Optimistic Humanist that believes we can reduce absurdity and increase meaning even in a sea of novelty. Creator of "The Common Sky" Playable on Spawn 𒀭𒂗𒆠
Joined February 2010
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"Some boast of being friends to government; I am a friend to righteous government, to a government founded upon the principles of reason and justice; but I glory in publicly avowing my eternal enmity to tyranny". John Hancock - 1774
You're asleep at the wheel.
I’m a genuine oldhat epileptic psuedo schizo
FYI.
My tweets may not be for you.
And that’s ok.
They aren’t for me either.
youtu.be/auiAKIbVCxc?si=X8NP…
Cosmic Entity retweeted
an evidentiary true description can become false as an ontology when treated as exhaustive of The Thing itself.
You can know things to be “true” without knowing everything about what makes it “true.”
Building systems to help us understand those gaps is a really useful tool for communicating “why”
But they are tools to explain the thing.
Not the thing.
Cosmic Entity retweeted
"Thinking is a sacred disease and sight is deceptive"
"If you do not expect the unexpected you will not find it, for it is not to be reached by search or trail"
-Heraclitus ‘the obscure’ of Ephesus (540–475 B.C.)
"Now, if we are to form a real judgment of the life of the just and unjust, we must isolate them; there is no other way; and how is the isolation to be effected? I answer: Let the unjust man be entirely unjust, and the just man entirely just; nothing is to be taken away from either of them, and both are to be perfectly furnished for the work of their respective lives. First, let the unjust be like other distinguished masters of craft; like the skilful pilot or physician, who knows intuitively his own powers and keeps within their limits, and who, if he fails at any point, is able to recover himself. So let the unjust make his unjust attempts in the right way, and lie hidden if he means to be great in his injustice (he who is found out is nobody): for the highest reach of injustice is: to be deemed just when you are not. Therefore I say that in the perfectly unjust man we must assume the most perfect injustice; there is to be no deduction, but we must allow him, while doing the most unjust acts, to have acquired the greatest reputation for justice. If he have taken a false step he must be able to recover himself; he must be one who can speak with effect, if any of his deeds come to light, and who can force his way where force is required his courage and strength, and command of money and friends. And at his side let us place the just man in his nobleness and simplicity, wishing, as Aeschylus says, to be and not to seem good. There must be no seeming, for if he seem to be just he will be honoured and rewarded, and then we shall not know whether he is just for the sake of justice or for the sake of honours and rewards; therefore, let him be clothed in justice only, and have no other covering; and he must be imagined in a state of life the opposite of the former. Let him be the best of men, and let him be thought the worst; then he will have been put to the proof; and we shall see whether he will be affected by the fear of infamy and its consequences. And let him continue thus to the hour of death; being just and seeming to be unjust. When both have reached the uttermost extreme, the one of justice and the other of injustice, let judgment be given which of them is the happier of the two."
-Glaucon
Plato, The Republic Book II
literaturepage.com/read/ther…
Chapter 3
SOCRATES - ADEIMANTUS
SUCH then, I said, are our principles of theology--some tales are to be told, and others are not to be told to our disciples from their youth upwards, if we mean them to honour the gods and their parents, and to value friendship with one another.
Yes; and I think that our principles are right, he said.
But if they are to be courageous, must they not learn other lessons besides these, and lessons of such a kind as will take away the fear of death? Can any man be courageous who has the fear of death in him?
Certainly not, he said.
And can he be fearless of death, or will he choose death in battle rather than defeat and slavery, who believes the world below to be real and terrible?
Impossible.
Then we must assume a control over the narrators of this class of tales as well as over the others, and beg them not simply to but rather to commend the world below, intimating to them that their descriptions are untrue, and will do harm to our future warriors.
That will be our duty, he said.
Then, I said, we shall have to obliterate many obnoxious passages, beginning with the verses,
I would rather he a serf on the land of a poor and portionless man than rule over all the dead who have come to nought.
We must also expunge the verse, which tells us how Pluto feared,
Lest the mansions grim and squalid which the gods abhor should he seen both of mortals and immortals.
And again:
O heavens! verily in the house of Hades there is soul and ghostly form but no mind at all!
Again of Tiresias:--
[To him even after death did Persephone grant mind,] that he alone should be wise; but the other souls are flitting shades.
Again:--
The soul flying from the limbs had gone to Hades, lamentng her fate, leaving manhood and youth.
Again:--
And the soul, with shrilling cry, passed like smoke beneath the earth.
And,--
As bats in hollow of mystic cavern, whenever any of the has dropped out of the string and falls from the rock, fly shrilling and cling to one another, so did they with shrilling cry hold together as they moved.
And we must beg Homer and the other poets not to be angry if we strike out these and similar passages, not because they are unpoetical, or unattractive to the popular ear, but because the greater the poetical charm of them, the less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who are meant to be free, and who should fear slavery more than death.
Undoubtedly.
Also we shall have to reject all the terrible and appalling names describe the world below--Cocytus and Styx, ghosts under the earth, and sapless shades, and any similar words of which the very mention causes a shudder to pass through the inmost soul of him who hears them. I do not say that these horrible stories may not have a use of some kind; but there is a danger that the nerves of our guardians may be rendered too excitable and effeminate by them.
There is a real danger, he said.
Then we must have no more of them.
True.
Another and a nobler strain must be composed and sung by us.