Aristotle and Leo Strauss on Music

The serious man, as Aristote writes says, will be the best the judge of what is fitting regarding the noble (Ethics, 1113 a34), and there will be something similar regarding music and which songs are best, if various particulars and modes are possible according to times. It is well known, though, that some songs transcend the fashion of their day, being called timeless. At the end of his class on Aristotle’s Politics, Leo Strauss addresses this section on Music:

[Aristotle Politics VIII 1337 b, Barker Translation] The real purpose of music is to be found in the cutivation of leisure……But the highest pleasure, derived from the noblest sources, will be that of the man of [the best] [The Greek is: “the aristoi, the best (pleasure), from the noblest (things).* It is clear therefore that there are some branches of learning and education that are studied with a view to the proper use of leisure in the cultivation of the mind (matheseis). It is clear too that these studies should be regarded as ends in themselves …This will explain why our forefathers made music a part of education. They did not do it because it is necessary; it is nothing of the sort. Nor did they do so because it is useful, as some other subjects are….We are thus left with its value for the cutivation of the mind in leisure. This is evidentltly the reason of its being introduced into education it ranks as part of the cutivation which men think proper to freemen. Aristotle then cites Homer [omitted from our text of the Odyssey at ]…”

Such are they who alone should be called to the bountiful banquet…with them they call a minstrel to pleasure all men with his music”…

Odysseus says that music is the best of pastimes when men are all merry…

“They who feast in the hall lend their ears to the minstre in silence Sitting in order due.” [1237

As Strauss discusses near the end of his class on Aristotle’s Politics [Class XVII, after 56 minutes],

…”Do you know what the Greek word for leisure is? Schole the Latin, leisure, school…was supposed to be the pllace of leisure, has become now a place of anguish [laughter].

…is what Aristotle calls play. Whatn is now frequently now called “fun.” Aristotle gives some example of those recreating activities…examples… sleep…but the man who woud work in order to sleep…getting drunk….the man who would work in order to get drunk would also be a very strange soul….business with pain…recreation is incompatable with annoyance and business is unthinkable without annoyance….simple suggestion made by a What was the traditional name for leisure time?… how was it called… working days… week days, what is the traditional name for that? Holidays…different from neither work nor recreation, it is a dedication.

Strauss asks, “Liberal studies have enabled him to spend his leisure nobly. The main point what gentlemans education is, and the relation of music to gentleman’s education. Enables him to spend his leisure nobly. The end of the gentleman’s life is to listen to music, to the poet …Ethics, a more comprehensive work than the politics…contemplation. Understanding. The gentleman does it this way. This is in a sense the end of the gentleman’s life. How does the gentleman spend his leisure? What does he do?… He listens to music…he listens to the singer with understanding. So the end of the gentleman’s life is to listen to the poets….Odysseus listens to the singer, then what does he do….he himself sings…describes worthwhie things in a worthwhie manner…The poet …is higher than the gentleman, he is a wise man. …What is the relation of the wisdom of the poet to other men…The man who writes and the man who recites…Ion, rhapsodes, a very vain and stupid man …stupid asses….

makes us imitative of characters….martial feelings, education to courage, others make us tame, what is the Greek enthusiasm, we must consider the meaning….something different from formation of character”’ this enthusiasm, inspired by a god….then there are sorts of music that inspire us in this way…tragedy… purguing…without an analysis of his poetics….partly moral and partly cathartic function has the function of liberating us from certian obstacles…function of music in the life of the mature gentleman that is the first question, and we have seen Aristote answer it….

The main point what gentlemans education is, and the relation of music to gentlemans education. Enables him to spend his leisure noby the end of the gentleman’s life is to listen to the poet…Ethics, a more comprehensive work than the politics…contemplation. Understanding. The gentleman does it this way. This is in a sense the end of the gentleman’s life.

That the right kind of music makes us better men…gentlemen.

How does it do this

purgation and character formation. Aristotle also has a famous section on these two functions of music [I still claim-if against Aristotle rather than in interpretation of him, from Book X of the Republic, that it is not pity that is purged, but through our sympathy with the tragic character, and fear of the outcome, we are purged of our tendendancy toward the tragic flaws. What tragedy was ever caused by pitilessness?] Music communicates an ethical character, and purges obstacles to virtue.

There is a very obvious comparison and contast to the treatment of law and the purgation of baptism by Paul in Romans 5-8.

*Lord has “the best sort regards it as the best pleasure, and that derived from the noblest things.” p. 231). :

Notes on Jung’s “Red Book”

My first impression was that I was disappointed with the Jung, but found myself learning from the Shamdasani introduction, going over the history of Psych material and connecting up with the Memories book. In a note on p. 149, he refers to the 4 kinds of divine madness, and the attempt of Jung (149-151) to distinguish between the two. Still reading the first section for the first time, my first impression of the Red Book was that it opens with a strange imitation of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, and it may in a sense pick up the account of the “Spirit of the depths, ” Hopefully straightening this out so as to address for us or for the collective the problem at the root of World War. The spirit of the times or “zeitgeist” enters common speech from Hegel, and the contrasting spirit of the depths- and depth psychology- perhaps from Nietzsche. This may be a problem if Nietzsche is antichristian. Our psychiatry cannot distinguish Christ from Antichrist, nor king from tyrant. One point I will labor is to demonstrate that the hierarchy in Nietzsche is “upside down,” as will be explained. Jung is still accepting the Nietzschean terms regarding the incapacities, and is correct to prophesy that disability will become a topic- but there is not only high and low, but good and evil. The hero is good and the villain is evil, and in the “sacrifice,” one can side with one’s true self, or apparently, in the diabolic opposite, sacrifice the child, who then becomes as though imprisoned in the basement. Indeed the tyrants are stronger than the many individuals, and so higher souls in a certain sense- but tyrant and king are opposites in a more fundamental sense than they are as “authoritarian,” and as “mon-archs,” the same. Pre Socratic philosophy has only three kinds of regime- of the one, few or many, while Socratic philosophers have 6, 3 natural forms and 3 wrong forms that are perversions of these. Nietzsche, by trying to save the high from the last men, became the spawn of tyrants- and it is these we see on the “right” as well as the Marxist “left,” bringing their steely cruelties and diabolic plans to the streets of nations in the twentieth century- resulting in some one hundred million deaths outside of war and civil war- that is, murders.

I do think that Jung comes out of this “right side up,” but that his progress is not compete, as he only began to recover Socratic psychology. The present opinion is that he was distracted into alchemy when more serious studies awaited. The work of Emma Jung on King Arthur is oddly superior to some of his later theory, and we note that there was some CIA involvement with Dulles regarding the war which may have continued.

I will critique this both from the view of what the later work of Jung has taught us and what classical political philosophy teaches. What will result is a slight Christian correction of Jung, and so I will comment occasionally on the many true and deep things Jung has to say about this- beginning with his teaching that becoming Christians is useless and we must become “Christs.” What do these “Christs” do but tend the sheep, that is, baptize or minister the coming into being of the Christians, of whom there will be many more saved than there are saviors? Not all need be Martyrs in fact- though what is to occur may make one wonder. The same could be said of the “child” as Jung says of the “sheep,” and we note that the meaning refers not to the subservience of the sheep, but the care of the shepherd. Enoch, in a very ancient text, drops the human down to the animal level in order to make certain invisible things visible. But does Jung begin his autobiography with messianic quotations from the prophets because he thinks these refer to him? Has the “spirit of the depths tricked him into that Hegelian and Nietzschean inflation where the “”ego” is possessed by the self archetype? This is 1913- and if so, I also believe Jung frees himself, while Nietzsche succumbed to a philosophic madness.

What Jung is right about is that Jesus does teach: “greater things than these you will do,” etc, so that there is a sense in which, as Paul says, “We have the mind of Christ,” should the Holy Spirit accept our invitation- but this is still different from us. Because men no longer believe in God, when they turn to the psychic or psychoid things, they mistake these for what is above them. Having no God, the imago is mistaken for the highest things of which it is the imago- access to these higher things having been rejected.. We try to imagine these, and they appear as worldly objects, like abstract forms- that is we inmagine the forms as particular beings, because we cannot imagine truth itself- how it is always and everywhere, at once many and one. The spirit of the times in Hegel likely contains this spirit of the depths yet indistinct- as Hegel does mean something collective that is higher and deeper than the utilitarian and pragmatist have in mind.

Consider how Jung uses the word “subjective” as synonymous with psychic (p. ), and also repeats the German teaching that we make the meaning of events. Jung wants to focus on the sense he is here discovering- that we war outside because of factions within. In this sense, the meaning of events is partly caused by us, and we are responsible. But our responsibility is in no way measured by a meaning some apex man creates and imposes on the matter as though it lacked a nature prior to his cruel rape. The measure is not made by man.

Jung tries throughout to reflect on the distinction between madness and sanity, divine and not divine. “I went into the desert only at night. Thus can you differentiate sick and divine delusiopn. Whoever does the one and does without the other you may call sick because he is out of balance.” p. 151 Shamdasani cites Mysterium Conjunctionis, CWb 14, #756: the reason why the invovement looks very much like psychosis is that the patient is integrating the same fantsy-material to which the insane person falls victim because he cannot integrate it but is swallowed by it.” (Red Book Intro, p. 29)

Madness is a kind of dreaming while awake, and is invountary, or cannot be taken up and set aside at leisure. But visions such as that of Paul or Ezekiel by the River Chebar, are also invountary, occur during the day, and are NOT pathological madness, or are divine madness. But many without divine madness are sane, and many unjust imbalanced without being in this sense insane. Nor did Jesus or the Buddha keep up with their daiy schedules 50 minute appointments. To distinguish that “fine line between genuis and madness” will require quite a few distinctions. Jung will also explain that the distinction is that you integrate the contents of the archeypes, rather than them integrating you. We wi say, following Farabi, that there is knowledge in the soul that is the cause of the symbols,and images. Farabi says that the mad see the first priciples, but incorrectly- whereas happiness is possible only when the active intellect first sees the first intelligibles. The soul is by nature intended to know, and its manifestation from the shadow threough love into contemplation can be understood as the journey of a natural desire to know, and a natiure capable of this full bloom. Poetry connects many more to the knowledge, giving a share in happiness by cultivating what is in harmony with this, “like a breeze bringing health from good paces.”

One characteristic of madness is the certainty- for which Socrates called all the natural philosophers mad (Xenophon, Memorabilia, I.6-16). Knowedge of ignorance, by contrast, is moderation. The certainy of the Zarathustran utterance is a possession from which we will see Jung gradualy freed. This is of course rather obnoxious when it is wrong or annunciating partial truths, or saying that evil is good, etc. and this too we think Jung gradually figures out, if he lacks a theoretical expression. Self knowledge again turns out to be the only thing that works- as the talking cure allows the patient to see what it is he might have to say. So some things cannot be recognized while one is alone, but one is able to integrate or live with these when has a friend to share the attempt at a context.

Jung has a prophetic dream regarding WWI, and then when the war did break nout, he concluded that he was not going mad, but had a dream of coective significance, a “great dream.” and here he moves beyond the Freudian personal uncomnscious. It this the difference- that the wakinbg dreams of the divinely inspired are true, while the delusions of the mad are false? Had the assasination not happened, war not broken out and mankind, or Europe, resolved to just not so they could say they didn’t, at the savings of the miions of lives with little gained, would it then have meant that Jung was mad? And do the mad not sometimes prophesy, as the madman recorded by Josephus who warned of the fall of Jerusalem from 66 AD intil it occurred in 70?

Shamdasani has a nice note regarding the dead who came to Jung in the Seven Sermons, from Jerusalem having not found what they sought. “The dead had appeared in a fantasy on January 17, 1914, and had said they were about to go to Jerusalem to pray at the holiest graves” (p. 41). Note 173 connects us to p. 335, where these are identified as anabaptists, an attempted reform insisting on a return to original Christianity and adult baptism, of whom thousands were killed. Note 75 p. 143 reports the beginnings of the monastic movement into the deserts by Andrew and Pachomius about 285 AD- approaching the 10 th persecution of Christrians by Rome. “In the fourth century, there were thousands of monks in the Egyptian desert.”Constantine ended the persecutions, but the resulting Chrisian orthodoxy led to the hiding of the Nag Hammadi texts within two generations.

The desert is the place where the appetites, including interests (p. 144 “The way to truth stands open only to those without intentions”) are dried up- “ambition” jung writes in (Aion? CW5? p. ). Ambition and honor as glory have dual senses as vices and as attendants of virtues, as the aim is to be worthy of honor, glory, fame noteriety or reputation, the reflections in appearance of excellence or virtue.. So it is the overcoming of appetite, as is fasting- drying up this part of the soul rather than watering it, as Socrates says in criticizing the poets. Jesus was 40 days in the widerness AFTER his baptism.

The account of the assasination of the hero symbol is somehow wrong (pp. ). Jesus would be the pattern of the “hero,” in self sacrifice, while Judas sacrificing the hero, or the crucifixion, would be opposite, evil, and damning. Jung’s imagery here seems Nietzschean and anti-Christian, and this may again be something he is sorting out in the Red Book. Does Jung lose the ability to distinguish between Christ AND Antichrist by trying to unite all opposite as a matter of principle? And is this the conjunction of opposites, a principle or essential to the nature of the transcendent function, or is the conjunction of opposites not rather a characteristic of things divine as well as other things?There are different kinds of opposites- factional like the matters of the shadow and complementary like the matters of animus and anima, which are understood not from Jung but from Genesis 1: 26, etc. from which tradition, however derivative, Jung mines these wonders. His claim is that he is making a great and need advance by integrating the anima or recognizing thr reality of evil. we will see. When the hero conquers the villain, he shows a prowess at the things of the body equal or superior to that of the villain, who has set the things of the body such as wealth and power upon the perverse crown of his soul. The marriage, too, when he “gets the girl” of course involves the body not as male opponent, but as female or complementary friend, and these are able together to care for the beings of the household.

Aristotle (Categories 11b) writes that there are four kinds of opposites::

1) As correlatives to one another Example: Doube and half

2) As contraries to one another Ex: Bad and good

3) As privatives to positives Ex: sight and blindness

4) As affirmatives to negatives Ex: The propositions he sits and he does not sit.

This topic proves to be rather difficult, but compementary opposites are two halves of a whole, while factional opposties are the same in one way and opposite in essence.

I just finished book I. Salome? Difficult. I think he is bringing the “spirit” of depth and times out of Nietzsche. Something is tempting him in the desert.

II.

He uses vanity and praise. Ask him “Why?”

But “I am not really what you see before you?” Is Jung not already in trouble if he cares?

One wonders how much of his is actiual experience, whether in dream or vision.

He is trying to discern what Jung is- a sophist, theologian or anti-Israelite (p. 215).

Why should he seem to himself to be joy? Jung says this is his devil, or this as it appears to him. “…he was my joy, the joy of the serious person (p. 217). Surely Jung is a kind of Kantian!

Jung was dressed as a “green man,” and after this conversation, his “green garments burst into leaf.” In a moment, we will see Jung the novelist burst into flowery language- quite well, too, in describing things pertaining to the anima and the sea or the collective unconscious.

The book is called the “Red Book.”

One wonders if Jung has not confused death with evil. The recognition of death is supposed to be this new integration of the dark side? And like to recognize death we have to be able to say such things as “…” bunk.

I still think that Jung makes it out, while Nietzsche does not, and I have to try to articulate this difference, that difference between “Individuation” and damnation.

On Aristotle’s De Anima: Rough Comments

[I am working from the J.A. Smith translation. I wanted to jot these notes while they are fresh- if these were knowledge, they would not degenerate]

The first note is that Aristotle does not yet distinguish between the animal and human soul, to find the distinct object of study that is psychology. The true Aristotelian psychology may be that underlying the Ethics– to which we may soon turn in trying to understand section III. 5-8. The five senses- sight, hearing, taste and smell, and touch, have intellectual and psychic analogies, even to “feelings,” aesthetic senses like taste and smell- which are also ethical senses- and hearing, which is used to denote both the receiving of a teaching by authority and the following of any account. There may be yet a third sense, as in “let him who can hear, hear” which includes not only perceiving the sentences, but also understanding or perceiving the meaning, as in a parable. One wonders too if the perception of music is not something more than the perception of sound, including harmony, discords and implied ratios. But the fairest of the senses is sight, due to its analogy to intelligence, and its medium to light. These in addition to the senses shared by many animate creatures are more properly the topic of psychology. What does the perception of objects of the imagination entail? These are not only imagined, but communicated from one mind to another by the poets and the greatest teachers- such as Plato in the Allegory of the Cave- and in order to be communicated, it would seem, must be perceived. And the same is so of reasoning and any rational account communicated- it must be perceived, and this like hearing and seeing the same object at once, is by the mind.

But it does seem that what was the animal body has become in man the soul, or that our soul is the same as our life, that of the particular person. It includes of course much more than the conscious function, if it is to contain, in any sense, the knowledge to be recollected. But we would say that these senses too are really “somewhat closer to the body,” and distinguish just here between body and soul.

We know pants do not feel pain, because they cannot move, and that would seem to be the purpose of pain. But if the premise is not true, this is not knowledge. Pants still may perceive, as to lean toward the sunlight- somehow getting longer on the far side to lean over. An amazing inter-sylvian communication system has recently been uncovered, enabling plants to even share resources- which would require something functioning as does communication.

Just as plants do not violate the laws of physics, by functioning as wholes, countering entropy, and achieving continuity through seeds, so animals do not violate the known causes even of botany and chemistry and physics when these move themselves- though this character almost unique to animal life cannot be explained from the principles of what one must notice appear as levels in a hierarchy of cause and being.

All the senses began in touch. In taste and smell, touch becomes first refined to sense especially food and poison or bacteria, and then further refined to receive molecules of the very substance without touching it, through unseen particles in the air. Let Kant say we receive only numina! Then in hearing touch is refined through the ear drum to perceive sound through waves in the air, and sight to perceive by light. Still all these are refinements of touch. There is a kind of fish that is able to perceive by electrical fields as well, and animals and humans can sense charges of static electricity through hairs and even through the skin. Our perception of dry and wet when we touch the spoil of a potted houseplant, is especially noteworthy and astonishing. The bind too are able to almost see by hearing, and the deaf by hear by interpreting visible lip movements and hand signs.

If soul were the wholes of which the parts of animals are parts, it would be difficult to distinguish the organism or soul from the wholes of organs and systems, and even the organelles of one celled creatures- where many of these mysteries can be seen in their root. But the soul is the distinct from the wholes- though it is one kind of the whole of an organic unity.

The root of self motion appears in the amoeba and the slime mold. Its root is in the wholeness of the organism as a being distinct from the rest of the cosmos, in contraction and selective reaching. “Reach and pull!” As Strauss when reading Genesis says, these are beings that change their courses, as would be quite valuable to plant trying to move into the sunlight- though they cannot do it. Nor could the wheel grow, except as the invention of a creature that grows- apparently because it has two disconnected parts. There are some microscopic living parts that resemble electric motors.

With life, there enters purpose into our consideration of the kinds of things that are. These have been well discerned to be survival and reproduction, the daily work of preserving the body. Aristotle discerns 4 causes, separating the final causes referenced by Socrates in the Phaedo into formal and final, as materia cause set in time becomes efficient cause. So the structures or forms are explicable by nature in terms of functions- we have feet to walk, etc. From the wing, it can be discerned not only that there is air, but from the kind of wing, the very density of the air in different periods of our history. But Aristotle does seem wrong to think of particular beings such as planets as having purposes. Whether nature itself or the tree of life itself is directed to a purpose, or rather manifests a possibility that is always there in being, is also a good question. The cause of purpose in nature must be at least as wonderous, whether or not it can be said to be or have a purpose. We can see the intelligible ground of the visible things as in geometry, but that of life, self motion and reason does not so easily appear, and yet must be. But it is said that every 7-10 years, every molecule of our bodies is exchanged, so that not a scrap is the same, and similarly with genetics, it is the order or meaning that is passed along through generations, like a word that grows, bridging time.

Preface To “Toward a Philosophic Psychology”

It may be that humans are incapable of the study and healing of the soul, or that psychiatry is in practice impossible because we are not capable of it. This problem may be at the root of the contemporary crisis of psychiatry and the failure in general of modern psychology to improve much upon the traditions for the common care of souls. At present, most practitioners arising from the medical background, and taking on a 2 year study of neuro-pharmacology, are inclined to deny the existence of the “soul.” That might make a psychology difficult! Indeed, we look to the future, to programs in psych-iatry or soul-healing that attract a different kind of student, more capable of the study. Just as biology must assume the existence of life even if it does not know what it is, so psychology must assume the existence of the soul, leaving it to philosophy to try to explain what this assumption might mean. In practice, a psychiatry will continue to be necessary regardless of whether it can be improved. We say the effort is worthwhile.

Aristotle, After opening his work suggesting that the knowledge of the soul is of “higher dignity and greater wonderfulness in its objects” than other kinds of knowledge, addresses the especial difficulty of what we now call “psychology.” As our translators have:

“To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world.”

He then raises the question of method, how to approach the what of this thing, and whether it will be the same as other methods of inquiry into the what of things, and whether it has parts. He treats the soul at least at the beginning as synonymous with the life or the principle of the animate, while what we intend in psychology is to study the especially human soul. This question, whether we mean all animal life, all animate life or rather especially the human animate life, precedes another which is alike a great difficulty, as we shall see in Chapter 1, of whether the soul is a mind or rather has a mind, and for the mind, whether this is or has a soul. These difficulties may be due in part to a problem inherent in self knowledge- that it is the subject that is doing the inquiry. So when we try to know man, we are both limited and enabled by our present condition which is ascending. And if Plato is correct, it is turning and ascent of the soul itself that is needed to know the soul: Psychology is not available to the faculty called logistikon while it is serving the ends of the appetites, while in other sciences, such as calculus, the soul itself doing the inquiry may not be in this way decisive. In addition to the difficulties attaining leisure that inhibit other studies, humans will not be capable of psychology if it requires the ascent from the cave to which Plato referred.

But this is just what we hold to be true- that the study of psychology is especially that referenced in the section of the allegory corresponding to the second section of the divided line. If the philosophic ascent is impossible- as all German philosophy assumes- well, that will explain why a genuine or scientific psychology has been hitherto- in a certain sense- impossible. Modern subjectivism may have tried to locate the higher things of the cosmos inside the human mind, mistaking knowledge for being and knowledges for forms- making a phenomenological psychology confused if not impossible or worse. Plato writes the description of Socrates to Glaucon:

Plato, Republic, 516a: “At first he would most easily make out the shadows and after that the phantoms of the human beings and other things in water, and later the things themselves. And from there he could turn to beholding the things in heaven and heaven itself…

(532 b-c) …Then, I said, the release from bonds and the turning around from the shadows to the phantoms and the light, the way up from the cave to the sun, and once there, the persisting inability to look at the plants and the sun’s light, and looking instead at the divine appearances in water and at the shadows of things that are, rather than as before at shadows of phantoms cast by a light that, when judged by comparison with the sun, also has the quality of a shadow of a phantom…

The “human beings” at 516 is the place of psychology, far above and presupposing the studies of poetry and the laws, the regimes and the characters that we hold are the shadows and phantoms of the nature of man. It is the study of the soul by nature- as there are no artificial beings outside the cave. The attempt to understand man according to the nature of the preSocratics, in terms of physics neurons or even the appetites of the animal, taken as the animal nature, may be hopelessly caved attempts to see the nature through the visible things. This nature of the soul may even be that same form of the regimes and souls seen in place of the Homeric images on the wall of the cave, and the characters shaped by the tunes of Homeric Greece. One wonders if the soul outside still has the same three parts. The attempt at theoretical psychology is a lifelong endeavor, simply impossible for most- and surely not accessible to a program of university studies intending to do more than give access to the library from which such a thing might be conducted. But we hold that it is on the possibility of this theoretical virtue that a scientific psychology depends, and that much else in practice too depends upon our success at theoretical psychology. The first effect, though, of the acceptance of the exalted nature and vastness of the topic is to communicate the reverence to which Socrates referred as the knowledge of ignorance. This should moderate psychiatry in practice, if anything at all might have this effect, as it is the case that we simply do not know what we are doing.

A final preface word: Platonic psychology is presented as propaedeutic to the study of the cosmos: “from there he could turn to beholding the things in heaven,” and he does not mean the decorations in the heaven of the literal reading of the 4th study after antistrophe., but a study of even higher dignity. Psychology is then the true prolegomena to metaphysics. Hence we notice that the cosmos in the allegory has two parts, the intelligible and the visible, the latter referring to manmade images and laws. But outside the cave these are seen in water, and even later called “divine images in water.” So the knowledge of the soul, recollected, appears through the images, and the men in turn prove to be themselves “divine images in water.”

Notes on Hegel

Tweets preserved:

Reading along in Hegel’s History, I’m getting on to what he means by “freedom” and “subjectivity-” where he is discussing Luther. “The will is free only when it does not will anything alien, extrinsic, foreign to itself.”

And we thought thought thinking thought a strange thought! Will willing will, I could BRAIN these guys! But one sees how modern philosophy is a continuous reaction against the authority of the medieval church regarding doctrine. Modern philosophy in Hegel then is still an adolescent seeking to leave the house of his father.

Like, if you see that ‘that truth is is self evident, this is called, “subjectivity,” It is precisely what we call objectivity in our objectivism- and so had been very confused when Hegel spiels the word. Seeing for oneself.

On my list is to read Thomas Pangel and Will Morrisey on Hegel. But this “will” stuff in the third wave of modernity- and to find it so related to Luther in German thought. We note that Socrates and Aristotle do not discuss “free will, exactly, either- in Aristotle, it is “wish.”

As said, the “wish” to power just does not have the same ring. The third wave of modernity is the cause of totalitarianism, and spawns tyrants and tyrannies.

For this study, we will also have to examine the word will (thelema) in the Bible and volition in the Socratic philosophers.

I also cannot explain my attachment to Liberty in the terms of my Platonic philosophy: “For we have sworn on the Altar of God eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the minds of men.” But along with Jefferson, we do not really know why!

But we turn from modern philosophy in search of a philosophic foundation for the humanistic part of modern psychology- the soul has a nature, and if one wants to see how physics cannot comprehend the causes regarding this, let him explain the difference between living and non-living matter. We do not need some ethereal will positing categorical imperatives out of nothing! The health, order and function of the soul can be addressed in terms of nature if our view of nature looks upward through the human nature.

II. Socrates might cuff this boy Hegel: “Is not the will especially free when following the way of the cross, the way of sacrificing ones own will to follow what is true and right? So it is no more free in willing than in not willing, or willing to sacrifice itself?” Conquest of the fear of death might be the liberty we seek, which may be why it is said that philosophy is learning how to die- how to let go as the cord of our attachment to the body that causes us to subject our desire for the higher to the lower, is severed. of our

It is most free of the attachment sacrificed- our enslavement to the earth, So the “will” is MORE “free” in not wiling than in willing.

Does Hegel then not know of anything beneath which one submits obedience other than the doctrines of the Church, authority and conventional opinion? And ‘that truth is,’ he calls “subjectivity!”

Notes on the Wizard of Oz

"[It is]the question of the Wizard of Oz: how those ignorant are to be able to tell the philosopher from the boaster."

-A teacher, commenting on the rule of understanding, Class on Shakespeare's Troilus.

— Mark A. McDonald (@mmcdonald77) August 31, 2019

The discernment of wisdom is the issue in The Wizard of Oz, and the Character of Dorothy is especially the soul of America (“The Wizard of Oz, Platonism for the People,” William Morrisey). The entire semi-transcendent realm of Oz refers to spiritual or intellectual concerns for America, and as the Founders think, the fate of Liberty for the world (Federalist 1). The symbolic events that occur in Oz- Dorothy is sent on a mission by the impostor wizard to destroy the Witch of the West and free the Western portion of Oz. She freed the Eastern portion, apparently, by the incredibly providential accident of landing her house on the Witch of the East when she arrived- her mere arrival in Oz being sufficient for the refutation. She will next overcome the Western problem by her mere efforts to return home, with her private concerns correcting the whole realm. This is most similar to the correction of the Fairy Kingdom in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Nights’s Dream– a similarly psychoid or in-between realm which admits of both marvels and corruption. Modern totalitarianism, too, had an Eastern or Marxist and a Western or fascist manifestation, due to causes in the higher realm of thought, as in the German philosophy of the nineteenth century. That at least is the direction in which we are directed by these things.

Students of the Republic are often astonished to consider how the Wizard of Oz has acted as a breeze bringing health from fine places to provide them an image of the three part soul. The likeness is not intentional on the part of the author Frank Baum, but is due to the archetypes, because the story is really very deep, or from the knowledge in the soul. Hence, the parts are just a bit different from the three parts of the soul in the Third Book of the Republic, and the differences are worth considering.

In the Republic, Plato has epithumia or appetite as love, as do the ancients following Plato, but the Republic abstracts from eros, which stretches throughout the three parts of the Soul. “Intellect” (Nous) is different from reason- a real wizard, or, Glinda is the closest.

The companions of Dorothy are of course the three pats of the soul (anima in the Jungian sense, personal, while Glinda would be called a collective unconscious anima figure). reason logistikon = scarecrow, heart (thumos)=Lion, woodsman heart (eros), while Toto is the animal.

Dorothy, in the Wizard of Oz, always had the Ruby slippers, but had to acquire the virtues of her three companions, which was the purpose of her journey. America as a whole must overcome the deficiencies that allowed this disaster to occur- the fake wizard, the bad witches, etc.

“Are you a good witch or a bad witch? The Munchkins ASSUME Dorothy is a witch, and that Glenda is a good witch. Dorothy is in the movie in the place of the good witch of the South, but does not recognize this.

3 and 4 are the parts of the soul and the directions of the spiritual. Upon awakening, Dorothy explains to Em that she did leave them for a while, so that the Land of Oz is likened to the things beyond death. To the three parts of the soul in the Republic are to be added the female element, deficient among the Greek aristocrats, as the law formed character is turned over to love for finishing in the crucible of nature. These parts of the soul- courage and moderation are the two virtues that pertain especially to things of the heart- are different from the image of intellectual virtue in two parts of philosopher and king, or Aristotle’s distinction of Sophia and phronesis, where the crowned king would be the whole of ethical virtue or the prudence of the legislator.

Dorothy is an orphan, living in Kansas with her Aunt and Uncle, and so is a bit out of pace on the farm, without much function, at leisure while others are busy, and just before that age of puberty, at the time when as Rousseau notes the child has sufficient means to all their necessities- as they have not yet been stirred to love. This allows for an abstraction from eros that makes the Wizard of Oz nearly unique among modern classics, enchanting and even riveting while lacking a love story.

The Emerald City is in Oz, and is something like a Utopia as are said to be found in the Republic and the Biblical City of God at the end of the Bible. Strangely mortal, and has been usurped by a fake wizard- something like the philosophy departments at American Universities.

The yellow brick road leads from East to West, and whatever is said, it is similar to the golden thread followed by Theseus to get out of the Labyrinth. For as a teacher once said, “virtue is the golden thread.” In the city that comes down from heaven at the conclusion of the Bible, the streets are god transparent as glass, and the city as a whole is “pure gold, as transparent as glass (Revelation 21:18; 21).

On Hamlet: The PDF Is Now Available Online- A Free Essay!

Simply search for “Author, Title, PDF.” Here is a 2 page blog that will serve as a summary of “On Hamlet and the Reformation,” in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy https://interpretationjournal.com › 2018/02 › IJ… PDF by SG Benardete · 2007 — Mark A. McDonald. On Hamlet and the Reformation: “To Show the Very Age and Body of the Time His Form and Pressure”.

Following the New Thinkery podcast on Act I of Hamlet, I asked on Twitter:

What is the tragic flaw of Shakespeare’s Hamlet? His Achilles heel?

It makes sense to ask this because Hamlet is a classical tragedy, as in the formula from Aristotle’s Poetics (1453a 10-15), stating that tragedy portrays a character that is noble, but with a certain flaw. In addition to a new sort of Comedy, Shakespearean tragedy is new in that it addresses villainous characters such as Macbeth and Richard III, where the character is not “noble but flawed,’ but rather, villainous. Hamlet is a noble character with a flaw. Roy Battenhouse- a favorite of John Alvis- has identified the lines indicating his flaw as those in which he comments to Horatio that he would as soon have met his dearest foe in heaven, as have seen the hasty marriage of his mother to his uncle so shortly after the death of his father Hamlet (I, ii, 183).

A reader of Hamlet (rennn, on Twitter) has asked:

Is it (his flaw) not his obsession with revenge? Interesting character analysis though; I agree Hamlet isn’t a villain, but I’ve never thought of him as particularly noble either.”

… But what to you makes him a noble character? His lack of evil intents besides the basic revenge?”

This is of course a very good question. In my essay, I do not address it directly enough, but simply underline the circumstance, as though the argument would then become obvious. John Alvis, too, does not seem to like Hamlet. His essay on Hamlet, mentioning Luther in connection with Wittenberg, is in “Shakespeare as Political Thinker.” Similar to what Jaffa has done for Lear, it is necessary then to restore the nobility of the character of Hamlet, so that we can more clearly see the teaching of the play regarding his tragic flaw.

First, how does Ophelia describe him as having been, prior to the death of his father? In contrast with his appearance of madness, she describes the Hamlet she had known:

Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!

The courtier’s, soldier’s scholar’s eye, tongue sword.

The expectancy and rose of the fair state

The glass of fashion and the mould of form,

Th’ observed of all observers…

Hamlet is the crown prince, expected to inherit the kingdom, and the guide to all the courtiers in the kingdom. Ophelia’s description is correct- until he fails the moment- due to the flaw indicated. Beginning from Ophelia’s account of his appearance: soldier, scholar, the only one in the kingdom who gets that there IS something rotten in Denmark and cares, while the court is servile. We say Hamlet ought not have done what Laertes would have done, when he hears the news of the death of his father (IV, vii).

First one would check to see if the report of murder is accurate. Then the question is how to make the invisible things visible in the kingdom? And how might Hamlet have done this? What does Henry V do? And what Prospero, or the Duke in Measure? All Hamlet would need to do is get Claudius to say publicly what he says in private at prayers, and abdicate- continuing the penance begun with his play.

He falls short of the one right thing to do in each circumstance because he almost, but not quite, has theoretical and practical virtue.

But it is, as C.S. Lewis writes, “The Hamlet formula is not ‘a man who has to avenge his father’ but ‘a man given a task by a ghost,” Not so much a Christian tasked with revenge, but a man given a mission by a ghost- a political action based upon an apprehension from a spirit or from the invisible things that cannot be made evident in the kingdom. This we say is like the circumstance of Luther and to some extent Shakespeare himself. For his Paulina in A Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare has written, “It is an heretic that makes the fire, not she that burns in it (II,iii, 113).”

That the flaw is indicated by these lines (I, ii, 183) is evident because Jesus of course teaches we should love even our enemies, and Scripture too teaches that revenge is reserved to the Lord: Vengeance is mine, says the Lord Deuteronomy 32:35; Romans 12:19)” This implies that one SHOULD wish to meet their dearest foe in heaven. Hamlet fails the moment of action because he thinks of the mission he is given by his father in terms of a mixed metaphor that is likely incompatible with arriving in heaven to begin. He considers killing Claudius at prayers to be “hire and salary, not revenge,” if Claudius should go then to heaven. He waits for him to be involved in some mischief.

The flaw and mixed metaphore is similar to the wish that the throne of the Papacy be damned. Jan Blits notices the fatalism of Hamlet as the action screams toward the tragic conclusion, and this too is like the determinism that may be a flaw of Lutheran and other Protestant theology. Interestingly, the passage Hamlet cites in showing his deadly fatalism, the fall of the sparrow, (Matthew 10:29) is in the Oxford edition mistranslated, indicating how this is understood. The word “will is added in the English- the text reads that not a Sparrow falls “without your father,” referring to His Presence, not necessarily his will. The Lord does not will that any of these children perish, says Jesus (Matthew 18:14).

The Germans read Hamlet as being trapped in his own mind, too much in thought rather that action, or unable to act because of thought. To this we joke that his flaw is that he is simply too thoughtful! George Anastaplo and Loretta Wasserman are the only two I have known to reject this reading. The reading of Nietzsche makes Hamlet revolted by the pointless ness of action in such a cosmos.

We say that Shakespeare’s Hamlet is about the Reformation, presenting a character that is in many ways analogous in the political real to the circumstance of Luther in the realm of the fundamental orders of the West, and that Shakespeare too faces this circumstance. The Shakespearean answer indicated in the play is the Globe Theater.

Something like this: Hamlet thinks his father’s bones are canonized, and does not question the mission of revenge- separating what is needed for prevention and the good of the Kingdom, on one hand, and revenge on the other. Is his father right about what needs to be done? The native hue of revenge, transposed to an artificial imagination of heaven, leads to the mixed metaphor guiding the action of Hamlet- and Luther. In the cave, there are artifacts and shadows. What if the Christ is true, and Plato right about the allegory?

Jung and Nazism: Excerpt from “The Revelation,” pp. 68-73

 Carl Jung: Antichrist and Symbol.

The thought of Carl Jung on this point is very interesting. In the context of a discussion of the image of God in the soul and the doctrine that evil is only a privation of being and good, he writes (1978, p. 42):

   For anyone who has a positive attitude towards Christianity the problem of the Antichrist is hard nut to crack. It is nothing less than the counter stroke of the devil, provoked by God’s incarnation. For the devil attains his true stature as the adversary of Christ, and hence of God, only after the rise of Christianity, while as late as the Book of Job he was still one of God’s sons and on familiar terms with Yahweh…The coming of the antichrist is not just a prophetic prediction–it is an inexorable psychological law…The ideal of spirituality striving for the heights was doomed to clash with the materialistic earth-bound passion to conquer matter and master the world. The Renaissance [as a] spirit of the renewal of the antique spirit…was chiefly a mask… The subsequent developments that led to the enlightenment and the French Revolution have produced a worldwide situation today which can only be called “anti-Christian,” in the sense that confirms the early Christian anticipation of the “end of time.” It is as if, with the coming of Christ, opposites that were latent till then had become manifest, or as if a pendulum had swung violently to one side and were now carrying out the complementary movement in the opposite direction…

   The psychological law to which Jung refers is called enantiodromia, an opposite development that attends things good in the world, where the balance of opposites is the rule. The shadow of the God image Christ is the Antichrist, and Jung understands the astrological age of the fishes or Pisces to portend a shift from one to the opposite. The Antichrist –as counter stroke of the devil provoked by the incarnation– may help us to understand Chapter 12 of the Revelation, in which the birth of the Messiah coincides with the defeat of the devil in heaven and his casting out onto the earth. Coincident with this astrological age is the balancing of two fishes, Christ and Antichrist. Jung considers St. Francis and Bernard, and the stirring that led to the struggle with heresies that characterized the second millennium of Christianity, Joachim and “the Holy Ghost movement, which some have rightly seen as the forerunner of the Reformation” (Aion, p. 87). The second half of the age of Pisces would then contain the development of the anti-Christian, culminating in the beginning of the new age of Aquarius, when the procession of the equinoxes enters into the next constellation, dated roughly as between 2000 and 2200 A. D. (Ibid., p.92; 94 n. 84).

   Jung will be revisited on various points throughout. On the eve of World War II, in 1936, when Heidegger was delivering speeches for the Nazis, Jung wrote an article called “Wotan,” in which he considered what was then arising in Germany. He had begun to call attention to the rising problem as early as 1919. After the Second World War, in his essay “After the Catastrophe,” he recognizes the events that have occurred as “apocalyptic,” though he does not from here enter into a reading of the Revelation. Jung wrote: It is above all the Germans who have an opportunity, perhaps unique in history, to look into their own hearts and to learn what the perils of the soul were from which Christianity tried to rescue mankind” (p. 187).[50] He was one of very few then alive who saw the diabolical aspect of the new German nationalism.

   In Aion, Jung considers the connection between the motion toward the coming of the antichrist and the development of the Western world:

…until 1933 only lunatics would have been found in possession of living fragments of myth…After this date, the world of heroes and monsters spread like a devastating fire over whole nations, proving that the strange world of myth had suffered no loss of vitality during the centuries of reason and enlightenment…(1978, p. 35).

The dechristianization of our world, the Luciferian development of science and technology, and the frightful material and moral destruction left behind by the second world war have been compared more than once with the eschatological events foretold in the New Testament.

   Jung then cites John in the second letter (4:3) regarding Antichrist…”of whom you have heard he cometh” (Ibid, p.36). He continues:

The antichristian era is to blame that the spirit became non-spiritual and that the visualizing archetype gradually degenerated into rationalism, intellectualism and doctrinarism, all of which leads straight to the tragedy of modern times now hanging over our heads like a sword of Damocles…[51] Fortunately for us, the threat of his coming had already been foretold in the New Testament– for the less he is recognized, the more dangerous he is (Ibid, p. 86).

   When a symbol is seen, as in a dream, the meaning is above our minds, and so unknown.[52] This is different from seeing snapshots of visible scenes from the future, though this may also occur. An example can be seen in the fact that John writes of a world with horses and chariots, if strange ones, and locusts that look like futuristic fighter planes. Cavalry are arrayed for battle rather than tanks, etc. (9:17). Even the most literal of literalists has not considered a teaching that there will literally be horses and chariots in the battle. And so it seems we are not being shown something that is like a snapshot or photograph.

   On the difference between a symbol and a sign Carl Jung writes, that a symbol refers to something unknown. Sign here means not a prognostication or indication, but like a stop sign, one image that refers to something easily apparent to common sense, one must for safety perform a certain action here, i. e., stop. When symbols are explained as though they were signs, such as saying that seven represents perfection, and this or that represents this or that, the explanation may be useful as a beginning, as are lists of dream symbols and their meanings. But as a replacement for knowledge, these interpretations are ridiculous. The symbols come from and lead to knowledge that is apparently in the soul, and can be recollected, as Plato’s Socrates explains regarding geometry (Meno 81b-e). While the knowledge is not ours, the access can be cultivated. The symbols help to awaken this knowledge in us, which in turn makes the images become intelligible. There is a faculty that is awakened, though, as we think, it is a mistake to call this knowledge. We can be mistaken in our relation to it, but it is like gaining access to a realm through a door. It may result from our participation in the death and resurrection. Al Farabi writes of the difference between madness and gnosis: the mad receive the “first intelligibles,” but “not as they really are.”[53] Some are not equipped to receive them, but happiness is possible, he says, only when the “Active intellect first gives the first intelligibles.” Cults and fascist movements may be possessed by the “archetypes,” using images like swastikas and thousand year reigns as instruments in the pursuit of power, yet this is only possible because the archetypes or something like this is there, and can be found in the right way. There are things involved in the Revelation that most readers do not know about: We see the cities, like Rome, but do we see what Augustine calls the City of Man, contrasted with the City of God? We see the woman and the particular churches. But do we see the mystical bride? We see the particular persons or nations, which readers try to identify with the referents of the symbols in the Revelation. But do we see the movement of history and church history over the course of centuries and ages, and the fundamental questions involved? Do we see what must have occurred within humanity in order for the political movements of Nazism and communism to emerge?

   In contemplating an image or symbol, there is some question as to what to see “literally” and what “symbolically” or allegorically. As Al Farabi writes, in a story regarding the works of Plato:[54] A certain ascetic was forbid from leaving the city of a tyrant, so he pretended to be a reveling drunk. When the gatekeeper asked who he was, he said “I am so and so, the ascetic” He was thought to be joking, and so was able to pass without having lied in what he said. Farabi says that the writings of Plato are like this. If the revelation too is like this, it would mean something like the following: The images we are shown are symbols of high things that are real but unknown. Every once in a while, though, things are said that are shockingly literal, and in a way that would be impossible without prophecy. Scripture too is like this, and sometimes slips a truth past the gatekeeper of a tyrant.

Carl Jung: a Sentence on the Allegory of the Cave in Plato’s Republic

In the context of a discussion of the reduction-ism of Freud in the relation of Psychology and poetry, Jung comments on the Allegory of the Cave as a symbol:

The true symbol differs essentially from this (a sign or symptom) and should be understood as an expression of an intuitive idea that cannot yet be formulated in any other or better way. When Plato, for instance, puts the whole problem of the theory of knowledge in his parable of the cave, or when Christ expresses the idea of the Kingdom of Heaven in parables, these are genuine and true symbols, that is, attempts to express something for which no verbal concept yet exists. If we were to interpret Plato’s metaphor in Freudian terms, we would naturally arrive at the uterus, and would have proved that even a mind like Plato’s was still stuck on a primitive level of infantile sexuality…

The Portable Jung, p. 307

Man is, though, male and female as well as earth and sky because being or the whole is this way, divided between intelligible and visible, earth and sky- which is to say Freud may be correct that the uterus is has something to do with it, but shallow in his understanding of what the uterus is- due to his assumption that the animal appetites are all that is natural to man. The “Uterus ecclesia” The Portable Jung, p. 63) or womb of the church may also be the womb from which the baptized emerge into the Kingdom. The fundamental two of the whole is the context of the ascent and descent to the causes of the laws and symbols seen in the cave. These are intelligible in light of the study of the soul or man, reflected in the two parts, body and soul or mind- which are more fundamental than the three part division of the soul. The divided line shows at least six distinguishable functions of the mind, and likely, as we say 16 and more. All of these are kinds, but not in the most common sense of the ideas, but more as in Genesis, places where the particular things are, such as in a pool or on the wall, etc. and it is especially in this sense that an emanation and participation approach to the forms makes sense, as the higher are reflected in the lower, and so communicated by analogy.

There is a double Yin Yang symbol: There is a heavenly and earthly feminine and masculine. The archetype is the singular cause involved in the two symbols. Wisdom is the same in Athens and Jerusalem. There is knowledge of the soul in the soul.

Psychology: Fidelity and Love

   On the Ted Talk this morning, they had a fellow, the writer of a pop science book, who argues theoretically in favor of lust. The argument is something like this: that fidelity in love is the mere invention of males attempting to possess women as property, that it enters the human world with agriculture, and so is contrary to our natures. We have begun a discussion of biology, psychology and love a few blogs back, and there are of course great mysteries involved. But to begin an attempt to defend the poor lover and human love, even Shakespearean love, we will say this: The love “contract,” or the agreement of fidelity that lovers enter into, and that courtship is about, is because the beloved can destroy the soul or, if that is an exaggeration, “break the heart” of the lover by infidelity. It is this, the broken heart, and not “property rights” that fidelity is about. The lover, impelled by nature and at its mercy, does not even foresee, but the conjugal union brings with it a fusion: the two become “one flesh” or soul, again an exaggeration, but true in part. St. Paul writes that even the union with a prostitute bring this about, so that the promiscuous are literally dragging about their history as baggage. Erotic union causes a filial connection. Events that would otherwise be telepathic or prophetic even occur because the two literally participate in one love, a soul higher than the soul of either, and yet it is themselves. Most people are base and do not love, but that does not mean that the marriage customs, built up over thousands of years of hard experience, are unnatural or harmful.

   It is no coincidence that the conjugal union is the participation of man in the Creating of the creator, and the perpetuation of the generations, continuing according to one account a four billion year continuous genetic lineage. And the reason marriage is sacred is that the soul is an image of God, male and female. The Creator appears at the incarnation, and the highest image of God in the scriptures – the wedding of the Bride and Lamb- is reflected in marriage. So both the Creator and Redeemer are reflected in human marriage: Called the mystery of the bridal chamber.

   It is also true that love is the navel of our attachment to the earth of cave, and that the jilted lover can be dawn to the fundamental penance that leads up and out. The attachment to the earth and to the mother is beneath the attachment to the beloved, and its conquest is the overcoming of the fear of death. When this is trapped in the material, it can become a literal suicide, or worse. The attachment at the root of the family presents each with the fundamental questions, and the opportunity for some most fundamental errors.

   The true lover does not desire another beside the beloved, and so it is the beloved that must be persuaded. Maybe one in ten actual humans love this way, but the happiness of the household depends in large part on the way to which they follow the example. Similarly, jealousy excludes infidelity, or at least would be contradicted by infidelity. A test of fidelity is whether one becomes jealous, but for humans to make such things by artifice renders the elation artificial already, and harms the love. Affairs cause faction in the household, as the staying one will withdraw from the love, cannot celebrate the holidays together in the same way, etc. It also causes faction in the soul, so that one cannot act in unison with himself, and becomes clumsy. making mistakes.

   Love has its own ethics and its own understanding of justice, as assumed though inexplicable in the words “cheating,” “faithful” and such. One suspects that the lovers use these words so that loves justice will be assumed and they will not have to explain, because we can’t! And so the language is that of contract and promise. These things are just assumed, and no one can explain them, let alone convince one who does believe: Then I saw her face / Now I’m a believer” say the Monkeys, contradicting Darwin. But i heard a straying husband once who lamented that, having seen what the affair had done to his wife, he was quite shocked, and would never sacrifice so much pain for so little pleasure.

   Of course there are many different ways that humans participate in erotic union, but the suggestion is that these are all based upon and understood in light of the natural conjugal union at the root of the family, called “fertile” rather than infertile love.

   From the start, the biology of the matter no more supports the argument of lust than the argument of fidelity. Fidelity is different for men and women due to the circumstance in which women find themselves by nature, being the ones to bear or carry the child.    The male may be confused as to whose child he is raising, but the woman cannot be so confused for the same cause. Infidelity, if one can get away with it, would be selected for, but fidelity would decrease deaths from cuckolded husbands and due to sexual diseases, and so have an obvious claim to natural selection. The human family is much older than agriculture, and it is suspected that the continuous rather than cyclical human estrus was invented by nature to fuse the family. But this as often can destroy the family. When things are well, the couples are together caring even for the bodies and pleasures of one another, and after a fight or argument it is well known what occurs when the couples make up. It is even possible to argue that true and free lust occurs only in the conjugal union. The human family goes back even millions of years, into the avian and reptilian nature, where the family first emerges to care for the young. Swans and certain birds even excel mankind in fidelity and the attachment of love that joins the couples. The continuous human estrus is as likely to break as preserve the human family, but another common experience is the emptiness of the brief liaison. Bar patrons joke about wanting to chew their own arm off in the morning. The suspicion is that deep within our nature. love and the conjugal union are involved in the mystery of human connected-ness at the root of our political and filial nature. I am thinking of Allan Bloom, who writes of love this way, as the root of our connected-ness to other persons, or the reason that almost all humans cannot be alone. For the true priest or solitary philosopher, there are different mysteries, but for almost all practical purposes, it is not good for man to be alone.

   The mysteries of mankind involve the distinction between the filial and political nature, endogamy and exogamy, and the connection of families into polities through intermarriage. The incest prohibition acts upon us as if it were biological, that is, “lust” does not even operate within the family, and humans cannot even consciously address the theoretical issue, such, as Freud noted, is the human unconscious- and our Ted Talk biologist has not even begun to consider such “scientific” questions, but the treatment of man as wholly animal by the evolutionary theorists fundamentally destroys the specifically human nature and indeed destroys the soul, and this is not even an exaggeration. Psychologist well know, without any theoretical basis, the grave harm done by molestations and violations of the prohibitions, though modern psychology literally has no theoretical basis to account for this. It is as though our human soul were fundamentally disturbed, and in the worst cases, split personalities even emerge, as though one soul cannot acknowledge what has occurred to another within the same soul. The psychologists thankfully revert to law, common sense and repression, and do not notice the theoretical marvel which the law assumes. The harm done to children by the indiscriminate lusts of criminal adults is beyond notorious. These laws are ancient for us beyond the Decalogue, so that Moses himself, while addressing the facts and furthering civilization by forbidding the practices that some cultures in 1300 B.C. did not yet forbid, struggles to understand the theoretical basis. Neanderthal man may have been filial and not political, but for our species, such things are indeed inhuman, crossing the bounds of the humanity of “Cromagnon” man. We are indeed, as Aristotle wrote, the “political” animal, joined into tribes and these into villages by filial connections that are established by love. Exogamy then is for us most natural, and we suggest that Ted and his remarkable guest have not begun to think out even the anthropology involved in a defense of animal lust. Love is a rare and delicate plant, and human customs, rightly conceived, aim to uphold this beautiful thing against a tide of animal nature threatening to sweep away all that is priceless and hard won in human civilization. The law is like a trellis that allows roses to grow in abundance. To say that such things are based upon some mere patriarchal right of property is a joke, and a bad joke if we begin to think the matter through.

   Love is for the lover attended by jealousy, though for the one loved, this is not as impelling, and it comes upon us by nature. The lover must contract the fidelity of the beloved to preserve his own soul from jealousy, which can so possess the lives and thoughts of lovers as to make their lives from morning until night a misery. This comes upon the lover as did the love, like a force of nature o like a daemonic possession, and would call it the influence of an “archetype, and each is measured by and responsible for his own reaction to painful jealousy. One can do little to correct the circumstance except to leave or recede, but many things to make it worse, and suspicion itself can drive the beloved away. Bloom, in commenting on Othello and Lear, notes that the beloved does not owe love, and the lover cannot command love. But infidelity means that the beloved does not love you. Stupid of us to think ourselves worthy of love, as though we were the best for the beloved! Love implies an inflation: “I am the best of those that speak this speech,” says Ferdinand in Shakespeare’s Tempest. The heo will be sent out to slay the dragon for the princess and by the princess, though she does not do this knowingly, but apparently by nature.In each relation, it seems, there is as in Plato’s Phaedrus, a lover and a beloved, or as Jung writes, a container and one contained within the whole that is the love. Mutual lovers are rare among the couples, and the lover must seek to inspire the “ant-eros,” to win the heart of the beloved. Consider the things Prospero says to Ferdinand about the challenge to overcome his lust until marriage: Weeds will infest his marriage bed if he does not succeed in this fundamental establishment of the order of soul where he is able to control himself even in under the influence of his strong love for Miranda. The lover is indeed not capable of doing this himself while in love, and that is why it is thankful or fortunate that Ferdinand has the wise man to compel him, and that we once had the marriage customs of courtship and convention.

A Note * The word love does not occur in the index of our textbook titled “Abnormal Psychology,” perhaps because they wish to assume that love is normal! There is however a disorder called the “dependent” personality, and “co-dependent” has become a catchphrase in the fashionable opinion that parades itself as science under the banner of our pseudoscience, unworthy of the trust we give to these supposed knowers and healers of the soul. One suspects that these phrases are the inventions of beloveds seeking to escape the annoyance of the pain of some lover’s broken heart, and that the shrinks are among the base who do not love. In fact, without an understanding of eros and the human soul, it will be impossible to establish a science for the treatment or healing of the human soul, and while we possess the study, we do not possess the science. I will be thought arrogant for asserting the superiority of Plato, Shakespeare and the Bible to all of modern psychology, but be this as it may, and let the accuser provide a theoretical explanation for why that, or any other thing, is truly wrong on the basis of their pseudo-science. Modern psychology has not begun the serious study of the soul, and the authority it assumes for itself is harmful to humanity.  We at least can begin to provide a theoretical basis for arguing why this, or any other thing, is harmful, right or wrong: The health of the human soul.

Note 2: What is at stake in the argument of love and lust is, an the one hand the beautiful things that make life meaningful and worth living, and on the other, a momentary and usually fruitless thing called a “pleasure.” Eros must be feed from its imprisonment in matter as Ariel, the spirit that serves the wise man, is freed from his imprisonment in a cloven pine, but threatened with imprisonment in an oak. Two different theories of the nature of man underlie the question of whether the excess human eros or libido creates the higher human things by a “sublimation,” or whether there is not rather a natural gradient that eros ascends, a “ladder of love,” as in the Symposium.

Note 3. Lyric poetry contains an understanding of the soul and love far superior to our pseudoscience. Jack White writes: “How dare you. How old are you now, anyway,” and “You took a white orchid, turned it blue.” Another tragic love lyric showing the height, depth and intensity of the passions involved in the question of fidelity is Seven Nation Army. We have  lyric interpretation on these, in blogs and in Chapter IX of the book of music commentaries.

Niel Young writes: “Country girl…

I think your pretty

Got to make you understand

Have no lovers in the city

Let me be your Country man

Note 4: This strange lyric, in its irrationality, demonstrates a number of points about common sense and love:

Jack White: I Fell in Love with a Girl:

Fell in love with a girl
I fell in love once and almost completely
She’s in love with the world
But sometimes these feelings
Can be so misleading
She turns and said “are you alright?”
I said “I must be fine cause my heart’s still beating
Come and kiss me by the riverside, yeah
Bobby says it’s fine he don’t consider it cheating now

Red hair with a curl
mellow roll for the flavor
and the eyes for peeping
can’t keep away from the girl
these two sides of my brain need to have a meeting
can’t think of anything to do yeah
my left brain knows that our love is fleeting
she just looking for something new
and I said it once before but it bears repeating now

Ah-ah-ah-ah!

can’t think of anything to do yeah
my left brain knows that our love is fleeting
she’s just looking for something new
and I said it once before but it bears repeating now

Fell in love with a girl
i fell in love once and almost completely
she’s in love with the world
but sometimes these feelings can be so misleading
she turns and said “are you alright?”
I said “I must be fine cause my heart’s still beating
come and kiss me by the riverside, yeah
Bobby says it’s fine he don’t consider it cheating now

can’t think of anything to do yeah
my left brain knows that our love is fleeting
she just looking for something new
and I said it once before but it bears repeating now