另類事件﹑八卦新聞﹑輕鬆評論

wherestip wrote:


Wenjer,

I'm glad you liked the link about Socrates. I posted that link for us to think about our own purposes in life, not for us to use any of it to justify our own position or to criticize someone else's.

Remember that Glen Campbell song that you liked? Life indeed is full of compromises. I also remember us at one point laughing at people who 宁折不弯 - rather than having the attitude of "you can bend but never break me" as written in the lyrics of that famous Helen Reddy song - yet sometimes we fail to look at ourselves and see the humor in how we react to controversy.

BTW, that's as much as I would like to say about this. It's the exact reason why I'm apolitical - I don't believe in absolute uprighteousness in most of any issues.

According to Plato's Apology, Socrates' life as the "gadfly" of Athens began when his friend Chaerephon asked the oracle at Delphi if anyone was wiser than Socrates; the Oracle responded that none was wiser. Socrates believed that what the Oracle had said was a riddle, because he believed that he possessed no wisdom whatsoever. He proceeded to test the riddle through approaching men who were considered to be wise by the people of Athens such as statesmen, poets, and artisans in order to refute the pronouncement of the Oracle. Questioning them, Socrates came to the conclusion that while each man thought he knew a great deal and was very wise, they in fact knew very little and were not really wise at all. Socrates realized that the Oracle was correct in that while so-called wise men thought themselves wise and yet were not, he himself knew he was not wise at all which, paradoxically, made him the wiser one since he was the only person aware of his own ignorance. Socrates' paradoxical wisdom made the prominent Athenians he publicly questioned look foolish, turning them against him and leading to accusations of wrongdoing. Socrates defended his role as a gadfly until the end: at his trial, when Socrates is asked to propose his own punishment, he suggests a wage paid by the government instead, to finance the time he spends as Athens' benefactor.[7] He was nevertheless found guilty of corrupting the minds of the youth of Athens and sentenced to death by drinking a mixture containing poison hemlock.

...

Knowledge

Socrates often said that his wisdom was limited to an awareness of his own ignorance. Socrates believed that wrongdoing was a consequence of ignorance and that those who did wrong knew no better. The one thing Socrates consistently claimed to have knowledge of was "the art of love" which he connected with the concept of "the love of wisdom", i.e., philosophy. He never actually claimed to be wise, only to understand the path that a lover of wisdom must take in pursuing it. It is debatable whether Socrates believed that humans (as opposed to gods like Apollo) could actually become wise. On the one hand, he drew a clear line between human ignorance and ideal knowledge; on the other, Plato's Symposium (Diotima's Speech) and Republic (Allegory of the Cave) describe a method for ascending to wisdom.

Wenjer Leuschel wrote:

I like this piece of Bertolt Brecht. He knew what was the point.

Wenjer Leuschel wrote:

Since I am more influenced by European thinkings, especially German, I might have quoted to many German thinkers. But I hope European thinkers would interest you and other Chinese forum participants, too. There is a special one I would like to introduce: Albert Schweitzer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Schweitzer

His "Ethics of Reverence for Life" is to be found in the following link. I hope it won't be too boring for you.

http://www1.chapman.edu/schweitzer/sch.reading4.html

Wenjer Leuschel wrote:
In our present case, Steve, I don't see any pieces to pick up at all. I am still in a whole piece and I guess Chance is also in whole. However, I hope that there isn't anyone broken into pieces, for my purpose has never been to break. The forum belongs to us all, not just to a small group of "veterans." My purpose may be to set a good example of being uprighteous in opinions, nothing more.

THE DEVIL. As far as I went, yes. But I will now go further, and confess to you that men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell; and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations of the world between these two extremes. An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving. But when you are as old as I am; when you have a thousand times wearied of heaven, like myself and the Commander, and a thousand times wearied of hell, as you are wearied now, you will no longer imagine that every swing from heaven to hell is an emancipation, every swing from hell to heaven an evolution. Where you now see reform, progress, fulfilment of upward tendency, continual ascent by Man on the stepping stones of his dead selves to higher things, you will see nothing but an infinite comedy of illusion. You will discover the profound truth of the saying of my friend Koheleth, that there is nothing new under the sun. Vanitas vanitatum—
DON JUAN [out of all patience] By Heaven, this is worse than your cant about love and beauty. Clever dolt that you are, is a man no better than a worm, or a dog than a wolf, because he gets tired of everything? Shall he give up eating because he destroys his appetite in the act of gratifying it? Is a field idle when it is fallow? Can the Commander expend his hellish energy here without accumulating heavenly energy for his next term of blessedness? Granted that the great Life Force has hit on the device of the clock-maker’s pendulum, and uses the earth for its bob; that the history of each oscillation, which seems so novel to us the actors, is but the history of the last oscillation repeated; nay more, that in the unthinkable infinitude of time the sun throws off the earth and catches it again a thousand times as a circus rider throws up a ball, and that the total of all our epochs is but the moments between the toss and the catch, has the colossal mechanism no purpose?
THE DEVIL. None, my friend. You think, because you have a purpose, Nature must have one. You might as well expect it to have fingers and toes because you have them.
DON JUAN. But I should not have them if they served no purpose. And I, my friend am as much a part of Nature as my own finger is a part of me. If my finger is the organ by which I grasp the sword and the mandoline, my brain is the organ by which Nature strives to understand itself. My dog’s brain serves only my dog’s purposes; but my own brain labors at a knowledge which does nothing for me personally but make my body bitter to me and my decay and death a calamity. Were I not possessed with a purpose beyond my own I had better be a ploughman than a philosopher; for the ploughman lives as long as the philosopher, eats more, sleeps better, and rejoices in the wife of his bosom with less misgiving. This is because the philosopher is in the grip of the Life Force. This Life Force says to him “I have done a thousand wonderful things unconsciously by merely willing to live and following the line of least resistance: now I want to know myself and my destination, and choose my path; so I have made a special brain—a philosopher’s brain—to grasp this knowledge for me as the husbandman’s hand grasps the plough for me. And this” says the Life Force to the philosopher “must thou strive to do for me until thou diest, when I will make another brain and another philosopher to carry on the work.”
THE DEVIL. What is the use of knowing?
DON JUAN. Why, to be able to choose the line of greatest advantage instead of yielding in the direction of the least resistance. Does a ship sail to its destination no better than a log drifts nowhither? The philosopher is Nature’s pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.
THE DEVIL. On the rocks, most likely.
DON JUAN. Pooh! which ship goes oftenest on the rocks or to the bottom? the drifting ship or the ship with a pilot on board?
THE DEVIL. Well, well, go your way, Señor Don Juan. I prefer to be my own master and not the tool of any blundering universal force. I know that beauty is good to look at; that music is good to hear; that love is good to feel; and that they are all good to think about and talk about. I know that to be well exercised in these sensations, emotions, and studies is to be a refined and cultivated being. Whatever they may say of me in churches on earth, I know that it is universally admitted in good society that the Prince of Darkness is a gentleman; and that is enough for me. As to your Life Force, which you think irresistible, it is the most resistible thing in the world for a person of any character. But if you are naturally vulgar and credulous, as all reformers are, it will thrust you first into religion, where you will sprinkle water on babies to save their souls from me; then it will drive you from religion into science, where you will snatch the babies from the water sprinkling and inoculate them with disease to save them from catching it accidentally; then you will take to politics, where you will become the catspaw of corrupt functionaries and the henchman of ambitious humbugs; and the end will be despair and decrepitude, broken nerve and shattered hopes, vain regrets for that worst and silliest of wastes and sacrifices, the waste and sacrifice of the power of enjoyment: in a word, the punishment of the fool who pursues the better before he has secured the good.
DON JUAN. But at least I shall not be bored. The service of the Life Force has that advantage, at all events. So fare you well, Señor Satan.

wherestip wrote:

I mentioned this play before. He's gotta be a renowned socialist thinker. Here's a glimpse at how he satirically debated from both sides the justification of all these "causes" men live and die for.

Well, if you don't agree with the philosophy, at least the writing is something to appreciate ...

BTW, I myself am not as jaded as THE DEVIL. But it does make me think about one's purpose in life



[Edited at 2008-04-05 20:59]

wherestip wrote:

没事看看也增长知识. 我看公元前已提出的哲学问题 到今天尚且没有结论, 咱们在这里为这类问题争吵 搞得不和, 很不实际.

我同意自己保持自己的人生观, 同时尊重别人的观点. 完全没必要非要说服他人. 说教依我看是无用功, 弄不好反而产生摩擦.

Yueyin Sun wrote:

至于我们在海外的这些同仁，我们确实享有充分的言论自由。按理说，我们照样可以高唱“自由、民主、人权”的高调，而不必担心会有什么不良后果。但是，我们都是成年人，都有自己独立思考和判断的能力。我们不能昧着良心胡说八道。我们更没有必要盲从别人的指挥棒，参加别人的“大合唱”。不管谁如何谩骂、侮辱或施加压力都无法使我们屈服。事实已经证明，那样霸道的人若是当政，必然是变本加厉的独裁专政！

我们在美国享受民主、自由和繁荣，并非是坐享别人几百年奋斗所得的成果。我们以自己不懈的努力，也在为这个社会的健康发展作出自己应有的贡献。在俄亥俄州哥伦布市中心哥伦布铜像附近的一块纪念碑上刻着一句话，大意是“移民是使这个国家保持强大的根本所在”。这就是为什么美国始终向追求理想、幸福的外国人敞开大门的道理。据我所知，包括我在内的一些来自中国大陆的翻译同仁，都不是来美国寻求政治避难的。我们都是经过合法途径，以学者学生的身份来到美国的。我们在美国取得高学位后决定留在美国发展，那是我们的自由和权利。任何人没有资格干涉或吹毛求疵 ...

wherestip wrote:

Yueyin,

对, 留住美国是完全无可非议的. 美国有言论自由, 咱们在这儿习惯了, 对待各种问题自然是 怎么想就怎么说, 力求抱着实事求是的态度. Wenjer 可能对这里的情况还是不够了解 — 对政府的某些政策有不同的意见并不等于对国家不热爱, 且不说这次拉萨暴乱美国政府基本上没有公开表态.

我建议今后 大家虽然意见可能有时不同, 讨论还是要心平气和、互相尊重.

lai an wrote:

veterans; what kind of example, exactly; what's sauce for the goose
But you are one of the veterans, Wenjer, and you are rude to the newcomers. So, you know, ... I think you bring it on yourself. (nuf said, really)