It could have been nice to live in a world where spending time and energy on playing chess did not seem like an unconscionable luxury.
Is it a luxury to be able to ignore the setting sun over Lesbos
in order to look at your mobile?
Photo taken September 1, 2024
on the coast of what used to be part of Lydia
I used to play chess, until I figured that when I wanted to think mathematically, there were better ways to do it.
In the Platonic dialogues, Socrates frequently mentions τέχνη (technê), which is art in the archaic sense: skill or craft. The concern of this post is how one develops a skill, and what it means to have one in the first place.
After seventeen weekly posts of readings with my annotations, the Pensées of Pascal join two other works that I have blogged about systematically, chapter by chapter or book by book:
R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, or Man, Society, Civilization, and Barbarism (1942);
Homer, the Iliad, in George Chapman’s translation.
Do three authors belong together, for any other reason than that I have spent time with each of them?
For Pascal, the Torah is history, but the Iliad was written too late to be that, and is just a novel (S 688 / L 436 / B 628). It has no concept of law, he says (S 691 / L 451 / B 620), but later Greeks took this and other things from the Jews. I discussed this in “Judaism for Pascal.” For example, Philo Judaeus thinks that when Heraclitus says, “We live their death and we die their life,” this is the death wrought by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in Genesis.
Pascal and Collingwood both come to terms with a world of contrariety. Collingwood calls it “a Heraclitean world,” alluding to how Plato has Socrates tell Hermogenes in the Cratylus (402a, Loeb translation by Harold North Fowler),
Heracleitus says, you know, that all things move and nothing remains still, and he likens the universe to the current of a river, saying that you cannot step twice into the same stream.
One day during the Trojan War, Apollo and Athena decide to give the combatants a break. The general conflict is to be replaced with a one-on-one. The Olympians induce Helenus to tell his brother Hector to take on whichever of the Greeks is up for it.
Day or night?
Sunset over Lesbos
From the Anatolian mainland
Tuesday, August 1, 2023
Index to this series | Text of Chapman’s Homer’s Iliad
Note added August 25; edited and augmented, August 27; 2024: In my view, the key events of the Iliad are Achilles’s holding back from
The latter case of self-restraint may be a disaster for Achilles, not to mention Patroclus and the other Greeks who die as a result; but it is also somehow a result of the former case. Not killing on impulse is probably a good thing; otherwise you have the situation of Njal’s Saga, which I took up in writing “On Homer’s Iliad Book I” (November 29, 2022).
Polytropy 