Subj : The Game To : Joshua Lee From : Frank Masingill Date : Mon Oct 30 2000 12:53 pm JL> Koheles already said "there is nothing new under the sun" JL> before Voegelin. It is part of modern arrogance that we insist JL> that there is. FM> That was one of Voegelin's favorite books and the favored FM> passages were those that went, "There is a time for.... and a FM> time for...." A time for EVERYTHING under the sun. JL> True. Of course, it's important to know exactly when it's the JL> time for something... Joshua, I think the point of that wisdom is not that we could KNOW when the time has come but that we recognize the truth that "under heaven" no THING lasts forever. I, for example, am 80 and the other day experienced a weaker spell than I have experienced in many years. I wondered if the time for me to die had come and since I do not want to die in a hospital if it can be avoided at all, I resisted being taken to the emergency room. It didn't happen THAT time, but I was born and so I will die. That is inescapable. What comes INTO existence goes OUT of existence. That is why when I hear the Divine Ground of existence that we experience in consciousness being talked about as an "existing thing" I think I am hearing something strange indeed - perhaps the voice of an egophantic fool (in the sense of the "fool who has said in his heart, there is no God" - not the ordinary "silly fool"). Only the libibdo dominandi could imagine this non-thingly, Divine Ground of Existence that draws the philosopher in his search for it to be less than the universal experience of the human or pertaining to anything less than universality. FM> One should not be surprised because Anaxamander's dictum: FM> "All things come from the apeiron and pay one another FM> penalties for the their time of existence." Or sumpin like FM> that!!! JL> Excuse my ignorance, but didn't Anaxamander have some JL> relationship, to the school of Paramenidies? (Who said that JL> all change and motion are illusionary, IIRC) I used to know JL> back when I studied philosophy in college, and when I read JL> Coppleston's history, but I forget, and am too lazy to search JL> for Anaxamander on the internet right now. ;-) (Besides, this JL> could lead to a philosophical discussion on this echo.) He's one of the pre-Socratics who stand apart in the era after Thales as beginning the questioning that was a part of the "dissociation of the cosmos" through the kind of questioning about Being that would lead Plato to style such "reasoning" PHILOSOPHY (love of wisdom instead of love of dogma or opinion). What he resisted was the reification of opinions that he found, e.g., in scandalous reports about the gods - even the old gods of the cosmos before dissociation. For some of these pre-Socratics there is preserved only sayings associated with them and not developed philosophy but their influence on Plato and Aristotle is unmmistakable for they quote them extensively. Frank Frank --- PPoint 2.07 * Origin: Maybe in 5000 years (1:396/45.12) .