Philosophy Now Forum

ACHOO!! too much pepper...

-Imp

Hiroshi

Hi, Nick_A.

I’m not sure I can answer your question to the point. I’m walking very slowly like a turtle, hopefully to the right destination. But I’ll try.

I thought Schlegel wrote that there are two kinds of philosophers, Platonic and Aristotelian. (We only have to remember that painting by Raphael, The School of Athens. ) I agree with him in a sense, and I think I can say that there are two kinds of appreciators of beauty in the world. Some are heavenly and ideal, seeking for something unworldly, finding beauty in it, trying to be more and more perfect and godlike, Platonic. Others are earthly and human, more or less content with what they are now, finding something beautiful and consoling even in imperfection in the world, Aristotelian. Thinking along these lines, it may be that those Platonic prefer perfection rather than imperfection, while Aristotelians regard the imperfect as essential to beauty. (I’m not saying that Aristotle is a lover of imperfection. I’m using his name just for convenience.) I prefer the latter. This is not because I reject the former idea of perfect beauty, but because the latter way of feeling is to my taste. The bottom line is, concerning beauty, I don’t think imperfection to be something bad. It is not a matter of something good or bad; the question is, as I see it, whether we like the one better than the other.

I appreciate your attitude. Much of modern philosophy especially when it includes the source of our existence is on a seek and destroy mission. It doesn’t appreciate much less enjoy the paradox as described by Kierkegard but seeks to destroy it in favor of superficial answers.

“One must not think slightingly of the paradoxical…for the paradox is the source of the thinker's passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity.” Kierkegaard.

I’m attracted to the Platonic perspective but am not looking for perfection. For me the Platonic perspective reveals my limitations so keeps me humble. It does seem that all the arguments over good and bad/right or wrong etc have to do with earthly values and can be related to the Aristotelian attraction to beauty. I’ve saved these two examples of the attraction to beauty since it really illustrates what you’ve described. It isn’t a matter of who is right but how they can be reconciled

"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere". I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?" ~ Richard P. Feynman


"Beauty is the only finality here below. As Kant said very aptly, it is a finality which involves no objective. A beautiful thing involves no good except itself, in its totality, as it appears to us. We are drawn toward it without knowing what to ask of it. It offers its own existence. We do not desire something else, we possess it, and yet we still desire something. We do not know in the least what it is. We want to get behind beauty, but it is only a surface. It is like a mirror that sends us back our own desire for goodness. It is a sphinx, an enigma, a mystery which is painfully tantalizing. We should like to feed upon it, but it is only something to look at; it appears only from a certain distance. The great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are two different operations. Only beyond the sky, in the country inhabited by God, are they one and the same operation. ... It may be that vice, depravity and crime are nearly always ... in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at." ~ Simone Weil

Feynman is drawn to the beauty of the “why” of detail while Simone is attracted to the source our experience of beauty masks. How we can reconcile these perspectives other than by first assuming an unchanging source and an eternal changing creation which functions within the eternal unchanging source beyond the limits of time and space but providing what is necessary for the process of existence to take place.. These are beautiful ideas but so many in these times are on a seek and destroy mission for the sake of their perspective so are becoming less and less attractive to the world as a whole in favor of material pragmatism.

Hiroshi Satow wrote: ↑Fri Jul 12, 2019 5:29 pm If I’m not wrong, Plato said that a beauty is beautiful because of its beautifulness; I like to think that a beauty is the more beautiful due to its beautilessness. Ultimately, Platonic beauty is superhuman, godlike, timeless, ideal, dependent on pure thinking; mine is human and worldly, within time and limit, deriving from self-love and sympathy.

Love of imperfect beauty can be an extension of self-love and sympathy. I know I’m not perfect; when I see someone make a mistake, just as I pity myself, so do I feel sympathy for them; when I see a crooked, aged, or plain object, I may pity and love it, thinking there is something beautiful and attractive about it. Here I go from self-love to sympathy to the appreciation of imperfect beauty. Out of self-pity comes pity for others; pity is akin to love; when we love we find beauty.

Yes, you've raised another important question. If Diotima's ladder of love is accurate, humanity has the potential to raise both its quality of love and its its perception of beauty. Love of imperfect beauty is natural but that is not to say that our perception of objective beauty can't consciously develop to reflect higher objective quality.

Are you familiar with the concept of metaxu introduced by Plato and used by Simone Weil? Metaxu is the conscious span between the being of Man and God. Eros is the medium between the two. When a society has a healthy metaxu its arts and ideas inspire us to open our minds to the awe and wonder of the quality of reality beyond what our senses can experience. Of course the seek and destroy mission is dedicated to the destruction of all the good a healthy metaxu can provide and is proving very effective as society sinks deeper into the glorification of technology

Hiroshi Satow wrote: ↑Fri Jul 12, 2019 5:34 pm When we find in a beauty some imperfection, we exercise imagination to try to make the beauty more complete and perfect. Since our experience of beauty is subjective, imagination plays a vital role in our sense of beauty. A beauty is the more beautiful through our imagination and participation, from incompletion to completion, from imperfection to perfection. It does not matter if we can make it; what counts is that our imagination grows and makes the beauty more beautiful and attractive.

Another important question. How much can a seeker of truth rely on imagination? Most in normal life use imagination to make life tolerable and provide consolation. Imagination as opposed to creative thought is a mixed blessing.

When if first read this quote from Simone I had to grudgingly agree that this is how I am. It made me wonder how far I am from a real appreciation of good and evil.

“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” Simone Weil

How can this be possible? The power of imagination. I underestimate the power it has over me and what it deprives me of.

Part of the value of philosophy for me is that it forces me to witness the power of the contradiction as it exists in me. Well as long as there is still good scotch in the world, all is not lost.

Hiroshi Satow wrote: ↑Fri Jul 12, 2019 5:43 pm I regret to say this, but I’ve got to admit that what I’m writing here is often far from well-organized. I may be giving a lame excuse, but these days I’m working from Monday through Sunday, hardly having any time to make and keep my ideas neat and tidy. Anyway, I think I should keep on going. Imperfection is a good spice to anything, you know

Nonsense! You are a sincere thinker without the need t destroy. Don't change.

The trick to becoming a good philosopher is choosing the right wife.

By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher. Socrates

The good wife will support your imagination furthering happiness while the bad wife will inspire creative philosophical speculation as to why everything is as it is.. Happiness vs. truth.

Hi, Nick_A. You are very passionate and knowledgeable. I wish I could write as much and as quick-witted as you. I think you asked some questions, but first I'd like to write about imagination. You asked me, "How much can a seeker of truth rely on imagination?" Imagination is a big issue. I'm not sure if I can write about it to our satisfaction. But I'll try.

The other day, I wrote something like the following somewhere in this forum:

Imagine you try to draw a circle, you almost finish drawing it but for some reason stop it, the circle isn't completed, so there's no circle before your eyes in a strict sense, and yet you think you see a circle with your own eyes. Why? This is because of what Gestalt psychologists call reification. Your perception compensates for the lack. What you believe you see is more than you really see, you making up for the shortage and completing the circle. And the psychologists claim it's perception; it is not will but perception that makes you compensate for the lack. I'd like to suggest it's imagination; you exert imagination in order to make it perfect. Imagination is in this sense an extension of perception, whose function is not to go far away from the reality, but to complement the deficiency in the reality, putting parts together into a whole, in this case.

Now I'd like to add:

Imagination of an object begins to work with its suggestion and lack. Which means imagination tries to make up for what is missing. On its own, it never gets what it intends to, because it's just flights of fancy at best, which fact may make us all the more saddened. But during the process of imagination, we activate ourselves, our spirits, and make our life more lively. This liveliness of our inner life can lead us to well-being, though it may not suffice for us to the utmost (because we cannot get what we lack and want).

As far as I can remember, Sartre said that, because of imagination, a picture of Pierre reminds us of Pierre himself. On the other hand, Plato wrote that, thanks to Anamnesis, a painting of Pierre - or anybody - makes us think of Pierre himself, and it is this Anamnesis that allows us to get to the Form. So I think I can say that imagination is Anamnesis, and that just as Anamnesis enables us to attain the Form, so does imagination makes the incomplete complete.

In a sense, it is true that we often console ourselves and make life tolerable by imagination, but imagination is in essence an attempt to make an imperfection of real things perfect. The reason why imagination makes us consoled and tolerant is because, figuratively speaking, we are showered with pieces of broken perfection; we could not make it to the perfection, but at least we tried and came nearer to it. As the saying goes, the important thing in life is not the victory but the battle, the essential is not to have won but to have fought well.

By the way, I don't enjoy scotch but I have a wife. And cats

Sartre, in his The Imagery, seems to have said that the function of imagination is 'irrealizing.' As for me, the function of imagination is an attempt to make the incomplete complete, so its essence lies in not 'irrealizing' but in an attempt at completing, perfecting, in other words, realizing.

Hi Hiroshi

The question of imagination is very important to me since I’ve come to believe that our collective ignorance of the power of imagination is at the heart of our collective denial of the human condition and what is lost as a result . So first, let me get your opinion of what Jacob Needleman wrote and next what Simone Weil wrote. They offer basic alternatives of how we can appreciate the value and effects of imagination.

Jacob Needleman in his book "Lost Christianity" says the following after a lecture he had been giving took an unexpected turn:

Of course it had been stupid of me to express it in quite that way, but nevertheless the point was worth pondering: does there exist in man a natural attraction to truth and to the struggle for truth that is stronger than the natural attraction to pleasure? The history of religion in the west seems by and large to rest on the assumption that the answer is no. Therefore, externally induced emotions of egoistic fear (hellfire), anticipation of pleasure (heaven), vengeance, etc., have been marshaled to keep people in the faith.

You’ve described how we use imagination to further our need for perfection and self justification. Since we live with impermanence, how we view perfection always changes. That is why a man picks up a woman as a thing of beauty and after going to bed somehow she is different in the morning when they awaken. Prof Needleman suggests that the attraction to truth is not the attraction to perfection but rather begins with the reality of imperfection. Such a person is attracted to truth as opposed to pleasure supplied by imagination.


Excerpted from a letter Simone Weil wrote on May 15, 1942 in Marseilles, France to her close friend Father Perrin:

At fourteen I fell into one of those fits of bottomless despair that come with adolescence, and I seriously thought of dying because of the mediocrity of my natural faculties. The exceptional gifts of my brother, who had a childhood and youth comparable to those of Pascal, brought my own inferiority home to me. I did not mind having no visible successes, but what did grieve me was the idea of being excluded from that transcendent kingdom to which only the truly great have access and wherein truth abides. I preferred to die rather than live without that truth.

In your opinion can there be a transcendent quality on earth in which people exist who have transcended opinion and experienced the truth which is the source of opinion and profit from it for the sake of their being? Was Simone attracted to a human possibility or just escapism?

Was she normal or abnormal to have such an attraction? A normal fourteen year old girl would be concerned with who is checking out her behind and or school studies. Was Simone abnormal or was her need to transcend imagination objectively normal?

By imagination I don’t mean creative thought Einstein supported but emotional reason used to validate our existence through the use of imagination.

Read this fable G.I. Gurdjieff told to P.D. Ouspensky about the Magician and his Sheep:

“The Magicians Sheep”

“There is an Eastern tale that speaks about a very rich magician who had a great many sheep. But at the same time this magician was very mean. He did not want to hire shepherds, nor did he want to erect a fence about the pasture where the sheep were grazing. The sheep consequently often wandered into the forest, fell into ravines and so on, and above all, they ran away, for they knew that the magician wanted their flesh and their skins, and this they did not like.

At last the magician found a remedy. He hypnotized his sheep and suggested to them, first of all, that they were immortal and that no harm was being done to them when they were skinned; that on the contrary, it would be very good for them and even pleasant; secondly he suggested that the magician was a good master who loved his flock so much that he was ready to do anything in the world for them; and in the third place, he suggested that if anything at all were going to happen to them, it was not going to happen just then, at any rate not that day, and therefore they had no need to think about it. Further, the magician suggested to his sheep that they were not sheep at all; to some of them he suggested that they were lions, to some that they were eagles, to some that they were men, to others that they were magicians. After this all his cares and worries about the sheep came to an end. They never ran away again, but quietly awaited the time when the magician would require their flesh and skins.”

So from the large human perspective, imagination prevents us from witnessing what we are in the context of objective reality by keeping us attached to earthly values

Matthew 16:26

What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?

Emotional self justifying imagination helps in our struggle with impermanence but keeps us ignorant what can be lost? Trying to understand this IMO is the great human question.

Imagination is just one tool for our understanding. We can only have a good understanding of what an object is after we've perceived, conceived, and imagined it. Understanding is the integration. When I perceive a cube, I can possibly see only 3 faces at a time. I begin to see one by one with care, I see all of them successively, at the sight of the last one I have remembrance ― one type of imagination ― that there are 5 others than the one I'm seeing, I conclude it has 6 sides, and I conceive the object as a cube, all of which in the end crystalize into a knowledge that what I'm seeing before me is a cube, a completion of understanding.

Here we should distinguish the difference between completion and perfection. Completion is found when something, good or bad, is done. Perfection is when something good is done. Imagination can serve at the beginning of both completion and perfection. I come to know I'm poorer than others, imagine being richer, plan to steal money and I make it. This is completion. Not good. I get to realize I'm a bad student, dream of ― imagine ― passing the entrance exam, begin studying harder and harder, and I manage to pass the exam. This is perfection. Very good. Imagination can work in either case. Good use of it is required.

Imagination is needed not only for understanding; it can also serve for our well-being. Other than this capacity, we need to make wise use of our wide variety of powers, inborn or acquired, as much as possible; not only imagination should we use, but also reason, intuition, emotion, and the like. We cannot be rich just by having a fancy that we'll be rich; we have to use our reason and be diligent. And imagination should be utilized in a sensible fashion. A depressed man may just imagine himself as being wretched, which will make him the more miserable; his use of imagination is no good. He should think of ― sort of imagine ― the way to get out of it, not regarding him as of little value to the world. We should use anything we have that will make our life better, and that wisely.

The magician's sheep imagined themselves to be safe. Which means that they exercised imagination but didn't use reason or intuition. What was worse, their imagination went the wrong way. If only they had used reason as well as imagination. If only they had imagined the right way.

I'm not sure if we are born with a tendency to be attracted to truth, but I do think our seeking for truth grows out of it. What contributes to this is imagination, with the help of all other natural powers, such as reason, intuition, emotion, and so on. And of course we have to make wise use of it. The reason why imagination helps us seek for truth is because those who want to attain truth are lacking in it, which leaves room for imagination. Remember imagination functions in deficiency. I may know by chance that I'm not as happy nor wise as Socrates is, which I wish to be, I imagine how satisfied and clever I might be if I were Socrates, and I try to begin to be like him, seeking after what he calls truth. This could happen to anyone who are motivated to philosophize. Imagination can function.

I've tried to put my thoughts in order. I don't know if I've made it or not. I still cannot answer some of your questions. I'll try, maybe a few days later. Busy days I've got to manage.... Anyway, I think I should thank you for motivating me to develop my theory of imagination, Nick_A.

Hi Hiroshi

I've tried to put my thoughts in order. I don't know if I've made it or not. I still cannot answer some of your questions. I'll try, maybe a few days later. Busy days I've got to manage.... Anyway, I think I should thank you for motivating me to develop my theory of imagination, Nick_A.

We can thank each other. I appreciate discussing ideas. You’ve offered your ideas in a polite meaningful way which is not the norm. I try to reply with the same respect. If we can do it, it is a step in the right direction.

Here we should distinguish the difference between completion and perfection. Completion is found when something, good or bad, is done. Perfection is when something good is done. Imagination can serve at the beginning of both completion and perfection. I come to know I'm poorer than others, imagine being richer, plan to steal money and I make it. This is completion. Not good. I get to realize I'm a bad student, dream of ― imagine ― passing the entrance exam, begin studying harder and harder, and I manage to pass the exam. This is perfection. Very good. Imagination can work in either case. Good use of it is required.

Socrates — 'Give me beauty in the inward soul; may the outward and the inward man be at one.'

As I understand it the inner man or our essence consists of qualities we are born with and their potentials. The outer man is our personality and learned behavioral patterns as we adapt to the external world and society.

Completion and perfection all pertain to the reactions of our personality. The development of a human perspective – the evolution of the real in our being can only come from the maturation of the inner man.

Where imagination makes life in the world tolerable it also prevents the maturation of the inner man in its striving to become human.

Where the outer man is creature of reaction, the inner man has the potential to acquire consciousness connecting above and below, free will as opposed to reactions to conditioned desires, and feeling conscience as opposed to being limited to conditioned emotional reactions.

I posted the story of the eagle and the chickens in the Encounters with the Sublime thread. I’ll post it here. The young eagle was conditioned to become like a chicken. This is the effect of imagination in our lives as we adapt to the world. It prevents us from becoming what we are meant to be represented by the soaring eagle. The soaring eagle has a human perspective. How many have even thought about what this is and remain content with arguing what is going on in the chicken cop.

Imagination appears to be a mixed blessing. As a function of the intellect it leads to creative thought and intuition. As n emotional function it becomes a tool for escapism and the psychological prison of self justification.

There’s an old, well known story of a chicken farmer who found an eagle’s egg. He put it with his chickens and soon the egg hatched.

The young eagle grew up with all the other chickens and whatever they did, the eagle did too. He thought he was a chicken, just like them.

Since the chickens could only fly for a short distance, the eagle also learnt to fly a short distance.

He thought that was what he was supposed to do. So that was all that he thought he could do. As a consequence, that was all he was able to do.

One day the eagle saw a bird flying high above him. He was very impressed. “Who is that?” he asked the hens around him.

“That’s the eagle, the king of the birds,” the hens told him. “He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth, we are just chickens.”

So the eagle lived and died as a chicken, for that’s what he thought he was.

The magician's sheep imagined themselves to be safe. Which means that they exercised imagination but didn't use reason or intuition. What was worse, their imagination went the wrong way. If only they had used reason as well as imagination. If only they had imagined the right way.

But if we are asleep in Plato’s cave attached to the shadows on the wall, reason will be used to justify this condition. Here Buddhism has the right idea. We have to awaken to the reality of the human condition rather than reason how to adapt to absurdity to serve our need for meaning and purpose. When a person realizes they are a slave to the human condition they can use reason to consider how to awaken. It is not so easy to do when the world is against awakening since it disturbs the status quo

Nothing is permanent.

Dontaskme wrote: ↑Tue Jul 23, 2019 7:02 am Nothing is permanent.

The Eternal Unchanging is permanent.

Nick_A wrote: ↑Tue Jul 23, 2019 7:05 pm

Dontaskme wrote: ↑Tue Jul 23, 2019 7:02 am Nothing is permanent.

The Eternal Unchanging is permanent.

News flash for cloud deniers:

The Eternal Unchanging is not climate.

Existence is only permanent in the sense that it is eternal because non existence cannot persist beyond the infinitesimal
However in another sense it is not permanent [ fixed and absolute ] at all because it is in a state of ever changing motion