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Ideas for 'teaching', 'Thought and Reality' and 'A Short History of Decay'

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4 ideas

22. Metaethics / A. Ethics Foundations / 1. Nature of Ethics / c. Purpose of ethics
19628 At a civilisation's peak values are all that matters, and people unconsciously live by them [Cioran]
     Full Idea: Epochs of apogee cultivate values for their own sake: life is only a means of realising them; the individual is not aware of living - he lives.
     From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 3)
     A reaction: This is a very Nietzschean thought. Mind you, a crazed and dangerous crowd exhibits the same absorption in simple values.
22. Metaethics / B. Value / 1. Nature of Value / a. Nature of value
19646 Values don't accumulate; they are ruthlessly replaced [Cioran]
     Full Idea: Values do not accumulate: a generation contributes something new only by trampling on what was unique in the preceding generation.
     From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 6 'We')
     A reaction: That may seem true for a Frenchman or a Romanian, but it doesn't feel true of British culture, which seems to me to have accumulated values over the last five hundred years. Before 1500 it seems to me to be a foreign country. We may be near the end!
22. Metaethics / B. Value / 2. Values / d. Health
3053 Pythagoras taught that virtue is harmony, and health, and universal good, and God [Pythagoras, by Diog. Laertius]
     Full Idea: Pythagoras taught that virtue is harmony, and health, and universal good, and God.
     From: report of Pythagoras (reports [c.530 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 08.1.19
     A reaction: I like the link with health, because I consider that a bridge over the supposed fact-value gap. Very Pythagorean to think that virtue is harmony. Plato liked that thought.
22. Metaethics / B. Value / 2. Values / g. Love
19614 Lovers are hateful, apart from their hovering awareness of death [Cioran]
     Full Idea: As for lovers, they would be hateful if among their grimaces the presentiment of death did not hover.
     From: E.M. Cioran (A Short History of Decay [1949], 1 'Gamut')
     A reaction: A nice existential corrective, if you were planning to build an ethical system around a rather sentimental idea of love! If you are not gripped by a latent fear that your beloved may die, I doubt whether you are in love.