Unjustly Condemned

Reading Justin's First Apology made me not think that this man was overly revolutionary in his thoughts until I got to chapter four where he discussed persecution of certain people by association. He cries out for reason to allow men to judge men as men, not as x,y, or z, depending on their affiliations. Although he seems to place some sort of elitism on Christians due to their connection with greatness above and beyond everyone, he brings up a point that is still not being fully utilized today. The first judgement people place on others is based on appearance, then after learning more about them, more assumptions lead to a general idea on that individual. And in many cases, one affiliation, like a religious one, could instantly allow for someone to judge more critically of that person. Will we ever be able to live up to this ideal? When will it be that humans will be able to look at each other in the colorblind and religious blind way of Stephen Colbert?

A "scientific" look at justice

http://www.economist.com/node/18584074?fsrc=scn/tw/te/ar/thegoodgodguide

This is a pretty fun article. Happy Easter everyone!

Conceit to Knowledge

The other day I was studying for Thomas Aquinas test and there was one thing that really stood out to me as I was going through my notes.  Thomas Aquinas said one reason believers-in-God have faith is so they won't seem irrational to nonbelievers by trying to prove something with reason that can't be proven in that way.  A few days later I was thinking about this and also about our discussion of men of knowledge, men of simple ignorance, and men of double ignorance.  Before considering faith as something to prevent a nonbeliever from seeing a believer as irrational, I thought of belief in God as a conceit to knowledge.  But after considering the faith thing I would put a belief in God could into the simple ignorance category since the believer is not really making an irrational claim that he or she doesn't understand, but admitting that his or her belief is not completely proven by reason, but by his or her strong feelings about God (I don't know if that's exactly right, but do you get the idea sort of?).  It think it's beautiful when people feel so strongly about certain things that they don't need to justify them with logical explanations.

Limitless and the Unity of Existence

I went to see a pretty awful movie last night. We went to see a horror film and upon arrival learned that it was sold out. Luckily for movie sales.. not lucky for us.. limitless was due to start at the same time so we chose to watch it instead. Awful... don't go and see it BUT the opening credits are INCREDIBLE. As I was watching them, I realized that it made a nice metaphor for neoplatonism. As the opening credits show, all is unity. We surge through life, with many individual differences, experiencing many individual sense impressions, but in reality, all of these difference originates from one infinite unity.

Enjoy. (to view it, click on the link and scroll down to the video within the article.)

Desert Island Books

Recently we have been discussing different ways to analyze texts, and this in turn sort of lead into a conversation of interpretation spanning art in general, but we limited it to our favorite books.
Dialogue has various different parts: matter, form, nature, soul, intellect, and good. Digging deeper into these various aspects of the dialogue, I started to wonder about typical reactions to art and how "art consciousness" has shifted greatly since the Neo Platonists and today.

Here comes the exposition!

I am a musician and I appreciate when people enjoy the music I make, who wouldn't? But one thing that I have noticed, when describing art--be it a book or song--people like to use the terms "interesting" or "boring" when asked their opinion. For some reason this really annoys me. I think describing a piece of art as interesting or boring lends itself to a naive approach towards/understanding of art.

Looking at the various parts of dialogue used by Proclus, the categories boring and interesting seem to be out of place;indeed, they are not even present. What does it mean for something to be boring or interesting? (Apparently Hegel thought it was not a compliment to call something interesting) How do we experience boredom or interest? It seems to me that the interesting and the boring are both presuppositions of one another; two psychological categories that rest in the emotions and not in any sort of objective. The vicissitudes of these feelings prove their solipsistic nature--surely bespeaking the solipsistic milieu of art. Also, these feelings seem to stand in for concepts such as "the beautiful" or "the ugly." The way we register the interesting or boring is also interesting (ha). An interesting/boring object finds itself in our attention, we take cognizance of the object and then just as easily we let it go passing it off as boring or interesting. The effect doesn't last any longer than it takes for me to perceive, it only lasts as long as I am subject to the interesting/boring object, and only in the sense that I am sitting in church bored, but once I leave church I never dwell on this boring experience again. The same thing can be said about an interesting experience. The notion of the interesting arises when our conception of truth is no longer connected to art. Nowadays we connect truth to science.

I will figure out some more stuff to say about this in the next few days. Gotta get started on that paper!

In class when we talked about how there is the relationship between the reader of a text and the text itself it got me wondering how the reader's interpenetration of what they are reading affects its ability to have its potential reached. If someone is reading and engaging with the text, then the text will have meaning but what if a reader of a text misses the point of what is being written? When the writer writes something with one meaning and the reader takes a meaning away that is unrelated the text still meaningful?
I started wondering this when I found this website that invited its users to provide interpretations for the rap lyrics of various songs. Some could high light a section of the song and if it the artist used a lot of figurative language, someone could break down what was being said in layman's terms and allow others to talk about how their interpenetration differed from the one provided. And when I read through the meanings of particular verses they were taking away my first instinct was to say that they were wrong and missed the point. But since it is their opinion who am I to say they were wrong? And I found myself wondering if any neo-platinous would be able to say that the meaning one takes away from a text is wrong. Maybe the only wrong interpenetration would be to conclude that there is no meaning and leave the text lifeless.

We talked about the interpretation of text and there was a spark of interest in the nature of a text: whether it is objective or subjective. A thought a good modern example of this is Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury was overwhelmingly disappointed in the poor understanding of Fahrenheit 451. People thought it was about government censorship, because they claimed that temperature was the same temperature at which paper burned, and in turn the temperature at which book burnings can be committed (the temperature is actually 450 Celsius).

The book actually turns out to be about the numbing effects of technology. Bradbury, although a science fiction writer, was himself a Luddite. The government is not the problem, the people are. The irony of this is that the people of this society cannot recognize his message, perhaps because society has numbed them from working through the intricacies of a text.