(no subject)
From today’s “lunch reading”…
This time, it was Aristotle:
“Such then is the general nature of political revolutions. They are produced either by violence, or by fraud, or by the union of both; for, sometimes, what is begun by fraud is ended by force.”
The “dead Greeks” got many things wrong, and cosmology is only one from that list. Yet, we still read Aristotle, Plato, Sophocles, Aeschylus with Euripides not only because their ideas built our civilization, but due to the simple fact that they transcended the mere sentient understanding of the human nature into the miracle of articulation. This rarely attainable goal tantalized the thinkers and writers who came after: the ability to write in a such way that scribbles from 2360 years ago sound like from today’s “The Wall Street Journal.”
In so many aspects, all revolutions are the same: French, Russian, the “Arab Spring,” recent Ukrainian Maidan. There is a script that allows no deviation. Determinism, that not of Calvin, but of the human condition. Here lays the origins of the idea of reincarnation. After all, someone had to come up with a plausible explanation why human beings keep repeating their own idiotic mistakes or occasional glimpses of brevity.
As a sidenote: although the events that started in 1775 in North America had some elements of a revolution, it was first and foremost a war for independence and - IMHO - should be called as such.
This time, it was Aristotle:
“Such then is the general nature of political revolutions. They are produced either by violence, or by fraud, or by the union of both; for, sometimes, what is begun by fraud is ended by force.”
The “dead Greeks” got many things wrong, and cosmology is only one from that list. Yet, we still read Aristotle, Plato, Sophocles, Aeschylus with Euripides not only because their ideas built our civilization, but due to the simple fact that they transcended the mere sentient understanding of the human nature into the miracle of articulation. This rarely attainable goal tantalized the thinkers and writers who came after: the ability to write in a such way that scribbles from 2360 years ago sound like from today’s “The Wall Street Journal.”
In so many aspects, all revolutions are the same: French, Russian, the “Arab Spring,” recent Ukrainian Maidan. There is a script that allows no deviation. Determinism, that not of Calvin, but of the human condition. Here lays the origins of the idea of reincarnation. After all, someone had to come up with a plausible explanation why human beings keep repeating their own idiotic mistakes or occasional glimpses of brevity.
As a sidenote: although the events that started in 1775 in North America had some elements of a revolution, it was first and foremost a war for independence and - IMHO - should be called as such.