Images, as Pat's friend Really Happening pointed out, go back a few hundred thousand years. Prehistoric carvings on bones suggest one of the oldest activities of homo sapiens is to make images. Images speak louder than words. One picture is worth a thousand words. Explanations tend to muddy the waters. Ok, so the less said the better... but then it's fun to talk sometimes.
Part of the problem is that words are not direct enough, except in certain cases, for example, mystical utterances such as messages from the Oracle at Delphi. A person could understand upon hearing the sound, or else be lost in a sea of interpretation and discursiveness. After his experience at the temple, Socrates decided to begin his philosophical investigations with himself, to know oneself. He claimed to know nothing and yet was declared to be very wise. His declaration of not knowing left him open to learn and explore, without barriers of ego or opinion. Pat was in the process of reading Parmenides.
In Parmenides, Socrates as a young man in a discussion with the much older Parmenides, discovers complications in the famous idea of forms, that things in the human world are copies of things existing in an eternal realm. There's a lot of fascinating discussion about the world of material things and the invisible intellectual world in which one seeks knowledge and virtue. Human hair and mud are sensual, physical things, which Socrates, don't need forms. Beauty and goodness are non-physical things and exist as forms, or transcendental things.
On a more prosaic level, Pat sometimes felt frustrated to notice ambiguity of meaning. Does Pat mean what he said? What was Pat trying to say? Maybe what he said is an expression of confusion and cognitive distortion. Maybe it doesn't matter... and so goes the human comedy, hopefully played out with patience and friendliness.
No comments:
Post a Comment