• Robert Lockhart
    170
    Wonder just how expansive a catalogue of insights into the true nature of our human condition - though grasped only momentarily and inarticulable perhaps - is in reality represented by the oft cathartic exclamation, “ - It’s a funny old world!”?

    Socrates believed - quaintly or idealistically? -- that at a subliminal level human beings in fact contain an understanding of all things and that, in the case of individual ignorance, personal experience alone - whose roll he thought analagous to that of a ‘mid-wife’ cathartically bringing forth conscious revelation of things already intimated - was in practice all that was wanting!
  • Nils Loc
    1.4k
    It's a lonely, depressing and fearful world, filled with individuals competing in dominance hierarchies.

    You could've been something terrible. The potentiality of anyone's terrible nature is elucidated by historical atrocities and causal circumstance.

    The lived perspective of history is always missing and so we are bound to make the same mistakes.

    Then it will all eventually black out, whether for the one sooner or the many later.
  • BC
    13.6k
    that at a subliminal level human beings in fact contain an understanding of all thingsRobert Lockhart

    It's a funny old world where ideas like that are still given credence. The truth is closer to "on many levels people don't know jack shit".
  • Cavacava
    2.4k


    “ - It’s a funny old world”!

    This is what Margret Thatcher said upon being forced to stand down in November 1990, even though she claimed to have never lost an election in her life.

    As we age we tend to beget more wind-eggs.
  • Nils Loc
    1.4k
    What Cavacava meant to say is this:

    "As we age we tend to produce more yolkless eggs."
  • BC
    13.6k
    wind-eggsCavacava

    Never heard of this before.
  • Cavacava
    2.4k
    Socrates
    Are we then, my friend, still pregnant and in travail with knowledge, or have we brought forth everything?

    Theaetetus
    Yes, we have, and, by Zeus, Socrates, with your help I have already said more than there was in me.

    Socrates
    Then does our art of midwifery declare to us that all the offspring that have been born are mere wind-eggs and not worth rearing?
    Theaetetus Dialogue

    Socrates' divine midwifery enables him to distinguish true thoughts from false thoughts. He is the sterile medium for delivery and birth of true thoughts and not mere "wind eggs" [it suggests a fart]
  • Robert Lockhart
    170
    Yeah, I've noticed that as well - how farting can sometimes feel like you're releasing an egg, that is! Wonderful, isn't it - how all these centuries later the timeless wisdom of 'The Ancients' still has the capacity to engender our empathy! :)

    Dare I say? - a neat analogy perhaps to describe a gestation process appropriate to the birth of at least some of the ideas first to see the light of day on this particular site!

    (- Moi-meme excepté, bien sűr!) :)
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