the other day i was (yet again) trying to justify my disgusting doom scrolling behavior. ive always resorted to the line of logic that reels and books are but different media for putting the author’s idea out there. but then i came up w the argument that it must be a pain in the ass to publish a book, and if someone is willing to go thru all that then maybe whatever they got is better than tralalero tralala
but yea i started writing these blogs cuz i have terrible memory and cannot get through another chapter of this book without forgetting the last one, but quoting paragraphs and paragraphs of the text verbatim doesnt feel like a good strategy either..
the presocratic philosophers, contd
pythagoras
pythagoras is personally smth of a mystery but had a perhaps religious following, said to have forbidden his followers from eating beams because they contain the souls of the dead. this i can totally get behind.
pythagoras’s influence on plato and others is obscured by the legends which grew around him centuries after his time – porphyry says “no one else has had greater or more extraordinary things believed about them”
pythagoreans follow a belief system seeking to help the soul escape from “the wheel of rebirth” (buddhism reference?!) and people are divided into “three kinds, on analogy w ppl who attend the games: some come to compete, some to buy and sell under the stands, and some to spactate”. the philosophers are those who spectate or look upon the world to study it and are the best kind of ppl and, according to pythagoreans, closest to purification and escaping the cycle of rebirth. not sure why theyre so eager to escape rebirth – i thought that was all the hype in the light novel world
apart from the pythagorean theorem, the pythagorean school also discovered that the pitch of a musical note depends on the length of a string whose vibration produce the note, and that simple ratios explain the consonant intervals of the scale. and then they proceeded to fit this on everything they could ig – earth and moon are a tone apart, moon to mercury a semitone, venus to the sun a minor third, etc. kinda 牵强 for me but supposedly this is how harmony became the go to metaphor in thinking about matters ethical and psychological
the pythagorean reality is constituted by number – allegedly the motto above the entrance to a pythagorean lodge was “all is number”. aristotle reports that they assigned numerical values to certain abstractions such as justice (4) and marriage (3). reminds me of godels proof. they l9ikely thought of the world as consisting structurally of whole numbers and their ratios, and hence their horrified reaction to the discovery of irrational numbers. the poor guy who “revealed it after the order’s members had been sworn to secrecy about it” – hippasos of metapontum, was punished by being drowned. tuff
xenophanes
xenophanes despised homer and hesiod’s anthropomorphic account of the gods. i also kinda feel that way now since damn that is so unimaginative? also kinda conceited
xenophanes’s emphatic rejection of traditional religion and its anthropomorphic olympian deities is one of the most distinctve facts about him – he argued that there is no such thing as divination – earthquakes and rainbows are not messages from the gods but should be naturalistically investigated and understood
he is also critical of the greeks’ obsession w atheletics and athletes and the expenditure of public money on both. “far better is our art [i.e. poetry] than the strength of men and horses!” he points out that even if there arises a boxer mightier, a runner swiftier, a wrestler more skillful, than others, “the city would be none the better governed for that. it is little joy to a city if a man conquer at the games; that does not fill its store-houses”. this makes a lot of sense tbh and yea what does athletics even mean other than a massive festival to stroke our own ego over our advancements in technology, be it in equipment or medication? granted theres nothing wrong w celebrating that.. actually i did indulge in some competitive programming myself in the past years – i guess its a testament to the human spirit and the drive to excel. still, i think when your whole life is about atheletics its kinda 本末倒置, although i havent figured out what the 本 should be oops (wasnt there a guy who quit being an olympian skiier and became a successful drug dealer?)
xenophanes schathed abt homer and hesiod because they “ascribed to the gods all things that are a shame and a disgrace among mortals, stealings and adulteries and deceivings”. “if oxen and horses or lions had hands, and could paint w their hands, and produce works of arts as men do, horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen”. he sure is humorous. he also thougt instead that there is a god which is nothing like anything we know, and which might in fact be the same thing as the world ifself. now this is actually a cool concept
aristotle says in metaphysics that xenophanes was the first to argue that reality is “one”, and plato called xenophanes “the first of the eleatics”, the philosophers of parmenides’s school who subscribed to the doctrine that reality is a single unchanging eternal thing. aristotle suggests xenophanes thought the world and god are the same thing, but commentators also remind us that his denial of traditional gods and his assertion that god and the world are one and the same thing jointly imply that “there is no god but the world”.
heraclitus
so this guys is known for being confusing. he wrote a book, a copy of which was given to socrates, who said “what i understood of it is splendid, what i dont understand of it is probably splendid too; but it would take a delian diver to get to the bottom of it”. these philosphers do be mad funny
in plato’s account heraclitus compares existing things to the flow a river – you could not step into the same river twice. heraclitus’s disciple cratylus is said to not reply when spoken to but only waggle his finger to indicate that he had heard, because by the time he was ready to answer, the world had changed. lmao. other commentators say that heraclitus meant the only thing that doesnt change is flux – that the flux does not destroy the river but constitutes it
another of heraclitus’s doctrines is the “unity of opposites”, that youth and age, waking and sleeping, life and death are “the same thing in us … for having changed round they are these, but when changed round again they are those”. one fragment says “good and ill are one” – heraclitus seems to have held that it is by the conflict or tension that holds oppisites together that existence itself is possible: “homer was wrong to say, ‘would that strife might perish from among gods and men!’ he did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe, for if his prayer were heard all things would pass away … all things come into being and pass away through strife … strife is justice, all things happen according to strife and necessity”