why I (still) love America
Everyone yesterday was either in ecstasy or agony it seems over the election and all seemed perplexed that I had no strong feelings one way or the other thinking I lacked passion on the issue, so as simply as I can, here is an explanation of my philosophy on the election.
A couple thousand years ago a Greek philosopher, I can’t remember his name or if he even had one, climbed to the top of a mountain and witnessed black forms racing past on the countryside below and watched as they changed shape climbing or descending the hills and valley. He realized that while they were flat and featureless the shadows were projections of the infinitely complex and beautiful clouds. As he walked down, glancing over his shoulder the mountain slowly changed and he came to the conclusion, the mountain had not changed, just his view of it. Days later he determined that everything on earth was an imperfect projection of its perfect ideal. So every tree is an imperfect projection of that one perfect tree, every animal an imperfect projection of that one perfect animal, for example. That’s why Greek art are never portraits of an individual, but rather an attempt to capture that perfect ideal.
So, I am not upset at the outcome of the election because it doesn’t change the perfect ideal of what the United States represent, it only changes its projection like a shadow passing over uneven ground.
comments?
Plato, from Book VII the Republic, "the Allegory of the Cave." Socrates says:
ReplyDeleteAnd now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision, -what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them, -- will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?
Yea,well, anyways.
Dust in the wind.