Paul Christensen's Blog - Posts Tagged "philosophy"

The Principles of Art by R.G. Collingwood

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


'If the Arts should perish
The world that lacked them would be like a woman
That, looking on the cloven lips of a hare,
Brings forth a hare-lipped child.'
- W.B. Yeats

Or as Collingwood has it, ‘art is not a luxury and bad art is not a thing we can afford to tolerate.’

Art is language; language emerged from imagination, the second stage of consciousness, not intellect, the third stage; but unlike everyday language, art don’t tolerate cliches.

To know good art requires an uncorrupt consciousness.

’But no one can know this except a person who possesses one. An insincere mind, so far as it is insincere, has no conception of sincerity.’

No artist is an island, and Collingwood thinks copyright laws are bad. Memes, the most vital form of contemporary art (not saying much), bear this out.

Collingwood thinks the relationship between artist and audience vital, and forms that separates them too much, e.g. cinema as opposed to live theatre, he thinks incapable of creating a truly great art (this is contestable).

Future art should be prophetic, telling the audience the secrets of their own hearts.

‘Art is the community’s medicine for the worst disease of mind, the corruption of consciousness.’

The true artist is in constant warfare against this corruption.



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Crito by Plato

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


There are those who go against the grain
(Even if it results in pain),
And those who conform to the Many.

Socrates goes against the grain,
Yet submits himself (as he here explains)
To the punishment willed by the Many.

He could disobey the verdict,
And flee like a lonesome hermit,
But thought it would harm the city.

As his nationalism was earnest,
If the polis wronged his person
He’d abide, not flee from self-pity.



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Plato's Euthyphro by Plato

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is a frustrating dialogue, because Euthyphro throws in the towel
Before Socrates has properly interrogated him (technically, a foul).

Socrates does not understand the Homeric account of the gods.
That disagreements should arise among them is not particularly odd;

The essential mission of Aryan gods is eternal war against Entropy,
Decreasing which in the cosmos is the true definition of piety.

In this the gods are all as one, and what's loved by them all is pious;
They follow an imperative beyond themselves, in spite of Socrates' bias.

The gods follow the ultimate good (that they love it is one of its attributes,
But not however its essence), else sans meaning would be their attitudes.

There is no 'Euthyphro dilemma', for you see both gods and men
Follow something higher (call it 'good'), whose essence is beyond them.

We help the gods to help the good, not the other way around;
This dialogue will clarify that - frustrating, yet profound.



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The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy by Bryan Magee

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Wagner, in Magee’s words, was ‘the only major composer who seriously engaged with philosophy’, so any book looking at the philosophers he read is bound to be interesting.

And so it is - where Magee follows Wagner’s early interest in Feuerbach, his earth-shattering discovery of Schopenhauer, as well as the real reasons for Nietzsche’s break with the master (namely the fapping advice incident).

However, the book has a major glaring omission - Arthur de Gobineau. Gobineau’s influence may have arrived too late to affect Wagner’s music and libretti, but Wagner’s fascination with his ideas was by all accounts a very strong one (although he rejected Gobineau’s pessimism, believing as he did in regeneration).

So, it would have been interesting to read about Gobineau’s ideas and how they affected the great man, but Magee dismisses Gobineau in a sentence or two as ‘unimportant’, when by all accounts he was W’s greatest philosophical discovery after Schopenhauer himself.

Magee seems to have written this book as a justification to his liberal friends as to why he likes Wagner so much, trying to make the latter seem philosophically ‘respectable’, but at the expense of truth. (To be fair, Magee lives in the UK, where it would be illegal to objectively discuss Gobineau’s ideas). So, while this book sheds valuable light on Wagner’s work, I can’t award it very high marks.



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Ion by Plato

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


The first half of this dialogue is good,
Dealing as it does with inspiration,
Magnetic power beyond the conscious ‘should’.
But then it makes erroneous equations,
Equating conscious knowledge with the pearl
Of true rhapsodic passion in a whirl.
Directed inspiration is a thing:
A mean, between blind groping on the wing
And uninspired and hollow artifice;
But Plato never says a word of this.



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Gorgias by Plato

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Men do bad when they do what they merely think best, rather than what they most deeply desire.

That seems to be the central point of this long dialogue.

The age-old question is: how to get men to follow their true Will (i.e. Self, rather than ego).

Does the dialogue answer it?

The answer it gives appears to be: Engage in the combat of life, live as well as you can, and then, after death, you will attain the Islands of the Blessed, and not the realm of the wretched, Tartarus.


But that doesn’t answer the question of how to distinguish between the desires of ego, and the true Will!!!






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