Philosophy and Literature Blog

     When I think of Consolation I think of the Stoics, in particular Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Stoicism has a very consolatory side. Tom Wolfe, of  'The Right Stuff' fame, wrote 'A Man in Full', a novel in which the main character's life is changed by reading the works of Epictetus. But the consolation of Stoicism does not seem the same as that of Christianity, which has an afterlife. Stoicism is not really like that. For stoicism, one puts things in perspective, stops the mind from catastrophizing when things don't go our way, asserts a kind of immanent God, and an ultimately rational universe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enchiridion_of_Epictetus There is a stoic tendency in modern therapy, particularly starting in the work of Albert Ellis:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Ellis To me there are also similar threads in the Tao Te Ching, though without stoicism's heavy emphasis on rationality or a god of some kind(for the stoics it was Zeus)...

     Well, I've been looking more at Watts' introduction. It looks like he's doing a very good job summarizing Boethius' work. The problem is that Boethius combines two traditions I almost entirely reject: Neoplatonism and Christianity. They've made for some nice poetry and art, but they ultimately do not yield credible consolation for me. I'm going to continue and read the book anyway, pointing out what I think is interesting, but I don't anticipate being consoled by it in any way. Watts basically admits that the modern reader would find a lot of Boethius' arguments unsatisfactory. It's too bad, but there it is.

     It appears this introduction was written in the year of my birth, 1967. Watts mentions the obvious importance of the goddess 'Fortuna' in the Consolation and the rest of the middle ages. I know in The Inferno, Virgil talks about 'fortune' as some kind of sub-diety that has control over the fortunes of mortals. We change places with one another in 'rapid permutation'(The Pinsky Translation).  Too often, Virgil says, Fortune is blamed when she should be thanked. Throughout the middle ages and Renaissance Fortune recurs, specifically the since debased 'Wheel of Fortune'. There's a famous line in Hamlet when he's talking to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern where they claim to be in the 'mid' section of fortune, you know, a typical renaissance bawdy reference.      Boethius had an ambitious plan to translate all of Aristotle and Plato into Latin, but you know, he was executed before he could finish the Plato part -- easy come easy go. Joking...

     Well, here's a huge, glaring gap in my education.  That's right, I've never read this book. So, I will attempt to read the copy that's been sitting on the shelf for a really long time. I'll start out by reading the introduction. I've read a lot of philosophy in my time, much of it worthless. By popular acclaim this is one of the most worthwhile books in all of Western letters and I've never read it. We'll see if I can make it through it. I'll try to get the introduction by V.E. Watts next time.

     I often say to people that I'm fortunate that I've failed in a lot of places because I would be stuck there if I'd succeeded. You know, I failed miserably in middle school and fitting in with the kids in my old neighborhood, so that worked out well for me. If I'd succeeded there I'd be dipping 'baccr and listening to that idiot Ted Nugent(and perhaps pretending my face is a Maserati) as I write. My middle school teachers were just about as stupid as the neighborhood thugs they were prepping for today's "mills and processing facilities"(line taken from Superintendent Chalmers). At the time I saw myself as a rebel, a wimpy rebel, but a rebel nonetheless.       Other people rebel in the sense of rising up. And it makes sense for many people to do so. As for me, I'm a poser. When I acted like a rebel it was because I knew I was not going to succeed according to the rules, so... If you real rebels are out there trying to bring about the end of...

     This is the kind of combination you'll only find on my blog, congratulations. Camus launches into a summary of Hegel's Phenomenology and the history of consciousness through the development of mutual recognition of humanity. First there is the Master/Slave relation, then there's penitent/God, then there's citizen/citizen, etc... History ends with the full recognition of humanity.  Our recognition of ourselves as human is dependent on the recognition we get from others. History, up through Hegel's time(corresponding to the era of Napoleon), is an evolution of self-consciousness as the transcendental Idea unfolds.      Left-wing Hegelians, such as Marx, materialize this, leading to the workers' revolution. For the Hegelians, rebellion is part of the divine development; I should think that for orthodox Hegelians no rebel, anarchist or otherwise, does anything other than forward this development. For Marxists, there can be counter-revolutio...

     Now I've really gone off. I got a whole bunch of Plato on Audio CD: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, The Republic, and The Symposium. I've listened to all of it except for the end of The Phaedo -- oh, man, I think Socrates is in trouble... Plato makes a big point of disallowing poets, in particular Homer, from The Republic. It has been pointed out with tiresome frequency that the dialogues are themselves art, with the attendant questioning as to whether Plato is a hypocrite and with the answer that since his art is in the service of dialectic, it is not subject to the same objections as Homer. Plato has specific problems with Homer.  First, Homer represents unstable personalities in a heroic way. Homer's poetry does not do what the dialogues do, instruct. So is Plato agrees with Camus that Homer is a poetical rebel.      The question is, what is the status of Socrates? Camus would likely say that Socrates was not a Rebel. In fact, Soc...