#plato

"The gods, too, are fond of a joke."

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world. It requires profound purpose larger than the self kind of understanding.

Western Esotericism begins with Plato. Don’t get scared. I am not about to spend the next several pages explaining all of classical philosophy to you. Our focus is more specific. The purpose of this text, dear reader, is to teach you how to approach a text like an esotericist. When faced with an unfamiliar writer, our first goal is to keep an eye out for three things: Style, Epistemology, and Physics. What kind of writer are we dealing with? Where does knowledge come from? What is the world made of? If you understand these three things, you’ve done 80% of the work.  Stylistically, Plato is a trickster. His writing is structured in the form of dialogues. These are extended literary arguments between two characters. Usually, between one of Plato’s students, and Socrates.* He debates questions like What is bravery? What is truth? What is friendship? By the end of the dialogue, the answer is almost always a resounding Who the Hell Knows? 

In general F&C S2 has been leaning very heavily into the Fairy Tale Motifs, so it's interesting that they decided to go specifically with the Ancient Greek Aesthetic for for the Cosmic Owl backstory…