Tomb of the Ghost of Aristotle - Your World..?

(the following is inspired by my recent reading and "grokking" of the book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", by Robert Pirsig)


Aristotle, the moment he coined the term "subtance", flung us from the real world, and into a timebound, materialist frame of reference. "Truth" as "facts" and "things" became reality, our reality, and the new mythos, our present "world" and so-called "reality" we now inhabit, was born. "It" came into being, as the very shape of the mind of man and of his worldview, as if from nothing whatsoever but a discussion, and a conversation or by what the Greeks called Rhetoric and something called Dialectic, which means a proving out of truth by competing ideas, or opposing frames of reference, only one of which may be percieved as "The Best" and therefore the Truth. In Plato's opinion, there was no other way to discover truth. Prior to that time, there was no such division, no separation, no subject / object duality. It did not exist in the mind of man, while people went about the business of living, in towns and cities, farms and villages, for a period of years (rotations of the sun) lasting FIVE TIMES the duration of that of the timespan from the Greeks, up until the present moment (as if it was ever anything but the present all along).

Of course, arisng from this ancient arrowhead of truth discovered by dialectic, and via the observation and measurement of change in substance, we were given the great scientific method, which no doubt, in one sense, has served us well - while at the same time, completely alienating us from the world, from one another and therefore, at some level, relative even to our own selves, divided and at odds with a harsh, materialist, indifferent, mechanistic universe - the use of our will seemingly without any significance, or impact, either on the world or our fellow man. Alone, striving against winds of change and uncertainty, with little hope of finding one's true "purpose" or true "nature", at best left something to be hoped for "later on" perhaps when we grow old.. "if only I work hard enough now, then perhaps at some point, I'll get to be happy and enjoy the fruits of my labors", that's the thought process we often have, as we march along our timebound arrow of progress from past to future, never happy, never satisfied, filled with unmet desire, disappointment, and the defeated will, without hope, seemingly for the very things we were born into this world, to try to experience, or bring about.

This is the true psychological and spiritual legacy of the so-called "greats", those teachers of ancient academia, who by inshrining dialetic and truth as "fracts", banished in the process, another whole MOUNTAIN of knowledge, held in the ideal of The Good, of The Best, of Quality, and for man, Virtue, not as a moral value, a right and wrong or a should and shouldn't, no virtue as the highest possible quality experiencial relationship of man, man to himself, to his fellow man, his family, society, and to the world and the reality at large, all as an expression of this undefined, but implicitly known QUALITY of Goodness, not as an attribute of either man or reality, but Virtue or Goodnes, as the very nature of reality itself, and nothing less. The One, being the One, cannot be given any attributes, nor placed under scientific scrutiny by the scientific method, nor can it even be discussed, since any description automatically would reduce it from the position of Oneness. This is simple reason and logic. The so-called brightest minds who ever lived, exalted their dialectic truth, to a position higher than, the Absolute Good of the One. It was a devilish move on their part, to have allowed thier minds to have moved and concurred, in this manner, desperate for a collectively shared and held "truth" or of those timeless principals which remain forever eternal. Could they possibly have erred, is that possible? It is, because in making the cut, they cut away the very best part, of everything.

This could very well be thought of in terms of a second fall of man if you will, and to a very very large degree, we're still in it, imbedded historically in the shadow of that mythos, and it matters not if we swing from subjective to objective idealism, or to man as either the source of all things, or as simply the observer of all things, in either case, we are out of a relationship WITH, which allows for 100% pure creative inspired action, for the sake not of "work" and toil and strife, ever willing ourselves based on a survivalist fear such a worldview engenders ("so why worry look at the birds of the air they neither labor nor spin!"), but simply for the sake of being in a relationshiop with whatever it so happens to be that we are working on, in or for. But do we work "harder" simply in order so that we might stave off more suffering at a later date, by storing up treasure for ourselves, or, do we do it for the sheer joy of doing SOMETHING, and hey whatever it is that we do, or find for ourselves to do, why not engage it, and make of it a creative expression of Quality? instead of hope for treasure as the "fruits of our labor" which perishes and never satisfies us no matter how much money we might have been able to accumulate. Ghandi, when asked if he could sum up his life in one sentence, replied "I can do better than that. I can do it in three word. RENOUCE AND ENJOY!"

Back to Ancient Greece: Now Prior to Aristotle and Plato and Socrates, there was a group of Greek Philosophers known as the Sophists. For them rhetoric was not an object of dialectic, nor dialectic, the only path to discovering the truth. For them, the teaching of Goodness, of Virtue, of "The Best", or of Quality, in all areas and in every sphere of life, this was their sole persuit, but an "aim" which could never be defined, nor placed uder the knife of dialectical rhetoric and put to the death of mere word games. To the contrary, it was a "KNOWN" element, something upon which we can all absolutely agree - intrinsic, not as an attribute, or a naming of any kind, not as a subject of a group, like a piece, but as the ah ha of what is the Best, what is Virtuous or simply put, Excellent. Perfect, and therefore whole and complete, and if "part" of anything, already part of everything, enveloped by "The One"; It was Quality as nothing less, than reality itself.

There's another mountain of knowledge, than that of materialist idealist scientific method reasoning, a higher truth from which it, and everything else arises - an apex if you will..set before us, and only apparently plowed under along with the Sophists during the fall of ancient Greece with Plato, and Aristotle, and Socrates and their "truth" left as the winners. In other words, Plato's and Aristotles dialectic truth of reason and substance of observation, dethroned The Good, the Good moved down the tree of knowlege from felt experience, and something known but undefined, into a sub-branch called Ethics, or at best encapsulated, enshrined or entombed in the sepulcre of Truth as an immovable Eternal Immortal Idea, set apart from man, and from his sense of place in the world, split off from it, left free only to argue ABOUT what is and isn't "good".

When I processed this, like the character in the book Phaedrus, I was stunned, at first baffled by what I was discovering, about what was done to the world, by an idea, born of a conversation, the labelling of a few things, and the proclamation of subject object duality and of "substance" as the truth, but a truth which isn't a REAL truth, just a point of conjecture in an argument, as "the word" but as I've come to clearly see, this word, not of the Shepherd, but of the Wolf, the destroyer of human reason and of man's true nature, of the very nature of nature itself! The more I think about this, about what happened, and the degree to which this explains what ails us as the human being in God's creation, the more I am brought to the verge of tears, first of sorrow, and then, of anger! It's an OUTRAGE, and, perhaps last but not least, but "Best" of all - an absolute ABSURDITY, as if the universe as we see it and experience it in our own worldly way, the one we inhabit as our "reality" suddenly sprung into being through a dialectic between Plato and Socrates or reformulated into the Scientific Method, by Aristotle. That's crazy, but look around, and look for Quality. Quality is an add on, a prettying-up in service to increased sales, little more. It's all just substance and form, but Quality must come over substance, and form follows function.

What does this MEAN..? How does this relate to the title of this post "Life's Own Goodwilled Goodnature, and the Arrow of Progress"

Perhaps some things are better left unsaid because they cannot be spoken of, although at the same time, just a little clarification may be needed, but first try to grapple as I have from reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (again as if for the first time) with this great Greek and Western World tragedy in our midst, that you are a part of and have been made to be a part of, unvoluntarily. We cannot blame anyone of course, but to see and recognize that there is this other mountain of knowledge, having to do with Life as Quality where "The Good" is the very fount of all creation - well now, that's something to just stop and admire and consider and "be with" for a while, and then you would know precisely where to take it, for you, in search of your Quality, your "Virtue", your Happiness, your Joy. That too is known. In fact, we surely know much much more about what we REALLY want (and are afraid to ask for), than what we don't want (been there done that, got the t-shirt).

Best Regards,

NAM

And so, therefore, with faith the size of a tiny seed (point of projection), I say to this mountain, in hopes for a better world, MOVE, and be thrown into the abyss.

Does that mean I oppose the scientific method or scientific progress? Hardly. That's not what it's about at all. What it's about, is everything that we've completely lost sight of, tricked, and blinded by nothing more than a slight of hand and mind word play perpetrated in pursuit of good grades and promotion, enacted with with all manner of inauthentic forms and mannerisms hated by the best, and loved by the worst.

I have read that Aristotle believed that the sex of a child is determined by the direction the wind is blowing when it is born and that the progress of western science was derailed for a thousand years because of his careless understanding of gravity was so far afield.

So maybe I grok the thought here. We, along with Western Civ. has gone off on a tangent of development for a couple of grand, based on a couple of guys who were poking around in their minds trying to grasp deeper essences of existence while all along the only reason any of their ideas held together was because they restricted from their thoughts a much larger relationship with reality grounded in just being?

Originally posted by TerryMcGuire
I have read that Aristotle believed that the sex of a child is determined by the direction the wind is blowing when it is born and that the progress of western science was derailed for a thousand years because of his careless understanding of gravity was so far afield.

So maybe I grok the thought here. We, along with Western Civ. has gone off on a tangent of development for a couple of grand, based on a couple of guys who were poking around in their minds trying to grasp deeper essences of existence while all along the only reason any of their ideas held together was because they restricted from their thoughts a much larger relationship with reality grounded in just being?

Yep, that's about it in a nutshell, and specifically, they first raised "Truth" to the apex, not a priori felt experience as knowledge, but external, dialectically determined (argued) truth, and then relegated Quality or The Good to a meager branch of ethics. Is it just me, but when you hear ethics discussed as a branch of reason, how does that make you feel? It feels wrong to me. Truth, Plato then encapsolated, into an immovable immortal truth, as God, but a false truth, not the real truth, not the real God.

The One cannot be subdivided nor cleaved with a knife of reason, breaking it apart, into pieces, or it's less than the one. This one is Goodness, a Good Nature, if you will, and Quality is something we all implicitly KNOW, through and through when we either see it in action or experience it for ourselves in creative action. We know it when we hear it, and when we read it. There is good and there is not as good, but never bad by compare, just part of a learning curve of increasing knowledge realized by experience, by felt experience. This good WAS the highest ideal, tought by the Sophists of whom Socrates was the greatest, but after him, what Plato and Aristotle went ahead and DID, in the ongoing war for the future mind of man, was to settle it, by USURPING an undefined Quality of innate Goodness, something both felt and strived for in every area of human enterprise and human endeavour, as quality realized and experienced, as what is the very Best in ALL THINGS when raised to the apex of all reason in a type of ultra-reason or suprarationism - and replaced it, with dialectically discovered truth in rhetoric, and called that truth the highest truth instead! It's absurd. And insane. So far flung from reality, that we can no longer ever see or experience reality, not as it's experienced, as it's FELT, and as it is known.

The Sophists said that man, is the measure of all things, and that his highest virtue was not to be "good" for show or to prove something to anyone, not even himself, but to be and to strive for the good in all things, in all ways, and for all time, so as to ENJOY everything that the highest life of man is intended for, by the Good (God), to experience and create, and bring to fruition in magnificent splendor, honor, and without compromise. That is what the Sophists taught. They used rhetoric, not under the knife of a dialectical reason to argue an ethical reletavism, but instead to teach and to learn, that of all things the ONLY thing that is both REAL and, which cannot be defined by mere words, available to reason, as an ultra-reason, as a supra-rationalism, is an AH HA experience, which IS the very stuff, of knowledge itself.

Aristotle and Plato, conspired to ensure that they would be in a position, as university presidents, to enshrine The Trtuh, in the "Church of Reason", while commiting the perhaps most blasphemous act in the history of man - winning for the mind of man, a lie upon which is built his entire world, via dialectical truth, as the reason of the scientific method now DEIFIED, and raised to the highest throne. They made of a valuable tool for creativity, a knife, with which they went ahead and divided the world in two and man apart from the world as a mere observer of substance. Man himself was removed as the measurement by which the Good Life was determined, he was set adrift, alone, in an impersonal, mechanistic universe, that's the world they created, so as to enshrine Truth above The Good, for the sake of definition, because you cannot otherwise have an academic instutition without it, or so they thought - meanwhile the Sophists against whom Plato and Aristotle railed in this war for the mind of future man, they were doing it right all along.

An error was made. A judgement error. A value error.

One whole mountain of knowledge and awareness, was cast away by them, the REAL MOUNTAIN OF GOD (as the Good).

Science is an approximation, and a helpful one at that, but it cannot operate as a knife with which to cleave reality apart from it's source and it's own intrinsic nature, which includes by extension, our own. As some know who've done science, for every "truth", there are a bifurcation of infinite hypothesis, and then it moves forward, but not necccessarily closer to "the truth" about which nothing can be said.

So I take back what I said about "their" mountain being moved into the abyss, since scientific rationalism, is a valuable tool, proven as such - BUT, when it's not placed in service to and submitted under, Quality, then even science itself can become man's worst nightmare, still further alienating him from the REAL LIFE, the life of spirit, the life of Quality.

It's just a method anyway, not the TRUTH itself, not the function of form, not the quality which in human experience gives rise to the very stuff of life and the experience of a subject-object interpenetration (think of a master craftsman at work), as a happiness experienced and a fruitful quality which is worthy of man's very best of the best. We all know who read this that that's been lost, long lost, but, the good news being, that it's STILL AVAILABLE, for rediscovery.

This IS psychology, philosophy and metaphysics, isn't it?

I figured that the greatest insight ever, realized or discopvered by a "madman" (Phaedrus, in the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), the most earth shattering, historical frame of reference altering idea, in the entire history of man, or at least the entire breadth of modern history, from the Greeks until now, that such a discovery juist might be of interest to more than one person..?

This, the lack of popularity of this particular topic, the lack of understanding and comprehension of what's being relayed, via rhetoric, that it's lost on the ears of a modern man, in and of itself proves the argumernt being made.

Interestingly, and perhaps ironically, Sir Isaac Newton captured this essense of Quality, in concluding his treatise "The Mathematical Principals of Nature Philosophy", when he wrote:

"I know not what the world will think of my labours, but to myself it seems that I have been but as a mere child playing along the seashore, now finding some stone slightly more polished and now some shell slightly more variagated than another, while the immense ocean of truth extended itself unexplored before me."

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

This thread is about rediscovering that fire, or the wheel.

There is another mountain of knowledge, a higher summit than scientific rationalism, and it's fun to climb, it makes our heart sing, and that's our destiny, not these long dead bones of a now defunk civilization which serves nothing but a materialist idealism, and a lie told to man by the father of lies.

I don't post much, and I don't talk much. But I love this thread. I love it, it's fantastic, and one of the best things I've ever read. I read it twice, not because I needed to, but because I wanted to.

I can see how we might consider these first steps taken on this path to be "original sin". Or better "Original Schism". Once Plato began dividing things, tearing them in half, the pieces just kept getting smaller and smaller and smaller. Certainly this led us to the atom but the question of the trade off, was the loss of so much worth the gain on the other side of the ledger. Not an easy question to answer. I suppose that if we manage to pull it back together.

It's possible that he did not see the potential outcome of his thinking, that he may not have realized where this way of pursuing truth might end up. He might have taken his division of matter concept and realized that it might have value in understanding the pursuit of truth also. If we keep dividing in half and dividing in half, we never reach the other side of the street (to borrow from another parable).

As I understand it, he and Aristotle had a major falling out and Aristotle went off to teach his point of view apart from Plato. This division has had major consequences on down through the centuries also. Aristotle , great teacher that he was, watched one of his prime pupils, Alexander, when he finished his studies, head off into the world and basically kill everyone he came across. (exaggeration of course but it does provide a certain perspective.)

This being set adrift you mention, that man has been taken out of the equation in the search for what is true is a wonderful insight. Descartes drew this out to an "Nth" degree and biased the search for what is true even further. Fortunately we have come to understand the major flaws in the Cartesian perspective along with the good to have come out of it.

Here's hoping that enough people can retain the wonderful insights of these great thinkers while understanding that they were fallible and that strict adherence to, or faith in, any philosophy of the past, and future will only prohibit our climb back up that original mountain.

reply to post by TerryMcGuire


But just for a moment IMAGINE a world, in which what was principally taught in the "Church of Reason", wasn't a bunch of things labelled in a relative frame of reference for the purpose of passing on inherited forms and structures of "truth" as facts, as mere things, as an "it", so as to propogate "the system" - but instead Quality, the undefined Quality, which rhetoric can only point to, but which the human experience, the felt experience of being and of becoming, can validate. This is real learning, not the learning of our present education system. It is the teaching of nothing less than "The Good Life", but not as a dialectic, with the double ended stick of should, and shouldn't (which only assumes the worst about our true human nature) - but as a formative creative dynamic of the EXPERIENCE of subject AND object in RELATIONSHIP, together as one, producing something worthy of man, and therefore of God also (Maker of Good Creation).
This makes of reality and life itself a new enterprise and a whole new ballgame, a new endeavour, whereby scientific rationalism and those original thinkers' entire structure of "reason" becomes, not a knife, or a sword with which to kill the mythos (while of course merely replacing it with a new one), but as a tool, as a creative tool in the hand of man, one of many, in pursuit of the REAL TRUTH, as that which is the very BEST both in function AND in form. The human being, recovered, as an absolutely intrinsic part of the world, a world not of horror and strife, but one of balance, of harmony, and integrity, or wholeness, in the felt experience of "The Good Life" as a life well lived, well mastered, our every creative endeavour, born of inspired creativity, wherein the master craftsman and his material, are not merely a form of production for material gain in service to still higher masters (slave trade), but a creative act, of ENJOYMENT..

Imagine that if you will..

As a relevant example, here is a rhetorical question with self contained dialectic, framed using the Socratic Method.
I am picking this one, because it's definitely one you'll be hearing more of I'm sure during the upcoming US Presidential election.



What is the difference between American exceptionalism, and American excellence?

3 “Happy are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
4 Happy are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
5 Happy are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.
6Happpy are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
7 Happy are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
8 Happy are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.
9 Happy are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.
10 Happy are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

When we sub in the word Happy for Blessed, in light of what's been discussed about Quality, what we can then see here and now understand more clearly, is a Rhetoric that is aimed towards teaching Quality and The Good Life.

Socrates and Jesus have much in common in terms of their philosophy, and both met with a conspiratorial fate intended to do away with their thinking and their mind, to silence them.

I'm pretty sure that this is the real reason Socrates drank the poison..

I'll betcha they haven't made this same mistake in other civilized worlds..


"Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,"

reply to post by NewAgeMan

I'll betcha they haven't made this same mistake in other civilized worlds..

Interestingly enough, right now I am reading a sic/fi novel titled Moon Flower by James P Hogan, which is based on an alien species that hasn't made this specific "error" that we have been going on about, at least I think as I have not finished it yet. I'll try to remember and let you know.

Arète

Arete
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Arete ( /ˈærətiː/; Greek: ἀρετή), in its basic sense, means excellence of any kind. In its earliest appearance in Greek, this notion of excellence was ultimately bound up with the notion of the fulfillment of purpose or function: the act of living up to one's full potential. Arete in ancient Greek culture was courage and strength in the face of adversity and it was to what all people aspired.

"The most articulated value in Greek culture is Areté. Translated as "virtue," the word actually means something closer to "being the best you can be," or "reaching your highest human potential." The term from Homeric times onwards is not gender specific. Homer applies the term of both the Greek and Trojan heroes as well as major female figures, such as Penelope, the wife of the Greek hero, Odysseus. In the Homeric poems, Areté is frequently associated with bravery, but more often, with effectiveness. The man or woman of Areté is a person of the highest effectiveness; they use all their faculties: strength, bravery, wit, and deceptiveness, to achieve real results. In the Homeric world, then, Areté involves all of the abilities and potentialities available to humans. The concept implies a human-centered universe in which human actions are of paramount importance; the world is a place of conflict and difficulty, and human value and meaning is measured against individual effectiveness in the world. Areté is explicitly linked with human knowledge, where the expressions "virtue is knowledge" and "Areté is knowledge" are used interchangeably. The highest human potential is knowledge and all other human abilities are derived from this central capacity. If Areté is knowledge and study, the highest human knowledge is knowledge about knowledge itself; in this light, the theoretical study of human knowledge, which Aristotle called "contemplation," is the highest human ability and happiness." -Richard Hooker [1]

History
The Ancient Greeks applied the term to anything: for example, the excellence of a chimney, the excellence of a bull to be bred and the excellence of a man. The meaning of the word changes depending on what it describes, since everything has its own peculiar excellence; the arete of a man is different from the arete of a horse. This way of thinking comes first from Plato, where it can be seen in the Allegory of the Cave.[1] In particular, the aristocratic class was presumed, essentially by definition, to be exemplary of arete: "The root of the word is the same as aristos, the word which shows superlative ability and superiority, and "aristos" was constantly used in the plural to denote the nobility."[2]

By the 4th and 5th centuries BC, arete as applied to men had developed to include quieter virtues, such as dikaiosyne (justice) and sophrosyne (self-restraint). Plato attempted to produce a moral philosophy that incorporated this new usage,[3] but it was in the work of Aristotle that the doctrine of arete found its fullest flowering. Aristotle's Doctrine of the Mean is a paradigm example of his thinking.

Arete has also been used by Aristotle when talking about athletic training and also the education of young boys. Stephen G. Miller delves into this usage in his book "Ancient Greek Athletics". Aristotle is quoted as deliberating between education towards arete "...or those that are theoretical". Educating towards arete in this sense means that the boy would be educated towards things that are useful in life. But even Aristotle himself says that arete is not something that can be agreed upon. He says, "Nor is there even an agreement about what constitutes arete, something that leads logically to a disagreement about the appropriate training for arete. To say that arete has a common definition of excellence or fulfillment may be an overstatement simply because it was very difficult to pinpoint arete, much less the proper ways to go about obtaining it.[4]

[edit]Athletics
It was commonly believed that the mind, body, and soul each had to be developed and prepared for a man to live a life of arete. This led to the thought that athletics had to be present in order to obtain arete. They did not need to consume one's life, merely exercise the body into the right condition for arete, just like the mind and soul would be exercised by other means.[4]

en.wikipedia.org...

It appears I may owe Aristotle an apology of sorts. He understood it perfectly, according to this Wikipedia article. perhaps the fault rests with later misinterpretations and misunderstandings as the insights were codified in the academic institution we call the University, and passed on as a system, where all the talk was simply ABOUT these things, instead of their understanding and fullest application in the affairs of day to day living.

What Phaedrus, the character in Zen and the Art of Motercycle Maintenance seemed to think was that Artistotle DEMOTED Arete, to a branch of ethics, while at the same time, making the mistake or perpetrating the intentional and willful trick, of simply naming everything and classifying it and calling THAT the truth.

It appears that Artistotle might not have been the least bit aware of the implications of the transfer through the institutionalization of this knowledge, and how it might be misundertood and misinterpreted, by future generations as the meaning and significance and importance of it, became watered down over time.

Or maybe Phaedrus was right and that Aristotle, in Institutionalizing his entire system of thought, made some basic errors in the midst of all the genius, and that is possible, and understandable, how that would occur, but it doesnt neccessarily make it Aristotles fault.

It seems that the split, the division, and the loss of Arete as the higest ideal and the urge and striving of man, that that occured at a later date, and so, if we can lay blame anywhere, it would the be at the feet of the great Institutions of Learning, the Universities, and on this score Phaedrus was not mistaken, since the fruits are plainly obvious almost everywhere we look today.

Originally posted by TerryMcGuire
reply to post by NewAgeMan

 

I'll betcha they haven't made this same mistake in other civilized worlds..

Interestingly enough, right now I am reading a sic/fi novel titled Moon Flower by James P Hogan, which is based on an alien species that hasn't made this specific "error" that we have been going on about, at least I think as I have not finished it yet. I'll try to remember and let you know.

How synchronistic!

Sure, on, or I should say IN, other civilized worlds, since they dont make the distinction, and recognize that the indivisability of the goodness of creation envelopes all things, including all inspired creative actions and endeavours in the free space of all possibility - for them, life would be fun, enjoyable and highly engaged and impassioned in every manner of creative enterprise and pursuit. Even in their leisure, they would be doing things, for fun and entertainment which advance the whole way of life of everyone by extension. Indeed it would be a type of heaven. where the highest will remains in alignment with the highest will, and the good is realized and enjoyed for its own sake. As in our world, and in our present day, unfortunately for us, they might even have an ancient legacy of something that was not as GOOD, but since the good cant be justified by the bad, the bad or less than good has been allowed to fall away, leaving only the good in pursuit of the better and the best in all things. Such a Civilization would be filled with master craftsman of every kind.

You know... if the character of Phaedrus (it's based on a true story), in the book, instead of going insane at the end, pissing his pants, getting institutionalized and given electric shock therapy against his will, had instead, overturned the thinking of the University of Chicago, and by extension what he called "the Church of Reason", then what otherwise simply became a popular book (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) written in the 1970's - might very well have changed the world we live in today. After all, it was from under the tutelague of the University of Chicago and in particular one professor Leo Strauss, that the "Neocons" of our most recent chapter of historic insanity sprung with the notion already formed in their young minds (people like Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith) that all truth is relative, and that the orginizing principal of Western Civilization and eventual dominion over history itself (since that is nothing but a public record), would be through the projection of power under the banner of American exceptionalism via any convenient pretense or LIE (since there's no truth it's perfectly ok to lie for Machiavellian ends). "Security" (as a response to insecurity) and even WAR as a projection against a percieved "evil" without might then conveniently serve the interests of the "elite" to rule by default since SOMEONE's got to be the leader, the rulers, and since man, without any such organizing principal, and "leadership", as the focal point of the society's "governing dynamic", will quite naturally and inevitably fall victim to it's lowest base instincts, and conceivably fall apart at the seams.. that's the kind of thinking that sprung from the UofC, when we take the fundamental error, and then build upon it a structure cemented with moral supremecy, and capped off with the utter insanity of self will and self entitlement run riot as in "we can RULE THE WORLD!"

Had he not succumbed to his fear of the unknown and of uncharted territory while climbing this new/old mountain of reality, and had he not fallen from it, relative to the world in which he found himself (A world without Qaulity), and completely surrendered his will, then the hero of the story, who is resurrected at the end through the first person narrator who tells the story as the "new guy" or the one who was left over after they obliterated this Phaedrus persona with shock treatment, would have fulfilled his "dharma" or his arete.

This thread's for you Phaedrus! You did all the work here.

Sadly, his son in the story, who rides with him across America for what he calls his "Chatauqua", is, later on, in a horrific twist and perhaps in symbolic or allegorical fashion, murdered with a knife by a random assailant.
Therefore, to you also Chris, a debt of gratitude to you both.

Re: American Exceptionalism

"Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. Patriotism is its cult. It should hardly be necessary to say, that by patriotism I mean that attitude which puts the own nation above humanity, above the principles of truth and justice; not the loving interest in one's own nation, which is the concern with the nation's spiritual as much as with its material welfare --never with its power over other nations. Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one's country which is not part of one's love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship."

~ Erich Fromm, American Psychologist

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NAM
Somehow I jumped by MotMain. But you say the protagonist had an encounter with Leo Strauss? Would that something, had derailed that hellbound express. I continue to lack comprehension of how Strauss' deep hatred for fascism morphed into such fascist tendencies in his most successful students. And while on that topic,what was with that school birthing both those neo-con revolutionaries and Friedman and the School of Economics? Some day that whole story will be a complete hoot. Nah never mind. It will all most likely be written up with that college being some kind of Bethlehem.

As far as American Exceptionalism goes, here is a post I left a while back on another thread with my feelings on the subject.

I don't remember when I first began to become aware of American Exceptualism other than it was during the Olympics. The fans of the US team rocking the stands with USA , USA,USA. There was such an attitude of we've got to win it all. Because we're America. USA, USA.
But first of all, we're not America. We are the USA.
USA.USA.

We built up the biggest teams. The best coached teams . The best trained athletes. We had the most money.
Pretty simple really.
USA. USA.
And the stands would rock,
USA.

Anyway, NAM, can you do me a favor. My eyesight is not what it used to be and my tracking sense is faltering. Less sentences in a paragraph would help me a lot, and others I am sure.
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