Thursday, December 7, 2023

Great thinkers are often thought of as Mad

 "Even Aristotle as quoted by Seneca (De Tranquillitate Animi, XV, 16 [xvii, 10]), is supposed to have said: There has been no great mind without an admixture of madness. Plato expresses it in the above mentioned myth of the dark cave (Republic, BK. 7) by saying that those who outside the cave have seen the true sunlight and thr things that actually are (the Ideas), cannot afterwards see within the cave any more, because their eyes have grown unaccustomed to the darkness; they no longer recognize the shadow-forms correctly. They are therefore ridiculed for their mistakes by those others who have never left that cave and those shadow-forms. Also in the Phaedrus (245 A), he distinctly says that without a certain madness there can be no genuine poet, in fact (249 D) that everyone appears mad who recognizes the eternal Ideas in fleeting things." - Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Page 190 and 191

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