Passion of the Western Mind

beyond the appearance to the essence.

With the advent of reason, everything seemed open to doubt,

Something is “beautiful” to the exact extent that the archetype of Beauty is present in it. When one falls in love, it is Beauty (or Aphrodite) that one recognizes and surrenders to, the beloved object being Beauty’s instrument or vessel.

Socrates thus became not only the inspiration for but also the personification of the Platonic philosophy. From Plato’s art emerged the archetypal Socrates, the avatar of Platonism.

Where the Ionian physicists were interested in the material substance of phenomena, the Pythagoreans focused on the forms, particularly mathematical, that governed and ordered those phenomena.

philosophy for Socrates was concerned less with knowing the right answers than with the strenuous attempt to discover those answers. Philosophy was a process, a discipline, a lifelong quest.

passion to restore a former unity, to overcome the separation from the divine and become one with it.

by speaking of Ideas on one page and gods on another in such analogous terms, Plato resolved, tenuously yet with weighty and enduring consequences, the central tension in the classical Greek mind between myth and reason.

self-critical reflection.