The Allegory Of The Cave

Okido

the cave is actually plato's big middle finger to the world; only just barely obscured, skillfully, in a somewhat unobvious allegory. it does not take a scholar to decipher what is being said in the text.

The Allegory Of My Ass

In The Shadow Of My Penis

To them, the ideal afterlife was probably cumming into fire

the fire is the cum, the creator of life.

So that explains why it burns every time. I've found one of the truths!

How To Fail At Trying To Be As Great As Plato, by Plato

  On 4/28/2014 at 9:27 AM, MisterE said:

You can spend the rest of your life thinking about this and any other philosophical ideas written down by any other deep thinker, and when you die of old age you still won't be any closer to 'the real truth' than someone who spent that entire time in a coma.

So tempted to put this in my sig

Its all bollocks, there is no truth.

Were all just particles vibrating in space!

  On 4/28/2014 at 4:30 PM, usagi said:

The Allegory Of My Ass

In a gaping hole?

poblequadrat -- really enjoyed your posts itt. thanks.

  On 4/28/2014 at 4:47 AM, Redruth said:

 

a bit of writing concerning the subject of the allegory of the cave:

 

the world as we know it is not unlike the cave with the shadows. the experience as we have been forced to watch it, as we have been forced to live it is all we have known from birth. to break free of this prison of shadows is painful at first.

 

 

i like, but maybe it would be better to think in the context of the time period. "playing the game" and being the smartest in the cave pertains to whom in ancient greece?

not sure its an anti capitalist rant from Plato

I feel we are just starting to see the real shadows on the wall. Thanks to science and hadron colliders, many worlds theories, bunch of shit i dont understand etc. we are all standing against the wall with our limited jelly mass in our craniums dictating how much we truly see.

learning about the ancient world it really strikes me how influential the culture of the time can be on human sexuality.

It was just no big thing to fuck a boy back then. Ancient Greece was Nambla headquarters basically.

also; ..."Sacred Band of Thebes was a was a troop of picked soldiers, consisting of 150 pairs of male lovers which formed the elite force of the Theban army"

  On 4/28/2014 at 12:13 AM, poblequadrat said:

 

  On 4/27/2014 at 7:26 PM, encey said:

Your reading of Plato sounds very Heideggerian!

 

Most people think that what we come to know outside of the cave are indeed 'things,' but things that exist in a different way & place than the things we come to know inside of the cave. That is, the stereotypical reading has it that the forms are non-physical timeless, unchanging things, in which all other things similar to the form in the relevant respect somehow 'participate' (usually through resemblance or imitation).

 

I'm surprised about your claim about 'ultimate things' -- for one, what about the discussion of love in the Symposium? Isn't that the paradigm of reconciling a pervasive sense of imperfection, incompleteness and unfulfillment within ourselves alone? Also, I think there's a case to be made that for both Plato and Aristotle (and the presocratics), there is a 'need for an ultimate thing' with respect to explanation -- they all wanted to understand the first principle that would explain why there is a world and why it is the way it is. But maybe that's not what you mean by 'ultimate thing'?

 

Great post!

 

Yeah, it's very Heideggerian! I've had a couple of Heideggerian professors and they've left their mark. But I find Plato very hard - for example I don't know what to make of the Timaeus, specifically because production seems to play a big role in it and I'd like to find a place for it other than the stock response of decrying technical reason.

 

I'm sorry about "ultimate things". That was poorly worded, also because the word "thing" has unintended Heideggerian connotations! What I meant is that the divine/non-divine opposition is different in Ancient Greece than it is in Hellenistic times. But of course the Ancient Greeks, and especially Plato himself are going on about "the most excellent thing", "the best virtue" and so on all the time. The thing is for the Ancient Greeks I think the truth of being is more of a distribution, or a structure, or what underlies the flow of things without flowing itself; while later on it came to be either a matter of factual veracity and practical application (for the Stoics or the Epicureans) or not a structure of the flow of things but a state of being (for the Neoplatonists). So while for Plato being reunited with Being is discussed in terms of love, virtue, knowledge; for Plato or Jamblichus this has to do with literally becoming God. Also, while in Ancient Greece there was a need for determining what is the sovereign discourse that ruled over everything, later on there was a need to determine that being can be consistent and that there exists a consistent state of Being other than misery.

 

But actually there was some of this in Ancient Greece too. Melissos talks about Parmenides' Being while completely shunning doxa, which is a bit strange. And then there is the sophistic distinction between custom and nature (instead of opinion and truth), which can also be found in Democritus. But Democritus still held a classical view on truth, which is maybe his main difference with Epicurus.

 

(i'm not making any sense, i'm sorry)

 

lol eugene!!

Page 3 is great so far!

Never read the Timaeus, never heard of Jamblichus!!

I'm not sure I understand the two contrasts you're drawing, (1) between a 'structure' vs. 'practical veracity & application,' and (2) between a 'sovereign discourse' vs. a 'consistent state of being' -- I don't clearly see what kind of opposition is at play in each case; the two don't immediately strike me as opposites.

I work on Heidegger, so your language jumped right out at me! :)

OBSOLETE

I love the new male archetype that is so often typified here.

You act like you know that we cannot know, like you are satisfied with that.

But what you wan't more than anything, deep down, is to know truth.

  On 4/29/2014 at 6:29 PM, sheatheman said:

I love the new male archetype that is so often typified here.

 

You act like you know that we cannot know, like you are satisfied with that.

Generation Y's aloof irony is a natural outgrowth of Gen X's weary cynicism*. We saw how their vocal rejection of archetypes became just another archetype itself and thus chose to become librarians of the past, shimmering wraiths that can never quite be pinned down. This is quite obviously reflected in music - grunge/industrial/big gaudy dance music vs lowkey/downtempo/oblique experimental noise.

uhhh there's probably a lot more to this but i've yet to really ratify my thoughts on the topic

Have you guys read Dichard J Rames' Allegory Of Da IDMz ?

Here is a basic overview:

There's like this musician dude in his mum's basement, working on electronic music. Everytime his speakers blast his choonage, he perceives the sonic vibrations and is like, "This is some next level elite shit!" So the dude keeps listening to "IDM ALL STARZ" (vol. 1~37) for reference. "Yeah, yeah- I'm basically as good as my reference. I've accomplished IDM." And then a UFO crashes into the basement and a Grey comes out and strips off the dude's skin. "DAAAGH!" The skinless dude looks in the mirror, and he sees that his body, has become a clusterfuck mashup of every IDM Star's body. The Grey is like, "See, you have become everybody else. You have lost yourself. Your IDM is not your IDM, because you spent your life trying to express others' IDM. You do not exist." The dude is like, "NOOOOO~!!!", as the UFO flies back to Nebraska. The End.

wow

much enlightenment

  On 4/28/2014 at 6:26 PM, Timothy Forward said:

 

  On 4/28/2014 at 9:27 AM, MisterE said:

You can spend the rest of your life thinking about this and any other philosophical ideas written down by any other deep thinker, and when you die of old age you still won't be any closer to 'the real truth' than someone who spent that entire time in a coma.

 

So tempted to put this in my sig

 

you have my approval if you choose to do so

it would be my only legacy here, and spread my 'anti-intellectual', anti-philosophy philosophy across watmm, like a virus in each of your posts, which would bring a tear (of perverse joy) to my eyes

absolute certainty about certainty being uncertain?

  On 5/2/2014 at 5:07 AM, Redruth said:

absolute certainty about certainty being uncertain?

are you uncertain about uncertainty being certain?