plato valentine – 2/14/14
Kind of wrapping up on Plato’s Phaedrus for now:
- We require madness from the gods to get anything done
- He points to four kinds of madness:
- Prophecy
- Justice (This is so smart to me! In order to forgive, to move on from grave wrong – chiefly as the aggrieved but one assumes as perpetrator as well – it takes a super-human leap…)
- Art (from the muses)
- Love (love and rhetoric – their relationship the main theme of the dialogue)
- We are paradoxically made – the idea that we are horses of two natures teamed together – the free (divine) and the attached (lustful, base). All action is the temporary consent of opposing natures to get something done; the base at the very least needs to be in the process of turning into the higher.
- To act profoundly, you must be moving to change (sprouting wings, in visceral detail)
- A way to change: See beauty. See beauty and be changed (in our work, show beauty)
- Letters and forgetting – writing is a playful reminder of the real deal; impermanent (69)
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