Living With Plato

[poliphilo]

Ailz has introduced me to on-line jig-saw puzzles. They kill a lot of time. Plato goes, "Tut, tut."  And I feel bad about killing it.

I'm arguing with Plato in my head. He says poetry is frivolous and I'm trying to convince him it isn't. Plato is a puritan; he wants to simplify life. He thinks you can make people virtuous by denying them distractions. No, no, no, I say. How can it be virtue if it's never put to the test? Simplify your own life by all means; leave other other people to make their own arrangements.

Plato+guns= Al Shabbab.

My mother was watching a celebration of the Eurovision Song Contest last night. Plato said he wouldn't want one of those in his Republic. I didn't take him up on it.

Comments

[matrixmann]

That was still a problem even with the old communists that came to power after WWII. Those were pretty conservertive, in some way also what a Puritan is like if it's about philosophy of life. My own judgment is, they also breathed the air that the Third Reich build up - the strictness, the "I command and you have to follow or you're an enemy" and the "if you want to have something to say, join our party".
Anyway, people like Walter Ulbricht also still sat upon that coach that dancing is for the bourgeoisie, but that thing turns out to be wrong with regular people. People aren't made like that.
They shouldn't be constantly celebrating and making party, otherwise they wouldn't get anything done or they'd be like the Farcebook-spoiled youth of these days which literally claims the right of continuous entertainment, but they should be allowed to be exuberant every once in a while after a day of hard work. They even "earned" it after they've done their duties.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Puritanism is one of the constants in human society. It wears different masks- will sometimes be right wing, sometimes left-wing, sometimes political, sometimes religious- but it's always there. I have some sympathy with it. At least as a matter of personal choice.

[matrixmann]

As a matter of personal celibacy it may be able to live with that, depending on the person. Not all people are attracted to entertainment or find too much joy in it. As long as nobody determines everyone out to live like that...

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

But then, simplification can itself be quite a luxury, as many a housewife will attest, with a thousand and one calls upon one's attentions during the day. That said, there's certainly plenty to be said for such, even to the modest extent of not accumulating unnecessary possessions. A lack of clutter in one's life can be quite heartening, even if I'm hardly speaking from much experience.

ESC, yay! Oh, it may come in for endless ribbing, but I'm there every year, watching from start to end. Well, at least the end of the songs - sometimes the winner becomes evident quite early on in the voting, which rather diminishes the fun, for me. (Perhaps needless to say, my choices aren't usually echoed by the voting =:)

I don't know if the UK's entry this year will fare well, but I'd like to think it'll be at least in the middle of the pack - nice to have a touch of electroswing in there, rather than Yet Another Gentle Ballad or Extruded Pop Product.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I haven't watched The ESC for ages. I'm afraid I stopped taking an interest when we stopped winning.

I've never understood why- with such overwhelming musical fire power in the UK- we no longer bother to wheel out our big guns.

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

That was actually what puzzled me about the ESC as a child; I couldn't understand why the big names in Danish pop music were completely absent and why there was this lot of completely unknown would-bes on stage.

Later I learned to scoff at the ESC with appropriate disdain, and then later again to love its 80's tunes with an ironic distance. These days, though, I fear I'm rather indifferent to any kind of modern music. I did, though, go to a wonderful performance of Bach's Matthäus-Passion last week.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

In the early days we Brits did field our big names- Cliff, for instance, and Lulu. Then- for whatever reason- we stopped taking it seriously.

I can't keep up with contemporary music. It's not written for me- most of it. I do try to keep up with new movies and new novels- and that's enough.

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

Plato did not trust poets because they were 'enthused'. When they write poetry they are irrational and don't know what they are saying. This was a shamanistic quality and Plato was a rationalist, so I suppose the enlightenment began right there. He wanted to replace poets with philosophers because he thought they were more practical.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

But also he was quite simply a philistine. He couldn't see the point of art. Poets and painters are simply "imitators" of reality and we'd be better off paying attention to the thing itself. He tolerated moral verse-because it has something to teach us-but tragic poetry is just an unmanly wallowing in emotion.

[jfs.livejournal.com]

"If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution" :-)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes!