Reminds me of The Vinegar Tasters ...

Indexicals, man, sometimes folly is funny, sometimes folly is sad.

Also, something can be funny and sad at the same time.

Flip sides of the same drachma. Janus masque (pace Graeca). Both Democritus & Heraclitus are favorites of mine (contra Parmenides --> Plato).

Thanks for the link. I wonder which of them actually got it right? Confucius was about resistance, the Buddha was about avoidance, and Lao Tze was about acceptance.

Indexicals, man, sometimes folly is funny, sometimes folly is sad.

Also, something can be funny and sad at the same time. — fdrake

So the tradition of taking Heraclitus and Democritus in philosophical opposition is mistaken?

Flip sides of the same drachma. Janus masque (pace Graeca). Both Democritus & Heraclitus are favorites of mine (contra Parmenides --> Plato) — 180 Proof

:up:

I wonder which of them actually got it right? — TheMadFool

All of the above. People are different and have different needs. Some need Confucianism, others need Buddhism. It seems that what people think is the fundamental aspect of nature or life depends on their personal perspective, rather than any objective truth about the world.

All of the above. People are different and have different needs. Some need Confucianism, others need Buddhism. It seems that what people think is the fundamental aspect of nature or life depends on their personal perspective, rather than any objective truth about the world. — Pinprick

Sad but true or should I be saying true but sad. On what should I lay the emphasis on? On truth, on sadness, both or neither? Perhaps this is the wrong question to ask. It's not about who got it right (or wrong) but about what they all wanted to get right - the true nature of reality. Clearly, Confucius was angry, the Buddha was depressed and Lao Tze had had enough and simply surrendered to that which made Confucius angry and the Buddha melancholy. It appears they were all grieving the fatal illness that had humanity in its deadly grip.

Human folly is real — TheMadFool

A congenital defect, which I name foolery, to recover from and learn to live with soberly (lucidly-absurdly) through foolosophy praxis.

A congenital defect, which I name foolery, to recover from and learn to live with soberly (lucidly-absurdly) through foolosophy praxis. — 180 Proof

Any ideas on what human folly actually refers to? :chin:

The common factor to comedy and tragedy, and what I hold makes drama (inclusive of both of those) like a mirror image of beauty, is that while beauty is about experiences of something seeming in some way right, comedy and tragedy are both experiences of something seeming in some way wrong.

The distinguishing difference between comedy and tragedy is how they approach that wrongness: comedy approaches it frivolously, with levity, making light of whatever is wrong; while tragedy approaches it seriously, with gravity, taking the wrong thing to be a weighty matter.

This wrongness can be of either a descriptive or prescriptive kind, just like the rightness of beauty can be. I think this is best illustrated in the wide varieties of comedy, ranging from slapstick (where people experiencing physical violence is treated lightly instead of as a matter of grievous injury) and roasts or other jokes explicitly at someone's expense (that are treated as an acceptable transgressions of social norms), which are both making light of prescriptively bad things; to jokes that hinge on setting up and then subverting expectations (where something that was thought to true turns out to be false), including postmodern comedy that violates medium conventions such as breaking the fourth wall, and even things like puns where the wrongness is just the use of the wrong word in place of the expected one.

All comedy hinges on something being, in some way or another, wrong, and yet treated as not a big deal.

Tragedy, on the other hand, depicts something being in some way wrong, and makes a big deal out of it being wrong.

Both of them are, for that wrongness that they depend on, in some way un-beautiful. Yet both can nevertheless be, in the end, beautiful in their own way. Comedy, in making light of bad things, shows them as not so bad, and so correspondingly good, at least relatively speaking, and thereby beautiful in a way. And tragedy, in treating bad things as weighty matters, can speak hard truths about bad experiences that people can really have, and so, for that truth, also be beautiful in a way.

Any ideas on what human folly actually refers to? — TheMadFool

This old post.

This thread reminds me of my favourite quote:

Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die. — Mel Brooks

This thread reminds me of my favourite quote:

Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.
— Mel Brooks — Luke

Brilliant :clap: Yet, I don't think Democritus would've laughed at "you", whoever it is that suffers the fatal fall into the open sewer but he would've laughed at anyone who takes offense/is hurt by the incident - it's typical human nature not to care about dangerous open sewers.

Any ideas on what human folly actually refers to?
— TheMadFool
This old post. — 180 Proof

Is the list a through g the Democritean idea of human folly? Democritus thought humans were stupid and that, to him, was laughable but the mother of all questions is: did Democritus think Socrates was, along with the rest of us, ridiculously stupid? Could we all be fools, just not equally foolish and what we perceive as wisdom is not actually wisdom but just a different, lower, level of idiocy? Reminds me of theater in the old days: cross-gender acting, when a woman actor was not a woman but the most effeminate man :lol:

Is the list a through g the Democritean idea of human folly? — TheMadFool

Not exhaustive by any means, just a sketch. Also this. We don't know what "the Democritean idea" per se was but, like fish in the sea, all of our lives we're swimming through "human folly" that's too close to see, no?

Democritus thought humans were stupid and that, to him, was laughable but the mother of all questions is: did Democritus think Socrates was, along with the rest of us, ridiculously stupid?

Ironically or not, Socrates thought he was also a fool himself (see "The Clouds" by Aristophanes) and didn't believe it when told the Delphic Oracle had said "there was no man wiser" than Socrates. Thus, he used the elenchus (socratic method) - mug's game for showing other fools that they too are fools, a gadfly's stinger - trying to prove 'the prophesy' wrong, etc ... I also suspect, for consistency sake, that Democritus didn't exempt himself either - for all of his speculative and proto-scientific acuity, the great atomist purportedly believed with deep conviction that the 'earth is flat' having argued, according to legend, forcefully against 'the absurdity of a round earth' :monkey: - from the circus of hilarious human folly. "The laughing philosopher", I'd like to believe, reflectively, self-deprecatingly, laughed at himself as well.

Could we all be fools, just not equally foolish and what we perceive as wisdom is not actually wisdom but just a different, lower, level of idiocy? Reminds me of theater in the old days: cross-gender acting, when a woman actor was not a woman but the most effeminate man :lol:

Yes, exactly.

Not exhaustive by any means, just a sketch. Also this. We don't know what "the Democritean idea" per se was but, like fish in the sea, all of our lives we're swimming through "human folly" that's too close to see, no?

Democritus thought humans were stupid and that, to him, was laughable but the mother of all questions is: did Democritus think Socrates was, along with the rest of us, ridiculously stupid?
Ironically or not, Socrates thought he was also a fool himself (see "The Clouds" by Aristophanes) and didn't believe it when told the Delphic Oracle had said "there was no man wiser" than Socrates. Thus, he used the elenchus (socratic method) - mug's game for showing other fools that they too are fools, a gadfly's stinger - trying to prove 'the prophesy' wrong, etc ... I also suspect, for consistency sake, that Democritus didn't exempt himself either - for all of his speculative and proto-scientific acuity, the great atomist purportedly believed with deep conviction that the 'earth is flat' having argued, according to legend, forcefully against 'the absurdity of a round earth' :monkey: - from the circus of hilarious human folly. "The laughing philosopher", I'd like to believe, reflectively, self-deprecatingly, laughed at himself as well.

Could we all be fools, just not equally foolish and what we perceive as wisdom is not actually wisdom but just a different, lower, level of idiocy? Reminds me of theater in the old days: cross-gender acting, when a woman actor was not a woman but the most effeminate man :lol:
Yes, exactly. — 180 Proof

:up: :clap:

I'm getting the feeling that wisdom isn't about what but about how, one thinks.

I'm getting the feeling that wisdom isn't about what but about how, one thinks. — TheMadFool

:up:

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