“They saw their injured country's woe;
The flaming town, the wasted field;
Then rushed to meet the insulting foe;
They took the spear, - but left the shield.”
―Philip Freneau
.
And by a prudent flight and cunning save A life which valour could not, from the grave. A better buckler I can soon regain, But who can get another life again?
Archilochus
I thank God every day for giving me the power to DISCRIMINATE between Right and Wrong, Truth and Falsehood, Beauty and Ugliness, Meritorious and Meretricious, Profound and Superficial, Worthy and Seductive, Healthy and Ill, Absorbing and Morbid, Endearing and Addictive, etc.
I happily eschew what I know to be innately, irredeemably vile.
SOCRATES: Let us suppose a man who understands justice, and has reason as well as understanding about the true nature of this and of all other things.
PROTARCHUS: We will suppose such a man.
SOCRATES: Will he have enough of knowledge if he is acquainted only with the divine circle and sphere, and knows nothing of our human spheres and circles, but uses only divine circles and measures in the building of a house?
PROTARCHUS: The knowledge which is only superhuman, Socrates, is ridiculous in man.
SOCRATES: What do you mean? Do you mean that you are to throw into the cup and mingle the impure and uncertain art which uses the false measure and the false circle?
PROTARCHUS: Yes, we must, if any of us is ever to find his way home.
SOCRATES: And am I to include music, which, as I was saying just now, is full of guesswork and imitation, and is wanting in purity?
PROTARCHUS: Yes, I think that you must, if human life is to be a life at all.
SOCRATES: Well, then, suppose that I give way, and, like a doorkeeper who is pushed and overborne by the mob, I open the door wide, and let knowledge of every sort stream in, and the pure mingle with the impure?
PROTARCHUS: I do not know, Socrates, that any great harm would come of having them all, if only you have the first sort.
SOCRATES: Well, then, shall I let them all flow into what Homer poetically terms 'a meeting of the waters'?
PROTARCHUS: By all means.
SOCRATES: There—I have let them in, and now I must return to the fountain of pleasure. For we were not permitted to begin by mingling in a single stream the true portions of both according to our original intention; but the love of all knowledge constrained us to let all the sciences flow in together before the pleasures.
PROTARCHUS: Quite true.
SOCRATES: And now the time has come for us to consider about the pleasures also, whether we shall in like manner let them go all at once, or at first only the true ones.
PROTARCHUS: It will be by far the safer course to let flow the true ones first.
SOCRATES: Let them flow, then; and now, if there are any necessary pleasures, as there were arts and sciences necessary, must we not mingle them?
PROTARCHUS: Yes; the necessary pleasures should certainly be allowed to mingle.
SOCRATES: The knowledge of the arts has been admitted to be innocent and useful always; and if we say of pleasures in like manner that all of them are good and innocent for all of us at all times, we must let them all mingle?
PROTARCHUS: What shall we say about them, and what course shall we take?
SOCRATES: Do not ask me, Protarchus; but ask the daughters of pleasure and wisdom to answer for themselves.
PROTARCHUS: How?
SOCRATES: Tell us, O beloved—shall we call you pleasures or by some other name?—would you rather live with or without wisdom? I am of opinion that they would certainly answer as follows:
PROTARCHUS: How?
SOCRATES: They would answer, as we said before, that for any single class to be left by itself pure and isolated is not good, nor altogether possible; and that if we are to make comparisons of one class with another and choose, there is no better companion than knowledge of things in general, and likewise the perfect knowledge, if that may be, of ourselves in every respect.
PROTARCHUS: And our answer will be:—In that ye have spoken well.
SOCRATES: Very true. And now let us go back and interrogate wisdom and mind: Would you like to have any pleasures in the mixture? And they will reply:—'What pleasures do you mean?'
PROTARCHUS: Likely enough.
SOCRATES: And we shall take up our parable and say: Do you wish to have the greatest and most vehement pleasures for your companions in addition to the true ones? 'Why, Socrates,' they will say, 'how can we? seeing that they are the source of ten thousand hindrances to us; they trouble the souls of men, which are our habitation, with their madness; they prevent us from coming to the birth, and are commonly the ruin of the children which are born to us, causing them to be forgotten and unheeded; but the true and pure pleasures, of which you spoke, know to be of our family, and also those pleasures which accompany health and temperance, and which every Virtue, like a goddess, has in her train to follow her about wherever she goes,—mingle these and not the others; there would be great want of sense in any one who desires to see a fair and perfect mixture, and to find in it what is the highest good in man and in the universe, and to divine what is the true form of good—there would be great want of sense in his allowing the pleasures, which are always in the company of folly and vice, to mingle with mind in the cup.'—Is not this a very rational and suitable reply, which mind has made, both on her own behalf, as well as on the behalf of memory and true opinion?
I'll sum it all up by quoting my dear old friend Bitch Cassidy, whom I met sixteen years ago at FrontPage Magazine before David Horowitz predated Who's Your Daddy? and let the trolls take over and destroy the integrity of his site.
"Honey, you don't need to EAT a POUND of SHIT to KNOW it DON'T TASTE GOOD."
As brilliant –– and succinct –– an observation as any I've seen.
Hail to thee, and God bless you, BITCH CASSIDY, wherever ever you are! May you live forever –– in the rare sweet clover that grows nowhere but the Elysian Fields.
Careful, FT. You're beginning to sound more and more like some of those know-nothing a-holes over at the Frankfurt School....
The term culture industry (German: Kulturindustrie) was coined by the critical theorists Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), and was presented as critical vocabulary in the chapter "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception", of the book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), wherein they proposed that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods — films, radio programmes, magazines, etc. — that are used to manipulate mass society into passivity. Consumption of the easy pleasures of popular culture, made available by the mass communications media, renders people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances.[citation needed] The inherent danger of the culture industry is the cultivation of false psychological needs that can only be met and satisfied by the products of capitalism; thus Adorno and Horkheimer especially perceived mass-produced culture as dangerous to the more technically and intellectually difficult high arts. In contrast, true psychological needs are freedom, creativity, and genuine happiness, which refer to an earlier demarcation of human needs, established by Herbert Marcuse. (See Eros and Civilization, 1955).
12 comments:
HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELP!!!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!
AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
STOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOP!
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
The world can't be all "classical" musical FT. The 'lyrical' is separate from the 'epic'. Archilochus is NOT, and never will be, Homer.
Some sayings of Archilochus of Paros...
I thank God every day for giving me the power to DISCRIMINATE between Right and Wrong, Truth and Falsehood, Beauty and Ugliness, Meritorious and Meretricious, Profound and Superficial, Worthy and Seductive, Healthy and Ill, Absorbing and Morbid, Endearing and Addictive, etc.
I happily eschew what I know to be innately, irredeemably vile.
Ecclesiastes 3... not!
..his prick, full as a corn-stuffed jackass,
a Prienian jackass...overflowed.
--Archilochus of Paros (Fragment 43W)
Plato, "Philebus"
SOCRATES: Let us suppose a man who understands justice, and has reason as well as understanding about the true nature of this and of all other things.
PROTARCHUS: We will suppose such a man.
SOCRATES: Will he have enough of knowledge if he is acquainted only with the divine circle and sphere, and knows nothing of our human spheres and circles, but uses only divine circles and measures in the building of a house?
PROTARCHUS: The knowledge which is only superhuman, Socrates, is ridiculous in man.
SOCRATES: What do you mean? Do you mean that you are to throw into the cup and mingle the impure and uncertain art which uses the false measure and the false circle?
PROTARCHUS: Yes, we must, if any of us is ever to find his way home.
SOCRATES: And am I to include music, which, as I was saying just now, is full of guesswork and imitation, and is wanting in purity?
PROTARCHUS: Yes, I think that you must, if human life is to be a life at all.
SOCRATES: Well, then, suppose that I give way, and, like a doorkeeper who is pushed and overborne by the mob, I open the door wide, and let knowledge of every sort stream in, and the pure mingle with the impure?
PROTARCHUS: I do not know, Socrates, that any great harm would come of having them all, if only you have the first sort.
SOCRATES: Well, then, shall I let them all flow into what Homer poetically terms 'a meeting of the waters'?
PROTARCHUS: By all means.
SOCRATES: There—I have let them in, and now I must return to the fountain of pleasure. For we were not permitted to begin by mingling in a single stream the true portions of both according to our original intention; but the love of all knowledge constrained us to let all the sciences flow in together before the pleasures.
PROTARCHUS: Quite true.
SOCRATES: And now the time has come for us to consider about the pleasures also, whether we shall in like manner let them go all at once, or at first only the true ones.
PROTARCHUS: It will be by far the safer course to let flow the true ones first.
SOCRATES: Let them flow, then; and now, if there are any necessary pleasures, as there were arts and sciences necessary, must we not mingle them?
PROTARCHUS: Yes; the necessary pleasures should certainly be allowed to mingle.
SOCRATES: The knowledge of the arts has been admitted to be innocent and useful always; and if we say of pleasures in like manner that all of them are good and innocent for all of us at all times, we must let them all mingle?
(cont)
PROTARCHUS: What shall we say about them, and what course shall we take?
SOCRATES: Do not ask me, Protarchus; but ask the daughters of pleasure and wisdom to answer for themselves.
PROTARCHUS: How?
SOCRATES: Tell us, O beloved—shall we call you pleasures or by some other name?—would you rather live with or without wisdom? I am of opinion that they would certainly answer as follows:
PROTARCHUS: How?
SOCRATES: They would answer, as we said before, that for any single class to be left by itself pure and isolated is not good, nor altogether possible; and that if we are to make comparisons of one class with another and choose, there is no better companion than knowledge of things in general, and likewise the perfect knowledge, if that may be, of ourselves in every respect.
PROTARCHUS: And our answer will be:—In that ye have spoken well.
SOCRATES: Very true. And now let us go back and interrogate wisdom and mind: Would you like to have any pleasures in the mixture? And they will reply:—'What pleasures do you mean?'
PROTARCHUS: Likely enough.
SOCRATES: And we shall take up our parable and say: Do you wish to have the greatest and most vehement pleasures for your companions in addition to the true ones? 'Why, Socrates,' they will say, 'how can we? seeing that they are the source of ten thousand hindrances to us; they trouble the souls of men, which are our habitation, with their madness; they prevent us from coming to the birth, and are commonly the ruin of the children which are born to us, causing them to be forgotten and unheeded; but the true and pure pleasures, of which you spoke, know to be of our family, and also those pleasures which accompany health and temperance, and which every Virtue, like a goddess, has in her train to follow her about wherever she goes,—mingle these and not the others; there would be great want of sense in any one who desires to see a fair and perfect mixture, and to find in it what is the highest good in man and in the universe, and to divine what is the true form of good—there would be great want of sense in his allowing the pleasures, which are always in the company of folly and vice, to mingle with mind in the cup.'—Is not this a very rational and suitable reply, which mind has made, both on her own behalf, as well as on the behalf of memory and true opinion?
PROTARCHUS: Most certainly.
You opened the door to Rock and Roll in music over a hundred years ago. So quit yer bitchin'! ;)
;p On Shoenberg and other 'degenerate' music.
You can't repress the expressionists!
I'll sum it all up by quoting my dear old friend Bitch Cassidy, whom I met sixteen years ago at FrontPage Magazine before David Horowitz predated Who's Your Daddy? and let the trolls take over and destroy the integrity of his site.
"Honey, you don't need to EAT a POUND of SHIT to KNOW it DON'T TASTE GOOD."
As brilliant –– and succinct –– an observation as any I've seen.
Hail to thee, and God bless you, BITCH CASSIDY, wherever ever you are! May you live forever –– in the rare sweet clover that grows nowhere but the Elysian Fields.
Careful, FT. You're beginning to sound more and more like some of those know-nothing a-holes over at the Frankfurt School....
The term culture industry (German: Kulturindustrie) was coined by the critical theorists Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), and was presented as critical vocabulary in the chapter "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception", of the book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), wherein they proposed that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods — films, radio programmes, magazines, etc. — that are used to manipulate mass society into passivity. Consumption of the easy pleasures of popular culture, made available by the mass communications media, renders people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances.[citation needed] The inherent danger of the culture industry is the cultivation of false psychological needs that can only be met and satisfied by the products of capitalism; thus Adorno and Horkheimer especially perceived mass-produced culture as dangerous to the more technically and intellectually difficult high arts. In contrast, true psychological needs are freedom, creativity, and genuine happiness, which refer to an earlier demarcation of human needs, established by Herbert Marcuse. (See Eros and Civilization, 1955).
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