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to Unedited Philosophy Quotes and Ramblings about Intequinism.
PLATO, 1989, Edited by Sir Kenneth Dover. Symposium.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, c1980. - A
PLATO, 1951, Translated by Walter
Hamilton, c1951. The Symposium. London, England: Penguin. - B
Reader: Mr MD Pienaar
28 December 2011
A - Page 6
Commentary
“ In life we
encounter many things, people and events. Each of these
'particulars' is limited in time and space: it comes into
being, it exists here or there, it changes, it ceases to be. Since
we
do not encounter anything which is wholly unlike everything
else [own italics], we can form and use 'universal'
concepts, generalising, exemplifying, defining, deducing and
predicting. In the light of experience, and in accordance with
our needs in trying to understand and affect our environment,
we correct our generalisations, modify our definitions,
replace our axioms. To many people this situation is wholly
acceptable. Others, of whom Plato was one, believe that there
is something more, something which 'really exists',
unchanging, independent of our indefinitely adjustable
generalisations and pragmatic definitions. Whether this
believe happens to be right, happens to be wrong, or is [s
printer higher than the i] insufficiently meaningful to be
called either, it is at any rate not dictated by reasoned
reflection on experience [own italics]; it is
engendered by a kind of craving, which may itself be an
operation of divine grace, a psychopathological symptom, the
product of an intellectual failure to disentangle words from
things, or an element of good or bad luck in the temperament
which heredity and experience combine to produce in the
individual. Whatever it is, Plato yielded to it, but not to it
alone; a second craving made him a philosopher (rather than
the kind of visionary who claims portentously to understand
the 'meaning of life'), for he believed that the human soul is
able to attain firm and certain knowledge of real unchanging
entities (εϊδη, ίδέαι 'ideas' or 'forms') by systematic and
communicable reasoning. This knowledge is έπιστημη;
propositions founded upon experience, and therefore ultimately
on sensory perceptions, are δοξαι 'opinions'. The eye can
perceive an object of the kind we call 'beautiful', but the
idea of beauty – 'Beauty', 'the beautiful' (το καλόν), 'the
beautiful (by) itself (αύτό τό καλόν) is perceived only by
'the eye of the soul' (cf. 211e-212a). Plato freely uses
generalisations [causal induction?] based upon sensory
experience (e.g. 207ab) in corroborations or refutation of
hypotheses about the ideas, and how particulars, perceptible
by our senses and having dimensions in time and space, reflect
or 'participate in' the ideas is never explained; indeed, in
Phaedo 100d Plato makes his ignorance of the mechanism
explicit. “
B - Page 13
“ Even Plato,
who in the Republic proposes that men and women shall receive
exactly the same education and be equally capable of
discharging all the duties of a citizen, at the same time
expressly prohibits for the men and women of his ruling class
anything beyond temporary sexual relations for the purpose of
breeding. It is true that both there and in the Laws he
forbids also sexual intercourse between men, and condemns it
as being unnatural, but this is probably due more to a
puritanical aversion from the physical aspect of sex in any
form than to a disapproval of homosexuality as such, and he
certainly seems to have held that a homosexual relationship is
alone capable of being transformed into a lifelong
partnership, and that homosexual love, like heterosexual love
with us, has a range which extends from the crudest physical
passion to a marriage of noble minds with no physical
manifestation at all. “
Self
It does not make sense to me to say
Plato thought that homosexuality is the only manner to have a
lifelong partnership and that he forbids it. It could be
argued that Plato thought then that lifelong partnership is
not acceptable or he changed his opinion during his lifetime.
B - Page 20
“ . . , just
as a man who has true opinions without being able to give a
rational account of them is half-way between wisdom and
ignorance. This comparison is of supreme importance for the
understanding of the dialogue. It presupposes the whole of
Plato's Theory of Ideas and Forms, which, reduced to its
barest elements, is that the manifold and ever-changing
phenomena of the world of sense are imitations or copies of
eternal and absolute Forms, which alone have true reality, and
to 'participation' in which the sensible world owes such
partial reality as it possesses. The impulse to this theory
was originally given by the search of the historical Socrates
for universal definitions of moral concepts, but the mature
system goes far beyond anything that Socrates can be supposed
to have contemplated; apparently for almost every class of
things, whether material or abstract, which can be embraced
under a common name, there exists a Form in the eternal world.
“
Self
Beauty played
an important role in Plato's theory of Forms. The essence of
something of a class (“ material or abstract ”) it seems to me
is the Form that Plato wrote about. It seems it is the essence
of a adjective sometimes. At the moment Forms means to me that
there is a most beautiful form for a class for example horses.
The Aus horses in Namibia originated from different breeds but
with natural selection they are currently about 80% Arab. An
Arab horse has the most beautiful form of all horses I have
seen and it seems that Plato's or rather Socrates' theory is
proven right because, the reality of the Aus horses'
procreation over a lengthy period, confirmed my view of
beauty. The Arab, most beautiful, horse genes, have with
natural selection, under harsh desert conditions, replaced the
impact humans had on the horse breeds, by replacing the most
beautiful horse genes back to a majority of the genes, of each
individual horse at Aus. When the horses settled at Aus,
possibly there were horses who had less than 80% Arab genes.
29 December 2011
B – Page 42
“ Hesiod tells us that Chaos first
came into existence,
'but next
Broad-breasted Earth, on whose foundation firm Creation
stands, and Love.'
Acusiles (5) agrees with Hesiod in
saying that after Chaos these two, Earth and Love, came into
being. And Parmenides in speaking of creation says
'First among all the gods she
invented Love.' “ (6)
(5)
“ Acusilaus of Argos was the author of a prose work called Genealogies
on the origins of gods and men, which covered much the same
ground as Hesiod's Theogony. “
(6) “
Parmenides (early 5th century B.C.), in obedience
to what he believed to be strict logic, rejected the
possibility of all plurality and change, and the line which is
here quoted belongs to the fragmentary second part of his
poem, in which he appears, in spite of his convictions, to
have constructed a cosmogony of more or less traditional type.
The context of the line is unknown. “
B – Page 43
“ If then one
could contrive that a state or an army should entirely consist
of lovers and loved, (7) it would be impossible for it to have
a better organization than that which it would then enjoy
through their avoidance of all dishonour and their mutual
emulation; moreover, a handful of such men, fighting side by
side, would defeat practically the whole world. ”
Self
“ lovers and loved ” means older and
younger homosexual men whereby the older have benefit of
sexual “favours” and the younger men benefit of knowledge to
be learned from the older men. “ Avoidance of all dishonour ”
is the opposite of pride as a deadly sin in Roman Catholisism.
(7) “ It is
possible that there is an illusion here to the famous Sacred
Band of Thebes, which has organized on this principle.
It is first heard of under Epaminondas at Leuctra in 371 B.C.,
but may have been in existence somewhat before that date.
Self
Theuth and
Ammon (Amen?) was also from Thebes. See notes about Phaedrus
of Plato. Is there a relation between the name Theuth and the
description in Greek for gods, theos. It sounds almost the
same. See notes about The
Band of Thebes.
31 December 2011
B
The partygoers give speeches about
what love is.
Agathon's says in his speech love is
beauty. Socrates then says that they agree that love is a want
of something and that the something is beauty and that
therefor love cannot be beauty because how can beauty want
beauty. Only something that is not beautiful will want beauty.
Because love is not beauty it must be ugly. Socrates then
tells what Diotima taught him about love. She said that if
something is not beautiful it does not mean it is ugly. There
is something between beautiful and ugly and that is where love
is. Diotima then goes on and explains about love and
procreation. She then explains another love of something more
that beauty. A something that is constant, an idea, which is
wider than beauty, which includes all things for example
institutions. Love is used as a noun and a verb. Love loves
something and Love is a god.
The last
speech is a speech which praises Socrates and blames him
partly because he does not partake in homosexuality. Socrates
is not affected by alcohol when he drinks much of it.
Self
It seems that at the time love was
something they were trying to explain. Everyone had different
opinions. I read somewhere that Greek philosophy influenced
the young people in Israel at the time of Jesus and that the
old Israelites did not like it. The word used for love in the
New Testament was Greek and The Symposium was written in
Greek. In the New Testament love is used as a verb. The
definition of love is still something which is not defined
constantly. According to my own experience resistance against
alcohol depends on how used a body is to it. It works the same
as cigarettes. The more one use it, the smaller effect it has
per unit.