The 10 Best Love Songs of All Time

Following our old method in aesthetics here, we will attempt to collect candidates for the ten best, hoping to catch the ten in a wider net- which, incidentally, works when fishing for songs. As these swim by, we simply ask: might this be one of the best 10? and these are the candidates, of transcendent height, depth, and beauty.

Two different senses of “love song” are 1) the human song that is like the songs of the birds, a part of our natural courtship ritual, and 2) Songs about love in general, including the sad ones, and the ones about all kinds of love, not only the romantic. About half of all lyric poetry is love songs. As said, we hold that love songs evince the imago Dei of Genesis 1:26, some being like a reflector. The knowledge within is the vehicle of inspiration. These are principles of psychology, more fundamental than what has been accessible to our “science.”

We look especially to the lyrics, and to what it is that lyric poetry is doing, or to the function of lyric poetry. If modern psychiatric science has a better way of collecting data and approaching the questions of love, so that these things are clear and known in the practice of the art, …we have not seen it. A tentative list is as follows:

1. The Wedding Song
2. In My Life
3. Dance Me to the End of Love
4. The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face
5. I Don’t Know How to Love Him Superstar
6. Holly Holy
7. Play Me
8. Your Love’s Return
9. I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You
10. Louie, Louie!

Candidates

Air That I Breathe Hollies

Your Song Elton John / Taupin

Tiny Dancer Elton John /Taupin

Into the Mystic Morrison

Brown Eyed Girl Morrison

Tupelo Honey Morrison

Have I Told You Lately Morrison

Evergreen Streisand

Crimson and Clover Tommy James

Golden Lady Stevie Wonder

Sunshine of My Life Stevie Wonder

For Your Love Yardbirds (Gouldman)

I Can’t Explain Who

Close to You Carpenters

We’ve Only Just Begun Carpenters

I Don’t Know How to Love Him Superstar

Hush Herman

*We Gotta Get Out of this place Eric Burden

*Born to Run Springsteen

*Because the Night Patti Smith/ East Street Band Guy

My Love McCartney

Soul Love Bowie

Let it Grow Clapton

Bus Stop Hollies

For Emily Simon

Kathy’s Song Simon

Bridge Over Troubled Water Simon

*Time of the Season Zombies

*Something Beatles (Harrison)

*#9 Dream Lennon (Lennon)

*Twilight Time Platters

Special Angel Helms

I Love Your Way Frampton

Thank You ZeppelinShe’s a Rainbow

*Stones She’s A Rainbow

*Beach Boys Good Vibrations

Wondring Aloud Tull

Songbird Fleetwood Mac

Sad Love songs:

Taxi Chapin

Yesterday Beatles

Against the Wind Seger

Train Man Seger

Fire and Rain James Taylor

Suzanne Cohen

Tomorrow is a long Time Dylan

Stretched on Your Grave Sinead

Ten Years Gone Zeppelin

I’m Not In Love 10cc

Baby I Love Your Way Frampton

Hello, Its Me Tod Rundgren

No Matter What Badfinger

The word love has many meanings, and the honoring of St. Valentine’s Day opens out from romantic love to all sorts of friendship and the love of humanity in general. While our psychology have been for the most part unable to address any of these theoretically, the Greeks had several words for these different kinds: eros, epithumia, philia, agape. When John writes that God is love, the word is agape. The whole scripture ends in the marriage that is said to unite all things, so that one sees that this is more than a mere coincidence of words- the romantic love that joins man and woman at the beginning of each new family. That this love of one for another is what is at the root of all human connection, community and connectedness.

Love as a “metaphysical” idea stands next to “the Good,” and perhaps “thought thinking thought,” as the best of the Names or definitions of the Most High. It is between and around the two, heaven and earth, that make up the creation, between the things that we see and the good there is somehow this love.

“Philanthrope” as the love of man mat be a participation in God. But the love of the higher for the lower is an overflowing, rather than an eros or longing for fulfillment, as of an emptyness.

“I would I love you from my fullness, rather than my emptiness,” some other man has said.

Paul: Eph 5:31- For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother, and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself…

So scripture ends in a wedding, of the Bride and Lamb,when the city of God comes down from heaven, Revelation 19-22. …as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, the things in heaven and the things on earth.” (Ephesians 1:10)

Jesus Matthew 19:4 …He who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh. …

…So they are no longer two but one flesh. What God has joined together, let no man put asunder.

Letter on the Epidemic of Shootings in the US

Dear Representative Dingell:

Please consider the possibility that psychiatric drugs, specifically antidepressants are CAUSING the epidemic of mass shootings in our nation.

HIPAA laws prevent the gathering and therefore study of this possibility, so that if it were so we would not know. Factors similar to the Oxy-heroin scam may be occurring. A known side effect on some persons is listed on the bottles- “suicidal ideation.” Might these not also make certain bad persons randomly murderous? The instances where the victims are not known to the shooter are especially interesting. What if 90% “involved” antidepressants? Most are under the care of our “Mental health” systems, which have obviously failed in these instances.

Mass psychiatric drugging is what we are doing that is different from all other armed nations and times, in which these shootings did not occur. While I also strongly advocate any gun control measures possible- if 18% of our people need psychiatric drugs, we may want to rethink that second Amendment!- it becomes gradually clearer that our psychiatry simply does not have the knowledge that would be required to treat the soul with drugs. An example is the recent deposing of the assumption that depression is a chemical imbalance. As a lifelong student of psychology, we submit the opinion that our psychiatry is in a word profitable, but unscientific ineffective and often decisively harmful- though necessary. Nor has it been answerable to any higher judge or authority, allowing great opportunity for pharmacy companies to harvest tax dollars while doing more harm than good.

Thank You,

Your new constituent,

Mark A. McDonald, PhD (Politics)

Menexenus: Constitution of Athens

Who else would write this? It is like a blog on the occasion of the funeral oration. I would append it to my blog on Theseus. But here is a democratic republic most similar to ours- minus a Sicilian expedition!

Then as now, our government was an aristocracy or government of the best which has the approval of the many. For kings we have always had, first hereditary then elected, and authority is mostly in the hands of the people, who dispense offices and power to those who appear to be most deserving of them Neither is a man rejected from weakness or poverty or obscurity of origin, nor honored by reason of the opposite, as in other cities, but there is one principle- he who appears to be wise and good is a governor and ruler. The basis of this our government is equality of birth, for other cities are made up of all sorts and unequal conditions of men, and therefore their governments are unequal- there are tyrannies and there are oligarchies, in which the one party are slaves and the others masters. But we and our citizens are brethren, the children all of one mother, and we do not think it right to be one another’s masters or servants, but the natural equality of birth compels us to seek for natural equality, and to recognize no superiority except in the reputation of virtue and wisdom.

Plato, Menexenus (Jowett), 238c- 239a

The Christ and “Religion”

In discussions with atheists, one impenetrable issue has been the distinction between the way of the Christ and what is common to all mankind in all ages, except in parts of our own age, called “religion.” The insistence is that Christianity is simply one among many false “religions,” which our enlightened age now knows to be false, with no more to say about the soul than unicorns about taxonomy, mere imaginary fables, etc. The assurance these hold demonstrates that this has in a way become our custom or dogma, replacing all others, and allowing us the new banner of toleration, the only virtue, on whose altar we have sacrificed all other virtues.

This question is far more complex than at first appears. Abraham rejected the religion of Babylon, the idols and false gods, when he came forth from Ur to receive the Promise. He hears God directly, and then is taught by Melchizedek about God Most High, the maker of heaven and earth, as distinct from the gods of “polytheism,” which are made of have come to be. Idolatrous religion is different from Mosaic religion, which is intended to replace it as animal sacrifice replaces human sacrifice.

A crucial teaching is contained in a statement of Paul in his Letter to the Galatians.

Formerly, when you did not know God, you were in bondage to beings that by nature (phusei) are no gods; but now that you have come to know (gnontes, knowing) God, or rather to be known (gnosthenres) by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and beggarly elemental spirits (stoichia,) whose slaves you want to be once more? You observe days and months and seasons and years! I am afraid I have labored over you in vain.

Galatians 4:

To worship the gods is a kind of enslavement to the weak elements, and this is related to the keeping of the calendar. That they are not quite said to know God, but rather be known by God, as through baptism, is of course interesting to us, but here the interesting point regards worship. The Christ receives this worship, as though it were formerly improperly given, and the table of the Last supper replaces ritual. The Christian images were then in conflict with every sort of common practice, but gradually, as the world became Christian, these same things continue- cities, laws, territories and conflicting ways, attempts to influence fortune, hierarchies of priests and honoring of the dead, imaginations of Providence. Then Saint Helen began the recovery of the relics, and the Christians could come out of the catacombs, having suffered the ten persecutions by Rome from Nero to Diocletan. Newton,* for example, blames the early Papacy, following Constantine, with introducing the worshiping of dead men’s souls and images, “mazuzahim,” he calls this. While this may in one side be a proper criticism, whom is it better men honor than saints, and are they really taught to worship them? Christian images and doctrines are conflated with the ancient and what Bloom calls “one’s own,” where originally the Way is a leaving behind of all these worldly things. Let the dead bury the dead. Only then is it possible that “Christians, or Christendom persecute of make martyrs, which of course never occurred in a single instance prior to the conversion of Rome. Again, one might ask, is it not better that the orders be Christian? The separation of Church and state was not yet imagined, but is the answer to this problem bequeathed or donated us by Constantine. The Papal states are especially the place where one sees the conjunction of the regimes of cities and nations with the Christian church. This has now been reduced to Vatican City, and Italy has become a unified nation, after Garibaldi.

The appearances of the word “religion” (threskeias) in scripture are rare and revealing, occurring only 5 times in 3 places, and never in the sense used when Christians speak of what they are doing or praise their own “revealed religion,” for example. It would be interesting to note the first time in history that Christianity was even called a religion. Paul and James use the word, while none of the Apostles or Jesus do so, ever. In Acts (26:5), Paul explains “…according to the strictest party of our religion I have lived as a Pharisee” The King James version also uses the word at Gal 1:13-14.

James writes:

“If any one among you thinks to be religious among you, not bridling his tongue, but deceiving his heart, the religion of this one is vain. Religion clean and undefiled before God the father is this, to visit orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.

This may be the only use of the word in a scripture in a sense that is not derogatory, or only semi- derogatory. Neither the Christians nor the Christ see themselves as establishing a “religion,” and their relation to all these things is a continual question, rather than anything clear. The Protestants at first made a great issue of this point and this was correct. Through all human history, humans have always had an understanding of things divine or above the mundane, and have always been concerned with the dead, and often with the afterlife- as in Egypt, though such things are astonishingly absent from the Hebrew scriptures. There have always been superstitious understandings of the causes, and what one finds is that Christians are not excepted from these ancient and local things merely by taking the name of Christian. The meetings of the earliest Christians around the Eucharist or “Lord’s Supper” would replace the meetings as at the Temple in Jerusalem, but there is nothing like what was to occur when the Christian images and opinions descended upon and over the pagan practices in the Greek and Roman world of Olympian gods and ancient ways quite foreign to Jerusalem, and quite similar to the idolatrous practices which Mosaic law replaced in Canaan, once out of Egypt- where the things said and done regarding the afterlife- including penance and forgiveness- are done amid an idolatrous religion. One point that arises repeatedly is that the Christians persecuted no one prior to the Fourth Century, when Constantine made Rome Christian, and Rome, having once persecuted the Christians and Jews especially for not worshiping the emperor continued to persecute, though now it was heretics, as began with the Donatists, priest reinstated who had be defrocked for fearing to face martyrdom rather than turn over the scriptures in the last Roman persecution. Soon Aryan and Catholic would be the issue, and it was one thing after another, though persecutions did become rare from the sixth until the early twelfth century.

In Rome as in Britain, Christianity was simply superimposed upon “pagan” altars. Rome in the 4th century took on an odd combination of Jewish temple and Roman pontificate, replacing the Rome that once persecuted Christians with the Rome that made martyrs of heretics. Changing the images did not end either war nor persecutions. One must wonder at the blessing when the 10 persecutions over the refusal to worship the emperor as a god gave way to the imposition of a unified doctrine. Humans did become more humane over all, with the difference that Christianity would now take the blame for the sins of the city.

Geoffrey of Monmouth indicates how the new religion was simply superimposed upon the pagan orders and images.*

When King St. Lucius, the first Christian king excepting Abgar, turned Britain to Christianity, about 156 AD,

…Once the holy missionaries had put an end to paganism throughout almost the whole island, they dedicated to the One God and His Blessed Saints the temples which had been founded in honor of a multiplicity of gods, assigning to them various categories of men in orders. At that time there were 28 flamens in Britain and three archflamens to whose jurisdiction the other spiritual leaders and judges of public morals were subject. At the Pope’s bidding, the missionaries converted these men from their idolatry. Where there were flamens, he placed bishops, and where there were archflamens, they appointed archbishops The seats of the archflamens had been in three noble cities: London, York, and the city of Legions, the site of which last is still known by its by the river Usk in Glaumorgan, is still known by its ancient walls and buildings. The twenty-eight bishops were placed under the jurisdiction of these three cities, once the superstitions practiced there had been purged away.

History of the Kings of Britain, IV.20

Coilus, the father of Lucius and the son of a Marius, son of Avarargus, had been friendly with Rome and paid tribute voluntarily- this in a time in the second century of the more decent emperors, and between persecutions, though it is clear that Britain is on the fringes of the Roman empire, and able to have kings and become Christian. The Coilus line continues after Lucius and a few usurpations to Old King Cole and his son Cole, the father of St. Helen who married a young Constantius, father of Constantine, and moved to York, where Constantine was crowned (Eusebius).

Now the principalities and powers are to become Christian- an improvement, maybe, though anti-christian ire will result from the evils of the city and crimes committed under the banner of the Christ. The cave does not cease to be a cave when painted over with christian images- though these may better lead up and out. It is the soul of humans that is caved and will see only shadows and artificial copies of the real beings outside the cave.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses and others reject the customs of Easter and Christmas on the basis of this history of the mixing of Christian and “pagan” ways, and holidays may be what Paul means when he writes, “You observe days and month and years- I fear I have labored over you in vain.” The mixture of the customs of Samhein with all Saints day to become All Hallows Eve is a good example- turnips and disguises being much older among the Irish than the honoring of all the saints.The monk’s calendaration- our favorite pastime- is not a part of Christianity as such at all, but has of course emerged from the melding of common festivals and imaginings with a Christian world. Santa Claus is a good example of how these things emerge, as this is a fairly recent folk tale. It is mixed, though, with the gift giving of the three wise men, and there seems no reason we should cease these things. From the beginning the Christians had something like the meeting at Synagogues or at the Temple in Jerusalem surrounding the celebration of the Eucharist or communion.

Shakespeare addresses these local dieties, the Fairies, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The nights are no longer blessed with hymn of carol, and this leads to disorders. The poet aims to restore this intermediary realm to its legitimate expression. With the advent of Christianity and the Socratic discovery of “hyper-ouranian” being, what once were the gods and personifications of the more collective causes regarding the soul or psyche become intermediary beings, and the psychoid is revealed as subordinate to Being. “Love is not a god but a spirit” is how this appears in the Symposium, who ascends with our prayers and descends with answers, which is the work of love. The image of this is the sea between two lands, and the traveler who journeys and returns is liker one who ascends. The gods were in one sense psychic and not being, archetype and not eidos, subject and not object, collective unconscious and not God. The limitations of phenomenology set by Jung for scientific psychology prevent his science from crossing over to a clearer distinction between the “self” or true self and God, the imago Dei from its original.

Isaac Newton, Commentary on Daniel and the Apocalypse, pp…

Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain, IV.20; Bede, I.4.

Jungian Platonism

I have to try to present the argument for the new Jungian Platonism, since no one gets it, just my saying it. We have to go back and forth, up and down, until the logos becomes apparent.

There is knowledge in the soul, including self knowledge. The “Archetypes are knowledges, the causes of the symbols, whose integration is philosophy.

The wise man or wisdom is the first principle of psychology. The three parts of the soul correspond too to the three levels of the Jungian unconscious and the challenges presented by each. If knowledge is in the soul, but we do not know, it is “unconscious.” Hence, we think the myth of recollection is literal in one surprising sense- regarding the knowledge that is virtue.

That the wise man is the principle of psychology, or the particular that embodies the health of the soul, does not of course mean that we should dress men and women in the cloaks befitting contemplatives, make this the mirror of fashion, or anything of the sort. What it does mean, though, will tale some spelling out. It is in part by analogies inherent in nature and the soul: The single contemplative in the invisible implies the sanctity of marriage in the visible, and the virtue of the king and statesman.

The knowledges are both the cause of the images or symbols and the faculties of knowing them. Hence the products of the soul are intelligible. An example is that the three parts of the city and soul in the Republic refer to the “same form and model.” The same form is archetype. Jung has these “in” the soul rather than in nature, being a subjectivist,” attempting something similar to the Kantian a-priori categories, but regarding the human things.

Platonic “forms” hare closer to the Jungian archetypes than to the linguistic universals of the faculty the sees concepts. Strauss reports that Plato did not think there were eternal forms of artificial things- yet there are linguistic universals of these, and in quite the same way as the other kinds and classes among the intelligibles. Let that suffice. The “numinosity” of the beautiful is the allure of knowledge waiting to become known. Knowledge is of course going to be singular.

Now go to the divided line and allegory of the cave. What are the “divine images in water.” What are the causes of the poems and laws? The nature of man? And this is what Homer too called “Godlike and an image of God.”

Hence the human things are the gateway of metaphysics, and the key to the understanding of all things. But this- philosophy- is called imaginary by those who think the animal revealed from beneath the artificial additions of poets and legislators- the Presocratics- is philosophy.

From Tweets on Johannine Gnosticism:

Someone IS awake out there! This is a difficult and important point. John 1:12: …exousan (power, liberty…) to become children of God, born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” With 1:9, the light that enlightens men,” and 3:8…

__________

…this is what is born in rebirth or baptism, and sleeps in each. It is Christ in us, AND also what each most is. If reason is nous, the eye that if well makes the whole body full of light, the faith and reason question has a top.

Romans 6 with John 3. I don’t say what everyone knows already, much. Peter, too, on Noah. We are begotten sons through the only begotten son- but not by faith in opinion or being born into a tradition. We say: “Turn toward God.” But the traditions are about this.

Jesus teaches this when he is about to be stoned for saying “I and the Father are one.” It is true of him, and us through Him, and surely not him through us. He is the light, we the enlightened. And the lamp guys. We can do remembrance, but this is not by custom or made by man.

Why does John use it in the plural to refer to the men, 1:13, without contradicting 1:14? We are not each Christs, as is often said nowadays, but we are begotten through Him, and not v.v. That is the mystery of the font, and if it were not a mystery.. But yes, and angels fall

Jesus teaches this when he is about to be stoned for saying “I and the Father are one.” It is true of him, and us through Him, and surely not him through us. He is the light, we the enlightened. And the lamp guys. We can do remembrance, but this is not by custom or made by man.

Why does John use it in the plural to refer to the men, 1:13, without contradicting 1:14? We are not each Christs, as is often said nowadays, but we are begotten through Him, and not v.v. That is the mystery of the font, and if it were not a mystery.. But yes, and angels fall

____________________

That “nous is what each most is,” and the eye of the soul, is from Aristotle, Ethics, Book X. We say this is higher than “reason,” which depends for its principles in BOTH theory and practice on the seeing of eye of the soul, nous.

Ben Franklin and the Books

Ben Franklin invented the lending library, when a group of friends pooled their books, at what is also the origin of the American Philosophical Society. The library was the first public project. He gained pledges of contributions, the “subscription” library, and began the education of the people that would be self governing. In a short while, the average American was said to be as well educated than most “gentlemen” of the artificial aristocracy. “Franklin” means a middle-class craftsman or tradesman, and Ben is an early cultivator of the Masonic attitude toward virtue. The habit of Lincoln, walking long distances to borrow and return books, and reading Jefferson, may be a result of this, another of the innumerable benefits of Franklin bestowed on mankind and his nation.

In his Autobiography, It is clear that Franklin has access to Xenophon’s Memorabilia, though it is not clear how many are the Platonic dialogues to which Franklin has access. His Latin may not have been sufficient, and the Republic was not yet translated. Similarly, Shakespeare is not quite yet accessible, until the Germans led to a British rediscovery. He writes his list of virtues as though he had not read Aristotle’s Ethics, nor known of the 4 cardinal virtues, though he has seen other lists. While he leaves out charity or liberality, he is, in addition to libraries, the cause of the fire departments, insurance, hospitals, orphanages, the Post office, Franklin stoves, lightening rods. While he leaves “wisdom” out of the list, he is a natural philosopher emerging into political philosophy, in the last third of his career, and is the teacher of Madison and Jefferson in the next generation.

Franklin writes:

“These libraries have improved the general conversation of the Americans, made common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries, and perhaps have contributed in some degree to the stand so generally made throughout the colonies in defense of their privileges.”

Imagine trying to study in the library at Alexandria, where one could not smoke or drink coffee! But seriously, to carry and own ones own books, as became possible with the printing press, is a modern marvel, giving those ion our age superior access to scholarship- though a population of 8 billion may not produce the thinkers that emerged in a single century in Athens. My own, built out of used books and books from classes, with additions from the library book sales where the best are discarded as unread, is likely far superior to that of Franklin, and he is one of the few philosophers who were not impoverished, like Anaxagoras, begging oil for his lamp of Pericles. With one’s own books, it is possible to underline in blue and red, saving a reading from 30 years ago, compounding efforts. The traditional bound paper book must make a comeback, as the E-book just is not portable!

Notes from Irving Wasserman II: Intro 1981

We took the Intro class in 1981, after the big conversion in the Plato class, and after the class called “Political Philosophy,” and so the notes begin to become more clear. This section completes my notes from Euthyphro, Apology, Crito and Meno, and introduces Irv’s gemstone: his class on the Republic. Unlike my own “Intro to Philosophy” class, which would have 22 or so students at a Catholic college, Irv had 32 students at a state school, and we remember fondly sitting in the back row marveling at the disrespect and indifference of the Athenian multitude, not knowing what they had before them in the class of Irving Wasserman. I can still see him smirk, twitch, cluck and shuffle his feet in response to the class!

Prof Wasserman was then not yet using the West edition of the Four Texts on Socrates, and was still using the Cornford summary of the Republic. I was quite proud to show him the West edition, from our studies in Dallas, similar to when I was able to get Irving the Strauss essay called “Mutual Influence,” like Mustard Seed in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, able to bring fresh honey to the consort of the Fairy Queen.

Philosophy 101- Section D Professor I. Wasserman

Introduction to Philosophy Office 428 Mackinac Hall

Fall, 1981 MWF 12:00. 210 Mackinac Hall

Texts Plato Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Bobbs-Merril

Plato Republic Cornford ed.

Shakespeare The Tempest Signet

Descartes, Discourse on Method, Bobbs-Merril

Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Penguin

Course Aim: To provide an understanding of some of the main problems of philosophy through a study of several important thinkers, both ancient and modern. The ancient, or classical view regarding happiness, the good life, reason and nature, freedom and equality, is represented by Plato and Shakespeare; the modern counterpart by Descartes and Karl Marx.

Notebook, p. 1

The Apology

Socrates speaks of himself Corrupting the minds of the youth

believing in other deities.

“Socrates is guilty of corrupting the minds of the young, and of believing in deities of his own invention instead of the gods of the city.

He spends his life in the effort to kindle into a flame the spark of good in every man

Socrates never condemned.

Socrates the hero

Dialogue rather than treatise, a good way to start philosophy

Apology

Not apologetic, eh? But rather bothers everyone

Manner of speaking Sophistry. Appearance.

Strongest case for the city If the city is the best for the youth and worships the true gods

Then Socrates does in fact corrupt the youth and has done wrong in worshiping other gods

Socrates first moves to dig up the context, old accusations.

The existent (present) opinion “When you were children

The foundations are old accusations.

Making the weaker argument appear the stronger

Inquiry into things below and above; Into the mysteries

Hades and Heaven, the beginning and the end

inquiry = Atheism

The oracle: Why he lived the way he did

Difference between public assembly +…begs them not to shout

[No, I’m not a sophist

Who is the expert in perfecting the human and social qualities

“It seems that I really am wise in a limited sense.”

Human wisdom

“an unimpeachable authority, witness, the Oracle of Delphi

Notebook, p. 2

Does the invisible preshadow the intelligible?

Callias, if your sons were calfs or bulls,, we’d get a trainer for their natures

Who is the expert in perfecting human social qualities?

A kind of wisdom, human wisdom

More than human, A lie? p. 21. The oracle

The paradox of human wisdom

“I felt that here if anywhere I should succeed in pointing out to the divine authority: “You said I was the wisest of men, but here is a man who is wiser than I… Notebook 2-5 is reading notes from the Apology]

Notebook, p. 6

Top margin: Timeaus- a likely story

1. speculates about the heavens and what is under the earth
2. 2) Makes the weaker argument appear the stronger
3. 3)Teaches these things to others

2) indirectly replies by talking about manner of speech, and about trying to arouse sympathy (perjury).

Natural philosophers

The reason why is what Socrates mwanted, not prior conditions or particular causes.

Anaxagoras: Mind. But Socrates was disappointed. Why?

Action limited to starting motion in space

Shift from outer tom inner

Pre-Socratic- discoverry of nature

Socratic- discovery of the soul

Bringing philosophy down from the heavens to the earth.

Technae- is there a comparable art that woill produce wisdom?

Arete, purpose, end skill, flute player, etc.

Who is the teachert of human arete’?

Sophists- rhetoric

Of how to win friends and influence people

-political art- to rise in the city

Philosophy: the archetectonic art

2) check- Meletus’ exchange

If he were speaking to folk who would not confuse him with the Sophists, would he answer #2?

The oracle: There is no one wiser than Socrates. (Not that Socrates is wise or is the wisest man)

He went to search for a wiser man. He knew he was not wise, but not that others were n’t. Human wisdom.

Notebook, p. 7

That it is good to know that we do not know.

Lecture

Questions for Crito

a) What arguments does Crito present to Persuade Socrates to live rather than die?

b) Why does Socrates choose death?

2a) What are the main points in Socrates’ dialogue with the laws?

Is his emphasis on obediesnce to law surprising? Does it seem to contradict what he says in the Apology?

Socrates seems to take for granted that the laws are good. Corrupting the young.

Socrates is not […F?] forcing a vote between philosophy and the city.

Courage in dialogue

Shows that we dio not really know what we thought we know.

Philosophy is always dangerous, unsettling.

Philosophy: What is? aims at the nature of something.

He had to do it in a responsible way, so as not to hurt the city.. The city thinks Socrates hurt them.

He declares his whole life was in service of the city.

Socrates went into the marketplace every day.

Socrates has haunted the West: Nietzsche loved and hated him.

Nietzsche and Heidegger attribute the evils of the West to Socrates.

“Socrates will appear again.”!

To not know and to think tyhat we do know is the worst possible condition, for then he will never know and never seek.

Create. Not a void.

Lecture

To the poets

The stories of heroesd and gods. Poetry recited to music.

Comparable to the writers of the Bible.

Homer and Hesiod. Literature in the broadest sense. Muses.

Inspiration- The poets say many good and true things. Not as the result of knowledge or understanding.

Notebook, p. 8 Top margin:Lecture Apology/ Text Crito. Take the best course reason has to offer.

numinosity. “Everyone would stop eating.”

The possession of the muses. So theyt think they know. A lot of other things eveyone else thinks they know too.

What kind of music has the most profound moral and political reproduction

The many decide that way by intense emotional attachment.

Artisans- the craftsmen. They do teach and practice a practical art.

They thought they knew a lot of other thiongs, like how to live the good life.

Socrates has a divine mission; For the god.

Service to the god- pointing out to people that they do not know what they thought they knew.

[Margin: Why is this a service of the god? The audience is skeptical.]

Cracow, Poland teaching of Apology

-they just let him have it

Never dig a pit for a student that you cannot fill.

Not iconoclasm.

[Crito reading notes]

Notebook, p. 10

Top margin: Lecture Apology. Crime and invention. The freedom consists in knowledge of reality. Rationalistic freedom and intention

Meletus. What is so wrong with answering: “The laws?” (He could have used that answer to some good)

He is out to show Meletus’ folly

Who? Everyone. To show that Meletus never cared about the improvement of the young.

The horse trainer.

Intentionality

No one would intentionally make someone worse, because he himself then would be harmed.

All harm is done unintentionally. If not intentional, its not a crime.

Acts of agents are intentional. Degrees of murder. Sanity, if your sane, you are responsible. If not sane, determined.

No person in his right mind would voluntarily do something to harm him.

Joury: “What!? No one voluntarily does wrong!? crime!?

All law and crime depends upon volition. He’ therefore, here undermines thew basis of all law.

2 senses of intentional.

[margin: Forgiveness is the truth above the law. Philosophers as such won’t punish]

We cannot act intentionalloy unless we know reality.

Jury: “Boy, he sure makes weaker arguments appear stronger”

Given[ing] Meletus a chance to make the indictment more extreme- and he will- Meletus goes for it. “Atheist.” contradiction. Mixes up with Anaxagoras.

Notebook p. 11-13 Crito second reading notes

p.13: Lecture

On Shakespeare’s King Henry V: What is a Christian king?

On King Henry V

   I have found a Qualifying Exam question written on Shakespeare’s King Henry V, on the question of the Christian king. It was written for Dr. Alvis, which is why it does not refer directly to his Essay “A Little Touch of the Night in Harry,” from the book Shakespeare as Political thinker. The exam format requires one to give an answer, where otherwise one might be silent, and also frees one from numbered references and the sort of precision that would require a longer essay. I remember sitting in worried silence, puzzled for a long time at the way Dr. Alvis had rephrased the question I had submitted, according to the exam procedure, and finally beginning only because I was running out of time.

Question: Is Henry a Christian King or is he a Machiavellian ruler? What is a Christian King, according to Shakespeare?

   At the funeral of Henry the Fifth, Bedford, Winchester and Gloucester present three views of Henry in praising him, or in their eulogies. Winchester calls him “A king blessed of the king of kings,” who was as fearsome to the French as the Judgement day. Bedford, who thinks the bad revolting stars consented to the death of Henry, is in the middle of invoking his spirit to protect England as the spirit of Caesar ruled over Rome after his death, when news arrives that 7 French towns have revolted, and the Anglo -French empire of Henry V begins to collapse.

   Bedford called Henry the best of the English kings and said that he would make a more glorious star than Julius Caesar or bright- (then he was interrupted. These two views agree with the chorus of the play, which calls Henry V “The mirror of all Christian kings” and a “conquering Caesar.” The third view presented is that of Gloucester, who says:

England n’er had a king until his time

Virtue he had, deserving to command…

What can I say? His deeds excel all speech

According to Gloucester, Henry is a true king, England’s first. His claim to rule is not, like Richard, based on hereditary legitimacy, nor like Bolingbroke, on strength alone, but on virtue. The thesis of this answer will be that Henry (aside from whether or not he is a truly Christian king) uses the appearance of both a Christian king and the ferocity of a Machiavellian “Prince” in doing what is expedient for England.

   According to the criterion of the play, that 1) Henry is the mirror of princes and is concerned with the honorable, and 2) that passions are subject to him, Henry is a Christian king. That Henry is not a Machiavellian ruler is shown by various examples, such as 1) his defense of his father in war, where a self-interested son might have simply stood by), 2) His tears at his father’s death, and 3) His sincere -piety shown in soliloquy before Agincourt, where he prays to the “God of Battles and relates his re-interring of the body of Richard with 500 poor to pray for him, 2 chantries built and genuinely repenting for the Lancastrian usurpation and murder of Richard. Machiavelli, or his prince, would presumably consider these things foolish.

   When a French ambassador comes from the Dauphin, and asks whether he may speak his message openly or not, Henry responds:

We are no tyrant, but a Christian king

Onto whose grace our passions are as subjected

As the wretches fettered in our prisons.

   The analogy of city and soul from Plato’s Republic shows the meaning of what is occurring in Henry’s England. A Christian king is the kind of a monarch opposed to the tyrant who subjects the passions This subjection of the passions comes about in England through the rise of Henry to the throne. After the usurpation of the throne by Bolingbroke, England suffered internal faction and civil war, and because ceremony fell with Richard, the appetites of England were unchained. Falstaff embodies the  tendencies of modernity, according to which the  public things are for the service of the private ends, the ends of the appetites The question facing Henry is how to bring Falstaff under again, or “How is kingship, as the sun, to break through the foul and ugly mists” of the appetites and the disrespect under which the crown has come.

The father of Henry compares his son to Richard II, due to his apparent “vile participation,” and advises rare public appearances to cultivate the wonder or awe necessary to the crown. But one problem in England is that the nobility no longer respect a king whom their own hands have helped to make so great. Henry treats the nobles as his father advised treating the people, with rare appearances.

By descending into the taverns, Henry takes the crown, which he will inherit, through a “low transformation,” attaching to it the opinion of England’s appetitiveness, while Henry becomes “of all the humors since Adam. Henry then appears to rise from the people as if born from them, slays Hotspur, and restores the rule of law by choosing the Chief Justice over Falstaff, at the end of II Henry IV. Henry’s calculated appearance, as shown in the conversation of Canterbury and Ely in Henry VI, has the appearance of a rebirth. In this he uses the appearance of Christianity to bring the rule of law to his regime. The free choice of the rule of law, rather than divine right, is to be the principle of the new regime.

After the first soliloquy of the prince in I Henry IV, the word redeem is used exclusively to refer to honor. In Richard II, Mowbray stated that without honor, men are but clay, and Falstaff is referred to as a clay man.” The honor catechism of Falstaff- which imitates Henry’s later speech on ceremony, shows that since the fall of chivalry and ceremony, honor has become meaningless. It was the dream of Hotspur, as he says, to restore honor to England, to pluck honor from the moon or dive into the deep and bring her up, so that he might wear all her dignities without a rival. It is Henry who is capable of separating honor from ceremony and restoring it to England.He slays Hotspur as the true prince slays the lion,” and in this replaces Hotspur as the mirror in which the noble youth of England dress themselves.” By the time Henry leads his men over to France, “silken dalliance” is put away, according to the patriotic chorus, and “Honor’s thought reigns solely in the breasts of every man.” As Mowbray’s use of the word honor shows, it is something of an allegory of immortality, in chivalry. Henry at Agincourt replaces religion with the glory of deeds, leading men into action.

If it is a sin to covet honor, Henry says, he is the most offending soul alive. In the deathbed advice of Henry’s father, he told Henry how he had planned to lead a crusade to the Holy Land in order to busy giddy minds with foreign wars.” and “waste the memory of former days. Instead of this plan to avoid civil faction, Henry chooses to lead the English, nobles and commoners, into France, renewing the Hundred Years War.

In the first act of Henry V, Canterbury and Ely speak of a bill by which the church stands to lose a great deal of its lands to the government of England. In exchange for relenting on the bill, the plan of Canterbury is for the Church to provide Henry with money and an apparent legitimate claim to the French throne. Canterbury agrees that Edward III has a claim through the wife of Philip, Isabel, if succession through the female were allowed. But Henry himself is not even the legitimate heir of Edward III, let alone of France. The Church provides him with the appearance of justice or legality for the war. The genuine “justice” of the war might be argued in terms of the need of England to restore honor and avoid civil war, ruling over the injustice of foreign conquest in the circumstance. But the king cannot do what appears to everyone to be good. In genuinely serving the common good, he does what is necessary. Where ceremony once hid the necessities of politics, Henry is capable of doing this himself. The Anglo-French empire would be a new founding, and would solve the Lancastrian problem of legitimacy.

In the second Act of Henry V, Henry miraculously discovers the conspiracy of Cambridge- heir to the legitimate title to the throne, according to Mortimer- Scroop and Grey to assassinate him Before executing them, Henry allows them to come into his presence, and gets them to advise strict punishment for a man who merely spoke abuse of the king while drunk. In doing this, it looks less harsh to the other nobles when Henry sentences these conspirators to death. Like his father, Henry the Fifth is capable of gardening and weeding. When he sentences the conspirators to death, he separates the public from the private, saying that as a man he will weep for them, and holds no revenge, but as king, he turns them over to the law to be sentenced to death for the safety of England. This separation distinguished Henry V from Richard II.

When Henry leads his men into battle, we see him giving them advice opposite to the advice which Machiavelli, in the Fourteenth Chapter of the Prince, gives to princes. Machiavelli tells princes to devote their intellect and the training of their bodies to war, and during peace, to never lift their thought from war. Henry tells his men that in peace, there is nothing so becomes a man as stillness and humility, but in war, to then stiffen the sinews, summon up the spirit, and disguise fair nature with the look of ferocity, imitating the tiger. Machiavelli tells men to look human, but devote themselves wholly to war, becoming like beasts, somewhat like Achilles in his choice of war over peace [See Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, p. 78]. Henry tells men to disguise a genuinely fair nature by imitating a fierce animal, the tiger. Thus it is shown that Henry uses both the appearance of Christianity and the appearance of Machiavellian ferocity.

Similarly, before Harfleur, Henry threatens to let loose the inhuman violence of war onto the city, allowing his soldiers to rape their daughters and kill their fathers and babies unless they give up the town. The threat works, and bloodshed is avoided.

Before Agincourt, the Chorus tells us to entertain conjecture of a time when darkness fills the wide vessel of the universe. There it has us imagine Henry as a “largess universal” like the sun, thawing the cold fear of his soldiers with the touch of Harry in the night.” In the scene that follows, Henry walks among his soldiers disguised with the cloak of Thomas Erpingham. On either side of an argument on the justice of the war- which Henry turns into an argument about the privacy of the salvation of the soul-Henry presents his speech on ceremony. When asked if the king has been told how bad their situation looks, Henry responds, ” The king is but a man, as am I, and so when he sees reason to fear, he fears as do other men. Later, when speaking alone on ceremony, Henry states how ceremony is “poison flattery,” and cannot cure the knee of a beggar whom it commands to kneel. Ceremony is basically nothing. As a result of his ability to separate himself as a man from his kingship, he need not descend like Richard II with a crash to discover that he shares the human condition with other men. He never forgets himself as Richard did, in what ceremony tells a king he is. Yet in the battle of Agincourt, greatly outnumbered,, it does appear that God fights for him, as Richard thought God would merely because he is king, or because of the divine right of kings and ceremonial kingship. It may be that in some sense Henry is what ceremony told Richard he was, or what Richard thought himself to be but was not, aq true king.

It looks like the thoughts of Henry on kingship cannot be compared to modern thought on rule, even though as a Lancastrian he sees the crown as a burden and says to Katherine, “We are the makers of manners, Kate. Nice customs curtsy to great kings.” Henry refers twice explicitly to the rule of mind, when he says that it is good for men to bear their present pains upon example, because it lifts the spirit, and when mind is quickened the organs, once dead, break their grave and come back to life, mind clearly ruling the body. Second, going into battle, he says, “All is ready if our minds be so.” Nor can his statements about the privacy of salvation be interpreted to mean that he does not think a king ought be concerned with moral education. Salvation does not come from the laws, nor even from the example of a human king, and is distinct from the character formation of moral education. It looks as if it were very necessary to separate out political concerns and political rule from ceremonial Christianity, to avoid the problems Richard II got himself into. It seems that according to the Bible, salvation does not come from the religious law. Thus salvation ought be private, not a matter for the political kingdom at all, except to not inhibit, or to get out of the way.

The unfavorable view of Henry is usually based on 1. The injustice of the war in France, 2. The killing of the French prisoners, 3) his apparent disregard for law and his genuine disregard for ceremony, and 4) the breakdown of his Anglo-French empire and the bleeding of England afterward. While all these might be answered, only some can possibly be answered by this answerer.

With regard to the French prisoners, there is some ambiguity as to what exactly occurs. First, the order is given to kill them when the French regroup. Then Fluellen comments, “Kill the poys and the luggage.” It is clear that the French have not killed the English luggage boys. As in the previous scene with Pistol and his prisoner, the boy commented on how the luggage was vulnerable, guarded only by boys, and it is said that the French have plundered the King’s tent. But this ambiguity may only be to cover up the unjust killing of the French prisoners. The second time the command is given, Henry speaks in the future tense, “We’ll kill the prisoners, as though this had not been done yet. If it was done, it may have been done, as indicated by Mr. Lewis, to avoid the possibility of the English brothers ransoming the king. Or it may simply be an unjust thing necessary to do to make the English forget the numbers of the French. But as it later turns out, they have already forgotten this and and defeated them. The king may do it to unite the soldiers in injustice. If it were somehow a necessary thing, a higher justice would balance it. If not, the king would simply be a doer of injustice.

Henry does fail in that the empire breaks down after his death. He doesn’t do what Caesar did, perhaps because his ends are different from that of Caesar, but Henry does not found on the flattery of the people as Caesar did. Other reasons contributing to the breakdown of the empire is that Henry died fairly early after the birth of his son and Katherine does not prove to be a “good soldier breeder,” nor educator. While Henry shows the deficiency of ceremony and ceremonial virtue, genuine virtue capable of responding to the circumstances (as Henry does for example in spontaneously speaking so as to give or show the significance of deeds) cannot be inculcated and passed on from father to son But if Henry had lived long and had quite a few sons, perhaps the empire could have been held, and the garden of France, so broken down as described in Act V, rebuilt and even better off for coming under English rule Another point is that Shakespeare comes out of the England Henry left behind Shakespeare, by presenting the deeds of Henry, can inspire men to virtue. This seems to be part of his purpose for England, as for example the patriotism of the Chorus could inspire Englishmen for generations. In this way, the defect of Christian orders in the kingdom which allows Machiavelli to introduce tyranny and the arguments for injustice are addressed by the simple restoration of the life of honor.

[In keeping with the principle that the political world of the kingdom reflects the spiritual things not directly, but by analogy may show that Henry’s redeeming of the time refers also to his imitation of the sun regarding the time of England, in a temporal and temporary analogy with the redemption, dependent upon accident, yet an analogous reflection of spiritual virtue in ethical or political virtue. That is, the redemption may refer to the political aspect of practical wisdom, or royal rule. Henry’s redemption of the time in imitation of the sun, planned from his first soliloquy (I Henry IV, I, ii, 183-205) may be contrasted with Richard’s wasting of the time (Richard II, V, v, 49). Hal imitates the sun, and so is not really among the moon’s men. The sense in which his “reformation” is Christian, and hence the sense in which Henry is a Christian king, depends upon the meaning of Christianity and the meaning of kingship. But he is not a Christian king in the sense in which Richard is a Christian king, by custom. “But a good heart, Kate, is both the sun and the moon,/ Or rather the sun and not the moon…” (King Henry V, V, ii, 160). The conjunction of sun and moon in the wedding connects the last to the first appearances of Henry in the History plays. Shakespeare, by upholding honor in the face of modernity and the principle of the body or self-preservation, by showing England its kings and what it means to be royal, exercises the practical wisdom not of a king or statesman, who cares for the particular time, but the practical wisdom of a philosopher, the gardener of statesmen and kings.]

[Winston Churchill, in his Birth of Britain,” reports on the cruelty of the historical Henry, and we can see from this what Shakespeare has done with the invention of Falstaff, or the identification of him with Oldcastle, a heretic persecuted in the medieval fashion. By abstracting from these defects, Shakespeare writes a comedy in history- almost unique- for the English.]

Notes from Irving Wasserman: On Plato

[In progress]

Preface

   The nearest semblance we may have to what Plato did regarding Socrates may be to try to collect notes from the classes of our greatest teachers, so that despite the unstateable truth of the living word and the introduction to philosophy in the circumstance, what has occurred might in somehow be preserved.

   There are reasons not to do this sort of thing, yet these seem outweighed by the reasons to do it, and next. I feel indeed like Apollodorus at the opening of Plato’s Symposium, coming to a friend or two with a speech of the philosopher. Wasserman did not write, but then, neither did Socrates, though they both took education through conversation and the greatest books with the utmost seriousness.

   One would wish to communicate the excitement of philosophy in those days, as we had studied psychology and evolutionary biology in search of the beginning of the way, or what we would call the way to the way, an “apprenticeship.” We wound up seeking a “psychology of consciousness,” and at the same time, the depths and heights of Jungian psychology. It is here, when our mentor James Blight, Historian of Freud, went off to Harvard, that we found Irving Wasserman, as though in the corner of a philosophy department in a corn field in Western Michigan.

   Notes from classes are in a way one’s own, what he was able to glean of what occurred and what was said. We mix in our own thoughts, and summarize in our own words, while trying to record triggers for memory of whole accounts. Separate thoughts of my own triggered by the lectures, I would later set off to the right, underangle or pediment. The first class to transcribe would be that called “Plato,” as it was in 1980, and then again in 1982, taught in the Ancient division to be followed by Medieval and Modern, sections for which each in a remarkable department would produce the best of the studies in their satchel,  In 1981 and then again in 1983, he did a class called “Political Philosophy,” in which we read Plato’s Republic and Shakespeare’s Tempest, and these would be most worth transcribing from the notebooks which may otherwise be soon lost in the mists.

We’ll see how this goes:

Plato 1980

The opening is “Why Plato wrote dialogues”]

1) Bring Socrates to us

2) Promise of insight, sobering significance

3) Plato never speaks directly to his reader

[Quote from 7th Letter] 4) “Concerning these things there is no written work of mine, nor will there ever be, for they cannot be expressed in words…”

Therefore there is no Platonic doctrine?

Plato wrote dialogues because of this.

“Mystical?” God help us!

Dramatic discourse precludes that philosophical wisdom

[Concretism   Showing and telling (Donahue) [ I seem to be recalling a saying of a High school English teacher, Mr. Donahue, on the distinction between telling someone something and showing them.]

6) Philo (sophy) carries implications for actions

9) The philosophic endeavor begins with a dilemma + admission of profound ignorance. ? Who knows

Philosophy is dangerous

Is it good to be gadflied, unsettled?  [yes- self knowledge faith

^ (change)                wisdom- Prove it. Insanity?]

“Never dig a pit for a student that you cannot fill” [ a saying from Tho. Aquinas]

Definitions abstract dangerously from the context

Philosophy can end only with a personal conclusion

Dialogues are Plato’s resolution to the paradox that philosophy cannot be written

Plato’s solution of the paradox of the writing of philosophy

The reader

a) excitement of radicals who dig conflict

b) fallacious arguments are dramatically significant

c) The written word knows not to whom it should speak. -(Phaedrus).

inflexible, fixed.

[p. 2] Top: Dialogue relates learning to living

Living word can function in context of relationship (symbol: sideways 8)

DB asks: Why is a dialogue less limited than a treatise?

Empathy- understanding- To climb into Socrates’ barefeet

“I see a dialogue as painting a picture

Treatise: bare facts “What is it that happened to you” [-Wasserman]

The speaker who can empathize his audience.

*To enshrine forever the greatest and the rarest things, deeds

*Fossilized ideas which come alive.

*Plato wrote for Socrates’ immortality.

To combine the power of spoken and written word to overcome the limitations in each.

In the dialogue, Socrates in 1980 still knows when to speak

Choose according to interest

One must participate directly in philosophy to understand

Abstract statements can only be understood in context.

Q[uestion] of the unity of Plato’s thought

Don’t presume [arrow] ideas of (~ unity) stages of Plato’s thought

*Exoteric- ostensible meaning

Esoteric meaning also (~literal)

[p.3] R. Gustavson: “funny that (Euthyphro) thought men and gods have the same standards.”

Euthyphro- Q of the gods- what if you don’t Q[uestion] the gods?

Trial- ” [Question of the gods]

Socrates “The right way is…” with rational backing; considering

similar value, rat[ional] argument produces objective ethic

There are paradigms in…

An art/ paradigms paradigms paradigms paradigms paradigms.

There is much more than content and process.

Conscience- daimon never tells Socrates what to do

Only interferes when he is inclined to get get excessive.

Euthyphro

Divine law/ Athenian law

P. 24: Plato’s theory of the Ideas [G edition of Euthyphro].

s-self [a picture is drawn: head with arrows out the eyes straight ahead and out the eyes, around front and over. Another arrow, a not equal sign, another arrow curving out around and down, = impiety. [Self knowledge and reflection does or does not equal impiety]

Soc. remaining on a formal rather than theoretical level

logic/ definition

Euthyphro fills the content

A drawing of a man out of a heart with dividing lines (quite a nice doodle- there are many on these pages, which means that time was occupied listening and musing) with the words to the left: I am that which is: Atman/Brahman

[p.] 25: “I shall tell you a great many other facts about our religion”

That which makes all pious actions pious (?)

“You can’t define anything that way-” -Wasserman

I write: Because one is then dealing with nature itself ?

“It is because they disagree about some action that some say it has been done rightly and others wrongly

Even if all x is wrong

What is piety>? Impiety? What is the predication

x is that which is

hierarchical abstraction of a verb  a process  -being  abstraction

That which one comes across in the search for self-knowledge.

It is like the wind, to try an to catch, not to catch, like Donovan’s wind.

[p. 5] Top: Where there is piety, there is moral rectitude But where there is moral rectitude there is not always piety.

an art of knowing what to give and what to ask for

Shattering of self-confidence to open the way to true wisdom.

Review

Piety is what I am doing now (definition mistake)

• Euthyphro sets himself up as the measure of all things

Definition in gods who disagree about good and evil (perfection)

contradiction   removed (arrow)    all gods love is pious

what is pious or holy is loved because it is pious (~ is ~)

4. Euthyphro silent

Socrates- Piety is that part of justice which attends to the care of the gods

The good would have to provide a norm for gods, rather than be what the gods do.

By making piety part of the just, he leads Euthyphro to

What do the gods do

The good-the light

Because it can’t turn on agreeing at all

[Do not define quality

What is the process. definition.

[head with self-reflecting arrow] The good is that which is found by light.  There is light and dark which never [triangle: “…changes.”

objection %. degree light/dark, man is both…

…is indefinable…]

Piety is part of the just means that not all of the just is pious.

[p. 6]

Lecture of Friday                     Of essence- its not that we know better now, but that it                                                             is different now.

All the virtues are one

That which results from light

Last words on the Euthyphro

Piety is pleasing to all the gods

consists in service to the gods which is not a barter.

Service is an art which involves knowledge.

Every art involves knowledge.

 

Every pious act is just, but not every just act is pious: [Circles drawn, the just around the pious.]

What Socrates is doing here are pious

The dialogues are an exhibition of Socrates’ piety.

[Piety is an aspect of being, being is impredicable.]

Excerpt: Lennon #9 Dream

From “Rock Commentaries”

1971: Shaved Fish: #9 Dream

John Lennon achieved some greatness apart from the Beatles. Together with “Mind Games” on Shaved Fish, the dream is a celebration of the mystery rite of love:

So long ago

Was it in a dream?

Was it just a dream?

I know oh yes I know

Seemed so very real

Seemed so real to me

Took a walk down the street

Through the heat whispered trees

I thought I could hear,

Hear, hear.

Somebody called out my name

As it started to rain

Two spirits dancing so strangely

[Ah! bawa kawa, posse posson]

Dream, dream away

Magic in the air. Was Magic in the air?

I believe, yes I believe

What more can I say

On a river of sound

Through the mirrors go round and round

I thought I could feel, feel, feel, feel

Music touching my soul

Something warm sudden cold

The spirit dance was unfolding

   The poem describes a very mysterious and beautiful experience involving love and rain. The song is said to have come to Lennon in a dream. At first he says he knows, at least that it seemed so very real, but then he admits, that he believes, and what more can he say?

   He was walking down the street in the heat, when he heard someone call out his name, and then they met as it started to rain, and their dance was like the spirits dance, as love brings the two to participate in what is like the dance of spirits, within the harmony of things lost from the beginning, in a conjunction of conscious and unconscious mind that is like walking in a waking dream. The harmony can apparently be entered briefly by two in love, and it is this brief contact that makes them both wish that the dance were permanent, and seek to recover the lost harmony in the end. But it is here that for a moment the divided human being can be as if whole, when the two participate in or incarnate the life of the soul which, if it were in one, would be the perfected soul. They are out of their minds, and at the same time more in them than they are likely to be again. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet dance like the two hands of a praying saint, and it is on this higher perfection that love depends for its magic. The two together and the singular soul are both in turn images of the Most High, or show what it means that the soul is an image of God, since here the overflow of the image allows indirect vision, by reflection. In love, the intelligible enters the visible, and so, some very strange things happen, as is commonly reported.

   Here is a nice note from one called Linclink on Steve Hoffman’s Music Forum:

In a weird synchronicity…there are two threads here tonight one on songs with “Sha La La” in them & one on the meaning of John Lennon’s #9 Dream chorus- “Ah! bowakawa pousse’ pousse'”
Well, here we go…when I was living in NYC (’94-’00) I deeply immersed myself in your basic do it yourself basement Shamanism…the mantra I made up was to evoke Love & Magic & it was “Sha La La, Ah Bowakawa Pousee Pousee; Ah Bowakawa Pousee Pousee Sha La La”, or if you prefer “Ah Bowakawa Pousee Pousee, Sha La La; Sha La La, Ah Bowakawa Pousee Pousee”.
The Sha La La was meant to evoke Love, as it’s been used in so many songs as something so jubilant & joyful, and the Lennon phrase because it came to him in a dream, but I had heard, though he didn’t know this, that it was an incantation & I used that to invoke Magic.
Well I became friends with a non-native New Yorker, from which country in Africa I sadly can’t recall the detail of, & when we were talking about mysticism one day I happened to tell him about the incantation/mantra I’d made up. His eyes got huge & he exclaimed, “How in the world do you know about ‘Ah Bowakawa Pousee Pousee’?!?!”. I explained it was from a John Lennon song, & while he didn’t elaborate a whole lot (he was fairly busy that day with customers) he confirmed that it was most certainly a phrase used in some non-Western, non-White (meaning race, not White vs. Black Magic) form of Mysticism/Shamanism. He used to call me by that name, as in “Hey ‘Ah Bowakawa Pousee Pousee’!!”, and get this huge grin on his face when he did so. He was very surprised & amused that any White New Yorker would have had any contact with this.
It came to Lennon in a dream, but it was a very Mystical dream, & I wish I could recall all the details (maybe I’ll look it up again someday), but he said he thought it was just a nice sounding phrase. I think it was a Magical phrase that was delivered to him. “#9 Dream” cracked the top ten (made it to #9 actually) & put a Magical incantation out across the airwaves (which I believe is VERY powerful medicine for the world), just as he might have done in the 60’s had “Across The Universe” ever become the hit single it should have been with “Jai Guru Deva Om”.

linclink, Oct 28, 2009