Here comes a gang of bastards knocking the preSocratic period to hell.
It is not just the Platonists knocking it down, the Sophists are knocking it down too. Then Athens gets rid of these bastards and gets rid of Socrates also. Athens gets the accolade that this is where it all took place, but it didn't. It synthesized in Athens. The original thinkers were all in the Ionian Islands. Or might have been in Syracuse, previous to the problem with Persia. From Homeric time there was a transition to philosophical time.
It is going on right here, right now. Religion and democracy is the same sort of thing. We have a political religion of pluralism that says all men can live here with a system that is going to run and function and balance beautifully because there is a magic taking place. That is what pluralism is, so;me kind of magic that goes on somehow, as if there is a natural law that takes place.
How does it all come together? It comes together as a question, not as an answer. Not like your education, which is conclusions. You look for a finished product. You look for a self-enclosed system.
Picture it like this. Above the surface, the surface, and the subsoil beneath the surface. Right on the spot we have three different realities that we can observe, this, this and that. We have to penetrate each reality, its complexities and its ecosystems, and its systems in relationship to each other. When we penetrate one and see all its complexities, we relate it to the next eco system that is above it. And then to the next ecosystem, and then to the next ecosystem.
Today I have been reading philosophy and someone says to me, why are you reading the most common philosophers? Because every time I read them I find something new. I keep reading them over and over, not because I'm satiated, because I am perplexed. The ability to live in that perplexity is what makes us who we are. You pull us up last the epistemological and to to the metaphysical. You want to see it for its own beauty.
With continuing perplexity you develop the balance of not losing it totally. It is forever a reinterpretation, like comparing Kantian philosophy with preSocratic philosophy. Kant is a burdensome philosopher to move through, because his argument is the argument of epistemology, the knowable. Knowledge. And it resorts to the arguments of perception and thinking. If we go to the arguments that Kant defined, it is a whole different beauty as opposed to laboriously memorize what he is saying. I can't memorise it word for word. I'm not interested in that, I'm interested in the way he views the world.
"How he views" is the way I teach philosophy, the method of taking the ideas and playing with the ideas and the concepts that come from them. The is what is essential, the rest of it is just information. There are no big philosophers that you cursory read to know what they said, and that's it. There are others that ponder also. There are the mainstream philosophers and the tributary philosophers. There are a lot of philosophers on the side that history has not picked up so far. It remains for somebody in the future to put this somebody with that somebody and synthesize different systems.
How does this type of philosophy happen here and that type happen there? Why should one thing take place on the Eastern side of the world and something else take place on the Western side of the world? Why did the Greek not accept religion? Why did he create philosophy?
Philosophy is a response to religion. At first they did not call it philosophy, They called it
(A LE' THEA) alethia, the word for truth in Greek. It is the word for uncovering, which is the word for unconcealing.
The word philosophy has a connative value, it connotes something. Today the word philosophy means somebody who hides in a room. I'm the example of the exact opposite. Philosophy is the highest order of communication. When we approach reality, it is like a man climbing down a cliff or climbing up a cliff. Unless we have certain ropes holding us, we will get destroyed within the morass of it. What we are doing is actually setting out stones. Slowly, ever so slowly.
There are two fundamental arguments, the argument of change and the argument of permanency. When you say structure, do you mean structure permanent or structure dynamic, in motion? Structure can be in motion too, you can't think of structure as static, structure means a form. That's the function of a structure. It keeps the thing together, as you learn about forms in engineering school.
Words like "form" will become, as you go along, like playing music. The best way to play music is to play music, not just to read notes. Listen to this story. The maestro musician Fernando Sor, 1778-1839, gave us 20 studies. He got so tired of the world he went into a monastery to do the following. He thought, how can I put the total knowledge of the guitar on a piece of paper? And he divided it into 20 studies. And each one of the studies has secrets, of technique, of musical tones, of rhythms, of all that is essential. At the end of the 20 studies you should be a master if you can play them, the study of dimensions. That kind of beauty is what we look to unravel. Unless you see that as beautiful, you don't see philosophy. Philosophy is not a term, it's a feeling.
At my graduation I did not show up because I was embarrassed to accept. How could they make me a philosopher? It is something that has to be felt, it is nothing that can be conferred. It is something that comes from inside. You can always tell the one who works from that confirmation I confer upon you, then you go pontificate. Listen carefully, because this is essential to the understanding of it. There is no way anybody can confer anything in this subject. This subject was alive before it became professional. Its Being was not in professionality, its Being was just like we are here. It wasn't born in an institution it was born by free men questioning and learning how to construct the question.
To the Greek the answer is not what is important, it is the question. That is dominant in the society today. Guys will sit there and ponder questions to ask. There is no solution to it.
(to be continued)