2. The Ancient Greeks saw beauty and morality as fused. Socrates (Patrick jokingly alludes to this elsewhere) was famously ugly, but he stressed moral beauty. He was, in fact, the first person to say it’s your “inner beauty” that counts.
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3. This was part of a pattern whereby Socrates & Plato (or Plato if Socrates is just his sock puppet) split everything: Platonic forms meant there was something “beyond” us, mind & body are separate, & morally it was our inner nature that counted.
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4. This split led to the denigration of the body, and it inspired the Christians, Gnostics, and Stoics (only the Epicurians were unaffected). Indeed, there’s a sense in which the ressentiment of Christianity Nietzsche speaks of required Socrates. It’s built on Socrates.
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5. And so we have people scourging their bodies in different sects. The body is evil. The “split thinking” of Socrates carried right through to Descartes (mind/body), Kant (noumena/phenom), and beyond. This is partly why we’re still perplexed by conciousness today.
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6. Patrick notes that now is the time (1888) to find a way out, and that we must reconnect with the holism of Heraclitus (finding the wisdom of the body), which is also similar to Leibniz’s view of the monad—a universe reasonably organised.
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7. You can see this tendency in the late Victorian and Edwardian trend towards muscular Christianity and physical exercise. The Victorians, some of them, knew that we needed to get back to the body, and away from split thinking and denigration of the body.
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8. This also tallied with developments in science, such as Darwinism, which saw the world in terms of interconnected struggles rooted in biology. In our time, the philosopher David Stove contributed to this view by attacking the irrational nature of split thinking.
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9. He name this error “the gem” or “the worst argument in the world”. He saw the logical fallacy in Platonic forms, Kant’s noumena world, the labour theory of value, Hegelian Idealism and so on. These all added an “extra layer” to reality that isn’t there.
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10. So, in conclusion, we could see the last 2,400 years since Socrates as a huge dead end or error in our thought, because his thought infected Christianity, Stoicism, and other thoughts systems and made us split ourselves from the natural whole—man & nature undivided.
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11. This also chimes with Malthusian, Darwinian, and othe genetic thought that suggests the process of civilisation as it has proceeded over the last. 2,400 years is unsustainable. It is only with a disenchanted science that we can return to the whole.
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12. And this whole is instinctive. The Heraclitan (as Heidegger suggests also) listens to the songs that nature is singing. This is how he understands her, not like a body on the chopping block (Baconian science). Rather, he lets nature speak to him.
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