I never thought I'd say this, but after reading
this speech, I'm a big fan of
the pope.
Dad sent me the link to the speech a couple days ago with the note, "The Pope created a furore with this lecture, but for the wrong reasons." By "furore" (British spelling--who knew?) he was referring to the
outcry by Islamic leaders against something mean
a
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Benedict actually (parenthetically) compared Platonism to Cartesianism. I hadn't made this connection before, but it makes sense to me now that I think about it. Platonists (not to be confused with Plato, mind you) take their semantic swords and attempt to cleave the subject thinker from the thought, and they dream up this process of the discovery of eternal Forms in some heavenly realm where these Forms really really exist. It is this subject/object split that, while a useful heuristic in many circumstances, should not (IMO) be embraced as anything more than a fiction.
I would say that the unyielding and indivisible nature of the universe was the crux of Heraclitus and the sophists--this is how the logos goes so well with the "I Am". The I am, inseparable from the "everything else but I am", dissolves the subject/object split, and the Word becomes a self-expression, a catharsis of sorts, a conversation between the Universe and itself. It becomes a unity instead of a division.
Not sure if that answered your question, but it was a try.
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It might be noted that in the face of a dogmatic and dominating religion of the middle ages, romatic love was born, in which each side recognized in the world its other half. This gnositic revelation was, for some time, considered a blasphemy. Romance, it would seem, has been reduced to an act in these modern times. A demand to be met, not a state to be witness to...
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It's a neat image--first a cleave apart (distinction), then a cleave unto (unification/synthesis).
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It seems the same old limits of logic are to haunt us eternal...
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Certainly don't. High time I reciprocated.
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