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Wednesday, June 4, 2014 |
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Monday, July 24, 2017 10:33:18 AM |
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I believe that this quote may be understood by reflecting on Plato's allegory of the cave (implicitly, his Theory of the Forms) from his dialogue "The Republic."
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Only the dead have seen the end of war.
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We might go even deeper and ask the question: "What is truth?" It seems that in the this age of relativism and skepticism, truth holds little worth. Today Mellville's quote might be phrased this way: "All truth is relative! Or...what truth? Maybe there is no truth."
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"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe are free." -- Goethe
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I think we'll never run the risk of being too moral! We might head, though, for the other direction. We're heading towards the peaks of immorality, unfortunately. It may be a good advice from Thoreau but we should work primarily on our immoral thinking, attitudes etc.
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Obviously, by 'desires' Aristotle meant the desires of the flesh that act as a hindrance in the way to overcoming yourself. You are your worst and most stubborn enemy. That is why it is so hard to gain victory over yourself.
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Lestibournes wrote:Really romantic, yet not realistic
With all due respect, I beg to differ. Thoreau's quote is not romantic, not at all. Yes, it contains the word 'love' but the idea of 'love' expounded by Thoreau transcends the mere notion of romance, and the superficial feelings driven by the passions of the flesh. The 'love' we're interested of here is the one that surpasses the body and reaches the soul. We don't see it as realistic because we don't love enough. And why don't we love enough? Because we don't know what love is, because we have a twisted, distorted notion of what it is and what it means!
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As beautiful as he makes it sounds, it is an utopic statement, especially in today's society when all notions of friendship, truth, beauty is trivialized, materialized and shamefully used for one's own interests.
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We need more of Plato today. One of the most beautiful lines (among many others) that simply make me love Plato more than any other lover of wisdom:
“what if the man could see Beauty Itself, pure, unalloyed, stripped of mortality, and all its pollution, stains, and vanities, unchanging, divine,...the man becoming in that communion, the friend of God, himself immortal;...would that be a life to disregard?”
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"Man – an animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada."
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