TERMS STARTING WITH
Dialogues of Plato, (tr.) B. lowett. 2 vols. New York:
Dialogues of St. Gregory the Great, (ed.) Henry T.
TERMS ANYWHERE
Abravanel, Judah: Or Judah Leon Medigo (1470-1530), son of Don Isaac, settled in Italy after the expulsion from Spain. In his Dialoghi d'Amore, i.e., Dialogues about Love, he conceives, in Platonic fashion, love as the principle permeating the universe. It emanates from God to the beings, and from the beings reverts back to God. It is possible that his conception of universal love exerted some influence upon the concept of Amor Dei of Spinoza. -- M.W.
anatreptic ::: a. --> Overthrowing; defeating; -- applied to Plato&
At the same time, Berkeley, trusting the external reference of individual experience, argues from it the existence of a universal mind (God) of which the content is the so-called objective world. Finite spirits are created by God, and their several experiences represent his communication to them, so far as they are able to receive it, of his divine experience. Reality, then, is composed of spirits and ideas. The physical aspects of the world are reducible to mental phenomena. Matter is non-existent. G. Berkeley, Treatise on the Principles of Human Knowledge, 1710; Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Phdonous, 1713; De Motu (critique of Newtonian mechanics), 1720; Al-ciphron, or the Minute Philosopher, 1733; Siris, 1744. -- B.A.S.F.
Chodang chip. (C. Zutang ji; J. Sodoshu 祖堂集). In Korean, "Patriarchs' Hall Collection"; one of the earliest "lamplight histories" (CHUANDENG LU), viz., lineage records, of the CHAN tradition, compiled in 952 by the monks Jing (K. Chong) (d.u.) and Yun/Jun (K. Un/Kyun) (d.u.) of the monastery of Chaojingsi in Quanzhou (in present-day Fujian provine). The Chodang chip builds on an earlier Chan history, the BAOLIN ZHUAN, on which it seems largely to have been based. According to one current theory, the original text by Jing and Yun was a short work in a single roll, which was expanded into ten rolls early in the Song dynasty and subsequently reissued in twenty rolls in the definitive 1245 Korean edition. The anthology includes a preface by the compilers' teacher and collaborator Zhaoqing Shendeng/Wendeng (884-972), also known as the Chan master Jingxiu, who also appends verse panegyrics after several of the biographies in the collection. The Chodang chip provides biographies of 253 figures, including the seven buddhas of the past (SAPTATATHAGATA), the first Indian patriarch (ZUSHI) MAHAKAsYAPA up to and including the sixth patriarch (LIUZU) of Chan in China, HUINENG, and monks belonging to the lineages of Huineng's putative disciples QINGYUAN XINGSI and NANYUE HUAIRANG. In contrast to the later JINGDE CHUANDENG LU, the Chodang chip mentions the lineage of Qingyuan before that of Nanyue. In addition to the biographical narrative, the entries also include short excerpts from the celebrated sayings and dialogues of the persons it covers. These are notable for including many features that derive from the local vernacular (what has sometimes been labeled "Medieval Vernacular Sinitic"); for this reason, the text has been the frequent object of study by Chinese historical linguists. The Chodang chip is also significant for containing the biographies of several Silla-dynasty monks who were founders of, or associated with, the Korean "Nine Mountains School of Son" (KUSAN SoNMUN), eight of whom had lineage ties to the Chinese HONGZHOU ZONG of Chan that derived from MAZU DAOYI; the anthology in fact offers the most extensive body of early material on the developing Korean Son tradition. This emphasis suggests that the two compilers may themselves have been expatriate Koreans training in China and/or that the extant anthology was substantially reedited in Korea. The Chodang chip was lost in China after the Northern Song dynasty and remained completely unknown subsequently to the Chinese Chan and Japanese Zen traditions. However, the 1245 Korean edition was included as a supplement to the Koryo Buddhist canon (KORYo TAEJANGGYoNG), which was completed in 1251 during the reign of the Koryo king Kojong (r. 1214-1259), and fortunately survived; this is the edition that was rediscovered in the 1930s at the Korean monastery of HAEINSA. Because the collection is extant only in a Koryo edition and because of the many Korean monks included in the collection, the Chodang chip is often cited in the scholarly literature by its Korean pronunciation.
Dial, Dialogues - The Dialogues of G. de Purucker, ed. A. L. Conger
Dialectic: (Gr. dia + legein, discourse) The beginning of dialectic Aristotle is said to have attributed to Zeno of Elea. But as the art of debate by question and answer, its beginning is usually associated with the Socrates of the Platonic dialogues. As conceived by Plato himself, dialectic is the science of first principles which differs from other sciences by dispensing with hypotheses and is, consequently, "the copingstone of the sciences" -- the highest, because the clearest and hence the ultimate, sort of knowledge. Aristotle distinguishes between dialectical reasoning, which proceeds syllogistically from opinions generally accepted, and demonstrative reasoning, which begins with primary and true premises; but he holds that dialectical reasoning, in contrast with eristic, is "a process of criticism wherein lies the path to the principles of all inquiries." In modern philosophy, dialectic has two special meanings. Kant uses it as the name of that part of his Kritik der reinen Vernunft which deals critically with the special difficulties (antinomies, paralogisms and Ideas) arising out of the futile attempt (transcendental illusion) to apply the categories of the Understanding beyond the only realm to which they can apply, namely, the realm of objects in space and time (Phenomena). For Hegel, dialectic is primarily the distinguishing characteristic of speculative thought -- thought, that is, which exhibits the structure of its subject-matter (the universal, system) through the construction of synthetic categories (synthesis) which resolve (sublate) the opposition between other conflicting categories (theses and antitheses) of the same subject-matter. -- G.W.C.
dialogist ::: n. --> A speaker in a dialogue.
A writer of dialogues.
dialogue ::: n. --> A conversation between two or more persons; particularly, a formal conservation in theatrical performances or in scholastic exercises.
A written composition in which two or more persons are represented as conversing or reasoning on some topic; as, the Dialogues of Plato. ::: v. i.
Dialogues of Plato, (tr.) B. lowett. 2 vols. New York:
Dialogues of St. Gregory the Great, (ed.) Henry T.
Dīghanikāya. In Pāli, "Collection of Long Discourses"; the first division of the Pāli SUTTAPItAKA. It is comprised of thirty-four lengthy suttas (SuTRA) arranged rather arbitrarily into three major sections: "morality" (sīlakkhanda), comprising suttas 1-14; "great division" (mahāvagga), comprising suttas 14-23; and the "charlatan" (pātikavagga), comprising suttas 24-34. Among the suttas contained in the Dīghanikāya are such renowned and influential scriptures as the AGGANNASUTTA, MAHĀPARINIBBĀNASUTTA, SĀMANNAPHALASUTTA, and the SATIPAttHĀNASUTTA. The Pāli tradition asserts that the texts of the Dīghanikāya were first recited orally during the first Buddhist council (SAMGĪTI; see COUNCIL, FIRST) following the Buddha's death and were officially transcribed into written form in Sri Lanka during the reign of King VAttAGĀMAnI ABHAYA in the first century BCE. An analogous recension of the "Long Discourses" appears in the Sanskrit DĪRGHĀGAMA (all but three of its thirty sutras have their equivalents in Pāli). Fragments of the Sanskrit recension, which is associated with the SARVĀSTIVĀDA school or its MuLASARVĀSTIVĀDA offshoot, were rediscovered in Afghanistan in the 1990s. Before that rediscovery, only a Chinese translation of the Dīrghāgama survived, which was attributed to the DHARMAGUPTAKA school; the translation was finished in 413 CE. Although all three recensions of this collection have a tripartite structure, only the first section of the Pāli, the sīlakkhanda, has a counterpart in the Sarvāstivāda and Dharmaguptaka recensions. The Dīghanikāya appears in the Pali Text Society's English translation series as Dialogues of the Buddha.
Fafang. (法舫) (1904-1951). In Chinese, "Skiff of Dharma"; distinguished Chinese Buddhist scholar and activist who initiated some of the earliest ecumenical dialogues between Chinese MAHĀYĀNA and Sri Lankan THERAVĀDA Buddhists. Ordained at the age of eighteen, Fafang was one of the first students to study in the Chinese Buddhist Academy that TAIXU founded in Wuchang (Wuchang Foxue Yuan). He eventually taught at the academy, as well as at other leading Chinese Buddhist institutions of his time, contributing significantly to Taixu's attempts to found international Buddhist research centers and libraries. He also was longtime chief editor of the influential and long-running Buddhist periodical Haichao yin ("Sound of the Tide"). In 1946, Fafang traveled to Sri Lanka after becoming proficient in Sanskrit, Pāli, Japanese, and English and studied Theravāda Buddhism with Kirwatatuduwe Prasekene. Among his later accomplishments, Fafang taught at the University of Sri Lanka, served as one of the chief editors for the compilation of Taixu's collected works, founded one of the first Pāli learning centers in China, and created a student exchange program for Chinese and Sri Lankan monks.
Florentine Academy: It was a loose and informal circle of scholars and educated persons which gathered in Florence around the Platonic philosopher Marsilio Ficino. Its activities consisted in regular lectures on Platonic philosophy as well as in informal discussions and parties. "Platonic" love or friendship was considered as the spiritual link between the members of the group which was organized and named after the model of Plato's Academy. The main documents describing it are Ficino's correspondence and a number of dialogues like Ficino's commentary on Plato's Symposion, Landino's Disputationes Camaldulenses , and Benedetto Colucci's Declamationes. Outstanding members or associates of the Academy were Cosimo, Piero, and Lorenzo de'Medici, Angelo Poliziano, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. The Academy which was first founded in 1462, dissolved after the revolution in Florence (1494) and after Ficino's death (1499), but the tradition of Platonic philosophy was continued in other private circles as well as at the universities of Florence and Pisa throughout the sixteenth century. -- P.O.K.
“Here again the Christians anthropomorphized the esoteric doctrine, thus distorting it. As a matter of fact, not only the animal kingdom, but the vegetable, mineral, and even the three elemental kingdoms, came forth from the primal human, the ’Adam Qadmon. They were all encapsulated within him, and he brought them forth” (FSO 354n). (Dialogues 3:421-3)
Hume, David: Born 1711, Edinburgh; died at Edinburgh, 1776. Author of A Treatise of Human Nature, Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding, Enquiry Concerning the Passions, Enquiry Concerning Morals, Natural History of Religion, Dialogues on Natural Religion, History of England, and many essays on letters, economics, etc. Hume's intellectual heritage is divided between the Cartesian Occasionalists and Locke and Berkeley. From the former, he obtained some of his arguments against the alleged discernment or demonstrability of causal connections, and from the latter his psychological opinions. Hume finds the source of cognition in impressions of sensation and reflection. All simple ideas are derived from and are copies of simple impressions. Complex ideas may be copies of complex impressions or may result from the imaginative combination of simple ideas. Knowledge results from the comparison of ideas, and consists solely of the intrinsic resemblance between ideas. As resemblance is nothing over and above the resembling ideas, there are no abstract general ideas: the generality of ideas is determined by their habitual use as representatives of all ideas and impressions similar to the representative ideas. As knowledge consists of relations of ideas in virtue of resemblance, and as the only relation which involves the connection of different existences and the inference of one existent from another is that of cause and effect, and as there is no resemblance necessary between cause and effect, causal inference is in no case experientially or formally certifiable. As the succession and spatio-temporal contiguity of cause and effect suggests no necessary connection and as the constancy of this relation, being mere repetition, adds no new idea (which follows from Hume's nominalistic view), the necessity of causal connection must be explained psychologically. Thus the impression of reflection, i.e., the felt force of association, subsequent to frequent repetitions of conjoined impressions is the source of the idea of necessity. Habit or custom sufficently accounts for the feeling that everything which begins must have a cause and that similar causes must have similar effects. The arguments which Hume adduced to show that no logically necessary connection between distinct existences can be intuited or demonstrated are among his most signal contributions to philosophy, and were of great importance in influencing the speculation of Kant. Hume explained belief in external existence (bodies) in terms of the propensity to feign the independent and continued existence of perceptual complexes during the interruptions of perception. This propensity is determined by the constancy and coherence which some perceptual complexes exhibit and by the transitive power of the imagination to go beyond the limits afforded by knowledge and ordinary causal belief. The sceptical principles of his epistemology were carried over into his views on ethics and religion. Because there are no logically compelling arguments for moral and religious propositions, the principles of morality and religion must be explained naturalistically in terms of human mental habits and social customs. Morality thus depends on such fundamental aspects of human nature as self-interest and altruistic sympathy. Hume's views on religion are difficult to determine from his Dialogues, but a reasonable opinion is that he is totally sceptical concerning the possibility of proving the existence or the nature of deity. It is certain that he found no connection between the nature of deity and the rules of morality. -- J.R.W.
In the field of the philosophy of religion, Platonism becomes obscure. There is little doubt that Plato paid only lip-service to the anthropomorphic polytheism of Athenian religion. Many of the attributes of the Idea of the Good are those of an eternal God. The Republic (Book II) pictures the Supreme Being as perfect, unchangeable and the author of truth. Similar rationalizations are found throughout the Laws. Another current of religious thought is to be found m the Timaeus, Politicus and Sophist. The story of the making of the universe and man by the Demiurgus is mythic and yet it is in many points a logical development of his theory of Ideas. The World-Maker does not create things from nothing, he fashions the world out of a pre-existing chaos of matter by introducing patterns taken from the sphere of Forms. This process of formation is also explained, in the Timaeus (54 ff), in terms of various mathematical figures. In an early period of the universe, God (Chronos) exercised a sort of Providential care over things in this world (Politicus, 269-275), but eventually man was left to his own devices. The tale of Er, at the end of the Republic, describes a judgment of souls after death, their separation into the good and the bad, and the assignment of various rewards and punishments. H. Stephanus et J. Serranus (ed.), Platonis Opera (Paris, 1578), has provided the standard pagination, now used in referring to the text of Plato, it is not a critical edition. J. Burnet (ed.), Platonis Opera, 5 vol. (Oxford, 1899-1907). Platon, Oeuvres completes, texte et trad., Collect. G. Bude (Paris, 1920 ff.). The Dialogues of Plato, transl. B. Jowett, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1920). W. Pater, Plato and Platonism (London, 1909). A. E. Taylor, Plato, the Man and his Work (N. Y., 1927). P. Shorey, What Plato Said (Chicago, 1933). A. Dies, Autour de Platon, 2 vol. (Paris, 1927). U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Platon, 2 vol. (Berlin, 1919). John Burnet, Platonism (Berkeley, 1928). Paul Elmer More, Platonism (Oxford, 1931). Constantm Ritter, Essence of Plato's Philosophy (London, 1933). Leon Robin, Platon (Paris, 1935). Paul Shorey, Platonism, Ancient and Modern (Berkeley, 1938). A. E. Taylor, Platontsm and Its Influence (London, 1924). F. J. E. Woodbridge, The Son of Apollo (Boston, 1929). C. Bigg, The Christian Platomsts of Alexandria (Oxford, 1913). T. Whittaker, The Neo-Platonists (Cambridge, 1918, 2nd ed ). John H. Muirhead, The Platonic Tradition in Angle-Saxon Philosophy (New York, 1931). F. J. Powicke, The Cambridge Platonists (Boston, 1927). -- V.J.B.
Khóa Hư Lục. (課). In Vietnamese, "Instructions on Emptiness," composed by Tràn Thái Tông (1218-1277); the first prose work on Buddhism written in Vietnamese. It is a collection of sermons and essays, most of them fragmentary, on the philosophy and practice of Buddhism from the perspective of the three trainings in morality (sĪLA), concentration (SAMĀDHI), and wisdom (PRAJNĀ). It also marks one of the earliest efforts to assimilate the worldview of the Southern school (NAN ZONG) of CHAN into Vietnamese Buddhism. The Khóa Hư Lu㈱c consists of two books. The first (lit. "upper") book includes twenty-one short essays, which can be classified as follows according to their literary styles: one "verse" on the FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS; two "general discourses" on the contemplation of the body and the Buddhist path; six "essays" on generating the thought of enlightenment (BODHICITTA), not taking life, not stealing, not indulging in sensual pleasures, not telling lies, and not using intoxicants; five "treatises" on the topics of morality, concentration, wisdom, receiving precepts, buddha-contemplation (NIANFO), sitting in meditation, and the mirror of wisdom; four "prefaces" to longer complete works (three of which are no longer extant), viz., "A Guide to the Chan School," "A Commentary on thE VAJRASAMĀDHISuTRA," "Liturgy of the Six-Period Repentance," and "An Essay on the Equality Repentance Liturgy"; "recorded encounter dialogues with disciples" that record dialogues between Tràn Thái Tông and his students; a "verse commentary" on the ancient public cases (GONG'AN) of Chan; and an "afterword." The second (lit. "lower") book includes a complete essay entitled "Liturgy of the Six-Period Repentance," which offers a detailed instruction on the performance of the repentance liturgy.
koutou Chan. (J. kutozen/kotozen; K. kudu Son 口頭禪). In Chinese, lit. "mouth Chan"; the CHAN that is practiced only through words, referring to practitioners who are versed in Chan theory but have not comprehended that theory themselves through their meditation. This Chan Buddhist expression refers to those practitioners who have merely memorized the pithy sayings and GONG'AN dialogues of the patriarchs and masters (ZUSHI) of the Chan school without actually understanding them or putting them into practice. Cf. YINGWU CHAN.
Mouzi lihuo lun. (J. Boshi riwakuron; K. Moja ihok non 牟子理惑論). In Chinese, "Treatise on the Resolution of Doubts," or "Treatise on the Disposition of Error"; the earliest extant Buddhist treatise written by a Chinese convert; often known by its abbreviated eponymous title, the Mouzi. The text is attributed to a Chinese Buddhist layman, MOUZI, who is claimed to have hailed from the south of China. The text is a polemical Buddhist defense of the faith, which responds to criticisms of Buddhism by rival religions in China. The text consists of a eulogistic preface, thirty-eight short dialogues between Mouzi and unnamed critic(s) of Buddhism, and a brief conclusion, in which the antagonist finally acquiesces to the rectitude of Buddhist positions. Stylistically, the work is written in Confucian commentarial form, thus making more palatable its putatively subversive idea, viz., that adherence to Buddhism is completely compatible with being a righteous and filial Chinese. Typically, criticisms deriving from Confucian beliefs are refuted using references from the Laozi and Zhuangzi, while Daoist criticisms are refuted with astute readings of both Daoist and Confucian texts. The Mouzi was thus successful not simply because it refuted the critiques of rival religions; in addition, by demonstrating the inherent inaccuracy and speciousness of their positions, the treatise was also able to prove the veracity, if not the superiority, of Buddhism itself. In one of the dialogues that argues that filiality is found not only in Confucianism but in Buddhism as well, the Mouzi compares the Buddhist monk to a son who saves his father from drowning by grabbing him and lifting him upside down back into the boat. Although the inelegant manner in which the son grabbed his father may initially seem disrespectful, since it saves his parent from drowning, the act would be acceptable even according to Confucius himself, who insisted that exigent circumstances justified adaptable demonstrations of filial piety. Similarly, the behavior of a Buddhist monk who leaves the home life may in fact be filial, even though initially it may not appear to be so. In another section, the Mouzi substantiates the filiality of Buddhism by pointing out that, since the Buddha protected his parents sUDDHODANA and MĀYĀ by showing them the path to their salvation, practicing Buddhism was indeed filial. In another dialogue concerning criticisms of the Buddhist teaching of rebirth, the Mouzi compares the spirit that is reborn to the seeds of a plant, which can grow into new plants even after the leaves and roots (viz., the physical body) have died. The composition date of the Mouzi has proven to be an intractable problem. Its preface claims that the text was written in the second century CE, although current scholarly estimates of its date range from the second quarter of the third century through the fourth or even early fifth century. More likely, the text developed over time, with many accretions. The text was included in the (nonextant) Fa lun ("Collection on the Dharma"), compiled by Lu Cheng (425-494) around 465, which would be the terminus ad quem for its composition. The text that is extant today is the recension appearing in SENGYOU's (445-518) HONGMING JI ("Collection on the Propagation and Clarification [of Buddhism]"), the important anthology of Buddhist apologetics, compiled c. 515-518. Although some earlier scholars have questioned the authenticity of the text, it is now generally accepted to be in fact one of the earliest extant sources from the incipiency of indigenous Chinese Buddhism.
Pak Chungbin. (朴重彬) (1891-1943). Founder of the Korean new religion of WoNBULGYO; also known by his cognomen SOT'AESAN. He is said to have begun his quest to discover the fundamental principle of the universe and human life at the age of seven and continued ascetic training for about twenty years. Finally, in 1916 at the age of twenty-six, Sot'aesan is said to have attained a personal enlightenment, which is considered the founding year of his religion. Since Sot'aesan recognized compelling parallels between his own experience and the description of enlightenment in Buddhism, he first called his religious organization the Pulpop Yon'guhoe (Society for the Study of the BUDDHADHARMA); later, the religion adopted the formal name of Wonbulgyo (lit. Consummate Buddhism). He presented his enlightenment, which he symbolized with the "one circle image" (IRWoNSANG), as the criterion of religious belief and practice by proclaiming the "cardinal tenet of one circle" (irwon chongji). Along with organizing his religion's fundamental tenets and building its institutional base, he and his followers also worked to improve the ordinary life of his followers, by establishing thrift and savings institutions and engaging in farming and land reclamation projects. The three foundational religious activities of edification (kyohwa), education (kyoyuk), and public service (chason) continue to be emblematic of Wonbulgyo practice. Sot'aesan published in 1943 the Wonbulgyo chongjon ("Principal Book of Won Buddhism"), a primer of the basic tenets of Wonbulgyo, which is one of the two representative scriptures of the religion, along with the Taejonggyong ("Discourses of the Founding Master"), the dialogues and teachings of Sot'aesan, published in 1962 by his successor Chongsan Song Kyu (1900-1962). Sot'aesan died in 1943 at the age of fifty-three, after delivering his last lecture, entitled "The Truth of Birth and Death" (Saengsa ŭi chilli).
Plato: (428-7 - 348-7 B.C.) Was one of the greatest of the Greek philosophers. He was born either in Athens or on the island of Aegina, and was originally known as Aristocles. Ariston, his father, traced his ancestry to the last kings of Athens. His mother, Perictione, was a descendant of the family of Solon. Plato was given the best elementary education possible and he spent eight years, from his own twentieth year to the death of Socrates, as a member of the Socratic circle. Various stories are told about his supposed masters in philosophy, and his travels in Greece, Italy, Sicily and Egypt, but all that we know for certain is that he somehow acquired a knowledge of Pythagoreanisrn, Heracleitanism, Eleaticism and othei Pre-Socratic philosophies. He founded his school of mathematics and philosophy in Athens in 387 B.C. It became known as the Academy. Here he taught with great success until his death at the age of eighty. His career as a teacher was interrupted on two occasions by trips to Sicily, where Plato tried without much success to educate and advise Dionysius the Younger. His works have been very well preserved; we have more than twenty-five authentic dialogues, certain letters, and some definitions which are probably spurious. For a list of works, bibliography and an outline of his thought, see Platonism. -- V.J.B.
Plato's theory of knowledge can hardly be discussed apart from his theory of reality. Through sense perception man comes to know the changeable world of bodies. This is the realm of opinion (doxa), such cognition may be more or less clear but it never rises to the level of true knowledge, for its objects are impermanent and do not provide a stable foundation for science. It is through intellectual, or rational, cognition that man discovers another world, that of immutable essences, intelligible realities, Forms or Ideas. This is the level of scientific knowledge (episteme); it is reached in mathematics and especially in philosophy (Repub. VI, 510). The world of intelligible Ideas contains the ultimate realities from which the world of sensible things has been patterned. Plato experienced much difficulty in regard to the sort of existence to be attributed to his Ideas. Obviously it is not the crude existence of physical things, nor can it be merely the mental existence of logical constructs. Interpretations have varied from the theory of the Christian Fathers (which was certainly not that of Plato himself) viz , that the Ideas are exemplary Causes in God's Mind, to the suggestion of Aristotle (Metaphysics, I) that they are realized, in a sense, in the world of individual things, but are apprehended only by the intellect The Ideas appear, however, particularly in the dialogues of the middle period, to be objective essences, independent of human minds, providing not only the foundation for the truth of human knowledge but afso the ontological bases for the shadowy things of the sense world. Within the world of Forms, there is a certain hierarchy. At the top, the most noble of all, is the Idea of the Good (Repub. VII), it dominates the other Ideas and they participate in it. Beauty, symmetry and truth are high-ranking Ideas; at times they are placed almost on a par with the Good (Philebus 65; also Sympos. and Phaedrus passim). There are, below, these, other Ideas, such as those of the major virtues (wisdom, temperance, courage, justice and piety) and mathematical terms and relations, such as equality, likeness, unlikeness and proportion. Each type or class of being is represented by its perfect Form in the sphere of Ideas, there is an ideal Form of man, dog, willow tree, of every kind of natural object and even of artificial things like beds (Repub. 596). The relationship of the "many" objects, belonging to a certain class of things in the sense world, to the "One", i.e. the single Idea which is their archetype, is another great source of difficulty to Plato. Three solutions, which are not mutually exclusive, are suggested in the dialogues (1) that the many participate imperfectly in the perfect nature of their Idea, (2) that the many are made in imitation of the One, and (3) that the many are composed of a mixture of the Limit (Idea) with the Unlimited (matter).
Socrates: (c. 470-399 B.C.) Was one of the most influential teachers of philosophy. The son of an Athenian stone cutter, named Sophroniscus, and of a mid-wife, Socrates learned his father's trade, but, in a sense, practised his mother's. Plato makes him describe himself as one who assists at the birth of ideas. With the exception of two periods of military service, he remained in Athens all his life. He claimed to be guided by a daimon which warned him against what was wrong, and Plato suggests that Socrates enjoyed mystic experiences. Much of his tirne was spent in high-minded philosophic discussion with those he chanced to meet in the public places of Athens. The young men enjoyed his easy methods of discussion and delighted in his frequent quizzing of the Sophists. He was eventually charged in the Athenian citizen court with being irreligious and corrupting the young. Found guilty, he submitted to the court and drank the poison which ended the life of one of the greatest of Athenians. He wrote nothing and is known through three widely divergent contemporary accounts. Aristophanes has caricatured him in the Clouds, Xenophon has described him, with personal respect but little understanding of his philosophical profundity; Plato's dialogues idealize him and probably develop the Socratic philosophy far beyond the original thought of his master. Socrates personifies the Athenian love of reason and of moderation; he probably taught that virtue is knowledge and that knowledge is only true when it reaches the stage of definition. See Socratic method. -- V.J.B.
Tantras (Sanskrit) Tantra-s Loom, the warp or threads in a loom; a rule or ritual for ceremonial rites. Religious treatises teaching mystical and magical formulas for the attainment of magical powers, and for the worship of the gods; treating of the evolution of the universe and its destruction; the adoration of the divinities; the attainment of desired objects, especially of six superhuman faculties; and methods of union (usually given as four) with the supreme divinity by contemplative meditation. They are mostly composed in the form of dialogues between Siva and his divine consort or sakti Durga, who is worshiped as a personified female power.
The ethics of Platonism is intellectualistic. While he questions (Protagoras, 323 ff.) the sophistic teaching that "virtue is knowledge", and stresses the view that the wise man must do what is right, as well as know the right, still the cumulative impetus of his many dialogues on the various virtues and the good life, tends toward the conclusion that the learned, rationally developed soul is the good soul. From this point of view, wisdom is the greatest virtue, (Repub. IV). Fortitude and temperance are necessary virtues of the lower parts of the soul and justice in the individual, as in the state, is the harmonious co-operation of all parts, under the control of reason. Of pleasures, the best are those of the intellect (Philebus); man's greatest happiness is to be found in the contemplation of the highest Ideas (Repub., 583 ff.).
The invariable form of the Puranas is of a dialogue between an exponent or teacher and an inquirer or disciple, interspersed with the dialogues and observations of other individuals. In addition to the Puranas there are 18 subordinate Upa-puranas. The Puranas are popularly classified in India under three categories corresponding to the gunas sattva, rajas, and tamas. Those in which the quality of sattva (purity) prevails are: the Vishnu, Naradiya, Bhagavata, Garuda, Padma, and Varaha Puranas, also called the Vaishnava-Puranas. Those in which rajas (passion) are said to prevail, relating chiefly to the god Brahma, are the Brahma, Brahmanda, Brahma-vaivarta, Markandeya, Bhavishya, and Vamana Puranas. Those in which tamas (inertia) is said to prevail, relating chiefly to the god Siva, are the Matsya, Kurma, Linga, Siva, Skanda, and Agni Puranas.
The works of Plato are chiefly in the form of dialogues, remarkable for their literary as well as for their philosophic qualities. The following list includes all the dialogues recognized as authentic by modern authorities.
To be an Aristotelian under such extremely complicated circumstances was the problem that St. Thomas set himself. What he did reduced itself fundamentally to three points: (a) He showed the Platonic orientation of St. Augustine's thought, the limitations that St. Augustine himself placed on his Platonism, and he inferred from this that St. Augustine could not be made the patron of the highly elaborated and sophisticated Platonism that an Ibn Gebirol expounded in his Fons Vitae or an Avicenna in his commentaries on the metaphysics and psychology of Aristotle. (b) Having singled out Plato as the thinker to search out behind St. Augustine, and having really eliminated St. Augustine from the Platonic controversies of the thirteenth century, St. Thomas is then concerned to diagnose the Platonic inspiration of the various commentators of Aristotle, and to separate what is to him the authentic Aristotle from those Platonic aberrations. In this sense, the philosophical activity of St. Thomas in the thirteenth century can be understood as a systematic critique and elimination of Platonism in metaphysics, psychology and epistemology. The Platonic World of Ideas is translated into a theory of substantial principles in a world of stable and intelligible individuals; the Platonic man, who was scarcely more than an incarcerated spirit, became a rational animal, containing within his being an interior economy which presented in a rational system his mysterious nature as a reality existing on the confines of two worlds, spirit and matter; the Platonic theory of knowledge (at least in the version of the Meno rather than that of the later dialogues where the doctrine of division is more prominent), which was regularly beset with the difficulty of accounting for the origin and the truth of knowledge, was translated into a theory of abstraction in which sensible experience enters as a necessary moment into the explanation of the origin, the growth and the use of knowledge, and in which the intelligible structure of sensible being becomes the measure of the truth of knowledge and of knowing.
Trúc Lam. (竹林). In Vietnamese, "Bamboo Grove"; the first indigenous Vietnamese school of THIỀN (C. CHAN), founded by TRẦN NHN TÔNG (1258-1308), the third king of the Trần dynasty (1225-1400). During the Trần period, Chan learning became established with the arrival of Chinese monks and Chan literature. Due to its literary bent (see WENZI CHAN), Chan was embraced by the Trần aristocratic circle, many of whom received instructions from Chan masters. Some Trần kings themselves would later in their lives be ordained and devote themselves to the practice of Chan. From the few extant writings of its three patriarchs, it is clear that Trúc Lam Chan displays a conscious effort to emulate Chinese patriarchal Chan. There were also typical motifs that appear in Chinese Chan literature, including the use of dialogues (see WENDA) as an instructional tool, transmission directly from teacher to disciple, the construction of lineages, the teacher leaving behind instructional verses for his disciples, the teacher bequeathing his robe and begging bowl to his principal student as a mark of succession, the teacher publicly conferring precepts on both monks and laypeople, and so forth. The school died out after the death of its third patriarch Huyền Quang (1254-1334). Although the Trúc Lam school was short-lived, it marked the first serious effort to establish a Buddhist community in medieval Vietnam, functioning essentially as a form of high-culture Buddhism for aristocrats. There were efforts among some Buddhist monks in the Later Le (1428-1788) and Nguyẽn (1802-1945) dynasties to connect themselves to Trúc Lam Chan.
Upanishad, Upanisad: (Skr.) One of a large number of treatises, more than 100. Thirteen of the oldest ones (Chandogya, Brhadaranyaka, Aitareya, Taittiriya, Katha, Isa, Mundaka, Kausitaki, Kena, Prasna, Svetasvatara, Mandukya, Maitri) have the distinction of being the first philosophic compositions, antedating for the most part the beginnings of Greek philosophy, others have been composed comparatively recently. The mode of imparting knowledge with the pupil sitting opposite (upa-ni-sad) the teacher amid an atmosphere of reverence and secrecy, gave these onginally mnemonic treatises their name. They are remarkable for ontological, metaphysical, and ethical problems, investigations into the nature of man's soul or self (see atman), God, death, immortality, and a symbolic interpretation of ritualistic materials and observances. Early examples of universal suffrage, tendencies to break down caste, philosophic dialogues and congresses, celebrated similes, succession of philosophic teachers, among other things, may be studied in the more archaic, classical Upanishads. See ayam atema brahma, aham brahma asmi, tat tvam asi, net neti. -- K.F.L.
Voltaire, M. De. Chinese Catechism, Dialogues and
Wonbulgyo. (圓佛教). In Korean, "Won Buddhism" or "Consummate Buddhism"; a modern Korean new religion, founded in 1916 by PAK CHUNGBIN (1891-1943), later known by his sobriquet SOT'AESAN. Based on his enlightenment to the universal order of the "one-circle image" (IRWoNSANG), Sot'aesan sought to establish an ideal world where this universal order could be accomplished in and through ordinary human life, rather than the specialized institution of the monastery. After perusing the scriptures of various religions, Sot'aesan came to regard the teachings of Buddhism as the ultimate source of his enlightenment and in 1924 named his new religion the Pulpop Yon'gu hoe (Society for the Study of the Buddhadharma); this organization was later renamed Wonbulgyo in 1947 by Sot'aesan's successor and the second prime Dharma master of the religion, Chongsan, a.k.a. Song Kyu (1900-1962). Since the tenets and institutions of Wonbulgyo are distinct from those of mainstream Buddhism in Korea, the religion is usually considered an indigenous Korean religion that is nevertheless closely aligned with the broader Buddhist tradition. Sot'aesan used the "one-circle image" as a way of representing his vision of the Buddhist notion of the "DHARMAKĀYA buddha" (popsinbul), which was reality itself; since this reality transcended all possible forms of conceptualization, he represented it with a simple circle, an image that is now displayed on the altar at all Wonbulgyo temples. Sot'aesan's religious activities were also directed at improving the daily lot of his adherents, and to this end he and his followers established thrift and savings institutions and led land reclamation projects. Wonbulgyo has focused its activities on the three pillars of religious propagation (kyohwa), education (kyoyuk), and public service (chason): for example, the second prime master Chongsan established temples for propagation, schools such as Won'gwang University for education, and social-welfare facilities such as hospitals and orphanages. These activities, along with international proselytization, were continued by his successors Taesan, Kim Taego (1914-1988), who became the third prime master in 1962, Chwasan, Yi Kwangjong (b. 1936), who became the fourth prime master in 1994, and Kyongsan, Chang Ŭngch'ol (b. 1940), who became the fifth prime master in 2006. The two representative scriptures of Wonbulgyo are the Wonbulgyo chongjon ("Principal Book of Won Buddhism"), a primer of the basic tenets of Wonbulgyo, which was published by Sot'aesan in 1943, and the Taejonggyong ("Scripture of the Founding Master"), the dialogues and teachings of Sot'aesan, published in 1962 by his successor Chongsan. Wonbulgyo remains an influential religious tradition in Korea, especially in the Cholla region in the southwest of the peninsula; in addition, there currently are over fifty Wonbulgyo temples active in over fourteen countries.
Yale Haskell "language" A fully integrated {Haskell} programming environment. It provides tightly coupled interactive editing, {incremental compilation} and dynamic execution of Haskell programs. Two major modes of compilation, correspond to {Lisp}'s traditional "interpreted" and "compiled" modes. Compiled and interpreted modules may be freely mixed in any combination. Yale Haskell is run using either a command-line interface or as an {inferior process} running under the {Emacs} editor. Using the Emacs interface, simple two-keystroke commands evaluate expressions, run dialogues, compile {modules}, turn specific compiler diagnostics on and off and enable and disable various {optimisers}. Commands may be queued up arbitrarily, thus allowing, for example, a compilation to be running in the background as the editing of a source file continues in Emacs in the foreground. A "scratch pad" may be automatically created for any module. Such a pad is a logical extension of the module, in which additional function and value definitions may be added, but whose evaluation does not result in recompilation of the module. A tutorial on Haskell is also provided in the Emacs environment. A {Macintosh} version of Yale Haskell includes its own integrated programming environment, complete with an Emacs-like editor and {pull-down menus}. Yale Haskell is a complete implementation of the Haskell language, but also contains a number of extensions, including: (1) Instead of stream based I/O, a {monadic I/O} system is used. Although similar to what will be part of the new {Haskell 1.3} report, the I/O system will change yet again when 1.3 becomes official. (2) Haskell programs can call both {Lisp} and {C} functions using a flexible foreign function interface. (3) Yale Haskell includes a {dynamic typing} system. Dynamic typing has been used to implement {derived instances} in a user extensible manner. (4) A number of small Haskell 1.3 changes have been added, including {polymorphic recursion} and the use of @_@ in an expression to denote {bottom}. Although the 1.3 report is not yet complete, these changes will almost certainly be part of the new report. (5) A complete Haskell level {X Window System} interface, based on {CLX}. (6) A number of {annotations} are available for controlling the optimiser, including those for specifying both function and data constructor {strict}ness properties, "{inlining}" functions, and specialising {over-loaded} functions. Many standard {prelude} functions have been specialised for better performance using these annotations. (7) {Separate compilation} (including {mutually recursive} {modules}) is supported using a notion of a UNIT file, which is a kind of localised {makefile} that tells the compiler about compiler options and logical dependencies amongst program files. (8) Yale Haskell supports both standard and "{literate}" Haskell syntax. Performance of Yale Haskell's compiled code has been improved considerably over previous releases. Although still not as good as the Glasgow ({GHC}) and Chalmers ({HBC}) compilers, the flexibility afforded by the features described earlier makes Yale Haskell a good choice for large systems development. For some idea of performance, Hartel's latest "Nuc" benchmark runs at about the same speed under both Yale Haskell and hbc. (Our experiments suggest, however, that Yale Haskell's compiled code is on average about 3 times slower than hbc.) Binaries are provided for {Sun}/{SPARC} and {Macintosh}, but it is possible to build the system on virtually any system that runs one of a number of {Common Lisp} implementations: {CMU Common Lisp}, {Lucid Common Lisp}, {Allegro Common Lisp} or {Harlequin LispWorks}. {akcl}, {gcl} and {CLisp} do not have adaquate performance for our compiler. The current version is 2.1. {Yale (ftp://nebula.cs.yale.edu/pub/haskell/yale)}. (128.36.13.1). {UK (ftp://ftp.dcs.glasgow.ac.uk/pub/haskell/yale/)}. {Sweden (ftp://ftp.cs.chalmers.se/pub/haskell/yale/)}. E-mail: "haskell-request@cs.yale.edu", "haskell-request@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk". (1993-07-14)
yingwu Chan. (J. omuzen; K. aengmu Son 鸚鵡禪). In Chinese, lit. "parrot Chan"; a CHAN Buddhist expression referring to the way some practitioners merely parrot with their mouths the pithy sayings and GONG'AN dialogues of the patriarchs and masters (ZUSHI), but fail to realize their true message and attain enlightenment for themselves. This pejorative description is also applied to pundits of the traditional Buddhist scholastic schools (C. jiao, see K. KYO), whose intellectual erudition and doctrinal prowess were caricatured as "parrot Chan," in contrast to the Chan school's supposed subitist spiritual approach that did not rely on mere intellectual understanding (see BULI WENZI). These pundits are likened to parrots in that they also mimic other people's understanding through their doctrinal exegeses, but without comprehending it themselves. Cf. KOUTOU CHAN.
KEYS (10k)
1 Mortimer J Adler
1 Cyril of Alexandria
1 A N Whitehead
1 Aleister Crowley
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
15 Alfred North Whitehead
4 Plato
4 Dan Simmons
2 Timothy J Keller
2 Ren Gu non
2 Pope Francis
2 Mortimer J Adler
2 Maggie Nelson
2 Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
2 Jos Saramago
2 Donna Tartt
2 Devdutt Pattanaik
2 Benjamin Jowett
2 bell hooks
2 Auguste Rodin
2 Arthur Koestler
1:This dogmatic common sense is the death of philosophic adventure. The Universe is vast. ~ A N Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, #KEYS
2:For God, it is the most beautiful and best part of his illustriousness and his glory to be able to create, because it is precisely in that way that we know who and what he is. ~ Cyril of Alexandria, Dialogues on the Trinity 538b, #KEYS
3:Reading list (1972 edition)[edit]
1. Homer - Iliad, Odyssey
2. The Old Testament
3. Aeschylus - Tragedies
4. Sophocles - Tragedies
5. Herodotus - Histories
6. Euripides - Tragedies
7. Thucydides - History of the Peloponnesian War
8. Hippocrates - Medical Writings
9. Aristophanes - Comedies
10. Plato - Dialogues
11. Aristotle - Works
12. Epicurus - Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus
13. Euclid - Elements
14.Archimedes - Works
15. Apollonius of Perga - Conic Sections
16. Cicero - Works
17. Lucretius - On the Nature of Things
18. Virgil - Works
19. Horace - Works
20. Livy - History of Rome
21. Ovid - Works
22. Plutarch - Parallel Lives; Moralia
23. Tacitus - Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania
24. Nicomachus of Gerasa - Introduction to Arithmetic
25. Epictetus - Discourses; Encheiridion
26. Ptolemy - Almagest
27. Lucian - Works
28. Marcus Aurelius - Meditations
29. Galen - On the Natural Faculties
30. The New Testament
31. Plotinus - The Enneads
32. St. Augustine - On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine
33. The Song of Roland
34. The Nibelungenlied
35. The Saga of Burnt Njal
36. St. Thomas Aquinas - Summa Theologica
37. Dante Alighieri - The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy
38. Geoffrey Chaucer - Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales
39. Leonardo da Vinci - Notebooks
40. Niccolò Machiavelli - The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
41. Desiderius Erasmus - The Praise of Folly
42. Nicolaus Copernicus - On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
43. Thomas More - Utopia
44. Martin Luther - Table Talk; Three Treatises
45. François Rabelais - Gargantua and Pantagruel
46. John Calvin - Institutes of the Christian Religion
47. Michel de Montaigne - Essays
48. William Gilbert - On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies
49. Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote
50. Edmund Spenser - Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
51. Francis Bacon - Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis
52. William Shakespeare - Poetry and Plays
53. Galileo Galilei - Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences
54. Johannes Kepler - Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World
55. William Harvey - On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals
56. Thomas Hobbes - Leviathan
57. René Descartes - Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy
58. John Milton - Works
59. Molière - Comedies
60. Blaise Pascal - The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises
61. Christiaan Huygens - Treatise on Light
62. Benedict de Spinoza - Ethics
63. John Locke - Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education
64. Jean Baptiste Racine - Tragedies
65. Isaac Newton - Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics
66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz - Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology
67.Daniel Defoe - Robinson Crusoe
68. Jonathan Swift - A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal
69. William Congreve - The Way of the World
70. George Berkeley - Principles of Human Knowledge
71. Alexander Pope - Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man
72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu - Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws
73. Voltaire - Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary
74. Henry Fielding - Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones
75. Samuel Johnson - The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets
~ Mortimer J Adler,#KEYS
4:SECTION 1. Books for Serious Study
Liber CCXX. (Liber AL vel Legis.) The Book of the Law. This book is the foundation of the New Æon, and thus of the whole of our work.
The Equinox. The standard Work of Reference in all occult matters. The Encyclopaedia of Initiation.
Liber ABA (Book 4). A general account in elementary terms of magical and mystical powers. In four parts: (1) Mysticism (2) Magical (Elementary Theory) (3) Magick in Theory and Practice (this book) (4) The Law.
Liber II. The Message of the Master Therion. Explains the essence of the new Law in a very simple manner.
Liber DCCCXXXVIII. The Law of Liberty. A further explanation of The Book of the Law in reference to certain ethical problems.
Collected Works of A. Crowley. These works contain many mystical and magical secrets, both stated clearly in prose, and woven into the Robe of sublimest poesy.
The Yi King. (S. B. E. Series [vol. XVI], Oxford University Press.) The "Classic of Changes"; give the initiated Chinese system of Magick.
The Tao Teh King. (S. B. E. Series [vol. XXXIX].) Gives the initiated Chinese system of Mysticism.
Tannhäuser, by A. Crowley. An allegorical drama concerning the Progress of the Soul; the Tannhäuser story slightly remodelled.
The Upanishads. (S. B. E. Series [vols. I & XV.) The Classical Basis of Vedantism, the best-known form of Hindu Mysticism.
The Bhagavad-gita. A dialogue in which Krishna, the Hindu "Christ", expounds a system of Attainment.
The Voice of the Silence, by H.P. Blavatsky, with an elaborate commentary by Frater O.M. Frater O.M., 7°=48, is the most learned of all the Brethren of the Order; he has given eighteen years to the study of this masterpiece.
Raja-Yoga, by Swami Vivekananda. An excellent elementary study of Hindu mysticism. His Bhakti-Yoga is also good.
The Shiva Samhita. An account of various physical means of assisting the discipline of initiation. A famous Hindu treatise on certain physical practices.
The Hathayoga Pradipika. Similar to the Shiva Samhita.
The Aphorisms of Patanjali. A valuable collection of precepts pertaining to mystical attainment.
The Sword of Song. A study of Christian theology and ethics, with a statement and solution of the deepest philosophical problems. Also contains the best account extant of Buddhism, compared with modern science.
The Book of the Dead. A collection of Egyptian magical rituals.
Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, by Eliphas Levi. The best general textbook of magical theory and practice for beginners. Written in an easy popular style.
The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. The best exoteric account of the Great Work, with careful instructions in procedure. This Book influenced and helped the Master Therion more than any other.
The Goetia. The most intelligible of all the mediæval rituals of Evocation. Contains also the favourite Invocation of the Master Therion.
Erdmann's History of Philosophy. A compendious account of philosophy from the earliest times. Most valuable as a general education of the mind.
The Spiritual Guide of [Miguel de] Molinos. A simple manual of Christian Mysticism.
The Star in the West. (Captain Fuller). An introduction to the study of the Works of Aleister Crowley.
The Dhammapada. (S. B. E. Series [vol. X], Oxford University Press). The best of the Buddhist classics.
The Questions of King Milinda. (S. B. E. Series [vols. XXXV & XXXVI].) Technical points of Buddhist dogma, illustrated bydialogues.
Liber 777 vel Prolegomena Symbolica Ad Systemam Sceptico-Mysticæ Viæ Explicandæ, Fundamentum Hieroglyphicam Sanctissimorum Scientiæ Summæ. A complete Dictionary of the Correspondences of all magical elements, reprinted with extensive additions, making it the only standard comprehensive book of reference ever published. It is to the language of Occultism what Webster or Murray is to the English language.
Varieties of Religious Experience (William James). Valuable as showing the uniformity of mystical attainment.
Kabbala Denudata, von Rosenroth: also The Kabbalah Unveiled, by S.L. Mathers. The text of the Qabalah, with commentary. A good elementary introduction to the subject.
Konx Om Pax [by Aleister Crowley]. Four invaluable treatises and a preface on Mysticism and Magick.
The Pistis Sophia [translated by G.R.S. Mead or Violet McDermot]. An admirable introduction to the study of Gnosticism.
The Oracles of Zoroaster [Chaldæan Oracles]. An invaluable collection of precepts mystical and magical.
The Dream of Scipio, by Cicero. Excellent for its Vision and its Philosophy.
The Golden Verses of Pythagoras, by Fabre d'Olivet. An interesting study of the exoteric doctrines of this Master.
The Divine Pymander, by Hermes Trismegistus. Invaluable as bearing on the Gnostic Philosophy.
The Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians, reprint of Franz Hartmann. An invaluable compendium.
Scrutinium Chymicum [Atalanta Fugiens]¸ by Michael Maier. One of the best treatises on alchemy.
Science and the Infinite, by Sidney Klein. One of the best essays written in recent years.
Two Essays on the Worship of Priapus [A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus &c. &c. &c.], by Richard Payne Knight [and Thomas Wright]. Invaluable to all students.
The Golden Bough, by J.G. Frazer. The textbook of Folk Lore. Invaluable to all students.
The Age of Reason, by Thomas Paine. Excellent, though elementary, as a corrective to superstition.
Rivers of Life, by General Forlong. An invaluable textbook of old systems of initiation.
Three Dialogues, by Bishop Berkeley. The Classic of Subjective Idealism.
Essays of David Hume. The Classic of Academic Scepticism.
First Principles by Herbert Spencer. The Classic of Agnosticism.
Prolegomena [to any future Metaphysics], by Immanuel Kant. The best introduction to Metaphysics.
The Canon [by William Stirling]. The best textbook of Applied Qabalah.
The Fourth Dimension, by [Charles] H. Hinton. The best essay on the subject.
The Essays of Thomas Henry Huxley. Masterpieces of philosophy, as of prose.
~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA, Appendix I: Literature Recommended to Aspirants#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:Cicero called Aristotle a river of flowing gold, and said of Plato's Dialogues, that if Jupiter were to speak, it would be in language like theirs. ~ plutarch, @wisdomtrove 2:John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume (2013). “The Empiricists: Locke: Concerning Human Understanding; Berkeley: Principles of Human Knowledge & 3 Dialogues; Hume: Concerning Human Understanding & Concerning Natural Religio”, p.334, Anchor ~ david-hume, @wisdomtrove 3:After meditating for some years, I began to see the patterns of my own behavior. As you quiet your mind, you begin to see the nature of your own resistance more clearly, struggles, inner dialogues, the way in which you procrastinate and develop passive resistance against life. As you cultivate the witness, things change. You don't have to change them. Things just change. ~ ram-das, @wisdomtrove 4:Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age. In writing Dialogues in Limbo, The Last Puritan, and now all these descriptions of the friends of my youth and the young friends of my middle age, I have drunk the pleasure of life more pure, more joyful than it ever was when mingled with all the hidden anxieties and little annoyances of actual living. Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure. ~ george-santayana, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:Stay quiet and the noisy surface dialogues will cease. ~ H W L Poonja, #NFDB
2:It started, as all dialogues do, when a path crosses that of another . ~ Loreth Anne White, #NFDB
3:Plato's dialogues bear at least some similarities to the classical plays. ~ Benjamin Jowett, #NFDB
4:A babe, by intercourse of touch I held mute dialogues with my Mother's heart. ~ William Wordsworth, #NFDB
5:I hate those Socratic dialogues where everything gets drawn out at the pace of an excessively logical snail. ~ Jo Walton, #NFDB
6:perhaps solitude has stretched out his thoughts into long strands, and accustomed him to internal dialogues. ~ Olga Tokarczuk, #NFDB
7:I only make notes, I don't write dialogues in full. And the notes are very much based on my knowledge of person. ~ Abbas Kiarostami, #NFDB
8:The English never abolish anything. They put it in cold storage. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), #NFDB
9:Where the successful or failed dialogues between Christianity and other cultures are concerned, we could go on for hours. ~ Ren Girard, #NFDB
10:In 80% of Socrates' dialogues there was no constructive outcome. He saw his role as simply pointing out what was "wrong. ~ Edward de Bono, #NFDB
11:A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), #NFDB
12:Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our time. Practical wisdom fled from school wisdom into this liberal form. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, #NFDB
13:A man of genius can hardly be sociable, for what dialogues could indeed be so intelligent and entertaining as his own monologues? ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, #NFDB
14:I feel that all the messages in the Conversations with God dialogues came from God. And many of them have been considered radical. ~ Neale Donald Walsch, #NFDB
15:Mississippi Mermaid was a very special experience because we only had the dialogues for the scenes we were shooting the night before. ~ Catherine Deneuve, #NFDB
16:The usual picture of Socrates is of an ugly little plebeian who inspired a handsome young nobleman to write long dialogues on large topics. ~ Richard Rorty, #NFDB
17:Cicero called Aristotle a river of flowing gold, and said of Plato's Dialogues, that if Jupiter were to speak, it would be in language like theirs. ~ Plutarch, #NFDB
18:Listen to all the conversations of our world, between nations as well as between individuals. They are, for the most part, dialogues of the deaf. ~ Paul Tournier, #NFDB
19:No seventeenth-century pedagogue would have publicly advised his disciple, as did Erasmus in his Dialogues, on the choice of a good prostitute. ~ Michel Foucault, #NFDB
20:I would say the flip side to my fascination with systems is a fascination with components. So many of my books are dialogues between little and big. ~ Richard Powers, #NFDB
21:A real value of a talk is not how it goes but what it leaves in your memory, which is one reason perhaps why dialogues in books are always so boring to read. ~ H G Wells, #NFDB
22:Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment in recognition of the pattern. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), #NFDB
23:And in the last sentence I would like also to mention that Poland is one of the countries with which the United States has run strategic dialogues since last year. ~ Marek Belka, #NFDB
24:all of these dialogues, this one and the others, would, without exception, have been found in the index of any Manual of Human Relations under Mutual Incomprehension ~ Jos Saramago, #NFDB
25:Reading the Socratic dialogues one has the feeling: what a frightful waste of time! What's the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing? ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein, #NFDB
26:There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), #NFDB
27:Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), #NFDB
28:Shakespeare wrote better poetry for not knowing too much; Milton, I think, knew too much finally for the good of his poetry. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), #NFDB
29:This is at the heart of all good education, where the teacher asks students to think and engages them in encouraging dialogues, constantly checking for understanding and growth. ~ William Glasser, #NFDB
30:What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), #NFDB
31:There is a remarkable sentence of Pascal according to which we know too little to be dogmatists and too much to be skeptics, which expresses beautifully what Plato conveys through his dialogues. ~ Leo Strauss, #NFDB
32:Rosenzweig daringly criticizes Plato’s dialogues because in them “the thinker knows his thoughts in advance,” and moreover the other is only raising the objections the author thought of himself. ~ Hilary Putnam, #NFDB
33:Games are not about being told things. If you want to tell people things, write a book or make a movie. Games are dialogues - and dialogue requires both parties to take the floor once in a while ~ Warren Spector, #NFDB
34:English dialogues are always just what you need and nothing more - like something out of Hemingway. In Italian and in French, dialogues are always theatrical, literary. You can do more with it. ~ Bernardo Bertolucci, #NFDB
35:I can understand people just fine," I grumble, flicking my fingernails against the skin of my thumb. "But can they understand you?" Jane asks gently. "Remember life is about dialogues, not monologues. ~ Sara Barnard, #NFDB
36:A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it, that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied, he is content. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), #NFDB
37:I don't remember ever feeling lonely; in fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my books. ~ Alberto Manguel, #NFDB
38:With the sense of sight, the idea communicates the emotion, whereas, with sound, the emotion communicates the idea, which is more direct and therefore more powerful. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), #NFDB
39:A philosopher of imposing stature doesn't think in a vacuum. Even his most abstract ideas are, to some extent, conditioned by what is or is not known in the time when he lives. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), #NFDB
40:The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and, if need be, die for it. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), #NFDB
41:The artist is the confidant of nature, flowers carry on dialogues with him through the graceful bending of their stems and the harmoniously tinted nuances of their blossoms, Every flower has a cordial word which nature directs towards him. ~ Auguste Rodin, #NFDB
42:The artist is the confidant of nature, flowers carry on dialogues with him through the graceful bending of their stems and the harmoniously tinted nuances of their blossoms. Every flower has a cordial word which nature directs towards him. ~ Auguste Rodin, #NFDB
43:There is a point where, as a writer, you grow to hate your characters, their stupid motivations, and their whiny inner dialogues. The only solution I have found to deal with that is to kill the character, resurrect him, then kill him again. ~ Caris O Malley, #NFDB
44:It doesn't upset me when people are annoyed or bothered by what may seem to them as a redundancy of topics about blacks and Latinos. As a reporter I welcome those types of conversations and dialogues. Even when it's uncomfortable, it's still necessary. ~ Soledad O Brien, #NFDB
45:No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), #NFDB
46:Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of human life is to grasp as much as we can out of the infinitude. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), #NFDB
47:Some people consider facts to be dangerous things that must be locked away and carefully guarded. But I consider mysteries a far greater threat. We should seek answers wherever possible, regardless of the consequences. —GILBERTUS ALBANS, secret Erasmus dialogues ~ Brian Herbert, #NFDB
48:Traditionally, Indians did not carry on dialogues when discussing important matters. Rather, each person listened attentively until his or her turn came to speak, and then he or she rose and spoke without interruption about the heart of the matter under consideration. ~ Kent Nerburn, #NFDB
49:L'humanisme de la Renaissance se présente comme le dialogue de Rome avec Rome, de la Rome païenne avec la Rome du Christ, de la civilisation antique avec la civilisation chrétienne. Assurément, l'un des plus riches dialogues - jamais interrompu - qu'ait connu l'Occident. ~ Fernand Braudel, #NFDB
50:A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it, that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied, he is content. A certain amount of encouragement is necessary." ~ Alfred North Whitehead in Lucien Price, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), p. 66, #NFDB
51:I look for the essence of a story and a human angle that I think audiences can relate to. I also look at how the dialogues flow in the film as a whole and between the characters, and most importantly I always consider what I can bring to the character from a creative point of view. ~ Hrithik Roshan, #NFDB
52:First and foremost, note that Plato always wrote dialogues, and never attempted to produce a theoretical or scientific treatise. This is a big clue for me. From beginning to end, Plato was aware of the limits of theoretical and technical reasoning, and his dialogues are a massive exploration. ~ David Roochnik, #NFDB
53:Philosophy is the true home of irony, which might be defined as logical beauty: for wherever men are philosophizing in spoken or written dialogues, and provided they are not entirely systematic, irony ought to be produced and postulated; even the Stoics regarded urbanity as a virtue. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, #NFDB
54:Plato is widely believed to have been a student of Socrates and to have been deeply influenced by his teacher's unjust death. Plato's brilliance as a writer and thinker can be witnessed by reading his Socratic dialogues. Some of the dialogues, letters, and other works that are ascribed to him are considered spurious ~ Plato, #NFDB
55:We can inspire others through witness so that one grows together in communicating. BUt the worst thing of all is religious proselytism, which paralyses: 'I am talking with you in order to persuade you.' No. Each person dialogues, starting with his and her own identity. The church grows by attracting, not proselytizing. ~ Pope Francis, #NFDB
56:There is thus always a basic asymmetry in a dialogue – and does this asymmetry not break out openly in late Plato’s dialogues, where we are no longer dealing with Socratic irony, but with one person talking all the time, with his partner merely interrupting him from time to time with “So it is, by Zeus!”, “How cannot it be so?”, etc ~ Slavoj i ek, #NFDB
57:The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), #NFDB
58:Today you can buy the Dialogues of Plato for less than you would spend on a fifth of whiskey, or Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the price of a cheap shirt. You can buy a fair beginning of an education in any bookstore with a good stock of paperback books for less than you would spend on a week's supply of gasoline. ~ Louis L Amour, #NFDB
59:181. Pharmakon means drug, but as Jacques Derrida and others have pointed out, the word in Greek famously refuses to designate whether poison or cure. It holds both in the bowl. In the dialogues Plato uses the word to refer to everything from an illness, its cause, its cure, a recipe, a charm, a substance, a spell, artificial color, and paint. ~ Maggie Nelson, #NFDB
60:Was it the speciality of Mr and Mrs Lammle, or does it ever obtain with other loving couples? In these matrimonial dialogues they never addressed each other, but always some invisible presence that appeared to take a station about midway between them. Perhaps the skeleton in the cupboard comes out to be talked to, on such domestic occasions? ~ Charles Dickens, #NFDB
61:Contrary to popular belief, the helpful words that open the way to great, dramatic dialogues are, in general, modest, ordinary, banal, no one would think that Would you like a cup of coffee could serve as an introduction to a bitter debate about feelings that have died or to the sweetness of a reconciliation that neither person knows how to bring about. ~ Jos Saramago, #NFDB
62:Berkeley affirmed the existence of personal identity, “I my self am not my ideas, but somewhat else, a thinking active principle that perceives . . .” (Dialogues, 3); Hume, the skeptic, refutes this identity and makes of every man “a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity” (op. cit., I, 4, 6). ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
63:After meditating for some years, I began to see the patterns of my own behavior. As you quiet your mind, you begin to see the nature of your own resistance more clearly, struggles, inner dialogues, the way in which you procrastinate and develop passive resistance against life. As you cultivate the witness, things change. You don't have to change them. Things just change. ~ Ram Dass, #NFDB
64:Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion. Our brains merely register and act upon what is telegraphed to them by our bodily experience. Intellect is to emotion as our clothes are to our bodies; we could not very well have civilized life without clothes, but we would be in a poor way if we had only clothes without bodies. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), #NFDB
65:The good is twice described in
the Philebus as perfect, self-
sufficient and seeked by all
conscious beings. And the good
does not have a contrary: it is not
the one end of a scale whose evil
would be the other end; it is a
measure on any scale."
Taken from Bernard Suzanne
Plato and his dialogues
Pursuing Goodness or the Good.
Updated Nov 21, 1998 ~ Plato,#NFDB
66:I have a long letter from him about The Sunlight Dialogues in which he tells me where the symbolism has gone amiss, where the language is excessive, and so on. (Though he did not say it, one implication of his letter was that I should cut the book by a third.) Because he approached me as he did, treated me as a serious novelist and attacked the work on its own grounds, I found it easy to listen. ~ John Gardner, #NFDB
67:I spent the better part of a week trying to figure out how to organize these stacks of 30 years of conversations and dialogues. I finally began clustering them in these different categories, and I ended up with the ones you listed.It's interesting to me the kinds of questions I haven't been called to wrestle with. For example, I don't know what this says, but I'm not asked a lot of political questions. ~ Max Lucado, #NFDB
68:The classic statement of it was given by David Hume, in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. “Epicurus’s old questions are yet unanswered. Is he willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”152 This has also been called the argument against God from evil, or just the argument from evil. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
69:Emotion comes from a Latin word emovere, to move. We talk of being “moved” by our emotions, and we are “moved” when those we love show their deeper feelings to us. If partners were to reconnect, they indeed had to let their emotions move them into new ways of responding to each other. My clients had to learn to take risks, to show the softer sides of themselves, the sides they learned to hide in the Demon Dialogues. ~ Sue Johnson, #NFDB
70:He found out that those processes wrongly known as “monologues” are really dialogues of a special kind; dialogues in which one partner remains silent while the other against all grammatical rules, addresses him as “I” instead of “you”, in order to creep into his confidence and to fathom his intentions; but the silent partner just remains silent, shuns observation and even refuses to be localized in time and space. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
71:I will begin with what in my opinion is your lack of restraint. You are like a spectator in a theatre who expresses his enthusiasm so unrestrainedly that he prevents himself and others from hearing. That lack of restraint is particularly noticeable in the descriptions of nature with which you interrupt dialogues; when one reads them, these descriptions, one wishes they were more compact, shorter, say two or three lines. ~ Anton Chekhov, #NFDB
72:The power of the word, with which the cast away is cast away, pronounces the turning away from all moral uncertainty, from every sympathy with the abyss, the reneging of that phrase of compassion, that “to understand all is to forgive all”, and what was beginning here was that “wonder of the reborn impartiality”, which was briefly mentioned in one of the author’s dialogues with not a little mystery. What strange coherence! ~ Thomas Mann, #NFDB
73:Mindfulness can create a foundation for emotional bonding that allows you to be fully present and authentic during dialogues or a discussion. A mindful approach to entering difficult conversations keeps both parties out of the heat of emotions and able to explore the needs, wants and interests on both sides. Judgement is suspended and, with a strong bond, the mind is able to focus on and look for the mutual benefit of the common goal. ~ George Kohlrieser, #NFDB
74:the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unselfconscious flow of little things – the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal. ~ Dan Simmons, #NFDB
75:I often wonder whether real conversation in real time may eventually give way to these sanitized and easier screen dialogues, in much the same way as killing, skinning and butchering an animal to eat has been replaced by the convenience of packages of meat on the supermarket shelf… Perhaps future generations will recoil with similar horror at the messiness, unpredictability and immediate personal involvement of a three-dimensional, real-time interaction. ~ Susan Greenfield Baroness Greenfield, #NFDB
76:But, among the disciples of Socrates, Plato was the one who shone with a glory which far excelled that of the others, and who not unjustly eclipsed them all. (…) And, as he had a peculiar love for his master Socrates, he made him the speaker in all his dialogues, putting into his mouth whatever he had learned, either from others, or from the efforts of his own powerful intellect, tempering even his moral disputations with the grace and politeness of the Socratic style. ~ Saint Augustine of Hippo, #NFDB
77:I think my role is as a writer, especially, and then also as a speaker, an organizer, and an entre- preneur of social change. My role isn't to make choices for people-each individual or group needs to do that on their own. But as a writer and a speaker, you can describe possibilities that perhaps haven't been visible before, and aren't in other public dialogues or in the rest of the media. So I suppose I think of myself mainly as an organizer and as someone who describes possibilities. ~ Gloria Steinem, #NFDB
78:She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things—the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal. ~ Dan Simmons, #NFDB
79:In the Timaeus dialogues, these being a record of discussions between the Greek Statesman Solon and an Egyptian priest, Plato reports the following: 'You Greeks are all children... you have no belief rooted in the old tradition and no knowledge hoary with age. And the reason is this. There have been and will be many different calamities to destroy mankind, the greatest of them by fire and water, and lesser one by countless other means... You remember only one deluge, though there have been many. ~ Brien Foerster, #NFDB
80:She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things - the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal. ~ Dan Simmons, #NFDB
81:Part of what the food industry does with public relations, just like the chemical industry or the oil industry, is to try to erase their fingerprints from their messaging. So when consumers hear about a recent effort like the "food dialogues" put on by a group called the US Farmers and Ranchers Alliance, do they know necessarily that these "dialogues" are being funded by companies like Monsanto, a large chemical company and the controller of most of the patents on genetically modified seeds? No, they don't. ~ Anna Lappe, #NFDB
82:the writer feels free to invent an inner language for the characters, to give their dialogues revelatory shape, to weave together episodes and characters with a fine mesh of recurrent motifs and phrases and analogies of incident, and to define the meaning of the events through allusion, metaphor, and symbol. The writer does all this not to fabricate history but in order to understand it. In this elaborately wrought literary vehicle, David turns out to be one of the most unfathomable figures of ancient literature. ~ Robert Alter, #NFDB
83:He lay still, his bloodshot eyes staring blankly before him, and drifted into dreams of his problems, compulsively living out dialogues, summing up emotional scenes with his mother, Dot, and his friends. Repeatedly he chided himself to go to sleep, but it did no good, for he was hungry for these waking visions that depicted his dilemmas, yet he knew that such brooding did not help; in fact he was wasting his waning strength, for into these unreal dramas he was putting the whole of his ardent being. The long hours dragged on. ~ Richard Wright, #NFDB
84:We met in the late afternoon at her house. Only the three of us were present on that occasion. In the set of dialogues which I composed and published in later years I took considerable liberties with our actual conversations, especially this first one: in fact, as hostile critics were quick to suggest, the dialogues were created by me with very little of Cave in them and a good deal of Plato, rearranged to fit the occasion. In time, though, my version was accepted implicitly, if only because there were no longer any hostile critics. ~ Gore Vidal, #NFDB
85:…episodic memories are the only ones with direct reference to the past. As Tulving (1999, p.15) points out: “episodic memory is the only form of memory that, at the time of retrieval, is oriented toward the past: retrieval in episodic memory means ‘mental time travel’ through and to one’s past. All other forms of memory, including semantic, declarative and procedural memory, are, at retrieval oriented to the present” ~ Ofengenden Tzofit (2014). "Memory formation and belief" (PDF). Dialogues in Philosophy, Mental and Neuro Sciences. 7 (2): p.37-38, #NFDB
86:Everything Brecht wrote—plays, dialogues, and poetry—was his attempt to clarify the inner contradictions not only of the capitalism and fascism of his times, but also of the communism that was always disappointing his deepest hopes. In a book that makes Brecht’s struggle to reveal these hidden contradictions its central theme, Glahn issues, by implication, a call to arms to today’s artists—who are faced with a world that seems to defy attempts to treat the global crisis with an art that is rarely more than notes on ‘local’ angst. ~ Richard Foreman, #NFDB
87:How precious is the family as the privileged place for transmitting the faith! Speaking about family life, I would like to say one thing: today, as Brazil and the Church around the world celebrate this feast of Saints Joachim and Anne, Grandparents Day is also being celebrated. How important grandparents are for family life, for passing on the human and religious heritage which is so essential for each and every society! How important it is to have intergenerational exchanges and dialogues, especially within the context of the family. ~ Pope Francis, #NFDB
88:In my fortress, in the Via Appia Antica in Rome, I wrote the first script for my film PAGANINI. It was not a script in the common sense. Not even a testament. And yet it was more than that: A shorthand note, which I had received on a wavelength of an earlier life over the distance of centuries away .
For the time being, I did not require more. The structure of my film originated in the instinct: Notes. Notes of music. Notes of captured images (and dialogues). Notes of feelings. Everything else I would decide in the course of the actual shooting. ~ Klaus Kinski,#NFDB
89:How to define a name, may not only be an inquiry of considerable difficulty and intricacy, but may involve considerations going deep into the nature of the things which are denoted by the name. Such, for instance, are the inquiries which form the subjects of the most important of Plato's Dialogues; as, “What is rhetoric?” the topic of the Gorgias, or, “What is justice?” that of the Republic. Such, also, is the question scornfully asked by Pilate, “What is truth?” and the fundamental question with speculative moralists in all ages, “What is virtue? ~ John Stuart Mill, #NFDB
90:Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age. In writing Dialogues in Limbo, The Last Puritan, and now all these descriptions of the friends of my youth and the young friends of my middle age, I have drunk the pleasure of life more pure, more joyful than it ever was when mingled with all the hidden anxieties and little annoyances of actual living. Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure. ~ George Santayana, #NFDB
91:Anything, even the conceptually most complex material, can be written for general audiences without any dumbing down. Of course you have to explain things carefully. This goes back to Galileo, who wrote his great books as dialogues in Italian, not as treatises in Latin. And to Darwin, who wrote The Origin of Species for general readers. I think a lot of people pick up Darwin's book and assume it must be a popular version of some technical monograph, but there is no technical monograph. That's what he wrote. So what I'm doing is part of a great humanistic tradition. ~ Stephen Jay Gould, #NFDB
92:[I]t's necessary to exert very great foresight every time you go to blame or praise a man, so that you won't speak incorrectly. . . . For you shouldn't suppose that, while stones are sacred and pieces of wood, and birds, and snakes, human beings are not. Rather of all these things, the most sacred is the good human being, while the most polluted is the wicked."
Speech attributed to Socrates in Plato, Minos 319a, trans. Thomas L. Pangle, in The Roots of Political Philosophy: Ten Forgotten Socratic Dialogues, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 63. ~ Plato,#NFDB
93:The history of philosophy has always been the agent of power in philosophy, and even in thought. It has played the represser’s role: how can you think without having read Plato, Descartes, Kant and Heidegger, and so-and-so’s book about them? A formidable school of intimidation which manufactures specialists in thought—but which also makes those who stay outside conform all the more to this specialism which they despise. An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking. ~ Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues II, as translated by H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (2002), p. 13, #NFDB
94:Epictetus is never weary of showing how we should deal with what are considered misfortunes, which he does often by means of homely dialogues. Like the Christians, he holds that we should love our enemies. In general, in common with other Stoics, he despises pleasure, but there is a kind of happiness that is not to be despised. 'Athens is beautiful. Yes, but happiness is far more beautiful—freedom from passion and disturbance, the sense that your affairs depend on no one' (p. 428). Every man is an actor in a play, in which God has assigned the parts; it is our duty to perform our part worthily, whatever it may be. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
95:In a world where positive expressions of sexual longing connect us we will all be free to choose those sexual practices which affirm and nurture our growth. Those practices may range from choosing promiscuity or celibacy, from embracing one specific sexual identity and preference or choosing a roaming uncharted desire that is kindled only by interaction and engagement with specific individuals with whom we feel the spark of erotic recognition no matter their sex, race, class, or even their sexual preference. Radical feminist dialogues about sexuality must surface so that the movement towards sexual freedom can begin again. ~ bell hooks, #NFDB
96:We are forced to play certain roles and speak certain dialogues. But we revolt. We want our own script to be performed and our own dialogues to be heard. So we negotiate with fellow actors. Some succeed in getting heard with some people, others fail with most people, no one succeeds with everybody. We cling to our scripts, submit to other people’s scripts, speak dialogues we do not want to, only to stay relevant and connected to the larger narrative, or at least to a subplot. Heroes emerge. Villains emerge. Heroes of one plot turn out to be villains of other plots. Eventually, all leave the stage but the play continues. Who ~ Devdutt Pattanaik, #NFDB
97:Remarquez un grand défaut des éducations ordinaires: on met tout le plaisir d'un côté , et tout l'ennui de l'autre; tout l'ennui dans l'étude, tout le plaisir dans les divertissements. - The greatest defect of common education is, that we are in the habit of putting pleasure all on one side, and weariness on the other; all weariness in study, all pleasure in idleness. ~ François Fénelon De l'éducation des filles, ch. 5, cited from De l’éducation des filles, dialogues des morts et opuscules divers (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1857) p. 21; translation from Selections from the Writings of Fénelon (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, Little and Wilkins, 1829) p. 72., #NFDB
98:To-day, when the crisis calls you, will you go off and display your recitation and harp on, 'How cleverly I compose dialogues'? Nay, fellow man, make this your object, 'Look how I fail not to get what I will. Look how I escape what I will to avoid. Let death come and you shall know; bring me pains, prison, dishonour, condemnation.' This is the true field of display for a young man come from school. Leave those other trifles to other men; let no one ever hear you say a word on them, do not tolerate any compliments upon them; assume the air of being no one and of knowing nothing. Show that you know this only, how not to fail and how not to fall. ~ Epictetus, #NFDB
99:Sarai had treasured every stage of Rachel's childhood, enjoying the day-to-day normalcy of things; a normalcy which she quietly accepted as the best of life. She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things - the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal. ~ Dan Simmons, #NFDB
100:If the end of education is to foster the love of truth, this love cannot be presupposed in the means. The means must rather be based on a resourceful pedagogical rhetoric that, knowing how initially resistant or impervious we all are to philosophic truth, necessarily makes use of motives other than love of truth and of techniques other than “saying exactly what you mean.” That is why, for example, the earlier, classical tradition of rationalism recognized the inescapable need to speak in philosophical poems and dialogues as well as treatises. ~ Arthur Melzer, “On the Pedagogical Motive for Esoteric Writing,” Journal of Politics, Vol. 69, Issue 4, November 2007, p. 1018, #NFDB
101:To inhabit our citizenry fully, we have to not only understand this, but also grasp it. In the words of the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, “The problem is we have to find some way with these dialogues to show and to encourage the white liberal to stop being a liberal and become an American radical.” And, as my friend the critic and poet Fred Moten has written: “I believe in the world and want to be in it. I want to be in it all the way to the end of it because I believe in another world and I want to be in that.” This other world, that world, would presumably be one where black living matters. But we can’t get there without fully recognizing what is here. ~ Jesmyn Ward, #NFDB
102:Humane wisdom understandeth some propositions so perfectly, and is as absolutely certain thereof, as Nature herself; and such are the pure Mathematical sciences, to wit, Geometry and Arithmetick: in which Divine Wisdom knows infinite more propositions, because it knows them all; but I believe that the knowledge of those few comprehended by humane understanding, equalleth the divine, as to the certainty objectivè, for that it arriveth to comprehend the necessity thereof, than which there can be no greater certainty. ~ Galileo Galilei, Dialogo sopra i due Massi Sistemi del Mondo (1632) as quoted in the Salusbury translation, The Systeme of the World: in Four Dialogues (1661)., #NFDB
103:Quoting from Thomas Merton
Dialogues With Silence
The true contemplative is not one who prepares his mind for a particular message that he wants or expects to hear, but is one who remains empty because he knows that he can never expect to anticipate the words that will transform his darkness into light. He does not even anticipate a special kind of transformation. He does not demand light instead of darkness. He waits on the Word of God in silence, and, when he is answered it is not so much by a word that bursts into his silence. It is by his silence itself, suddenly, inexplicably revealing itself to him as a word of great power, full of the voice of God. (17) ~ Stephen Cope,#NFDB
104:If cissexual academics truly believe that transsexual and intersex people can add new perspectives to existing dialogues about gender, then they should stop reinterpreting our experiences and instead support transsexual and intersex intellectual endeavors and works of art. Instead of exploiting our experiences to further their own careers, they should insist that their universities make a point of hiring transsexual and intersex faculty, and that their publishers put out books by gender-variant writers. And they should finally acknowledge the fact that they have no legitimate claim to use transsexual and intersex identities, struggles, and histories for their own purposes. ~ Julia Serano, #NFDB
105:With regard to the linguistic constraint on classroom speaking, the teacher’s role in preparing learners for speaking activities (rather than simply plunging them into them) and of supporting them during speaking activities is obviously extremely important. Allowing learners to script and rehearse their own dialogues in pairs or small groups before publicly performing them is one way of reducing some of the anxiety associated with speaking the L2 in public. Another is providing the words and phrases they might need in advance, and having these available on the board during the activity. You can always erase these progressively as the learners become more proficient at using them. ~ Scott Thornbury, #NFDB
106:to believe those things, which are commonly spoken, by such as take upon them to work wonders, and by sorcerers, or prestidigitators, and impostors; concerning the power of charms, and their driving out of demons, or evil spirits; and the like. Not to keep quails for the game; nor to be mad after such things. Not to be offended with other men's liberty of speech, and to apply myself unto philosophy. Him also I must thank, that ever I heard first Bacchius, then Tandasis and Marcianus, and that I did write dialogues in my youth; and that I took liking to the philosophers' little couch and skins, and such other things, which by the Grecian discipline are proper to those who profess philosophy. ~ Marcus Aurelius, #NFDB
107:At any given moment, four or five separate dialogues were going on across the table, but because people weren't necessarily talking to the person next to them, these dialogues kept intersecting with one another, causing abrupt shifts in the pairings of the speakers, so that everyone seemed to be taking part in all the conversations at the same time, simultaneously chattering away about his or her own life and eavesdropping on everyone else as well. Add to this the frequent interruptions from the children, the coming and goings of the different courses, the pouring of wine, the dropped plates, overturned glasses, and spilled condiments, the dinner began to resemble an elaborate, hastily improvised vaudeville routine. ~ Paul Auster, #NFDB
108:Pharmakon means drug, but as Jacques Derrida and others have pointed out, the word in Greek famously refuses to designate whether poison or cure. It holds both in the bowl. In the dialogues Plato uses the word to refer to everything from an illness, its cause, its cure, a recipe, a charge, a substance, a spell, artificial color, and paint. Plato does not call fucking pharmakon, but then again, while he talks plenty about love, Plato does not say much about fucking. In the Phaedrus, the written word is also notoriously called pharmakon. The question up for debate between Socrates and Phaedrus is whether the written word kills memory or aids it- whether it cripples the mind's power, or whether it cures it of its forgetfulness. ~ Maggie Nelson, #NFDB
109:You know how much I used to like Plato. Today I realize he lied. For the things of this world are not a reflection of the ideal, but a product of human sweat, blood and hard labour. It is we who built the pyramids, hewed the marble for the temples and the rocks for the imperial roads, we who pulled the oars in the galleys and dragged wooden ploughs, while they wrote dialogues and dramas, rationalized their intrigues by appeals in the name of the Fatherland, made wars over boundaries and democracies. We were filthy and died real deaths. They were 'aesthetic' and carried on subtle debates.
There can be no beauty if it is paid for by human injustice, nor truth that passes over injustice in silence, nor moral virtue that condones it. ~ Tadeusz Borowski,#NFDB
110:In a few dreams, I’d answer the phone and hear a long silence, which I interpreted as my mother’s speechless disdain. Or I heard crackling static, and cried out, “Mom? Dad?” into the receiver, desperate and devastated that I couldn’t hear what they were saying. And other times, I was just reading transcripts of dialogues between the two of them, typed on aging onionskin paper that fell apart in my hands. Occasionally I’d spot my parents in places like the lobby of my apartment building or on the steps of the New York Public Library. My mother seemed disappointed and rushed, as though the dream had pulled her away from an important task. “What happened to your hair?” she asked me in the Starbucks on Lexington Avenue, then she trotted down the hall to the restroom. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh, #NFDB
111:It was hard not to think of the Dalai Lama’s comment on the first day of the dialogues that the suffering of natural disasters we cannot stop, but so much of the rest of our suffering we can. Adversity, illness, and death are real and inevitable. We choose whether to add to these unavoidable facts of life with the suffering we create in our own minds and hearts, the chosen suffering. The more we make a different choice, to heal our own suffering, the more we can turn to others and help to address their suffering with the laughter-filled, tear-stained eyes of the heart. And the more we turn away from our self-regard to wipe the tears from the eyes of another, the more—incredibly—we are able to bear, to heal, and to transcend our own suffering. This was their true secret to joy. ~ Dalai Lama XIV, #NFDB
112:Vedanta is the teaching of the Upanishads, a collection of dialogues, stories, and poems, some of which go back to at least 800 B.C. Sophisticated Hindus do not think of God as a special and separate super-person who rules the world from above, like a monarch. Their God is “underneath” rather than “above” everything, and he (or it) plays the world from inside. One might say that if religion is the opium of the people, the Hindus have the inside dope. What is more, no Hindu can realize that he is God in disguise without seeing at the same time that this is true of everyone and everything else. In the Vedanta philosophy, nothing exists except God. There seem to be other things than God, but only because he is dreaming them up and making them his disguises to play hide-and-seek with himself. ~ Alan W Watts, #NFDB
113:Rubashov had always believed that he knew himself rather well. Being without moral prejudices, he had no illusions about the phenomenon called the "first person singular" and had taken for granted, without particular emotion, that this phenomenon was endowed with certain impulses which people are generally reluctant to admit. Now, when he stood with his forehead against the window or suddenly stopped on the third black tile, he made unexpected discoveries. He found that those processes wrongly known as monologues are really dialogues of a special kind - dialogues in which one partner remains silent while the other, against all grammatical rules, addresses him as "I" instead of "you," in order to creep into his confidence and to fathom his intentions, but the silent partner just remains silent, shuns observation, and even refuses to be localized in time and space. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
114:The world into which we are born is imagined as a stage full of actors but with no script, or director. Everyone assumes they are the hero, but discover they are not the protagonists of the ongoing play. We are forced to play certain roles and speak certain dialogues. But we revolt. We want our own script to be performed and our own dialogues to be heard. So we negotiate with fellow actors. Some succeed in getting heard with some people, others fail with most people, no one succeeds with everybody. We cling to our scripts, submit to other people’s scripts, speak dialogues we do not want to, only to stay relevant and connected to the larger narrative, or at least to a subplot. Heroes emerge. Villains emerge. Heroes of one plot turn out to be villains of other plots. Eventually, all leave the stage but the play continues. Who knows what is actually going on? Vishnu, ~ Devdutt Pattanaik, #NFDB
115:Sixth, show a deep acquaintance with the same books, magazines, blogs, movies, and plays — as well as the daily life experiences — that your audience knows. Mention them and interpret them in light of Scripture. But be sure to read and experience urban life across a spectrum of opinion. There is nothing more truly urban than showing you know, appreciate, and digest a great diversity of human opinion. During my first years in New York, I regularly read The New Yorker (sophisticated secular), The Atlantic (eclectic), The Nation (older, left-wing secular), The Weekly Standard (conservative but erudite), The New Republic (eclectic and erudite), Utne Reader (New Age alternative), Wired (Silicon Valley libertarian), First Things (conservative Catholic). As I read, I imagine dialogues about Christianity with the writers. I almost never read a magazine without getting a scrap of a preaching idea. ~ Timothy J Keller, #NFDB
116:conversation. In Laches, he discusses the meaning of courage with a couple of retired generals seeking instruction for their kinsmen. In Lysis, Socrates joins a group of young friends in trying to define friendship. In Charmides, he engages another such group in examining the widely celebrated virtue of sophrosune, the “temperance” that combines self-control and self-knowledge. (Plato’s readers would know that the bright young man who gives his name to the latter dialogue would grow up to become one of the notorious Thirty Tyrants who briefly ruled Athens after its defeat by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War.) None of these dialogues reaches definite conclusions. They end in aporia, contradictions or other difficulties. The Socratic dialogues are aporetic: his interlocutors are left puzzled about what they thought they knew. Socrates’s cross-examination, or elenchus, exposes their ignorance, but he exhorts his fellows to ~ Plato, #NFDB
117:Hume’s purported fideism had serious impact on some religious thinkers. One of these, the German philosopher J. G. Hamann, decided that Hume, intentionally or not, was the greatest voice of religious orthodoxy—for insisting that there was no rational basis for religious belief, and that there was no rational evidence for Christianity. When the Dialogues appeared, Hamann became quite excited; he translated the first and last dialogues into German so that Immanuel Kant might read them and become a serious Christian. Hamann’s use of Hume as the voice of orthodoxy led the great Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard to become the most important advocate of fideistic Christianity in the nineteenth century. So, although most of Hume’s influence has been in creating doubts and leading thinkers to question accepted religious views, he also played an important role in the development of fideistic orthodoxy, culminating in Kierkegaard’s views. ~ David Hume, #NFDB
118:Pur: that one word contains for me the secret, the bright, terrible clarity of ancient Greek. How can I make you see it, this strange harsh light which pervades Homer’s landscapes and illumines the dialogues of Plato, an alien light, inarticulable in our common tongue? Our shared language is a language of the intricate, the peculiar, the home of pumpkins and ragamuffins and bodkins and beer, the tongue of Ahab and Falstaff and Mrs Gamp; and while I find it entirely suitable for reflections such as these, it fails me utterly when I attempt to describe in it what I love about Greek, that language innocent of all quirks and cranks; a language obsessed with action, and with the joy of seeing action multiply from action, action marching relentlessly ahead and with yet more actions filing in from either side fall into neat step at the rear, in a long straight rank of cause and effect toward what will be inevitable, the only possible end. ~ Donna Tartt, #NFDB
119:I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord soil has produced, whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I hear the name of Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were my townsman and I never saw him — my next neighbor and I never heard him speak or attended to the wisdom of his words. But how actually is it? His Dialogues, which contain what was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet I never read them. We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my townsman who cannot read at all and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects. We should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were. We are a race of tit-men, and soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than the columns of the daily paper. ~ Henry David Thoreau, #NFDB
120:Baccalaureate
A year or two, and grey Euripides,
And Horace and a Lydia or so,
And Euclid and the brush of Angelo,
Darwin on man, Vergilius on bees,
The nose and Dialogues of Socrates,
Don Quixote, Hudibras and Trinculo,
How worlds are spawned and where the dead gods go,-All shall be shard of broken memories.
And there shall linger other, magic things,-The fog that creeps in wanly from the sea,
The rotton harbor smell, the mystery
Of moonlit elms, the flash of pigeon wings,
The sunny Green, the old-world peace that clings
About the college yard, where endlessly
The dead go up and down. These things shall be
Enchantment of our heart's rememberings.
And these are more than memories of youth
Which earth's four winds of pain shall blow away;
These are earth's symbols of eternal truth,
Symbols of dream and imagery and flame,
Symbols of those same verities that play
Bright through the crumbling gold of a great name.
~ Archibald MacLeish,#NFDB
121:I am completely against ecumenism as it is envisaged today--with its ineffective "dialogues" and gratuitous and sentimental gestures amounting to nothing. Certainly an understanding between religions is possible and even necessary, though not on the dogmatic plane, but solely on the basis of common ideas and common interests. The common ideas are a transcendent, perfect, all-powerful, merciful Absolute, then a hereafter that is either good or bad depending on our merits or demerits; all the religions, including Buddhism--Buddhist "atheism" is simply a misunderstanding--are in agreement on these points. The common interests are a defense against materialism, atheism, perversion, subversion, and modernism in all its guises. I believe Pius XII once said that the wars between Christians and Muslims were but domestic quarrels compared to the present opposition between the world of the religions and that of militant materialism-atheism; he also said it was a consolation to know that there are millions of men who prostrate themselves five times a day before God. ~ Frithjof Schuon, #NFDB
122:Radical feminist work around the world daily strengthens political solidarity between women beyond the boundaries of race/ethnicity and nationality. Mainstream mass media rarely calls attention to these positive interventions. In Hatreds: Radicalized and Sexualized Conflicts in the 21st Century, Zillah Eisenstein shares the insight:
Feminism(s) as transnational - imagined as the rejection of false race/gender borders and falsely constructed 'other' - is a major challenge to masculinist nationalism, the distortions of statist communism and 'free'-market globalism. It is a feminism that recognizes individual diversity, and freedom, and equality, defined through and beyond north/west and south/east dialogues.
No one who has studied the growth of global feminism can deny the important work women are doing to ensure our freedom. No one can deny that Western women, particularly women in the United States, have contributed much that is needed to this struggle and need to contribute more. The goal of global feminism is to reach out and join global struggles to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. ~ bell hooks,#NFDB
123:One might wonder how on earth learning came to be seen primarily a result of teaching. Until quite recently, the world’s great teachers were understood to be people who had something fresh to say about something to people who were interested in hearing their message. Moses, Socrates, Aristotle, Jesus—these were people who had original insights, and people came from far and wide to find out what those insights were. One can see most clearly in Plato’s dialogues that people did not come to Socrates to “learn philosophy,” but rather to hear Socrates’ version of philosophy (and his wicked and witty attacks on other people’s versions), just as they went to other philosophers to hear (and learn) their versions. In other words, teaching was understood as public exposure of an individual’s perspective, which anyone could take or leave, depending on whether they cared about it. No one in his right mind thought that the only way you could become a philosopher was by taking a course from one of those guys. On the contrary, you were expected to come up with your own original worldview if you aspired to the title of philosopher. ~ Russell L Ackoff, #NFDB
124:Cultivating an ethic of responsibility begins with nonnatives understanding ourselves as beneficiaries of the illegal settlement of indigenous people's land, and unjust appropriation of indigenous peoples' resources and jurisdiction. When faced with this truth, it is common for activists to get stuck in their feelings of guilt, which I would argue is a state of self-absorption that actually upholds privilege. While guilt is often representative of much-needed shift in consciousness, in itself it does nothing to motivate the responsibility necessary to actively dismantle entrenched systems of oppression. In a movement-building round table, longtime Montreal activist Jaggi Singh expressed that "the only way to escape complicity with settlement is active opposition to it. That only happens in the context of on-the-ground, day-to-day organizing, and creating and cultivating the spaces where we can begin dialogues and discussions as natives an nonnatives."
Original blog post: Unsettling America: Decolonization in Theory and Practice.
Quoted In: Decolonize Together: Moving beyond a Politics of Solidarity toward a Practice of Decolonization. Taking Sides. ~ Harsha Walia,#NFDB
125:Il regarde les gens autour de lui, écoute leurs conversations, suppute, pour chacun, ses chances d’échapper à sa condition présente. Les clochards, les vrais, c’est râpé. Les employés, les secrétaires, qui viennent à l’heure du déjeuner manger un sandwich sur un banc, ils auront de l’avancement mais n’iront pas bien loin, d’ailleurs ils n’imaginent même pas d’aller bien loin. Les deux jeunes types à têtes d’intellectuels qui discutent et couvrent d’annotations, avec l’air de se prendre très au sérieux, les feuillets dactylographiés de ce qui doit être un scénario : ils doivent y croire, à leurs dialogues à la con, à leurs personnages à la con, et peut-être qu’ils ont raison d’y croire, peut-être qu’ils y arriveront, peut-être qu’ils connaîtront Hollywood, les piscines, les starlettes, et la cérémonie des Oscars. La tribu de Portoricains, en revanche, qui déploie sur la pelouse tout un campement de couvertures, de transistors, de bébés, de thermos... : ceux-là, on peut être sûr qu’ils resteront où ils sont. Encore que... qui sait? Peut-être que leur bébé braillard, à la couche pleine de merde, fera grâce à leurs sacrifices de formidables études et deviendra prix Nobel de médecine ou secrétaire général de l’ONU. Et lui, Édouard, avec son jean blanc et ses idées noires, que va-t-il devenir? ~ Emmanuel Carr re, #NFDB
126:Twenty-five hundred years ago it might have been said that man understood himself as well as any other part of his world. Today he is the thing he understands least. Physics and biology have come a long way, but there has been no comparable development of anything like a science of human behavior. Greek physics and biology are now of historical interest only (no modern physicist or biologist would turn to Aristotle for help), but the dialogues of Plato are still assigned to students and cited as if they threw light on human behavior. Aristotle could not have understood a page of modern physics or biology, but Socrates and his friends would have little trouble in following most current discussions of human affairs. And as to technology, we have made immense strides in controlling the physical and biological worlds, but our practices in government, education, and much of economics, though adapted to very different conditions, have not greatly improved. We can scarcely explain this by saying that the Greeks knew all there was to know about human behavior. Certainly they knew more than they knew about the physical world, but it was still not much. Moreover, their way of thinking about human behavior must have had some fatal flaw. Whereas Greek physics and biology, no matter how crude, led eventually to modern science, Greek theories of human behavior led nowhere. If they are with us today, it is not because they possessed some kind of eternal verity, but because they did not contain the seeds of anything better. ~ B F Skinner, #NFDB
127:Promises of two children and superhuman happiness are of no avail, nor assurance of extreme respectability carried to an age far exceeding that usually allotted to mortals. The sorrows of our heroes and heroines, they are your delight, oh public! — their sorrows, or their sins, or their absurdities; not their virtues, good sense, and consequent rewards. When we begin to tint our final pages with couleur de rose, as in accordance with fixed rule we must do, we altogether extinguish our own powers of pleasing. When we become dull, we offend your intellect; and we must become dull or we should offend your taste. A late writer, wishing to sustain his interest to the last page, hung his hero at the end of the third volume. The consequence was that no one would read his novel. And who can apportion out and dovetail his incidents, dialogues, characters, and descriptive morsels so as to fit them all exactly into 930 pages, without either compressing them unnaturally, or extending them artificially at the end of his labour? Do I not myself know that I am at this moment in want of a dozen pages, and that I am sick with cudgelling my brains to find them? And then, when everything is done, the kindest-hearted critic of them all invariably twits us with the incompetency and lameness of our conclusion. We have either become idle and neglected it, or tedious and overlaboured it. It is insipid or unnatural, overstrained or imbecile. It means nothing, or attempts too much. The last scene of all, as all last scenes we fear must be, ~ Anthony Trollope, #NFDB
128:Too often, however, these passing modes of relief proved insufficient. Among the all-too-scanty literary documents as yet unearthed, two dialogues on suicide significantly remain, one Egyptian and one Mesopotamian. In each case a member of the privileged classes, with every luxury and sensual gratification open to him, finds his life intolerable. His facile dreams are unsalted by reality. The Egyptian debate between a man and his soul dates from the period following the disintegration of the Pyramid Age, and betrays the desperation of an upper-class person who had lost faith in the ritualistic exaltation of death as the ultimate fulfillment of life, which rationalized the irrationalities of high Egyptian society. But the Mesopotamian dialogue between a rich master and his slave, dating from the first Millenium B.C., is even more significant: for the principal finds that no piling up of wealth, power, or sexual pleasure produces a meaningful life. Another seventh-century B.C. 'Dialogue About Human Misery' expands the theme: the fact that it has been called a Babylonian Ecclesiastes indicates the depth of its pessimism-the bitterness of power unrelieved by love, the emptiness of wealth condemned to enjoy only the goods that money can buy.
If this is what the favored few could expect, in justification of thousands of years of arduous collective effort and sacrifice, it is obvious that the cult of power, from the beginning, was based upon a gross fallacy. Ultimately the end product proved as life-defeating for the master classes as the mechanism itself was for the disinherited and socially dismembered workers and slaves. ~ Lewis Mumford,#NFDB
129:Plato is the first writer who distinctly says that education is to comprehend the whole of life, and to be a preparation for another in which education begins again... He has long given up the notion that virtue cannot be taught; and he is disposed to modify the thesis of the Protagoras, that the virtues are one and not many. He is not unwilling to admit the sensible world into his scheme of truth. Nor does he assert in the Republic the involuntariness of vice, which is maintained by him in the Timaeus, Sophist, and Laws... Still, we observe in him the remains of the old Socratic doctrine, that true knowledge must be elicited from within, and is to be sought for in ideas, not in particulars of sense. Education, as he says, will implant a principle of intelligence which is better than ten thousand eyes. The paradox that the virtues are one, and the kindred notion that all virtue is knowledge, are not entirely renounced; the first is seen in the supremacy given to justice over the rest; the second in the tendency to absorb the moral virtues in the intellectual, and to centre all goodness in the contemplation of the idea of good. The world of sense is still depreciated and identified with opinion, though omitted to be a shadow of the true. In the Republic he is evidently impressed with the conviction that vice arises chiefly from ignorance and may be cured by education; the multitude are hardly to be deemed responsible for what they do ... he only proposes to elicit from the mind that which is there already. Education is represented by him, not as the filling of a vessel, but as the turning the eye of the soul towards the light. ~ Benjamin Jowett, "Introduction and Analyisis," (1892) p. cc, The Dialogues of Plato: Republic. Timaeus. Critias. Vol. 3 The Republic, #NFDB
130:Pour quiconque veut examiner les choses avec impartialité, il est manifeste que les Grecs ont bien véritablement, au point de vue intellectuel tout au moins, emprunté presque tout aux Orientaux, ainsi qu’eux-mêmes l’ont avoué assez souvent ; si menteurs qu’ils aient pu être, ils n’ont du moins pas menti sur ce point, et d’ailleurs ils n’y avaient aucun intérêt, tout au contraire. Leur seule originalité, disions-nous précédemment, réside dans la façon dont ils ont exposé les choses, suivant une faculté d’adaptation qu’on ne peut leur contester mais qui se trouve nécessairement limitée à la mesure de leur compréhension ; c’est donc là, en somme, une originalité d’ordre purement dialectique. En effet, les modes de raisonnement, qui dérivent des modes généraux de la pensée et servent à les formuler, sont autres chez les Grecs que chez les Orientaux ; il faut toujours y prendre garde lorsqu’on signale certaines analogies, d’ailleurs réelles, comme celle du syllogisme grec, par exemple, avec ce qu’on a appelé plus ou moins exactement le syllogisme hindou. On ne peut même pas dire que le raisonnement grec se distingue par une rigueur particulière ; il ne semble plus rigoureux que les autres qu’à ceux qui en ont l’habitude exclusive, et cette apparence provient uniquement de ce qu’il se renferme toujours dans un domaine plus restreint, plus limité, et mieux défini par là même. Ce qui est vraiment propre aux Grecs, par contre, mais peu à leur avantage, c’est une certaine subtilité dialectique dont les dialogues de Platon offrent de nombreux exemples, et où se voit le besoin d’examiner indéfiniment une même question sous toutes ses faces, en la prenant par les plus petits côtés, et pour aboutir à une conclusion plus ou moins insignifiante ; il faut croire que les modernes, en Occident, ne sont pas les premiers à être affligés de « myopie intellectuelle ». ~ Ren Gu non, #NFDB
131:The point is, the brain talks to itself, and by talking to itself changes its perceptions. To make a new version of the not-entirely-false model, imagine the first interpreter as a foreign correspondent, reporting from the world. The world in this case means everything out- or inside our bodies, including serotonin levels in the brain. The second interpreter is a news analyst, who writes op-ed pieces. They read each other's work. One needs data, the other needs an overview; they influence each other. They get dialogues going.
INTERPRETER ONE: Pain in the left foot, back of heel.
INTERPRETER TWO: I believe that's because the shoe is too tight.
INTERPRETER ONE: Checked that. Took off the shoe. Foot still hurts.
INTERPRETER TWO: Did you look at it?
INTERPRETER ONE: Looking. It's red.
INTERPRETER TWO: No blood?
INTERPRETER ONE: Nope.
INTERPRETER TWO: Forget about it.
INTERPRETER ONE: Okay.
Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.
An exemplary piece of confusion.
INTERPRETER ONE: There's a tiger in the corner.
INTERPRETER TWO: No, that's not a tiger- that's a bureau.
INTERPRETER ONE: It's a tiger, it's a tiger!
INTERPRETER TWO: Don't be ridiculous. Let's go look at it.
Then all the dendrites and neurons and serotonin levels and interpreters collect themselves and trot over to the corner.
If you are not crazy, the second interpreter's assertion, that this is a bureau, will be acceptable to the first interpreter. If you are crazy, the first interpreter's viewpoint, the tiger theory, will prevail.
The trouble here is that the first interpreter actually sees a tiger. The messages sent between neurons are incorrect somehow. The chemicals triggered are the wrong chemicals, or the impulses are going to the wrong connections. Apparently, this happens often, but the second interpreter jumps in to straighten things out. ~ Susanna Kaysen,#NFDB
132:To James Boswell In London
Boswell - you old rake - I have tried to imitate
your style; but it is no use; my dialogues are
all between my selves: and though I sit up late,
make endless notes and jottings that I hope will jar
my memory - it is in vain - for in the end
I have no Dr. Johnson but myself.
The difference is (I think) between our lives. You spend
the morning at the coffee house, nourish yourself
with talk and kippers before proceeding on to dine.
A ramble across London perks the appetite.
Every step is an adventure; the written line
distills itself from life. How can you help but write?
I consort with books while you see men, haunt the shelves
where your London lies buried. Your book once opened,
I become the ghost, a pale phantom who delves
into your life to borrow moments penned
two hundred years ago. I roam your world ignored while my own life, waiting outside, questions my motives.
A man should never live more than he can record
you say; but what if he records more than he lives?
My journal swarms with me and even I am bored.
I am all my personae - children, lovers, wives,
philosophers and country-wenches. Though I give them
different robes and wigs to wear, all converse alike;
all reason falsely with the same stratagem;
each suspects the logic of the other, dislikes
him, yet cannot prove him wrong. Petty cavils
grow to monstrous issues, belabored arguments
resolve themselves only in sleep; darkness prevails.
Only the living find solace in common sense.
Safe, preserved from the rape of the world, I grow
dishonest, and pen my crooked words, for one can lie
with ease about those things the world will never know.
Conversation - that clearinghouse for thoughts - denied,
the mind gets gouty and the conscience needs a cane.
245
Notions unuttered seem to echo through the brain and our monologues are doomed to the same end.
We all think better - interrupted by a friend.
~ Erica Jong,#NFDB
133:I see things in windows and I say to myself that I want them. I want them because I want to belong. I want to be liked by more people, I want to be held in higher regard than others. I want to feel valued, so I say to myself to watch certain shows. I watch certain shows on the television so I can participate in dialogues and conversations and debates with people who want the same things I want. I want to dress a certain way so certain groups of people are forced to be attracted to me. I want to do my hair a certain way with certain styling products and particular combs and methods so that I can fit in with the In-Crowd. I want to spend hours upon hours at the gym, stuffing my body with what scientists are calling 'superfoods', so that I can be loved and envied by everyone around me. I want to become an icon on someone's mantle. I want to work meaningless jobs so that I can fill my wallet and parentally-advised bank accounts with monetary potential. I want to believe what's on the news so that I can feel normal along with the rest of forever. I want to listen to the Top Ten on Q102, and roll my windows down so others can hear it and see that I am listening to it, and enjoying it. I want to go to church every Sunday, and pray every other day. I want to believe that what I do is for the promise of a peaceful afterlife. I want rewards for my 'good' deeds. I want acknowledgment and praise. And I want people to know that I put out that fire. I want people to know that I support the war effort. I want people to know that I volunteer to save lives. I want to be seen and heard and pointed at with love. I want to read my name in the history books during a future full of clones exactly like me.
The mirror, I've noticed, is almost always positioned above the sink. Though the sink offers more depth than a mirror, and mirror is only able to reflect, the sink is held in lower regard. Lower still is the toilet, and thought it offers even more depth than the sink, we piss and shit in it. I want these kind of architectural details to be paralleled in my every day life. I want to care more about my reflection, and less about my cleanliness. I want to be seen as someone who lives externally, and never internally, unless I am able to lock the door behind me.
I want these things, because if I didn't, I would be dead in the mirrors of those around me. I would be nothing. I would be an example. Sunken, and easily washed away. ~ Dave Matthes,#NFDB
134:Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God (Luke 6:20). I'm learning what it means to descend, which is so revolutionary it often leaves me gasping. I have been trying to ascend my entire life. Up, up, next level, a notch higher, the top is better, top of the food chain, all for God's work and glory, of course. The pursuit of ascension is crippling and has stunted my faith more than any other evil I've battled. It has saddled me with so much to defend, and it doesn't deliver. I need more and more of what doesn't work. I'm insatiable, and ironically, the more I accumulate, the less I enjoy any of it. Instead of satisfaction, it produces toxic fear in me; I'm always one slip away from losing it all. Consequently, my love for others is tainted because they unwittingly become articles for consumption. How is this person making me feel better? How is she making me stronger? How is he contributing to my agenda? What can this group do for me? I am an addict, addicted to the ascent and thus positioning myself above people who can propel my upward momentum and below those who are also longing for a higher rank and might pull me up with them. It feels desperate and frantic, and I'm so done being enslaved to the elusive top rung. When Jesus told us to 'take the lowest place' (Luke 14:10), it was more than just a strategy for social justice. It was even more than wooing us to the bottom for communion, since that is where He is always found. The path of descent becomes our own liberation. We are freed from the exhausting stance of defense. We are no longer compelled to be right and are thus relieved from the burden of maintaining some reputation. We are released from the idols of greed, control, and status. The pressure to protect the house of cards is alleviated when we take the lowest place. The ascent is so ingrained in my thought patterns that it has been physically painful to experience reformation at the bottom. The compulsion to defend myself against misrepresentation nearly put me in the grave recently. I was tormented with chaotic inner dialogues, and there were days I was so plagued with protecting my rung that I couldn't get out of bed. With every step lower, the stripping-away process was more excruciating. I had no idea how tightly I clung to reputation and approval or how selfishly I behaved to maintain it. Getting to the top requires someone else to be on the bottom; being right means someone else must be wrong. It is the nature of the beast. ~ Jen Hatmaker, #NFDB
135:FREEING YOURSELF FROM YOUR MIND What exactly do you mean by “watching the thinker”? When someone goes to the doctor and says, “I hear a voice in my head,” he or she will most likely be sent to a psychiatrist. The fact is that, in a very similar way, virtually everyone hears a voice, or several voices, in their head all the time: the involuntary thought processes that you don’t realize you have the power to stop. Continuous monologues or dialogues. You have probably come across “mad” people in the street incessantly talking or muttering to themselves. Well, that’s not much different from what you and all other “normal” people do, except that you don’t do it out loud. The voice comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains, likes, dislikes, and so on. The voice isn’t necessarily relevant to the situation you find yourself in at the time; it may be reviving the recent or distant past or rehearsing or imagining possible future situations. Here it often imagines things going wrong and negative outcomes; this is called worry. Sometimes this soundtrack is accompanied by visual images or “mental movies.” Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. It is not uncommon for the voice to be a person’s own worst enemy. Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease. The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is the only true liberation. You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by “watching the thinker,” which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence. When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially. That is to say, do not judge. Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door. You’ll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind. ~ Eckhart Tolle, #NFDB
136:write animal stories. This one was called Dialogues Between a Cow and a Filly; a meditation on ethics, you might say; it had been inspired by a short business trip to Brittany. Here’s a key passage from it: ‘Let us first consider the Breton cow: all year round she thinks of nothing but grazing, her glossy muzzle ascends and descends with impressive regularity, and no shudder of anguish comes to trouble the wistful gaze of her light-brown eyes. All that is as it ought to be, and even appears to indicate a profound existential oneness, a decidedly enviable identity between her being-in-the-world and her being-in-itself. Alas, in this instance the philosopher is found wanting, and his conclusions, while based on a correct and profound intuition, will be rendered invalid if he has not previously taken the trouble of gathering documentary evidence from the naturalist. In fact the Breton cow’s nature is duplicitous. At certain times of the year (precisely determined by the inexorable functioning of genetic programming) an astonishing revolution takes place in her being. Her mooing becomes more strident, prolonged, its very harmonic texture modified to the point of recalling at times, and astonishingly so, certain groans which escape the sons of men. Her movements become more rapid, more nervous, from time to time she breaks into a trot. It is not simply her muzzle, though it seems, in its glossy regularity, conceived for reflecting the abiding presence of a mineral passivity, which contracts and twitches under the painful effect of an assuredly powerful desire. ‘The key to the riddle is extremely simple, and it is that what the Breton cow desires (thus demonstrating, and she must be given credit here, her life’s one desire) is, as the breeders say in their cynical parlance, “to get stuffed”. And stuff her they do, more or less directly; the artificial insemination syringe can in effect, whatever the cost in certain emotional complications, take the place of the bull’s penis in performing this function. In both cases the cow calms down and returns to her original state of earnest meditation, except that a few months later she will give birth to an adorable little calf. Which, let it be said in passing, means profit for the breeder.’ * The breeder, of course, symbolized God. Moved by an irrational sympathy for the filly, he promised her, starting from the next chapter, the everlasting delight of numerous stallions, while the cow, guilty of the sin of pride, was to be gradually condemned to the dismal pleasures of artificial fertilization. The pathetic mooing of the ruminant would prove incapable of swaying the judgment of the Great Architect. A delegation of sheep, formed in solidarity, had no better luck. The God presented in this short story was not, one observes, a merciful God. ~ Michel Houellebecq, #NFDB
137:To the impartial observer it is plain that the Greeks, from the intellectual point of view at least, really borrowed very largely from the Orientals, as they themselves frequently admitted ; however unveracious they may have been at times, on this point at least they cannot have lied, for they had no possible interest in doing so, indeed quite the contrary. As we said before, their originality principally lay in their manner of expressing things, by means of a faculty for adaptation one cannot deny them, but which was necessarily limited by the extent of their comprehension ; briefly, their originality was of a purely dialectical order. Actually, since Greeks and Orientals differed in their characteristic ways of thinking, there were necessarily corresponding differences in the modes of reasoning which they employed ; this must always be borne in mind when pointing out certain analogies, real though they be, such as for instance the analogy between the Greek syllogism and what has fairly correctly been called the Hindu syllogism. It cannot even be said that Greek reasoning is distinguished by an ^exceptional strictness ; it only appears stricter than other methods of reasoning to people who are themselves in the habit of employing it exclusively, and this illusion is due solely to the fact that it is restricted to a narrower and more limited field and is therefore more easily defined. On the contrary, the faculty most truly characteristic of the Greeks, but which is little to their advantage, is a certain dialectical subtlety, of which the dialogues of Plato provide numerous examples ; there is an apparent desire to examine each question interminably, under all its aspects and in minutest detail, m order to arrive finally at a rather insignificant conclusion; it would appear that in the West the moderns are not the first people to have been afflicted with “ intellectual myopia.”
Perhaps, after all, the Greeks should not be blamed too severely for restricting the field of human thought as they have done ; on the one hand this was an inevitable result of their mental constitution, for which they cannot be held responsible, and on the other hand they did at least in this way bring within reach of a large part of humanity certain kinds of knowledge which were otherwise in danger of remaining completely foreign to it. It is easy to realise the truth of this if one considers what Westerners are capable of to-day, when they happen to come into direct contact with certain Oriental conceptions and set about interpreting them in a manner conforming to their own particular mentality : anything which they cannot connect with the “classical” idiom escapes them completely and whatever can be made to tally with it, by hook or by crook, is so disfigured in the process that it becomes almost unrecognizable. » ~ Ren Gu non,#NFDB
138:The great self-limitation practiced by man for ten centuries yielded, between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, the whole flower of the so-called "Renaissance." The root, usually, does not resemble the fruit in appearance, but there is an undeniable connection between the root's strength and juiciness and the beauty and taste of the fruit. The Middle Ages, it seems, have nothing in common with the Renaissance and are opposite to it in every way; nonetheless, all the abundance and ebullience of human energies during the Renaissance were based not at all on the supposedly "renascent" classical world, nor on the imitated Plato and Virgil, nor on manuscripts torn from the basements of old monasteries, but precisely on those monasteries, on those stern Franciscians and cruel Dominicans, on Saints Bonaventure, Anselm of Canterbury, and Bernard of Clairvaux. The Middle Ages were a great repository of human energies: in the medieval man's asceticism, self-abnegation, and contempt for his own beauty, his own energies, and his own mind, these energies, this heart, and this mind were stored up until the right time. The Renaissance was the epoch of the discovery of this trove: the thin layer of soil covering it was suddenly thrown aside, and to the amazement of following centuries dazzling, incalculable treasures glittered there; yesterday's pauper and wretched beggar, who only knew how to stand on crossroads and bellow psalms in an inharmonious voice, suddenly started to bloom with poetry, strength, beauty, and intelligence. Whence came all this? From the ancient world, which had exhausted its vital powers? From moldy parchments? But did Plato really write his dialogues with the same keen enjoyment with which Marsilio Ficino annotated them? And did the Romans, when reading the Greeks, really experience the same emotions as Petrarch, when, for ignorance of Greek, he could only move his precious manuscripts from place to place, kiss them now and then, and gaze sadly at their incomprehensible text? All these manuscripts, in convenient and accurate editions, lie before us too: why don't they lead us to a "renascence" among us? Why didn't the Greeks bring about a "renascence" in Rome? And why didn't Greco-Roman literature produce anything similar to the Italian Renaissance in Gaul and Africa from the second to the fourth century? The secret of the Renaissance of the fourteenth-fifteenth centuries does not lie in ancient literature: this literature was only the spade that threw the soil off the treasures buried underneath; the secret lies in the treasures themselves; in the fact that between the fourth and fourteenth centuries, under the influence of the strict ascetic ideal of mortifying the flesh and restraining the impulses of his spirit, man only stored up his energies and expended nothing. During this great thousand-year silence his soul matured for The Divine Comedy; during this forced closing of eyes to the world - an interesting, albeit sinful world-Galileo was maturing, Copernicus, and the school of careful experimentation founded by Bacon; during the struggle with the Moors the talents of Velasquez and Murillo were forged; and in the prayers of the thousand years leading up to the sixteenth century the Madonna images of that century were drawn, images to which we are able to pray but which no one is able to imitate.
("On Symbolists And Decadents") ~ Vasily Rozanov,#NFDB
139:The value of Greek prose composition, he said, was not that it gave one any particular facility in the language that could not be gained as easily by other methods but that if done properly, off the top of one's head, it taught one to think in Greek. One's thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation. By necessity, I suppose, it is difficult for me to explain in English exactly what I mean. I can only say that an incendium is in its nature entirely different from the feu with which a Frenchman lights his cigarette, and both are very different from the stark, inhuman pur that the Greeks knew, the pur that roared from the towers of Ilion or leapt and screamed on that desolate, windy beach, from the funeral pyre of Patroklos.
Pur: that one word contains for me the secret, the bright, terrible clarity of ancient Greek. How can I make you see it, this strange harsh light which pervades Homer's landscapes and illumines the dialogues of Plato, an alien light, inarticulable in our common tongue? Our shared language is a language of the intricate, the peculiar, the home of pumpkins and ragamuffins and bodkins and beer, the tongue of Ahab and Falstaff and Mrs. Gamp; and while I find it entirely suitable for reflections such as these, it fails me utterly when I attempt to describe in it what I love about Greek, that language innocent of all quirks and cranks; a language obsessed with action, and with the joy of seeing action multiply from action, action marching relentlessly ahead and with yet more actions filing in from either side to fall into neat step at the rear, in a long straight rank of cause and effect toward what will be inevitable, the only possible end.
In a certain sense, this was why I felt so close to the other in the Greek class. They, too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape, centuries dead; they'd had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home. It was why I admired Julian, and Henry in particular. Their reason, their very eyes and ears were fixed irrevocably in the confines of those stern and ancient rhythms – the world, in fact, was not their home, at least the world as I knew it – and far from being occasional visitors to this land which I myself knew only as an admiring tourist, they were pretty much its permanent residents, as permanent as I suppose it was possible for them to be. Ancient Greek is a difficult language, a very difficult language indeed, and it is eminently possible to study it all one's life and never be able to speak a word; but it makes me smile, even today, to think of Henry's calculated, formal English, the English of a well-educated foreigner, as compared with the marvelous fluency and self-assurance of his Greek – quick, eloquent, remarkably witty. It was always a wonder to me when I happened to hear him and Julian conversing in Greek, arguing and joking, as I never once heard either of them do in English; many times, I've seen Henry pick up the telephone with an irritable, cautious 'Hello,' and may I never forget the harsh and irresistible delight of his 'Khairei!' when Julian happened to be at the other end. ~ Donna Tartt,#NFDB
140:Reading list (1972 edition)[edit]
1. Homer – Iliad, Odyssey
2. The Old Testament
3. Aeschylus – Tragedies
4. Sophocles – Tragedies
5. Herodotus – Histories
6. Euripides – Tragedies
7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War
8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings
9. Aristophanes – Comedies
10. Plato – Dialogues
11. Aristotle – Works
12. Epicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus
13. Euclid – Elements
14. Archimedes – Works
15. Apollonius of Perga – Conic Sections
16. Cicero – Works
17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things
18. Virgil – Works
19. Horace – Works
20. Livy – History of Rome
21. Ovid – Works
22. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia
23. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania
24. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic
25. Epictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion
26. Ptolemy – Almagest
27. Lucian – Works
28. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations
29. Galen – On the Natural Faculties
30. The New Testament
31. Plotinus – The Enneads
32. St. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine
33. The Song of Roland
34. The Nibelungenlied
35. The Saga of Burnt Njál
36. St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica
37. Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy
38. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales
39. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks
40. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
41. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly
42. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
43. Thomas More – Utopia
44. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises
45. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel
46. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion
47. Michel de Montaigne – Essays
48. William Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies
49. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote
50. Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
51. Francis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis
52. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays
53. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences
54. Johannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World
55. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals
56. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan
57. René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy
58. John Milton – Works
59. Molière – Comedies
60. Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises
61. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light
62. Benedict de Spinoza – Ethics
63. John Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education
64. Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies
65. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics
66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology
67. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe
68. Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal
69. William Congreve – The Way of the World
70. George Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge
71. Alexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man
72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws
73. Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary
74. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones
75. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets ~ Mortimer J Adler,#NFDB
141:Reading list (1972 edition)[edit]
1. Homer - Iliad, Odyssey
2. The Old Testament
3. Aeschylus - Tragedies
4. Sophocles - Tragedies
5. Herodotus - Histories
6. Euripides - Tragedies
7. Thucydides - History of the Peloponnesian War
8. Hippocrates - Medical Writings
9. Aristophanes - Comedies
10. Plato - Dialogues
11. Aristotle - Works
12. Epicurus - Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus
13. Euclid - Elements
14.Archimedes - Works
15. Apollonius of Perga - Conic Sections
16. Cicero - Works
17. Lucretius - On the Nature of Things
18. Virgil - Works
19. Horace - Works
20. Livy - History of Rome
21. Ovid - Works
22. Plutarch - Parallel Lives; Moralia
23. Tacitus - Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania
24. Nicomachus of Gerasa - Introduction to Arithmetic
25. Epictetus - Discourses; Encheiridion
26. Ptolemy - Almagest
27. Lucian - Works
28. Marcus Aurelius - Meditations
29. Galen - On the Natural Faculties
30. The New Testament
31. Plotinus - The Enneads
32. St. Augustine - On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine
33. The Song of Roland
34. The Nibelungenlied
35. The Saga of Burnt Njal
36. St. Thomas Aquinas - Summa Theologica
37. Dante Alighieri - The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy
38. Geoffrey Chaucer - Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales
39. Leonardo da Vinci - Notebooks
40. Niccolò Machiavelli - The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
41. Desiderius Erasmus - The Praise of Folly
42. Nicolaus Copernicus - On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
43. Thomas More - Utopia
44. Martin Luther - Table Talk; Three Treatises
45. François Rabelais - Gargantua and Pantagruel
46. John Calvin - Institutes of the Christian Religion
47. Michel de Montaigne - Essays
48. William Gilbert - On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies
49. Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote
50. Edmund Spenser - Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
51. Francis Bacon - Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis
52. William Shakespeare - Poetry and Plays
53. Galileo Galilei - Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences
54. Johannes Kepler - Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World
55. William Harvey - On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals
56. Thomas Hobbes - Leviathan
57. René Descartes - Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy
58. John Milton - Works
59. Molière - Comedies
60. Blaise Pascal - The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises
61. Christiaan Huygens - Treatise on Light
62. Benedict de Spinoza - Ethics
63. John Locke - Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education
64. Jean Baptiste Racine - Tragedies
65. Isaac Newton - Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics
66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz - Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology
67.Daniel Defoe - Robinson Crusoe
68. Jonathan Swift - A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal
69. William Congreve - The Way of the World
70. George Berkeley - Principles of Human Knowledge
71. Alexander Pope - Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man
72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu - Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws
73. Voltaire - Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary
74. Henry Fielding - Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones
75. Samuel Johnson - The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets
~ Mortimer J Adler,#NFDB
142:SECTION 1. Books for Serious Study
Liber CCXX. (Liber AL vel Legis.) The Book of the Law. This book is the foundation of the New Æon, and thus of the whole of our work.
The Equinox. The standard Work of Reference in all occult matters. The Encyclopaedia of Initiation.
Liber ABA (Book 4). A general account in elementary terms of magical and mystical powers. In four parts: (1) Mysticism (2) Magical (Elementary Theory) (3) Magick in Theory and Practice (this book) (4) The Law.
Liber II. The Message of the Master Therion. Explains the essence of the new Law in a very simple manner.
Liber DCCCXXXVIII. The Law of Liberty. A further explanation of The Book of the Law in reference to certain ethical problems.
Collected Works of A. Crowley. These works contain many mystical and magical secrets, both stated clearly in prose, and woven into the Robe of sublimest poesy.
The Yi King. (S. B. E. Series [vol. XVI], Oxford University Press.) The "Classic of Changes"; give the initiated Chinese system of Magick.
The Tao Teh King. (S. B. E. Series [vol. XXXIX].) Gives the initiated Chinese system of Mysticism.
Tannhäuser, by A. Crowley. An allegorical drama concerning the Progress of the Soul; the Tannhäuser story slightly remodelled.
The Upanishads. (S. B. E. Series [vols. I & XV.) The Classical Basis of Vedantism, the best-known form of Hindu Mysticism.
The Bhagavad-gita. A dialogue in which Krishna, the Hindu "Christ", expounds a system of Attainment.
The Voice of the Silence, by H.P. Blavatsky, with an elaborate commentary by Frater O.M. Frater O.M., 7°=48, is the most learned of all the Brethren of the Order; he has given eighteen years to the study of this masterpiece.
Raja-Yoga, by Swami Vivekananda. An excellent elementary study of Hindu mysticism. His Bhakti-Yoga is also good.
The Shiva Samhita. An account of various physical means of assisting the discipline of initiation. A famous Hindu treatise on certain physical practices.
The Hathayoga Pradipika. Similar to the Shiva Samhita.
The Aphorisms of Patanjali. A valuable collection of precepts pertaining to mystical attainment.
The Sword of Song. A study of Christian theology and ethics, with a statement and solution of the deepest philosophical problems. Also contains the best account extant of Buddhism, compared with modern science.
The Book of the Dead. A collection of Egyptian magical rituals.
Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, by Eliphas Levi. The best general textbook of magical theory and practice for beginners. Written in an easy popular style.
The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. The best exoteric account of the Great Work, with careful instructions in procedure. This Book influenced and helped the Master Therion more than any other.
The Goetia. The most intelligible of all the mediæval rituals of Evocation. Contains also the favourite Invocation of the Master Therion.
Erdmann's History of Philosophy. A compendious account of philosophy from the earliest times. Most valuable as a general education of the mind.
The Spiritual Guide of [Miguel de] Molinos. A simple manual of Christian Mysticism.
The Star in the West. (Captain Fuller). An introduction to the study of the Works of Aleister Crowley.
The Dhammapada. (S. B. E. Series [vol. X], Oxford University Press). The best of the Buddhist classics.
The Questions of King Milinda. (S. B. E. Series [vols. XXXV & XXXVI].) Technical points of Buddhist dogma, illustrated bydialogues.
Liber 777 vel Prolegomena Symbolica Ad Systemam Sceptico-Mysticæ Viæ Explicandæ, Fundamentum Hieroglyphicam Sanctissimorum Scientiæ Summæ. A complete Dictionary of the Correspondences of all magical elements, reprinted with extensive additions, making it the only standard comprehensive book of reference ever published. It is to the language of Occultism what Webster or Murray is to the English language.
Varieties of Religious Experience (William James). Valuable as showing the uniformity of mystical attainment.
Kabbala Denudata, von Rosenroth: also The Kabbalah Unveiled, by S.L. Mathers. The text of the Qabalah, with commentary. A good elementary introduction to the subject.
Konx Om Pax [by Aleister Crowley]. Four invaluable treatises and a preface on Mysticism and Magick.
The Pistis Sophia [translated by G.R.S. Mead or Violet McDermot]. An admirable introduction to the study of Gnosticism.
The Oracles of Zoroaster [Chaldæan Oracles]. An invaluable collection of precepts mystical and magical.
The Dream of Scipio, by Cicero. Excellent for its Vision and its Philosophy.
The Golden Verses of Pythagoras, by Fabre d'Olivet. An interesting study of the exoteric doctrines of this Master.
The Divine Pymander, by Hermes Trismegistus. Invaluable as bearing on the Gnostic Philosophy.
The Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians, reprint of Franz Hartmann. An invaluable compendium.
Scrutinium Chymicum [Atalanta Fugiens]¸ by Michael Maier. One of the best treatises on alchemy.
Science and the Infinite, by Sidney Klein. One of the best essays written in recent years.
Two Essays on the Worship of Priapus [A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus &c. &c. &c.], by Richard Payne Knight [and Thomas Wright]. Invaluable to all students.
The Golden Bough, by J.G. Frazer. The textbook of Folk Lore. Invaluable to all students.
The Age of Reason, by Thomas Paine. Excellent, though elementary, as a corrective to superstition.
Rivers of Life, by General Forlong. An invaluable textbook of old systems of initiation.
Three Dialogues, by Bishop Berkeley. The Classic of Subjective Idealism.
Essays of David Hume. The Classic of Academic Scepticism.
First Principles by Herbert Spencer. The Classic of Agnosticism.
Prolegomena [to any future Metaphysics], by Immanuel Kant. The best introduction to Metaphysics.
The Canon [by William Stirling]. The best textbook of Applied Qabalah.
The Fourth Dimension, by [Charles] H. Hinton. The best essay on the subject.
The Essays of Thomas Henry Huxley. Masterpieces of philosophy, as of prose.
~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA, Appendix I: Literature Recommended to Aspirants #reading list,#NFDB
13 Philosophy
5 Occultism
4 Poetry
4 Christianity
3 Integral Yoga
2 Psychology
2 Fiction
1 Yoga
1 Integral Theory
1 Alchemy
10 Plato
4 William Wordsworth
2 The Mother
2 Plotinus
2 H P Lovecraft
2 Carl Jung
2 Aleister Crowley
4 Wordsworth - Poems
3 Liber ABA
2 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
2 Lovecraft - Poems
0.00 - THE GOSPEL PREFACE, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
And Swamiji added a post script to the letter: "Socratic dialogues are Plato all over you are entirely hidden. Moreover, the dramatic part is infinitely beautiful. Everybody likes it here or in the West." Indeed, in order to be unknown, Mahendranath had used the pen-name M., under which the book has been appearing till now. But so great a book cannot remain obscure for long, nor can its author remain unrecognised by the large public in these modern times. M. and his book came to be widely known very soon and to meet the growing demand, a full-sized book, Vol. I of the Gospel, translated by the author himself, was published in 1907 by the Brahmavadin Office, Madras. A second edition of it, revised by the author, was brought out by the Ramakrishna Math, Madras in December 1911, and subsequently a second part, containing new chapters from the original Bengali, was published by the same Math in 1922. The full English translation of the Gospel by Swami Nikhilananda appeared first in 1942.
In Bengali the book is published in five volumes, the first part having appeared in 1902
0 1967-04-15, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This is the description (retranslated from the French) of the "cellular level" by Dr. Timothy Leary, psychologist and professor at Harvard University: "Huge aggregates of cells are animated and the consciousness whirls about in strange landscapes for which there exist neither words nor concepts. L.S.D. reveals cellular dialogues imperceptible to the normal state of consciousness, for which we have no appropriate symbolic terms. You become aware of processes you never sensed before. You feel yourself sinking into the soft swamps of your own body's tissues, slowly drifting below dark red aqueducts, floating through endless capillary systems, gently propelled through endless systems of cells, grandfa ther clocks of fibres tirelessly jingling, clinking, tinkling, pumping. This experience is striking when you have it for the first time; it can also be a dreadful, frightening and at the same time marvellous experience..." Then his description of the "pre-cellular level": "Your nervous cells become aware, as Einstein did, that all matter, all structure is nothing but pulsating energy. Your body and the world around you dissolve into a sparkling lattice of white waves. You have penetrated matter's intimate structure and vibrate in harmony with its primeval and cosmic pulse."
Mother is referring to U Thant, secretary-general of the United Nations. U.N.O., April 10, 1967: "That a fraction of the amounts that are going to be spent in 1967 on arms could finance economic, social, national and world programs to an extent so far unimaginable is a notion within the grasp of the man in the street. Men, if they unite, are now capable of foreseeing and, to a certain point, determining the future of human development. This, however, is possible only if we stop fearing and harassing one another and if together we accept, welcome and prepare the changes that must inevitably take place. If this means a change in human nature, well, it is high time we worked for it; what must surely change is certain political attitudes and habits man has."
04.02 - A Chapter of Human Evolution, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The intermediary faculty the Paraclete, which the Greeks brought to play is a corner-stone in the edifice of human progress. It is the formative power of the Mind which gives things their shape and disposition, their consistency and cogency as physical realities. There are deeper and higher sources in man, more direct, immediate and revealing, where things have their birth and origin; but this one is necessary for the embodiment, for the building up and maintenance of the subtler and profounder truths in an earthly structure, establish and fix them in the normal consciousness. The Socratic dialogues are rightly placed at the start of the modern culture; they set the pattern of modern mentality. That rational turn of mind, that mental intelligence and understanding as elaborated, formulated, codified by the Aristotelian system was the light that shone through the Grco-Latin culture of the Roman days; that was behind the culture and civilisation of the Middle Ages. The changes and revolutions of later days, social or cultural, did not affect it, rather were based upon it and inspired by it. And even today our scientific culture maintains and continues the tradition.
The Mind of Reason is a kind of steel-frame for other movements of consciousness pure ideas, imaginations or instinctive and sensory notions, or even secret intimations and visions of deeper truths and greater realitiesto take body, to find a local habitation and name and be firmly stabilised for experience or utilisation in physical life. There was indeed a hiatus in the human consciousness of the earlier period. Take, for example, the earliest human civilisation at its best, of which we have historical record, the Vedic culture of India: human consciousness is here at its optimum, its depth and height is a thing of wonder. But between that world, an almost occult world and this world of the physical senses there is a gap. That world was occult precisely because of this gap. The physical life and mind could translate and represent the supra-physical only in figures and symbols; the impact was direct, but it expressed itself in hieroglyphs. Life itself was more or less a life of rites and ceremonies, and mind a field of metaphors and legends and parables. The parable, the myth was an inevitability with this type of consciousness and in such a world. The language spoken was also one of images and figures, expressing ideas and perceptions not in the abstract but as concrete objects, represented through concrete objects. It is the Mind of Reason that brought in the age of philosophy, the age of pure and abstract ideas, of the analytic language. A significant point to note is that it was in the Greek language that the pre-position, the backbone almost of the analytical language, started to have an independent and autonomous status. With the Greeks dawned the spirit of Science.
1.01 - 'Imitation' the common principle of the Arts of Poetry., #Poetics, #Aristotle, #Philosophy
There is another art which imitates by means of language alone, and that either in prose or verse--which, verse, again, may either combine different metres or consist of but one kind--but this has hitherto been without a name. For there is no common term we could apply to the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and the Socratic dialogues on the one hand; and, on the other, to poetic imitations in iambic, elegiac, or any similar metre. People do, indeed, add the word 'maker' or 'poet' to the name of the metre, and speak of elegiac poets, or epic (that is, hexameter) poets, as if it were not the imitation that makes the poet, but the verse that entitles them all indiscriminately to the name. Even when a treatise on medicine or natural science is brought out in verse, the name of poet is by custom given to the author; and yet Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common but the metre, so that it would be right to call the one poet, the other physicist rather than poet. On the same principle, even if a writer in his poetic imitation were to combine all metres, as Chaeremon did in his Centaur, which is a medley composed of metres of all kinds, we should bring him too under the general term poet. So much then for these distinctions.
There are, again, some arts which employ all the means above mentioned, namely, rhythm, tune, and metre. Such are Dithyrambic and Nomic poetry, and also Tragedy and Comedy; but between them the difference is, that in the first two cases these means are all employed in combination, in the latter, now one means is employed, now another.
1.03 - Reading, #Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience, #Henry David Thoreau, #Philosophy
I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord soil has produced, whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I hear the name of Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were my townsman and I never saw him,my next neighbor and I never heard him speak or attended to the wisdom of his words. But how actually is it? His dialogues, which contain what was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet
I never read them. We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my townsman who cannot read at all, and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects. We should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were. We are a race of tit-men, and soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than the columns of the daily paper.
1951-03-22 - Relativity- time - Consciousness - psychic Witness - The twelve senses - water-divining - Instinct in animals - story of Mothers cat, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is probably not always the same. Usually the work of becoming aware ought to be done by the psychic, but it is rarely the psychic. More often it is a part of the mind, more or less enlightened, which has acquired the capacity to stand back a little and look at the rest. But you know it well: if you are conscious in your mind, one part of the mind says one thing and the other replies, and there is an endless discussion between the two parts. Many people have these dialogues in their mind.
It is difficult to say generally what is conscious; but naturally, if something observes, it is always the witness element in this partin each part of the being there is something which is a witness, which looks on. There is even a physical witness which can get very much in the way; for instance, if it watches you playing, this can paralyse you considerably. There is also a vital witness which looks at you, sees your desires and enjoys highly all that happens; it acts also as a brake. There is the mental witness which judges ideas, which says, This idea contradicts this other, and which arranges everything. Then there is the great psychic Witness, who is the inner divinity.
1f.lovecraft - The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
few ghoulish dialogues in which the past affairs of Providence families
were concerned, most of the questions and answers he could understand
1f.lovecraft - The Horror at Red Hook, #Lovecraft - Poems, #unset, #Zen
music, sometimes in stupefied dozes or indecent dialogues around
cafeteria tables near Borough Hall, and sometimes in whispering
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hip-pocket liquor, and judicious dialogues with frightened prisoners,
learned many isolated facts about the movement whose aspect had become
1.ww - Book Ninth [Residence in France], #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
From earnest dialogues I slipped in thought,
And let remembrance steal to other times,
1.ww - Book Second [School-Time Continued], #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
I held mute dialogues with my Mother's heart,
I have endeavoured to display the means
1.ww - Ode on Intimations of Immortality, #Wordsworth - Poems, #unset, #Zen
To dialogues of business, love, or strife;
But it will not be long
1.ww - The Recluse - Book First, #Wordsworth - Poems, #unset, #Zen
And moving dialogues between this Pair
Who in their prime of wedlock, with joint hands
2.08 - The Sword, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Heaven, in spite of the perfect plainness of the language in such dialogues as those between the Arahat Nagasena and King Milinda; and their attempts to square the text with their preconceptions will always stand as one of the great folies of the wise.
Again, it is almost impossible for the well-mannered Christian to realize that Jesus Christ ate with his fingers. The temperance advocate makes believe that the wine at the marriage feast of Cana was non-alcholic.
3.00 - The Magical Theory of the Universe, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
haphazard dialogues between Frater P. and Soror A.; but on arranging the MSS.,
they fell naturally and of necessity into this division. Conversely my knowledge of
3-5 Full Circle, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
The crucial dialogues, however, will be among scientists, for our first objective has to be moral orientation of the sciences. Only with its attainment, does our ultimate aim become even possibly attainable: moral orientation of the Earth. That is the way it's said in uni-scientese. In the ideolect of our religion this goal is called the Kingdom of God.
FIGURE V-5 The Central Order (1972 model).
4.02 - BEYOND THE COLLECTIVE - THE HYPER-PERSONAL, #The Phenomenon of Man, #Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, #Christianity
the idea in his dialogues. Later, with thinkers like Nicolas of
Cusa, mediaeval philosphy returned technically to the same
4.04 - Conclusion, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
linguistic sphere and give rise to dialogues and the like. With
slightly pathological individuals, and particularly in the not in-
6.0 - Conscious, Unconscious, and Individuation, #The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, #Carl Jung, #Psychology
quaternity. Cf. the Samyutta-Nikaya, in dialogues of the Buddha, Part II, p. 242.
91 "God separated and divided this primordial water by a kind of mystical
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by Mrs. C. A. F. Rhys Davids. London, [1922]. Also: dialogues of
the Buddha. Part II. Translated by T. W. and C. A. F. Rhys
Apology, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Yet some of the topics may have been actually used by Socrates; and the recollection of his very words may have rung in the ears of his disciple. The Apology of Plato may be compared generally with those speeches of Thucydides in which he has embodied his conception of the lofty character and policy of the great Pericles, and which at the same time furnish a commentary on the situation of affairs from the point of view of the historian. So in the Apology there is an ideal rather than a literal truth; much is said which was not said, and is only Platos view of the situation. Plato was not, like Xenophon, a chronicler of facts; he does not appear in any of his writings to have aimed at literal accuracy. He is not therefore to be supplemented from the Memorabilia and Symposium of Xenophon, who belongs to an entirely different class of writers. The Apology of Plato is not the report of what Socrates said, but an elaborate composition, quite as much so in fact as one of the dialogues. And we may perhaps even indulge in the fancy that the actual defence of Socrates was as much greater than the Platonic defence as the master was greater than the disciple. But in any case, some of the words used by him must have been remembered, and some of the facts recorded must have actually occurred. It is significant that Plato is said to have been present at the defence (Apol.), as he is also said to have been absent at the last scene in the Phdo. Is it fanciful to suppose that he meant to give the stamp of au thenticity to the one and not to the other?especially when we consider that these two passages are the only ones in which Plato makes mention of himself. The circumstance that Plato was to be one of his sureties for the payment of the fine which he proposed has the appearance of truth. More suspicious is the statement that Socrates received the first impulse to his favourite calling of cross-examining the world from the Oracle of Delphi; for he must already have been famous before Chaerephon went to consult the Oracle (Riddell), and the story is of a kind which is very likely to have been invented. On the whole we arrive at the conclusion that the Apology is true to the character of Socrates, but we cannot show that any single sentence in it was actually spoken by him. It breathes the spirit of Socrates, but has been cast anew in the mould of Plato.
There is not much in the other dialogues which can be compared with the Apology. The same recollection of his master may have been present to the mind of Plato when depicting the sufferings of the Just in the Republic. The Crito may also be regarded as a sort of appendage to the Apology, in which Socrates, who has defied the judges, is nevertheless represented as scrupulously obedient to the laws. The idealization of the sufferer is carried still further in the Georgias, in which the thesis is maintained, that to suffer is better than to do evil; and the art of rhetoric is described as only useful for the purpose of self-accusation. The parallelisms which occur in the so-called Apology of Xenophon are not worth noticing, because the writing in which they are contained is manifestly spurious. The statements of the Memorabilia respecting the trial and death of Socrates agree generally with Plato; but they have lost the flavour of Socratic irony in the narrative of Xenophon.
The Apology or Platonic defence of Socrates is divided into three parts: 1st. The defence properly so called; 2nd. The shorter address in mitigation of the penalty; 3rd. The last words of prophetic rebuke and exhortation.
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The above remarks must be understood as applying with any degree of certainty to the Platonic Socrates only. For, although these or similar words may have been spoken by Socrates himself, we cannot exclude the possibility, that like so much else, e.g. the wisdom of Critias, the poem of Solon, the virtues of Charmides, they may have been due only to the imagination of Plato. The arguments of those who maintain that the Apology was composed during the process, resting on no evidence, do not require a serious refutation. Nor are the reasonings of Schleiermacher, who argues that the Platonic defence is an exact or nearly exact reproduction of the words of Socrates, partly because Plato would not have been guilty of the impiety of altering them, and also because many points of the defence might have been improved and streng thened, at all more conclusive. (See English Translation.) What effect the death of Socrates produced on the mind of Plato, we cannot certainly determine; nor can we say how he would or must have written under the circumstances. We observe that the enmity of Aristophanes to Socrates does not prevent Plato from introducing them together in the Symposium engaged in friendly intercourse. Nor is there any trace in the dialogues of an attempt to make Anytus or Meletus personally odious in the eyes of the Athenian public.
APOLOGY
APPENDIX I - Curriculum of A. A., #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
The Questions of King Milinda. (S.B.E. Series.) ::: Technical points of Buddhist dogma, illustrated by dialogues.
Liber 777 vel Prolegomena Symbolica Ad Systemam Sceptico-Mystic Vi Explicand, Fundamentum Hieroglyphicam Sanctissimorum Scienti Summ. ::: A complete Dictionary of the Correspondences of all magical elements, reprinted with extensive additions, making it the only standard comprehensive book of reference ever published. It is to the language of Occultism what Webster or Murray is to the English language.
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Three dialogues, by Bishop Berkeley. ::: The Classic of subjective idealism.
Essays of David Hume. ::: The Classic of Academic Scepticism.
BOOK VIII. - Some account of the Socratic and Platonic philosophy, and a refutation of the doctrine of Apuleius that the demons should be worshipped as mediators between gods and men, #City of God, #Saint Augustine of Hippo, #Christianity
But, among the disciples of Socrates, Plato was the one who shone with a glory which far excelled that of the others, and who not unjustly eclipsed them all. By birth an Athenian of honourable parentage, he far surpassed his fellow-disciples in natural endowments, of which he was possessed in a wonderful degree. Yet, deeming himself and the Socratic discipline far from sufficient for bringing philosophy to perfection, he travelled as extensively as he was able, going to every place famed for the cultivation of any science of which he could make himself master. Thus he learned from the Egyptians whatever they held and taught as important; and from Egypt, passing into those parts of Italy which were filled with the fame of the Pythagoreans, he mastered, with the greatest facility, and under the most eminent teachers, all the Italic philosophy which was then in vogue. And, as he had a peculiar love for his master Socrates, he made him the speaker in all his dialogues, putting into his mouth whatever he had learned, either from others, or from the efforts of his own powerful intellect, tempering even his moral disputations with the grace and politeness of the Socratic style. And, as the study of wisdom consists in action and contemplation, so that one part of it may be called active, and the other contemplative,the active part having reference to the conduct of life, that is, to the regulation of morals, and the contemplative part to the investigation into the causes of nature and into pure truth,Socrates is said to have excelled in the active part of that study, while Pythagoras gave more attention to its contemplative part, on which he brought to bear all the force of his great intellect. To Plato is given the praise of having perfected philosophy by combining both parts into one. He[Pg 311] then divides it into three parts,the first moral, which is chiefly occupied with action; the second natural, of which the object is contemplation; and the third rational, which discriminates between the true and the false. And though this last is necessary both to action and contemplation, it is contemplation, nevertheless, which lays peculiar claim to the office of investigating the nature of truth. Thus this tripartite division is not contrary to that which made the study of wisdom to consist in action and contemplation. Now, as to what Plato thought with respect to each of these parts,that is, what he believed to be the end of all actions, the cause of all natures, and the light of all intelligences,it would be a question too long to discuss, and about which we ought not to make any rash affirmation. For, as Plato liked and constantly affected the well-known method of his master Socrates, namely, that of dissimulating his knowledge or his opinions, it is not easy to discover clearly what he himself thought on various matters, any more than it is to discover what were the real opinions of Socrates. We must, nevertheless, insert into our work certain of those opinions which he expresses in his writings, whether he himself uttered them, or narrates them as expressed by others, and seems himself to approve of,opinions sometimes favourable to the true religion, which our faith takes up and defends, and sometimes contrary to it, as, for example, in the questions concerning the existence of one God or of many, as it relates to the truly blessed life which is to be after death. For those who are praised as having most closely followed Plato, who is justly preferred to all the other philosophers of the Gentiles, and who are said to have manifested the greatest acuteness in understanding him, do perhaps entertain such an idea of God as to admit that in Him are to be found the cause of existence, the ultimate reason for the understanding, and the end in reference to which the whole life is to be regulated. Of which three things, the first is understood to pertain to the natural, the second to the rational, and the third to the moral part of philosophy. For if man has been so created as to attain, through that which is most excellent in him, to that which excels all things,that is, to the one true and absolutely good[Pg 312] God, without whom no nature exists, no doctrine instructs, no exercise profits,let Him be sought in whom all things are secure to us, let Him be discovered in whom all truth becomes certain to us, let Him be loved in whom all becomes right to us.
5. That it is especially with the Platonists that we must carry on our disputations on matters of theology, their opinions being preferable to those of all other philosophers.
ENNEAD 04.08 - Of the Descent of the Soul Into the Body., #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 01, #Plotinus, #Christianity
Last, we have the divine Plato, who has said so many beautiful things about the soul. In his dialogues he often spoke of the descent of the soul into the body, so that we have the right to expect from him something clearer. Unfortunately, he is not always sufficiently in agreement with himself to enable one to follow his thought. In general, he depreciates corporeal things; he deplores the dealings between the soul and the body; insists150 that the soul is chained down to it, and that she is buried in it as in a tomb. He attaches much importance to the maxim taught in the mysteries that the soul here below is as in a prison.151 What Plato calls the "cavern"152 and Empedocles calls the "grotto," means no doubt the sense-world.153 To break her chains, and to issue from the cavern, means the soul's154 rising to the intelligible world. In the Phaedrus,155 Plato asserts that the cause of the fall of the soul is the loss of her wings; that after having once121 more ascended on high, she is brought back here below by the periods;156 that there are souls sent down into this world by judgments, fates, conditions, and necessity; still, at the same time, he finds fault with the "descent" of the soul into the body. But, speaking of the universe in the Timaeus,157 he praises the world, and calls it a blissful divinity. He states that the demiurgic creator, being good, gave it a soul to make it intelligent, because without the soul, the universe could not have been as intelligent as it ought to have been.158 Consequently, the purpose of the introduction of the universal Soul into the world, and similarly of each of our souls was only to achieve the perfection of the world; for it was necessary for the sense-world to contain animals equal in kind and numbers to those contained in the intelligible world.
QUESTIONS RAISED BY PLATO'S THEORIES.
ENNEAD 06.05 - The One and Identical Being is Everywhere Present In Its Entirety.345, #Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 04, #Plotinus, #Christianity
1290 If however we should seek some one special Platonic element, it would be that genuineness of reflection, that sincerity of thought, that makes of his dialogues no cut and dried literary figments, but soul-tragedies, with living, breathing, interest and emotion. Plato thus practised his doctrine of the double self,472 the higher and the lower selves, of which the higher might be described as "superior to oneself." In his later period, that of the Laws, he applied this double psychology to cosmology, thereby producing doubleness in the world-Soul: besides the good one, appears the evil one, which introduces even into heaven things that are not good.
It was only a step from this to the logical deduction of Xenocrates that these things in heaven were "spirits" or "guardians," both good and evil, assisting in the administration of human affairs.473 Such is the result of doubleness introduced into anthropology; introduced into cosmology, it establishes Pythagorean indefinite duality as the principle opposing the unity of goodness.
Euthyphro, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
The subtle connection with the Apology and the Crito; the holding back of the conclusion, as in the Charmides, Lysis, Laches, Protagoras, and other dialogues; the deep insight into the religious world; the dramatic power and play of the two characters; the inimitable irony, are reasons for believing that the Euthyphro is a genuine Platonic writing. The spirit in which the popular representations of mythology are denounced recalls Republic II. The virtue of piety has been already mentioned as one of five in the Protagoras, but is not reckoned among the four cardinal virtues of Republic IV. The figure of Daedalus has occurred in the Meno; that of Proteus in the Euthydemus and Io. The kingly science has already appeared in the Euthydemus, and will reappear in the Republic and Statesman. But neither from these nor any other indications of similarity or difference, and still less from arguments respecting the suitableness of this little work to aid Socrates at the time of his trial or the reverse, can any evidence of the date be obtained.
EUTHYPHRO
Gorgias, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
In several of the dialogues of Plato, doubts have arisen among his interpreters as to which of the various subjects discussed in them is the main thesis. The speakers have the freedom of conversation; no severe rules of art restrict them, and sometimes we are inclined to think, with one of the dramatis personae in the Theaetetus, that the digressions have the greater interest. Yet in the most irregular of the dialogues there is also a certain natural growth or unity; the beginning is not forgotten at the end, and numerous allusions and references are interspersed, which form the loose connecting links of the whole. We must not neglect this unity, but neither must we attempt to confine the Platonic dialogue on the Procrustean bed of a single idea. (Compare Introduction to the Phaedrus.)
Two tendencies seem to have beset the interpreters of Plato in this matter. First, they have endeavoured to hang the dialogues upon one another by the slightest threads; and have thus been led to opposite and contradictory assertions respecting their order and sequence. The mantle of Schleiermacher has descended upon his successors, who have applied his method with the most various results. The value and use of the method has been hardly, if at all, examined either by him or them. Secondly, they have extended almost indefinitely the scope of each separate dialogue; in this way they think that they have escaped all difficulties, not seeing that what they have gained in generality they have lost in truth and distinctness. Metaphysical conceptions easily pass into one another; and the simpler notions of antiquity, which we can only realize by an effort, imperceptibly blend with the more familiar theories of modern philosophers. An eye for proportion is needed (his own art of measuring) in the study of Plato, as well as of other great artists. We may hardly admit that the moral antithesis of good and pleasure, or the intellectual antithesis of knowledge and opinion, being and appearance, are never far off in a Platonic discussion. But because they are in the background, we should not bring them into the foreground, or expect to discern them equally in all the dialogues.
There may be some advantage in drawing out a little the main outlines of the building; but the use of this is limited, and may be easily exaggerated. We may give Plato too much system, and alter the natural form and connection of his thoughts. Under the idea that his dialogues are finished works of art, we may find a reason for everything, and lose the highest characteristic of art, which is simplicity. Most great works receive a new light from a new and original mind. But whether these new lights are true or only suggestive, will depend on their agreement with the spirit of Plato, and the amount of direct evidence which can be urged in support of them. When a theory is running away with us, criticism does a friendly office in counselling moderation, and recalling us to the indications of the text.
Like the Phaedrus, the Gorgias has puzzled students of Plato by the appearance of two or more subjects. Under the cover of rhetoric higher themes are introduced; the argument expands into a general view of the good and evil of man. After making an ineffectual attempt to obtain a sound definition of his art from Gorgias, Socrates assumes the existence of a universal art of flattery or simulation having several branches:this is the genus of which rhetoric is only one, and not the highest species. To flattery is opposed the true and noble art of life which he who possesses seeks always to impart to others, and which at last triumphs, if not here, at any rate in another world. These two aspects of life and knowledge appear to be the two leading ideas of the dialogue. The true and the false in individuals and states, in the treatment of the soul as well as of the body, are conceived under the forms of true and false art. In the development of this opposition there arise various other questions, such as the two famous paradoxes of Socrates (paradoxes as they are to the world in general, ideals as they may be more worthily called): (1) that to do is worse than to suffer evil; and (2) that when a man has done evil he had better be punished than unpunished; to which may be added (3) a third Socratic paradox or ideal, that bad men do what they think best, but not what they desire, for the desire of all is towards the good. That pleasure is to be distinguished from good is proved by the simultaneousness of pleasure and pain, and by the possibility of the bad having in certain cases pleasures as great as those of the good, or even greater. Not merely rhetoricians, but poets, musicians, and other artists, the whole tribe of statesmen, past as well as present, are included in the class of flatterers. The true and false finally appear before the judgment-seat of the gods below.
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The characters of the three interlocutors also correspond to the parts which are assigned to them. Gorgias is the great rhetorician, now advanced in years, who goes from city to city displaying his talents, and is celebrated throughout Greece. Like all the Sophists in the dialogues of Plato, he is vain and boastful, yet he has also a certain dignity, and is treated by Socrates with considerable respect. But he is no match for him in dialectics. Although he has been teaching rhetoric all his life, he is still incapable of defining his own art. When his ideas begin to clear up, he is unwilling to admit that rhetoric can be wholly separated from justice and injustice, and this lingering sentiment of morality, or regard for public opinion, enables Socrates to detect him in a contradiction. Like Protagoras, he is described as of a generous nature; he expresses his approbation of Socrates' manner of approaching a question; he is quite 'one of Socrates' sort, ready to be refuted as well as to refute,' and very eager that Callicles and Socrates should have the game out. He knows by experience that rhetoric exercises great influence over other men, but he is unable to explain the puzzle how rhetoric can teach everything and know nothing.
Polus is an impetuous youth, a runaway 'colt,' as Socrates describes him, who wanted originally to have taken the place of Gorgias under the pretext that the old man was tired, and now avails himself of the earliest opportunity to enter the lists. He is said to be the author of a work on rhetoric, and is again mentioned in the Phaedrus, as the inventor of balanced or double forms of speech (compare Gorg.; Symp.). At first he is violent and ill-mannered, and is angry at seeing his master overthrown. But in the judicious hands of Socrates he is soon restored to good-humour, and compelled to assent to the required conclusion. Like Gorgias, he is overthrown because he compromises; he is unwilling to say that to do is fairer or more honourable than to suffer injustice. Though he is fascinated by the power of rhetoric, and dazzled by the splendour of success, he is not insensible to higher arguments. Plato may have felt that there would be an incongruity in a youth maintaining the cause of injustice against the world. He has never heard the other side of the question, and he listens to the paradoxes, as they appear to him, of Socrates with evident astonishment. He can hardly understand the meaning of Archelaus being miserable, or of rhetoric being only useful in self-accusation. When the argument with him has fairly run out.
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The Socrates of the Gorgias may be compared with the Socrates of the Protagoras and Meno. As in other dialogues, he is the enemy of the Sophists and rhetoricians; and also of the statesmen, whom he regards as another variety of the same species. His behaviour is governed by that of his opponents; the least forwardness or egotism on their part is met by a corresponding irony on the part of Socrates. He must speak, for philosophy will not allow him to be silent. He is indeed more ironical and provoking than in any other of Plato's writings: for he is 'fooled to the top of his bent' by the worldliness of Callicles. But he is also more deeply in earnest. He rises higher than even in the Phaedo and Crito: at first enveloping his moral convictions in a cloud of dust and dialectics, he ends by losing his method, his life, himself, in them. As in the Protagoras and Phaedrus, throwing aside the veil of irony, he makes a speech, but, true to his character, not until his adversary has refused to answer any more questions. The presentiment of his own fate is hanging over him. He is aware that Socrates, the single real teacher of politics, as he ventures to call himself, cannot safely go to war with the whole world, and that in the courts of earth he will be condemned. But he will be justified in the world below. Then the position of Socrates and Callicles will be reversed; all those things 'unfit for ears polite' which Callicles has prophesied as likely to happen to him in this life, the insulting language, the box on the ears, will recoil upon his assailant. (Compare Republic, and the similar reversal of the position of the lawyer and the philosopher in the Theaetetus).
There is an interesting allusion to his own behaviour at the trial of the generals after the battle of Arginusae, which he ironically attributes to his ignorance of the manner in which a vote of the assembly should be taken. This is said to have happened 'last year' (B.C. 406), and therefore the assumed date of the dialogue has been fixed at 405 B.C., when Socrates would already have been an old man. The date is clearly marked, but is scarcely reconcilable with another indication of time, viz. the 'recent' usurpation of Archelaus, which occurred in the year 413; and still less with the 'recent' death of Pericles, who really died twenty-four years previously (429 B.C.) and is afterwards reckoned among the statesmen of a past age; or with the mention of Nicias, who died in 413, and is nevertheless spoken of as a living witness. But we shall hereafter have reason to observe, that although there is a general consistency of times and persons in the dialogues of Plato, a precise dramatic date is an invention of his commentators (Preface to Republic).
The conclusion of the Dialogue is remarkable, (1) for the truly characteristic declaration of Socrates that he is ignorant of the true nature and bearing of these things, while he affirms at the same time that no one can maintain any other view without being ridiculous. The profession of ignorance reminds us of the earlier and more exclusively Socratic dialogues. But neither in them, nor in the Apology, nor in the Memorabilia of Xenophon, does Socrates express any doubt of the fundamental truths of morality. He evidently regards this 'among the multitude of questions' which agitate human life 'as the principle which alone remains unshaken.' He does not insist here, any more than in the Phaedo, on the literal truth of the myth, but only on the soundness of the doctrine which is contained in it, that doing wrong is worse than suffering, and that a man should be rather than seem; for the next best thing to a man's being just is that he should be corrected and become just; also that he should avoid all flattery, whether of himself or of others; and that rhetoric should be employed for the maintenance of the right only. The revelation of another life is a recapitulation of the argument in a figure.
(2) Socrates makes the singular remark, that he is himself the only true politician of his age. In other passages, especially in the Apology, he disclaims being a politician at all. There he is convinced that he or any other good man who attempted to resist the popular will would be put to death before he had done any good to himself or others. Here he anticipates such a fate for himself, from the fact that he is 'the only man of the present day who performs his public duties at all.' The two points of view are not really inconsistent, but the difference between them is worth noticing: Socrates is and is not a public man. Not in the ordinary sense, like Alcibiades or Pericles, but in a higher one; and this will sooner or later entail the same consequences on him. He cannot be a private man if he would; neither can he separate morals from politics. Nor is he unwilling to be a politician, although he foresees the dangers which await him; but he must first become a better and wiser man, for he as well as Callicles is in a state of perplexity and uncertainty. And yet there is an inconsistency: for should not Socrates too have taught the citizens better than to put him to death?
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(1) In the Gorgias, as in nearly all the other dialogues of Plato, we are made aware that formal logic has as yet no existence. The old difficulty of framing a definition recurs. The illusive analogy of the arts and the virtues also continues. The ambiguity of several words, such as nature, custom, the honourable, the good, is not cleared up. The Sophists are still floundering about the distinction of the real and seeming. Figures of speech are made the basis of arguments. The possibility of conceiving a universal art or science, which admits of application to a particular subject-matter, is a difficulty which remains unsolved, and has not altogether ceased to haunt the world at the present day (compare Charmides). The defect of clearness is also apparent in Socrates himself, unless we suppose him to be practising on the simplicity of his opponent, or rather perhaps trying an experiment in dialectics. Nothing can be more fallacious than the contradiction which he pretends to have discovered in the answers of Gorgias (see above). The advantages which he gains over Polus are also due to a false antithesis of pleasure and good, and to an erroneous assertion that an agent and a patient may be described by similar predicates;a mistake which Aristotle partly shares and partly corrects in the Nicomachean Ethics. Traces of a 'robust sophistry' are likewise discernible in his argument with Callicles.
(2) Although Socrates professes to be convinced by reason only, yet the argument is often a sort of dialectical fiction, by which he conducts himself and others to his own ideal of life and action. And we may sometimes wish that we could have suggested answers to his antagonists, or pointed out to them the rocks which lay concealed under the ambiguous terms good, pleasure, and the like. But it would be as useless to examine his arguments by the requirements of modern logic, as to criticise this ideal from a merely utilitarian point of view. If we say that the ideal is generally regarded as unattainable, and that mankind will by no means agree in thinking that the criminal is happier when punished than when unpunished, any more than they would agree to the stoical paradox that a man may be happy on the rack, Plato has already admitted that the world is against him. Neither does he mean to say that Archelaus is tormented by the stings of conscience; or that the sensations of the impaled criminal are more agreeable than those of the tyrant drowned in luxurious enjoyment. Neither is he speaking, as in the Protagoras, of virtue as a calculation of pleasure, an opinion which he afterwards repudiates in the Phaedo. What then is his meaning? His meaning we shall be able to illustrate best by parallel notions, which, whether justifiable by logic or not, have always existed among mankind. We must remind the reader that Socrates himself implies that he will be understood or appreciated by very few.
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a. The antithesis of good and pleasure, which as in other dialogues is supposed to consist in the permanent nature of the one compared with the transient and relative nature of the other. Good and pleasure, knowledge and sense, truth and opinion, essence and generation, virtue and pleasure, the real and the apparent, the infinite and finite, harmony or beauty and discord, dialectic and rhetoric or poetry, are so many pairs of opposites, which in Plato easily pass into one another, and are seldom kept perfectly distinct. And we must not forget that Plato's conception of pleasure is the Heracleitean flux transferred to the sphere of human conduct. There is some degree of unfairness in opposing the principle of good, which is objective, to the principle of pleasure, which is subjective. For the assertion of the permanence of good is only based on the assumption of its objective character. Had Plato fixed his mind, not on the ideal nature of good, but on the subjective consciousness of happiness, that would have been found to be as transient and precarious as pleasure.
b. The arts or sciences, when pursued without any view to truth, or the improvement of human life, are called flatteries. They are all alike dependent upon the opinion of mankind, from which they are derived. To Plato the whole world appears to be sunk in error, based on self-interest. To this is opposed the one wise man hardly professing to have found truth, yet strong in the conviction that a virtuous life is the only good, whether regarded with reference to this world or to another. Statesmen, Sophists, rhetoricians, poets, are alike brought up for judgment. They are the parodies of wise men, and their arts are the parodies of true arts and sciences. All that they call science is merely the result of that study of the tempers of the Great Beast, which he describes in the Republic.
c. Various other points of contact naturally suggest themselves between the Gorgias and other dialogues, especially the Republic, the Philebus, and the Protagoras. There are closer resemblances both of spirit and language in the Republic than in any other dialogue, the verbal similarity tending to show that they were written at the same period of Plato's life. For the Republic supplies that education and training of which the Gorgias suggests the necessity. The theory of the many weak combining against the few strong in the formation of society (which is indeed a partial truth), is similar in both of them, and is expressed in nearly the same language. The sufferings and fate of the just man, the powerlessness of evil, and the reversal of the situation in another life, are also points of similarity. The poets, like the rhetoricians, are condemned because they aim at pleasure only, as in the Republic they are expelled the State, because they are imitators, and minister to the weaker side of human nature. That poetry is akin to rhetoric may be compared with the analogous notion, which occurs in the Protagoras, that the ancient poets were the Sophists of their day. In some other respects the Protagoras rather offers a contrast than a parallel. The character of Protagoras may be compared with that of Gorgias, but the conception of happiness is different in the two dialogues; being described in the former, according to the old Socratic notion, as deferred or accumulated pleasure, while in the Gorgias, and in the Phaedo, pleasure and good are distinctly opposed.
This opposition is carried out from a speculative point of view in the Philebus. There neither pleasure nor wisdom are allowed to be the chief good, but pleasure and good are not so completely opposed as in the Gorgias. For innocent pleasures, and such as have no antecedent pains, are allowed to rank in the class of goods. The allusion to Gorgias' definition of rhetoric (Philebus; compare Gorg.), as the art of persuasion, of all arts the best, for to it all things submit, not by compulsion, but of their own free willmarks a close and perhaps designed connection between the two dialogues. In both the ideas of measure, order, harmony, are the connecting links between the beautiful and the good.
In general spirit and character, that is, in irony and antagonism to public opinion, the Gorgias most nearly resembles the Apology, Crito, and portions of the Republic, and like the Philebus, though from another point of view, may be thought to stand in the same relation to Plato's theory of morals which the Theaetetus bears to his theory of knowledge.
Ion, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
The Ion, like the other earlier Platonic dialogues, is a mixture of jest and earnest, in which no definite result is obtained, but some Socratic or Platonic truths are allowed dimly to appear.
The elements of a true theory of poetry are contained in the notion that the poet is inspired. Genius is often said to be unconscious, or spontaneous, or a gift of nature: that 'genius is akin to madness' is a popular aphorism of modern times. The greatest strength is observed to have an element of limitation. Sense or passion are too much for the 'dry light' of intelligence which mingles with them and becomes discoloured by them. Imagination is often at war with reason and fact. The concentration of the mind on a single object, or on a single aspect of human nature, overpowers the orderly perception of the whole. Yet the feelings too bring truths home to the minds of many who in the way of reason would be incapable of understanding them. Reflections of this kind may have been passing before Plato's mind when he describes the poet as inspired, or when, as in the Apology, he speaks of poets as the worst critics of their own writingsanybody taken at random from the crowd is a better interpreter of them than they are of themselves. They are sacred persons, 'winged and holy things' who have a touch of madness in their composition (Phaedr.), and should be treated with every sort of respect (Republic), but not allowed to live in a well-ordered state. Like the Statesmen in the Meno, they have a divine instinct, but they are narrow and confused; they do not attain to the clearness of ideas, or to the knowledge of poetry or of any other art as a whole.
Meno, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
To the doctrine that virtue is knowledge, Plato has been constantly tending in the previous dialogues. But the new truth is no sooner found than it vanishes away. 'If there is knowledge, there must be teachers; and where are the teachers?' There is no knowledge in the higher sense of systematic, connected, reasoned knowledge, such as may one day be attained, and such as Plato himself seems to see in some far off vision of a single science. And there are no teachers in the higher sense of the word; that is to say, no real teachers who will arouse the spirit of enquiry in their pupils, and not merely instruct them in rhetoric or impart to them ready-made information for a fee of 'one' or of 'fifty drachms.' Plato is desirous of deepening the notion of education, and therefore he asserts the paradox that there are no educators. This paradox, though different in form, is not really different from the remark which is often made in modern times by those who would depreciate either the methods of education commonly employed, or the standard attainedthat 'there is no true education among us.'
There remains still a possibility which must not be overlooked. Even if there be no true knowledge, as is proved by 'the wretched state of education,' there may be right opinion, which is a sort of guessing or divination resting on no knowledge of causes, and incommunicable to others. This is the gift which our statesmen have, as is proved by the circumstance that they are unable to impart their knowledge to their sons. Those who are possessed of it cannot be said to be men of science or philosophers, but they are inspired and divine.
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Some lesser points of the dialogue may be noted, such as (1) the acute observation that Meno prefers the familiar definition, which is embellished with poetical language, to the better and truer one; or (2) the shrewd reflection, which may admit of an application to modern as well as to ancient teachers, that the Sophists having made large fortunes; this must surely be a criterion of their powers of teaching, for that no man could get a living by shoemaking who was not a good shoemaker; or (3) the remark conveyed, almost in a word, that the verbal sceptic is saved the labour of thought and enquiry (ouden dei to toiouto zeteseos). Characteristic also of the temper of the Socratic enquiry is, (4) the proposal to discuss the teachableness of virtue under an hypothesis, after the manner of the mathematicians; and (5) the repetition of the favourite doctrine which occurs so frequently in the earlier and more Socratic dialogues, and gives a colour to all of themthat mankind only desire evil through ignorance; (6) the experiment of eliciting from the slave-boy the mathematical truth which is latent in him, and (7) the remark that he is all the better for knowing his ignorance.
The character of Meno, like that of Critias, has no relation to the actual circumstances of his life. Plato is silent about his treachery to the ten thousand Greeks, which Xenophon has recorded, as he is also silent about the crimes of Critias. He is a Thessalian Alcibiades, rich and luxuriousa spoilt child of fortune, and is described as the hereditary friend of the great king. Like Alcibiades he is inspired with an ardent desire of knowledge, and is equally willing to learn of Socrates and of the Sophists. He may be regarded as standing in the same relation to Gorgias as Hippocrates in the Protagoras to the other great Sophist. He is the sophisticated youth on whom Socrates tries his cross-examining powers, just as in the Charmides, the Lysis, and the Euthydemus, ingenuous boyhood is made the subject of a similar experiment. He is treated by Socrates in a half-playful manner suited to his character; at the same time he appears not quite to understand the process to which he is being subjected. For he is exhibited as ignorant of the very elements of dialectics, in which the Sophists have failed to instruct their disciple. His definition of virtue as 'the power and desire of attaining things honourable,' like the first definition of justice in the Republic, is taken from a poet. His answers have a sophistical ring, and at the same time show the sophistical incapacity to grasp a general notion.
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The difficulty in framing general notions which has appeared in this and in all the previous dialogues recurs in the Gorgias and Theaetetus as well as in the Republic. In the Gorgias too the statesmen reappear, but in stronger opposition to the philosopher. They are no longer allowed to have a divine insight, but, though acknowledged to have been clever men and good speakers, are denounced as 'blind leaders of the blind.' The doctrine of the immortality of the soul is also carried further, being made the foundation not only of a theory of knowledge, but of a doctrine of rewards and punishments. In the Republic the relation of knowledge to virtue is described in a manner more consistent with modern distinctions. The existence of the virtues without the possession of knowledge in the higher or philosophical sense is admitted to be possible. Right opinion is again introduced in the Theaetetus as an account of knowledge, but is rejected on the ground that it is irrational (as here, because it is not bound by the tie of the cause), and also because the conception of false opinion is given up as hopeless. The doctrines of Plato are necessarily different at different times of his life, as new distinctions are realized, or new stages of thought attained by him. We are not therefore justified, in order to take away the appearance of inconsistency, in attri buting to him hidden meanings or remote allusions.
There are no external criteria by which we can determine the date of the Meno. There is no reason to suppose that any of the dialogues of Plato were written before the death of Socrates; the Meno, which appears to be one of the earliest of them, is proved to have been of a later date by the allusion of Anytus.
We cannot argue that Plato was more likely to have written, as he has done, of Meno before than after his miserable death; for we have already seen, in the examples of Charmides and Critias, that the characters in Plato are very far from resembling the same characters in history. The repulsive picture which is given of him in the Anabasis of Xenophon, where he also appears as the friend of Aristippus 'and a fair youth having lovers,' has no other trait of likeness to the Meno of Plato.
The place of the Meno in the series is doubtfully indicated by internal evidence. The main character of the Dialogue is Socrates; but to the 'general definitions' of Socrates is added the Platonic doctrine of reminiscence. The problems of virtue and knowledge have been discussed in the Lysis, Laches, Charmides, and Protagoras; the puzzle about knowing and learning has already appeared in the Euthydemus. The doctrines of immortality and pre-existence are carried further in the Phaedrus and Phaedo; the distinction between opinion and knowledge is more fully developed in the Theaetetus. The lessons of Prodicus, whom he facetiously calls his master, are still running in the mind of Socrates. Unlike the later Platonic dialogues, the Meno arrives at no conclusion. Hence we are led to place the Dialogue at some point of time later than the Protagoras, and earlier than the Phaedrus and Gorgias. The place which is assigned to it in this work is due mainly to the desire to bring together in a single volume all the dialogues which contain allusions to the trial and death of Socrates.
ON THE IDEAS OF PLATO.
Plato's doctrine of ideas has attained an imaginary clearness and definiteness which is not to be found in his own writings. The popular account of them is partly derived from one or two passages in his dialogues interpreted without regard to their poetical environment. It is due also to the misunderstanding of him by the Aristotelian school; and the erroneous notion has been further narrowed and has become fixed by the realism of the schoolmen. This popular view of the Platonic ideas may be summed up in some such formula as the following: 'Truth consists not in particulars, but in universals, which have a place in the mind of God, or in some far-off heaven. These were revealed to men in a former state of existence, and are recovered by reminiscence (anamnesis) or association from sensible things. The sensible things are not realities, but shadows only, in relation to the truth.' These unmeaning propositions are hardly suspected to be a caricature of a great theory of knowledge, which Plato in various ways and under many figures of speech is seeking to unfold. Poetry has been converted into dogma; and it is not remarked that the Platonic ideas are to be found only in about a third of Plato's writings and are not confined to him. The forms which they assume are numerous, and if taken literally, inconsistent with one another. At one time we are in the clouds of mythology, at another among the abstractions of mathematics or metaphysics; we pass imperceptibly from one to the other. Reason and fancy are mingled in the same passage. The ideas are sometimes described as many, coextensive with the universals of sense and also with the first principles of ethics; or again they are absorbed into the single idea of good, and subordinated to it. They are not more certain than facts, but they are equally certain (Phaedo). They are both personal and impersonal. They are abstract terms: they are also the causes of things; and they are even transformed into the demons or spirits by whose help God made the world. And the idea of good (Republic) may without violence be converted into the Supreme Being, who 'because He was good' created all things (Tim.).
It would be a mistake to try and reconcile these differing modes of thought. They are not to be regarded seriously as having a distinct meaning. They are parables, prophecies, myths, symbols, revelations, aspirations after an unknown world. They derive their origin from a deep religious and contemplative feeling, and also from an observation of curious mental phenomena. They gather up the elements of the previous philosophies, which they put together in a new form. Their great diversity shows the tentative character of early endeavours to think. They have not yet settled down into a single system. Plato uses them, though he also criticises them; he acknowledges that both he and others are always talking about them, especially about the Idea of Good; and that they are not peculiar to himself (Phaedo; Republic; Soph.). But in his later writings he seems to have laid aside the old forms of them. As he proceeds he makes for himself new modes of expression more akin to the Aristotelian logic.
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Passing on to the Parmenides, we find in that dialogue not an exposition or defence of the doctrine of ideas, but an assault upon them, which is put into the mouth of the veteran Parmenides, and might be ascribed to Aristotle himself, or to one of his disciples. The doctrine which is assailed takes two or three forms, but fails in any of them to escape the dialectical difficulties which are urged against it. It is admitted that there are ideas of all things, but the manner in which individuals partake of them, whether of the whole or of the part, and in which they become like them, or how ideas can be either within or without the sphere of human knowledge, or how the human and divine can have any relation to each other, is held to be incapable of explanation. And yet, if there are no universal ideas, what becomes of philosophy? (Parmenides.) In the Sophist the theory of ideas is spoken of as a doctrine held not by Plato, but by another sect of philosophers, called 'the Friends of Ideas,' probably the Megarians, who were very distinct from him, if not opposed to him (Sophist). Nor in what may be termed Plato's abridgement of the history of philosophy (Soph.), is any mention made such as we find in the first book of Aristotle's Metaphysics, of the derivation of such a theory or of any part of it from the Pythagoreans, the Eleatics, the Heracleiteans, or even from Socrates. In the Philebus, probably one of the latest of the Platonic dialogues, the conception of a personal or semi-personal deity expressed under the figure of mind, the king of all, who is also the cause, is retained. The one and many of the Phaedrus and Theaetetus is still working in the mind of Plato, and the correlation of ideas, not of 'all with all,' but of 'some with some,' is asserted and explained. But they are spoken of in a different manner, and are not supposed to be recovered from a former state of existence. The metaphysical conception of truth passes into a psychological one, which is continued in the Laws, and is the final form of the Platonic philosophy, so far as can be gathered from his own writings (see especially Laws). In the Laws he harps once more on the old string, and returns to general notions:these he acknowledges to be many, and yet he insists that they are also one. The guardian must be made to recognize the truth, for which he has contended long ago in the Protagoras, that the virtues are four, but they are also in some sense one (Laws; compare Protagoras).
So various, and if regarded on the surface only, inconsistent, are the statements of Plato respecting the doctrine of ideas. If we attempted to harmonize or to combine them, we should make out of them, not a system, but the caricature of a system. They are the ever-varying expression of Plato's Idealism. The terms used in them are in their substance and general meaning the same, although they seem to be different. They pass from the subject to the object, from earth (diesseits) to heaven (jenseits) without regard to the gulf which later theology and philosophy have made between them. They are also intended to supplement or explain each other. They relate to a subject of which Plato himself would have said that 'he was not confident of the precise form of his own statements, but was strong in the belief that something of the kind was true.' It is the spirit, not the letter, in which they agreethe spirit which places the divine above the human, the spiritual above the material, the one above the many, the mind before the body.
Phaedo, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
The place of the Dialogue in the series is doubtful. The doctrine of ideas is certainly carried beyond the Socratic point of view; in no other of the writings of Plato is the theory of them so completely developed. Whether the belief in immortality can be attri buted to Socrates or not is uncertain; the silence of the Memorabilia, and of the earlier dialogues of Plato, is an argument to the contrary. Yet in the Cyropaedia Xenophon has put language into the mouth of the dying Cyrus which recalls the Phaedo, and may have been derived from the teaching of Socrates. It may be fairly urged that the greatest religious interest of mankind could not have been wholly ignored by one who passed his life in fulfilling the commands of an oracle, and who recognized a Divine plan in man and nature. (Xen. Mem.) And the language of the Apology and of the Crito confirms this view.
The Phaedo is not one of the Socratic dialogues of Plato; nor, on the other hand, can it be assigned to that later stage of the Platonic writings at which the doctrine of ideas appears to be forgotten. It belongs rather to the intermediate period of the Platonic philosophy, which roughly corresponds to the Phaedrus, Gorgias, Republic, Theaetetus. Without pretending to determine the real time of their composition, the Symposium, Meno, Euthyphro, Apology, Phaedo may be conveniently read by us in this order as illustrative of the life of Socrates. Another chain may be formed of the Meno, Phaedrus, Phaedo, in which the immortality of the soul is connected with the doctrine of ideas. In the Meno the theory of ideas is based on the ancient belief in transmigration, which reappears again in the Phaedrus as well as in the Republic and Timaeus, and in all of them is connected with a doctrine of retri bution. In the Phaedrus the immortality of the soul is supposed to rest on the conception of the soul as a principle of motion, whereas in the Republic the argument turns on the natural continuance of the soul, which, if not destroyed by her own proper evil, can hardly be destroyed by any other. The soul of man in the Timaeus is derived from the Supreme Creator, and either returns after death to her kindred star, or descends into the lower life of an animal. The Apology expresses the same view as the Phaedo, but with less confidence; there the probability of death being a long sleep is not excluded. The Theaetetus also describes, in a digression, the desire of the soul to fly away and be with God'and to fly to him is to be like him.' The Symposium may be observed to resemble as well as to differ from the Phaedo. While the first notion of immortality is only in the way of natural procreation or of posthumous fame and glory, the higher revelation of beauty, like the good in the Republic, is the vision of the eternal idea. So deeply rooted in Plato's mind is the belief in immortality; so various are the forms of expression which he employs.
As in several other dialogues, there is more of system in the Phaedo than appears at first sight. The succession of arguments is based on previous philosophies; beginning with the mysteries and the Heracleitean alternation of opposites, and proceeding to the Pythagorean harmony and transmigration; making a step by the aid of Platonic reminiscence, and a further step by the help of the nous of Anaxagoras; until at last we rest in the conviction that the soul is inseparable from the ideas, and belongs to the world of the invisible and unknown. Then, as in the Gorgias or Republic, the curtain falls, and the veil of mythology descends upon the argument. After the confession of Socrates that he is an interested party, and the acknowledgment that no man of sense will think the details of his narrative true, but that something of the kind is true, we return from speculation to practice. He is himself more confident of immortality than he is of his own arguments; and the confidence which he expresses is less strong than that which his cheerfulness and composure in death inspire in us.
Difficulties of two kinds occur in the Phaedoone kind to be explained out of contemporary philosophy, the other not admitting of an entire solution. (1) The difficulty which Socrates says that he experienced in explaining generation and corruption; the assumption of hypotheses which proceed from the less general to the more general, and are tested by their consequences; the puzzle about greater and less; the resort to the method of ideas, which to us appear only abstract terms,these are to be explained out of the position of Socrates and Plato in the history of philosophy. They were living in a twilight between the sensible and the intellectual world, and saw no way of connecting them. They could neither explain the relation of ideas to phenomena, nor their correlation to one another. The very idea of relation or comparison was embarrassing to them. Yet in this intellectual uncertainty they had a conception of a proof from results, and of a moral truth, which remained unshaken amid the questionings of philosophy. (2) The other is a difficulty which is touched upon in the Republic as well as in the Phaedo, and is common to modern and ancient philosophy. Plato is not altogether satisfied with his safe and simple method of ideas. He wants to have proved to him by facts that all things are for the best, and that there is one mind or design which pervades them all. But this 'power of the best' he is unable to explain; and therefore takes refuge in universal ideas. And are not we at this day seeking to discover that which Socrates in a glass darkly foresaw?
Some resemblances to the Greek drama may be noted in all the dialogues of Plato. The Phaedo is the tragedy of which Socrates is the protagonist and Simmias and Cebes the secondary performers, standing to them in the same relation as to Glaucon and Adeimantus in the Republic. No Dialogue has a greater unity of subject and feeling. Plato has certainly fulfilled the condition of Greek, or rather of all art, which requires that scenes of death and suffering should be clothed in beauty. The gathering of the friends at the commencement of the Dialogue, the dismissal of Xanthippe, whose presence would have been out of place at a philosophical discussion, but who returns again with her children to take a final farewell, the dejection of the audience at the temporary overthrow of the argument, the picture of Socrates playing with the hair of Phaedo, the final scene in which Socrates alone retains his composureare masterpieces of art. And the chorus at the end might have interpreted the feeling of the play: 'There can no evil happen to a good man in life or death.'
'The art of concealing art' is nowhere more perfect than in those writings of Plato which describe the trial and death of Socrates. Their charm is their simplicity, which gives them verisimilitude; and yet they touch, as if incidentally, and because they were suitable to the occasion, on some of the deepest truths of philosophy. There is nothing in any tragedy, ancient or modern, nothing in poetry or history (with one exception), like the last hours of Socrates in Plato. The master could not be more fitly occupied at such a time than in discoursing of immortality; nor the disciples more divinely consoled. The arguments, taken in the spirit and not in the letter, are our arguments; and Socrates by anticipation may be even thought to refute some 'eccentric notions; current in our own age. For there are philosophers among ourselves who do not seem to understand how much stronger is the power of intelligence, or of the best, than of Atlas, or mechanical force. How far the words attri buted to Socrates were actually uttered by him we forbear to ask; for no answer can be given to this question. And it is better to resign ourselves to the feeling of a great work, than to linger among critical uncertainties.
Sophist, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
The dramatic power of the dialogues of Plato appears to diminish as the metaphysical interest of them increases (compare Introd. to the Philebus). There are no descriptions of time, place or persons, in the Sophist and Statesman, but we are plunged at once into philosophical discussions; the poetical charm has disappeared, and those who have no taste for abstruse metaphysics will greatly prefer the earlier dialogues to the later ones. Plato is conscious of the change, and in the Statesman expressly accuses himself of a tediousness in the two dialogues, which he ascribes to his desire of developing the dialectical method. On the other hand, the kindred spirit of Hegel seemed to find in the Sophist the crown and summit of the Platonic philosophyhere is the place at which Plato most nearly approaches to the Hegelian identity of Being and Not-being. Nor will the great importance of the two dialogues be doubted by any one who forms a conception of the state of mind and opinion which they are intended to meet. The sophisms of the day were undermining philosophy; the denial of the existence of Not-being, and of the connexion of ideas, was making truth and falsehood equally impossible. It has been said that Plato would have written differently, if he had been acquainted with the Organon of Aristotle. But could the Organon of Aristotle ever have been written unless the Sophist and Statesman had preceded? The swarm of fallacies which arose in the infancy of mental science, and which was born and bred in the decay of the pre-Socratic philosophies, was not dispelled by Aristotle, but by Socrates and Plato. The summa genera of thought, the nature of the proposition, of definition, of generalization, of synthesis and analysis, of division and cross-division, are clearly described, and the processes of induction and deduction are constantly employed in the dialogues of Plato. The 'slippery' nature of comparison, the danger of putting words in the place of things, the fallacy of arguing 'a dicto secundum,' and in a circle, are frequently indicated by him. To all these processes of truth and error, Aristotle, in the next generation, gave distinctness; he brought them together in a separate science. But he is not to be regarded as the original inventor of any of the great logical forms, with the exception of the syllogism.
There is little worthy of remark in the characters of the Sophist. The most noticeable point is the final retirement of Socrates from the field of argument, and the substitution for him of an Eleatic stranger, who is described as a pupil of Parmenides and Zeno, and is supposed to have descended from a higher world in order to convict the Socratic circle of error. As in the Timaeus, Plato seems to intimate by the withdrawal of Socrates that he is passing beyond the limits of his teaching; and in the Sophist and Statesman, as well as in the Parmenides, he probably means to imply that he is making a closer approach to the schools of Elea and Megara. He had much in common with them, but he must first submit their ideas to criticism and revision. He had once thought as he says, speaking by the mouth of the Eleatic, that he understood their doctrine of Not-being; but now he does not even comprehend the nature of Being. The friends of ideas (Soph.) are alluded to by him as distant acquaintances, whom he criticizes ab extra; we do not recognize at first sight that he is criticizing himself. The character of the Eleatic stranger is colourless; he is to a certain extent the reflection of his father and master, Parmenides, who is the protagonist in the dialogue which is called by his name. Theaetetus himself is not distinguished by the remarkable traits which are attributed to him in the preceding dialogue. He is no longer under the spell of Socrates, or subject to the operation of his midwifery, though the fiction of question and answer is still maintained, and the necessity of taking Theaetetus along with him is several times insisted upon by his partner in the discussion. There is a reminiscence of the old Theaetetus in his remark that he will not tire of the argument, and in his conviction, which the Eleatic thinks likely to be permanent, that the course of events is governed by the will of God. Throughout the two dialogues Socrates continues a silent auditor, in the Statesman just reminding us of his presence, at the commencement, by a characteristic jest about the statesman and the philosopher, and by an allusion to his namesake, with whom on that ground he claims relationship, as he had already claimed an affinity with Theaetetus, grounded on the likeness of his ugly face. But in neither dialogue, any more than in the Timaeus, does he offer any criticism on the views which are propounded by another.
The style, though wanting in dramatic power,in this respect resembling the Philebus and the Laws,is very clear and accurate, and has several touches of humour and satire. The language is less fanciful and imaginative than that of the earlier dialogues; and there is more of bitterness, as in the Laws, though traces of a similar temper may also be observed in the description of the 'great brute' in the Republic, and in the contrast of the lawyer and philosopher in the Theaetetus. The following are characteristic passages: 'The ancient philosophers, of whom we may say, without offence, that they went on their way rather regardless of whether we understood them or not;' the picture of the materialists, or earth-born giants, 'who grasped oaks and rocks in their hands,' and who must be improved before they can be reasoned with; and the equally humourous delineation of the friends of ideas, who defend themselves from a fastness in the invisible world; or the comparison of the Sophist to a painter or maker (compare Republic), and the hunt after him in the rich meadow-lands of youth and wealth; or, again, the light and graceful touch with which the older philosophies are painted ('Ionian and Sicilian muses'), the comparison of them to mythological tales, and the fear of the Eleatic that he will be counted a parricide if he ventures to lay hands on his father Parmenides; or, once more, the likening of the Eleatic stranger to a god from heaven.All these passages, notwithstanding the decline of the style, retain the impress of the great master of language. But the equably diffused grace is gone; instead of the endless variety of the early dialogues, traces of the rhythmical monotonous cadence of the Laws begin to appear; and already an approach is made to the technical language of Aristotle, in the frequent use of the words 'essence,' 'power,' 'generation,' 'motion,' 'rest,' 'action,' 'passion,' and the like.
The Sophist, like the Phaedrus, has a double character, and unites two enquirers, which are only in a somewhat forced manner connected with each other. The first is the search after the Sophist, the second is the enquiry into the nature of Not-being, which occupies the middle part of the work. For 'Not-being' is the hole or division of the dialectical net in which the Sophist has hidden himself. He is the imaginary impersonation of false opinion. Yet he denies the possibility of false opinion; for falsehood is that which is not, and therefore has no existence. At length the difficulty is solved; the answer, in the language of the Republic, appears 'tumbling out at our feet.' Acknowledging that there is a communion of kinds with kinds, and not merely one Being or Good having different names, or several isolated ideas or classes incapable of communion, we discover 'Not-being' to be the other of 'Being.' Transferring this to language and thought, we have no difficulty in apprehending that a proposition may be false as well as true. The Sophist, drawn out of the shelter which Cynic and Megarian paradoxes have temporarily afforded him, is proved to be a dissembler and juggler with words.
The chief points of interest in the dialogue are: (I) the character attri buted to the Sophist: (II) the dialectical method: (III) the nature of the puzzle about 'Not-being:' (IV) the battle of the philosophers: (V) the relation of the Sophist to other dialogues.
I. The Sophist in Plato is the master of the art of illusion; the charlatan, the foreigner, the prince of esprits-faux, the hireling who is not a teacher, and who, from whatever point of view he is regarded, is the opposite of the true teacher. He is the 'evil one,' the ideal representative of all that Plato most disliked in the moral and intellectual tendencies of his own age; the adversary of the almost equally ideal Socrates. He seems to be always growing in the fancy of Plato, now boastful, now eristic, now clothing himself in rags of philosophy, now more akin to the rhetorician or lawyer, now haranguing, now questioning, until the final appearance in the Politicus of his departing shadow in the disguise of a statesman. We are not to suppose that Plato intended by such a description to depict Protagoras or Gorgias, or even Thrasymachus, who all turn out to be 'very good sort of people when we know them,' and all of them part on good terms with Socrates. But he is speaking of a being as imaginary as the wise man of the Stoics, and whose character varies in different dialogues. Like mythology, Greek philosophy has a tendency to personify ideas. And the Sophist is not merely a teacher of rhetoric for a fee of one or fifty drachmae (Crat.), but an ideal of Plato's in which the falsehood of all mankind is reflected.
A milder tone is adopted towards the Sophists in a well-known passage of the Republic, where they are described as the followers rather than the leaders of the rest of mankind. Plato ridicules the notion that any individuals can corrupt youth to a degree worth speaking of in comparison with the greater influence of public opinion. But there is no real inconsistency between this and other descriptions of the Sophist which occur in the Platonic writings. For Plato is not justifying the Sophists in the passage just quoted, but only representing their power to be contemptible; they are to be despised rather than feared, and are no worse than the rest of mankind. But a teacher or statesman may be justly condemned, who is on a level with mankind when he ought to be above them. There is another point of view in which this passage should also be considered. The great enemy of Plato is the world, not exactly in the theological sense, yet in one not wholly differentthe world as the hater of truth and lover of appearance, occupied in the pursuit of gain and pleasure rather than of knowledge, banded together against the few good and wise men, and devoid of true education. This creature has many heads: rhetoricians, lawyers, statesmen, poets, sophists. But the Sophist is the Proteus who takes the likeness of all of them; all other deceivers have a piece of him in them. And sometimes he is represented as the corrupter of the world; and sometimes the world as the corrupter of him and of itself.
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2. The use of the term 'Sophist' in the dialogues of Plato also shows that the bad sense was not affixed by his genius, but already current. When Protagoras says, 'I confess that I am a Sophist,' he implies that the art which he professes has already a bad name; and the words of the young Hippocrates, when with a blush upon his face which is just seen by the light of dawn he admits that he is going to be made 'a Sophist,' would lose their point, unless the term had been discredited. There is nothing surprising in the Sophists having an evil name; that, whether deserved or not, was a natural consequence of their vocation. That they were foreigners, that they made fortunes, that they taught novelties, that they excited the minds of youth, are quite sufficient reasons to account for the opprobrium which attached to them. The genius of Plato could not have stamped the word anew, or have imparted the associations which occur in contemporary writers, such as Xenophon and Isocrates. Changes in the meaning of words can only be made with great difficulty, and not unless they are supported by a strong current of popular feeling. There is nothing improbable in supposing that Plato may have extended and envenomed the meaning, or that he may have done the Sophists the same kind of disservice with posterity which Pascal did to the Jesuits. But the bad sense of the word was not and could not have been invented by him, and is found in his earlier dialogues, e.g. the Protagoras, as well as in the later.
3. There is no ground for disbelieving that the principal Sophists, Gorgias, Protagoras, Prodicus, Hippias, were good and honourable men. The notion that they were corrupters of the Athenian youth has no real foundation, and partly arises out of the use of the term 'Sophist' in modern times. The truth is, that we know little about them; and the witness of Plato in their favour is probably not much more historical than his witness against them. Of that national decline of genius, unity, political force, which has been sometimes described as the corruption of youth, the Sophists were one among many signs;in these respects Athens may have degenerated; but, as Mr. Grote remarks, there is no reason to suspect any greater moral corruption in the age of Demos thenes than in the age of Pericles. The Athenian youth were not corrupted in this sense, and therefore the Sophists could not have corrupted them. It is remarkable, and may be fairly set down to their credit, that Plato nowhere attri butes to them that peculiar Greek sympathy with youth, which he ascribes to Parmenides, and which was evidently common in the Socratic circle. Plato delights to exhibit them in a ludicrous point of view, and to show them always rather at a disadvantage in the company of Socrates. But he has no quarrel with their characters, and does not deny that they are respectable men.
The Sophist, in the dialogue which is called after him, is exhibited in many different lights, and appears and reappears in a variety of forms. There is some want of the higher Platonic art in the Eleatic Stranger eliciting his true character by a labourious process of enquiry, when he had already admitted that he knew quite well the difference between the Sophist and the Philosopher, and had often heard the question discussed;such an anticipation would hardly have occurred in the earlier dialogues. But Plato could not altogether give up his Socratic method, of which another trace may be thought to be discerned in his adoption of a common instance before he proceeds to the greater matter in hand. Yet the example is also chosen in order to damage the 'hooker of men' as much as possible; each step in the pedigree of the angler suggests some injurious reflection about the Sophist. They are both hunters after a living prey, nearly related to tyrants and thieves, and the Sophist is the cousin of the parasite and flatterer. The effect of this is heightened by the accidental manner in which the discovery is made, as the result of a scientific division. His descent in another branch affords the opportunity of more 'unsavoury comparisons.' For he is a retail trader, and his wares are either imported or home-made, like those of other retail traders; his art is thus deprived of the character of a liberal profession. But the most distinguishing characteristic of him is, that he is a disputant, and higgles over an argument. A feature of the Eristic here seems to blend with Plato's usual description of the Sophists, who in the early dialogues, and in the Republic, are frequently depicted as endeavouring to save themselves from disputing with Socrates by making long orations. In this character he parts company from the vain and impertinent talker in private life, who is a loser of money, while he is a maker of it.
But there is another general division under which his art may be also supposed to fall, and that is purification; and from purification is descended education, and the new principle of education is to interrogate men after the manner of Socrates, and make them teach themselves. Here again we catch a glimpse rather of a Socratic or Eristic than of a Sophist in the ordinary sense of the term. And Plato does not on this ground reject the claim of the Sophist to be the true philosopher. One more feature of the Eristic rather than of the Sophist is the tendency of the troublesome animal to run away into the darkness of Not-being. Upon the whole, we detect in him a sort of hybrid or double nature, of which, except perhaps in the Euthydemus of Plato, we find no other trace in Greek philosophy; he combines the teacher of virtue with the Eristic; while in his omniscience, in his ignorance of himself, in his arts of deception, and in his lawyer-like habit of writing and speaking about all things, he is still the antithesis of Socrates and of the true teacher.
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In all the later dialogues of Plato, the idea of mind or intelligence becomes more and more prominent. That idea which Anaxagoras employed inconsistently in the construction of the world, Plato, in the Philebus, the Sophist, and the Laws, extends to all things, attri buting to Providence a care, infinitesimal as well as infinite, of all creation. The divine mind is the leading religious thought of the later works of Plato. The human mind is a sort of reflection of this, having ideas of Being, Sameness, and the like. At times they seem to be parted by a great gulf (Parmenides); at other times they have a common nature, and the light of a common intelligence.
But this ever-growing idea of mind is really irreconcilable with the abstract Pantheism of the Eleatics. To the passionate language of Parmenides, Plato replies in a strain equally passionate:What! has not Being mind? and is not Being capable of being known? and, if this is admitted, then capable of being affected or acted upon?in motion, then, and yet not wholly incapable of rest. Already we have been compelled to attri bute opposite determinations to Being. And the answer to the difficulty about Being may be equally the answer to the difficulty about Not-being.
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IV. The later dialogues of Plato contain many references to contemporary philosophy. Both in the Theaetetus and in the Sophist he recognizes that he is in the midst of a fray; a huge irregular battle everywhere surrounds him (Theaet.). First, there are the two great philosophies going back into cosmogony and poetry: the philosophy of Heracleitus, supposed to have a poetical origin in Homer, and that of the Eleatics, which in a similar spirit he conceives to be even older than Xenophanes (compare Protag.). Still older were theories of two and three principles, hot and cold, moist and dry, which were ever marrying and being given in marriage: in speaking of these, he is probably referring to Pherecydes and the early Ionians. In the philosophy of motion there were different accounts of the relation of plurality and unity, which were supposed to be joined and severed by love and hate, some maintaining that this process was perpetually going on (e.g. Heracleitus); others (e.g. Empedocles) that there was an alternation of them. Of the Pythagoreans or of Anaxagoras he makes no distinct mention. His chief opponents are, first, Eristics or Megarians; secondly, the Materialists.
The picture which he gives of both these latter schools is indistinct; and he appears reluctant to mention the names of their teachers. Nor can we easily determine how much is to be assigned to the Cynics, how much to the Megarians, or whether the 'repellent Materialists' (Theaet.) are Cynics or Atomists, or represent some unknown phase of opinion at Athens. To the Cynics and Antis thenes is commonly attri buted, on the authority of Aristotle, the denial of predication, while the Megarians are said to have been Nominalists, asserting the One Good under many names to be the true Being of Zeno and the Eleatics, and, like Zeno, employing their negative dialectic in the refutation of opponents. But the later Megarians also denied predication; and this tenet, which is attri buted to all of them by Simplicius, is certainly in accordance with their over-refining philosophy. The 'tyros young and old,' of whom Plato speaks, probably include both. At any rate, we shall be safer in accepting the general description of them which he has given, and in not attempting to draw a precise line between them.
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In several of the later dialogues Plato is occupied with the connexion of the sciences, which in the Philebus he divides into two classes of pure and applied, adding to them there as elsewhere (Phaedr., Crat., Republic, States.) a superintending science of dialectic. This is the origin of Aristotle's Architectonic, which seems, however, to have passed into an imaginary science of essence, and no longer to retain any relation to other branches of knowledge. Of such a science, whether described as 'philosophia prima,' the science of ousia, logic or metaphysics, philosophers have often dreamed. But even now the time has not arrived when the anticipation of Plato can be realized. Though many a thinker has framed a 'hierarchy of the sciences,' no one has as yet found the higher science which arrays them in harmonious order, giving to the organic and inorganic, to the physical and moral, their respective limits, and showing how they all work together in the world and in man.
Plato arranges in order the stages of knowledge and of existence. They are the steps or grades by which he rises from sense and the shadows of sense to the idea of beauty and good. Mind is in motion as well as at rest (Soph.); and may be described as a dialectical progress which passes from one limit or determination of thought to another and back again to the first. This is the account of dialectic given by Plato in the Sixth Book of the Republic, which regarded under another aspect is the mysticism of the Symposium. He does not deny the existence of objects of sense, but according to him they only receive their true meaning when they are incorporated in a principle which is above them (Republic). In modern language they might be said to come first in the order of experience, last in the order of nature and reason. They are assumed, as he is fond of repeating, upon the condition that they shall give an account of themselves and that the truth of their existence shall be hereafter proved. For philosophy must begin somewhere and may begin anywhere,with outward objects, with statements of opinion, with abstract principles. But objects of sense must lead us onward to the ideas or universals which are contained in them; the statements of opinion must be verified; the abstract principles must be filled up and connected with one another. In Plato we find, as we might expect, the germs of many thoughts which have been further developed by the genius of Spinoza and Hegel. But there is a difficulty in separating the germ from the flower, or in drawing the line which divides ancient from modern philosophy. Many coincidences which occur in them are unconscious, seeming to show a natural tendency in the human mind towards certain ideas and forms of thought. And there are many speculations of Plato which would have passed away unheeded, and their meaning, like that of some hieroglyphic, would have remained undeciphered, unless two thousand years and more afterwards an interpreter had arisen of a kindred spirit and of the same intellectual family. For example, in the Sophist Plato begins with the abstract and goes on to the concrete, not in the lower sense of returning to outward objects, but to the Hegelian concrete or unity of abstractions. In the intervening period hardly any importance would have been attached to the question which is so full of meaning to Plato and Hegel.
Symposium translated by B Jowett, #Symposium, #Plato, #Philosophy
Phaedrus (speech begins 178a):[19] an Athenian aristocrat associated with the inner-circle of the philosopher Socrates, familiar from Phaedrus and other dialogues
Pausanias (speech begins 180c): the legal expert
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Of all the works of Plato the Symposium is the most perfect in form, and may be truly thought to contain more than any commentator has ever dreamed of; or, as Goe the said of one of his own writings, more than the author himself knew. For in philosophy as in prophecy glimpses of the future may often be conveyed in words which could hardly have been understood or interpreted at the time when they were uttered (compare Symp.)which were wiser than the writer of them meant, and could not have been expressed by him if he had been interrogated about them. Yet Plato was not a mystic, nor in any degree affected by the Eastern influences which afterwards overspread the Alexandrian world. He was not an enthusiast or a sentimentalist, but one who aspired only to see reasoned truth, and whose thoughts are clearly explained in his language. There is no foreign element either of Egypt or of Asia to be found in his writings. And more than any other Platonic work the Symposium is Greek both in style and subject, having a beauty 'as of a statue,' while the companion Dialogue of the Phaedrus is marked by a sort of Gothic irregularity. More too than in any other of his dialogues, Plato is emancipated from former philosophies. The genius of Greek art seems to triumph over the traditions of Pythagorean, Eleatic, or Megarian systems, and 'the old quarrel of poetry and philosophy' has at least a superficial reconcilement. (Rep.)
An unknown person who had heard of the discourses in praise of love spoken by Socrates and others at the banquet of Agathon is desirous of having an au thentic account of them, which he thinks that he can obtain from Apollodorus, the same excitable, or rather 'mad' friend of Socrates, who is afterwards introduced in the Phaedo. He had imagined that the discourses were recent. There he is mistaken: but they are still fresh in the memory of his informant, who had just been repeating them to Glaucon, and is quite prepared to have another rehearsal of them in a walk from the Piraeus to Athens. Although he had not been present himself, he had heard them from the best authority. Aristodemus, who is described as having been in past times a humble but inseparable attendant of Socrates, had reported them to him (compare Xen. Mem.).
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The character of Alcibiades in the Symposium is hardly less remarkable than that of Socrates, and agrees with the picture given of him in the first of the two dialogues which are called by his name, and also with the slight sketch of him in the Protagoras. He is the impersonation of lawlessness'the lion's whelp, who ought not to be reared in the city,' yet not without a certain generosity which gained the hearts of men,strangely fascinated by Socrates, and possessed of a genius which might have been either the destruction or salvation of Athens. The dramatic interest of the character is heightened by the recollection of his after history. He seems to have been present to the mind of Plato in the description of the democratic man of the Republic (compare also Alcibiades 1).
There is no criterion of the date of the Symposium, except that which is furnished by the allusion to the division of Arcadia after the destruction of Mantinea. This took place in the year B.C. 384, which is the forty-fourth year of Plato's life. The Symposium cannot therefore be regarded as a youthful work. As Mantinea was restored in the year 369, the composition of the Dialogue will probably fall between 384 and 369. Whether the recollection of the event is more likely to have been renewed at the destruction or restoration of the city, rather than at some intermediate period, is a consideration not worth raising.
The Symposium is connected with the Phaedrus both in style and subject; they are the only dialogues of Plato in which the theme of love is discussed at length. In both of them philosophy is regarded as a sort of enthusiasm or madness; Socrates is himself 'a prophet new inspired' with Bacchanalian revelry, which, like his philosophy, he characteristically pretends to have derived not from himself but from others. The Phaedo also presents some points of comparison with the Symposium. For there, too, philosophy might be described as 'dying for love;' and there are not wanting many touches of humour and fancy, which remind us of the Symposium. But while the Phaedo and Phaedrus look backwards and forwards to past and future states of existence, in the Symposium there is no break between this world and another; and we rise from one to the other by a regular series of steps or stages, proceeding from the particulars of sense to the universal of reason, and from one universal to many, which are finally reunited in a single science (compare Rep.). At first immortality means only the succession of existences; even knowledge comes and goes. Then follows, in the language of the mysteries, a higher and a higher degree of initiation; at last we arrive at the perfect vision of beauty, not relative or changing, but eternal and absolute; not bounded by this world, or in or out of this world, but an aspect of the divine, extending over all things, and having no limit of space or time: this is the highest knowledge of which the human mind is capable. Plato does not go on to ask whether the individual is absorbed in the sea of light and beauty or retains his personality. Enough for him to have attained the true beauty or good, without enquiring precisely into the relation in which human beings stood to it. That the soul has such a reach of thought, and is capable of partaking of the eternal nature, seems to imply that she too is eternal (compare Phaedrus). But Plato does not distinguish the eternal in man from the eternal in the world or in God. He is willing to rest in the contemplation of the idea, which to him is the cause of all things (Rep.), and has no strength to go further.
The Symposium of Xenophon, in which Socrates describes himself as a pander, and also discourses of the difference between sensual and sentimental love, likewise offers several interesting points of comparison. But the suspicion which hangs over other writings of Xenophon, and the numerous minute references to the Phaedrus and Symposium, as well as to some of the other writings of Plato, throw a doubt on the genuineness of the work. The Symposium of Xenophon, if written by him at all, would certainly show that he wrote against Plato, and was acquainted with his works. Of this hostility there is no trace in the Memorabilia. Such a rivalry is more characteristic of an imitator than of an original writer. The (so-called) Symposium of Xenophon may therefore have no more title to be regarded as genuine than the confessedly spurious Apology.
The Act of Creation text, #The Act of Creation, #Arthur Koestler, #Psychology
hamavec for both poet and inventor. Galileo's dialogues and polemical
writings were literary masterpieces which had a lasting influence on
Theaetetus, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Some dialogues of Plato are of so various a character that their relation to the other dialogues cannot be determined with any degree of certainty. The Theaetetus, like the Parmenides, has points of similarity both with his earlier and his later writings. The perfection of style, the humour, the dramatic interest, the complexity of structure, the fertility of illustration, the shifting of the points of view, are characteristic of his best period of authorship. The vain search, the negative conclusion, the figure of the midwives, the constant profession of ignorance on the part of Socrates, also bear the stamp of the early dialogues, in which the original Socrates is not yet Platonized. Had we no other indications, we should be disposed to range the Theaetetus with the Apology and the Phaedrus, and perhaps even with the Protagoras and the Laches.
But when we pass from the style to an examination of the subject, we trace a connection with the later rather than with the earlier dialogues. In the first place there is the connexion, indicated by Plato himself at the end of the dialogue, with the Sophist, to which in many respects the Theaetetus is so little akin. (1) The same persons reappear, including the younger Socrates, whose name is just mentioned in the Theaetetus; (2) the theory of rest, which Socrates has declined to consider, is resumed by the Eleatic Stranger; (3) there is a similar allusion in both dialogues to the meeting of Parmenides and Socrates (Theaet., Soph.); and (4) the inquiry into not-being in the Sophist supplements the question of false opinion which is raised in the Theaetetus. (Compare also Theaet. and Soph. for parallel turns of thought.) Secondly, the later date of the dialogue is confirmed by the absence of the doctrine of recollection and of any doctrine of ideas except that which derives them from generalization and from reflection of the mind upon itself. The general character of the Theaetetus is dialectical, and there are traces of the same Megarian influences which appear in the Parmenides, and which later writers, in their matter of fact way, have explained by the residence of Plato at Megara. Socrates disclaims the character of a professional eristic, and also, with a sort of ironical admiration, expresses his inability to attain the Megarian precision in the use of terms. Yet he too employs a similar sophistical skill in overturning every conceivable theory of knowledge.
The direct indications of a date amount to no more than this: the conversation is said to have taken place when Theaetetus was a youth, and shortly before the death of Socrates. At the time of his own death he is supposed to be a full-grown man. Allowing nine or ten years for the interval between youth and manhood, the dialogue could not have been written earlier than 390, when Plato was about thirty-nine years of age. No more definite date is indicated by the engagement in which Theaetetus is said to have fallen or to have been wounded, and which may have taken place any time during the Corinthian war, between the years 390-387. The later date which has been suggested, 369, when the Athenians and Lacedaemonians disputed the Isthmus with Epaminondas, would make the age of Theaetetus at his death forty-five or forty-six. This a little impairs the beauty of Socrates' remark, that 'he would be a great man if he lived.'
In this uncertainty about the place of the Theaetetus, it seemed better, as in the case of the Republic, Timaeus, Critias, to retain the order in which Plato himself has arranged this and the two companion dialogues. We cannot exclude the possibility which has been already noticed in reference to other works of Plato, that the Theaetetus may not have been all written continuously; or the probability that the Sophist and Politicus, which differ greatly in style, were only appended after a long interval of time. The allusion to Parmenides compared with the Sophist, would probably imply that the dialogue which is called by his name was already in existence; unless, indeed, we suppose the passage in which the allusion occurs to have been inserted afterwards. Again, the Theaetetus may be connected with the Gorgias, either dialogue from different points of view containing an analysis of the real and apparent (Schleiermacher); and both may be brought into relation with the Apology as illustrating the personal life of Socrates. The Philebus, too, may with equal reason be placed either after or before what, in the language of Thrasyllus, may be called the Second Platonic Trilogy. Both the Parmenides and the Sophist, and still more the Theaetetus, have points of affinity with the Cratylus, in which the principles of rest and motion are again contrasted, and the Sophistical or Protagorean theory of language is opposed to that which is attributed to the disciple of Heracleitus, not to speak of lesser resemblances in thought and language. The Parmenides, again, has been thought by some to hold an intermediate position between the Theaetetus and the Sophist; upon this view, the Sophist may be regarded as the answer to the problems about One and Being which have been raised in the Parmenides. Any of these arrangements may suggest new views to the student of Plato; none of them can lay claim to an exclusive probability in its favour.
The Theaetetus is one of the narrated dialogues of Plato, and is the only one which is supposed to have been written down. In a short introductory scene, Euclides and Terpsion are described as meeting before the door of Euclides' house in Megara. This may have been a spot familiar to Plato (for Megara was within a walk of Athens), but no importance can be attached to the accidental introduction of the founder of the Megarian philosophy. The real intention of the preface is to create an interest about the person of Theaetetus, who has just been carried up from the army at Corinth in a dying state. The expectation of his death recalls the promise of his youth, and especially the famous conversation which Socrates had with him when he was quite young, a few days before his own trial and death, as we are once more reminded at the end of the dialogue. Yet we may observe that Plato has himself forgotten this, when he represents Euclides as from time to time coming to Athens and correcting the copy from Socrates' own mouth. The narrative, having introduced Theaetetus, and having guaranteed the au thenticity of the dialogue (compare Symposium, Phaedo, Parmenides), is then dropped. No further use is made of the device. As Plato himself remarks, who in this as in some other minute points is imitated by Cicero (De Amicitia), the interlocutory words are omitted.
Theaetetus, the hero of the battle of Corinth and of the dialogue, is a disciple of Theodorus, the great geometrician, whose science is thus indicated to be the propaedeutic to philosophy. An interest has been already excited about him by his approaching death, and now he is introduced to us anew by the praises of his master Theodorus. He is a youthful Socrates, and exhibits the same contrast of the fair soul and the ungainly face and frame, the Silenus mask and the god within, which are described in the Symposium. The picture which Theodorus gives of his courage and patience and intelligence and modesty is verified in the course of the dialogue. His courage is shown by his behaviour in the battle, and his other qualities shine forth as the argument proceeds. Socrates takes an evident delight in 'the wise Theaetetus,' who has more in him than 'many bearded men'; he is quite inspired by his answers. At first the youth is lost in wonder, and is almost too modest to speak, but, encouraged by Socrates, he rises to the occasion, and grows full of interest and enthusiasm about the great question. Like a youth, he has not finally made up his mind, and is very ready to follow the lead of Socrates, and to enter into each successive phase of the discussion which turns up. His great dialectical talent is shown in his power of drawing distinctions, and of foreseeing the consequences of his own answers. The enquiry about the nature of knowledge is not new to him; long ago he has felt the 'pang of philosophy,' and has experienced the youthful intoxication which is depicted in the Philebus. But he has hitherto been unable to make the transition from mathematics to metaphysics. He can form a general conception of square and oblong numbers, but he is unable to attain a similar expression of knowledge in the abstract. Yet at length he begins to recognize that there are universal conceptions of being, likeness, sameness, number, which the mind contemplates in herself, and with the help of Socrates is conducted from a theory of sense to a theory of ideas.
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The Socrates of the Theaetetus is the same as the Socrates of the earlier dialogues. He is the invincible disputant, now advanced in years, of the Protagoras and Symposium; he is still pursuing his divine mission, his 'Herculean labours,' of which he has described the origin in the Apology; and he still hears the voice of his oracle, bidding him receive or not receive the truant souls. There he is supposed to have a mission to convict men of self-conceit; in the Theaetetus he has assigned to him by God the functions of a man-midwife, who delivers men of their thoughts, and under this character he is present throughout the dialogue. He is the true prophet who has an insight into the natures of men, and can divine their future; and he knows that sympathy is the secret power which unlocks their thoughts. The hit at Aristides, the son of Lysimachus, who was specially committed to his charge in the Laches, may be remarked by the way. The attempt to discover the definition of knowledge is in accordance with the character of Socrates as he is described in the Memorabilia, asking What is justice? what is temperance? and the like. But there is no reason to suppose that he would have analyzed the nature of perception, or traced the connexion of Protagoras and Heracleitus, or have raised the difficulty respecting false opinion. The humorous illustrations, as well as the serious thoughts, run through the dialogue. The snubnosedness of Theaetetus, a characteristic which he shares with Socrates, and the man-midwifery of Socrates, are not forgotten in the closing words. At the end of the dialogue, as in the Euthyphro, he is expecting to meet Meletus at the porch of the king Archon; but with the same indifference to the result which is everywhere displayed by him, he proposes that they shall reassemble on the following day at the same spot. The day comes, and in the Sophist the three friends again meet, but no further allusion is made to the trial, and the principal share in the argument is assigned, not to Socrates, but to an Eleatic stranger; the youthful Theaetetus also plays a different and less independent part. And there is no allusion in the Introduction to the second and third dialogues, which are afterwards appended. There seems, therefore, reason to think that there is a real change, both in the characters and in the design.
The dialogue is an enquiry into the nature of knowledge, which is interrupted by two digressions. The first is the digression about the midwives, which is also a leading thought or continuous image, like the wave in the Republic, appearing and reappearing at intervals. Again and again we are reminded that the successive conceptions of knowledge are extracted from Theaetetus, who in his turn truly declares that Socrates has got a great deal more out of him than ever was in him. Socrates is never weary of working out the image in humorous details,discerning the symptoms of labour, carrying the child round the hearth, fearing that Theaetetus will bite him, comparing his conceptions to wind-eggs, asserting an hereditary right to the occupation. There is also a serious side to the image, which is an apt similitude of the Socratic theory of education (compare Republic, Sophist), and accords with the ironical spirit in which the wisest of men delights to speak of himself.
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The greater part of the dialogue is devoted to setting up and throwing down definitions of science and knowledge. Proceeding from the lower to the higher by three stages, in which perception, opinion, reasoning are successively examined, we first get rid of the confusion of the idea of knowledge and specific kinds of knowledge,a confusion which has been already noticed in the Lysis, Laches, Meno, and other dialogues. In the infancy of logic, a form of thought has to be invented before the content can be filled up. We cannot define knowledge until the nature of definition has been ascertained. Having succeeded in making his meaning plain, Socrates proceeds to analyze (1) the first definition which Theaetetus proposes: 'Knowledge is sensible perception.' This is speedily identified with the Protagorean saying, 'Man is the measure of all things;' and of this again the foundation is discovered in the perpetual flux of Heracleitus. The relativeness of sensation is then developed at length, and for a moment the definition appears to be accepted. But soon the Protagorean thesis is pronounced to be suicidal; for the adversaries of Protagoras are as good a measure as he is, and they deny his doctrine. He is then supposed to reply that the perception may be true at any given instant. But the reply is in the end shown to be inconsistent with the Heraclitean foundation, on which the doctrine has been affirmed to rest. For if the Heraclitean flux is extended to every sort of change in every instant of time, how can any thought or word be detained even for an instant? Sensible perception, like everything else, is tumbling to pieces. Nor can Protagoras himself maintain that one man is as good as another in his knowledge of the future; and 'the expedient,' if not 'the just and true,' belongs to the sphere of the future.
And so we must ask again, What is knowledge? The comparison of sensations with one another implies a principle which is above sensation, and which resides in the mind itself. We are thus led to look for knowledge in a higher sphere, and accordingly Theaetetus, when again interrogated, replies (2) that 'knowledge is true opinion.' But how is false opinion possible? The Megarian or Eristic spirit within us revives the question, which has been already asked and indirectly answered in the Meno: 'How can a man be ignorant of that which he knows?' No answer is given to this not unanswerable question. The comparison of the mind to a block of wax, or to a decoy of birds, is found wanting.
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2. The other difficulty is a more subtle, and also a more important one, because bearing on the general character of the Platonic dialogues. On a first reading of them, we are apt to imagine that the truth is only spoken by Socrates, who is never guilty of a fallacy himself, and is the great detector of the errors and fallacies of others. But this natural presumption is disturbed by the discovery that the Sophists are sometimes in the right and Socrates in the wrong. Like the hero of a novel, he is not to be supposed always to represent the sentiments of the author. There are few modern readers who do not side with Protagoras, rather than with Socrates, in the dialogue which is called by his name. The Cratylus presents a similar difficulty: in his etymologies, as in the number of the State, we cannot tell how far Socrates is serious; for the Socratic irony will not allow him to distinguish between his real and his assumed wisdom. No one is the superior of the invincible Socrates in argument (except in the first part of the Parmenides, where he is introduced as a youth); but he is by no means supposed to be in possession of the whole truth. Arguments are often put into his mouth (compare Introduction to the Gorgias) which must have seemed quite as untenable to Plato as to a modern writer. In this dialogue a great part of the answer of Protagoras is just and sound; remarks are made by him on verbal criticism, and on the importance of understanding an opponent's meaning, which are conceived in the true spirit of philosophy. And the distinction which he is supposed to draw between Eristic and Dialectic, is really a criticism of Plato on himself and his own criticism of Protagoras.
The difficulty seems to arise from not attending to the dramatic character of the writings of Plato. There are two, or more, sides to questions; and these are parted among the different speakers. Sometimes one view or aspect of a question is made to predominate over the rest, as in the Gorgias or Sophist; but in other dialogues truth is divided, as in the Laches and Protagoras, and the interest of the piece consists in the contrast of opinions. The confusion caused by the irony of Socrates, who, if he is true to his character, cannot say anything of his own knowledge, is increased by the circumstance that in the Theaetetus and some other dialogues he is occasionally playing both parts himself, and even charging his own arguments with unfairness. In the Theaetetus he is designedly held back from arriving at a conclusion. For we cannot suppose that Plato conceived a definition of knowledge to be impossible. But this is his manner of approaching and surrounding a question. The lights which he throws on his subject are indirect, but they are not the less real for that. He has no intention of proving a thesis by a cut-and-dried argument; nor does he imagine that a great philosophical problem can be tied up within the limits of a definition. If he has analyzed a proposition or notion, even with the severity of an impossible logic, if half-truths have been compared by him with other half-truths, if he has cleared up or advanced popular ideas, or illustrated a new method, his aim has been sufficiently accomplished.
The writings of Plato belong to an age in which the power of analysis had outrun the means of knowledge; and through a spurious use of dialectic, the distinctions which had been already 'won from the void and formless infinite,' seemed to be rapidly returning to their original chaos. The two great speculative philosophies, which a century earlier had so deeply impressed the mind of Hellas, were now degenerating into Eristic. The contemporaries of Plato and Socrates were vainly trying to find new combinations of them, or to transfer them from the object to the subject. The Megarians, in their first attempts to attain a severer logic, were making knowledge impossible (compare Theaet.). They were asserting 'the one good under many names,' and, like the Cynics, seem to have denied predication, while the Cynics themselves were depriving virtue of all which made virtue desirable in the eyes of Socrates and Plato. And besides these, we find mention in the later writings of Plato, especially in the Theaetetus, Sophist, and Laws, of certain impenetrable godless persons, who will not believe what they 'cannot hold in their hands'; and cannot be approached in argument, because they cannot argue (Theat; Soph.). No school of Greek philosophers exactly answers to these persons, in whom Plato may perhaps have blended some features of the Atomists with the vulgar materialistic tendencies of mankind in general (compare Introduction to the Sophist).
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In ancient philosophies the analysis of the mind is still rudimentary and imperfect. It naturally began with an effort to disengage the universal from sensethis was the first lifting up of the mist. It wavered between object and subject, passing imperceptibly from one or Being to mind and thought. Appearance in the outward object was for a time indistinguishable from opinion in the subject. At length mankind spoke of knowing as well as of opining or perceiving. But when the word 'knowledge' was found how was it to be explained or defined? It was not an error, it was a step in the right direction, when Protagoras said that 'Man is the measure of all things,' and that 'All knowledge is perception.' This was the subjective which corresponded to the objective 'All is flux.' But the thoughts of men deepened, and soon they began to be aware that knowledge was neither sense, nor yet opinionwith or without explanation; nor the expression of thought, nor the enumeration of parts, nor the addition of characteristic marks. Motion and rest were equally ill adapted to express its nature, although both must in some sense be attri buted to it; it might be described more truly as the mind conversing with herself; the discourse of reason; the hymn of dialectic, the science of relations, of ideas, of the so-called arts and sciences, of the one, of the good, of the all:this is the way along which Plato is leading us in his later dialogues. In its higher signification it was the knowledge, not of men, but of gods, perfect and all sufficing:like other ideals always passing out of sight, and nevertheless present to the mind of Aristotle as well as Plato, and the reality to which they were both tending. For Aristotle as well as Plato would in modern phraseology have been termed a mystic; and like him would have defined the higher philosophy to be 'Knowledge of being or essence,'words to which in our own day we have a difficulty in attaching a meaning.
Yet, in spite of Plato and his followers, mankind have again and again returned to a sensational philosophy. As to some of the early thinkers, amid the fleetings of sensible objects, ideas alone seemed to be fixed, so to a later generation amid the fluctuation of philosophical opinions the only fixed points appeared to be outward objects. Any pretence of knowledge which went beyond them implied logical processes, of the correctness of which they had no assurance and which at best were only probable. The mind, tired of wandering, sought to rest on firm ground; when the idols of philosophy and language were stripped off, the perception of outward objects alone remained. The ancient Epicureans never asked whether the comparison of these with one another did not involve principles of another kind which were above and beyond them. In like manner the modern inductive philosophy forgot to enquire into the meaning of experience, and did not attempt to form a conception of outward objects apart from the mind, or of the mind apart from them. Soon objects of sense were merged in sensations and feelings, but feelings and sensations were still unanalyzed. At last we return to the doctrine attri buted by Plato to Protagoras, that the mind is only a succession of momentary perceptions. At this point the modern philosophy of experience forms an alliance with ancient scepticism.
The Dwellings of the Philosophers, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
(20) Jacques Tesson or Le Tesson, Le grand et Excellent Oeuvre des Sages, contenant trois traits ou dialogues: dialogues du
Lyon verd, du grand theriaque et du Regime. Ms. Of the 17th century; Lyon Library, #971, p. 900.
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develops it according to his fantasy. The Cosmopolite resumes the familiar dialogues of the
medieval period and is inspired by Jehan de Meung (18) . More modem, Cyliani hides the
Timaeus, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
A greater danger with modern interpreters of Plato is the tendency to regard the Timaeus as the centre of his system. We do not know how Plato would have arranged his own dialogues, or whether the thought of arranging any of them, besides the two 'Trilogies' which he has expressly connected; was ever present to his mind. But, if he had arranged them, there are many indications that this is not the place which he would have assigned to the Timaeus. We observe, first of all, that the dialogue is put into the mouth of a Pythagorean philosopher, and not of Socrates. And this is required by dramatic propriety; for the investigation of nature was expressly renounced by Socrates in the Phaedo. Nor does Plato himself attribute any importance to his guesses at science. He is not at all absorbed by them, as he is by the IDEA of good. He is modest and hesitating, and confesses that his words partake of the uncertainty of the subject (Tim.). The dialogue is primarily concerned with the animal creation, including under this term the heavenly bodies, and with man only as one among the animals. But we can hardly suppose that Plato would have preferred the study of nature to man, or that he would have deemed the formation of the world and the human frame to have the same interest which he ascribes to the mystery of being and not-being, or to the great political problems which he discusses in the Republic and the Laws. There are no speculations on physics in the other dialogues of Plato, and he himself regards the consideration of them as a rational pastime only. He is beginning to feel the need of further divisions of knowledge; and is becoming aware that besides dialectic, mathematics, and the arts, there is another field which has been hitherto unexplored by him. But he has not as yet defined this intermediate territory which lies somewhere between medicine and mathematics, and he would have felt that there was as great an impiety in ranking theories of physics first in the order of knowledge, as in placing the body before the soul.
It is true, however, that the Timaeus is by no means confined to speculations on physics. The deeper foundations of the Platonic philosophy, such as the nature of God, the distinction of the sensible and intellectual, the great original conceptions of time and space, also appear in it. They are found principally in the first half of the dialogue. The construction of the heavens is for the most part ideal; the cyclic year serves as the connection between the world of absolute being and of generation, just as the number of population in the Republic is the expression or symbol of the transition from the ideal to the actual state. In some passages we are uncertain whether we are reading a description of astronomical facts or contemplating processes of the human mind, or of that divine mind (Phil.) which in Plato is hardly separable from it. The characteristics of man are transferred to the world-animal, as for example when intelligence and knowledge are said to be perfected by the circle of the Same, and true opinion by the circle of the Other; and conversely the motions of the world-animal reappear in man; its amorphous state continues in the child, and in both disorder and chaos are gradually succeeded by stability and order. It is not however to passages like these that Plato is referring when he speaks of the uncertainty of his subject, but rather to the composition of bodies, to the relations of colours, the nature of diseases, and the like, about which he truly feels the lamentable ignorance prevailing in his own age.
We are led by Plato himself to regard the Timaeus, not as the centre or inmost shrine of the edifice, but as a detached building in a different style, framed, not after the Socratic, but after some Pythagorean model. As in the Cratylus and Parmenides, we are uncertain whether Plato is expressing his own opinions, or appropriating and perhaps improving the philosophical speculations of others. In all three dialogues he is exerting his dramatic and imitative power; in the Cratylus mingling a satirical and humorous purpose with true principles of language; in the Parmenides overthrowing Megarianism by a sort of ultra-Megarianism, which discovers contradictions in the one as great as those which have been previously shown to exist in the ideas. There is a similar uncertainty about the Timaeus; in the first part he scales the heights of transcendentalism, in the latter part he treats in a bald and superficial manner of the functions and diseases of the human frame. He uses the thoughts and almost the words of Parmenides when he discourses of being and of essence, adopting from old religion into philosophy the conception of God, and from the Megarians the IDEA of good. He agrees with Empedocles and the Atomists in attri buting the greater differences of kinds to the figures of the elements and their movements into and out of one another. With Heracleitus, he acknowledges the perpetual flux; like Anaxagoras, he asserts the predominance of mind, although admitting an element of necessity which reason is incapable of subduing; like the Pythagoreans he supposes the mystery of the world to be contained in number. Many, if not all the elements of the Pre-Socratic philosophy are included in the Timaeus. It is a composite or eclectic work of imagination, in which Plato, without naming them, gathers up into a kind of system the various elements of philosophy which preceded him.
If we allow for the difference of subject, and for some growth in Plato's own mind, the discrepancy between the Timaeus and the other dialogues will not appear to be great. It is probable that the relation of the ideas to God or of God to the world was differently conceived by him at different times of his life. In all his later dialogues we observe a tendency in him to personify mind or God, and he therefore naturally inclines to view creation as the work of design. The creator is like a human artist who frames in his mind a plan which he executes by the help of his servants. Thus the language of philosophy which speaks of first and second causes is crossed by another sort of phraseology: 'God made the world because he was good, and the demons ministered to him.' The Timaeus is cast in a more theological and less philosophical mould than the other dialogues, but the same general spirit is apparent; there is the same dualism or opposition between the ideal and actualthe soul is prior to the body, the intelligible and unseen to the visible and corporeal. There is the same distinction between knowledge and opinion which occurs in the Theaetetus and Republic, the same enmity to the poets, the same combination of music and gymnastics. The doctrine of transmigration is still held by him, as in the Phaedrus and Republic; and the soul has a view of the heavens in a prior state of being. The ideas also remain, but they have become types in nature, forms of men, animals, birds, fishes. And the attri bution of evil to physical causes accords with the doctrine which he maintains in the Laws respecting the involuntariness of vice.
The style and plan of the Timaeus differ greatly from that of any other of the Platonic dialogues. The language is weighty, abrupt, and in some passages sublime. But Plato has not the same mastery over his instrument which he exhibits in the Phaedrus or Symposium. Nothing can exceed the beauty or art of the introduction, in which he is using words after his accustomed manner. But in the rest of the work the power of language seems to fail him, and the dramatic form is wholly given up. He could write in one style, but not in another, and the Greek language had not as yet been fashioned by any poet or philosopher to describe physical phenomena. The early physiologists had generally written in verse; the prose writers, like Democritus and Anaxagoras, as far as we can judge from their fragments, never attained to a periodic style. And hence we find the same sort of clumsiness in the Timaeus of Plato which characterizes the philosophical poem of Lucretius. There is a want of flow and often a defect of rhythm; the meaning is sometimes obscure, and there is a greater use of apposition and more of repetition than occurs in Plato's earlier writings. The sentences are less closely connected and also more involved; the antecedents of demonstrative and relative pronouns are in some cases remote and perplexing. The greater frequency of participles and of absolute constructions gives the effect of heaviness. The descriptive portion of the Timaeus retains traces of the first Greek prose composition; for the great master of language was speaking on a theme with which he was imperfectly acquainted, and had no words in which to express his meaning. The rugged grandeur of the opening discourse of Timaeus may be compared with the more harmonious beauty of a similar passage in the Phaedrus.
To the same cause we may attri bute the want of plan. Plato had not the comm and of his materials which would have enabled him to produce a perfect work of art. Hence there are several new beginnings and resumptions and formal or artificial connections; we miss the 'callida junctura' of the earlier dialogues. His speculations about the Eternal, his theories of creation, his mathematical anticipations, are supplemented by desultory remarks on the one immortal and the two mortal souls of man, on the functions of the bodily organs in health and disease, on sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. He soars into the heavens, and then, as if his wings were suddenly clipped, he walks ungracefully and with difficulty upon the earth. The greatest things in the world, and the least things in man, are brought within the compass of a short treatise. But the intermediate links are missing, and we cannot be surprised that there should be a want of unity in a work which embraces astronomy, theology, physiology, and natural philosophy in a few pages.
It is not easy to determine how Plato's cosmos may be presented to the reader in a clearer and shorter form; or how we may supply a thread of connexion to his ideas without giving greater consistency to them than they possessed in his mind, or adding on consequences which would never have occurred to him. For he has glimpses of the truth, but no comprehensive or perfect vision. There are isolated expressions about the nature of God which have a wonderful depth and power; but we are not justified in assuming that these had any greater significance to the mind of Plato than language of a neutral and impersonal character... With a view to the illustration of the Timaeus I propose to divide this Introduction into sections, of which the first will contain an outline of the dialogue: (2) I shall consider the aspects of nature which presented themselves to Plato and his age, and the elements of philosophy which entered into the conception of them: (3) the theology and physics of the Timaeus, including the soul of the world, the conception of time and space, and the composition of the elements: (4) in the fourth section I shall consider the Platonic astronomy, and the position of the earth. There will remain, (5) the psychology, (6) the physiology of Plato, and (7) his analysis of the senses to be briefly commented upon: (8) lastly, we may examine in what points Plato approaches or anticipates the discoveries of modern science.
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There was one more illusion to which the ancient philosophers were subject, and against which Plato in his later dialogues seems to be strugglingthe tendency to mere abstractions; not perceiving that pure abstraction is only negation, they thought that the greater the abstraction the greater the truth. Behind any pair of ideas a new idea which comprehended themthe (Greek), as it was technically termedbegan at once to appear. Two are truer than three, one than two. The words 'being,' or 'unity,' or essence,' or 'good,' became sacred to them. They did not see that they had a word only, and in one sense the most unmeaning of words. They did not understand that the content of notions is in inverse proportion to their universalitythe element which is the most widely diffused is also the thinnest; or, in the language of the common logic, the greater the extension the less the comprehension. But this vacant idea of a whole without parts, of a subject without predicates, a rest without motion, has been also the most fruitful of all ideas. It is the beginning of a priori thought, and indeed of thinking at all. Men were led to conceive it, not by a love of hasty generalization, but by a divine instinct, a dialectical enthusiasm, in which the human faculties seemed to yearn for enlargement. We know that 'being' is only the verb of existence, the copula, the most general symbol of relation, the first and most meagre of abstractions; but to some of the ancient philosophers this little word appeared to attain divine proportions, and to comprehend all truth. Being or essence, and similar words, represented to them a supreme or divine being, in which they thought that they found the containing and continuing principle of the universe. In a few years the human mind was peopled with abstractions; a new world was called into existence to give law and order to the old. But between them there was still a gulf, and no one could pass from the one to the other.
Number and figure were the greatest instruments of thought which were possessed by the Greek philosopher; having the same power over the mind which was exerted by abstract ideas, they were also capable of practical application. Many curious and, to the early thinker, mysterious properties of them came to light when they were compared with one another. They admitted of infinite multiplication and construction; in Pythagorean triangles or in proportions of 1:2:4:8 and 1:3:9:27, or compounds of them, the laws of the world seemed to be more than half revealed. They were also capable of infinite subdivisiona wonder and also a puzzle to the ancient thinker (Rep.). They were not, like being or essence, mere vacant abstractions, but admitted of progress and growth, while at the same time they confirmed a higher sentiment of the mind, that there was order in the universe. And so there began to be a real sympathy between the world within and the world without. The numbers and figures which were present to the mind's eye became visible to the eye of sense; the truth of nature was mathematics; the other properties of objects seemed to reappear only in the light of number. Law and morality also found a natural expression in number and figure. Instruments of such power and elasticity could not fail to be 'a most gracious assistance' to the first efforts of human intelligence.
--
A further study of the Timaeus suggests some after-thoughts which may be conveniently brought together in this place. The topics which I propose briefly to reconsider are (a) the relation of the Timaeus to the other dialogues of Plato and to the previous philosophy; (b) the nature of God and of creation (c) the morality of the Timaeus:
(a) The Timaeus is more imaginative and less scientific than any other of the Platonic dialogues. It is conjectural astronomy, conjectural natural philosophy, conjectural medicine. The writer himself is constantly repeating that he is speaking what is probable only. The dialogue is put into the mouth of Timaeus, a Pythagorean philosopher, and therefore here, as in the Parmenides, we are in doubt how far Plato is expressing his own sentiments. Hence the connexion with the other dialogues is comparatively slight. We may fill up the lacunae of the Timaeus by the help of the Republic or Phaedrus: we may identify the same and other with the (Greek) of the Philebus. We may find in the Laws or in the Statesman parallels with the account of creation and of the first origin of man. It would be possible to frame a scheme in which all these various elements might have a place. But such a mode of proceeding would be unsatisfactory, because we have no reason to suppose that Plato intended his scattered thoughts to be collected in a system. There is a common spirit in his writings, and there are certain general principles, such as the opposition of the sensible and intellectual, and the priority of mind, which run through all of them; but he has no definite forms of words in which he consistently expresses himself. While the determinations of human thought are in process of creation he is necessarily tentative and uncertain. And there is least of definiteness, whenever either in describing the beginning or the end of the world, he has recourse to myths. These are not the fixed modes in which spiritual truths are revealed to him, but the efforts of imagination, by which at different times and in various manners he seeks to embody his conceptions. The clouds of mythology are still resting upon him, and he has not yet pierced 'to the heaven of the fixed stars' which is beyond them. It is safer then to admit the inconsistencies of the Timaeus, or to endeavour to fill up what is wanting from our own imagination, inspired by a study of the dialogue, than to refer to other Platonic writings,and still less should we refer to the successors of Plato,for the elucidation of it.
More light is thrown upon the Timaeus by a comparison of the previous philosophies. For the physical science of the ancients was traditional, descending through many generations of Ionian and Pythagorean philosophers. Plato does not look out upon the heavens and describe what he sees in them, but he builds upon the foundations of others, adding something out of the 'depths of his own self-consciousness.' Socrates had already spoken of God the creator, who made all things for the best. While he ridiculed the superficial explanations of phenomena which were current in his age, he recognised the marks both of benevolence and of design in the frame of man and in the world. The apparatus of winds and waters is contemptuously rejected by him in the Phaedo, but he thinks that there is a power greater than that of any Atlas in the 'Best' (Phaedo; Arist. Met.). Plato, following his master, affirms this principle of the best, but he acknowledges that the best is limited by the conditions of matter. In the generation before Socrates, Anaxagoras had brought together 'Chaos' and 'Mind'; and these are connected by Plato in the Timaeus, but in accordance with his own mode of thinking he has interposed between them the idea or pattern according to which mind worked. The circular impulse (Greek) of the one philosopher answers to the circular movement (Greek) of the other. But unlike Anaxagoras, Plato made the sun and stars living beings and not masses of earth or metal. The Pythagoreans again had framed a world out of numbers, which they constructed into figures. Plato adopted their speculations and improved upon them by a more exact knowledge of geometry. The Atomists too made the world, if not out of geometrical figures, at least out of different forms of atoms, and these atoms resembled the triangles of Plato in being too small to be visible. But though the physiology of the Timaeus is partly borrowed from them, they are either ignored by Plato or referred to with a secret contempt and dislike. He looks with more favour on the Pythagoreans, whose intervals of number applied to the distances of the planets reappear in the Timaeus. It is probable that among the Pythagoreans living in the fourth century B.C., there were already some who, like Plato, made the earth their centre. Whether he obtained his circles of the Same and Other from any previous thinker is uncertain. The four elements are taken from Empedocles; the interstices of the Timaeus may also be compared with his (Greek). The passage of one element into another is common to Heracleitus and several of the Ionian philosophers. So much of a syncretist is Plato, though not after the manner of the Neoplatonists. For the elements which he borrows from others are fused and transformed by his own genius. On the other hand we find fewer traces in Plato of early Ionic or Eleatic speculation. He does not imagine the world of sense to be made up of opposites or to be in a perpetual flux, but to vary within certain limits which are controlled by what he calls the principle of the same. Unlike the Eleatics, who relegated the world to the sphere of not-being, he admits creation to have an existence which is real and even eternal, although dependent on the will of the creator. Instead of maintaining the doctrine that the void has a necessary place in the existence of the world, he rather affirms the modern thesis that nature abhors a vacuum, as in the Sophist he also denies the reality of not-being (Aristot. Metaph.). But though in these respects he differs from them, he is deeply penetrated by the spirit of their philosophy; he differs from them with reluctance, and gladly recognizes the 'generous depth' of Parmenides (Theaet.).
--
Lastly, Plato, though an idealist philosopher, is Greek and not Oriental in spirit and feeling. He is no mystic or ascetic; he is not seeking in vain to get rid of matter or to find absorption in the divine nature, or in the Soul of the universe. And therefore we are not surprised to find that his philosophy in the Timaeus returns at last to a worship of the heavens, and that to him, as to other Greeks, nature, though containing a remnant of evil, is still glorious and divine. He takes away or drops the veil of mythology, and presents her to us in what appears to him to be the form-fairer and truer farof mathematical figures. It is this element in the Timaeus, no less than its affinity to certain Pythagorean speculations, which gives it a character not wholly in accordance with the other dialogues of Plato.
(b) The Timaeus contains an assertion perhaps more distinct than is found in any of the other dialogues (Rep.; Laws) of the goodness of God. 'He was good himself, and he fashioned the good everywhere.' He was not 'a jealous God,' and therefore he desired that all other things should be equally good. He is the IDEA of good who has now become a person, and speaks and is spoken of as God. Yet his personality seems to appear only in the act of creation. In so far as he works with his eye fixed upon an eternal pattern he is like the human artificer in the Republic. Here the theory of Platonic ideas intrudes upon us. God, like man, is supposed to have an ideal of which Plato is unable to tell us the origin. He may be said, in the language of modern philosophy, to resolve the divine mind into subject and object.
The first work of creation is perfected, the second begins under the direction of inferior ministers. The supreme God is withdrawn from the world and returns to his own accustomed nature (Tim.). As in the Statesman, he retires to his place of view. So early did the Epicurean doctrine take possession of the Greek mind, and so natural is it to the heart of man, when he has once passed out of the stage of mythology into that of rational religion. For he sees the marks of design in the world; but he no longer sees or fancies that he sees God walking in the garden or haunting stream or mountain. He feels also that he must put God as far as possible out of the way of evil, and therefore he banishes him from an evil world. Plato is sensible of the difficulty; and he often shows that he is desirous of justifying the ways of God to man. Yet on the other hand, in the Tenth Book of the Laws he passes a censure on those who say that the Gods have no care of human things.
--
One more aspect of the Timaeus remains to be consideredthe mythological or geographical. Is it not a wonderful thing that a few pages of one of Plato's dialogues have grown into a great legend, not confined to Greece only, but spreading far and wide over the nations of Europe and reaching even to Egypt and Asia? Like the tale of Troy, or the legend of the Ten Tribes (Ewald, Hist. of Isr.), which perhaps originated in a few verses of II Esdras, it has become famous, because it has coincided with a great historical fact. Like the romance of King Arthur, which has had so great a charm, it has found a way over the seas from one country and language to another. It inspired the navigators of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; it foreshadowed the discovery of America. It realized the fiction so natural to the human mind, because it answered the enquiry about the origin of the arts, that there had somewhere existed an ancient primitive civilization. It might find a place wherever men chose to look for it; in North, South, East, or West; in the Islands of the Blest; before the entrance of the Straits of Gibraltar, in Sweden or in Palestine. It mattered little whether the description in Plato agreed with the locality assigned to it or not. It was a legend so adapted to the human mind that it made a habitation for itself in any country. It was an island in the clouds, which might be seen anywhere by the eye of faith. It was a subject especially congenial to the ponderous industry of certain French and Swedish writers, who delighted in heaping up learning of all sorts but were incapable of using it.
M. Martin has written a valuable dissertation on the opinions entertained respecting the Island of Atlantis in ancient and modern times. It is a curious chapter in the history of the human mind. The tale of Atlantis is the fabric of a vision, but it has never ceased to interest mankind. It was variously regarded by the ancients themselves. The stronger heads among them, like Strabo and Longinus, were as little disposed to believe in the truth of it as the modern reader in Gulliver or Robinson Crusoe. On the other hand there is no kind or degree of absurdity or fancy in which the more foolish writers, both of antiquity and of modern times, have not indulged respecting it. The Neo-Platonists, loyal to their master, like some commentators on the Christian Scriptures, sought to give an allegorical meaning to what they also believed to be an historical fact. It was as if some one in our own day were to convert the poems of Homer into an allegory of the Christian religion, at the same time maintaining them to be an exact and veritable history. In the Middle Ages the legend seems to have been half-forgotten until revived by the discovery of America. It helped to form the Utopia of Sir Thomas More and the New Atlantis of Bacon, although probably neither of those great men were at all imposed upon by the fiction. It was most prolific in the seventeenth or in the early part of the eighteenth century, when the human mind, seeking for Utopias or inventing them, was glad to escape out of the dulness of the present into the romance of the past or some ideal of the future. The later forms of such narratives contained features taken from the Edda, as well as from the Old and New Testament; also from the tales of missionaries and the experiences of travellers and of colonists.
--
From the garden of the Timaeus, as from the other dialogues of Plato, we may still gather a few flowers and present them at parting to the reader. There is nothing in Plato grander and simpler than the conversation between Solon and the Egyptian priest, in which the youthfulness of Hellas is contrasted with the antiquity of Egypt. Here are to be found the famous words, 'O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are ever young, and there is not an old man among you'which may be compared to the lively saying of Hegel, that 'Greek history began with the youth Achilles and left off with the youth Alexander.' The numerous arts of verisimilitude by which Plato insinuates into the mind of the reader the truth of his narrative have been already referred to. Here occur a sentence or two not wanting in Platonic irony (Greeka word to the wise). 'To know or tell the origin of the other divinities is beyond us, and we must accept the traditions of the men of old time who affirm themselves to be the offspring of the Godsthat is what they sayand they must surely have known their own ancestors. How can we doubt the word of the children of the Gods? Although they give no probable or certain proofs, still, as they declare that they are speaking of what took place in their own family, we must conform to custom and believe them.' 'Our creators well knew that women and other animals would some day be framed out of men, and they further knew that many animals would require the use of nails for many purposes; wherefore they fashioned in men at their first creation the rudiments of nails.' Or once more, let us reflect on two serious passages in which the order of the world is supposed to find a place in the human soul and to infuse harmony into it. 'The soul, when touching anything that has essence, whether dispersed in parts or undivided, is stirred through all her powers to declare the sameness or difference of that thing and some other; and to what individuals are related, and by what affected, and in what way and how and when, both in the world of generation and in the world of immutable being. And when reason, which works with equal truth, whether she be in the circle of the diverse or of the same,in voiceless silence holding her onward course in the sphere of the self-moved,when reason, I say, is hovering around the sensible world, and when the circle of the diverse also moving truly imparts the intimations of sense to the whole soul, then arise opinions and beliefs sure and certain. But when reason is concerned with the rational, and the circle of the same moving smoothly declares it, then intelligence and knowledge are necessarily perfected;' where, proceeding in a similar path of contemplation, he supposes the inward and the outer world mutually to imply each other. 'God invented and gave us sight to the end that we might behold the courses of intelligence in the heaven, and apply them to the courses of our own intelligence which are akin to them, the unperturbed to the perturbed; and that we, learning them and partaking of the natural truth of reason, might imitate the absolutely unerring courses of God and regulate our own vagaries.' Or let us weigh carefully some other profound thoughts, such as the following. 'He who neglects education walks lame to the end of his life, and returns imperfect and good for nothing to the world below.' 'The father and maker of all this universe is past finding out; and even if we found him, to tell of him to all men would be impossible.' 'Let me tell you then why the Creator made this world of generation. He was good, and the good can never have jealousy of anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all things should be as like himself as they could be. This is in the truest sense the origin of creation and of the world, as we shall do well in believing on the testimony of wise men: God desired that all things should be good and nothing bad, so far as this was attainable.' This is the leading thought in the Timaeus, just as the IDEA of Good is the leading thought of the Republic, the one expression describing the personal, the other the impersonal Good or God, differing in form rather than in substance, and both equally implying to the mind of Plato a divine reality. The slight touch, perhaps ironical, contained in the words, 'as we shall do well in believing on the testimony of wise men,' is very characteristic of Plato.
TIMAEUS.
--- Overview of noun dialogue
The noun dialogue has 4 senses (first 3 from tagged texts)
1. (3) dialogue, dialog, duologue ::: (a conversation between two persons)
2. (2) dialogue, dialog ::: (the lines spoken by characters in drama or fiction)
3. (2) dialogue, dialog ::: (a literary composition in the form of a conversation between two people; "he has read Plato's Dialogues in the original Greek")
4. negotiation, dialogue, talks ::: (a discussion intended to produce an agreement; "the buyout negotiation lasted several days"; "they disagreed but kept an open dialogue"; "talks between Israelis and Palestinians")
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun dialogue
4 senses of dialogue
Sense 1
dialogue, dialog, duologue
=> talk, talking
=> conversation
=> speech, speech communication, spoken communication, spoken language, language, voice communication, oral communication
=> auditory communication
=> communication
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 2
dialogue, dialog
=> script, book, playscript
=> dramatic composition, dramatic work
=> writing, written material, piece of writing
=> written communication, written language, black and white
=> communication
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 3
dialogue, dialog
=> literary composition, literary work
=> writing, written material, piece of writing
=> written communication, written language, black and white
=> communication
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
Sense 4
negotiation, dialogue, talks
=> discussion, give-and-take, word
=> speech, speech communication, spoken communication, spoken language, language, voice communication, oral communication
=> auditory communication
=> communication
=> abstraction, abstract entity
=> entity
--- Hyponyms of noun dialogue
2 of 4 senses of dialogue
Sense 2
dialogue, dialog
=> duologue
Sense 4
negotiation, dialogue, talks
=> parley
=> diplomacy, diplomatic negotiations
=> bargaining
=> collective bargaining
=> horse trading
=> mediation
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun dialogue
4 senses of dialogue
Sense 1
dialogue, dialog, duologue
=> talk, talking
Sense 2
dialogue, dialog
=> script, book, playscript
Sense 3
dialogue, dialog
=> literary composition, literary work
Sense 4
negotiation, dialogue, talks
=> discussion, give-and-take, word
--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun dialogue
4 senses of dialogue
Sense 1
dialogue, dialog, duologue
-> talk, talking
=> cant, pious platitude
=> dialogue, dialog, duologue
=> heart-to-heart
=> shmooze
=> shop talk
=> wind, malarkey, malarky, idle words, jazz, nothingness
=> yak, yack, yakety-yak, chatter, cackle
Sense 2
dialogue, dialog
-> script, book, playscript
=> promptbook, prompt copy
=> continuity
=> dialogue, dialog
=> libretto
=> scenario
=> screenplay
=> shooting script
Sense 3
dialogue, dialog
-> literary composition, literary work
=> acrostic
=> belles-lettres, belles lettres
=> dialogue, dialog
=> fiction
=> fictionalization, fictionalisation
=> hagiology
=> lucubration
=> pastoral
=> poem, verse form
=> potboiler
=> tushery
Sense 4
negotiation, dialogue, talks
-> discussion, give-and-take, word
=> argument, argumentation, debate
=> deliberation
=> conference, group discussion
=> panel discussion
=> postmortem, post-mortem
=> public discussion, ventilation
=> negotiation, dialogue, talks
--- Grep of noun dialogue
dialogue
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https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Primacy_of_the_Roman_Pontiff#Joint_International_Commission_for_Theological_Dialogue
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Religious_pluralism#Interfaith_dialogue
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Integral World - Violence Dialogue Response, Elliot Benjamin
Integral World - The Quantum Mind, Closing the Gap between Concrete Reality and Subjective Experience, Brandon Gillett and David Lane in Dialogue
Integral World - NOTHING SPECIAL: More Dialogue with Gerry Goddard, essay by Andrew Smith
Esoteric Jazz: Pat Martino in Dialogue
The History of Voice Dialogue
selforum - east west dialogue and exchange_23
selforum - dialogue with death
selforum - albuquerques imaginary dialogue with
selforum - religion and science dialogue is slowly
Psychology Wiki - Dialogue
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fr/Dialogue
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Laconic/Dialogue
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/XanthippicDialogues
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BilingualDialogue
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CasualDangerDialogue
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Dialogue
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DialogueReversal
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DialogueTree
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FacialDialogue
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FeaturelessPlaneOfDisembodiedDialogue
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FinishDialogueInUnison
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InflationaryDialogue
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InstructionalDialogue
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InverseDialogueDeathRule
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LittleProfessorDialogue
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MadLibsDialogue
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoDialogueEpisode
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneDialogueTwoConversations
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SlidingScaleOfVisualsVersusDialogue
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TrickDialogue
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TwoScenesOneDialogue
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Nl/Dialogue
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Sandbox/Dialogue
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/AutomatedDialogueRecording
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Webcomic/InnerDialogue
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dialogue_Concerning_the_Two_Chief_World_Systems
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Laws_(dialogue)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Systeme_of_the_World:_in_Four_Dialogues
ZZZap! (1993 - 2001) - An award-winning confection aimed at young children, both deaf and hearing, and presented in the form of a comic - something like a cross between Vision On and The Dandy. The humour is broadly slapstick in nature and performed without dialogue, just grunts and exclamations, with words flashing on th...
Space: Above and Beyond (1995 - 1996) - Set in the future follows some intergalactic marine/pilots who are protecting earth from an alien raceand earth created AIs. Much if it set on a mothership with them flying to planets or refinery type complexes. The show had some good space and combat sequences. The dialogues between the marines wa...
Tiny Planets (2001 - 2002) - Tiny Planets is a British television series created by Casey Dobie. The television series consists of 65 five-minute dialogue-free episodes featuring two small furry aliens travelling their universe solving a specific problem each episode. It is actively licensed worldwide for broadcast and video di...
Devil Hunter Yohko (1990 - 1995) - an anime series created by Madhouse, produced by Toho, and released in North America by ADV Films in their first release.. is about a boy-crazy sixteen-year-old girl named Yohko Mano who banishes demons from the Earth. Yohko is voiced by Aya Hisakawa in the original Japanese dialogue. In the English...
Crystal Tipps and Alistair (1971 - 1974) - British cartoon series about the adventures of a frizzy haired girl and her dog, Alistair. They also meet up with their friends Birdie and Butterfly. The stories are told without dialogue but have a musical score and Pop-Art design.
Dance, Fools, Dance(1931) - Dance, Fools, Dance (1931) is a pre-Code Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie starring Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, and Lester Vail in a story about a reporter investigating the murder of a colleague. Story and dialogue were created by Aurania Rouverol, and the film was directed by Harry Beaumont. Dance, Fools,...
My Dinner with Andre(1981) - My Dinner with Andre is a 1981 American comedy-drama film directed by Louis Malle, and written by and starring Andre Gregory (Andre) and Wallace Shawn (Wally). The actors play fictionalized versions of themselves sharing a conversation at Caf des Artistes in Manhattan. The film's dialogue covers to...
Agneepath (2012) ::: 6.9/10 -- Not Rated | 2h 54min | Action, Crime, Drama | 26 January 2012 (India) -- A young boy's father is lynched before his eyes; fifteen years later he returns home for revenge. Director: Karan Malhotra Writers: Ila Bedi Dutta (screenplay), Avinash Ghodke (additional dialogue) | 2
Anguish (1987) ::: 6.7/10 -- Angustia (original title) -- Anguish Poster A controlling mother uses telepathic powers to send her middle-aged son on a killing spree. Director: Bigas Luna Writers: Bigas Luna (screenplay), Michael Berlin (dialogue) Stars:
Black (2005) ::: 8.2/10 -- Not Rated | 2h 2min | Drama | 4 February 2005 (USA) -- The cathartic tale of a young woman who can't see, hear or talk and the teacher who brings a ray of light into her dark world. Director: Sanjay Leela Bhansali Writers: Sanjay Leela Bhansali (screenplay), Bhavani Iyer (English dialogue) | 3
Black Moon (1975) ::: 6.3/10 -- R | 1h 35min | Fantasy, Horror, Mystery | 24 September 1975 (France) -- To escape a gender war, a girl flees to a remote farmhouse and becomes part of an extensive family's unusual, perhaps even supernatural, lifestyle. Director: Louis Malle Writers: Louis Malle, Joyce Buuel (additional dialogue) (as Joyce Bunuel) Stars:
California Dreamin' (2007) ::: 7.8/10 -- California Dreamin' (Nesfarsit) (original title) -- California Dreamin' Poster A railway chief delays a NATO train transporting military equipment during the war in Kosovo in 1999. Director: Cristian Nemescu Writers: Catherine Linstrum (additional dialogue), Cristian Nemescu | 1 more credit
Danny Deckchair (2003) ::: 6.7/10 -- PG-13 | 1h 40min | Comedy, Romance | 31 July 2003 (Australia) -- An Aussie becomes a national sensation when he lifts off in his deck chair tied to balloons. Director: Jeff Balsmeyer Writers: Jeff Balsmeyer, Lizzie Bryant (additional dialogue) | 1 more credit
Dheepan (2015) ::: 7.2/10 -- R | 1h 55min | Crime, Drama | 13 May 2016 (USA) -- Dheepan is a Sri Lankan Tamil warrior who flees to France and ends up working as a caretaker outside Paris. Director: Jacques Audiard Writers: Jacques Audiard (dialogue), Jacques Audiard (screenplay) | 4 more
Garth Marenghi's Darkplace ::: TV-MA | 30min | Comedy, Fantasy, Horror | TV Mini-Series (2004) Episode Guide 6 episodes Garth Marenghi's Darkplace Poster This parody series is an unearthed 80s horror/drama, complete with poor production values, awful dialogue and hilarious violence. The series is set in a Hospital in Romford, which is situated over the gates of Hell. Stars: Richard Ayoade, Matt Berry, Matthew Holness Available on Amazon
Germany Year Zero (1948) ::: 7.9/10 -- Germania anno zero (original title) -- Germany Year Zero Poster A young German boy faces the problems of the tough life in the immediate post WWII Berlin. Director: Roberto Rossellini Writers: Roberto Rossellini (screenplay), Roberto Rossellini (dialogue) | 3 more credits
Guzaarish (2010) ::: 7.4/10 -- PG | 2h 6min | Drama | 19 November 2010 (India) -- A paralyzed Magician-turned-RJ files a Petition in Court seeking permission to end his life. Director: Sanjay Leela Bhansali Writers: Sanjay Leela Bhansali (screenplay), Bhavani Iyer (dialogue) | 3 more
Heartbeats (2010) ::: 7.1/10 -- Les amours imaginaires (original title) -- Heartbeats Poster -- The story of three close friends who are involved in a love-triangle. Director: Xavier Dolan Writer: Xavier Dolan (scenario & dialogue)
House of Bamboo (1955) ::: 6.8/10 -- Approved | 1h 42min | Crime, Drama, Film-Noir | 28 August 1955 (Japan) -- Planted in a Tokyo crime syndicate, a U.S. Army Investigator attempts to probe the coinciding death of a fellow Army official. Director: Samuel Fuller Writers: Harry Kleiner, Samuel Fuller (additional dialogue)
It Boy (2013) ::: 6.4/10 -- 20 ans d'cart (original title) -- It Boy Poster Alice works for "Rebelle" magazine, where she needs to let her hair down to get a promotion. When Balthazar returns a lost USB to Alice, the appearance of dating someone half her age helps her. Does it get real? Director: David Moreau Writers: Amro Hamzawi (original idea), Amro Hamzawi (scenario and dialogue) | 4
It Happened on Fifth Avenue (1947) ::: 7.7/10 -- Passed | 1h 56min | Comedy, Music, Romance | 19 April 1947 (USA) -- Two homeless men move into a mansion while its owners are wintering in the South. Director: Roy Del Ruth Writers: Everett Freeman (screen play), Vick Knight (additional dialogue) | 2 more credits Stars:
Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar (1992) ::: 8.2/10 -- PG | 2h 54min | Comedy, Drama, Romance | 22 May 1992 (India) -- A rich brat and a poor chap try to woo a girl, with their rivalry culminating in the most prestigious college event - the marathon cycle race. Director: Mansoor Khan Writers: Nasir Hussain (dialogue) (as Nasir Husain), Mansoor Khan (screenplay) | 1 more credit
Juggernaut (1974) ::: 6.6/10 -- PG | 1h 49min | Action, Drama, Thriller | 25 September 1974 (USA) -- A blackmailer demands a huge ransom in exchange for information on how to disarm the seven bombs he placed aboard the transatlantic liner Britannic. Director: Richard Lester Writers: Richard Alan Simmons (as Richard De Koker), Alan Plater (additional dialogue)
Kabul Express (2006) ::: 6.8/10 -- Not Rated | 1h 45min | Adventure, Comedy, Drama | 15 December 2006 (UK) -- A thrilling story spanning 48 hours of five individuals linked by hate and fear but brought together by fate to finally recognize each other. Director: Kabir Khan Writers: Kabir Khan, Sandeep Shrivastava (additional dialogue) (as Sandeep
King of Hearts (1966) ::: 7.5/10 -- Le roi de coeur (original title) -- King of Hearts Poster During World War I, a British private, sent ahead to a French town to scout for enemy presence, is mistaken for a King by the colorful patients of an insane asylum. Director: Philippe de Broca Writers: Daniel Boulanger (scenario and dialogue), Maurice Bessy (idea)
Kings & Queen (2004) ::: 7.1/10 -- Rois et reine (original title) -- Kings & Queen Poster Parallel storylines tell the current state of affairs for two ex-lovers: Nora's a single mother who comes to care for her terminally ill father; holed in up in mental ward, Ismael, a brilliant musician, plots his escape. Director: Arnaud Desplechin Writers: Arnaud Desplechin (scenario & dialogue), Roger Bohbot (scenario &
Lady for a Day (1933) ::: 7.4/10 -- Passed | 1h 36min | Comedy, Drama | 13 September 1933 (USA) -- A gangster tries to make Apple Annie, the Times Square apple seller, a lady for a day. Director: Frank Capra Writers: Robert Riskin (screen play and dialogue), Damon Runyon (from the story by) Stars:
L'Eclisse (1962) ::: 7.9/10 -- L'eclisse (original title) -- L'Eclisse Poster A young woman meets a vital young man, but their love affair is doomed because of the man's materialistic nature. Director: Michelangelo Antonioni Writers: Michelangelo Antonioni (scenario and dialogue), Tonino Guerra (scenario and dialogue) | 2 more credits
Luther (2003) ::: 6.6/10 -- PG-13 | 2h 3min | Biography, Drama, History | 26 September 2003 (USA) -- During the early sixteenth century, idealistic German monk Martin Luther, disgusted by the materialism in the Catholic Church, begins the dialogue that will lead to the Protestant Reformation. Director: Eric Till Writers: Camille Thomasson, Bart Gavigan Stars:
Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (2005) ::: 7.6/10 -- Not Rated | 1h 48min | Comedy, Drama | 15 May 2008 (Argentina) -- All but abandoned by her family in a London retirement hotel, an elderly woman strikes up a curious friendship with a young writer. Director: Dan Ireland Writers: Martin Donovan (additional dialogue), Dan Ireland (additional dialogue) | 2 more credits Stars:
Mujhse Fraaandship Karoge (2011) ::: 6.9/10 -- Not Rated | 1h 46min | Comedy, Romance | 14 October 2011 (India) -- When you can't make it on your own, the best thing to do is to fake it. But, the question remains, how long can you fake true love? Director: Nupur Asthana Writers: Pooja Desai (story), Anvita Dutt (additional dialogue) | 4 more
Nos Amours (1983) ::: 7.3/10 -- nos amours (original title) -- Nos Amours Poster An erratic young woman's family desperately tries to prevent her increasingly erotic ways. Director: Maurice Pialat Writers: Arlette Langmann (scenario and dialogue), Maurice Pialat (scenario and dialogue)
Page 3 (2005) ::: 7.3/10 -- 2h 19min | Drama | 21 January 2005 (India) -- A look at Mumbai's socialite party circle world through the eyes of a Page 3 journalist. Director: Madhur Bhandarkar Writers: Nina Arora (screenplay), Madhur Bhandarkar (dialogue) | 2 more
Pygmalion (1938) ::: 7.7/10 -- Not Rated | 1h 29min | Comedy, Drama, Romance | 3 March 1939 (USA) -- A phonetics and diction expert makes a bet that he can teach a cockney flower girl to speak proper English and pass as a lady in high society. Directors: Anthony Asquith, Leslie Howard Writers: George Bernard Shaw (screen play and dialogue) (as Bernard Shaw), W.P. Lipscomb (scenario) | 1 more credit Stars:
Redirected (2014) ::: 6.6/10 -- Not Rated | 1h 39min | Action, Comedy, Crime | 10 January 2014 -- Redirected Poster -- Three friends try to make money and invite another friend in on a plot. Director: Emilis Velyvis Writers: Jonas Banys, Lewis Britnell (dialogue editor) | 1 more credit
Reservoir Dogs (1992) ::: 8.3/10 -- R | 1h 39min | Crime, Drama, Thriller | 2 September 1992 (France) -- When a simple jewelry heist goes horribly wrong, the surviving criminals begin to suspect that one of them is a police informant. Director: Quentin Tarantino Writers: Quentin Tarantino, Quentin Tarantino (background radio dialogue written
Romeo + Juliet (1996) ::: 6.7/10 -- PG-13 | 2h | Drama, Romance | 1 November 1996 (USA) -- Shakespeare's famous play is updated to the hip modern suburb of Verona still retaining its original dialogue. Director: Baz Luhrmann Writers: William Shakespeare (play), Craig Pearce (screenplay) | 1 more credit
Shaitan (2011) ::: 7.2/10 -- Not Rated | 2h 1min | Action, Crime, Drama | 10 June 2011 (India) -- Five substance-abusing friends decide to fake a kidnapping in order to bribe a police constable for covering-up a hit-and-run accident. Director: Bejoy Nambiar Writers: Abhijeet Shirish Deshpande (dialogue) (as Abhijeet Deshpande), K.S.
Shane (1953) ::: 7.6/10 -- Not Rated | 1h 58min | Drama, Western | 1 October 1953 (Japan) -- A weary gunfighter attempts to settle down with a homestead family, but a smoldering settler/rancher conflict forces him to act. Director: George Stevens Writers: A.B. Guthrie Jr. (screenplay), Jack Sher (additional dialogue) | 1 more
StageFright (1987) ::: 6.7/10 -- Deliria (original title) -- StageFright Poster A group of stage actors lock themselves in the theater for a rehearsal of their upcoming musical production, unaware that an escaped psychopath has sneaked into the theater with them. Director: Michele Soavi (as Michael Soavi) Writers: George Eastman (as Lew Cooper), Sheila Goldberg (dialogue)
Tere Bin Laden (2010) ::: 7.2/10 -- Not Rated | 1h 35min | Comedy, Drama | 16 July 2010 (India) -- A reporter casts a fake Bin Laden to act in his video message to America, so he can immigrate there. Director: Abhishek Sharma Writers: Mohammad Ahmad (dialogue), Abhishek Sharma (story & screenplay)
The Element of Crime (1984) ::: 6.8/10 -- Forbrydelsens element (original title) -- The Element of Crime Poster A cop in a dystopian Europe investigates a serial killings suspect using controversial methods written by his now disgraced former mentor. Director: Lars von Trier (as Lars Von Trier) Writers: Niels Vrsel, William Quarshie (dialogue translation) | 2 more credits
The Killing (1956) ::: 8.0/10 -- Approved | 1h 24min | Crime, Drama, Film-Noir | 6 June 1956 (USA) -- Crook Johnny Clay assembles a five man team to plan and execute a daring race-track robbery. Director: Stanley Kubrick Writers: Stanley Kubrick (screenplay by), Jim Thompson (dialogue by) | 1 more
The Leopard Man (1943) ::: 6.9/10 -- Approved | 1h 6min | Horror, Thriller | 25 June 1943 (USA) -- A seemingly tame leopard used for a publicity stunt escapes and kills a young girl, spreading panic throughout a sleepy New Mexico town. Director: Jacques Tourneur Writers: Ardel Wray (screenplay), Edward Dein (additional dialogue) | 1 more
The Private Life of Henry VIII. (1933) ::: 7.1/10 -- The Private Life of Henry VIII (original title) -- The Private Life of Henry VIII. Poster King Henry VIII marries five more times after his divorce from his first wife Catherine of Aragon. Director: Alexander Korda Writers: Lajos Bir (story and dialogue) (as Lajos Biro), Arthur Wimperis (story and dialogue) | 1 more credit
They Call Me Trinity (1970) ::: 7.5/10 -- Lo chiamavano Trinit... (original title) -- They Call Me Trinity Poster A lazy, unorthodox gunfighter and his portly, horse-thieving brother defend a Mormon settlement from a land-grabbing Major, a Mexican bandit, and their henchmen. Director: Enzo Barboni (as E.B. Clucher) Writers: Enzo Barboni (story and screenplay) (as E.B. Clucher), Gene Luotto (dialogue)
To Each His Own Cinema (2007) ::: 6.8/10 -- Chacun son cinma ou Ce petit coup au coeur quand la lumire s'teint -- G | 1h 40min | Comedy, Drama | 31 October 2007 (France) To Each His Own Cinema Poster A collective film of 33 shorts directed by different directors about their feeling about Cinema. Directors: Theodoros Angelopoulos (as Tho Angelopoulos), Olivier Assayas | 34 more credits Writers: Manoel de Oliveira (dialogue), Manoel de Oliveira (scenario) | 13 more
Trinity Is Still My Name (1971) ::: 7.3/10 -- Continuavano a chiamarlo Trinit (original title) -- Trinity Is Still My Name Poster Bambino tries to teach his brother Trinity how to become an outlaw, but the two wind up saving a pioneer family and breaking up an arms ring instead. Director: Enzo Barboni (as E.B. Clucher) Writers: Enzo Barboni (as E.B. Clutcher), Gene Luotto (dialogue)
Under the Sand (2000) ::: 7.1/10 -- Sous le sable (original title) -- Under the Sand Poster When her husband goes missing at the beach, a female professor begins to mentally disintegrate as her denial of his disappearance becomes delusional. Director: Franois Ozon Writers: Franois Ozon (scenario and dialogue), Emmanule Bernheim (collaboration) | 2 more credits
Viva Maria! (1965) ::: 6.4/10 -- Not Rated | 1h 59min | Adventure, Comedy, Romance | 18 December 1965 -- Viva Maria! Poster Somewhere in Central America in 1907: Maria II is the daughter of an Irish terrorist. After her father's death, she meets Maria I, a singer in a circus. She decides to stay with the circus,... S Director: Louis Malle Writers: Louis Malle (scenario and dialogue), Jean-Claude Carrire (scenario and dialogue) (as Jean-Claude Carriere)
Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967) ::: 6.6/10 -- I Call First (original title) -- Who's That Knocking at My Door Poster J.R. is a typical Italian-American on the streets of New York. When he gets involved with a local girl, he decides to get married and settle down, but when he learns that she was once raped... S Director: Martin Scorsese Writers: Betzi Manoogian (additional dialogue), Martin Scorsese
Yes Boss (1997) ::: 6.8/10 -- 2h 43min | Comedy, Drama, Musical | 18 July 1997 (India) -- Rahul Joshi wants to be a successful businessman so he works hard for his boss Siddharth. One day Rahul meets Seema, an up and coming model, and he feels like he's finally met his match. Will Seema fall for Rahul? Director: Aziz Mirza Writers: Sanjay Chhel (dialogue), Mangesh Kulkarni (screenplay) | 1 more credit
Z (1969) ::: 8.3/10 -- M | 2h 7min | Crime, Drama, History | 8 December 1969 (USA) -- The public murder of a prominent politician and doctor amid a violent demonstration is covered up by military and government officials. A tenacious magistrate is determined not to let them get away with it. Director: Costa-Gavras Writers: Vasilis Vasilikos (novel) (as Vassili Vassilikos), Jorge Semprn (dialogue) (as Jorge Semprun)
Zero 2 (2010) ::: 7.6/10 -- 1h 30min | Comedy, Thriller | 20 January 2010 (Lithuania) -- What would you get if you mix a gangster film and a soap opera? "Zero 2" is a crazy twister of criminal romance and sexy violence that just might laugh you to death. Director: Emilis Velyvis Writers: Jonas Banys, Aidas Puklevicius (dialogue) | 1 more credit Stars:
Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011) ::: 8.1/10 -- Not Rated | 2h 35min | Comedy, Drama | 15 July 2011 (India) -- Three friends decide to turn their fantasy vacation into reality after one of their friends gets engaged. Director: Zoya Akhtar Writers: Farhan Akhtar (dialogue), Reema Kagti (story) | 4 more credits
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Death Note: Rewrite -- -- Madhouse -- 2 eps -- Manga -- Mystery Police Psychological Supernatural Thriller -- Death Note: Rewrite Death Note: Rewrite -- 1. Genshisuru Kami (Visions of a God) -- A two hour episode of Death Note, mainly a compilation of the confrontations between Light and L, re-edited from Ryuk's perspective with new dialogue and soundtrack along with additional animation that could not be included in the original series. An Unnamed Shinigami comes to Ryuk to question him about his new story in the human world. -- -- 2. L o Tsugu Mono (L's Successors) -- This story continues where the previous left off, continuing the story of Light. As the previous special told Light and L's battles, this story does the same with the conflicts between Light, Mello, and Near. -- -- (Source: Wikipedia) -- -- Licensor: -- VIZ Media -- Special - Aug 31, 2007 -- 159,335 7.71
Death Note: Rewrite -- -- Madhouse -- 2 eps -- Manga -- Mystery Police Psychological Supernatural Thriller -- Death Note: Rewrite Death Note: Rewrite -- 1. Genshisuru Kami (Visions of a God) -- A two hour episode of Death Note, mainly a compilation of the confrontations between Light and L, re-edited from Ryuk's perspective with new dialogue and soundtrack along with additional animation that could not be included in the original series. An Unnamed Shinigami comes to Ryuk to question him about his new story in the human world. -- -- 2. L o Tsugu Mono (L's Successors) -- This story continues where the previous left off, continuing the story of Light. As the previous special told Light and L's battles, this story does the same with the conflicts between Light, Mello, and Near. -- -- (Source: Wikipedia) -- Special - Aug 31, 2007 -- 159,335 7.71
Joshikausei -- -- Seven -- 12 eps -- Web manga -- Comedy School Slice of Life -- Joshikausei Joshikausei -- Momoko Futo is an average high-school girl going about her everyday life. Though laid-back and cheerful, her life is anything but mundane as her eccentricity and clumsiness never fail to spice up her days. Her two best friends are always with her: the cute and innocent Mayumi Furui, and the calm and cool Shibumi Shibusawa. Without any spoken dialogue or narration, Joshikausei aims to recount the comedic shenanigans these girls get up to through the expressive sounds and gestures that they make. -- -- 44,909 5.76
Kangaeru Renshuu -- -- - -- 1 ep -- Original -- Dementia -- Kangaeru Renshuu Kangaeru Renshuu -- The description of Suwami Nogami's minimalistic line drawing piece, Imagination Practice, calls it an unending "thought loop". It depicts an artist sitting in front of a window with a self-portrait, like a miniature mirror image, on the desk in front of him. The window frame and the blue sky filled with moving clouds are in colour, but the figure of the artist is not coloured in. The soundtrack sounds like a skipping record that is punctuated by humourous springing noises (a la Bugs Bunny) as the image 'bounces' in an unending loop from the establishing shot into the "drawing." A philosophical piece, Imagination Practice considers the circular dialogue between an artist and his work. -- -- (Source: Midnight Eye) -- Movie - ??? ??, 2003 -- 483 4.27
Memory (ONA) -- -- - -- 1 ep -- - -- Drama Military Sci-Fi Slice of Life -- Memory (ONA) Memory (ONA) -- Set in a post-apocalyptic world destroyed by nuclear war, it tells the story of a damaged robot found by futuristic soldiers investigating a devastated area. -- -- The humanoid appeared to be household robot, reminiscent of Asimov, and when the soldiers booted it up, they were able to see what was left of videos recorded inside its memory as seen by the robot throughout the years. -- -- In just under seven minutes and with no dialogue, the film poignantly reminds us that all our experiences, the things that we hold dear in our lives, are in constant threat. -- -- (Source: Bouncing Red Ball.com) -- ONA - Apr ??, 2009 -- 2,278 6.21
Mobile Suit Gundam 00 Special Edition -- -- Sunrise -- 3 eps -- - -- Action Drama Mecha Military Sci-Fi -- Mobile Suit Gundam 00 Special Edition Mobile Suit Gundam 00 Special Edition -- Condensed version of both the first and second seasons of Gundam 00 featuring some new animated sequences and some partially re-recorded dialogue. -- OVA - Oct 27, 2009 -- 10,372 7.60
Nami yo Kiitekure -- -- Sunrise -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Comedy Drama Romance Seinen -- Nami yo Kiitekure Nami yo Kiitekure -- Restaurant worker Minare Koda has recently been through a bad breakup. Heartbroken and drunk after a night out, she rants about her misery to a complete stranger—Kanetsugu Matou, a radio station director local to Sapporo, Hokkaido. -- -- The next day at work, Minare is shocked to hear a recording of herself from the previous night playing over the radio. Flustered, she rushes to the radio station in a frenzy to stop the broadcast. As she confronts Matou, a chain of events leads to her giving an impromptu talk live on air, explaining her savage drunken speech. With her energetic voice, she delivers a smooth dialogue with no hesitation, which Matou recognizes as raw talent. -- -- Minare soon becomes a late-night talk show host under Matou's direction, covering amusing narratives set in Sapporo, all while balancing her day job and personal life to make ends meet. -- -- 62,168 7.37
Nami yo Kiitekure -- -- Sunrise -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Comedy Drama Romance Seinen -- Nami yo Kiitekure Nami yo Kiitekure -- Restaurant worker Minare Koda has recently been through a bad breakup. Heartbroken and drunk after a night out, she rants about her misery to a complete stranger—Kanetsugu Matou, a radio station director local to Sapporo, Hokkaido. -- -- The next day at work, Minare is shocked to hear a recording of herself from the previous night playing over the radio. Flustered, she rushes to the radio station in a frenzy to stop the broadcast. As she confronts Matou, a chain of events leads to her giving an impromptu talk live on air, explaining her savage drunken speech. With her energetic voice, she delivers a smooth dialogue with no hesitation, which Matou recognizes as raw talent. -- -- Minare soon becomes a late-night talk show host under Matou's direction, covering amusing narratives set in Sapporo, all while balancing her day job and personal life to make ends meet. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- 62,168 7.37
Nisou no Kuzu -- -- - -- 1 ep -- Original -- Psychological -- Nisou no Kuzu Nisou no Kuzu -- The dialogue in question takes place between a woman, who appears to be submerged in water, and a man who sits by a tree on sandy soil. The messages the couple sends back and forth to one another take the form of metaphor: a seed, a fish, a thorn, and so on. -- -- (Source: Midnight Eye) -- Movie - ??? ??, 2004 -- 654 4.99
Ookami to Koushinryou -- -- Imagin -- 13 eps -- Light novel -- Adventure Fantasy Historical Romance -- Ookami to Koushinryou Ookami to Koushinryou -- Holo is a powerful wolf deity who is celebrated and revered in the small town of Pasloe for blessing the annual harvest. Yet as years go by and the villagers become more self-sufficient, Holo, who stylizes herself as the "Wise Wolf of Yoitsu," has been reduced to a mere folk tale. When a traveling merchant named Kraft Lawrence stops at Pasloe, Holo offers to become his business partner if he eventually takes her to her northern home of Yoitsu. The savvy trader recognizes Holo's unusual ability to evaluate a person's character and accepts her proposition. Now in the possession of both sharp business skills and a charismatic negotiator, Lawrence inches closer to his goal of opening his own shop. However, as Lawrence travels the countryside with Holo in search of economic opportunities, he begins to realize that his aspirations are slowly morphing into something unexpected. -- -- Based on the popular light novel of the same name, Ookami to Koushinryou, also known as Spice and Wolf, fuses the two polar genres of economics and romance to create an enthralling story abundant with elaborate schemes, sharp humor, and witty dialogue. Ookami to Koushinryou is more than just a story of bartering; it turns into a journey of searching for a lost identity in an ever-changing world. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation, Kadokawa Pictures USA -- 660,637 8.26
RahXephon: Kansoukyoku/Kanojo to Kanojo Jishin to - Thatness and Thereness -- -- Bones -- 1 ep -- Original -- Sci-Fi Psychological Drama -- RahXephon: Kansoukyoku/Kanojo to Kanojo Jishin to - Thatness and Thereness RahXephon: Kansoukyoku/Kanojo to Kanojo Jishin to - Thatness and Thereness -- Quon Kisaragi was surprised when she saw an illusion of herself floating in midair. This other "self" of her claimed that she is a fragment of Quon. Thus an existentialistic dialogue began between the two. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- OVA - Aug 7, 2003 -- 6,611 6.34
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A Dialogue Between Joseph Smith and the Devil
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