I'm thinking along the lines of The Forms and the cave. Maybe there's a way of concieving the forms elsewise -- but my thoughts with regards to the mythic, at least, are along those lines: the cave makes sense to me. When Plato writes about the light which you turn to, this is a feeling, at least, that I think I've had.

And yet it is also a myth which orients me, rather than a truth. I'm tempted to say "literal", but I know I mean more than that.... I'm just uncertain how to make more of a differentiation at this point.

Uh... thinking -- on the other side, I'm saying the dry subjects people hate -- logic and such -- not only should but does address itself to everyone. Even if they don't like it.

a myth which orients me, rather than a truth — Moliere

Philosophy aims to tell truth-based myths no?

Logic, like math, is "addressed to everyone", yet illogic and innumeracy prevail.

It does!

I'm thinking it does more than that too, though.

Now.... what that is.... eh. Usual philosophical wondering stuff... :D

I'm just uncertain how to make more of a differentiation at this point — Moliere

Squeeze the myth so hard that the truth pops out.

Clever. :)

Physicists, by and large, are Platonists who seek reality in the archetypes behind the scenes. Non-scientists, by and large, are Kierkegaardians for whom the subjectivity of life and thought is more real than scientific models.

- Allan Sandage, "Science and religion -- separate closets in the same house,"

Literature must be written from the periphery toward the center, and we can criticize the center. Our credo, our theme, or our imagination is that of the peripheral human being. The man who is in the center does not have anything to write. From the periphery, we can write the story of the human being and this story can express the humanity of the center, so when I say the word periphery, this is a most important creed of mine. — Kenzaburō Ōe, d. 2023

:flower:

I would not recognize any authority, any value, higher than democracy — Kenzaburō Ōe (1994, referring to the Emperor of Japan)

 It's time to move beyond 'thoughts and prayers.' — opening prayer by U.S. Senate Chaplain Barry C. Black, retired Navy Rear Admiral, on 3 March 2023

Not long ago, I informed you that my third son had lost his sanity: I was wrong, and I ask you not to take it into account. Since the time has come, I will tell you what I remember: My late husband, involved in the officers' revolt, which ended in failure, came to the conclusion that the only way out was the assassination of His Majesty the Emperor. It was the nature of this monstrous fact that led him to withdraw into the storage room, which remained boarded up until his death. This was due to heart failure. That's all I have to tell you.

Kenzaburo Ōe, Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness. Page 54.

I am completely an elitist in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense. I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive, and full to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it's an expert gardener at work or a good carpenter chopping dovetails. I don't think stupid or ill-read people are as good to be with as wise and fully literate ones. I would rather watch a great tennis player than a mediocre one, unless the latter is a friend or a relative. — Robert Hughes, art critic

:up:

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well, lucky you. — Philip Roth, American Pastoral

Just finished that book :heart:

And now, after an abortive foray into another book that I didn't really like...

Call me Ishmael.

:)

The world is made for people who aren't cursed with self-awareness. — Annie Savoy (Bull Durham)

I saw a t-shirt with a likeness of the Buddha on it. Underneath it said,'Try not to be a cunt: The Buddha.' — Tom Storm

:smirk:

At your age, if you are single and do not have an address, it is understandable that you lack confidence in society... right? — Yukio Mishima.

If the ignorance of nature gave birth to such a variety of gods, the knowledge of this nature is calculated to destroy them. — Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach, System of Nature, or the Laws of the Moral and Physical World (1770)

I am complete skeptic when it comes to Plato.
Nietzsche — Twilight of the Idols

Said by one skeptic about another. It takes a skeptic to know how to read a skeptic.

Whoever is called a great minister,
when he finds that he cannot morally serve his prince, he resigns. — Confucius, Analects: 9817

I'm skeptical of your assumption that 'being skeptical of X' makes one a skeptic in a philosophical sense. Neither Freddy (perspectival-fictionalist?) nor Plato (concept realist?) seem to me to be philosophical skeptics such Academics or Pyrrhonians, Cartesians or Humeans. Maybe I'm reading too much into your remark?

Plato, following Socrates, is a zetetic skeptic. This is redundant since both terms originally mean to inquire. He knows he does not know. He desires to be wise, but is not. And so he inquires.

In the Antichrist Nietzsche says:

What I here mean by philology is, in a general sense, the art of reading with profit—the capacity for absorbing facts without interpreting them falsely, and without losing caution, patience and subtlety in the effort to understand them. Philology as ephexis in interpretation ...

(52)

The term ephexis (Greek ephektikos) means suspension of belief.

He goes on:

Do not let yourself be deceived: great intellects are sceptical. Zarathustra is a sceptic. The strength, the freedom which proceed from intellectual power, from a superabundance of intellectual power, manifest themselves as scepticism.

(54)

The bodies of both thinkers' works convince me otherwise.

Since this area is for quotations rather than discuss I will leave off, but I have discussed Plato's zeteticism elsewhere.

Plato's zeteticism — Fooloso4

From what I can tell the word was coined and used by the Flat Earth society in the 19th century and still today (Rationalwiki). Anyway, right, this is not the place to resolve a terminological dispute.

“Have you ever had that feeling—that you'd like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?”, Haruki Murakami.

“In short there are two principles, which I cannot render consistent; nor is it in my power to renounce either of them, viz. that all our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and that the mind never perceives any real connexion among distinct existences. Did our perceptions either inhere in something simple and individual, or did the mind perceive some real connexion among them, there wou'd be no difficulty in the case. For my part, I must plead the privilege of a sceptic, and confess, that this difficulty is too hard for my understanding.” -David Hume

The mind is its own place and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n. — John Milton, Paradise Lost

The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion, but no brains. — Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri, pessimistic freethinker, d.1057 CE

Death gives us something to do. Because it's a full-time job looking the other way.

- Martin Amis

If America is the culmination of Western white civilization, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization. This is a painful truth; few of us want to go that far.... The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al, don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself. — Susan Sontag, Paris Review 1967

Accurate critique or posturing "white guilt"? Both or neither? I've no doubt what Fanon would say. :chin:

Irony of representation, I wonder what Ms. Sontag thought of this scene ...