11.07.07
Something to think about.
“For here below most of our attention is directed to lifeless things” Plotinus, Ennead VI.6.18
06.06.07
Nécessité: interne ou externe?
“La nécessité qui commande la chute de chacun est intérieure à chacun. Plotin semble parfois réserver la part des influences extérieures, puisqu’il affirme que les âmes déchues sont régies “par leur nature ou par les circonstances” (IV.8.4.34). Sa pensée est plutôt que ces influences, quand elles sont efficaces sur l’attitude profonde de l’âme, répondent à un appel intérieur. Si je me laisse entraîner, c’est que je n’attendais qu’un prétexte, j’étais mûr pour la déchéance. Ou bien il n’y a pas d’occasions, ou bien chacun a les occasions qu’il mérite. Nous faisons surgir de toutes parts les raisons d’agir et d’abonder dans notre sens. Notre expérience nous confirme toujours, mais aussi nous juge.”
Jean Trouillard, La purification plotinienne, p. 22.
05.07.07
I just have to put this somewhere in my dissertation.
“He [viz. Plotinus] builds the soul a fairy palace,” said MacKenna once to Bergin: “enchanted, you follow him through the lovely labyrinthine structure; you mount, breathless, by successive stairways of the spirit, each more pure, more tenuous, more aspiring than the last- but sooner or later there comes a time when you ask yourself where the W.C. is.”
- Stephen MacKenna [a man who devoted a large part of his life to translating the entirety of Plotinus' Enneads] as reported in Dodds, E. R., Journal and Letters of Stephen MacKenna, William Morrow and Company, New York, 1937, pp. 69-70.
04.11.07
Mythos and logos.
“But myths, if they are really going to be myths, must separate in time the things of which they tell, and set apart from each other many realities which are together, but distinct in rank or powers, at points where rational discussions, also, make generations of things ungenerated, and themselves, too, separate things which are together [cf. VI.7.35.27-30]; the myths, when they have taught us as well as they can, allow the man who has understood them to put together again that which they have separated.”
Plotinus, Enn. III.5.9.24-29. [tr. Armstrong]
02.26.07
“Other lives” - Burnyeat on Pythagoras
Head over to the London Review of Books for an interesting pseudo-review of two recent books on Pythagoreanism by Miles Burnyeat which will, if nothing else, burst your bubble about certain myths on his account and give you some of the sense of the kind of revolution which the publication of Burkert’s Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism should and (to a less extant) has triggered in that field.
On another topic (although bearing a similar title) I’ve devoured Missing Persons, the autobiography of the great Irish classicist and scholar of Platonism E.R. Dodds, and I can’t recommand it enough. The humanity and simplicity of the man shines through. I intend to save some time in the near future for the collection of letters and essays by Stephen MacKenna which Dodds collated after his death. MacKenna, for those who do not know him, spent a rather significant chunk of his life turning the dense and often arid Greek of Plotinus into an awe-inspiring piece of English prose.
02.22.07
Political responsibility
“But it is not lawful for those who have become wicked to demand others to be their saviours and to sacrifice themselves in answer to their prayers, nor, furthermore, to require gods to direct their affairs in detail, laying aside their own life, or, for that matter, good men, who live another life better than human rule, to be their rulers; for they themselves have never taken any trouble to see that there should be good rulers of the rest of mankind, who would care that it should be well with them, but they are envious if anyone naturally becomes good by himself; for more people would have become good if they had made the good their leaders.” [Plotinus, Ennead III.2.9.10-20]
09.02.06
More on Jahanbegloo.
And so it unsurprisingly turns out that Ramin Jahanbegloo’s release from Iranian prison was not obtained without a price. The Iranian authorities have apparently figured out that threats to family are more effective than personal assault. Courage to Mr. Jahanbegloo, who will presumably now (on top of it all) have to endure accusations of ‘selling out’ to the Iranian government.
09.01.06
Rorty on Hauser’s ‘Moral Minds’.
The latest edition of the New York Times Book Review features an interesting review of Marc. D. Hauser’s ‘Moral Minds’ by philosopher Richard Rorty. The book attempts (unsuccessfully, of course) the silly demonstration that we possess a biologically hard-wired ‘moral faculty’, a fable which even moral intuitionists (who would very much appreciate the existence of such a faculty) frown upon. Quite a little gem of a knock-out.
[As an aside, I hope you have heard about (and celebrated) the release from jail of Irano-Canadian political philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo earlier this week. If not, you now do!]
08.17.06
I wish I could say this was entirely inaccurate.
“The study [viz. of the ways of the world] is difficult enough in itself; but the difficulty is doubled by novels, which represent a state of things in life and the world, such as, in fact, does not exist. Youth is credulous, and accepts these views of life, which then become part and parcel of the mind; so that, instead of a merely negative condition of ignorance, you have positive error—a whole tissue of false notions to start with; and at a later date these actually spoil the schooling of experience, and put a wrong construction on the lessons it teaches. If, before this, the youth had no light at all to guide him, he is now misled by a will-o’-the-wisp; still more often is this the case with a girl. They have both had a false view of things foisted on them by reading novels; and expectations have been aroused which can never be fulfilled. This generally exercises a baneful influence on their whole life. In this respect those whose youth has allowed them no time or opportunity for reading novels—those who work with their hands and the like—are in a position of decided advantage. There are a few novels to which this reproach cannot be addressed—nay, which have an effect the contrary of bad. First and foremost, to give an example, Gil Blas, and the other works of Le Sage (or rather their Spanish originals); further, The Vicar of Wakefield, and, to some extent Sir Walter Scott’s novels. Don Quixote may be regarded as a satirical exhibition of the error to which I am referring”
- Schopenhauer, On Education
08.16.06
(…)
“In earlier times, one had an earlier conscience about being a person than one does today. People were like cornstalks in a field, probably more violently tossed back and forth by God, hail, fire, pestilence, and war than they are today, but as a whole, as a city, a region, a field, and as to what personal movement was left to the individual stalk- all this was clearly defined and could be answered for. But today responsibility’s center of gravity is not in people but in circumstances. Have we not noticed that experiences have made themselves independent of people? They have gone on the stage, into books, into the reports of research institutes and explorers, into theological or religious communities, which foster certain kinds of experience at the expense of others as if they are conducting a kind of social experiment, and insofar as experiences are not actually being developed, they are simply left dangling in the air. Who can say nowadays that his anger is really his own anger when so many people talk about it and claim to know about it more than he does? A world of qualities without a man has arisen, of experiences without the person who experiences them, and it almost looks as though ideally private experience is a thing of the past, and that the friendly burden of personal responsibility is to dissolve into a system of formulas of possible meanings. Probably the dissolution of the anthropocentric point of view, which for such a long time considered man to be at the center of the universe but which has been fading away for centuries, has finally arrived at the ”I“ itself, for the belief that the most important thing about experience is the experiencing, or of action its doing, is beginning to strike most people as naïve. There are probably people who still lead personal lives, who say ”We saw the So-and-sos yesterday“ or ”We’ll do this or that today“ and enjoy it without its needing to have any content or significance. They like everything that comes in contact with their fingers, and are purely private persons insofar as this is at all possible. In contact with such people, the world becomes a private world and shines like a rainbow. They may be very happy, but this kind of people usually seems absurd to the others, although it is still not at all clear why.”
- Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities (tr. Wilkins), t. 1, p. 158-9.
