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November 29 - December 28, 2021
alienation.
“all preferred the safety of the present to the dangers of the past.” Still, as historian M. L. Clarke puts it,
Annals,†
The decay had infected all of Roman society.
“they call it civilization when in fact it is only slavery.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the “noble savage,” among
Is this the same savage as BraveNew Worldm
his Myth of Atlantis:
super-race of Atlantis
“the depth of their degeneration was clear enough, but to those whose judgement of true happiness is defective they seemed, in their pursuit of unbridled ambition and power, to be at the height of their fame and fortune.”
the cycle of decay and dissolution was complete,
Plato’s dialogues and Aristotle’s treatises, plus the innumerable commentaries on their works by generations of students, were part of the fabric of daily intellectual life.
they moved through the world like random atoms, just as the world itself was only a heap of atoms that had come together by chance, with no deeper meaning or purpose.
the perfect formula for a moral relativism that knows no bottom.
The arts of civilized life, including building, tools, machines, and farming, were proof that humans were destined to build a future for themselves based on benevolent interdependence with others, under the protection of a divine providence.
Cicero’s On Moral Obligations,
the philosopher Seneca
Seneca loved humanity more than he cared for human beings.
Roman society
a collection of wild beasts.
They prefer to endure the “slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune,” in the words of Shakespeare (whose tragedies were heavily shaped
He must live within, and for, himself. He must cultivate the virtue of apatheia, literally an indifference to the fate of others—apathy
Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations,
Aristotle, never.
Aristotle’s outlook was precisely the one Marcus Aurelius wanted to warn against: the idea that man is born to take charge of his existence and solve problems in a practical way, by building a better house or a more efficient machine;
Plotinus was also the most relentlessly antimaterialist thinker
Plotinus
Lyco in Egypt, a city that was founded on the Lower Nile by priests of Osiris,
Plotinus,
philosophy to examine the alternatives—this
Timaeus,
the key for understanding existence itself.
“What is reality?”
material world is not distinct from the spiritual. The cave still reflects the distant light of truth, no matter how dimly.
value,
Aristotle’s Metaphysics.
scale for ordering all reality.
Plato’s picture of God the Demiurge from the Timaeus, the Supreme Creator
so that each element reflects the perfection of the whole.
Being.
Does this mean a butterfly...
William Blake spoke of seeing eternity in a grain of sand, he was speaking the language of Plotinus and Neoplatonism.
Great Chain of Being.
Enneads,
inadequacy of mere words to express reality—one
Pythagorean alternative had been to turn to the eternal truths of number and mathematics. But to Plotinus mathematical reasoning,
leap of mystical illumination.
At its core is a mystical, even ecstatic, union with God,
Plotinus, the task of the wise man is the same as it was for Socrates. It is to prepare the soul for the final revelation of truth.
the Roman Empire was steadily coming apart. Plotinus ignored it. He proposed to the
“The wise man,” Plotinus said, “will attach no importance to the loss of his country.”32 True happiness (eudaimonia) requires a flight from all worldly connections toward a higher
end, the final union of the soul with God.
