(11-11-2023, 09:34 AM)astrolabeabelard Wrote: [ -> ]If the medievals were uniquely enlightened, that means that everything which we actually lost during the beginning of the Western medieval (i.e. most of Plato, most of Aristotle) and then regained during the end of the Western medieval (via e.g. Ficino, Aquinas) was totally unimportant for enlightenment.
I do not think that they were
uniquely enlightened, but rather enlightened in comparison to current-day modernity in their conception of life based on an acceptance of death. This can be strongly countered, as it can be said that this is 'anti-life'. After all, I did present the idea that perhaps they "wanted to die." The broader point, though, is that we see a spirit that lacks fear of death, similar to that of antiquity—though the similarities likely end there.
Here is one view: Platonism,
on its face, was important for (1) Christianity's victory over Roman society (the vessel of Greek enlightenment),
but also for (2) The Enlightenment's victory over Christianity (the vessel of
outward, facial Platonism). It was said:
Quote:"They, however, thought that the senses might lure them away from their own world, from the cold realm of 'ideas,' to some dangerous southern island where they feared that their philosophers virtues might melt away like snow in the sun. Having 'wax in one's ears' was then almost a condition of philosophizing; a real philosopher no longer listened to life insofar as life is music; he denied the music of life—it is an ancient philosopher's superstition that all music is sirens' music."
What is this? One remains a "real philosopher" while having "
denied the music of life"? It is apparently so. Thus, the assumption: Plato, like Ulysses, heard fully the music of life, but it was only an act of charity on his part to plug the ears of the others, lest order would be destroyed by the sounds,
the senses, that the multitude wouldn't be able to bear.... is this
the problem of tyranny and philosophy in the thought of Plato and Nietzsche?
(11-11-2023, 09:34 AM)astrolabeabelard Wrote: [ -> ]we immediately experienced the same kind of renaissance which Greece experienced after the end of her Dark Age [...] an upper-class interest in literature, discourse, and science. This is the same upper-class investment in academia which has produced the bourgeois-oriented academic culture which America suffers right now. This bourgeois-oriented academic culture is incredibly influential over anyone who wants to know anything.
Post-Enlightenment modernity, for all it's talk of secularism, is really nothing more than a gross contortion and bending of very particularly selected Christian concepts. Behold, the fruits of enlightened secularism... Secular Christianity, the desecration that serves as the New Religion of the modern state... our 'Judeo-Christian' values. The Holocaust, slavery and Jim Crow... these are literal appropriations of the Passion.
Here is the problem with your Jacobinised (I don't attack to the person, you've admitted such yourself) comparison: the "upper-class" is not an upper-class, the "bourgeois" is not even bourgeois. These "class" distinctions don't exist, not really. For all that can be asserted to prove the deleterious effects that Christianity had on what we may call "literature, discourse, and science", it can just as easily be said that the "renaissance" which sprang from post-Enlightenment modernity (today) is
more 'Christian' than Christianity ever was, and has done
more to create the "academic culture which America suffers right now" than Christianity, historically, ever did. This can be said with as much certainty as the sun rising tomorrow, because what is modern academic culture if not 'equality' and 'charity to the poor' (i.e., 'virtuous' pity)? The classrooms of today's academy are filled with yesterday's serfs, who, for all intents and purposes, remain serfs in all but their falsely derived credentials. And "anyone who wants to know anything" understands this, and knows that such "bourgeois-oriented academic culture is [
NOT] incredibly influential" over them, but rather is the real destruction of truth and knowledge.
A friend said recently, "whether [Christianity] will be remembered as something else is up to the genuinely religious friends I have to ponder. It may have something to do with how these religions get
filtered when you have a democratic mass."