OIKEIOSIS, PHRONESIS and EUDAIMONIA**
March 22nd, 2009, search relatedRelated posts :: OIKEIOSIS, PHRONESIS and EUDAIMONIA** :: OIKEIOSIS, PHRONESIS and EUDAIMONIA*** :: OIKEIOSIS, PHRONESIS and EUDAIMONIA** :: OIKEIOSIS, PHRONESIS and EUDAIMONIA**
Tags: Phronesis
In a message dated 3/20/2009 3:33:51 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
GEVANS613 at aol.com writes:
In a message dated 15/03/2009 15:13:40 GMT Standard Time,
gottlos752004 at yahoo.com writes:
PHRONESIS
Hi Gary:
Thanks for all the Greek goodies. The account of the Stoic relish for
reification was very interesting. Reification is one of the gifts that the Greeks
and others (not to mention Plato or: *Reificatrix Rex,* bequeathed to us. It
is still arguable whether the freeing-up of human thought that the benign
aspects of thingification enabled was worth the tremendous loss of human life that
its negative aspects engendered and continue to do so (another major bomb in
Iraq recently.)
I find all that you write fascinating from a historical POV and your
sometimes your insights make me gasp with sheer delight. Having a rather a jaundiced
view of entification, I tend to liken the introduction of reification to the
instauration of the plague into Europe, which was said to have happened by
black rats shinning along the mooring ropes of middle-eastern trading vessels and
dropping off onto the quay sides of Italian merchant ports. The disease,
caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, is best known for killing roughly one
fourth of the population of Western Europe - an estimated 20 million people. Of
course as employed by competive savagery of competing religions for which
reification forms their life-blood and the various vicious nationalisms that
thrive on thingification, the concretisation of ideas has been responsible for
many more dead bodies than the black death - but it did bring about all these
lovely abstractions that allow us to conceptualise with greater ease and speed
to make up for it, as we stand in the check-out queues in the supermarkets
and discuss the latest transcendentalist terrorists and their evil acts..
It was interesting to read what Arius had to say about *the Perfect Good* and
that he thought that the term might refer to the telos. The
writer/philosopher Iris Murdoch thought the same thing and I have written an essay about it
which I can’t remember if you have read?
Yes, Jud, the “perfect good” does refer to the telos insofar as both refer to
the ens, the final term that never comes and is beyond “reification.” In the
MEANTIME Bush bangers, global warmerers and Obama will save the worlders still
dream in the Stoic Logos Spermatikos, the final coming, the load that was
never dropped in eternal coitus interruptus. In short, the best way to prevent
reification is by abortion of the fetus. And only then there will be no one or
thing to blame for having been born to face death. In the same old meantime
move to the high ground or forerver hold your breath– the ice is melting and
eudaimonia is at hand on earth as it is in heaven.
sincerely;
Bernard
