Philosophy Now Forum

Walker wrote: ↑Mon Jul 10, 2017 2:57 pm

Belinda wrote: ↑Mon Jul 10, 2017 10:42 am But it's not possible to "cancel out emotions" unless the subject is dead, drugged with a lot of tranquillisers, unaware in dreamless sleep, or suffering from hypothyroidism. Indeed we don't want to "cancel out " emotions. What we need to do, all of us, is refine our raw, and even our diseased, emotional reactions with reasoned thought, foresight, ethics, and insight into our own psyches.

What about surgical lobotomy?

One can cancel emotions, but that’s to be avoided. Emotions are to be experienced with as much depth and expanse as possible. That’s why they’re there. The confusion arises with attachment to the emotions. One is attached when one is smaller than the emotion. When one is larger, attachment is not possible because the perspective of compassion cannot be ignored.

Raw emotion fuels the movement of life. Attachment is to be enslaved and emotion is attached to energy, which unchecked is destructive. Non-attached energy, undissipated by emotion which usually focuses on past or present, is movement of body, or verk in the present. The same energy applied to movement of mind is thought that directs the body. Mind directed by body is just as enslaved as energy can be to emotion.

For example, the teaching of Milarepa’s life demonstrates how he lost emotional attachment to the burden of his past via the stacking all those stones, should you feel like googling. In the course of human evolution one eventually does encounter the ego-nullifying effects of craftsmanship that requires stupefying labor, such as one encounters in stone wall-building competitions.

Eastern disciplines such as martial arts and meditation require training in controlling, not deprivation of, emotions don't you think? I agree with your post.
I did look up Milarepa.

"The ego-nullifying effects of craftmanship that requires stupifying labor" : do you include all physical training disciplines such as ballet, tai chi chuan, or mountaineering? Do you agree that Muslims' five times a day prayer discipline,and the discipline of Ramadan ; or in the case of Christians, Lent, are conducive to control of the emotions and the ego?

Is the urge to nurture and to display sympathy an emotion ?

Nick_A:

Why do you insist on involving yourself in ideas you clearly do not understand. Simone refers to an ideal impossible for the Beast because of what it has become.

She says nothing of the sort. She says that the task of government is to express the general will. This is not something she condemns, it is something she wants to secure. The general will is the will of the people is the will of society is the will of the Beast. According to Weil, once again, as stated in the article and as you quoted, the will of the people, is not achieved by purging individuals of their “malicious private interest” but rather it is her belief that “malicious private interest” is purged from the will of the people by:

heeding the consensus that emerges from honest public discussion, in which “individual passions will neutralize one another and act as mutual counterweights.

She does not posit this as an impossible ideal to be lamented because it cannot possible be achieved by secular society, but rather as a workable alternative to the party system that thwarts the will of the people. It does not require that people become other than they are, only that everyone be allowed to contribute to honest public discussion, be given an equal say or vote, and that the consensus that emerges to be honored. It is a matter of restructuring government not people. The restructuring of government is something that has occurred quite often and there is nothing to prevent it from happening again. It is not anathema to secularism or liberalism, it promotes the rights of the individual.

If you think it is an impossible ideal then you are not in agreement with Weil on this matter. This may create a dilemma or even a crisis for you but not one that can be resolved by claiming I do not understand what is plainly stated. If this is not what she means or is not what she proposes then you must explain what she does mean by reference to the article and identify where she rejects it in the article. If you think the author of the article does not understand it either then you must reference the book the article discusses and explain by way of the book itself what she means and identify where in the book she rejects this proposal. General comments about the Great Beast and force taken from other sources will not do and only exacerbates the problem of reading comprehension by multiplying the number of texts that require proper interpretation unless the address her proposal. Nor will yet another rant against and unfounded claims about secular society complete with your idiosyncratic definition of terms.

Society as a whole is incapable of objective reason. Corrupt emotions will not allow it.

It is her opinion, as stated in the article, that corrupt emotions will cancel each other out, they will “neutralize one another and act as mutual counterweights". Now you may find this claim to be as hopelessly naive as I and others do, but unless you can show that this is not what she is saying then you must either reject it or accept it.

Secular intolerance assures that the help necessary to further emotional intelligence or become human will be denied by secularism which is closed to the value of the light of grace.

It has nothing to do with furthering emotional intelligence or the light of grace, it is, as she clearly says, a matter of counterbalancing the interests of each individual with those of other individuals, no matter how malicious their interests the may be.

No. social force is what diminishes a human being into a thing. It results in mechanical reactions as opposed to conscious actions. As a secularist you are not open to the difference.

Yes, I have heard all this before, but it has nothing to do with what the article actually says.

The bottom line is that all those who value a free society as was the intent of America’s founding fathers know that what John Adams wrote is true:

The bottom line is that we are discussing the ideas presented in the article on Weil not John Adams or the American founding fathers.

You do not believe that philosophy is the love of wisdom.

I am not going to be goaded into following you down the rabbit hole you believe to be your ascent out of the cave.

The purpose of the thread is an expose on the detrimental affects of secular intolerance on the young capable of being more than indoctrinated atoms of the great beast. The author of the article discusses the power of political parties representing facets of the beast and how human individuality is easily sacrificed to these secular collectives.

http://www.hermitary.com/solitude/weil.html

In "Sketch of Contemporary Social Life" (1934), Weil develops the theme of collectivism as the trajectory of modern culture.

“Never has the individual been so completely delivered up to a blind collectivity, and never have men been so less capable, not only of subordinating their actions to their thoughts, but even of thinking.”

Does this read like someone who believes in people with objective reason or just slaves to convention?

According to Weil, the person's accession to society, the individual's renunciation of values to the collective as defined by a small group, is based on ignorance and fear, fear that without society (which is to say the state), people will collapse into crime and evil. The social and collective is seen as transcending individuals, as a supernatural entity from which nationalism and war is as normal as science, progress, and consumption. All of these evils are taking place simultaneously in a social context. The individual has probably never reflected on these issues at all, never acknowledged his or her degree of complicity in this system. But, say the apologist for the Great Beast, the individual need have no direct responsibility,

“The collective is the object of all idolatry, this it is which chains us to the earth. In the case of avarice, gold is the social order. In the case of ambition, power is the social order.”

You glorify the collective as the greater good and I recognize it as what deprives a human being of recognizing the direction of the Good.

Thus society itself is the Great Beast, not some particular product of society, not even the state, the mode of production, the capitalist class, or any other social product. The weight of humanity is a heavy and ponderous gravity, a force but a contrived force to which the individual remains oblivious.

As long as one accepts the "totem," and subordinates all values to the collective, the contrived dichotomy of good and evil will trap individuals in fear. But the solution to the dilemma Weil depicts is not Nietzsche's transcendence of morality but a simple perception of the nature of society, of the nature of the "Great Beast."

“It is the social which throws the color of the absolute over the relative. The remedy is in the idea of relationship. Relationship breaks its way out of the social. It is the monopoly of the individual. Society is the cave. The way out is solitude.”

Alluding to the allegory of the cave in Plato's Republic, where reality is seen second-hand as shadows on the wall rather than directly in the light of reality, Weil points to the compelling truth that everything people do or believe is based on a second-hand source: society. As long as individuals substitute society's view of reality for their own discoveries of reality -- so that the relationship to self, others, nature, and the universe is direct, immediate, intuitive, and accountable -- the individual will remain oppressed.

“Conscience is deceived by the social. Our supplementary energy (imagination) is to a great extent taken up with the social. It has to be detached from it. That is the most difficult of detachments.”

The most difficult of detachments , yet it can begin, not with action but with reflection.

“Meditation on the social mechanism is in this respect a purification of the first importance. To contemplate the social is as good a way of detachment as to retire from the world. That is why I have not been wrong to rub shoulders with politics or society.”

In order to verify the human condition in ourselves and in the world it is necessary to experience both our inner world and the outer world with conscious attention as opposed to our usual self justifying imagination in accordance with the demands of the Beast. This is poison to the secularist who defends the Great Beast and its domain in Plato’s cave through the manipulation of imagintion.

Secular intolerance opposes all means of awakening to reality inviting help from above. It opposes anything that questions glorification of its god the great beast. I oppose blind indoctrination into the Great Beast depriving the young of their awakening possibilities. You insist on this indoctrination since there is nothing greater than the whims of the great Beast and are intolerant of all that questions its glory. Spirit killing for the young.


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Nick_A:

The author of the article discusses the power of political parties representing facets of the beast and how human individuality is easily sacrificed to these secular collectives.

The author of the article discusses much more than that. You go on and on about the great beast but ignore what Weil says about it in the book being reviewed that does not fit your well rehearsed and often repeated spiel. This may be willful blindness, but it may be a protective mechanism that is not within your control. Either way it is part of exactly what you often accuse others of, a mechanistic response, a reflex, it is neither reflective and certainly not reflexive. But it allows your slumber to continue undisturbed.

There is no value in continually pointing to what you cannot or refuse to see. I'm done.

Nothing is more difficult for a fish to see than the water in which it swims.

The New Republic article concludes with:

Democracy functions by recognizing that politics is not a matter of finding the right answer, but of coming up with an answer that everyone agree to live with. That is why liberal democracy never satisfies those, like Weil, who are in search of perfect truth and goodness, or who see politics as a form of soul-making. In this sense, Weil herself has more in common with the totalitarian parties she attacks than she does with liberalism. Like them, she insists on a single truth, and demonizes those who oppose her as enemies of truth.

The danger in American politics today is that, on more and more issues, we are falling into this same Manicheanism, in which each party accuses the other, not just of error, but of treason and evil. Democracy only works if our loyalty to the collective is more powerful than our insistence on our own righteousness. When righteousness and loyalty cannot be reconciled—as they finally couldn’t over the issue of slavery—democracy fails, and the only resort is to violence. Parties ought to help avert that kind of apocalyptic conflict, by forming coalition in support of political consensus. The more ideologically embittered our parties become, the greater the danger we face of returning to Simone Weil’s world, where the very word “party” can only be a curse.

This really does illustrate the problem of secular intolerance and why freedom much less awakening to objective human meaning and purpose becomes impossible under its dominance.

From the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Notice how rights initiate with a quality of truth higher than the government. The purpose of the government is to preserve the relationship between higher truth and a subservient government.

Secularism is intolerant of this relationship and all which supports it. The government as an expression of the great Beast does what it can to deny it with all the righteous indignation it can muster.

As the article suggests, as soon as society forgets the source of rights which unites people, arguments begin over details over who is right and the attraction to appreciating the source which unites Man devolves into human interpretations which divide Man. Secular intolerance must encourage what divides man for the purpose of creating the ultimate fiction of man made utopia. Of course Simone came to gradually realize it through her transformation from Marxist social activism into Christian mysticism. It became horribly evident that Man is denied anything other than slavery without the help of grace. The struggle for prestige resulting in conflict will prevent it. Those aware of the human condition are in a minority so have little influence.

Freedom and the goal of understanding and furthering objective human meaning and purpose will be sacrificed the more secular intolerance is glorified as intellectually superior. Attempts to open to understanding the nature of man and an understanding of God will be denied especially in schools serving the purpose of spirit killing necessary for the dominance of the Beast mentality.

"even if we can't prevent the forces of tyranny from prevailing, we can at least "understand the force by which we are crushed." Simone Weil

Understanding leading to partial consolation may unfortunately be the best the Great Beast can be capable of in the presence of dominant secular intolerance..

"A man found an eagle's egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them. All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air.

Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat on his strong golden wings. The old eagle looked up in awe. "Who's that?" he asked. "That's the eagle, the king of the birds," said his neighbour. "He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth - we're chickens." So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that's what he thought he was.

Anthony de Mello (1931 - 1987) Jesuit Priest"

Kill any young eagles you may find. Who knows what trouble they may cause. They could even corrupt the youth of Athens which simply cannot be allowed.

Belinda wrote: ↑Mon Jul 10, 2017 7:08 pm Eastern disciplines such as martial arts and meditation require training in controlling, not deprivation of, emotions don't you think? I agree with your post.
I did look up Milarepa.

"The ego-nullifying effects of craftmanship that requires stupifying labor" : do you include all physical training disciplines such as ballet, tai chi chuan, or mountaineering? Do you agree that Muslims' five times a day prayer discipline,and the discipline of Ramadan ; or in the case of Christians, Lent, are conducive to control of the emotions and the ego?

Is the urge to nurture and to display sympathy an emotion ?

If the performance art, etc. is egoless, sure. Can it be so? The rock stacker goes where the cathedral masons went, building for the glory of God and not ego. Today with the same intent he had then, Bach would be a rockstar.

If God in one way or another says tear it down again, then within the labor Milarepa learns, who is ego to quibble when ego identity is gone? His identity transforms from Milearpa stacking rocks, into stacking rocks.

Emotions are naturally-arising energy that get associated with thoughts, and then get burned into habit by a lack of mindfulness of what the hell is actually going on, here and now.

For instance, see or hear second hand of an injustice in the world, as progressives often do, and the natural energy of the body follows the habitual, mental route to anger. This is why they seem so angry, especially when speaking to groups. They want to get folks riled up along the customary pathways that the noggin has been wired.

Walker, I doubt if any living thing can live without the feeling the need to remain a unitary whole. If that's ego, then even Milarepa must be unable to continue living without ego. Yet I can understand how the Buddhist and the Taoist become what they are doing or feeling.

Is Milarepa stacking stones doing so to train himself in self discipline; but not stacking stones in order to become egoless?

I think that to control reactive emotions is not the same as to be without ego.

Belinda wrote: ↑Tue Jul 11, 2017 5:20 pm Walker, I doubt if any living thing can live without the feeling the need to remain a unitary whole. If that's ego, then even Milarepa must be unable to continue living without ego. Yet I can understand how the Buddhist and the Taoist become what they are doing or feeling.

Is Milarepa stacking stones doing so to train himself in self discipline; but not stacking stones in order to become egoless?

I think that to control reactive emotions is not the same as to be without ego.

- Not even Milarepa would choose to do what he did.
- Reactive emotions are conditioned, implanted often early, the how and why forgotten until dredged up into a narrative of memory that correlates with the present conditions and views.
- Sometimes folks have a need to search for the how and why.
- The rationale for the analysis of searching the past for clues of causation, is that awareness of a particular situation, such as the cause of reactive emotions, is enough to dissipate the control of the reactive emotion.
- Road rage is an example.
- In the ragers, the auto is an extension of identity, of being, of self-concept, and during road rage any affront to the rager’s car in traffic is taken as a personal affront to egocentric control.
- With life as the measure right down to the bones, spontaneous awareness of death’s presence in the unstoppable physics of mass and motion, not so much controls the reactive emotions that may spontaneously arise as energy habituated to forgotten conditioning and causing road rage, but rather, the awareness of life perspective clarifies the moment, and irrationality is naturally subsumed by intelligence.
- In less dramatic situations such as meditation, non-clinging to anything, especially thoughts, becomes an effortless method and thoughts just naturally go away, minus their imperatives of importance.

Walker wrote:

- In the ragers, the auto is an extension of identity, of being, of self-concept, and during road rage any affront to the rager’s car in traffic is taken as a personal affront to egocentric control.
- With life as the measure right down to the bones, spontaneous awareness of death’s presence in the unstoppable physics of mass and motion, not so much controls the reactive emotions that may spontaneously arise as energy habituated to forgotten conditioning and causing road rage, but rather, the awareness of life perspective clarifies the moment, and irrationality is naturally subsumed by intelligence.
- In less dramatic situations such as meditation, non-clinging to anything, especially thoughts, becomes an effortless method and thoughts just naturally go away, minus their imperatives of importance.

That is as good or better than the other rationales or explanations of meditation I have heard.

As an explanation of how ego weakness works to cause road rage, this is also easy to understand. I am wondering how awareness of one's own and others' reactive emotions works to bring reason to bear upon those raw emotional reactions. Road rage is a classic situation for illustrating ego-reaction, but I guess that there are other life situations that challenge the ego- self in less obvious ways.

None of us is Jesus, and sometimes we have to deal with disrespect other than by giving in to it. Sometimes we should help victims of disrespect as did Dr Martin Luther King Jnr. The ego strength of such as he, and Rosa Parks for instance, was ego in the service of good. So control of the emotions is not the same as giving in to aggressors. When Jesus submitted to the Roman aggressors he was unable to do otherwise.

Belinda wrote: ↑Wed Jul 12, 2017 9:14 am Walker wrote:

- In the ragers, the auto is an extension of identity, of being, of self-concept, and during road rage any affront to the rager’s car in traffic is taken as a personal affront to egocentric control.
- With life as the measure right down to the bones, spontaneous awareness of death’s presence in the unstoppable physics of mass and motion, not so much controls the reactive emotions that may spontaneously arise as energy habituated to forgotten conditioning and causing road rage, but rather, the awareness of life perspective clarifies the moment, and irrationality is naturally subsumed by intelligence.
- In less dramatic situations such as meditation, non-clinging to anything, especially thoughts, becomes an effortless method and thoughts just naturally go away, minus their imperatives of importance.

That is as good or better than the other rationales or explanations of meditation I have heard.

As an explanation of how ego weakness works to cause road rage, this is also easy to understand. I am wondering how awareness of one's own and others' reactive emotions works to bring reason to bear upon those raw emotional reactions. Road rage is a classic situation for illustrating ego-reaction, but I guess that there are other life situations that challenge the ego- self in less obvious ways.

None of us is Jesus, and sometimes we have to deal with disrespect other than by giving in to it. Sometimes we should help victims of disrespect as did Dr Martin Luther King Jnr. The ego strength of such as he, and Rosa Parks for instance, was ego in the service of good. So control of the emotions is not the same as giving in to aggressors. When Jesus submitted to the Roman aggressors he was unable to do otherwise.

Well, the road rage thing is not altogether without justification, when you consider the chain of causality.
- Owning and operating a car requires money.
- Money requires work.
- Work requires time.
- Time is finite for the worker, thus valuable.
- Earned money is life-force traded.
- A reckless driver who is unperceptive of this is not assessing the disrespected car on the scale of life, including babies on board, and thus is an irrational idiot.
- To be needlessly threatened with two tons of steel and plastic by an irrational idiot driver using negligent ego as the measure of all things, is cause for alarm for future victims of said driver’s idiocy, thus this could justify reciprocal road rage.
- However, if intended effect is the reason for moving, which it is in a rational world of one’s own creation, then reactive irrational action caused by rage, in order to end the threat of idiotic driving unleashed upon the future, often causes more grief. Everyone knows that.
- The big blind spot is the insistence on self-assessing the state-of-mind from whence actions flow, when flowing from an irrational point of view, thus the virtues of ouzo training, which teaches the principles of limitations and their peccadillos, in all their guises, to the mindful.

Apparently, these children are free of this referenced beast.

Will they also be enslaved and devoured by the beast? Like all people, possibly.

Googled TED to see what was forgotten and found a transcript of the talk, which doesn’t take much time.

Kids can teach themselves
SUGATA MITRA
https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_ ... transcript

Walker wrote: ↑Wed Jul 12, 2017 1:28 pm Apparently, these children are free of this referenced beast.

Will they also be enslaved and devoured by the beast? Like all people, possibly.

Googled TED to see what was forgotten and found a transcript of the talk, which doesn’t take much time.

Kids can teach themselves
SUGATA MITRA
https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_ ... transcript

The majority will always be devoured by the Beast.. It is nature's way. Water seeks its own level. If you throw a rock into a pond it makes ripples. soon they die down and the water becomes as it was. The minority who oppose slavery to the Beast and seek to experience reality and conscious help from above will be opposed by the Beast in many ways including the vile spirit killing attitudes and methods of secular intolerance

Walker:

Kids can teach themselves.

I would like to talk about the major premise or paradigm of the talk - self-organizing systems. While I do think there is some truth to the claim that learning is a self-organizing system, it leaves open the question of the system or systems that emerge. This is related to a) the question of values and whether those values that emerge from “outdoctrination” will be beneficial to those who come to hold them, and b) the extent to which what is learned will be useful in promoting the way of life that is valued.

In other words, we are not freed from but led to the problem of society, the great beast, which is itself a self-organizing system. If we tie this to “remoteness” then hypothetically, we may over time find in geographically remote areas something like peaceful tribes, but we may also find something closer to “Lord of the Flies”. More generally, whether we are dealing with remote societies or nations, we cannot simply escape social structures or systems. They confer both benefit and harm. It is human beings who structure these systems and in turn are structured by them.

To the extent that we free ourselves from prevailing social norms we do so within society. We live in times where it is quite easy to see that social structures and values can and do change, and that such change is brought about within the system by those who rejected certain norms in favor of others. As with all change there will be some who will condemn it and long for a mythological golden age.

An ill-informed appeal to Plato is particularly ironic in this regard. Those who condemned Socrates did so because he threatened the status quo, which many thought had already deteriorated from a golden age they longed to return to. Let’s take a look at the passage from Plato from which all this talk of a great beast derives:

"Well, then," I said, "besides that one, be of this opinion too."
"What?"
"That each of the private wage earners whom these men call sophists and believe to be their rivals in art, educates in nothing other than these convictions" of the many, which they opine when they are gathered together, and he calls this wisdom. It is just like the case of a man who learns by heart the angers and desires of a great, strong beast he is rearing, how it should be approached and how taken hold of, when—and as a result of what—it becomes most difficult or most gentle, and, particularly, under what conditions it is accustomed to utter its several sounds, and, in turn, what sort of sounds uttered by another make it tame and angry. When he has learned all this from associating and spending time with the beast, he calls it wisdom and, organizing it as an art, turns to teaching. Knowing nothing in truth about which of these convictions and desires is noble, or base, or good, or evil, or just, or unjust, he applies all these names following the great animal's opinions—calling what delights it good and what vexes it bad. He has no other argument about them but calls the necessary just and noble, neither having seen nor being able to show someone else how much the nature of the necessary and the good really differ. Now, in your opinion, wouldn't such a man, in the name of Zeus, be out of place as an educator?"
"Yes," he said, "in my opinion, he would indeed." (Republic 493a-c)

What Plato is talking about is a kind of knowledge used by the sophist to manipulate opinion. The problem is not that they manipulate opinion (note this passage begins by Socrates telling Adeimantus to “be of the opinion”) but rather that the sophist does not know:

...which of these convictions and desires is noble, or base, or good, or evil, or just, or unjust, he applies all these names following the great animal's opinions—calling what delights it good and what vexes it bad.

There is in this no condemnation of the great beast, but rather a condemnation of those who attempt to set themselves up as teachers of wisdom who are not wise. To the extent that Socrates is wise it is with regard to "whatever I do not know, I do not even suppose I know" (Apology 21d). To the extent he teaches wisdom it is with regard to self-knowledge which includes knowledge of the limits of what we know. As humans we possess at best this human wisdom not the divine wisdom of the gods.

Weil, however, sees society itself, that is, a “collective”, whether it be a church or a state, as the great beast:

Society is the cave. The way out is solitude.

This does not necessarily mean physical isolation:

Meditation on the social mechanism is in this respect a purification of the first importance. To contemplate the social is as good a way of detachment as to retire from the world. That is why I have not been wrong to rub shoulders with politics or society.

Contemplation of the social is not wholesale condemnation of or opposition to society or "secular society". It is a call to individualism in thought and action. It is to find one’s own way. It is not only “secular society” that imprisons us. One can build his own prison out of such things as a perverse preoccupation with the very thing that he claims imprisons us, seeing everything as a Manichean struggle between good and evil instantiated the evil of secularism versus an ideal of consciousness not yet attained.
Finding one’s own way does not mean worshiping in the cult of Simone Weil wherein one’s every thought and statement is shaped by hers. Nor is it a matter of taking Plato’s image of the cave as if having read about it and what is supposed to exist outside of it gives one authority to speak about things he does not know. One should not mistake the “sounds uttered by another [that] make [him] tame and angry” for truth. To do so is to be a slave to Weil’s great beast, an enslavement that is the result of a failure to properly identify it. As she says:

In order to be exercised, the intelligence requires to be free to express itself without control by any authority.

This applies equally to the authority of Weil or Plato or anyone else. And for this reason one may question her next statement:

There must therefore be a domain of pure intellectual research, separate but accessible to all, where no authority intervenes.

There is no ‘therefore’ that must follow from the call for the intelligence to express itself freely. Such a domain may not exist. There is a difference between influence and control. We can free ourselves of control but no one, not even, Simone Weil is without influence.

Fooloso4

What Plato is talking about is a kind of knowledge used by the sophist to manipulate opinion. The problem is not that they manipulate opinion (note this passage begins by Socrates telling Adeimantus to “be of the opinion”) but rather that the sophist does not know

There is in this no condemnation of the great beast, but rather a condemnation of those who attempt to set themselves up as teachers of wisdom who are not wise. To the extent that Socrates is wise it is with regard to "whatever I do not know, I do not even suppose I know" (Apology 21d). To the extent he teaches wisdom it is with regard to self-knowledge which includes knowledge of the limits of what we know. As humans we possess at best this human wisdom not the divine wisdom of the gods.

If sophists or what I call (experts) admitted their ignorance it would be meaningful but their puffed up egoism makes it impossible to consider resulting in intolerance. The problem is always the same: sophists, experts, lawyers, or whatever name you use, their expertise is in the devolution of knowledge into opinions - wholeness into arguing fragmentation with the progressive result of destroying eros in the young.

Luke 11: 52 “Woe to you experts in the law, because you have taken away the key to knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you have hindered those who were entering.”

“And, moreover,” I said, “we have not yet mentioned the chief necessity and compulsion.” “What is it?” said he. “That which these ‘educators’ and sophists impose by action when their words fail to convince. Don't you know that they chastise the recalcitrant with loss of civic rights and fines and death?” “They most emphatically do,” he said. “What other sophist, then, or what private teaching do you think [492e] will prevail in opposition to these?” “None, I fancy,” said he. “No,” said I, “the very attempt110is the height of folly. For there is not, never has been and never will be,111 a divergent type of character and virtue created by an education running counter to theirs112—humanly speaking, I mean, my friend; for the divine, as the proverb says, all rules fail.113 And you may be sure that, if anything is saved and turns out well [493a] in the present condition of society and government, in saying that the providence of God114 preserves it you will not be speaking ill.” “Neither do I think otherwise,” he said. “Then,” said I, “think this also in addition.” “What?” “Each of these private teachers who work for pay, whom the politicians call sophists and regard as their rivals,115inculcates nothing else than these opinions of the multitude which they opine when they are assembled and calls this knowledge wisdom.

The expert including secular intolerants must use every trick in the book including PC, condemnation, and ridicule, to establish their ends. If they were able they probably would intimidate with threats of civic action, fines, and death. Why condemn the Beast? It is what it is. Why do the secularists condemn through secular intolerance those who have experienced there is more to human life than just being an indoctrinated atom of the Great Beast? What is so bad about desiring to become consciously human?

Contemplation of the social is not wholesale condemnation of or opposition to society or "secular society". It is a call to individualism in thought and action. It is to find one’s own way. It is not only “secular society” that imprisons us. One can build his own prison out of such things as a perverse preoccupation with the very thing that he claims imprisons us, seeing everything as a Manichean struggle between good and evil instantiated the evil of secularism versus an ideal of consciousness not yet attained.
Finding one’s own way does not mean worshiping in the cult of Simone Weil wherein one’s every thought and statement is shaped by hers. Nor is it a matter of taking Plato’s image of the cave as if having read about it and what is supposed to exist outside of it gives one authority to speak about things he does not know. One should not mistake the “sounds uttered by another [that] make [him] tame and angry” for truth. To do so is to be a slave to Weil’s great beast, an enslavement that is the result of a failure to properly identify it. As she says:

You seem hopelessly caught up in duality, right and wrong, good and bad. She suggests something you have become closed to.

In order to be exercised, the intelligence requires to be free to express itself without control by any authority.

This applies equally to the authority of Weil or Plato or anyone else. And for this reason one may question her next statement:

There must therefore be a domain of pure intellectual research, separate but accessible to all, where no authority intervenes.

There is no ‘therefore’ that must follow from the call for the intelligence to express itself freely. Such a domain may not exist. There is a difference between influence and control. We can free ourselves of control but no one, not even, Simone Weil is without influence.

You won’t accept this but understanding Simone requires it

"There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too." - Simone Weil

'Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be obtained only by someone who is detached.” ~ Simone Weil

Detachment is a state of which there is no right and wrong. It is a state of witnessing what IS. People capable of conscious detachment must have places where they can gather and speak honestly in the cause of impartial intellectual research. No experts allowed.

A person can free themselves from cave influences through the practice of conscious attention and detachment which allows impartial experience to take the place of indoctrination acquired through living in psychological slavery to the beast mentality.

I support efforts of the minority who have the need for truth. You support those through secular intolerance who impose the beast mentality as educational progress and support of the sophists imaginary self importance.