I've been using this blog in ways I hadn't anticipated when I set out. It seems that as my customary means of self-expression have been eliminated, I have turned to sending my thoughts out through this medium...
And much of what I've written needs some kind of warning label: provisional, not publishable, subject to revision--read at your own risk....

And tonight I find myself annoyed at the interpretations of Socrates as an airtight system....not that there isn't much insight there...

But I find myself longing for the pain and tragedy one can express in literature.

I am thinking of the sadness of the book we call in English "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"....

Finally, when Tomas is old, he is completely Tereza's, and she feels a kind of sadness....
And he? He does care, in the end, that he should not do something to hurt her...
But that development through conflict--both inner and outer--That is not like the clash of arguments in Plato's dialogues. For me there is something light about Socratic conversation, even when Socrates is talking about the most important matters... even when an interlocutor is angry with him . . . The inner world one finds in novels just isn't there...

And that disappoints me....

I don't want a theory that's going to package human suffering as due to error or ignorance or whatever. That sort of theory is cold and heartless. It's a bit like saying it doesn't really matter...

Yet, then I think of Tomas, toward the end of ULB, saying that a "career", a "calling" is meaningless, bullshit--when earlier, we know, all he'd ever wanted was to be a surgeon.....

Yes, but he's not saying what this insight is. He's not saying that his previous life belonged to one particular philosopher's category. He's just used ordinary non-pretentious language and said it's bullshit... That's not what life is about....a career.......He's realized that he gave up his career, but was happy being with Tereza....career advancement, status,--all bullshit.....

But to say it all like that means ripping it out of context. We can't take it as if there were general principles about careers and such-like. What's to be learned here is not so simply put....and without more of a surrounding context, what I've just written is misleading . . . without saying more about the story it belongs to........

(An after-thought: One could say that when Socrates has a conversation about how to educate the young (as he does, e.g., in the "Laches"), the suffering is off-stage. The parent wants the child to have a good education to spare the child suffering....)