Magni Formica Laboris

"One must be daring and approach the truth: for even if we may not grasp it completely, yet we will get closer to it than we are now" - Galen [In light of this it appears that the prototype modern scientist enjoys tenets of Epicurean, Utilitarian, Thomist, reductive materialist, and Galenic thought. Contrast with what the modern scientist is not: Kantian, Platonic (most, at least), Aristotelian, Humean, ...]

from The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, article by Michael J. White: "Another illustration of Stoic accommodation of ontological monism to more conventional ways of thinking and speaking about reality is found in one feature of the Stoic doctrine of cosmic cycles. For a monist such as Spinoza, the identity of god and nature is axiomatic. For orthodox Stoics, the doctrine of cosmic cycles allows them to 'qualify' this identity to a degree. During the phase of conflagration or ekpurosis within a cosmic cycle, god may be regarded as completely existing 'in himself', so to speak. As a passage from Origen, quoted previously, puts it, 'the god of the Stoics has the whole of substance ( ten holen ousian ) as its controlling principle, whenever there is the conflagration'...This 'god-phase' of the cosmic cycle imparts a quasi-transcendence to god and allows the Stoics more naturally to speak of a deity as the creator of the world order - as the '

--various funnies brought to you by The Hellenistic Philosophers 21S Lucretius 4.622-32 "When the bodies of the diffusing flavour are smooth, they give pleasure by touching and stimulating all the moist and oozing regions in the tongue's vicinity. But by contrast, the more each of the bodies is furnished with roughness, they prick the sense and tear it in their encounter. Next comes pleasure from the flavour at the boundary of the palate. But when it has plunged right down through the throat, there is no pleasure while it is all spreading into the limbs. And it makes no difference at all what diet nourishes the body, provided that you can digest what you take and spread it out in the limbs and keep a moist tenor in the stomach" (p.118-119). 48E Plutarch, On common conceptions 1078B-D "If blending occurs in the way they [the Stoics] insist, the constituents must come to be in one another, and the same thing must both be enveloped by being in the other and by accomodat

Epistemology: 1) "Zeno, the founder of the Stoic school, illustrated sensation by the outstretched hand, assent by the curled fingers, apprehension by the closed fist and knowledge by the grasping of one hand by the other (Cicero, Academica Priora 2.145 = LS 41 A); for knowledge for the Stoics is part of a whole system, and while individual statements can be true (or false), truth, as opposed to just 'what is true', is a property of the system as a whole." 2) "The problem is, of course, that while we receive many impressions of which we can be reasonably sure that they represent their sourecs accurately, it is less easy to find examples of individual impressions which simply could not be in any way distorted or misleading...A man can normally recognise hsi own wife without ther ebeing any doubt about the matter; but this was not so for Admetus in Euripides' play when his wife Alcestis had returned from the dead." 3) "The second important Stoic co

"Actually there is a subconscious element in the verbal component as well. Speech is language projected by voice. Just as singing intensifies the expressive power of the sound of the voice through the formalization of its inflections, poetry---like good prose, for that matter---intensifies the expressive powers of the language through the formalization of the choice and ordering of words" (34).

Important quotations: 1. "Music is similar to language. Expressions like musical idiom or musical accent are not metaphors. But music is not language. Its similarity to language points to its innermost nature, but also toward something vague. The person who takes music literally as language will be led astray by it" (401). 2. "...quite a few things in music come rather close to the 'primitive concepts' that are dealt with in epistemology" (401). 3. "In comparison to signifying language, music is a language of a completely different type. Therein lies music's theological aspect. What music says is a proposition at once distinct and concealed. Its idea is the form of the name of God. It is demythologized prayer, freed from the magic of making anything happen, the human attempt, futile, as always, to name the name itself, not to communicate meanings" (402). 4. "Music aims at an intention-less language, but it does not separate itself on

A few quotes from: Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold's Ghost. First Mariner Books, New York: 1999. 1. Furthermore, unlike many other great predators of history, from Genghis Khan to the Spanish conquistadors, King Leopold II never saw a drop of blood spilled in anger. He never set foot in the congo. There is something very modern about that, too, as there is about the bomber pilot in the stratosphere, above the clouds, who never hears screams or sees shattered homes or torn flesh" (4). 2. Joseph Conrad found in Africa "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience" (4). 3. Past the Canary Islands you would enter the Mare Tenebroso : "In the medieval imagination [writes Peter Forbath], this was a region of uttermost dread... where the heavens fling down liquid sheets of flame and the waters boil... where serpent rocks and ogre islands lie in wait for the mariner, where the giant hand of Satan reaches up from the f

from the text: 1. " 'Virtue is knowledge; sin is only committed out of ignorance; the virtuous man is a happy man'; in these three basic forms of optimism lies the death of tragedy. For the virtuous hero must now be a dialectician; there must now be a necessary, visible connection between virtue and knowledge, faith and morality; the solution by transcendental justice in the plays of Aeschylus is now debased to the shallow and impertinent principle of 'poetic justice', with its usual deus ex machina" (70). 2. In a dream, Socrates was impelled by a figure to 'make music' (see Phaedo, 60e5ff). "The words spoken by the figure who appeared to Socrates in a dream are the only hint of any scruples in him about the limits of logical nature; perhaps, he must have told himself, things which I do not understand are not automatically unreasonable. Perhaps there is a kingdom of wisdom from which the logician is banished? Perhaps art may even be a necessa

from the text: 1. "When we turn away blinded after a strenuous attempt to look directly at the sun, we have dark, coloured patches before our eyes, as if their purpose were to heal them; conversely, those appearances of the Sophoclean hero in images of light, in other words, the Apolline quality of the mask, are the necessary result of gazing into the inner, terrible depths of nature - radiant patches, as it were, to heal the gaze seared by gruesome night" (46). 2. "The myth of Prometheus (in Aeschylus' play) presupposes the unbounded value which naive humanity placed on fire as the true palladium of every rising culture; but it struck those contemplative original men as a crime, a theft perpetrated on divine nature, to believe that man commanded fire freely, rather than receiving it as a gift from heaven, as a bolt of lightning which could start a blaze, or as the warming fire of the sun" (49). 3. "Like Plato, Euripides undertook to show the world the o

from the text: 1. "...for only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world externally justified..." (33) 2a. "Even when a musician speaks in images about a composition, as when he describes a symphony as 'pastoral', calling one movement a 'scene by a stream' and another a 'merry gathering of country folk', these too are merely symbolic representations born out of the music (as opposed to the objects imitated by the music), representations which are quite incapable of informing us about the Dionysiac contents of music, and which indeed have no exclusive value as compared with other images" (35). 2b. "...music itself, in its absolute sovereignty, has no need at all of images and concepts but merely tolerates them as an accompaniment" (36). --NB - in 1956 Theodor Adorno, in his Music, Language, and Composition essay, reiterates this theme: "Music aims at an intention-less language, but it does not separate itself once

Here are some notes from an early summer endeavor (Eco, Umberto. The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas . Boston: Harvard College, 1988.) 1. "When we talk about the medievals' taste and spontaneity, their immediate sensuous pleasure in the beauty of the world, we at once raise another problem. Did they always think of art as didactic, or were they capable of disinterested aesthetic experience?" (Eco 13) 2. Suger describes beauty in a way completely contrasting Saint Bernard: " Another element in medieval aesthetic pleasure appears in a passage in which Suger relates what it is like to contemplate the beauty of his church. It is an experience which unites the sensuousness of beautiful materials with an awareness of the supernatural, in a manner which he describes as 'anagogical.' In the medieval Weltanschauung there was a direct connection linking the earth with heaven, and this must be taken into account when one considers their aesthetic perceptions. 

from the text: 1. Apollo is a mere veil of the Dionysian "In the Dionysiac dithyramb man is stimulated to the highest intensification of his symbolic powers; something that he has never felt before urgently demands to be expresseed: the destruction of the veil of maya, one-ness as the genius of humankind, indeed of nature itself. The essence of nature is bent on expressing itself; a new world of symbols is required, firstly the symbolism of the entire body, not just of the mouth, the face, the word, but the full gesture of dance with its rhythmical movement of every limb. Then there is a sudden, tempestuous growth in music's other symbolic powers, in rhythm, dynamics, and harmony. To comprehend this complete unchaining of all symbolic powers, a man must already have reached that height of self-abandonment which seeks symbolic expression in those powers: thus the dithyrambic servant of Dionysos can only be understood by his own kind! With what astonishment the Apolline G

Two quotations from the Student Companion (Lenson, David. The Birth of Tragedy - A Commentary. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co, 1987.) 1. "Thomson, in Aeschylus and Athens , gives a continuation of the myth of the young god's birth fromm the thigh of Zeus: 'Enraged at the honors which Zeus was bestowing on the child, Hera suborned the Titans and persuaded them to destroy it. Accordingly, having provided themselves with attractive toys... The Titans enticed the child from the Kouretes, in whose charge it had been placed, tore it in pieces, threw the limbs into a cauldron and boiled and ate them... When Zeus discovered what had happened, he blasted the Titans with his thunderbolt, and in some way... the dead child was brought to life again' (Thomson, George. Aeschylus and Athens. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1968.). The notion of a god whose birth and death are both cause for celebration was of course borrowed by Christianity, which put the birth of the god in the

Some particularly interesting quotes from Raymond Geuss' introduction: 1. "The highest form of culture we know, Nietzsche thinks, is that of ancient Greece, and the most perfect expression of that culture is fifth-century Attic tragedy, but the depredations of time make our knowledge of that culture at best fragmentary and indirect" (x). 2. "Roughly speaking, The Birth of Tragedy asks: how can we remedy the ills of 'modern' society? Nietzsche's answer is: by constructing a new 'tragic culture' centered on an idealized form of Wagnerism" (x). 3. "The synthesis of Apollo and Dionysos in tragedy (in which the musical, Dionysiac element, Nietzsche claims, has a certain dominance) is part of a complex defence against the pessimism and despair which is the natural existential lot of humans" (xi). 4. "Modern individuals have developed their talents and powers in an overspecialized, one-sided way; their lives and personalities ar

Some of the more profound Jung quotes are located in the conclusion; here they are: "Theories in psychology are the very devil. It is true that we need certain points of view for their orienting and heuristic value; but they should be regarded as mere auxiliary concepts that can be laid aside at any time. We still know so very little about the psyche that is positively grotesque to think we are far enough advanced to frame general theories. We have not even established the empirical extent of the psyche's phenomenology; how then can we dream of general theories? No doubt theory is the best cloak for lack of experience and ignorance, but the consequences are depressing: bigotedness, superficiality, and scientific sectarianism." (Vol. 17, p. 7) *Kant content* 'Jung pointed out that, after all, causality and finalism are arbitrary modes of thinking employed by the scientist for ordering observable phenomena. Causality and teleology are not themselves found in nature.'

"The goal of amplification is to comprehend the symbolic significance and the archetypal roots of a dream, fantasy, hallucination, painting, or any other human product. Thus, for example, Jung writes concerning the song of the moth: 'Under the symbol of "moth and sun" we have dug deep down into the historical layers of the psyche, and in the course of our excavations have uncovered a buried idol, the sun-hero, "young, comely, with glowing locks and fiery crown," who, forever unattainable to mortal men, revolves around the earth, causing night to follow day, and winter summer, and death life, and who rises again in rejuvenated splendor to give light to new generations. for him the dreamer longs with her very soul, for him the "soul-moth" burns her wings' (Vol. 5, p. 109). In the sun-hero, we see the representation of an archetype, the product of countless generations of men experiencing the great power and radiance of the sun." (p. 112-

IV. Death By Water Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell And the profit and loss. A current under sea Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell He passed the stages of his age and youth Entering the whirlpool. Gentile or Jew O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

“One could suggest, for instance, that reality is itself nothing but one very complicated formal system. Its symbols do not move around on paper, but rather in a three-dimensional vacuum (space); they are the elementary particles of which everything is composed. (Tacit assumption: that there is an end to the descending chain of matter, so that the expression “elementary particles” makes sense.) The “typographical rules” are the laws of physics, which tell how, given the positions and velocities of all particles at a given instant, to modify them, resulting in a new set of positions and velocities belonging to the “next” instant. So the theorems of this grand formal system are the possible configurations of particles at different times in the history of the universe. The sole axiom is (or perhaps was) the original configurations of all the particles at the ‘beginning of time.’ This is so grandiose a conception, however, that it has only the most theoretical interest; and besides.