The Christianity link is through a neo-Platonist, Plotinus, who Saint Augustine studied. Through the link with Plato Augustine constructed the complex theology that defined Christianity through the ages. There are many dimensions to it, including the dismissing of the temporal world of the senses and desires; the eternal existence of God…
The Christianity link is through a neo-Platonist, Plotinus, who Saint Augustine studied. Through the link with Plato Augustine constructed the complex theology that defined Christianity through the ages. There are many dimensions to it, including the dismissing of the temporal world of the senses and desires; the eternal existence of God - which he took from Plato's Good; the idea of evil as the absence of good (God) plus the free will He gave us; the original sin of Adam (who used his free will to choose evil) that passed down to us; and so forth.
I’ve read Augustine - and came to despise his theories and exigesis of God as both facile and misogynist. (But I admit to finding The established precepts of organized Christianity the same.). Thank you though. You are a teacher -
He was a deeply troubled man but brilliant and his obsessive Cofessions, if you have to stomach to wade through his neuroses, contain some gems of insight. Thank you for the compliment.
Plato thought that Beauty was a Form most easily accessed by us, though a beautiful person. Our attraction to that person grows into an attraction to beauty of character and beauty in general, the highest being the Good. Today that lives in people who believe that contemplating beautiful art in museums of concert halls somehow makes them better people.
Beauty can be pernicious. There are some beautiful theories that describe the world well, but biology is full of historical artifacts, spandrels, kludges, satisficing and a great deal of ugly. Chemistry is almost as bad. It just lacks evolution. Even mathematics has a good supply of ugly if you know where to look, and then you can't unsee it.
Associating beauty with virtue or truth in the human world is an easy way to do a great deal of harm and not a lot of good.
Truth is, I don't know what I think on the subject because Beauty is so varioius. A beautiful painting, song, sunset, woman, equation, are all different. There are ideas of beauty being functionality. Art, I think, should defamiliarize the viewer with the subject, make him/her see it anew, but I don't know if that makes it beautiful. What you think? I'd rather you not treat me like some oracle, cos I'm searching just as you are.
I don't know. Thinking about it, if engaging an art makes you more empathetic then it can make you a better person. Someone once asked me what I hoped to do with a film and I answered that I wanted the viewer to be different after they've seen it from what they were before. If you surrender to beauty it can take you out of yourself, which is antithesis to much meanness in the world. It's a big complex topic and it takes more than an off the cuff response here. I'd have to think hard and write about before I know what's my opinion.
Am only engaging and accept the concept of fallibility. Admit I do enjoy debate - my dad (a Greek what else) got me to accept it as constructive conflict. (There was plenty around our dinner table)
But I’m not attempting to turn you into anything. I do appreciate the exchange though - thank you!
O gosh, I don't mean to sound so snappy, I'm just kinda joking too. Debate is great, but it doesn't limit the possibilities of conversation. Debate, even friendly debate, is built on conflict: you score points, I defend my position, you demolish my argument, etc. But you can also think of conversation as an improvised dance. Then the possibilities are different. You can do something and I try to follow, then I lead and you follow.
You are genuinely appreciated I was not offended or even taken aback. And I embrace your description of what it is to engage in respectful exchange of thoughts on a subject. A dance. I kind of love that.
LOL, don't dance with respect, be playful, stretch yourself. My best friend and I when we get into that mood we're shouting at one another and hurling insults the other hasn't a clue what he's talking about and we're laughing like lunatics.
It’s wonderful isn’t it? Very alike here- at least how we routinely were when the family would get together. (Thankfully we still laugh like lunatics - a common thread that saves us all, yeah? )
That's what Plato thought and the belief has come down the centuries. Knowledge in Plato led to The Good. St Augustine kinda translated that into God, but both interpretations have intermingled. We see it in how some people treat museums - like cathedrals. "Art appreciation" is a part of self-improvement that makes you a better person. Some really awful Nazis thought themselves elevated by Wagner. The proportion ideal lives on too but not as strongly. Up to the Renaissance, proportion was central to beauty. We all know Leonardo's sketches of the ideal man, but other artists also had similar ideas.
Maybe, but not now. I'm actually writing something now and rather not spend more time on substack lest I lose my train of thought. I was just surprised and a bit flattered you liked my comments above.
I plan to write a regular piece for substack but I generate industrial quantities of procrastination (AL Kennedy). Maybe in coming weeks I'll start. It's my meditations on language, music and love.
I won't be here to see the worst of it but I am deeply concerned for my son (he turned 28 near the end of May, I turned 65 at the end of June). But I do believe in him and his generation. I told him, when he was five, that future wars won't be about oil, they'll be about water. Well, at least election results in the UK and France have been more positive than negative. I'm keeping my fingers crossed 🤞. In the 70s a lot of us felt nuclear war was a very real threat but I've not known it as bad and divided as it is at present. We're all human and have far more in common than that which differentiates us.
I found the UK results depressing because Keir Starmer is such a right-wing conservative and so dishonest, I wonder how much worse than the Tories he can be. I'm glad Corbyn won so handsomely. The nuclear threat of the 70s-80s was awful but ecological collapse could be as bad if not worse, because once it starts it can't be stopped, and the poor countries will be become uninhabitable and there will be more refugees, and immigration always fuels the right wing.
The oppression is one thing, that’s worse than ever with modern surveillance, but I’m a bit optimistic it won’t last. Pessimism of the intellect but optimism of the will. I was in Europe when the Berlin wall fell and everyone was shocked. No one thought that could happen without horrific bloodshed, but it did. What I’m more worried about is the ecological collapse we’re heading for.
I’ve been thinking of this and admit my eyes have shifted to focus largely on political calamity as opposed to imminent climate disaster.
I’m consoling myself, in the interest of sanity, to hope industries in expectation of major profit (what else?) are developing strategies to mitigate what we are already confronting.
The Christianity link is through a neo-Platonist, Plotinus, who Saint Augustine studied. Through the link with Plato Augustine constructed the complex theology that defined Christianity through the ages. There are many dimensions to it, including the dismissing of the temporal world of the senses and desires; the eternal existence of God - which he took from Plato's Good; the idea of evil as the absence of good (God) plus the free will He gave us; the original sin of Adam (who used his free will to choose evil) that passed down to us; and so forth.
I’ve read Augustine - and came to despise his theories and exigesis of God as both facile and misogynist. (But I admit to finding The established precepts of organized Christianity the same.). Thank you though. You are a teacher -
He was a deeply troubled man but brilliant and his obsessive Cofessions, if you have to stomach to wade through his neuroses, contain some gems of insight. Thank you for the compliment.
Plato thought that Beauty was a Form most easily accessed by us, though a beautiful person. Our attraction to that person grows into an attraction to beauty of character and beauty in general, the highest being the Good. Today that lives in people who believe that contemplating beautiful art in museums of concert halls somehow makes them better people.
Beauty can be pernicious. There are some beautiful theories that describe the world well, but biology is full of historical artifacts, spandrels, kludges, satisficing and a great deal of ugly. Chemistry is almost as bad. It just lacks evolution. Even mathematics has a good supply of ugly if you know where to look, and then you can't unsee it.
Associating beauty with virtue or truth in the human world is an easy way to do a great deal of harm and not a lot of good.
True. But without beauty life wouldn't be worth living.
Alfred Hitchcock would agree. La femme fatale
So beauty as a path to higher knowledge? Or proportion?
Truth is, I don't know what I think on the subject because Beauty is so varioius. A beautiful painting, song, sunset, woman, equation, are all different. There are ideas of beauty being functionality. Art, I think, should defamiliarize the viewer with the subject, make him/her see it anew, but I don't know if that makes it beautiful. What you think? I'd rather you not treat me like some oracle, cos I'm searching just as you are.
I don't know. Thinking about it, if engaging an art makes you more empathetic then it can make you a better person. Someone once asked me what I hoped to do with a film and I answered that I wanted the viewer to be different after they've seen it from what they were before. If you surrender to beauty it can take you out of yourself, which is antithesis to much meanness in the world. It's a big complex topic and it takes more than an off the cuff response here. I'd have to think hard and write about before I know what's my opinion.
Am only engaging and accept the concept of fallibility. Admit I do enjoy debate - my dad (a Greek what else) got me to accept it as constructive conflict. (There was plenty around our dinner table)
But I’m not attempting to turn you into anything. I do appreciate the exchange though - thank you!
O gosh, I don't mean to sound so snappy, I'm just kinda joking too. Debate is great, but it doesn't limit the possibilities of conversation. Debate, even friendly debate, is built on conflict: you score points, I defend my position, you demolish my argument, etc. But you can also think of conversation as an improvised dance. Then the possibilities are different. You can do something and I try to follow, then I lead and you follow.
You are genuinely appreciated I was not offended or even taken aback. And I embrace your description of what it is to engage in respectful exchange of thoughts on a subject. A dance. I kind of love that.
LOL, don't dance with respect, be playful, stretch yourself. My best friend and I when we get into that mood we're shouting at one another and hurling insults the other hasn't a clue what he's talking about and we're laughing like lunatics.
It’s wonderful isn’t it? Very alike here- at least how we routinely were when the family would get together. (Thankfully we still laugh like lunatics - a common thread that saves us all, yeah? )
It's a life saver. Music, laughter and love.
That’s the prescription isn’t it?
That's what Plato thought and the belief has come down the centuries. Knowledge in Plato led to The Good. St Augustine kinda translated that into God, but both interpretations have intermingled. We see it in how some people treat museums - like cathedrals. "Art appreciation" is a part of self-improvement that makes you a better person. Some really awful Nazis thought themselves elevated by Wagner. The proportion ideal lives on too but not as strongly. Up to the Renaissance, proportion was central to beauty. We all know Leonardo's sketches of the ideal man, but other artists also had similar ideas.
It’s a subject I’ve thought of (and discussed) at length, myself. Would you share your own thoughts on it?
Maybe, but not now. I'm actually writing something now and rather not spend more time on substack lest I lose my train of thought. I was just surprised and a bit flattered you liked my comments above.
Just looked for you and subscribed. (Totally unsurprised you are an educator.)
I plan to write a regular piece for substack but I generate industrial quantities of procrastination (AL Kennedy). Maybe in coming weeks I'll start. It's my meditations on language, music and love.
I’ll look for them.
It’s an exhausting time isn’t it
It’s awful and gets worse every day; I worry for my daughters who’ve got to live their entire lives in it.
For them especially. For all the children in danger of living in a dystopian replica of hundreds of years of oppression.
I won't be here to see the worst of it but I am deeply concerned for my son (he turned 28 near the end of May, I turned 65 at the end of June). But I do believe in him and his generation. I told him, when he was five, that future wars won't be about oil, they'll be about water. Well, at least election results in the UK and France have been more positive than negative. I'm keeping my fingers crossed 🤞. In the 70s a lot of us felt nuclear war was a very real threat but I've not known it as bad and divided as it is at present. We're all human and have far more in common than that which differentiates us.
I found the UK results depressing because Keir Starmer is such a right-wing conservative and so dishonest, I wonder how much worse than the Tories he can be. I'm glad Corbyn won so handsomely. The nuclear threat of the 70s-80s was awful but ecological collapse could be as bad if not worse, because once it starts it can't be stopped, and the poor countries will be become uninhabitable and there will be more refugees, and immigration always fuels the right wing.
Same.
The oppression is one thing, that’s worse than ever with modern surveillance, but I’m a bit optimistic it won’t last. Pessimism of the intellect but optimism of the will. I was in Europe when the Berlin wall fell and everyone was shocked. No one thought that could happen without horrific bloodshed, but it did. What I’m more worried about is the ecological collapse we’re heading for.
I’ve been thinking of this and admit my eyes have shifted to focus largely on political calamity as opposed to imminent climate disaster.
I’m consoling myself, in the interest of sanity, to hope industries in expectation of major profit (what else?) are developing strategies to mitigate what we are already confronting.