| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: call, and that he would be happy, if any man ever was, when he arrived
there, and therefore I did not pity him as might have seemed natural at
such an hour. But I had not the pleasure which I usually feel in
philosophical discourse (for philosophy was the theme of which we spoke).
I was pleased, but in the pleasure there was also a strange admixture of
pain; for I reflected that he was soon to die, and this double feeling was
shared by us all; we were laughing and weeping by turns, especially the
excitable Apollodorus--you know the sort of man?
ECHECRATES: Yes.
PHAEDO: He was quite beside himself; and I and all of us were greatly
moved.
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Euthydemus by Plato: I was thrown into consternation at this.
Taking advantage of my consternation he added: You wish him no longer to
be what he is, which can only mean that you wish him to perish. Pretty
lovers and friends they must be who want their favourite not to be, or to
perish!
When Ctesippus heard this he got very angry (as a lover well might) and
said: Stranger of Thurii--if politeness would allow me I should say, A
plague upon you! What can make you tell such a lie about me and the
others, which I hardly like to repeat, as that I wish Cleinias to perish?
Euthydemus replied: And do you think, Ctesippus, that it is possible to
tell a lie?
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche: modern ideas in this mode of looking at things, a disbelief in
all that has been constructed yesterday and today; there is
perhaps some slight admixture of satiety and scorn, which can no
longer endure the BRIC-A-BRAC of ideas of the most varied origin,
such as so-called Positivism at present throws on the market; a
disgust of the more refined taste at the village-fair motleyness
and patchiness of all these reality-philosophasters, in whom
there is nothing either new or true, except this motleyness.
Therein it seems to me that we should agree with those skeptical
anti-realists and knowledge-microscopists of the present day;
their instinct, which repels them from MODERN reality, is
Beyond Good and Evil |
