possess alphabetical writing and began to associate with a humanity that instead made extensive use of it. But, bear in mind, in Plato's time very few still knew how to read and write.
Reading texts was something very few people did, it was something so unusual that the comedians, those who staged comedies in Athens, comedies to make people laugh, when they ran out of invention, when they no longer knew how to make people laugh, they resorted to this little gag, as we would say today, they would stage a man who read.
The audience as soon as they saw someone immersed in reading would burst out laughing because they had never seen it, they had never seen such things.
This is easily understandable if you think back to the early times when you saw people on the street talking into a portable phone, or, in more recent times, those who talk into wireless headphones that you never know whether they are talking to you or not.
Now we are all used to it, it doesn't make us laugh at all, just as none of us would be surprised to walk into a library and see fifty people all silent and immersed in reading.

Here, imagine a humanity that does not have all this as familiar, for which this is not an everyday thing, that comes from orality, from an oral world, from a world in which what you know you know from having heard it with your ears, from having repeated it with your mouth and from having remembered it with your heart, otherwise you do not remember it.

One of the things Plato insists on saying is that writing will make us less capable of remembering.

It would seem the opposite, right? It would seem that writing, insofar as it can record things, becomes a storehouse of memory, that's clear, right? How many things we do not know about ancient times because they were not written down and how many things we do know because they were written down.
But Plato means something else, he means something extraordinary in my opinion.
He means that, to the extent that we, transfer into a thing, into an object, memory, yes, we retain it as news but we lose it as our possession.
Think of the computer, the computer is a further step in this. The memory of the computer we, in fact, say and not by chance.
That we transfer into an object something that was previously at one with our living, subjective life, with our passion, with our leaping fire, with the fact that we participate directly and passionately in things, huh?
There, then we begin perhaps to guess, where Plato is taking us, where he is putting his finger, his attention.

On the one hand it is inevitable, let us say, that the human being moves into things, indeed this is the intelligence, this is the difference from the animal.
The difference from the animal is that man precisely builds tools, the tools that the animal builds are extremely fragile, they are extremely evanescent.
Even the most intelligent animals, think of the chimpanzee, is said to be the one closest to the human being in some aspects, even genetic, as we say today.
The chimpanzee makes use of tools, but how does it make use of tools? It does not regard them as things, it uses them in the moment and then forgets them.

There is an experiment that ethologists do that is very interesting and very nice because it tells about the intelligence of these animals.
A chimpanzee, in his natural environment, has learnt to eat termite as breakfast, he likes termites very much and they are a good breakfast, not much more as termites are not very big of course.
What does the good chimpanzee do in the morning? We go for a cappuccino, or bacon and eggs, he doesn't, he pulls out a twig, stands next to a termite mound, at its entrance, and then sticks the twig in.
The termites are curious and are there defending their territory and inevitably some get on the sprig, so the chimp pulls out the sprig and quietly eats them.
Then he puts it back as long as there is some dumb termite climbing on it, after a while the termites have understood the game and the game ends there.

But what does our chimp do and what would a human being do?

A human being would say, this twig is better than that one, so I'll keep it, but no, the chimp doesn't keep it, he throws it away, he loses it, he forgets it, he doesn't own it, and besides, where would he keep it? He has no pockets, he has no clothes, the animal has no instruments while the human being has instruments.

Instrumentality is something to do with intelligence, intelligence without instrumentality does not exist. Intelligence means putting into objects the projects of action that we are. Being able precisely to transfer these projects into things that become efficient instruments.

What is the first instrument? The first fundamental that determines the human being in its difference from all the beings we know? It is very clear, it is the voice.
Here is the first great instrument, here is the first medium, the first memory that becomes an object, huh?
Animals also use sounds, like signals, warning signals, which would be like patting yourself, I shout and you turn your head, like I give you a bump and you turn around.
But it's another thing if I turn the voice into what it objectively says what I desire, that it says, turn around. And it says it to you, as I say it to me, as I say it to everyone, it becomes a word.

Here the voice is the first instrument towards which man exposes himself outside and transforms his reality, transforms himself, he is confronted with a power, a force, an efficiency that other animal species do not have but, at the same time, he begins the first step in the human problem, a problem that the animal does not have.
And what is the human problem?

The human problem is that I can tell you, turn around, I can add to this invocation, to this exhortation, to this command, I can add a series of reasonings with which I can explain why I want you to turn around, what the reasonableness of turning around is, what my good reasons are, but no matter how much I multiply the information, no matter how much I multiply the notations, objectify them in the sound of my voice that becomes something that resonates there for everyone, no matter how much I do this, I will never be able to transmit my lived experience to you.
My lived experience remains behind, remains somehow forgotten, remains somehow unexpressed and inexpressible, and man always has this condemnation, the more he strengthens his means, the more he refines his communication skills, the more he refines his ways, let's say, of mastering experience and the more he also experiences the impossibility of sharing, through those ways, the truth, the truth of his life, the truth of his experience.

Here, I can put thousands of pages into the computer and have saved them in the computer's memory and yet what I have saved in the computer's memory is not mine, it becomes the computer's, I no longer have it.
Last edited by sMartins on Tue Nov 29, 2022 11:28 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Philosophy & Poetry

Postby ItsFunToLose » Tue Nov 29, 2022 8:42 am

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Re: Philosophy & Poetry

Postby sMartins » Sat Dec 03, 2022 1:06 pm

CONCLUSIONS

There, I can put thousands of pages into the computer and have saved them in the computer's memory and yet what I have saved in the computer's memory is not mine, it becomes the computer's, I no longer have it.

There is a problem here, a problem that philosophy has taken on since Plato.

The more we have a cognitive instrument, the more we objectivise our intelligence, our thoughts, our emotions, our discoveries. The more we objectivise them, the more powerful we become together, because we have those tools, we have that memory, but the more we become poor each for himself, forgotten, oblivious, perhaps we spend our lives studying a subject and have never really experienced it to the full, but that is not the point, the point is even more serious.

Let us say it from the outset so that we can bring it to today, that we see it in today.

Think about the efficiency of scientific writing.
The efficiency of scientific writing is itself a consequence of the alphabet revolution.
The alphabet invented by the Greeks gave rise to that science that we call Philosophy, that is, the science of being, of entities, and this science, in turn, gave rise to logic, the ability to formulate coherent reasoning, inferences, inductions, abductions, hypotheses, that is, to formulate rational hypotheses about the world around us and thus gave us the power of a rational investigation into the world.
On this basis then came the great mathematical writing, starting with that of Archimedes, but above all of the moderns, the Arabs and then the mathematical writing of the 17th century, Tartaglia, Galileo.
Therefore, a very powerful writing, which can predict, which can establish, which can describe, which can objectify what happens and what we presume will happen.
The scientist is the one who becomes competent with this writing.

In recent years, we have often heard broadcasts about Einstein, because it is 100 years since the famous formulation of Relativity and we hear very roborants phrases about it: "Einstein discovered the writing of the universe, how God thought the universe .... "
It is not true, it is all talk, nonsense.

The truth is that scientific writing is of extraordinary power in predicting, in calculating, in reducing the events of experience to an extreme manipulability and thus to a possibility of transformation, which is very useful and very important.
But the scientist, the individual scientist, because of the kind of training he or she has for a long time now, is exactly what Plato says, one who knows nothing, who personally knows nothing.
We read the sentence: 'Who is he who has written? He does not know either', do you remember how it says? "what manner of men they are not even themselves know".
What do you mean "he does not know who he is"?
He does not know who he is, he has no knowledge, which is an embodied knowledge and not an externalised, alienated knowledge in the writing.
This does not mean despising the written, far from it. Writing is very important, it has transformed our lives and continues to transform them, but it poses a problem, a fundamental problem.
It poses the problem whereby we today have a writing power that allows us to do extraordinary things, like send missiles into space, yes, but it does not allow us to answer the question, why? Why do we do it? What's the point?
If not a lot of talk.

What's more, it's not just that we are unable to answer the question, why?

That these particular wisdoms, these articulated wisdoms, these wisdoms that give us a dominion over what exists, never before, evidently, experienced by man, whether on the physical plane, on the political plane, or on the plane of universal information. It is not only this.
Is it not just the fact that, today, all the peoples of the earth, through these instruments, these objectivised memories, these scriptures made into instruments, can immediately be informed of what is happening here and there? In which they are, evidently, informed only of what is written, huh? And everything that is not written remains completely ignored, but that is not the only problem.
The increase of these writings, a civilisation founded on writing, a civilisation that has entrusted its destiny of truth to writing, without reflecting on the instrument, on the limits of the instrument, on the problems that the instrument poses, well, this civilisation is in nothing, in absolutely nothing improved with respect to those problems that Plato raised.
It is not more just, it is not more peaceful, it is not more good, it is not more civilised, it is not more human, in fact if it is possible, it is worse.
If it is possible, it has worsened proportionally, that is, as its power has grown, so to speak, so has its violence, violence that is also in these means.

Violence that is also in these means.

I ask you, have any of you ever seen a service on television, which placed another service next to it? Since it is said that those things are at the service of the public? To inform it? Is it your right to be informed?
Here, but have you ever been informed of how the service was done?
No one tells you this, many, I believe, do not even know it, they do not even imagine it, they do not even have the scruples to make it known that what a television camera picks up is not the truth, it is not what happens in truth, because what happens in truth is what each one of us lives, lives directly, experiences, and when he writes it, for example, when he tells it, he writes and tells from his point of view, a part of what he has experienced, what he is able to say, what can be said with that instrument of the written word, not what he has experienced and not above all what everyone has experienced, because no one can say that, one can only experience that, translating it into information is already a betrayal.
Of course it is natural that it is useful and necessary, but it must be known.

When we read a writing, well, writing was such a problem for Plato, writings betray.
This idiot heard for one night that I was telling him about my philosophy, he wrote it down and thought he understood and did not realise that you cannot write down what I told him in one night.
Either he has encountered something, or he has had an experience, or he has come out of this night changed, or this has happened to him, or any writing is useless, it can never account for it.

But there is one thing to be said, that when we see writing, we know that it is a subjective product, writing has its limitations but somehow also exhibits them, it goes without saying that a journalist's written account is what the journalist believes he has seen, believes he has to say, it seemed meaningful to him.

The problem with today's media, which are the legacy of this whole problem and the consequence of this problem, is that they are illusory.

We, because we are offered a vision, believe that we are there in the flesh, and are seeing what is happening, that we are witnessing how things actually happened.
Not true! That is not true.
That is what has been assembled, as they say, right?
What was edited inside an office with scissors and glue, saying, this we show, this we don't show, but even before that it was edited by the one who directed his vision (or his camera), evidently, that he could not show everything and anyway you cannot see everything.
One can live a situation and there is a difference between living it and transcribing it.

Philosophy asks for the truth of man's living.

Philosophy does not simply ask to write down the criteria of social justice, that too, it is useful to write them down, but they will never be true if they are not applied.
And they are only applied where they are directly experienced, where just men exercise justice, because where there are no just men, any writing does not make that society just, and that is the philosopher's problem.

The philosopher's problem is certainly not one of obscurantism, how shall we say, of limiting the tools, of criticising the tools, or wanting a return to an earlier model of humanity, it is not that, on the contrary, philosophy has been one of the most extraordinary written initiatives, philosophy has written, and if it had not written we would not have the philosophical tradition.
We all know how much we owe to writing.
However, Plato's teaching, Plato's warning is important.
It is very important, a knower is not a philosopher.
A journalist is not a philosopher, huh?
It is not that because you learn your textbook from memory, if you feel like it, you necessarily understand what is written in it.
Understanding means encountering an experience, taking a leap, being faced with something that shocks, that revolts, that transforms.
If a master does not know how to do this he has nothing to teach, and if a disciple does not encounter this he has nothing to learn.
At the very moment that Greek culture invented, precisely, culture, it invented the culture of writing, of manuscripts, of books, as we say, and created this grandiose tradition, of which we can only be proud, at the very moment that it created all that, this public memory, which are libraries, which are books, which are the possibility of writing, which today are video libraries, together with even more extraordinary and marvellous instruments to record all that, none of us, unfortunately, has footage of Plato lecturing in the academy, I wish we had it but we don't, we couldn't have it, whereas we have footage of Einstein lecturing and these are magnificent, marvellous things.
So, while all this has been going on in the West, there has also been a big problem, of how to live within these instruments, how to have a critical awareness of them, how not to fall into blunder, into superstition, into conformism.

These tools, like all human tools, like all human things are double-edged, they are a great possibility and they are a great danger.

Man is a dangerous animal, precisely because he is technological, precisely because he speaks, precisely because he objectifies, precisely because he builds tools, which are at once his glory, his strength, his power and his supreme danger.

The Greeks said it, perhaps best of all, they said, man is the most terrible animal, and they were right.





Thanks again to all those who have had the patience to follow me this far.

Thank you,

Marco
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Re: Philosophy & Poetry

Postby sMartins » Tue Jan 17, 2023 10:44 am

Image

Child of the pure unclouded brow
And dreaming eyes of wonder!
Though time be fleet, and I and thou
Are half a life asunder,
Thy loving smile will surely hail
The love-gift of a fairy-tale.
I have not seen thy sunny face,
Nor heard thy silver laughter:
No thought of me shall find a place
In thy young life’s hereafter –
Enough that now thou wilt not fail
To listen to my fairy-tale.
A tale begun in other days,
When summer suns were glowing–
A simple chime, that served to time
The rhythm of our rowing–
Whose echoes live in memory yet,
Though envious years would say “forget.”
Come, hearken, ere voice of dread,
With bitter tidings laden,
Shall summon to unwelcome bed
A melancholy maiden!
We are but older children, dear,
Who fret to find our bedtime near.
Without, the frost, the blinding snow,
The storm-wind’s moody madness–
Within, the firelight’s ruddy glow,
And childhood’s nest of gladness.
The magic words shall hold the fast:
Thou shalt not heed the raving blast.
And, though the shadow of a sigh
May tremble through the story,
For”happy summer glory–
It shall not touch, with breath of bale,
The pleasance of our fairy-tale.



Through The Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
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Re: Philosophy & Poetry

Postby sMartins » Fri Jan 20, 2023 12:16 pm

XENOPHANES

Xenophanes was a Greek philosopher and poet, believed to have been born around 570 B.C. in Colophon, a colony in Asia Minor. He left his homeland around 545 B.C. because of the advance of the Persians, and spent his life travelling continually throughout Greece and Magna Graecia, where he was also in Sicily, certainly also in Elea, practising the profession of cantor, although this is an unsuitable word in those times, of rhapsodus, of aedo.
He was a wandering poet, a very likeable character I must say.

A wandering poet who dedicated his life to making his elegies known to the entire Greek-speaking population, perhaps even two poems that have not survived and the famous silli, poems of a satirical nature.
He is an aedo of the ancient tradition but, as you will see, completely renewed and transfigured by him.

Tradition says that he was the founder of the school of Elea and perhaps the teacher of Parmenides, but historians are very doubtful about this, and there are even those who reverse things, saying that it is more likely that he was Parmenides' disciple and not the other way around.
The reasons for this tradition are understandable because Xenophanes' ideas are easily approximated to certain traits of Parmenides' thought, but we will get rid of all that, we are not interested in knowing the truth about Xenophanes, Elea and Parmenides because it is quite another matter as we will try to show.

Having said this, we can introduce ourselves into the matter by saying that the few fragments that have remained to us, which are not many, are nonetheless the testimony of something extraordinary, of a cyclopean event.
At this point it is a question of focusing on the problem, not simply reporting what is written in these fragments, we must focus on the problem, and the real problem, specific in this case is the following: how do you read an ancient text?

How do you read a text from the past? in this case it is even ancient, but how do you make a proper reading that has the purpose of understanding it? mind you, understand it and not judge it.

Those who judge have not understood the work that needs to be done, and this is an aspect that often remains on the margins of school work, because very often one is anxious to get a message across and imprint it in the memory of those who are studying and who did not know it before, but this is too little and also daunting.
It is of no interest what judgement we make of what Xenophanes says.
It is of interest that we understand what he says and why he says it, under what conditions a man expressed himself in this way and dedicated his life to being an aedo travelling all over Greece, why? What had happened?
That is the point.
In culture you don't have to cheer, as in sport, no, in culture you have to understand, understanding doesn't mean cheering, understanding doesn't mean having the presumption to make judgements: I like it, I don't like it, I agree, I disagree, who cares?!
Do you understand? This is the real point.

Here, in the case of Xenophanes, we are faced with an emblematic situation because what Xenophanes says seems, at first sight, absolutely comprehensible, even shareable in certain respects, because we come from him, it is about the roots, we are all great-grandchildren of Xenophanes, it is certain, when we read his propositions we are not surprised at all, indeed perhaps we say thank goodness, someone who reasons.
However, no, it is not that simple at all.
Some of the most famous fragments have been preserved for us by the fathers of the Christian church, who obviously were very much in tune, or they thought they were very much in tune, and in some ways they were right, and since we certainly come from two thousand years of Christianity we immediately find ourselves in tune, and so we understand nothing.

And so we understand nothing!
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Re: Philosophy & Poetry

Postby sMartins » Sat Jan 21, 2023 12:05 pm

THE MAN OF THE MIND

And so we understand nothing.

Let us try to get into the matter by first of all saying, aiming at the big target, what are the most amazing things that happen in Xenophanes' words.
The first extraordinary thing that happens is that here we have a denunciation of so-called anthropomorphism, that is, of that view of nature and in particular of the gods, of the divinities, which takes man as its measure, which makes nature a human personification, of the forces of nature as if fire, earth, air and water were subjects. In short, they are humanised and thus come to be the gods, who are depicted with human features.
Even the Bible says that Adam was made in the image and likeness of God, but, as you know, there is much debate there about what that means, does it mean that God has a nose? ears? There, already this is excluded by the Jewish religion.
So in what sense are they made in the image and likeness? In what sense will Xenophanes answer.

Certainly the gods are not made as men, caught up in anthropomorphic superstition, imagine them to be.
You see, huh? This is the first time, after thousands and thousands of years in which mankind has thought in another way, a guy comes along and says, all this is anthropomorphism.

I remind you that there is not a single ancient, archaic population, a single archaic culture that did not believe in the gods and honoured the gods, there must be a reason, right?
It is not possible that they were all idiots, or all so superstitious, there must have been a reason, and it is not easy to guess what that reason is, and it is not easy to put yourself in the right focus to be able to think about it, because it is clear that we think 'from another side', looking with our eyes at humanity, and there are still some who believe in gods, humanity who have another view, on the world, on divinity, on the origin of life, on the meaning of death.
So, we, we are always on the other side when we look at them and we are on the side of Xenophanes, interesting? huh?

First element, this denunciation of an anthropomorphism that has lasted for thousands and thousands of years.
Today we can evaluate these times better than in Xenophanes' time, and we can safely speak of 50,60,70 thousand years. We have evidence of such ancient sepulchres, therefore of a sense of divinities, of the sacred, of particular divinities, which are evoked by the appearance of the sepulchre. Thousands and thousands of years.

Second element, end of myth.
The end of myth as that oral tale that peoples, again, for thousands and thousands of years, hand down from mouth to ear, myth that constitutes their culture, their wisdom, everything they know about themselves, the world, how to behave in the world, what will happen after death, etc.
Xenophanes is the first one to denounce all this, but he does not denounce it only in the things he says, but in the practice he practises. Because yes, he is an aedo, a rhapsodist, he sings his verses but he also writes them, he begins to be an exponent of a profound transformation of Greek culture that passes from orality to the alphabet, to literacy, and that is why we have, albeit few and poor, testimonies of what he sang and said as he travelled around Greece and caused great scandal of course, great emotion and great scandal. It was a legendary event that was passed on for many years.

Xenophanes wrote, he was not like Homer, who did not write, and if we have two poems by Homer, or rather of Homer's age, because, as you know, Homer is a name and not a character. If we have these two poems, which are not even coeval, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Iliad is older, at least some parts, while the Odyssey is more recent.
If we have these two poems, it is because at some point this oral tradition was written down, otherwise we would not have it, and it became something quite different from what it was in the oral tradition, which was a kind of encyclopaedia of memory, which handed down the beliefs, customs, values, as we say today, of an entire community, of an entire people.
Here, then it is transcribed and becomes a literary fact, because it enters the letters, they give it another garment which is the letter, it is no longer the voice of the aedo alone.
Here, Xenophanes, belongs to this second type of use of the word, there is no longer myth, mythos means word, oral word, narration.
With Xenophanes there is no longer the oral memory that believes in fairy tales, in stories, in the wonderful traditions of imaginative culture, no, here we enter another world, the world of literature, the world of history, the world of science, we are on the margins of this extraordinary event.

Third element, the most important thing for us to understand, the birth of the man of the mind.

If we use the metaphors of a great Italian philosopher, Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), we could say, the mankind before Xenophanes were basically mankind of the imagination, men of fantasy, of the poetic-memorial, oral fantasy.
It is our words, 'fantasy', they would not have said it, it is our way of arranging things, they used 'fantasy', we say, from Xenophanes onwards fantasy is no longer enough, it takes the mind, there is the discovery of a man endowed with intellect, mind, logos, reason.
Rationality, the world of rationality, of philosophy, of science, begins, so we cannot do without Xenophanes, to understand the roots of our culture.

And finally, fourth element, an ethics of the state begins.
Very clearly, Xenophanes first appeals to what is important to the state community and not to the cultural-heroic, sacred, polytheistic, etc. community.
The ethics of the state, what the state needs, begins.

Here, these are the condensation points of the great revolution that we see embodied, be careful how I speak, that we see embodied in Xenophanes.
I did not say it is Xenophanes' effect, and here again please stop with me, reflect for another moment.
As I said before, it is not a matter of judging the content of what Xenophanes says, but it is a matter of understanding it, but what must one do to understand it?
After we have listed these four points where we immediately see the difference between the previous culture and the culture that is to follow, so in Xenophanes we have a litmus test of how things went in Greece between the sixth and fifth centuries BC.
But what does this mean? Does it mean that we have a good witness?
Here, we have a good witness, Xenophanes is a good witness, he is not a creator, none of us is a creator, no one has ever been a creator, except in the second place.
Last edited by sMartins on Sun Jan 22, 2023 5:37 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Philosophy & Poetry

Postby sMartins » Sun Jan 22, 2023 5:35 pm

THE LIFE FORCES OF ALL OF US

There, we have a good witness, Xenophanes is a good witness, he is not a creator, none of us is a creator, no one has ever been a creator, except in the second place.

What do I want to say?
I mean that when we study our manuals, which are of course a compendium of news, built to support school preparation but which have obvious limitations, well, when we read the manuals, it seems that, the history of mankind, that which we are the way we are today, was made by Xenophanes, by Heraclitus, by Parmenides, by Achilles, by Napoleon, etc., it is not so.
This image of culture is wrong, it has to be taken out of our heads, it is a way of reconstructing our history that emphasises, Nietzsche would have said, a monumental history, that emphasises singularities, subjects, Hegel created the modern state, we say, this is not true, this is not to lower or diminish the greatness of these our masters, for goodness sake, we owe them everything, of course, but in each of them, let alone in Xenophanes who is on the brink of a great cultural revolution, of customs, economic, political, etc.. ., in each of them the forces of life are expressed, you see? Huh?

The forces of everyone's life, who makes things is the operating of everyone.

That blind operating, that operating that happens through us, of which we have no dominion, of which we have no awareness, why? Because life changes, more or less quickly according to historical periods, there are communities that remain almost immobile for centuries, others that start running, just think of the 1800s, or the 1900s, where in the first half everything moved, in the second half we seem to have fallen asleep.
So there are periods when things change totally, human beings live differently, they produce their personal economy differently, how things are done, how houses are lived in, how children are brought up, how love is made, how war is waged.

Of course we, how can I put it, we judge these changes, and this is a cause of great excitement for all of us and great contrast between us, uh? so before cheering it is good to think.
Of course we all judge the transformations that happen with an old mentality, we don't have an old mentality, we were trained in the old ideas, which were necessary to give us an education, a way of coping with life and being equal to the things that happen, so each one of us has in our hands mental tools, as Xenophanes would tell us, antiquated mental tools.
We believe in antiquated values, antiquated does not mean that those values were not important, but they are no longer important, they are no longer sufficient, at least in that version that is ours, they are no longer sufficient to understand what happens to us.
And so the great contrast, those who are revolutionaries and those who are traditionalists, those who love change and those who are afraid of change, in short a great confusion, it has always been this way, because things change, our lives change but our minds do not change as quickly.

So then, if this is the background of our experience, this is how it has always been, ever since an upright animal started chipping stone and then building cultural tools, if this is how it has always been, after this happening that continually happens, right there, within this happening, the great personalities come out, sure, Xenophanes, Hegel, Marx, Napoleon, Julius Caesar, it's certain.
These great personalities come out as those who, among the first, and usually the first are also the most powerful, the strongest in understanding, the first who understood what was happening, or rather, the first who built a system of ideas through which what was happening was made understandable.
So, it is not Xenophanes who criticises ancient polytheism, the world of fairy tales, it is not him, it is his life, it is the life of Greece, the life of that world there that has changed, it can no longer believe as before, it can no longer live as before, and it is from this very fabric that a man emerges who has the strength, the power to say the words adequate to express those facts, to say new words, which make our life comprehensible in its contradiction between what we have become and what we continue to think we should be, without succeeding in being so.

So, yes, this is where the creative element begins, depending, however, on what we all do, which no one can govern or direct, which happens through the force of destiny, through the force of things, and if you wish, you can also include the force of divine providence, but of course we can tell the story in many ways, but what is certain is that first it happens, that the world changes and someone begins to find the words to say this change, to bring it to mind, to consciousness, to make it conscious, and naturally this process, which makes us conscious, influences the process itself.

First you live, then you say, then you build on what you have said .

Here is where ideas begin to be, only now, promoters of novelty, but not because one starts from ideas to promote novelty, one always starts from life, from economic life, from material life, sensual, emotional, from life in the flesh.

Philosophy does not come from books, it comes from things, and truth does not lie in books.
Books are an indispensable tool for understanding how we live, where we go or where we would like to go.

Here, this understanding, the cause of further consequences, finds an emblematic example in Xenophanes.
You see, at school we do what we can, the hours are what they are, the things to learn are endless, a teacher would have to start somewhere else to make immediate use of the school textbook, she cannot say with absolute freedom what should actually be done, she cannot say this thing that you certainly were not told, could not be said, that Xenophanes is not comprehensible if you do not know the Greek history of that period.
Xenophanes is not comprehensible if one does not know the economy of the Greek world of that period, how people lived in the cities, how they produced in the countryside, how they made tools, artefacts, weapons, how they honoured the gods.
We should start from there to understand a guy like Xenophanes, but if we start from ideas, we invert the real sense of things, we think that ideas alone are important, but ideas alone say nothing if we don't relate them to the real situation in which this man lived and reacted emotionally and was in conflict with his contemporaries, but at the same time he was also a dragger, because he was capable of new views on reality.

We should start there, and not only there, but by doing what the school manual does not do, what the manualistic tradition does not do, and what does the manualistic tradition do?
In the manualistic tradition, for example, Xenophanes, even if we mention him, we hurry, there are more important things, it is true, in a way it is true, even if it is not true.
What should be done, really, is not to take Parmenides and say that Parmenides says about being and Heraclitus says about becoming, so they are opposites, maybe even, let's say, one criticises the other, it's all baloney, it's not true.
This is a scholastic textbook arrangement that has been handy for a long time, centuries, no, you don't understand anything about Xenophanes if you don't hold him in the same vein, and we are in the same years or so, if you don't hold him in the same vein as Heraclitus or Parmenides, for example.

So of course, you have to start from economic life, and you can talk very little about that in school, you have to be clear about what was maturing in trade, between the Middle East and Greece, the enrichment of the polis, in the lives of the citizens who were beginning to know a certain luxury, the differentiation of trades, which became centres of power. The centre of power was no longer just the priest or the sacredness of ritual, of worship, of sacrifice.
No, the market began, the square began, the agora began, the court where civil disputes between citizens were dealt with began, currency, money, writing, written culture began.
If we do not see all this horizon a guy like Xenophanes is incomprehensible, or, on the contrary, we take him as truth. Understand? Huh?
Here then is prejudice, here is dogmatism. Of course, before him they were all anthropomorphic, superstitious, savage, we on the other hand civilised, we rational, Xenophanes was the first to realise that, that's what we say, but no, that's not how it happened, that's not what happened.

All these things happened in the materiality of life and then one man brought them to the word, but not alone.
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Re: Philosophy & Poetry

Postby sMartins » Sun Jan 29, 2023 8:09 pm

THE WORLD OF THE AWAKENED MIND

All these things happened in the materiality of life and then one man brought them to the word, but not alone.

To understand Xenophanes' word, which is preserved for us in a few fragments, it is essential to understand what Heraclitus said, what Parmenides said. And what did they say?

Let us begin by remembering, what did Heraclitus say? You have to be able to read it, he is not at all the philosopher of 'becoming', these are later traditions, Heraclitus is the philosopher of 'logos', of thought, this is Heraclitus, and in this he is very similar to Parmenides, he is not at all the opposite of Parmenides, they are two different ways of saying similar things.
Heraclitus' first fragment begins with the word 'logos'! This word, this thought that is always living.
What Heraclitus is saying is that one must go beyond the idiotic visions, linked to the idion, of men who are asleep, of men who do not even know that they are asleep, one must wake these men up, bringing them out of the idiocy of their beliefs.
What, for Heraclitus, is the idiocy of their beliefs? The belief in the gods.
If you go to Sparta these are the gods, if you go to Athens they are others, if you go to Egypt imagine that.
Heraclitus says no, one, unique, common to all is the logos, the discourse of reason, and on this discourse of reason, he says, the states must be founded, the city must be founded.

This is an enormous revolution, huh?
The first manifestation of man reasoning with his mind and not with tradition, and not with the customs that have traditionally followed from one generation to the next, indicating what we should believe, what we should do, how we should behave, what will happen if we do not behave, etc.
No, says Heraclitus, a great revolution that appeals to the ever-living logos, to the eternity of reason, 'discovered now'!
These words emerge, in fact it is very difficult to translate 'logos' in Heraclitus because it has many meanings, but it certainly means not the world of tradition, not the world of local sacredness, not the world of dreams, but the world of the awakened mind, that the voice of reason, the universal voice of reason, has awakened.
Of course, one cannot imagine the universal voice of reason if there is no writing to write it, huh? It is writing that is the garment of universal reason, that which, precisely, is not tied to what is done, but to what 'the saying' says. Well, this is Heraclitus.

Parmenides states precisely that in his poem.

Parmenides says to the young man who is being initiated into this new form of wisdom, he says, 'look well', or rather, 'listen well to my saying'.
"My saying", but he says more, he says to take into account the meaning of what he says, of the saying, separate from the fact that it is a goddess who says it, it does not matter, it matters what the saying says, do you understand?
We have moved from a world that says this thing is true because the god said it, this thing is true because the priest of the god said it, to a world that says this thing is true because?
Because it expresses the ever-living logos, yes, OK, but Parmenides was much more profound in this, because what he says is not contestable, it is not contradictory, and then we are faced with the capital phrase of Parmenides' poem, which is not so much "being and thinking are the same", of course, this is fundamental, the being of things is in thought, it is not in the revelation of the god, it is not in the word of the oracle, it is not in the sacred tradition of myths, cults, rites, but it is in thought.
But what is thought?
"Nous" is the word of Parmenides, as "Logos" was in Heraclitus.
And what is thought, here, he says in a fragment that sounds like the trumpets of universal judgement, it is the end of a world and the beginning of ours, the one with which we still identify, it is the one in which the goddess tells the young man to listen to her sayings and then adds, judge with the logos, judge with the mind, with reasoning the things that I have uttered with my mouth.

He does not say, believe what I say because I am the goddess, but he says judge with your mind!

And so, here we are, ready to judge, this is true and this is false, this is contradictory and this is not.

So, it is only by bearing in mind this arc of events, to which we have very rare testimony in these fragments, which have been preserved for us because, evidently, they have always seemed fundamental, that we must read Xenophanes' revolution, then we understand another fundamental piece, a piece that fits perfectly into this horizon that I have described and that adds fundamental things, or rather says explicitly what was, how should I say, presupposed in Heraclitus and Parmenides, which suggests it is right that Xenophanes is a little earlier than Parmenides, perhaps.

At this point I read you a very poignant passage from Xenophanes, which reads as follows:

"It is now 67 years since my thoughts have been stirring all over the land of Greece, 25 years I was then, and even more, though of these things I can tell the truth".

An autobiographical fragment, touching, after so many years, Xenophanes died very old, which was quite rare at the time. After so many years, he says, how long have I been travelling all over Greece bringing this announcement, this news, this new word, huh?
He goes on to say, when I moved, I was 25 years old or thereabouts, I was a young man in essence, I left my homeland, I came here, to Greece, moved by this thought that burned inside me, that had to be said, had to be expressed, even though we know very well that the expression of this thought provoked enormous scandal, very violent opposition, even dangerous for his life probably.
But these things had to be said because the word was pressed by reality, you understand, pressed by the need to say 'the true'.

The true, every time, is what we experience that cannot be said with the old words, it is the new ones that are true, but not because they, the words, do things, but because they are the only ones that are adequate to make us aware of what is happening to us?

What is happening to us?
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