As I listened to the exposition of virtue, goodness. Evil, and, of course, Plato there in the thick of it, I found myself repeating to myself the question at the opening of Meno. Of course after all these years I have no more of a certain answer regarding knowledge, virtue and the good than I had as a young student of philosophy and Greek literature.
Nevertheless, I have come to something which -- for lack of a better term -- I will call a new speculation. In short, I think I have found a tentative answer in the poets and tragedians, and in the tales of c.haracters like Ixion and Lycaon. They did not violate preceprs in some decalogue. Rather each in his own way overstepped a limit or boundary.
Borges seems ti gave vuewed reality as the world
Of Plato's forms , but if we understand Diotima and the Silenus correctly, our knowledge of beauty, love, goodness are inextricably bound with the physical world. We humans can only hope to understand such lofty abstractions insofar as they are embodied in the physical, in the body. We experience them in extenso, as a threshold not necessarily to be grasped entirely, but not to be violated. Perhaps this limit which is not to be transgressed but which also is not ultimately defined is an early but sophisticated formulation of what humankind came to know as natural law.
I suppose that where this must lead is to the shared understanding of a Humean community of knowers who know not moral or epistemological absolutes, but rather boundaries or limits of finitude and absolute uncertainty.
I can't recall the location, but Fanon has a brief account of a the French constabulary who was a patient of his, and had the dubious authority of governance over the minds and bodies of colonial prisoners. Fanon's patient did horrible things for which he compensated by allowing himself to be humiliated and hurt sexually. This man was not a moral phiosopher. Perhaps he was a legalist in the sense of a Javert or a Chinese official, but he seems to have sensed that under his cloak of power, something was amiss in that soul which he probably negated in the course of rationalizing his business. He was struggling and suffering at the vounds of sense, being broken on a wheel of realpolitik.
Well, these are just a few thoughts, speculations provoked by the podcast. As you can see, it partakes more of a question that an answer or codification.
If we are to see the truth clearly then we need to refine our perceptions rather than using drugs to confuse them and blunt them even more. None of these drugs would work anyway if they weren't already present in the human body. And if they're there already why introduce them from outside?
There you go again, pretending to be an oracle. I am calm, not "upset." You are the one who jumps to wild conclusions and can't support your claims. I am an individual, not a herd-follower. Now here you are insulting me and claiming to have proper British manners. How amusing!
First you lecture me, then you become presumptuous, telling me that I am "wetting my feet." You seem like a person who leaps to conclusions. You know nothing about me, nothing about my spiritual experiences, nothing about the conclusions I drew from them. I did find the discussion interesting for awhile, but someone who presumes and lectures is not my cup of tea. This is not "how it happens with everyone," another presumption. Socrates said he was the wisest man in Greece because only he admitted how little he knew. You may think you are "more advanced than me," but I suspect I am more advanced because I don't presume to know what cannot be known.
I find it amusing that people of faith fear some sort of "conspiracy" to control minds when religion has been by far the greatest exeter of mind control throughout human history.
I live in the United States where the majority of the population believe in a "god" who murdered Adam and Eve unjustly because he had denied them the knowledge of good and evil, meaning they couldn't know it was a "sin" to eat the forbidden fruit. This "god" became the first murderer when he killed animals to give their skins to Adam and Eve for clothes. Why didn't he use his superpowers to give them clothes of cotton, wool or some other nonlethal fiber?
I read the Bible from cover to cover at age 11 and wrote this epigram to express my opinion about the Bible:
If God
is good
half the Bible
is libel.
—Michael R. Burch
As Voltaire pointed out, if people can control your beliefs they can control your actions. The nonsensical ideas that sex is a "sin" and that being LBGTQ is a "sin" leads people of faith to discriminate against and persecute their own kind.
The earth is not flat, although the Bible says it is. Stars are not tiny pinpricks of light that can fall to earth, although the Bible says they can. Sex outside marriage is not a sin, although the Bible says it is. Stoning children to death is murder, although the Bible commands such stonings. And so on.
Human religions are a mass of false beliefs, contradictions and absurd errors. And all too often they pit one believer against another, as we saw during the Crusades, the Inquisitions, the Holocaust and today in Israel/Palestine.
As far as I'm concerned the Muse dictates my poems to me, in a voice quieter than silence. I very often mishear her, but luckily she is endlessly patient with me, and repeats the poem till I get it down right. When I do finally succeed in doing do she let's me know I've done that by giving me a pat on the back. (Which perhaps explains why I get rather impatient with editors who try to second-guess me. Or rather Her. )
But if that's the case with my poems then it occurs to me that it would be rather inconsistent of me to think that something similar didn't occur in my life as well. But of course that Being too will speak in a voice quieter than silence. As it did for Elijah.
Milton equated the Muse with the Holy Ghost.
All religion is a more or less erratic reaching out into a subtle but important region which is very difficult to record correctly. Which is why we mere humans so often get it wrong. Here it seems to me that the role of the poet is crucial. As a witness.
If poetry depends on the Muse, what is the explanation for so many poets writing terrible poetry? It seems far more likely that good poetry depends on poets mastering the English language as much as it can be mastered. Otherwise illiterates would be outdoing Shakespeare.
I had talent at a young age, and 38 of my teenage poems have been published by literary journals. However, I had to work diligently at my poems for several years before I finally wrote one that I thought was really good. At one point I had destroyed everything I had written, in frustration. There is a lot more to writing poetry than a mysterious Muse doing all the work.
I find it helpful to divide a poet's life into four phases: Apprenticeship; Discipline; Mastery; and Freedom.
Discipline comprises the years of hard slog when you are learning your trade. Apprenticeship is when you sit at the feet of the masters and learn from them everything you can, and begin to find your own voice. With Mastery things get a bit easier. Freedom is when you begin to be able to enjoy yourself and spread your wings.
Keats wrote his greatest poetry when he gave up on ambition and hard work. Up until then he has been very industrious indeed. But the big danger here is idolatry, of not being able to see the wood for the trees.
He heralded this new phase with his Ode on Indolence. So you see there is a time for hard graft and then a time for cultivating your acquaintance with the Muse.
And this works because it makes you less vainglorious. And vainglory can get in the way. In fact it inevitably does. The poem is no longer your achievement but a gift you've been given. Indeed your only achievement is to have copied it down correctly. Though that can be difficult enough.
Paul Valéry talked of the 'given line' and the 'found lines'. This fits in with my experience too. Except that for me the found lines are just as given as the given lines. In fact of course it's all given. And as a result the result always surprises me. The great skill lies in learning to get out of the way. In the end the Muse does it all.
All this makes no sense to me. If all we need to do is get out of the way, the less we know about the English language, the better. Just leave the Muse free to operate. But that's not how it works. Mastery of the language comes first. Illiterates do not write great poetry. They are unable to channel the Muse as you allege, by simply getting out of the way. Great poets have spent years of diligent effort on poems. They didn't relax and get out of the Muse's way.
People who go to war over football teams are called "hooligans" and seldom kill anyone, and never in large numbers. And yet they are considered hooligans and reprobates. Alleged "Christians" have enslaved and murdered millions of people. It would be a very odd sort of blindness not to see the immense difference.
I have to assume you don't believe in a spiritual world or man as a spiritual being encased in flesh, so any reply would be useless. If you knew the author, you would understand the Book.
The problem with Christianity in the United States is that it has become more about mind control than spirituality. According to orthodox Christianity, Jesus will save Christians by "grace" and send everyone who guesses wrong about which religion to believe to a purposeless "eternal hell." That, of course, makes the Christian "god" worse than the equally mythological "devil." Such brainwashing does not improve human behavior.
Now you sound like you're lecturing me, but you say unprovable things as if they are facts. That is no way to teach and you merely make yourself sound silly. Did the yogis really think Jesus said those things, when it seems obvious that many of the quotes were made up after the fact? If so, the yogis were less than wise. No one knows what Jesus said, that is the fact. That is the reality. All too often religion is like a math book that starts with the premise 1+1=3 and builds on a house of cards. Socrates would advise us to distinguish what we know from what we think we know.
There is little logic in religion. People adopt other people's superstitions. Where is there any evidence of gods, prophets with any accuracy, etc.? The only religion I know intimately is Christianity, and the main teachings seem like insanity to me: a "god" who created a perfect world, condemned Adam and Eve to death on false charges, demanded the blood of innocent animals in order to forgive sins, then murdered himself in the form of his son! Then, after having "saved" the world, he condemned most of it to a "hell" he had forgotten to mention for thousands of years.
Unfortunately, many children are brainwashed before they are able to think critically and never change their beliefs. I know members of my own family like that: the majority.
I don't believe in eternal damnation, which would make God a monster. I doubt that Jesus came to "save" anyone. That seems like something people made up after his death. As for the Great White Light, I have seen it myself and find it encouraging, although I don't pretend to know what it means beyond this life. I like what the Dalai Lama said: "My religion is kindness." That is as close as I come to religion these days.
As I listened to the exposition of virtue, goodness. Evil, and, of course, Plato there in the thick of it, I found myself repeating to myself the question at the opening of Meno. Of course after all these years I have no more of a certain answer regarding knowledge, virtue and the good than I had as a young student of philosophy and Greek literature.
Nevertheless, I have come to something which -- for lack of a better term -- I will call a new speculation. In short, I think I have found a tentative answer in the poets and tragedians, and in the tales of c.haracters like Ixion and Lycaon. They did not violate preceprs in some decalogue. Rather each in his own way overstepped a limit or boundary.
Borges seems ti gave vuewed reality as the world
Of Plato's forms , but if we understand Diotima and the Silenus correctly, our knowledge of beauty, love, goodness are inextricably bound with the physical world. We humans can only hope to understand such lofty abstractions insofar as they are embodied in the physical, in the body. We experience them in extenso, as a threshold not necessarily to be grasped entirely, but not to be violated. Perhaps this limit which is not to be transgressed but which also is not ultimately defined is an early but sophisticated formulation of what humankind came to know as natural law.
I suppose that where this must lead is to the shared understanding of a Humean community of knowers who know not moral or epistemological absolutes, but rather boundaries or limits of finitude and absolute uncertainty.
I can't recall the location, but Fanon has a brief account of a the French constabulary who was a patient of his, and had the dubious authority of governance over the minds and bodies of colonial prisoners. Fanon's patient did horrible things for which he compensated by allowing himself to be humiliated and hurt sexually. This man was not a moral phiosopher. Perhaps he was a legalist in the sense of a Javert or a Chinese official, but he seems to have sensed that under his cloak of power, something was amiss in that soul which he probably negated in the course of rationalizing his business. He was struggling and suffering at the vounds of sense, being broken on a wheel of realpolitik.
Well, these are just a few thoughts, speculations provoked by the podcast. As you can see, it partakes more of a question that an answer or codification.
If we are to see the truth clearly then we need to refine our perceptions rather than using drugs to confuse them and blunt them even more. None of these drugs would work anyway if they weren't already present in the human body. And if they're there already why introduce them from outside?
This was a great conversation I'm glad to have stumbled upon your work.
Looking forward to exploring more of what you've put here.
The ultimate goal of the elites is to eliminate Truth.
I really enjoyed this conversation. Subscribed to your substack based on your appearance.
There you go again, pretending to be an oracle. I am calm, not "upset." You are the one who jumps to wild conclusions and can't support your claims. I am an individual, not a herd-follower. Now here you are insulting me and claiming to have proper British manners. How amusing!
First you lecture me, then you become presumptuous, telling me that I am "wetting my feet." You seem like a person who leaps to conclusions. You know nothing about me, nothing about my spiritual experiences, nothing about the conclusions I drew from them. I did find the discussion interesting for awhile, but someone who presumes and lectures is not my cup of tea. This is not "how it happens with everyone," another presumption. Socrates said he was the wisest man in Greece because only he admitted how little he knew. You may think you are "more advanced than me," but I suspect I am more advanced because I don't presume to know what cannot be known.
I find it amusing that people of faith fear some sort of "conspiracy" to control minds when religion has been by far the greatest exeter of mind control throughout human history.
I live in the United States where the majority of the population believe in a "god" who murdered Adam and Eve unjustly because he had denied them the knowledge of good and evil, meaning they couldn't know it was a "sin" to eat the forbidden fruit. This "god" became the first murderer when he killed animals to give their skins to Adam and Eve for clothes. Why didn't he use his superpowers to give them clothes of cotton, wool or some other nonlethal fiber?
I read the Bible from cover to cover at age 11 and wrote this epigram to express my opinion about the Bible:
If God
is good
half the Bible
is libel.
—Michael R. Burch
As Voltaire pointed out, if people can control your beliefs they can control your actions. The nonsensical ideas that sex is a "sin" and that being LBGTQ is a "sin" leads people of faith to discriminate against and persecute their own kind.
The earth is not flat, although the Bible says it is. Stars are not tiny pinpricks of light that can fall to earth, although the Bible says they can. Sex outside marriage is not a sin, although the Bible says it is. Stoning children to death is murder, although the Bible commands such stonings. And so on.
Human religions are a mass of false beliefs, contradictions and absurd errors. And all too often they pit one believer against another, as we saw during the Crusades, the Inquisitions, the Holocaust and today in Israel/Palestine.
Do you believe in the Muse?
Not as a "god" but I think some poets do have sources of inspiration.
As far as I'm concerned the Muse dictates my poems to me, in a voice quieter than silence. I very often mishear her, but luckily she is endlessly patient with me, and repeats the poem till I get it down right. When I do finally succeed in doing do she let's me know I've done that by giving me a pat on the back. (Which perhaps explains why I get rather impatient with editors who try to second-guess me. Or rather Her. )
But if that's the case with my poems then it occurs to me that it would be rather inconsistent of me to think that something similar didn't occur in my life as well. But of course that Being too will speak in a voice quieter than silence. As it did for Elijah.
Milton equated the Muse with the Holy Ghost.
All religion is a more or less erratic reaching out into a subtle but important region which is very difficult to record correctly. Which is why we mere humans so often get it wrong. Here it seems to me that the role of the poet is crucial. As a witness.
If poetry depends on the Muse, what is the explanation for so many poets writing terrible poetry? It seems far more likely that good poetry depends on poets mastering the English language as much as it can be mastered. Otherwise illiterates would be outdoing Shakespeare.
I had talent at a young age, and 38 of my teenage poems have been published by literary journals. However, I had to work diligently at my poems for several years before I finally wrote one that I thought was really good. At one point I had destroyed everything I had written, in frustration. There is a lot more to writing poetry than a mysterious Muse doing all the work.
I agree.
I find it helpful to divide a poet's life into four phases: Apprenticeship; Discipline; Mastery; and Freedom.
Discipline comprises the years of hard slog when you are learning your trade. Apprenticeship is when you sit at the feet of the masters and learn from them everything you can, and begin to find your own voice. With Mastery things get a bit easier. Freedom is when you begin to be able to enjoy yourself and spread your wings.
Keats wrote his greatest poetry when he gave up on ambition and hard work. Up until then he has been very industrious indeed. But the big danger here is idolatry, of not being able to see the wood for the trees.
He heralded this new phase with his Ode on Indolence. So you see there is a time for hard graft and then a time for cultivating your acquaintance with the Muse.
And this works because it makes you less vainglorious. And vainglory can get in the way. In fact it inevitably does. The poem is no longer your achievement but a gift you've been given. Indeed your only achievement is to have copied it down correctly. Though that can be difficult enough.
Paul Valéry talked of the 'given line' and the 'found lines'. This fits in with my experience too. Except that for me the found lines are just as given as the given lines. In fact of course it's all given. And as a result the result always surprises me. The great skill lies in learning to get out of the way. In the end the Muse does it all.
All this makes no sense to me. If all we need to do is get out of the way, the less we know about the English language, the better. Just leave the Muse free to operate. But that's not how it works. Mastery of the language comes first. Illiterates do not write great poetry. They are unable to channel the Muse as you allege, by simply getting out of the way. Great poets have spent years of diligent effort on poems. They didn't relax and get out of the Muse's way.
People go to war over football teams. So what?
People who go to war over football teams are called "hooligans" and seldom kill anyone, and never in large numbers. And yet they are considered hooligans and reprobates. Alleged "Christians" have enslaved and murdered millions of people. It would be a very odd sort of blindness not to see the immense difference.
I have to assume you don't believe in a spiritual world or man as a spiritual being encased in flesh, so any reply would be useless. If you knew the author, you would understand the Book.
The problem with Christianity in the United States is that it has become more about mind control than spirituality. According to orthodox Christianity, Jesus will save Christians by "grace" and send everyone who guesses wrong about which religion to believe to a purposeless "eternal hell." That, of course, makes the Christian "god" worse than the equally mythological "devil." Such brainwashing does not improve human behavior.
Now you sound like you're lecturing me, but you say unprovable things as if they are facts. That is no way to teach and you merely make yourself sound silly. Did the yogis really think Jesus said those things, when it seems obvious that many of the quotes were made up after the fact? If so, the yogis were less than wise. No one knows what Jesus said, that is the fact. That is the reality. All too often religion is like a math book that starts with the premise 1+1=3 and builds on a house of cards. Socrates would advise us to distinguish what we know from what we think we know.
There is little logic in religion. People adopt other people's superstitions. Where is there any evidence of gods, prophets with any accuracy, etc.? The only religion I know intimately is Christianity, and the main teachings seem like insanity to me: a "god" who created a perfect world, condemned Adam and Eve to death on false charges, demanded the blood of innocent animals in order to forgive sins, then murdered himself in the form of his son! Then, after having "saved" the world, he condemned most of it to a "hell" he had forgotten to mention for thousands of years.
Unfortunately, many children are brainwashed before they are able to think critically and never change their beliefs. I know members of my own family like that: the majority.
I don't believe in eternal damnation, which would make God a monster. I doubt that Jesus came to "save" anyone. That seems like something people made up after his death. As for the Great White Light, I have seen it myself and find it encouraging, although I don't pretend to know what it means beyond this life. I like what the Dalai Lama said: "My religion is kindness." That is as close as I come to religion these days.