Dr. Ginsu (jch1@voicenet.com) wrote:
: No, not you.
:
: This has to do with Plato's Eternal Forms. In the SYMPOSIUM, Diotima
: relates to Socrates, as related to us in Socrates' speech at the climax
: of the movement, that the Grandest Vision he had yet to see was that of
: the Eternal Form of the Good Itself. What does this mean? One must
: involve oneself with the admiration of the beauty of the carnal, the
: fleshy beauty, first. Inevitable. With luck, one comes (to realize)
: that the beauty you've seen, embodied incarnate as your lover, reflects
: a much larger beauty that all bodies share. Therefore you grow to
: appreciate the beauty of all bodies.
Plato was full of shit on this. Forms. Forms. So wait a second, for
every, say, Zoogz Rift CD, up in heaven there's a perfect version of
the Zoogz Rift CD, and all Zoogz Rift CDs here on the meat-roller-rink
are just cheap bastardizations of it? What a load of shit. Although
you bring up an interesting point. If you were going to look at the
eternal forms, if there were eternal forms, they wouldn't look the
damndest bit like Zoogz Rift CD, they'd be totally fuckin' different,
because the good stuff in question is really there all along. So to
speak. So Plato isn't really the most evil man in human history
after all, he's just misunderstood! By me, at least. Maybe some people
understand him. But I DON'T think meat-buckets or even bit-buckets
are necessarily inferior, I mean, you can take the peanut butter out of
the chocolate but you CAN'T take the chocolate out of the peanut butter,
see? This "evil" stuff isn't as "evil" as the "good" which Plato was
talking about, which is opposed to the good that most people put in
opposition to evil which isn't really any good at all which is why the
Buddhists want to get rid of it. Right? See, if you're going to have
LEVELS like this, which you shouldn't, really, you gotta get straight
what you're talking about when you use words like "nothingness" and
"desire" and "good". That's why words piss me off so much.
: Diotima goes on to lead Socrates to understand that a few worthy
: spirits understand that the beauty of all bodies can be much more
: clearly apprehended if one appreciated the goodness of the principle
: which established that those bodies would be beautiful. So here we make
: a switch, two switches actually: One, from the beautiful to the good;
: and two, from bodies (substantial) to abstract ideas/principles/laws
: (insubstantial). Struggling to keep up with the Goddess, Socrates then
: understood the beauty and goodness of no particular law, but the very
: possibility of ANY law. Human laws and administrations are therefore
: according to Plato to be admired. Any Discordian might argue with that,
: but you gotta take the bad with the good. Right. Anyway, Diotima then
: shows Socrates how to appreciate not the Law, but rather the Good-ness
: which that Law pivots upon; this good-ness being the over-all welfare
: that the Law is supposed to preserve, ideally.
Well, now, this I don't agree with at all, I mean, principles is all
philosophical wishy-washy stuff, and it's no surprise "socrates" would be
into that, being a philosopher and all, but the apprehensible contains the
seeds of the abstract, that is, I think the existence of the abstract is
dependent on the existence of the concrete and NOT vice versa. Laws to
be admired? Well, it's a worthy effort, that is, to try and incorporate
the "hundin" into everyday life, but one must make adjustments for the
fact that you ARE dealing with everyday life and realize that the ones
who are trying to carry it out are fucking it up horribly, and really it's
the worst travesty you could imagine, people who don't have any fucking
clue what they're on about trying to promote ideals, like Dead Kennedys
fans who didn't see that "Kill the Poor" was supposed to be SARCASM.
That's the kind of mentality we're dealing with with law enforcement
officials and lawmakers, and it's inevitable. So try to be faithful to
the principles as you can, but recognize that the arbiters of those
principles on the retard farm are just NOT getting it right. Idealism just
doesn't WORK, y'see.
: When we arrive, the Ultimate Vision for Socrates is that of the Good
: Itself. That abstract concept, mistakenly taken as substantial by
: generations afterwards, has caused more curious onlookers to waste their
: lives bullshitting about nonsense than even Dobbs Himself, or this
: newsgroup. But there is a catch: Plato's doctrine later established
: that there are Forms for all things: The Form of the Perfect Chair, the
: Perfect Hamburger, the Penultimate (Fill In the Blank). Hell, if he had
: only beaten Jesus to the punch he might have even dreamed up the form of
: God Itself, the Template from which all other Gods were cut. But one
: thing bothers me. These forms presumably live in the realm of
: mathematical truth. That means, no tangible existence in themselves,
Is the penultimate Hamburger established by the Forms as well as the
ultimate Hamburger? Did Plato mandate the second-best as well, the losers
as well as the winners? The Hamburger that just MIGHT have been perfect
if it had some Winking Lizard sauce? But yeah. Here Plato clearly went
loopy, and wrong, and stupid, and caused much of the idiocy that has plagued
philosophy for the past 2000 years. Ideally all of the philosophical
advancements of humanity should be torn down every ten minutes, not
every two thousand fucking years.
: only as instatiations of that which they represent: Chairs, Hamburgers,
: (Fill in the blank)'s, gods. However, what of the Form of the Perfect
: Unseen? Are not any of the many versions of the Unseen just as good as
: the Unseen Itself? I mean, you can't see any of them anyway, what does
: it matter if it is the Perfect Unseen or Not? ANY Unseen will do the
: job. So what gives? Do not all of the Eternal Forms live in this wild
: realm of mathematical truth, or are there different levels to the types
: of Forms, and only abstracts like the Good or the Just get to live
: there, while all the other forms enjoy some kind of mixed existence here
: on Earth?? This has been puzzling me. I bet DynaSoar could clear this
: up, and set me straight. But I bet that ten minutes later I would be
: wondering again.
I'll clear this up. The whole "form" thing is a load of shit. It doesn't
make any sort of sense, and isn't this whole thing the root of Anselm's
ontological argument? There's not this perfect little cerebral realm
unsullied by course reality. This is the very fucking definition of "ivory
tower".
: I'm thinking ... of bringing a box of butterflies to the X-Day Drill.
: One day I'm gonna open the cage and set them all free, and we can spend
: the afternoon chasing butterflies. Sound good?
Actually, that's a pretty damn good idea. Except I don't have any particular
desire to catch butterflies. I'd maybe just watch them. And then maybe
hit the spit-fight. Drink lots of beer first, I mean, pee is allowed, right?
: I just wasted a half an hour of work typing this. Praise "Bob".
It's time better spent than making fifty snappy one-line comments.
Substance, m'man. Substance is what this newsgroup should be about,
and what we'll be seeing lots more of come Freitag ("Free-Day"). That
shall be the day we declare our freedom from the Pinks.
--
GOD IS NOT MOCKED
David F Lynch wrote:
>
> Dr. Ginsu (jch1@voicenet.com) wrote:
>
> : only as instatiations of that which they represent: Chairs, Hamburgers,
> : (Fill in the blank)'s, gods. However, what of the Form of the Perfect
> : Unseen? Are not any of the many versions of the Unseen just as good as
> : the Unseen Itself? I mean, you can't see any of them anyway, what does
> : it matter if it is the Perfect Unseen or Not? ANY Unseen will do the
> : job. So what gives? Do not all of the Eternal Forms live in this wild
> : realm of mathematical truth, or are there different levels to the types
> : of Forms, and only abstracts like the Good or the Just get to live
> : there, while all the other forms enjoy some kind of mixed existence here
> : on Earth?? This has been puzzling me. I bet DynaSoar could clear this
> : up, and set me straight. But I bet that ten minutes later I would be
> : wondering again.
>
> I'll clear this up. The whole "form" thing is a load of shit. It doesn't
> make any sort of sense, and isn't this whole thing the root of Anselm's
> ontological argument? There's not this perfect little cerebral realm
> unsullied by course reality. This is the very fucking definition of "ivory
> tower".
The Forms just correspond to the Perfect Exemplars of all noun
categories. We can classify objects as being better or worse examples of
a category (ostriches are pretty bad examples of birds). It has been
suggested that we construct mental templates for noun categories by
generalizing from examples, and recognize things by comparing them to
these "perfectly typical" template forms. There are a few odd bits of
experimental evidence for this (obviously difficult to test). Plato has
it that we get a grip on them by soul-soaring roung The World Of Forms
before birth. Slight difference there, but the principle's similar.
Fine, it's a load of shit. It falls apart if you take it any further
than that (well, you can take it in other directions, but who the fuck
gives a fucking fuck?). It doesn't make any sense. 20,000,000 Plato fans
CAN be wrong. On the plus side, everything everyone else has ever said
is a load of shit too.
As for the Perfect Unseen, it's a thing you don't see. So you can't ever
see perfect examples of it, only the imperfect ones where you DO see
something but not properly. So it's like that, but more so. Kind of a
gigantic abstract meta-agnosia.
--
"You reason like a cancer cell might." -- Grantland