Okay so i read basically all of plato and aristotle, and i learned some stuff, but it ultimately felt like a chore and i just did it for pseudointellectual and quasi-academic credit.
But when i listen to music and all of the sublime images enter my head and im filled with song and dance, i feel like i am being inspired by the truth; some poetic truth of my being. Like love. It feels worthy and transcendent, where dialog and argumentation feels draining and trite.
For example, i even read decartes' "principles of philosophy" today and he admits that all he is doing is re-stating a "most ancient and common" perspective immanent to philosophy.
So here i do not see an "intellectual" revolution in modernity, but modernity is clearly the site of History as such; of "progress" (by whichever measure) and the self-movement of a self-referential subjectivity, which i would argue is not from a new metaphysical grounding (as vulgar historians would have it), but of a *cultural* or *artistic* development instead.
Marxists would argue that it is technology, but my feeling is that the superstructure has primacy in such things.
even hephaestus had his "mechanical women" in his dwelling. I would argue instead that mechanics takes its leading role from class interests of producers rather than some historical determinacySo basically what im saying is that philosophy is totally circular and even by fichte's conception (which is later adapted by lenin and althusser), the real battle is between materialism and idealism (which is also what aristotle's "de anima" and "metaphysics" is implicitly about - how all of the presocratics where materialists, and how only socrates, the pythagorians and plato are idealists in different proportions).
So philosophy is ultimately dichotomous. You either believe in God or you dont basically (or you believe in the *anti-god* of atheism). Its sophistry properly boils down to a normative theology. This to me is good though since it grounds thought in the social, and thus gives self-reference to lofty contemplation.
So here i return to the fundamental contradiction of philosophy; namely, socrates' daemon/muse, which in his imprisonment, beckoned him to put aesop's fables into prose (against the supposed "higher" 'music' of philosophy), and this to me (in "phaedo", the final socratic dialog), is the most beautiful image since it harkens back to Plato's own life.
Plato originally was a
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