Is it possible that our understanding of the soul has advanced as much as our understanding of the world over the past 5000 years? Or is it rather that we learned of the soul first and have pushed the boundary of our ignorance steadily outwards?

Is it sometimes necessary to be inauthentic in order to be virtuous?

It would seem that it is sometimes necessary to be inauthentic in order be virtuous because the good man seeks perfection and no man is perfect. An ethical life is grounded in habits and some habits are good while others are bad. Thus, at times, the good man must thwart his own desires in the pursuit of justice, and authenticity is to live in accordance with one's own desires. Therefore it is sometimes necessary to be inauthentic in order to be virtuous.

On the contrary, a tedious old fool says, "This above all: to thine ownself be true."

I answer that, It is never necessary to be inauthentic in order to be virtuous, for the desire for perfection is the mark of the good man, and he who breaks with the bad habits that he has in order to acquire better habits that are not yet his is living in accordance with a desire that is higher, and thus more virtuous, than the man who is content to be himself as he is. Virtue is not a state but a power; one is never in a good place but, when virtuous, on a good way. A man is only truly himself insofar as he betters himself.

We are given
to know the fact,
to believe the claim,
to understand the statement,

to imagine the picture
and the procedure,

to obey the command,
to desire the outcome,
to master the act,
which takes us.

________

Note:

This should perhaps be ramified as follows (though it loses some pith here as its aim improves):

We are given
(in these empty spaces)
to know the fact,
(on pain of ignorance)
to believe the claim,
(on pain of doubt)
to understand the statement,
(on pain of confusion)

to imagine the picture
and the procedure,
(on pain of dullness,
on pain of darkness)

to obey the command,
(on pain of disloyalty)
to desire the outcome,
(on pain of misery)
to master the act,
(on pain of impotence)
which takes us
(in the fullness of time).

What is Art?

Perhaps it's not what it is
but what it should be,
perhaps it's not what it should be
but what it pretends
to be. Perhaps it is
what it should pretend to be.

Passion is as distinctly human as reason.

We are as connected by our reasons as our passions.

(It should perhaps be said that philosophers and poets are often most instructive in their failures. We admire philosophers for their misunderstandings, and our poets, for their disobedience.)

The philosopher tries to understand how imagination makes knowledge possible.

Imagination also makes power actual. The poet tries to obey.

You do not know what you do not believe,
nor believe what you cannot understand,
nor can you understand what you will not imagine.

Who you do not imagine, you cannot obey,
Who you cannot obey, you will not desire,
Who you do not desire, cannot master you.

Belief is to desire as knowledge to power,
as understanding to obedience.
In imagination, they find composure.

Those who will not face their ignorance cannot grow in knowledge.

Those who cannot manage their impotence will not grow in power.

Photons are the lightest things in the universe.
And when heavy metals are created in the collision of dark stars,
gravity waves ripple through space-time.

πάθει μάθος

The passion of math is to suffer and learn.

Your subjective passions shape your desires. They are not objective reasons to hold your beliefs. There is a passion to seek a reason. But the passion is not itself a reason. Nor does the passion invalidate the reason once it's found.

The right to enjoy bourgeois pleasures is predicated on the obligation to maintain our institutions. This, perhaps more than anything else, explains the crippling, joyless guilt of the middle class.

There is something unsettling about hearing the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy announce that the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature will be given to Kazuo Ishiguro for "uncover[ing] the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world".

After all, the Nobel Prize in Physics this year was given to Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves." Gravity waves presumably exist.

Has the Swedish Academy declared my sense of connection with the world illusory? Has Kazuo Ishiguro proved the existence of an abyss beneath my being? Has he discovered my nothingness?

The image is
thought by the mind,
felt in the heart.

The water is still and dark.

The hand passes
through the surface
as the eye dwells
on the appearance.

The water is shimmering and wet.

Foundations

Beneath an ethical life,
the daily grind.

Beneath the grind,
political struggle.

Beneath the struggle,
              a killing field.