Marco to all the Ponderers
many thanks to David Lind, Platt Holden, Elephant, ThracianBard, Jon for
this thread. It's IMO a good "lateral drift" from the usual path. As
everything pops out from a sentence I offered, I need to jump in.
Firstly, for those who will have a bit of patience, I try to translate
some excerpts from an (IMO) interesting paper I've found on an Italian
magazine. The title is "Antithesis vs. Paradoxes".
***********
<<Angela Locatelli, in "Eloquence and Enchantments", a collection of
essays about Shakespeare's tragedies writes: "Tragedy is to believe you
are immortal, and then to discover you are not.... this makes tragedy
the place where every knowledge is manifestly illusory and ineffective.
In addition, when facts contradict our own knowledge, the result
is not only an emotional delusion; not only the loss of our cognitive
illusions; also, more deeply, the denial of any possibility to
establish a durable knowledge". >>
Then the paper goes on with a deep analysis of a tragedy, Timon of
Athens, comparing it with other Shakespeare's tragedies.
<< Timon is a rich Athenian who loves to share his own richness with the
other citizens. As he does not listen to the suggestions of the
philosopher Apemantus [..], he rapidly spends all his fortune; but when
he tries to ask for the help of those citizens he formerly benefited,
they all oppose their denial. So he invites all the "friends" to a last
banquet where he just offers hot water and insults. [...] Then he
retires to live in a cave, where he discovers a treasure. He pays
Alcibiades (a soldier ostracized by the Athenians) to organize a siege
of the city. When the Athenians ask for the help of Timon, he answer
with a tree with which they all could hang, to free themselves from
their pains.>>
In the end, Alcibiades will read an epitaph on the tomb of Timon, but,
as the tragedy is clearly unfinished, we don't know if he committed
suicide or he simply is dead alone. Anyway, the thesis of the
paper is that Timon has been victim of a wrong vision of reality.
Firstly, all friends; then, all enemies.
<<What is the cause for Timon's failure? The answer resides in his lack
of imagination: he has been victim of a Manichean vision of reality.
Such a vision has its source in an overstated usage of reason; a reason
that says that "a" can be equal or not equal to "b", no other
alternatives. A reason opposite to an imaginative faculty, exactly like
the reason of king Teseus in "A Midsummer Night's Dream", who is
completely lacking of "emotive intelligence" and will never be able to
grasp the infinite complexity of reality, the various and struggling
levels our identity develops through, the paths we must run to reach for
the integration of the diversities, as expressed by these words:
"So we grow together,
Like a double cherry, seeming parted,
But yet an union in partition"
(W.Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, II, ii 210);
it's the same reason Pascal talks about when he challenges us to
convince
someone to fall in love by means of reason. [...] Imagination is the
faculty that allows us to surpass the fictitious vision of an univocal
reality as it appears.
This is a basilar problem in Shakespeare. If we compare Timon and
Macbeth [ we will see that ] while the Scottish hero at least will
reach -too late to be saved- for the awareness that "beautiful is
ugly and ugly is beautiful" (as the witches say in the beginning),
Timon is not able to surpass his dualistic position. He reduces the
PARADOX, the absurd -that is finally all that he can't understand- to
ANTITHESIS. Like Othello, who holds that if Desdemona is not a righteous
person, all the world must be an hell. Even if it's true that all the
tragic Shakespearean heroes will reach for a crystallized useless
knowledge, actually other characters like Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth
are able to come in the end to a sort of cognitive redemption; only
Timon of
Athens is the tragedy of a complete "non-knowledge", caused by the
Timon's mental rigidity>>.
The paper shows some examples of this rigidity: the "worthy friends"
become "dogs". "present friends" become "detested parasites". Even,
Timon's fury explodes in a series of oxymorons , when he calls the
Athenians "courteous destroyers/affable wolves/meek bears". So that his
friend Apemantus states:
"The middle of humanity thou never newest,
but the extremity of both ends".
The thesis of the paper is that a vision made of antithesis does not fit
in a flowing world, not stable like Athens was, and today is. Antithesis
crystallize the movement and is an obstacle to any comprehension of a
flowing reality. At the contrary doubts and dilemmas should be faced by
means of paradoxes, as reality is closer to a paradox than a
black/white, antithetic polarity.
The conclusion is that our current situation (actually it's about Italy,
but I guess it can be valid everywhere) lacks of an humanistic and
artistic attitude to face the world (the capacity of Shakespeare as well
as of every great artist).
*****************
After a due gratitude to all you so patient to read this digression, I
recall the origin of the "Paradox" thread.
MARCO:
As Quality is an event, Reality is an ever present event.
ELEPHANT:
I think you will find "ever-present event" is a contradiction in terms.
(Kant's quite good on that one).
MARCO:
Yes, it was a paradox. Like to say: a never ending moment.
ELEPHANT:
I don't think that 'never ending moment' is any advance on 'ever-present
event'. Is it too much to hope that your acknowledgement of the
'paradox' consitutes 'conceeding the point'?
Elephant, my acknowledgement of the 'paradox' is due to the
consideration that our reason will never grasp reality. Don't you think
that imagination and paradoxes, far from being exhaustive, are the
*best* tools. A reason made of antithesis, where an event can't be
forever; where ugliness can't be valuable; where something can't be
right and wrong at the same time... is maybe the source of all the
tragedies, as your old compatriot Bill showed.
On the other hand, I must admit that it is equally a tragedy to state
that paradox is the right way, and antithesis is a wrong way... mainly
'cause this point is an antithesis. I stop now, as probably I'm more
puzzled than you.
All the Best,
Marco
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