Plato : (c. 428-348/347 BC), 2nd of the Great Trio of ancient Greeks – Socrates, Plato, & Aristotle – who laid the philosophical foundations of Western culture & system of philosophy that was ethical yet basically rationalistic. Plato was a pupil & friend of Socrates. In Athens he founded a school in the grove of Academus where he taught mathematics & philosophy until his death. Plato’s greatest work is contained in his ‘Dialogues’. [“Irish Plato” in SABCL 3:3, refers to Oscar Wilde].
... the originality of Plato. Now the answer is to a straight query about India. The query, inspired by a passage from Plato on the Idea of the Good and on God the Creator, wondered whether Plato had obtained his thoughts from Indian books. Sri Aurobindo said: "Not from Indian books — something of the philosophy of India got through by means of Pythagoras and others. But I think Plato got most of these... Kant or Hegel: even Plato does not fit into the term, though Pythagoras has a good claim to it. Hegel and other transcendental or idealistic philosophers were great intellects, not mystics."! Yes, Pythagoras, unlike Plato, is unchallengeable; actually elsewhere Sri Aurobindo has gone so far as to say: "Pythagoras was one of the greatest of the mystics." 5 But, although Plato is different, we should... possible also to "one like Shelley or like Plato for instance" who has a developed mental Page 11 personality centred around the psychic individual. 9 Here Plato represents the philosopher, just as Shelley represents the poet, who has lived intensely in the light of his inmost being which is ever open to divine influences. The fact that Plato, though acutely intellectual, yet reflects ...
... contrast to Plato whose mind was not only a light but also a fire, one in which intellect was married to imagination and made the philosopher a poet even if he did not fulfil the poetic element in him through any substantial body of verse proper. Chesterton has wittily hit off the difference between Plato and Aristotle and summed up the qualities of their thinking: Said Aristotle unto Plato: "Have... "Have another hot potato. " Said Plato unto Aristotle: "No, thank you, I prefer the bottle." I suppose Aristotle had finished talking to Plato and was offering to continue. He must have asked Plato's permission because Plato was his teacher. But one hot potato of sober and earth-heavy intellectualism from the pupil was enough for the teacher who loved a soar, with all the being a lightness... brain added a bit of warmth and saved him from freezing to death by his own intellectualism: it could not change his potato to anything else but could make it hot. Or, looking at Plato, he must have believed that when Plato got too fiery with his famous allegories and myths and metaphors illustrating philosophical doctrines the brain manufactured an amount of ice and spread it in Plato's body in order ...
... refer to my intense liking for Plato and observe that your favourite is Socrates rather than Plato. May I point out that I spoke of Plato's Socratic dialogues? It is the Plato permeated by and suffused with Socrates that has been gloriously close to my mind and heart ever since my school-days. There is also the question: "Can we separate Socrates from the young Plato?" Do we know any substantial Socrates... and ear of Plato does he come Page 228 alive to us down the ages as the ideal philosopher and the archetypal moralist? We have to speak of the Platonic Socrates no less than of the Socratic Plato. Thus, in the final perspective, you and I may be seen as standing together and when you by way of praise compare my writings to Plato's you really mean the writings of Plato as the door... "Soul of Song" the last Line: Haloed with hush he enters, corona'd with calm he goes. Luckily for the world, unlike Socrates he has communicated with it independently of whatever Plato may mediate his message. I say "luckily" not only because direct interaction is possible but also because nothing can transmit the magnificence and mercy of his light as does his own Word. What we can ...
... soul as well as a resultant [earthly] future. 88 And if, despite the evidence, we persist in thinking that man has Page 88 only one life at his disposal, we encounter an absurdity: Plato and the Hottentot, the fortunate child of saints or Rishis 89 and the born and trained criminal plunged from beginning to end in the lowest fetid corruption of a great modern city have equally to... vitalistic European occupied with dynamic production and vital pleasure or in an Asiatic peasant engrossed in the ignorant round of the domestic and economic life. We may reasonably doubt whether even a Plato or a Shankara marks the crown and therefore the end of the outflowering of the spirit in man. We are apt to suppose that these may be the limit, because these and others like them seem to us the highest... lower part would never have become integrated into our higher ones. Perhaps it was the same collective process that brought about Athens' fall, so that some old barbarians, too, might be exposed to Plato. The integral yoga does not follow a straight line rising higher and higher out of sight, toward a smaller and smaller point, but, according to Sri Aurobindo, a spiral that slowly and methodically ...
... life's vicissitudes, through empathy with all who in the past or in the present have longed and looked for the "Secret Splendour". The books that meant much to you were my own boon companions - Plato and Marcus Aurelius and Spinoza, Wordsworth and Shelley and Swinburne and many others. I studied Roman Catholic thought with great interest, starting with St. Augustine and ending with Chesterton's... (Image Books, New York, 1979), p. 528. Page 158 Christian religion and much less as inevitably true. Miracle-avid believers in an epoch when not only were human figures (e.g., Plato, Apollonius of Tyana, Augustus Caesar, the last two Jesus' own contempories) said to have been virginally born but also Mother-Goddesses were rife - such believers were most likely to support the... years one day I felt an opening in my mind and suddenly seemed to see a way out of the fog that had haunted every thinker I had consulted from the time of Kapila to our own, from the antiquity of Plato and Aristotle to the modernity of Maritain and Sartre. I wrote down what seemed to open up before me and sent my short compressed essay to Sri Aurobindo. It was called: "Freewill in Sri Aurobindo's ...
... theology we meet in the Timaeus and Laws. 8. Techne. 9. Arete. Page 129 NOTES Biography of Plato Plato was born c. 427 BC to one of the most distinguished families of the Athenian ruling aristocracy. Through his father Plato was supposed to be descended from Poseidon, the god of the sea and horses. Through his mother he was descended from Solon, the wise-man... teacher and tyrant, but court intrigues and quarrels intervened and Plato returned to Athens and never again directly intervened in political affairs. Plato now wrote the so-called later dialogues, He continued to teach at the Academy and to play a leading role in the research "problems". He died in 346 BC. Plato wrote over twenty philosophical dialogues and his literary activity extended... One of the most famous allegories in the history of human thought is found in the seventh book of Plato s Republic: "The Simile of the Cave ". The main purpose of this allegory is to describe the ignorant state of humanity and its possible passage to a state of knowledge. According to Plato, most men are like prisoners tied in a cave since their childhood and able to see in only one direction ...
... on the Phaedo by Benjamin Jowett 54. Cebes of Thebes, was a disciple of Socrates and Philolaus. He is one of the speakers in the Phaedo of Plato. Plato depicts him as a sincere seeker of truth and virtue. 55. Meno is a dialogue written by Plato, which has two central characters Socrates and Meno. The basic aim of this dialogue is to expound the theory that knowledge is innate and carried... and References Plato, The Seventh Letter. Silenus - In Greek mythology, Silenus was considered to be the tutor and faithful companion of the wine-god Dionysus'. He was bald, and fat with thick lips and a squat nose, and had the legs of a human and when intoxicated was said to possess special knowledge and the powers of prophesy. Plato, Symposium Aristotle... Aristotle (384-322 BC), was a greek philosopher, a student of Plato and a teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on diverse subjects including physics, metaphysics, poetry, biology and zoology, logic, rhetoric, politics, government and ethics.Along with Socrates and Plato, he is considered to be one of the most influential of the ancient Greek philosophers. The Persian king Darius was defeated ...
... Apollo, the most widely revered of the Greeks Gods. 2. Plato, ibid, p. 63. . 3. Plato, ibid, p. 73. 4. Plato, ibid, p. 60. Page 62 In The School of Athens by the Italian painter Raphael (1483-1520), one can see Socrates on the right side, reclining on the stairs. The two tall figures at the back are Plato and Aristotle. As expected, his accusers, who would... subjects ranging from reflections on nature to inquiries into politics; but he never set himself up as a teacher. A number of these conversations were recorded by Plato who, after 1. Plato, The Seventh Letter, 324 e . 2. Plato, Complete Works. Xenophon, Memorabilia 3. In ancient Greece, the "Gymnasion" was a public school for physical education for the adult male population. The... condemned. He refuses a possibility of escape and is executed 347 BC Death of Plato Suggestions for further reading Durant,Will. The Story of Civilization: part II, The Life of Greece. New York: Simon &Schuster, 1966 Hare, R.M. Plato. Oxford University Press, 1982. Plato, The Last Days of Socrates. Translates by Hugh Tredennick. Penguin Books, 1961. Russell ...
... India, Persia and the former Indian colonies in the Far-East, but in philosophy the old ideas still reign. "From Thales to Bergson" is their idea of the History of Philosophy. 2 May 1936 Plato Plato says [according to Weber, p. 86]: "The world of sense is the copy of the world of Ideas, and conversely, the world of ideas resembles its image; it forms a hierarchy.... In our visible world there... the One—that is the Overmind realisation. Plato had these ideas not as realisations but as intuitions which he expressed in his own mental form. There are many such thoughts in Plato's philosophy. Did he get them from Indian books? Not from Indian books—something of the philosophy of India got through by means of Pythagoras and others. But I think Plato got most of these things from intuition... imagination of the Theosophists. Is there any truth in the belief? Atlantis is not an imagination. Plato heard of this submerged continent from Egyptian sources and geologists are also agreed that such a submersion was one of the great facts of earth history. 22 June 1936 In his book Plato, Taylor says that "the standing Academic definition of 'man' " is "Soul using a body" and that "the soul ...
... Socrates and Plato distinguished between opinions on the one hand, and knowledge, on the other. They point out that whereas opinions can be formed on the basis of questionable sense experiences, knowledge which consists of pure ideas is independent of sense-experience and can be gained by some kind of experience which is akin to remembrance. In other words, according to Socrates and Plato, knowledge... knowledge is 'remembered' by a process of uncovering. Again, according to Socrates and Plato, virtue is knowledge. Therefore, what is true of knowledge is also true of virtue. Just as knowledge cannot be taught but can only be uncovered, even so virtue, too, cannot be taught but can only be uncovered. But here, again, it does not mean that there is no such thing as teaching or that the teacher has... within him an innate drive ________________________________ 1 Professor Kireet Joshi, The Good Teacher and The Good Pupil, ed., Auroville Press, Auroville, 2005 (reprint), pp. 119-131. Plato, Protagoras and Meno, Harmondsworth, Penguine, 1985, pp.130-8. Page 200 towards some kind of goal seeking and fulfillment. In other words, even if we admit that external stimulation ...
... cluster of unchangeable ideas. Plato also held the view that behind our physical body is an inner soul or psyche, and that this soul has the knowledge of the realm of Ideas, which in physical existence is lost in forgetfulness. According to Plato, this forgotten knowledge can be recovered and the process of learning is actually a process of recollection. Plato also believed in the theory of rebirth... the West. Socrates and Plato should receive our utmost attention. It is for this reason that we have selected here an extremely instructive passage from Plato's dialogue Meno, which expounds the startling view that learning is recollection. The Platonic philosophy which developed out of the seminal thought of Socrates is centred on the theory of Ideas. According to Plato, Ideas have an objective... physical world are only partially real. Since sense perception is limited to the objects of the world, says Plato, it cannot seize upon Ideas. Yet these Ideas really exist and alone are the right objects of knowledge. We can have opinions about the objects of the physical world, but no knowledge; for, Plato argues, only that can be known which really exists. But if sense perception cannot give us knowledge ...
... condemned. He refuses a possibility of escape and is executed. 347 BC — Death of Plato. SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Durant, Will. The Story of Civilization: part II, The Life of Greece. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966 Hare, R.M. Plato. Oxford University Press, 1982. Plato, The Last Days of Socrates. Translated by Hugh Tredennick. Penguin Books, 1961. Russell... and guide. To such a man, indeed, no given action is good unless it is a manifestation of the integrating experience, which is also the true knowledge. In the Republic of Plato, when we read the myth of the den, 1 where Plato describes the way by which the Highest Good is realized, what we get is the symbolic description of spiritual experience. That realization is not intellectual apprehension... Socrates Plato among his students, Pompeian mosaic, National Museum, Naples Appendix I A Synoptic Essay on Socrates It (the true soul) is the concealed Witness and Control, the hidden Guide, the Daemon of Socrates, the inner light or inner voice of the mystic. — Sri Aurobindo O ne of the greatest of the ...
... Socrates Apology Plato I do not know what effect my accusers have had upon you, gentlemen, but for my own part I was almost carried away by them; their arguments were so convincing. On the other hand, scarcely a word of what they said was true. I was especially astonished at one of their many misrepresentations: I mean when they told you that you must... brother of Theodotus but Theodotus is dead, so he cannot appeal to his brother and Paralius here, the son of Demodocus; his brother was Theages. And here is Adimantus, the son of Ariston, whose brother Plato is over there; and Aeantodorus, whose brother Apollodorus is here on this side. I can name many more besides, some of whom Meletus most certainly ought to have produced as witness in the course of his... could pay. I suppose I could probably afford five pounds.38 I suggest a fine of that amount. Silver coin with image of Goddess Athena, 6th century BC One moment, gentlemen. Plato here, and Crito and Critobulus and Apollodorus, want me to propose 150 pounds, on their security. Very well, I agree to this sum, and you can rely upon these gentlemen for its payment. (The jury ...
... have written: "My dear brother's thoughts are like those of great sages - like Plato's thinkings." How did Plato of all "sages" swim into your ken? From my boyhood I have had a strong affinity with ancient Greece. Even in my school-days 1 delved with intense joy into the Socratic dialogues of Plato - the shorter ones: Crito, Phaedo, Apologia and Symposium. In the B.A. of Bombay University 1 had the... perfect world above throwing a shining shadow of itself below is a triumph of philosophical thought which Plato alone has achieved in some anticipation of Sri Aurobindo's vision. Am I taxing your mind too much? Forgive me for being carried away by my enthusiasm at your breathing the name of Plato. Indeed the very word "enthusiasm" has a Platonic air and should be appropriate in this context. I remember... possession by the divine enthousiasmos of which Plato has spoken." Literally the term means: "entry by a God." The poetic enthousiasmos blows often through Plato's prose. He was an artist in language and not only a fashioner of philosophy. There is the saying: "If Zeus were to speak in the language of mortals, it would be in the Greek of Plato." How particular he was for the right order of ...
... Vol. 7 The Poet and The Seer PLATO has exiled the poet from his Republic – in his ideal society there is no place for the poet – this is a stern condemnation. It is a matter of surprise to us, even of disbelief. Especially when we notice that there is no dearth of poetry in Plato himself – he was no dry-as-dust reasoner like his disciple Aristotle. In genius... beyond all that can be grasped by the daily experiences and perceptions of men, and that truth which is really the deepest and supreme in men. Plato's reasoning amounts to this in modern terms. What Plato says does not, on reflection, appear to be utterly worthless. The vital world is the source of the poet and all other artists who are creators. When the vital is stirred things spring up from it and... will remain quite irreproachable. He will be called a poet and seer even if he fails to see or show the real nature of the Ideal but can unfold the reality of the practical life. It is doubtful if Plato would recognise even a seer-poet of this type. He might say the. poet whose heart is pure or has been purified, whose consciousness has transcended the human consciousness, who has direct vision of ...
... on the religion, the social ideas, the daily life of the people, its immense dynamic Page 244 power on the mind and actions of Indian humanity. The Greek thinkers, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, the Stoics and Epicureans, had also this practical aim and dynamic force, but it acted only on the cultured few. That was because Greek philosophy, losing its ancient affiliation to the Mystics, separated... rationalism. But even without religion philosophy by itself can give us at least some light on the spiritual destiny of man, some hope of the infinite, some ideal perfection after which we can strive. Plato who was influenced by Heraclitus, tried to do this for us; his thought sought after God, tried to seize the ideal, had its hope of a perfect human society. We know how the Neo-platonists developed his... Science and Philosophy and how even his more superficial thoughts indicate later powerful tendencies of the occidental mind, how too some of his ideas influenced such profound and fruitful thinkers as Plato, the Stoics, the Neo-platonists. But in his defect also he is a forerunner; it illustrates the great deficiency of later European thought, such of it at least as has not been profoundly influenced by ...
... may be] exist at all in matter?” 3 “The enigmatic relation between conscious experience and the physical world, commonly known as the mind-body problem, has frustrated philosophers at least since Plato, and now stonewalls scientists in their attempt to construct a rigorous theory. … Evidence is mounting that the mind-body problem is surprisingly hard and requires revision of deeply held presuppositions... are deeply ingrained in the thought of the West. The very first time a graded world is mentioned seems to have been by Homer, who’s golden chain reaches from God’s throne down to the meanest worm. Plato, drawing his inspiration from Pythagoras, divided the human consciousness into three levels. The lowest was the desire soul, corresponding to the material and vegetative vital plane centered around... pattern of the universe; and as such it necessarily predetermined current ideas on many other matters.” 13 Lovejoy posits two principles as supports of his assertion, both originating with Plato and Aristotle, who, after all, had been Plato’s disciple for twenty years. The first is the principle of plenitude. The Greek reason could not imagine a gap, empty space or break in the cosmos. For ...
... Aristotle and Plato of the Hellenic era. According to Plato's view, all learning and knowing Page 52 are recollection and recognition of the immortal traces in the soul which humans carry in themselves right from the beginning of their life. Aristotle speaks of telos working at every level of reality—physical, biological, psychological and the beyond. But both Plato and Aristotle... Oldenberg. 6. Social Life in Ancient India, S. Chattopadhyaya. 7. Hymns of the Tamil Saivite Saints, Kingsbury and Phillips. 8. Studies in Tamil Literature and History, Dikshitar. 9.Plato (390s-350s BC) Complete Works, ed. J. Cooper, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1996. ( The Dialogues of most direct relevance are the Euthydemus, Protagoras, Meno, Gorgias, ...
... said. "I know. I understand because although I was brought up as a Marxist, I came to be greatly influenced by Socrates and Plato. It is the Page 14 "Dialogues" of Plato that gave the structure and substance to my brain. And, you know, both Socrates and Plato believed in Soul and in God." "Yes, but the Western thought developed on new lines. Christianity brought in new ideas and ...
... It is not enough to prove the existence of God or that God is Self-Existence or Pure Existence. God is not mere essence, and as Plato had said long ago, the Supreme Good exceeds essence in both power and dignity. The Vedanta has also pointed out long before Plato that God exceeds essence or Pure Existence Page 16 (Sat), both as Conscious Force (Cit), and Delight (Ananda). Sri Aurobindo... have occupied the best minds of the East and the West through long ages of history. In India, we find in the different systems of philosophy, these questions and their answers. In the West, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle have been witnessed as gripped by these questions. In the Medieval history of Europe, we find St. Thomas Aquinas proving existence of God by means of what is called the Ontological Argument ...
... totalitarianism, points to Aristotle's teacher, Plato (427-347 B.C.) as more properly its initiator. Though Plato was not unfamiliar with the Spirit, and in spite of Plotinus's 3n1 c. mystical reinterpretations of his ideas, the beginnings of a problematical relationship, symptomatic of mind's disorientation from Spirit, manifests itself in his works. Plato banishes the poet from his ideal Republic... n, a fixed hierarchy reveals itself extending from the world of Divine Ideas to its secondary and tertiary projections respectively in the world of Nature and in Nature's product, Man. Thus, to Plato, human creation, which is based on sensory reception and response to the world of Nature is "twiceremoved" from the world of Divine Ideas. Nature's expressions are copies from the world of Ideas,... heart's blood he achieves His transient house of the divine Idea, His figure of a Time-inn for the Unborn." This passage is preceded by one which introduces the idea of human 10 Plato, The Republic, X 11 Savitri, p.109. Page 242 creation being a copy of "heaven's art." The passage evokes the metallic brilliance of Byzantine sculpture, presenting, in ...
... having their origin in a supra-rational source. Nevertheless, the emphasis Plato placed on reason and on dialectical thought is undeniable, and later schools of rationalism have derived their sustenance from Plato. With Aristotle, who was a pupil of Plato, we have the first comprehensive statement of logic in the history of Western thought. The foundations he laid for logical thought remained unshaken... the mysteries, occultism and mysticism, and the age of reason. Plato made a distinction between perception and reason and argued that the true source of knowledge is reason. Reason, he taught, is made up of mate ideas analogous to the rays of the sun that radiate outward yet point back to the sun as the supreme source of light. In Plato s philosophy, innate ideas could be conceived as intuitions having ...
... Disciple : Plato says that each form has its own "Idea" – Page 289 that is, behind the form is a fixed Idea of the type a and it is that which persists while it is the individual that varies. The genus remains the same on the plane of Idea ? Sri Aurobindo : But where is the Idea ? Disciple : In Plato. (Laughter ) Disciple : I do not suppose Plato meant a mental... mental abstraction by his "Idea". It may mean "creative conception" Sri Aurobindo : Plato had very mathematical ideas about these things. If he meant by it the creative conception then there are several things in it. First of all, it is not a mental idea but what I call the Real-Idea : that is Idea with a Reality and a Power. Now, corresponding to every form there is what may be called the... it exists in matter. Everything exists first in consciousness and then in matter. Disciple : Could that be the Mahat-Brahma of which the Gita speaks ? Sri Aurobindo : I do not know if Plato had some dim intimation of the Supramental; but as his mind was mathematical he cast it into rigid rational and mental forms. That was the Greek mind. Disciple : The Buddhist have an idea that ...
... goddess who presides over this feast?" "Let Julian do it in his master's fashion" suggested Corydon. "I cannot tread beaten ground, Lionel." "Ah but Love is as bottomless as the sea." "Yet Plato was an excellent diver and brought up the richest pearls." Page 3 "Scarcely in one dive, Julian" said Powell. "In five, if I remember aright." "Yet Agathon's pearl was not flawless... amend it?" "I should but spoil it; but I could dive for a pearl of my own finding perhaps." "You shall have a rich meed of praise." "But, my dear critic" said Erinna "what ground was untrod by Plato?" "Agathon painted the loveliness of Love but not Love himself." "Describe him then you" said Julian and raised his hand for silence. Powell lay back a moment with his dark Welsh eyes fixed ...
... cycle of his transmigrations, nor would I wrong the author of the Hippias by ignoring his conclusions. Or why go to dead men for an example? The mould has not fallen on the musical lips of the Irish Plato nor is Dorian Gray forgotten on the hundred tongues of Rumour. Wilson —If our sense of right is really so prone to error, we should not rely upon it. Keshav —Then, to quote Mṛṣ Mountstuart,... as evil? Keshav —What the utilitarian may not justly do, it is beyond the limits of my intellect to discover. Had it not been for these premature civilizations, had it not been for the Athens of Plato, the Rome of the Caesars, the India of Vikramaditya, what would the world be now? It was premature, because barbarism was yet predominant in the world; and it is wholly due to our premature efflorescence ...
... for a detailed review of the arguments in favour of rebirth, and only one or two of the most relevant points should be borne in mind. Notable Westerners have believed in reincarnation: Pythagoras, Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, Leibniz, Benjamin Franklin, Goethe, Shelley, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Richard Wagner, Walt Whitman, Nietzsche, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Gauguin, Strindberg, Mondriaan, Jung, H. G.... are and are yet responsible for what we are, or at least for what we shall be hereafter, which is inevitably determined to a large extent by what we are originally. And we have only this one chance. Plato and the Hottentot, the fortunate child of saints or Rishis and the born and trained criminal plunged from beginning to end in the lowest fetid corruption of a great modern city have equally to create ...
... into fleeting lives And Godhead pent in the mire and the stone." Plato long ago intuited that on a high plane beyond ours there subsisted ideal forms, which he called archimages, of all things that are part of the flux of time. These things can merely approximate, distantly reflect, those idealities. That is because Plato made a distinction between the real world and Page 198 ...
... philosophical scripture of the West. In a certain sense Plotinus, whose source is Plato, is a river that is better than its source, for though the source is the crystalline mind, the river reflects something higher. For it is a paradoxical river and it does not flow down from the source but flows up from it. While Plato was a superb idealist, Plotinus was a master-mystic - though we have to guard against ...
... set about the race and now at last it is over. I have tried to do my best, but the Gibbon and the Panther in the names of the firms concerned are none too happily suggestive to a lifelong lover of Plato. Plato long ago spoke of the difficulty of dealing with the ape and the tiger in man. But let me not be led away by a poet's sensitivity to sound. An Aurobindonian poet should be mystic but not pessimistic ...
... technique and in it beauty, power, perfection, why not? The moralist, preacher, philosopher, social or political enthusiast is often doubled with an artist—as shining proofs and examples there are Plato and Shelley, to go no farther. Only, you can say of him on the basis of this theory that as a work of art his creation should be judged by its success of craftsman ship and not by its contents; it... whatever the writer touched became a thing of beauty—no matter Page 364 what its substance—or a perfect form and memorable. Bankim seemed to me to have achieved that in his own way as Plato in his or Cicero or Tacitus in theirs or in French literature, Voltaire, Flaubert or Anatole France. I could name others, but especially in French which is the greatest store-house of fine prose among ...
... The Later Heidegger, Routledge, London, 2000. Pillai, Vaiyapuri S., History of Tamil Language and Literature, New Century Book House, Madras, 1956. Plato , Timaeus, In E. Hamilton & H .Caims (eds). The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1961. Pradhan, A.P., The Buddha's System of Meditation, Sterling Publishers, N. Delhi, 1986. PAGE–149 ...
... Socrates The Death of Socrates by French painter Jean-Louis David (1748-1825) Phaedo Plato PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE: PHAEDO: who is the narrator of the Dialogue to Echecrates of Phlius. ECHECRATES SOCRATES APOLLODORUS SIMMIAS CEBES CRITO ATTENDANT OF THE PRISON SCENE: The Prison of Socrates PLACE OF... native Athenians there were, besides Apollodorus, Critobulus and his father Crito, Hermogenes, Epigenes, Aeschines, Antisthenes; likewise Ctesippus of the deme of Paeania, Menexenus, and some others; Plato, if I am not mistaken, was ill. ECHECRATES. Were there any strangers? PHAEDO. Yes, there were; Simmias the Theban, and Cebes, and Phaedondes; Euclid and Terpsion, who came from Megara. ...
... is sounder than the Ontological. It sets out from the world as given, and from the character of the world infers the existence of a God to explain it. This line of thought was at least suggested by Plato in the Timaeus, where he says that every created thing must be created by some cause. 9 It is also hinted at by Augustine: "And I beheld the other things below Thee, and I perceived that they neither... first blush seems so transparent, and the need for applying the human analogy of the designer and his material Page 36 so obvious. The Teleological Argument is consequently an old one; and Plato has in substance made use of it when he suggested that the principle that mind orders all things was the only one worthy of the world around us and the heavens above us. 11 The natural tendency of ...
... of India. 5. Rose was introduced into the country by the foreign invaders. 6. Alexander the Great was the first invader of India. 7. Alexander's Master was Aristotle; Aristotle's Master was Plato, and Plato learnt at the feet of Socrates. 8. Socrates had to drink hemlock and die. 9. Was Christ too offered hemlock before his crucifixion? 10. Christ is one of the three Avatars mentioned by Sri Aurobindo ...
... ourselves to the omniscient tutor, though we should hesitate to surrender our sons... 1 Like his master Plato, he took the child away from the contagion of his parents in the hope that the child, graduating from a saving education, would then befit to rear his own children. And like Plato, he "laid up in heaven a pattern" of a perfect state or method, so that "he who desires may behold it, and beholding ...
... more ample material than the Greeks had, but in the handling of them the present-day mind is not superior to the Greek mind with its more limited field and material. PURANI: Emerson writing about Plato, says that he has been the epitome of the European mind for the last two thousand years or more. SRI AUROBINDO: Yes, the European mind got everything from the Greeks and owes everything to them.... people would have killed them off for sport. You can't say man kills only when he is compelled. And yet we cannot declare man has made no progress. True, the philosopher today is not superior to Plato, but there are many who can philosophise today, also many more who can understand philosophy than in Plato's time. And throughout the course of history a small minority has been carrying the torch to ...
... the nature of the mind in general. ( After a pause ) In my own case so long as I was in the mind I couldn't understand philosophy at all. I tried to read Kant but couldn't read more than one page. Plato, of course, I read. But it was only when I went above the mind that I could understand philosophy and write philosophy. Ideas and thoughts began to flow in, visions and spiritual experience. Insight... SRI AUROBINDO: As I said, I read only one page of Kant and then gave it up, because it wouldn't go in: that is, it didn't become real to me. I was like Manilal grappling with The Life Divine . Plato I could read, as he was not merely metaphysical. Nietzsche also because of his powerful ideas. In Indian philosophy I read the Upanishads and the Gita, etc. They are, of course, mainly results of spiritual ...
... greatest men, not only of our age, but of all ages. His all-embracing, crystal clear and profound philosophy is assuredly a contribution to human thought, vision and progress which ranks with that of Plato, Kant, Bergson or Goethe... the findings of Sri Aurobindo which we have no means of verifying at our level of experience actually supply all the consistency which strikes us in the explanation given... said that Auroville was "going to be a laboratory of the evolving world city". Angelo Moretta wrote in Giornale d'ltalia that Auroville would "serve to translate into reality the teachings of the Plato of modern India, Aurobindo Ghosh". The Times of India described the simple ceremony as "history in the making, with all countries of the world participating in the first attempt ever to provide mankind ...
... overmind, 436-7; emergence of Gnostic being, 437ff; current evolutionary crisis, 438; Mind of light, 439; a Manifesto for the Future, 440; tributes, 440; synthesis of West & East, 440-41; compared with Plato, Plotinus & others, 441-2; with Heidegger, 442; with Gurdjieff, 442-3; with Teilhard de Chardin, 443ff; Supermind & Omega Point, 444; Sachidananda and Cosmic Christ, 445; Vedanta & Christianity, 445;... Phenomenon of Man, The, 443ff Phillips, Stephen, 32 Pillai, V.O. Chidambaram, 235, 266fn, 299, 300 Pinto "Udar", 579, 739 Piper, Raymond R, 20, 515 Plato, 48, 418, 441 Plotinus, 441 Poddar, Arabinda, 26fh Prasad, Narayan, 579 Prince of Edur, The, 119,120, 152,154-55 Prince of Mathura, The, 119 Prin ...
... in Sri Aurobindo's thought the "meeting of the East and the West", and he also makes interesting comparisons between Sri Aurobindo and Western thinkers like Plato, Plotinus, Hegel, Hartmann, Bergson, Whitehead and others. 64 Plato, like Sri Aurobindo, was a seer and a poet, but as a philosopher he was rather less consistent than the Indian thinker. Plotinus' double trinity is paralleled ...
... motherland, he soon came to understand the unique value of her civilization. "Look at the India of Vikramaditya," he wrote at the age of eighteen in The Harmony of Virtue, a dialogue in the manner of Plato between Keshav, a young Indian, and a few English students. "How gorgeous was her beauty! How Olympian the voices of her poets! How sensuous the pencil of her painters! How languidly voluptuous the... Indian boy replied: "What the utilitarian may not justly do, it is beyond the limits of my intellect to discover. Had it not been for these premature civilizations, had it not been for the Athens of Plato, the Rome of the Caesars, the India of Vikramaditya, what would the world be now? It was premature, because barbarism was yet predominant in the world; and it is wholly due to our premature efflorescence ...
... prominent Greeks to journey to the Land of the Two Kingdoms (Upper and Lower Egypt) – Solon, Pythagoras, Herodotus and Plato among them – and to stay there for long periods. The Egyptian influence is quite evident in their teachings and writings. For example, Egypt is where Plato got his story about Atlantis. Still more important: according to Herodotus, “the father of history”, most of the Greek gods... fresh intellectual and material activity and progress. “The first attempt was the filtering of Egyptian, Chaldean and Indian wisdom through the thought of the Greek philosophers from Pythagoras to Plato and the Neo-Platonists; the result was the brilliantly intellectual and unspiritual civilisation of Greece and Rome. But it prepared the way for the second attempt when Buddhism and Vaishnavism filtered ...
... a greater man than Christopher Columbus because he can reach America without trouble in a few days? Is a university graduate in philosophy greater than Plato because he can reason about problems and systems which had never even occurred to Plato? No, only humanity has acquired greater scientific power which any good navigator can use or a wider intellectual knowledge which anyone with a philosophic... rise beyond the human animal—all who have tried to follow the path of the Christ, the Buddha; stigmatise as folly Vedanta, Tantra, Yoga, the way of the Jinas, Christ himself and Buddha, Pythagoras, Plato, and any other pathfinder and seeker. On the other hand you write that in "the Avatar, the divinely-born Man, the real substance shines through the coating; the mark of the seal is there only for ...
... with so basic a connection with Shelley that whenever he writes about Shelley the tone is as if he were dealing with an essential part of himself. The connection is basic because in Shelley's mind Plato of the Symposium and Dante of the Paradiso interfused: he burned with a spiritual idealism of thought, the lips of his love carried a flame-kiss from the fragmentary human heart to the Absolute... Thompson's Buona Notte . In her last letter to Shelley, Jane Williams wrote: "Why Page 75 do you always talk of never enjoying moments like the past? Are you going to join your friend Plato, or do you expect I shall do so soon? Buona Notte." Shelley was drowned two days after; and in Thompson's verses the poet's spirit addresses Jane while his body is tossing on the waters of Spezzia:... is not long — The salt shall dry on them like the song. Now know'st thou that voice desolate, — Mourning ruined joy's estate, — Reached thee through a closing gate. 'Go'st thou to Plato?' Ah, girl, no! It is to Pluto that I go. Page 76 This is no imitation, Thompson catches the very essence of Shelley in one aspect, there is a free and living tone which makes ...
... School" gripped me with its story of your progress from modern materialism and scientism, products of a passing phase, surface glimmers of time's flux, to the Eternity which the masters of insight like Plato and Plotinus and the adepts of the imagination like Blake and Yeats have felt in the depths of their being on the one hand and on the other in the urge of the endless that is the secret carried by the... early twentieth century, it was a siren-song loud enough for one who from his earliest years had his mind steeped in the multifarious movement of modernism's self-expression in the English language. Plato was a voice I had heard from almost the beginning and his call to see the temporal as the changing image of the eternal was never quite forgotten, but it couldn't help becoming just a background music... music for Page 12 several years while the assertive self-confident shout of the empirical and analytic scientist sprang from various directions at me and swayed me in spite of Plato from antiquity and the great Romantic poets - Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats - from the near past. A new turn came only when I had on a few rare occasions the direct contact of India's still lived spirituality ...
... The political structure of Athens is in ruin. The plague seems also to have had a devastating effect on morals. Cleon becomes leader of the Democratic Party. 427 BC — Birth of Plato. 423 BC — Aristophanes's play Clouds, satirizing Socrates, is performed for the first time. 421 BC — Peace of Nicias is signed between Sparta and Athens... property could be seized and he could be executed. Socrates refuses to collaborate with the Oligarchs. Leon is arrested and put to death. Page 147 The School of Athens (detail): Plato andAristotle, fresco by Raphael (1483 - 1520), Rome 403 BC — Democracy is restored in a violent overthrow of the Rule of the Thirty. The Amnesty of Eucleides is passed ... — Establishment of Plato's School Academy' 367 BC — Aristotle, at age 17, enters Plato's Academy and becomes his most illustrious student. 347 BC —Death of Plato. 345 BC — The earliest recorded non-Platonic and non-Xenophonic reference to the trial of Socrates is made by Aeschines, an Athenian statesman and orator, in a prosecution. In ...
... the body and the soul, the physical and the spiritual, was foreign to the Greek — at least until the time of Socrates and Plato. To him there was simply the whole man. That the body is the tomb of the soul is indeed an idea which we meet in certain Greek mystery-religions, and Plato, with his doctrine of immortality, necessarily distinguished sharply between body and soul; but for all that, it is not... any context but the widest possible, namely as men. Their ideal was not a specifically knightly ideal, like Chivalry or Love: they called it arete — another typically Greek word. When we meet it in Plato we translate it "Virtue' and consequently miss all the flavour of it. 'Virtue', at least in modem English, is almost entirely a moral word; arete on the other hand is used indifferently in all the ...
... pupil an enormous wealth of information and some degree of intimacy with the teachings of Socrates2 and Plato. Alexander surely must have known that man could attain his highest well-being only by acquiring a knowledge _________ 1. Aristotle: 384-322 B.C., Greek philosopher; pupil of Plato, tutor of Alexander the Great, and founder of the Peripatetic school at Athens; author of works on... works influenced Muslim philosophy and science and medieval scholastic philosophy. 2. Socrates: 470-399 B.C., Athenian philosopher, whose beliefs are known only through the writings of his pupils Plato and Xenophon. He taught that virtue was based on knowledge, which was attained by a dialectical process that took into account many aspects of a stated hypothesis. He was indicted for impiety and corruption ...
... within the heart of man. They were solely interested in external expression through rhythm; cadence and harmony of a mental or rational idealism. There was Plato, no doubt, and the Platonists and esoterics (like Pythagoras), but Aristotle and not Plato came to be their teacher and legislator. The virtue of the Romans lay in virility and the spirit of conquest and effective organisation of life. And the... the royal editions or dignified versions of our frail human nature. Never do they reflect the Infinite. The gift of the West is to bring to the fore the speciality of the finite through the senses. Plato himself did not like very much the Homerian god who to him was only "human – all too human." The gift of the East on the other hand is to manifest the Infinite and the Truth beyond the grasp of the ...
... become a mystic-a Rishi in our language. For we must remember that Plato himself was really more of a poet than a philosopher. Very few among the great representative souls of humanity surpassed him in the true poetic afflatus. The poet and the mystic -Kavi and Rishi - are the same in our ancient lore. However these two, Plato and Aristotle, the mystic and the philosopher, the master and the disciple... mayic circle of art and philosophy. To have access to it, a lid overhead is to be broken through-rather, as it is said, it is that that breaks through of its own accord and reveals its identity. Plato would not tolerate the poets in his ideal society since they care too much for beauty and very little for the true and good. He wanted it all to be a kingdom of philosophers. I am afraid Plato's philosopher ...
... has become a mystic—a Rishi in our language. For we must remember that Plato himself was really more of a poet than a philosopher. Very few among the great representative souls of humanity surpassed him in the true poetic afflatus. The poet and the mystic—Kavi and Rishi—are the same in our ancient lore. However these two, Plato and Aristotle, the mystic and the philosopher, the master and the disciple... mayic circle of art and philosophy. To have access to it, a lid overhead is to be broken through—rather, as it is said, it is that that breaks through of its own accord and reveals its identity. Plato would not tolerate the poets in his ideal society since they care too much for beauty and very little for the true and good. He wanted it all to be a kingdom of philosophers. I am afraid Plato's philosopher ...
... is compelled. This is not to say that man has not made progress. It is true that the philosopher of to-day is not superior to Plato but there are many who can philosophise to-day. Also there are many more to-day who can understand philosophy than in the times of Plato. 16–5–1940 Sri Aurobindo : Even after the war is finished the Germans might present a difficulty of making it last... more ample material than the Greeks had; but in the handling of it the present-day mind is not superior to the Greek mind in its handling of its limited material. Disciple : Writing about Plato, Emerson says that he is the epitome of the European mind for the last 2000 years. Sri Aurobindo : It is true; – the European mind got every- thing and owes everything to the Greeks. Every ...
... and prior to the Particulars. And among these philosphers the most celebrated is Plato who, finding the Universal capable of being at all times and all places, regarded it as a reality unbound by space or time — a spaceless and timeless reality existing in some secret realm beyond the world of particular instances. To Plato, these instances are merely approximations to the Universal: the Universal is ...
... man's. It is embalmed for all time in the Dialogues of Plato. About the contents of these Dialogues it has been remarked that all subsequent philosophy is only a number of footnotes to what Socrates said. About their form, their style, it has been stated: "If Zeus were to speak in the language of mortals, he would do so in the Greek of Plato." To find another colossal talker we have to jump over ...
... a greater man than Christopher Columbus be cause he can reach America without trouble in a few days? Is a university graduate in philosophy greater than Plato because he can reason about problems and systems which had never even occurred to Plato? No, only humanity has acquired greater scientific power which any good navigator can use or a wider intellectual knowledge which anyone with a philosophic ...
... Karl Marx in his general socialist opinions, yet he too had a living sense of realities beyond the human and the earthly, as had the mediaeval master-craftsmen whom he admired. Nor exactly can Plato be enlisted on Marx's side on the strength of his socialist leanings. The highest goal of the Platonic life was oneness with the divine beauty, truth and goodness. Morality and social behaviour were... knit in Platonism with the mystical and metaphysical intuition. Though the Platonic artist was meant to be a social-motived creature, he could never serve society with a materialistic penchant. Plato wanted all art to have a keen Page 47 consciousness of the archetypal world he posited above the flux of phenomena. Whether these "visionaries" are right, or the pragmatic ...
... very well be insuperable. All difficulties in that realm can be insuperable: if this were not so, there would be a universal consensus of philosophers instead of Aristotle at loggerheads with Plato, Kant going hammer-and-tongs at the Schoolmen as well as the Empiricists, Bertrand Russell spitting fire at Bergson. The spectacle, though extremely fascinating, is a trifle ludicrous too. Seeing... is inspired by the intellect alone. If the philosopher's realisation is poor and fragmentary, the philosophy will seem narrow in spite of the intellect being gigantic. In some respects Plato, Spinoza and Hegel seem very narrow, they do not cover our full sense of things: the cause is that each of them elaborated in terms of the intellect a one-sided intuition of a limited set of ...
... few years back. A major theme in his talk with some of us for nearly two hours was that modern scientific theory needed to link up in its own way with the essentials of Plato. Before he left, he presented me with a copy of the only book of his which he had with him in English translation, The History of Nature, and using my Ashram... Page 258 which was Einstein's ideal, an affinity to Platonism: "More than twenty-three hundred years ago Plato declared, 'The true lover of knowledge is always striving after being.... He cannot rest at those multitudinous phenomena whose existence is appearance ...
... Chhandogya, Brihadaranyaka and others can uplift students to very great heights of aspirations and even of practice of the realisation of the Ultimate Reality. Profound passages from great thinkers like Plato can ignite in the students the fires of the inner soul. The stories such as those of relationship between Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda can convince that search for God is not submission to... of Nirvana; tapasya of Mahavira and his state of liberation; the question of Arjuna and the message he received from Sri Krishna to fight in the battle as an instrument of the Divine Will; search of Plato and his conclusion that the world can be set right only when kings become philosophers or philosophers become kings; realisations of Jesus that filled him with love that inspired him to give himself ...
... Comparative History of Ideas (1992, Motilal Banarsidas Publishers Pvt. Ltd.) pointed out that the earliest teleological argument or what Kant has called "physico-theological proof" was formulated by Plato (427-347 B. C. E.), who, in his Laws stated the proof of existence of gods as follows: "In the first place, the earth and the sun, and the stars and the universe, and the fair order of the seasons... "Methods of Vedantic Knowledge" and "Knowledge by Identity and Separative Knowledge".) Page 99 Notes and references 1. Laws, X. 886, Jowett's translation, The Dialogues of Plato (New York: Random House, 1937), vol. II, p. 628. 2.Sarikara defines the Brahman as follows: "Brahman is the omniscient and omnipotent cause of the origin, persistence and passing away of the world ...
... a greater man than Christopher Columbus because he can reach America without trouble in a few days? Is a university graduate in philosophy greater than Plato because he can reason about problems and systems which had never even occurred to Plato? No, only humanity has acquired greater scientific power which any good navigator can use or a wider intellectual knowledge which anyone with a philosophic ...
... And of the bravery of the pen-stroke And of a beauty all formulated.) Aristotle's preceptor, Plato, draws our attention to this side of poetry – the illusory charming power of poetry. No doubt, the world of the poet is charming. But it is equally the world of falsehood. Plato was religious to the marrow. The main cause of his looking upon the poets with considerable displeasure is that ...
... is full of sunshine. Page 143 Towarnicki: Ever since Plato, reason has attempted – because reason is a difficult business and this is not to question the goodwill or capacity of Western thinkers and others who have tried to solve the enigmas – to organize the universe hierarchically, in a mythic form with Plato, or in a theological form through Christianity. Everywhere we see the ...
... Nature that Nature may see heron image beside that of Art and realise her own deformity and imperfections. Page 84 It was Meredith who taught me that the epigram is the soul of style, and Plato who whispered that rhythm is its body. Words are the texture of the flesh and sentences the system of hard matter that gives it consistency: the texture of the flesh may be coarse or delicate, and as ...
... and makes it a passive instrument for utterance the full meaning of which the brain is unable at the moment to grasp. This is the divine mania and enthusiasm which the subtle spiritual discernment of Plato discovered to be the real meaning of what we call inspiration. And of this unattainable force the best lyrics of Rabindranath are full to overflowing. The article Shantiniketane Rabindranath by ...
... please, Now the inspired and curious hand decrees That waked quick life in these quiescent stones, To yield thee water pure. Thou lest the sleep Yon perilous boy unchain, more softly creep. PLATO ...
... experience and it carried it thus changed in form but hardly in substance over all Asia and westward towards Europe. The ideas of the Upanishads can be rediscovered in much of the thought of Pythagoras and Plato and form the profoundest part of Neo-platonism and Gnosticism with all their considerable consequences to the philosophical thinking of the West, and Sufism only repeats them in another religious language ...
... sacrifice, and without this the idea cannot belong to it. Page 79 "But these are pretty symbols, and few indeed can perceive the very precise reality which lies beneath them. "It needed a Plato to identify this thing which lives and vibrates, which moves and shines, travels and is propagated through time and space, which acts and wills and freely chooses its own time and place—in short, to ...
... development, that makes it easier to retain the developed mental or vital after death. But it is not absolutely necessary that the person should have been a Bhakta or a Jnani. One like Shelley or like Plato for instance could be said to have a developed mental being centred round the psychic - of the vital the same can hardly be said. Napoleon had a strong vital, but not one organised round the psychic ...
... nature. Mind also has its own types of perfection and its own absolutes. What intrusion of Overmind or Supermind could produce philosophies more perfect in themselves than the systems of Shankara or Plato or Plotinus or Spinoza or Hegel, poetry superior to Homer's, Shakespeare's, Dante's or Valmiki's, music more superb than the music of Beethoven or Bach, sculpture greater than the statues of Phidias ...
... Mythology has deformed the sense of man's early traditions by ignoring this important stage in human progress. It has founded its interpretation on a theory which saw nothing between the early savage and Plato or the Upanishads. It has supposed the early religions to have been founded on the wonder of barbarians waking up suddenly to the astonishing fact that such strange things as Dawn and Night and the ...
... development, that makes it easier to retain the developed mental or vital after death. But it is not absolutely necessary that the person should have been a Bhakta or a Jnani. One like Shelley or like Plato for instance could be said to have a developed mental being centred round the psychic—of the vital the same can hardly be said. Napoleon had a strong vital but not one organised round the psychic being ...
... after a veiled truth behind things and not of Page 9 an outward knowledge. The scientists and philosophers came afterwards; they were preceded by the mystics and often like Pythagoras and Plato were to some extent mystics themselves or drew many of their ideas from the mystics. In India philosophy grew out of the seeking of the mystics and retained and developed their spiritual aims and kept ...
... earthly but by developing it as the very nature of those terms. For it is not just a realm of perfection high above, like the Platonic Ideas: it is simultaneously the perfection hidden below in what Plato labelled as the flux of phenomena and in what Sri Aurobindo names the Inconscience, an apparent negation of everything divine, where yet the full divinity lies "involved" as a prelude to its being "evolved" ...
... their natures are compounded, but whence spring beauty, harmony and unbounded compassion, how out of a heartless and inexorable unconscious energy are born the heart of a Chaitanya, the intellect of a Plato and the exquisite sensibility of a Da Vinci? If we accept a Spirit as well as its secondary powers as concealed in the material shell, we can comprehend both sides of human nature no less than all those ...
... — Page 221 but he resolutely cut it out because it detained the reader too long from the real subject and precluded, rather than prepared for, the subsequent reference to Plato. His principle, as declared in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, was that the poet should never "interweave a foreign splendour of his own with that which the passion naturally suggests". Hence, on the ...
... had not meant otherwise for our nation, the Sannyasin would have become an extinct type, Yoga been classed among dead superstitions with witchcraft & alchemy and Vedanta sent the way of Pythagoras & Plato. Nor was the old Vaishya type needed by the new dispensation. The Indian mechanician, engineer, architect, artist, craftsman got notice of dismissal; for to develop the industrial life of the country ...
... mind's two chief helpers and misleaders, inference and conjecture. Our observation is bad because, prepossessed by the fixed idea of a brief & recent emergence from immemorial barbarism, imagining Plato to have blossomed in a few centuries out of a stock only a little more advanced than the South Sea islander, we refuse to seek in the records that still remain of a lost superior knowledge their natural ...
... fresh intellectual and material activity and progress. The first attempt was the filtering of Egyptian, Chaldean and Indian wisdom through the thought of the Greek philosophers from Pythagoras to Plato and the Neo-Platonists; the result was Page 141 the brilliantly intellectual and unspiritual civilisation of Greece and Rome. But it prepared the way for the second attempt when Buddhism ...
... are and are yet responsible for what we are,—or at least for what we shall be hereafter, which is inevitably determined to a large extent by what we are originally. And we have only this one chance. Plato and the Hottentot, the fortunate child of saints or Rishis and the born and trained criminal plunged from beginning to end in the lowest fetid corruption of a great modern city have equally to create ...
... with a pejorative and not a laudatory significance. To ignore the influence of the mystic thought and its methods of self-expression on the intellectual thinking of the Greeks from Pythagoras to Plato is to falsify the historical procession of the human mind. It was enveloped at first in the symbolic, intuitive, esoteric style and discipline of the Mystics,—Vedic and Vedantic seers, Orphic secret ...
... If we turn such a person into a supreme standard we shall overlook three-fourths of the valuable activity of the human consciousness. The reflective Page 13 adult could never be a Plato considering the obvious world of common sense as no ultimate reality but the poor image of an eternal and ideal Beauty that one can grasp only by a slow graded progression of both love and logic in ...
... increasingly realised in the cosmic. According to Whitehead, an actual event is the meeting point of a world of actualities, on the one side, and a world of ideal possibilities, on the other. Like Plato, Whitehead believes in eternal objects. He maintains that eternal objects in their interaction with creative passage issue in actuality, reckoning with space-time, limitation, causal push or drag of ...
... fulfilment of life. The objective here is not an individual achievement of divine realisation for the sake of the individual, but something to be gained for the earth consciousness as a whole. No Plato and no Marx ever thought of such a Republic based on a communism of the spirit. The Divine Materialism and Spiritual Communism advocated by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is such a revolutionary ...
... the East and the West and some of their principal languages, and he had imbibed the literature and the poetry of their epics and lyrics, Homer and Shelley as well as Vyasa and Kalidasa. He admired Plato greatly and classical Greek culture as a whole – “where living itself was an education” – witness his essay on Heraclitus and the four thousand hexameters of his unfinished epic Ilion. He had the ...
... play of electrons, of atoms and their resultant molecules, of cells, glands, chemical secretions and physiological processes manages by their activity on the nerves and brain of a Shakespeare or a Plato to produce or could be perhaps the dynamic occasion for the production of a Hamlet or a Symposium or a Republic ; but we fail to discover or appreciate how such material movements could have composed ...
... the pitiless eugenic customs and laws in ancient societies. The healthy, strong and harmoniously built (among the own people) have always been admired and favoured, as they still are in our own time. Plato made eugenics one of the pillars of his Republic . Infanticide of the physically defective and superfluous has always been a widespread practice, and in Sparta, the classical example of authoritarian ...
... ‘The first attempt [towards a spiritualization of the West by the East] was the filtering of Egyptian, Chaldean and Indian wisdom through the thought of the Greek philosophers from Pythagoras to Plato and the Neo-Platonists; the result was the brilliantly intellectual and unspiritual civilisation of Greece and Rome. But it prepared the way for the second attempt when Buddhism and Vaishnavism, filtered ...
... the limitations of the human mind. Spiritual insight is based on direct knowledge; mental activity remains inexorably restricted by the human constitution, as has been recognized by philosophers like Plato, Berkeley and Kant. Another example of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s “foreknowledge” is the very special nature and purpose of the Earth, as commented upon in the talk “2012 and 1956: Doomsday?” ...
... Egypt were determined by an exceptional presence of the occult. What is occult is by definition unknown. It is worthwhile pointing out that many of the prominent Greeks – Solon, Pythagoras, Herodotus, Plato – found the sources of their knowledge in Egypt (which means that European culture has its roots deeper than Greece, in the Kingdom of the Two Lands). 96 All of these Greeks were instructed by r ...
... that in history of culture both of East and West, there is none who can compare with or come near him in learning and scholarship. If only we take account of the vastness of his erudition, neither Plato nor Shankara nor both of them together approach him although at the initial stages of his life, he had to learn from both of them in depth and breadth, height and subtlety of knowledge not acquired ...
... is in discourse — and discourse alone - that intelligibility and truth alike can ultimately be found. The totality of intelligible discourse is the truth." 11 (ii) We know that to Plato language seemed to be a veil interposed between us and reality, which has to be torn away and cast aside if we would see reality face to face. And in our time Bergson has emphatically put forward the ...
... species. Again might not the shared subconscious mind, in man, provide some reality for Plato's world of ideas: shared ideas built up with the evolution of conceptional thought?²² Mention of Plato must make strict Darwinists shudder. But if something akin to Platonism serves science we cannot attend to their idiosyncratic sensibilities. And it is the theory of the "racial plan" that best explains ...
... studied Sri Aurobindo since 1964, realized that the author of Lives and I didn't agree on many (most) points. In my opinion, Sri Aurobindo is one of the great masters of all time. I consider him the Plato of the East and really of the world. Peter's book, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo , will one day land in the recycle bin. Sri Aurobindo's work will last forever. I think anyone deeply involved with ...
... demands a background such as preceded the schools of intellectual philosophy in Europe. Just as the "Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries prepared the rich soil of mentality out of which sprang Pythagoras and Plato", so too does the Rigveda represent "the starting point... for the later march of thought in India". 2 In fact, to Sri Aurobindo, the Orphic and Eleusianian mysteries are "the failing remnants" of ...
... tion 107 Proper background to the highly developed Upanishads required 107 A background like the Orphic and Eleusinian Mysteries before Pythagoras and Plato 107 The Rigveda belongs to the oldest Age of Mysteries with inner and outer meanings 107 The Upanishad's forms and symbols and the Brāhmaṇas' substance ...
... (1881-1955) Page 52 According to Whitehead, an actual event is the meeting point of a world of actualities, on the one side, and a world of ideal possibilities, on the other. Like Plato, Whitehead believes in eternal objects. He maintains that eternal objects in this interaction with creative passage issue in actuality, reckoning with space-time, limitation, causal push or drag ...
... time, he chooses one in preference to the other; but, in the long run, he seems to be looking for something else. The contemporary man may resolve to explore. He may turn to the dialogues of Plato, learn and endure the Cartesian doubt, and marvel at the magnificence of Spinoza and Leibnitz. He may witness the conflict between Galileo and God, sharpen his intellect on the whetstone of materialism ...
... universe if its constituents were not already in existence. The qualities which are said to emerge historically are ingredients into events from the Page 12 beginning. There are, as in Plato, eternal objects, and ingredience of these objects into events are the explanation of the historical becoming. He admits that at every step there is the emergence of what is genuinely new. Every event ...
... restore God-centred existence by re-discovering the values of great saints. *There is a need for identifying universal values. These values are to be promoted among students. *According to Plato, education of mind is prior to training of body. This is very relevant even in today's society. *There are two major aims of education. One is individual development and the other is collective ...
... in world history, Aristotle, was his teacher. It can safely be assumed that Aristotle gave his pupil an enormous wealth of information and some degree of intimacy with the teachings of Socrates and Plato. Alexander surely must have known that man could attain his highest well-being only by acquiring a knowledge that would lead him to do the right action voluntarily. This was the very teaching of Socrates: ...
... immortal image of a Teacher who shines by inherent light and whose rays of light shed their luster on the entire history of Western Thought, and indeed on the entire history of World-Thought. It is to Plato that we owe so much for leaving to humanity a living testimony of the one who knew how to live, why to live and even how to die, so that knowledge may triumph, heroism may always remain triumphant. ...
... enlightened by the proceedings which were very stimulating, he wondered why the educational situation has deteriorated particularly over the past 50 years. He referred to the great thinkers like Socrates, Plato, Diogenes, Rousseau, Bernard Shaw, Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo. He said that in spite of the great agreement among these thinkers, he wondered why their great ideas had ...
... transformation. Aids for the Development of Value-Consciousness and Experience The ideal and practice of brahmacharya (example of Dayananda Saraswati). Study of passages from Plato, particularly from the Apology and The Republic. Study of passages from the Upanishads, particularly Isha Upanishad Contemplation on the concept of "Universals". Topic for ...
... transformation. II. Aids for the Development of Value-Consciousness and Experience 1. The ideal and practice of brahmacharya (example of Dayananda Saraswati). 2. Study of passages from Plato, particularly from the Apology and The Republic. 3. Study of passages from the Upanishads, particularly Isha Upanishad. 4. Contemplation on the concept of "Universals". 5. Topic ...
... dogmas of the materialist. The gastric juice rises in my estimation. Genius is after all only a form of indigestion, a line of Shakespeare the apotheosis of a leg of mutton and the speculations of Plato an escape of diseased tissue arrested in the permanency of ink. What did I break my fast with this morning? Kippered herring? Bread? Marmalade? Tea? O kippered herring, art thou the material form of ...
... seas were to become converted, as they beheld with wonder and reverence this new epiphany. The Curtain Rises — "Living in a Fairy Tale" In the whole history of education, from the time of Plato to the present day, there is no episode more remarkable that the series of happenings which came tumbling into being, one after the other, during the next six months. Nothing that took place in Pestalozzi's ...
... right. I did not find so much of poetry in the book. Perhaps you have read it in the original Greek? Even in a good translation the poetry ought to come out to some extent. Plato was a great writer as well as a philosopher — no more perfect prose has been written by any man. In some of his books his prose carries in it the qualities of poetry and his thought has poetic ...
... Mazzini in place of King John or The Faerie Queene. One day I suddenly discovered that they had removed my Mazzini from the shelves of the library, and even the Life and Death of Socrates by Plato had disappeared. These books were no doubt supposed to turn the heads of our Indian students! About this time, I had been several times to my home town of Rungpore. There at the local Library, I ...
... puts life into it, light into it is your own inner light. All education, all culture means drawing this inner light to the front. Indeed the word 'education' literally means, 'to bring out.' Plato also pointed to the same truth when he said that education is remembrance. You remember what is imbedded or secreted within, you bring to the light, the light of your physical mind, what you have ...
... great legends that treasure the deepest memories of the human race. Seemingly irrational and unscientific, myths and symbols are attempts to open the gateways of Reality, and if a philosopher like Plato himself made pregnant use of them, it was because he realised that it is, "the only type of language in which the world of 'becoming' can be expressed at all." 34 Page 268 ...
... Mazzini in place of King John or The Faerie Queene. One day I suddenly discovered that they had removed my Mazzini from the shelves of the library, and even the Life and Death of Socrates by Plato had disappeared. These books were no doubt supposed to turn the heads of our Indian students! About this time, I had been several times to my home town Rungpore. There at the local Library, I ...
... Thus each species has a generic personality, a consciousness and an ideal or intrinsic form also: the individuals on the physical plane are its various incarnations, projections and formations. Old Plato was not so naive, as we of today are apt to believe, when he spoke of the real reality of general ideas. The attributes, qualities and functions of the generic personality are the source and pattern ...
... rather ages of the Gita, the Mahabharata, the Darshanas. It was the rational spirit that impelled and inspired the Buddhist consciousness and in Europe it had its heyday in the age of Socrates and Plato. Those were intellectual ages and the intellect was trying to find and explore its own domain in its full and free power and sovereignty. And the human language too, as a necessary corollary was remoulded ...
... . And the physical body is a visible formula, a graph of that magnitude, an image— —a faithful image or shadow thrown upon the wall of this cave of earthly life,—of a reality above and outside, as Plato conceived the phenomenon. And the human appearance too is an extension or projection of an inner and essential reality which brings out or takes up that configuration when fronting the soul in its ...
... made between culture and civilisation; what the moderns have achieved is progress with regard to civilisation, Page 82 that is to say, the outer paraphernalia; but as regards culture a Plato, a Lao-tse, a Yajnavalkya are names to which we still bow down. One can answer, however, that even if in the last eight or ten thousand years which, they say, is the extent of the present cycle ...
... itself and the object is consciousness turned outside or going abroad. This is pre-eminently the Upanishadic position. In Europe, Kant holds a key position in this line: and on the whole, idealists from Plato to Bradley and Bosanquet can be said more or less to belong to this category. The second intermediate position views the subject as imbedded into the object, not the object into the subject as in the ...
... physical body is precisely to regain the memory of what has been forgotten. Spiritual discipline means at bottom this remembering, and all culture too means nothing more than that – that is also what Plato thought when he said that all knowledge, all true knowledge consists in reminiscence. Man, in his terrestrial body, although fallen, because shrouded and diverted from his central being of light ...
... And the physical body is a visible formula, a graph of that magnitude, an image – a faithful image or shadow thrown upon the wall of this cave of earthly life, – of a reality above and outside, as Plato conceived the phenomenon. And the human appearance too is an extension or projection of an inner and essential reality which brings out or takes up that configuration when fronting the soul in its ...
... "What is judgment?" and "What is not judgment?" They appear to be written for the purpose of using the mind, not for finding or arriving at the Truth. People speak of Platonism as a philosophy. Plato simply expresses what he thought and knew about life and men. You hear of Neoplatonisrn, etc., etc. I must say I got a shock when I read Adhar Das describing my philosophy as "Aurobindoism"! NIRODBARAN: ...
... Hellas is modern. There is a breath in the Ionian atmosphere, a breath of ozone, as it were, which wafts down to us, even into the air of today. Homer and Solon, Socrates and Aristotle, Pythagoras and Plato are still the presiding gods ruling over the human spirit that was born on Olympus and Ida. Human evolution took a decisive turn with the advent of the Hellenic culture and civilisation. All crises ...
... manner or another so that whatever the writer touched became a thing of beauty —no matter what its substance —or a perfect form and memorable. Bankim seemed to me to have achieved that in his own way as Plato in his or Cicero or Tacitus in theirs or in French Literature Voltaire, Flaubert or Anatole France. I could name many more, especially in French which is the greatest store-house of fine prose among ...
... What puts life into it, light into it is your own inner light. All education, all culture means drawing this inner light to the front. Indeed the word 'education' literally means, 'to bring out.' Plato also pointed to the same truth when he said that education is remembrance. You remember what is imbedded or secreted with in, you bring to the light, the light of your physical mind, what you have within ...
... Meditations, 224, 227-9, 231, 236, 247 NACHIKETAS, 340, 400 PARIS, 171, 173 Pashupati, 179 Pawamana Soma, 330 Pharaohs, the, 264 Pindar, 278n - Olympian Odes, 278n Plato, 201, 297 Poseidon, 383 Prahlad, 183 Pururavas, 390-1 RADHA, 134-5, 183, 297 Rakshasa, 250 Ramakrishna, 85n, 379 Russia, 196 SAHARA, 141, 313 Sankhya, 182, 186, 279 ...
... . He was not attracted to metaphysics, and he found the disputes of dialectical ratiocination too abstract, abstruse and generally inconclusive. Before coming to Baroda, he had read something of Plato, as well as Epictetus and the Lucretian statement of the ideas of Epicurus. Only such philosophical ideas as could be made dynamic for life interested him. Beyond a nodding acquaintance with the ...
... as if She, too, had to exhaust all the false paths of the Possible before knocking at the real door—perhaps in order to close the way once and for all to any resurgence of the old Atlanteans, whom Plato said had been swallowed up 9,000 years before him; perhaps, too, because She had to meet death once before wresting its secret from it. For Death, according to the ancient Scriptures, is the guardian ...
... and provide a unique example in international living". Professor Angelo Morretta wrote in Giornale d'Italia that Auroville would serve to translate into reality the ideals of Sri Aurobindo, the Plato of modern India. A Sri Lanka paper, the Sun, described Auroville as "a Town named Friendship". And so in their enthusiasm, or the ardour of their hope and expectations, others referred to Auroville ...
... difficulties with a searching empathy and a patient, dispassionate courage, and directed the powers of his soul or the supreme Force of the Spirit to effect its radical conversion and transfiguration. Even Plato who gave so great an importance to physical culture, speaks with an undisguised disparagement of the body which, in his view, is "the source of endless trouble to us by reason of the mere requirement ...
... Self. How will he now receive the praise and honour which used to gratify him so much? Has he any ambition for philosophical laurels left in him? What if he became as great as or even greater than Plato or Aristotle? What is the highest glory and achievement of the human life by the side of the luminous infinity and eternity of his Page 147 spiritual existence? Does he not now contain ...
... but they also connect with the higher spiritual thought of the civilised world, ancient and modern: The ideas of the Upanishads can be rediscovered in much of the thought of Pythagoras and Plato and form the profoundest part of Neo-Platonism and Gnosticism with all their considerable consequences to the philosophical thinking of the West, and Sufism only repeats them in another religious language ...
... have no means of access except when the divine part within seizes on the brain and makes it a passive instrument.... This is the divine mania and enthusiasm which the subtle spiritual discernment of Plato discovered to be the real meaning of what we call inspiration. And of this unattainable force the best lyrics of Rabindranath are full to overflowing." There spoke the poet Sri Aurobindo. "The ...
... powerful in this direction than Art and by the perfect expression of harmony insensibly steeps the man in it. And it is noticeable that England has hardly produced a single musician worth the name. Plato in his Republic has dwelt with extraordinary emphasis on the importance of music in education; as is the music to which a people is accustomed, so, he says in effect, is the character of that people ...
... Lines on Ireland . Dated 1896 in the manuscript and all printed editions. On a Satyr and Sleeping Love . Circa 1890–98. This is a translation of a Greek epigram attributed to Plato. A Rose of Women . Circa 1890–98. This is a translation of a Greek epigram by Meleager (first century B.C.) Saraswati with the Lotus . 1894 or later. Written after the death ...
... the dogmas of the materialist. The gastric juice rises in my estimation. Genius is after all only a form of indigestion, a line of Shakespeare the apotheosis of a leg of mutton and the peculations of Plato an escape of diseased tissue arrested in the permanency of ink. What did I break my fast with this morning? Kippered herring? bread? marmalade? tea? O kippered herring, art thou the material form of ...
... happened in the West, Greece leading the way. The old Page 204 knowledge was prolonged in a less inspired, less dynamic and more intellectual form by the Pythagoreans, by the Stoics, by Plato and the Neo-Platonists; but still in spite of them and in spite of the only half-illumined spiritual wave which swept over Europe from Asia in an ill-understood Christianity, the whole real trend of ...
... in these pages. But he denies that this familiarity and this subtlety are any proof of great mental capacity—"necessarily", he adds, I suppose in order to escape the charge of having suggested that Plato, Spinoza or Berkeley did not show a great mental capacity. Perhaps it is not "necessarily" such a proof; but it does show in one great order of questions, in one large and especially difficult range ...
... superior to what presently represents our highest intelligence are bound to be born in the coming decades. Geniuses? If one wishes, although the term refers to the notion of exceptional individuals—Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, Mozart, Napoleon, Einstein—in whom the collective unconscious culminates, without the individual members of the collective being able to equal them. In this case, on the other hand ...
... was made to bring out any doctrinal principle for its own sake, as was done by Shankara. In fact one wonders whether Jnaneshwar himself would have relished being a Spinoza or a Berkeley, nor even a Plato. Therefore such a discussion in the context of his phenomenological-experiential attainments will be our misplaced enthusiasm to call him a philosopher. It is through the poetry of his creation that ...
... all whether upon the surface of the earth or under it.” 23 “Our observation is bad because, prepossessed by the fixed idea of a brief and recent emergence from immemorial barbarism, imagining Plato to have blossomed in a few centuries out of a stock only a little more advanced than the South Sea islander, we refuse to seek in the records that still remain of a lost superior knowledge their natural ...
... truncated, has also been a part of other great wisdom traditions through the ages. “The ideas of the Upanishads, ” writes Sri Aurobindo, “can be rediscovered in much of the thought of Pythagoras and Plato and form the profounder part of Neoplatonism and Gnosticism with all their considerable consequences to the philosophical thinking of the West.” In his remarkable series of articles on the pre-Socratic ...
... × Id. , pp. 94 and 95. × To Plato “the Good” was synonymous with the Supreme Being. This adjective, with its ethical associations, applied to “God” has caused enormous confusion in all subsequent philosophy and theology referring to ...
... is considerable. Moreover, “their writings are positively loaded with references to the Vedas, the Upanishads, Taoism (Bohr made the yin-yang symbol part of his family crest), Buddhism, Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus, Berkeley, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Kant, virtually the entire pantheon of perennial philosophers.” 35 Consequently Wilber divides the 20th century physicists into two batches: the open-minded ...
... letters (the casual impromptus of an unknown man) leave me cold. Let them read the Gita, or, if they have a taste for these things in letter form, the 'Friendly Epistle' of Nagarjuna, thie letters of Plato, or even the Epistles of St. Paul which should afforad sufficient variety. The semi-private-wholly- public letter is a form that does not suit me. It resembles too much those cinema-cameras in front ...
... insight is the mysterious gold of this great bloom, an intense loveliness and a creative artistry are the bloomed greatness of this gold that is a mystery. The Wisdom on the summits of being has all Plato and Hegel in it, every analytic acuteness, every synthetic sweep those master-philosophers possessed, but it has also a direct Seerhood far beyond their brains: it is free from the obscurities of the ...
... pantheistic no less than alive to "unknown modes of being", the occult presences, and the transcendent glories of "God who is our home" and from whom the soul comes into terrestrial birth with what Plato calls "reminiscence". The actively imaginative sensing, however, is not confined to the mystical apprehension or to the poetic vision. In fact it occurs every time Nature is enjoyed as beautiful ...
... all tosses was so enjoyable that I sometimes thought I would adopt it even when my leg had recovered. Now I am out of plaster and practising again to be Plato's "featherless biped". Mention of Plato brings me to your awe-inspiring programme of learning. With the subjects you have mentioned I'm sure you will soon be fit to rattle off a series of articles of your own on subjects like Teilhard de ...
... in Philosophy. His Page xix "early preoccupation with religious studies" had inclined him towards "questions of metaphysics". He spent a great deal of his time over masters like Plato, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. He thought over profound issues like "good and evil, justice, charity and equanimity". While earlier he had "a reckless and wayward disposition", there was now a gentleness ...
... searching of human hearts and mortal fortunes. To deal with a Greek theme is not to be antiquated or obsolete. Much depends on the inner substance of the theme. When we open Herodotus or Thucydides, Plato or Aristotle, Aeschylus or Sophocles, we often light on "modern" figures, situations and attitudes, for the world-drama has many motifs common to its several acts. Besides, we must not forget that Sri ...
... 59-60 Persia, 74 Phillips, E.D., 74 Phoenicians, 16 Piggott, Stuart, 6, 54, 58, 59, 60, 68, 74 Pipru, 110, 111 Piśācha, 85, 116-17 Pischel, 103 Plato, 107 Potter, Simeon, 91 Pottery, 63-4, 68-9 Prakrit, 33 Pre-Harappān, 56, 59, 61, 63, 64, 65, 67, 101, 102 Prehistory and Protohistory of India and Parkistan, 2fn ...
... and the magical] are of an entirely different order, using different sources in a different way, and making their appeal to different sides of the human mind.” 376 Marcello Ficino, who translated Plato, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola were not only erudite classicists, they were also magicians, as was Giordano Bruno, who was burned for it at the stake in the year 1600. On the contrary, Desiderius ...
... as a whole they formed the school of “German Idealism”, which attained some of the most elevated and abstract thinking in the history of philosophy, and is therefore often compared with the Socrates-Plato-Aristotle period in classical Athens. Nonetheless, figures of the format of Fichte, Schlegel and Hegel were so much embedded in the German awakening that, in one way or another, they managed to regard ...
... occupied with dynamic production and vital pleasure Page 792 or in an Asiatic peasant engrossed in the ignorant round of the domestic and economic life. We may reasonably doubt whether even a Plato or a Shankara marks the crown and therefore the end of the outflowering of the spirit in man. We are apt to suppose that these may be the limit, because these and others like them seem to us the highest ...
... wanted a poet of war, she had to import an Athenian. We have a curious example of the repercussion of this instinctive distrust even on a large and aesthetic Athenian mind in the utopian speculations of Plato who felt himself obliged in his Republic first to censure and then to banish the poets from his ideal polity. The end of these purely ethical cultures bears witness to their insufficiency. Either they ...
... Europe the schools of intellectual philosophy were preceded by the secret doctrines of the mystics; Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries prepared the rich soil of mentality out of which sprang Pythagoras and Plato. A similar starting-point is at least probable for the later march of thought in India. Much indeed of the forms and symbols of thought which we find in the Upanishads, much of the substance of the ...
... seek everywhere for some word of harmony, not forgetting immediate in ultimate truth, nor ultimate in immediate, but giving each its due place and portion in the Infinite Purpose. Some minds, like Plato, like Vivekananda, feel more than others this mighty complexity and give voice to it. They pour out thought in torrents or in rich and majestic streams. They are not logically careful of consistency ...
... following sentence was written in the top margin of the manuscript page. Its place of insertion was not marked: One would sometimes almost think that this upheaval of thought anticipated at once Plato & Empedocles, Luther, Erasmus and Melanchthon, Kant, Hegel & Berkeley, Hume, Haeckel & Huxley—that we have at one fell blast Graeco-Roman philosophy, Protestant Reformation & modern rationalistic tendency ...
... practical purposes the same sun? Why should the stream be, as Heraclitus himself admits, the same stream although it is ever other and other waters that are flowing? It was in this connection that Plato brought in his eternal, ideal plane of fixed ideas, by which he seems to have meant at once an originating real-idea and an original ideal schema for all things. An idealistic philosophy of the Indian ...
... that what is written seems not to be the fabrication of the brain-mind, but something more sovereign breathed or poured in from above. That is the possession by the divine enthousiasmos of which Plato has spoken. But it is seldom that the whole word leaps direct from that source, that cavern of natal light ready-shaped and with the pure stamp of its divine origin,—ordinarily it goes through some ...
... technique and in it beauty, power, perfection, why not? The moralist, preacher, philosopher, social or political enthusiast is often doubled with an artist—as shining proofs and examples there are Plato and Shelley, to go no farther. Only, you can say of him on the basis of this theory that as a work of art his creation should be judged by its success of craftsmanship and not by its contents; it is ...
... Age; or how we in the West were able to evolve from the simplicity of Arcadian shepherds to the wisdom of Greek philosophers. We cannot assume that there was nothing between the early savage and Plato or the Upanishads . 5 Nor was it insignificant that fire, Agni , was the core of the Vedic mysteries: Agni , the inner flame, the soul within us (for who can deny that the soul is fire ...
... Nous towards phenomenal creation, but still in a kind of planning potentiality, a controlled corona of world-initiatives. A vision similar to Plotinus's is, I believe, behind Platonism, though Plato seems to reduce it more than Plotinus to Page 20 intellectual terms, except perhaps in the Symposium. Plotinus too perhaps loses the wholeness of the vision while putting it into ...
... only in a quarter of reality. Blake had the same view of course, 'single vision and Newton's sleep' but the successive Page 218 loss of a quarter I had not previously seen set forth. Plato, Cabbala, Swedenborg, all know of the four 'worlds'. Perhaps we are beginning the reascent - Sri Aurobindo would presumably have taken this view. As these things (coincidences) happen, I am reading ...
... Silent, upon a peak in Darien, if we find that a mare magnum already familiar to us had all along a shade of glory we had never distinguished—that, for instance, it was Homer who also wrote Plato or that the author of the Republic was the true wizard who even here in the world of Impermanence had made the phenomenal ill-fate of Ilium almost a divine Idea. Such indeed is the blessing of surprise ...
... insight is the mysterious gold of this great gloom, an intense loveliness and a creative artistry are the bloomed greatness of this gold that is a mystery. The Wisdom on the summits of being has all Plato and Hegel in it, every analytic acuteness, every synthetic sweep those master-philosophers possessed, but it has also a direct Seerhood far beyond their brains: it is free from the obscurities of the ...
... that what is written seems not to be the fabrication of the brain-mind, but something more sovereign breathed or poured in from above. That is the possession by the divine enthousiasmos of witch plato has Page 7 spoken. But it is seldom that the whole word leaps direct from that source, that cavern of natal light ready-shaped and with the pure stamp of its divine origin, - ordinarily ...
... generally recognised: a double-shaded implication - what we, Page 125 quoting a phrase of Wordsworth's own, may call "unknown modes of being" and what in addition we may call after Plato the prenatal bliss of the soul. Both the shades join with suggestions floating or flashing out from Coleridge's Kubla Khan. The woman wailing for her demon lover and haunting the romantic chasm is ...
... practised in a great measure and by very large sections of the society. It is true that while the recognition of the Spirit is quite discernible in the ancient Greek thought, particularly in Socrates and Plato, yet a special and greater emphasis was laid on the powers of Reason and on the means and methods by which Reason can integrate the ethical, aesthetic, pragmatic and physical aspects of human personality ...
... with the Vedic concept of kavikratu (RigVeda 1.1.5), of one who combines within oneself wisdom and the will which is guided by wisdom, one who has attained to ṛtaṃ and satyaṃ. According to Plato, the education of the guardian is supposed to be of the nature that leads one to the vision of the truth, beauty and goodness. The underlying idea is that, one who has the vision of the truth will ...
... Page 142 referred to the gods, without the use of the individual intelligence to arrive at conclusions with regard to matters of morality and ethics. There is a dialogue called Euthypro by Plato in which Socrates argues that the good is not good because the gods approve of it, but that the gods approve of it because it is good. It is obvious that the orthodox would find him a threat because ...
... rise beyond the human animal—all who have tried to follow the path of the Christ, the Buddha; stigmatise as folly Vedanta, Tantra, Yoga, the way of the Jinas, Christ himself and Buddha, Pythagoras, Plato, and any other pathfinder and seeker. On the other hand you write that in the Avatar, "the divinely-born Man, the real substance shines through the coating; the mark of the seal is there only for ...
... changes his ideas because of that, his ideas are not worth much. The first business of a philosopher is to anticipate the objections and then meet them. PURANI: He has written some good treatises on Plato and others. SRI AUROBINDO: That means he is a good teacher, not original thinker. PURANI: He has reviewed a book on Indian philosophy. SRI AUROBINDO: Yes, I have seen the review. He says he ...
... Rishis, but they tried their best to maintain the laws as they understood them, elaborate them, change or modify wherever possible or needed under given circumstances. In ancient Europe too, it was Plato who envisaged the ideal Republic, a government of philosophers – the wise who are not actively engaged in the turmoil of life, but stand aloof and detached and can see more of the game and accordingly ...
... and the spiritual. He got something at the Darshan. SRI AUROBINDO: There are two or three poems in connection with that mood. I have read Desai's account of Vinoba. He has combined Buddha and Plato in him. He could have added Diogenes too. It seems Vinoba doesn't like literature. Only history and philosophy interest him. PURANI: Yes, I told you he is proud of not having read Shakuntala. ...
... politic) under the aegis of mens sana (a sound mind). The light that was Greece was at its zenith a power of the higher mind and intelligence, intuitively dynamic in one – the earlier –phase through Plato, Pythagoras, Heraclitus and the mystic philosophers, and discursively and scientifically rational through the Aristotelian tradition. The practical and robust Roman did not indulge in the loftier and ...
... those who professed to be its champions and adorers – the torch-bearers of the New Enlightenment; no, its direct descendants were to be found among the builders of the Christian civilization. Plato and Pythagoras and Heraclitus and the initiates to the Orphic and the Eleusinian mysteries continued to live in and through Plotinus and Anselm and Paracelsus and the long line 'Of Christian savants ...
... 239 Periclean Age, 206 Persia, 240 Pharaohs, the, 239 Phidias, 220 Phoenicia, 219 Pisa, 322 Pisacha, 201, 234 Planck, Max, 356 Plato, 1l7, 150, 211, 219, 326 Plotinus, 150, 361 Poland, 72, 127 Pole, the, 304 Polonius, 187 Pope, 212 Pound, Ezra, 192 Pragmatism, 326 ...
... to deny the existence of God and declare himself to be 'the monarch of all I survey'. Ever since the day when Protagoras, the most famous of the Greek sophists of the fifth century b.c., whom Plato pitted even against Homer as an authority on the education and improvement of mankind, formulated his famous maxim, Panton chrematon metron anthropos, "Man is the measure of all things", this formula ...
... curious but significant fact that some of the greatest philosophical thinkers, notably Pythagoras, Descartes, Pascal and Leibnitz, were great mathematicians as well. Some others like Thales, Democritus, Plato, Saint Augustine, Condorcet, Kant, Auguste Comte and Husserl were not professional mathematicians, but their acquaintance with 'the Queen of the Sciences' was certainly not negligible. One remembers ...
... may remember in this connection the metaphysical argument advanced by a character in a play of Addison in validation of the instinctive desire on the part of man for physical immortality: "Plato, thou reason'st well, Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire, This longing after immortaliy ? Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror Of falling into nought ...
... II. Aids for the Development of Value-Consciousness and Experience: 1. The ideal and practice of brahmacharya (example of Dayananda Saraswati). 2. Study of passages from Plato, particularly from (he Apology and The Republic. 3. Study of passages from the Upanishads, particularly Isha Upanishad. 4. Contemplation on the concept of "Universals". ...
... the soul has not surely finished what it had to do, by merely developing into humanity; it has still to develop that humanity into its own higher possibilities. We may reasonably doubt whether even a Plato or a Shankara makes the crown of human birth and therefore signifies the end of the outflowering of the Spirit in man. At any rate the present highest point at least must be reached Page 147 ...
... restatement of one side of the Upanishadic experience, although it represented a new standpoint and provided fresh terms of intellectual definition and reasoning. Even in the thought of Pythagoras and Plato, one could rediscover the ideas of the Upanishads. Sufism has been found repeating the teaching of the Upanishads in another religious language. Even some of the modern thinkers of the East and the ...
... 1990. Pandey, G.C. (ed.), The Dawn of Indian Civilization (up to 600 BC), PHISPC, Centre For Studies in Civilizations, New Delhi, 1999. Pandey, V.C, (Hindi Tr.) Avesta, Delhi, 1996. Plato, the Collected Dialogues of, Bollingen Series LXXI, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1971. Radhakrishnan, S., The Indian Philosophy, McMilan, 1923, London, Vols. I, II Radhakrishnan ...
... developed, the historical curve of development, however took different turns. The age of the Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries in Greece was followed by a gradual development through Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato into an age of intellectual efflorescence; in India, the age of Vedic Mysteries was followed, after considerable loss of the yogic knowledge during an intermediate period, by a fresh renewal of yogic ...
... Object as repeatedly seen, experienced and realized as imperishable and ultimate, and there is nothing beyond It. If we do not comprehend That Reality, how can it be helped? Is it understandable when Plato says in 'The Republic’ that the highest reality, the Good far exceeds essence both in power and dignity'? In what way this highest reality can be known and known justifiably as indescribable and yet ...
... history is marked by crises in which the perception of human inadequacies becomes increasingly acute. We are dissatisfied with ourselves, both individually and collectively. If we define justice as Plato did, as a state in which everyone occupies his proper place in a social organization, then the whole world is in a state of injustice. Things, events, and men are not where they ought to be. In such ...
... under which he lived, the ideas that filled his mind. It is absurd for us to judge of past people as if they lived now and thought as we do. There is no one to defend slavery to-day, and yet the great Plato held that slavery was essential. Within recent times scores of thousands of lives were given in an effort to retain slavery in the United States. We cannot judge the past from the standards of the present ...
... politic) under the aegis of mens sana (a sound mind). The light that was Greece was at its zenith / a power of the higher mind and intelligence, intuitively dynamic in one—the earlier—phase through Plato, Pythagoras, Heraclitus and the mystic philosophers, and discursively and scientifically rational through the Aristotelian tradition. The practical and robust Roman did not indulge in the loftier and ...
... What puts life into it, light into it is your own inner light. All education, all culture means drawing this inner light to the front. Indeed the word 'education' literally means, 'to bring out.' Plato also pointed to the same truth when he said that education is remembrance. You remember what is imbedded or secreted within, you bring to the light, the light of your physical mind, what you have within ...
... -"Fairy Tales", 189n -"Hamlet", 185 -"Magdalene II", 190n -"Miracle", 190n -"Winter Night", 189n Pax Britannica, 250 Persia, 284 Philolaus, 131 Pilate, 4 Plato, 247-8, 275n., 279 Poetry, 196n., 207n Pondicherry, 228 Pope, 85 Pound, Ezra, 88 Pravahan, 22 Pythagoras, 30 RAKsHASAS, 159 Rama, 187 Ramayana, the, 235 Ramprasad ...
... the, 82 Olympians, 46, 253 PANDAVAS, the, 76 Pani, the, 164 Pantheon, 299 Paris, 242, 287, 356, 376 Pashu, the, 80 Petrarch, 209 Pharaohs, the, 200 Pishacha, the, 80,213 Plato, 34, 120, 134, 178 Plotinus, 34, 40 Pondicherry, 17 Pradyurnana,44,207 Prudhomme, Sully, 320 Puranas , the, 46 Pyramid, the, 200 Pythagoras, 180 RACINE, 210 Raghus ...
... The Buddhists deny likewise the real existence of general ideas: according to them only individuals are real existences, general ideas are mere abstractions. The Hindus, on the other hand, like Plato who must have been influenced by them, affirm the reality of general ideas-although real need not always mean material. (4) The Vedic Rishis declared with one voice that all existence is built upon ...
... their abiding status. Plato's aristocracy was the ideal society, it was composed of and ruled by the best of men (aristas, srestha) the wisest. And the question was put by many and not answered by Plato himself, what brought about the decline in a perfect system. We have attempted to give our answer. Page 275 ...
... made between culture and civilisation; what the moderns have achieved is progress with regard to civilisation, Page 133 that is to say, the outer paraphernalia; but as regards culture a Plato, a Lao-tse, a Yajnavalkya are names to which we still bow down. One can answer, however, that even if in the last eight or ten thousand years which, they say, is the extent of the present cycle, ...
... spiritual life? The Puritans had cast aside poetry and music like poison. In the Talmud (the scripture of the Jews) there is the total prohibition to draw the picture of anybody, be he a man or a God. Plato in his Republic refused to award a locus to the poet. Even in the world of to-day, behind the externals we are after Idealism that awakens the higher emotions, the spiritual perception, and inspires ...
... represents colour, line, mass and proportion, or very similar to music in which the meaning is captured in the form of a sound in a vehicle marked by pitch, volume and rhythm. Idea is really a Form, as Plato conceived it and as Vishwamitra much earlier described it as something so transparent that it cannot be called either clad or unclad [avasana anagnah). But precisely because the purest idea is still ...
... play of electrons, of atoms, and their resultant molecules, of cells, glands, chemical secretions and physiological processes manages by their activity on the nerves and brain of a Shakespeare or a Plato to produce or could be perhaps the dynamic occasion for the production of a Hamlet or a Symposium or a Republic. But if we examine this kind of explanation, we fail to discover or appreciate how ...
... secret Mysteries of spiritual and occult knowledge. This eclipse proved there to be total, and even in Greece, where the light of the Mysteries continued for some time, through Pythagoras, Stoics, Plato and Neo-Platonists, there came about finally a cleavage between the old and the new and there arose a dominantly vital and mental civilization in which the knowledge of the old Mysteries hardly played ...
... restatement of one side of the Upanishadic experience, although it represented a new standpoint and provided fresh terms of intellectual definition and reasoning. Even in the thought of Pythagoras and Plato, one could rediscover the ideas of the Upanishads. Sufism has been seen to be repeating the teaching of the Upanishads in another religious language. Even some of the modem thinkers of the East and ...
... not merely different aspects of Nature-worship. We do not like to believe that these terms "water" and "fire" can ever be the symbols of spiritual truths. We study the philosophies of Pythagoras and Plato. But we do not delve into the spiritual culture or esoteric aspect of which their philosophies are but outer expressions. Behind the mythologies of China, Japan, old-world America and Australia there ...
... distinction is sometimes made between culture and civilisation; what the moderns have achieved is progress with regard to civilisation, that is to say, the outer paraphernalia; but as regards culture a Plato, a Laotse, a Yajnavalkya are names to which we still bow down. Page 18 One can answer however that even if in the last eight or ten thousand years which, they say, is the extent of ...
... physical body is precisely to regain the memory of what has been forgotten. Spiritual discipline means at bottom this remembering, and all culture too means nothing more than that—that is also what Plato thought when he said that all knowledge, all true knowledge consists in renriniscence. Page 116 Man, in his terrestrial body, although fallen, because shrouded and diverted from his ...
... preconceptions. It is only the prophets who embody and express the inspirations of the Time-Spirit in their purity, so long as they remain loyal to it in the depths of their being. Pythagoras and Plato, Zoroaster and Christ and Mohammed, Leonardo, Galileo and Newton, Mirabeau, Danton, Robespierre and Napoleon, Mazzini and Garibaldi, Marx and Lenin etc., in the West, and Rama, Sri Krishna, Mahavira ...
... Rishis, but they tried their best to maintain the laws as they understood them; elaborate them, change or modify wherever possible or heeded under given circumstances. In ancient Europe too, it was Plato who envisaged the ideal Republic, a government of philosophers -the wise who are not actively engaged in the turmoil of life, but stand aloof and detached and can see more of the game and accordingly ...
... 21 Peacock, Ronald 427 Pearce, Roy Harvey 388,394 Perseus the Deliverer 12,47,49,318 Pinto, Vivian de Sola 344 Piper, Ravmond Frank 373 Plato 33,271 Plotinus33,326 Page 495 Pope, Alexander 33, 78,315,341,346,355, 410 Pound, Ezra 377, 384, 389, 392-394, 398, ...
... translations noted above are included in Volume 8: the first two appear without title as numbers I and II of the "Selected Poems of Chandidas" on pages 302 to 304; the last two, translations from Plato and Meleager respectively, appear on page 411. SABCL: Collected Poems, Vol. 5 Translations, Vol. 8 82 . SPEECHES Prabartak Publishing House, Calcutta, 1922 ...
... inclusive arc of Omnipresent Reality. Some of Maitra's comparative studies are in the nature of fraternal encounters between philosophers, interesting to watch as well as rewarding in result. Plato and Sri Aurobindo, for example: what a rare concatenation! They were seers and poets both, but Plato's philosophy "is haunted by a sense of incompleteness: its intuition and reason cannot be reconciled ...
... grouped under "The Song of Wisdom" and "Wisdom and the Religions" - a veritable universal congress of the world's seers, saints and savants like Asoka, Carlyle, Porphyry, Seneca, Emerson, Socrates, Plato, Heraclitus, Voltaire, Tseu-Tse, Confucius, Minamoto Sanetomo, St. Paul, St. Augustine, Epictetus, Lao-Tse, Leibnitz, Hermes, Schopenhauer, Sadi, Asvaghosha, Rumi, Spinoza, Bahaaullah, Omar Khayyam ...
... intense richness of the Upanishadic age, or again, in the West, from Arcadian shepherds to the wisdom of Greek thinkers. We fail to see how there could have been nothing between the early savage and Plato or the Upanishads. 10 Yet the exegetes of the Veda are not wholly wrong, for the Rishis did live among pastoral tribes, and it was through familiar material symbols that those men had to be brought ...
... Vallabhbhai 457, 463 Pathak, G.S. 778 Pavitra (Philippe Barbier St.-Hilaire) 227-30, 235, 246, 280, 287, 296-7, 321, 325, 328-9, 362, 372, 433, 478, 494, 496, 558, 578, 678, 690-1, 732, 734, 780 Plato 315 Poincaré, President Raymond 132 Pondicherry 46-7, 89-90, 534, 571-2, 595, 756 Ponnuswami Aiyar, A.R. 353 Pournaprema (Francoise Morisset) 477 Poushpa Dass 745 Prabartak Sangha 200, 205 ...
... that it was knocking at the door of a greater good? For the last two thousand years and more, we have been devising beneficial systems, which crumble one after another – fortunately. Even the wise Plato banished poets from his Republic, much as today we would perhaps banish those useless eccentrics who roam the world and knock blindly at the doors of the future. We complain about our incapacity (to ...
... such a phenomenon, if only in terms of organization of consciousness, to mention only the external part of the task. Even if we put together all the geniuses of the world, we could not conceive of Plato writing Phaedras, The Republic, The Laws and God knows what else at the same time, nor can we imagine Goethe managing Faust, Wilhelm Meister .. . and whatever else in one go. Furthermore, Sri Aurobindo ...
... been responded to with such a resounding chorus of Page 17 fervid assent. It is true that some forms of spiritual culture were prevalent in the West in the times of Pythagoras and Plato, and that Plotinus and some of the Gnostics and Stoics were regular Yogis, as also some of the Neo-Platonists and Essences. Among the mediaeval mystics of Europe and the Manicheans of Persia, there ...
... Fragments on Various Subjects Science, Religion, Reason, Justice Essays Divine and Human Justice Late 1940s Justice, one says; but what is Justice? Plato's question applies to this as to every other sacred icon set up by men for their worship. Justice for each man is what his own type of mind accepts as right and proper and equitable as between men ...
... intellectual truth— Vain strife! Yet only the subhuman nest Bears the untrammelled vigour that can strain To skies like some vast super-rose of ruth, Seer suns beyond the gold of Plato's brain. The exquisite heart, the delicate reverie gain Miracled escape, but never the God-life's zest. Blind hungers alone draw down transcendent things, And we must scour the Infinite ...
... Autobiographical Notes Sources of His Philosophy Sri Aurobindo's intellect was influenced by Greek philosophy. Very little. I read more than once Plato's Republic and Symposium, but only extracts from his other writings. It is true that under his impress I rashly started writing at the age of 18 an explanation of the cosmos on the foundation of the ...
... by Mr. Ranade are founded upon misconceptions. Heraclitus' affirmation is not simply that the One is always Many, the Many always One, but in his own words, "out of all the One and out of One all." Plato's phrasing of the thought, "the reality is both many and one and in its division it is always being brought together," states the same idea in different language. It means a constant current and back-current ...
... excess. SRI AUROBINDO: What do you mean by excess? Excess for somebody else. But if the quantity doesn't affect him, it can't be excess for him. DR. MANILAL: I submit, Sir. SRI AUROBINDO: In Plato's Symposium, Socrates, Aristophanes, Agathon and others meet and discuss the nature of love, and drink wine. Everybody gets drunk except Socrates. Even after heavy drinking he keeps on discussing ...
... his philosophy? For if his thought is not developed in the severe systematic method of later thinkers, if it does not come down to us in large streams of subtle reasoning and opulent imagery like Plato's but in detached aphoristic sentences aimed like arrows at truth, still they are not really scattered philosophical reflections. There is an inter-relation, an inter-dependence; they all start logically ...
... truth - Vain strife! yet only the subhuman nest Bears the untrammelled vigour that can strain To skies like some vast super-rose of ruth, Seer suns beyond the gold of Plato's brain. The Divine Comedy gets invoked quite often in crystalline poems. Some passages from Dante and Prudhomme have also been transcreated. Page 345 ...
... return to its true home... the philosopher is the man who lives most for the soul and least for the body, so that he can be said to anticipate death and to lead here and now a dying life". 4 Plato's standpoint in the Phaedo, as also in the Theaetetus and Gorgias, represents "a harsh and rigid dualism: here, the world of illusion and illusive values, beneath which nothing permanent exists; ...
... character and from that should come the arts of painting and sculpture. He must mould "Time's clay to everlasting Art". When one has not trained one's vision one sees imprecisely, says the Mother. Plato's eye views a wonderful world of forms of which things are just remote copies here. A technique, rather a faculty of vision that sees objects with another sensitivity, has been highly specialised in ...
... physical response can be converted into or amount to or by itself constitute in result a conscious operation, a perception, emotion, thought-concept, or prove that love is a chemical product or that Plato's theory of ideas or Homer's Iliad or the cosmic consciousness of the Yogin was only a combination of physiological reactions or a complex of the changes of grey brain matter or a flaming marvel of ...
... enters incarnation in the seventh sign; and the parents, also, sought for their daughter seven days, and on the eighth came in their turn to the sign of the Lion . . . The number seven also occurs in Plato's mythology. The souls returning to incarnation, having been allotted their lives, for seven days travel across a desert, hot and dry, and at the end of this journey, reach the waters of Lethe (matter) ...
... future, in his provocative essay "Surgery for the Novel or a Bomb", D.H. Lawrence said: If you wish to look into the past for what next books, you can go back to the Greek Philosophers. Plato's dialogues are queer little novels. It seems to me it was the greatest pity in the world, when philosophy and notion got split. They used to be one, right from the days of myth. Then they went and ...
... with Pindar's "Become what you really are", Protagoras's "Man is the measure of things", Sophocles's Many marvels there are, But none so marvellous as Man. It also looks forward to Plato's "Knowledge" which is "Nous", the intuitive insight crowning the work of the intelligence. The 1 The Aeneid of Virgil, p. 120, line 46-51. 2 The Greeks (Pelican, Harmondsworth, 1951) ...
... begins to let memories unroll before the mind's eye, and musing, to recognise oneself in the inner and outer images of the past. This is like a preparation for an existence in the hereafter, just as in Plato's view, philosophy is a preparation for death. (London: Fontana, 1983, pp. 351-52) Old age is thus a preparation for the afterlife when the soul or that divine element in human beings continues ...
... strike open the doors within, to bring the memory that one comes from elsewhere and for a very special reason.”² In this way all knowledge comes to the psychic as memory, as reminiscence, to use Plato's expression; for all knowledge is already in the psychic; what is needed is the shocks and impacts of the world to break open the seals and let the latent consciousness, the veiled knowledge, shine ...
... realities of the world of Ideas. The shadow of the dome of pleasure Floated midway on the waves Page 118 is an image that must recall to any Platonist those shadows that, in Plato's famous fable, the prisoners saw cast upon the walls of the cave in which they were imprisoned, and mistook for realities; or, as Plotinus mythologizes the same concept (or conceptualises the myth) ...
... foot is there you might hold the passage to be a covert allusion which could again be considered unmistakable. But the wingedness gives one pause, until one remembers my versifying tendencies and Plato's idea that a poet is a winged creature who has no power over himself but sort of lives in the air of the mind blown by various forces good or otherwise. In any case it is difficult to think how so grandiose ...
... "O.K. It is all right now." [ In the first version Sri Aurobindo did not approve of Our guts alone draw down transcendent things.' A line he appreciated very much is 'Seer-suns beyond the gold of Plato's brain.' ] (21.10.1949) Page 698 ...
... piece of humorous writing again from the pen of young Aurobindo and picked at random from the same The Harmony of Virtue about which Sri Aurobindo remarked apropos: "I read more than once Plato's Republic and Symposium, but only extracts from his other writings. It is true that under his impress I rashly started writing at the age of 18 an explanation of the cosmos on the foundation of ...
... -still continues to be the one in the uttermost degree. It is the world of fundamental realities. Sri Aurobindo names it the Supermind or Gnosis. It is something higher than but distantly akin to Plato's world of Ideas or Noumena ( ideai, nooumena ) or to what Plotinus calls the first divine emanation ( nous ) . These archetypal realities are realities of the Spirit, Idea-forces, truth-energies, the ...
... morning in 1929, somebody - Perhaps Miss Maitland? - put a series of questions to the Mother as a provocation for a memorable pronouncement, recalling almost Socrates' celebrated rhapsody on Love in Plato's Symposium. Of the Mother's many Aspects, Powers and Personalities, the face of Love was the most significant and nectarean, and it was as the Mother of Love that she manifested a power of 'the The ...
... entire piece was probably written during 1892, Sri Aurobindo's second and last year at Cambridge. He was referring to The Harmony of Virtue when he wrote late in his life: "It is true that under his [Plato's] impress I rashly started writing at the age of 18 [ more likely 19 ] an explanation of the cosmos on the foundation of the principle of Beauty and Harmony, but I never got beyond the first three or ...
... —still continues to be the one in the uttermost degree. It is the world of fundamental realities. Sri Aurobindo names it the Supermind or Gnosis. It is something higher than but distantly akin to Plato's world of Ideas or Noumena (ideai, nooumena) or to what Plotinus calls the first divine emanation (nous). These archetypal realities are realities of the Spirit, Idea-forces, truth-energies, the ...
... —still continues to be the one in the uttermost degree. It is the world of fundamental realities. Sri Aurobindo names it the Supermind or Gnosis. It is something higher than but distantly akin to Plato's world of Ideas or Noumena ( ideai, nooumena) or to what Plotinus calls the first divine emanation (nous). These archetypal realities are realities of the Spirit, Idea-forces, truth-energies, the ...
... on which mentally triumphs over physical time over and above including telepathic transcendence of matter and the space-relations of the material world. If possibilities are opened to us of being Plato's "spectator of all time and all existence", are we confronting a sub-human relic or the promise of a super- human development? No doubt, the facts themselves of ESP are very primitive - reading ...
... preceding pair by intimating with paradoxical felicity how the keenly felt divine presence within is able to manifest its glory despite the faults and frailties of human nature: we are reminded of Plato's famous rejoinder to Diogenes — "Your pride peeps out through the holes of your raggedness", but here it is the high and rare splendour of the spirit taking by surprise the poor surface self: not only ...
... of a "termite civilisation"; and Sri Aurobindo posits the possibility of the Communist principle becoming a means "at once of the fulfilment of the individual and the perfect harmony of a * Plato's idea of a philosopher was that he should have a true vision of Reality and that he should possess utter truthfulness. Page 478 collective being". 26 But if that is ever ...
... shave themselves. Does the barber shave himself? Yes or no? Ponder over the two possible answers and be seized of the impasse. How do you propose to solve the riddle? Page 148 (6) Plato's successors in the Academy at Athens spent much time and thought on the problem of defining "man". First they opted for the definition: "A man is a biped animal." But presently they came across a ...
... awarded. He wrote more than 2oo plays. 3 Rudder: anything that guides or directs. 4 Curb: something that restrains or holds back. 5 Aristotle was a famous philosopher who spent 20 years in Plato's academy in Athens. His works had a tremendous influence on Western thought. Page 21 his time, and rewarded him with the generosity that his reputation deserved. . Aristotle was a native ...
... an intense flame that touched many Indian hearts and set them ablaze. Some people have supposed that Aurobindo studied Greek philosophy while he was in England. This is not true. He read Plato's Republic and Symposium , but he did not study Greek Philosophy. He had heard of Heraclitus while in England, but ¹Ibid pp. 1 - 4. ² Ibid. p. 4. Page 31 ...
... . So also ether itself, gross or subtle, and all that evolves from ether is involved in Avyakta; they are present but they can never be discovered there because there [they] are undifferentiated. Plato's world of ideas is a confused attempt to arrive at this condition of things, confused because it unites two incompatible things, the conditions of Avyakta and those of the next state presided over by ...
... began to be published again, but this time they were not on politics, but on philosophy and poetry and so on. I was acclaimed a great philosopher. I had never studied any philosophy, though I had read Plato's Republic and Symposium. Of course, if you can call them philosophy, I had read the Gita and the Upanishads. However, after a year, the Mother returned to France - " "But why?" "Because the ...
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.