Woman at Point Zero

From Goodreads

I can't say that I enjoyed this book more than The Circling Song because there isn't much to enjoy about this book. It's not bad in the sense that it is poorly written. In fact there are passages that are exceptionally well written.

"Now I had learnt that honour required large sums of money to protect it, but that large sums of money could not be obtained without losing one's honour"

"I am speaking the truth. And truth is savage and dangerous".

"I only arrived at the savage, primitive truths of life after years of struggle. For it is only very rarely that people can arrive at the simple, but awesome and powerful truths of life after one no longer fears death. For death and truth are similar in that they both require a great courage if one wishes to face them".

It's beautiful writing, and like The Circling Song the story echoes itself and with each echo one sees more of the savage truth being unveiled. Having read the other book I was more prepared for thsi one, but it's still not a fun read. It reminds me a bit of the movie Dogville, especially with all the rape and the power structures between men and women ending in a reversal by the end. Like Dogville too, it's a good piece of work that I don't see me picking up again any time in the near future.

In some ways Firdaus is a bit of a stoic saint, suffering, but rising above the suffering. Her outlook on life as suffering and suffering as the path to truth have the feel of Stoicism about it. However, she has to have a final, explosive act of passion to move from the dissociative state to the state of enlightenment that doesn't quite fit the mold. But then again, Marcus Aurelius killed more than a single pimp. Firdaus is a character that is hard to empathize with, but she was made so by the male dominated society that was both the setting and the impetus for her abuse. I don't want to make light of anybody's suffering, but this book details a much more graphic and horrific situation than what more contemporary and Western feminist writers are having to deal with at the moment. It's probably wrong of me to look at the world with a sliding scale approach to oppression, but it's hard not to read something like this book and compare it to the railings against mansplaining or the fight over whether women athletes should be paid as much as their male counterparts. I'm sure some of this comes from a bit of a chauvinist way of thinking; but, it feels as though it is rooted in reality and common sense.

A comparison between this and Aristophane's Lysistrata would be an interesting endeavor.

Goodreads: Lysistrata

Lysistrata
Aristophanes

The play is like a good American Pie movie. It's entertaining, raucous and racy and an absurdist take on nonviolent protest. But it's still an American Pie movie so it can't get more than three stars.

Quick Thoughts on The Symposium

I just finished The Symposium by Plato last night. It was probably the third or fourth time I've read it in my recent (and slow paced) journey through all of Plato's works. I've taken notes in my notebooks that will eventually find their way on to this blog in the future, so I won't spend too much time here other than to give my overarching thoughts on it. Here is what I wrote on my Goodreads page: "In the Symposium not all speeches are equal. This is one of my favorite dialogues of Plato, but surprisingly not because of Socrates. Aristophanes' speech about the fantastically weird original humans and Alcibiades' drunken entrance are exceptional pieces of literature - humorously and babbingly brilliant". I'm not going to add much more to this here, but I read this book again, even though I had read this particular dialogue in two or three collections of dialogues earlier because I wanted to reread the speech of Aristophanes. I don't know why it is so fascinating to me. It could be that it's just so odd I can't help just be attracted to it.

Introducing Plato (D)

(Originally written November 16, 2016 in Book 26)

Introducing Plato
D. Robinson

Particulars are contingent
Universals are the properties that particulars share with one another.

Plato was the first philosopher to see that universals were problematic.

Plato tried to explain it with a two-world system. A perfect world of universals and an imperfect world of copies (particulars).

The world of forms/ideas is never quite explained perfectly.

Forms exist in their own world and can only be "recollected only in the minds of a few talented and well-trained individuals" (Robinson, 65).

Plato's epistemology is difficult because it is mystical and therefore, not directly communicable.

Plato needed the forms to deal with the problem of Heraclitus' flux.

"Forms are more 'real' than particulars, because, unlike particulars, they are eternal and unchanging. Authentic philosophical knowledge can only ever be of these 'forms'" (Robinson, 74).

Everyone is born with the knowledge of the forms because everyone encounters them in earlier lives.

Some of the reason why Plato thought this way about particulars and universals was an account of the Greek language. It was a sort of linguistic determinism. It equates "meeting" and "knowing".

Heidegger was similar in his thinking as German is similar to Greek in how it deals with nouns. It precedes nouns with either masculine, feminine and neuter articles, allowing Heidegger to think about "the nothingness" rather than nothingness.

The forms suffer from an infinite regress, or third man argument.

Plato was also unsure if all man-made objects had forms or not.

The forms have weird ontological problems as well. How can the forms have more reality than particulars? Can reality have degrees?

Plato, because of the notion that meeting and knowing are the same thing, "Maintaining that real knowledge has to be a kind of personal and mystical encounter" (Robinson, 84).

What about universals?

Aristotle - universals are real, but don't exist separately

British Empiricists - universals are a mental image arrived at by abstraction.

"Wittgenstein suggested that our craving for definitive generalities can never be ultimately satisfied, and it is rather unhealthy" (Robinson, 87).

Plato introduced a problem that has not been satisfactorily solved.

Political Philosophy

Plato's view of society is communitarian, emphasizing the social nature of individuals. "Individuals can therefore be judged primarily in terms of their contribution to the State" (Robinson, 88).

The formation of the State came from humans developing a taste for luxury. Divisions of labor is then necessary to provide the luxuries.

Plato would turn the education over to the State (away from the hands of the dangerous Sophists). His educational system is roughly based on the Spartan system which produced a strong army and a stable society.

Plato wanted his society to have experts in every profession. The experts in ruling would get the guardian status and guardian education.

Plato would teach the myth that each man was born of a certain type of metal, thus predetermining every man's status in life.

The myth of the Cave allegory illustrates the ability and the duty of the guardian class.

Those who exit the cave know true knowledge comes from thinking, not seeing.

Plato's ideal republic is hierarchical but because of the myth of the four metals it will function well because everyone will know and accept their place in society (like a beehive).

"By the second generation, everyone will believe this myth of hierarchical castes to be natural and inevitable. Plato is quite content to admit that his hierarchical society must be based on a lie" (Robinson, 101).

Marx inverted the term "ideology" to explain how Plato's big lie works in reality.

The Guardian life is extremely rigorously controlled:
- lived coed in the barracks
- own no property
- breed only with one another by lot
- children are not left with their parents

"Plato's guardians are allowed no individuality or personal freedom" (Robinson, 103).

The social system Plato advocates is severe but it is meritocratic and is not sexist.

"Socrates maintained that morality is a special kind of knowledge which, once known, would always be chosen. Plato seems to have agreed, but argued that this knowledge must be restricted to Guardian experts who will always know the 'correct' answers to all moral problems" (Robinson, 106).

Plato had no time for art in the ideal republic. Only art as propaganda would be admitted. (This art foreshadowed the propagandist art of the Nazis and Soviets).

Plato's moral geometry is often rejected for being inflexible and for reason linking morality and knowledge.

Plato was anti-democratic because democrats have to resort to populism to stay in power. Populist policies are thus favored over wise ones.

"Democratic politicians are merely the slaves of those they pretend to rule, and ordinary people are volatile, violent and bestial" (Robinson, 114).

Popper argued against Plato for his utopianism.

Utopianists often advocate for wiping the slate clean which entails the destruction of society to build a new one.

"The Laws makes a disappointing ending to a philosophical body of work that began with a total commitment to Socrates' own freedom of speech and thought" (Robinson, 131).

"Because Plato cannot have perfect people, he insists on perfect laws which must be obeyed because they are perfect" (Robinson, 131).

The Symposium

Plato seems convinced that homosexual love could be transformed into something spiritually transcendental.

What is love?

Phaedrus: a good thing that instills honor and self-sacrifice

Pausanias: love is sensual gratification but is somehow purer when directed at young men rather than young women

Eryximachus: "love is the cosmic force that constitutes the universe itself" (Robinson, 134).

Aristophanes: Everyone was originally male, female and hermaphrodite. Love is the quest to find the lost part of one's soul. (Zeus punished humanity by splitting everyone into single genders).

Agathon - love is a yearning towards some object of beauty which is not yet possessed.

Diotima - love is the link between sensible and spiritual worlds. "If love is that which moves towards what is beautiful, and wisdom is beautiful, then love is the manifestation of the human soul seeking out the true wisdom of the forms" (Robinson, 136).

The Timaeus

Presents a cosmological account of creation.

"Time is simply a series of numbers that measure how the sub-standard cosmos is always changing" (Robinson, 142).

Plato follows Empedocles' view that all matter is various combinations of the four elements.

Humans are different because of their soul. The soul will return to its star after death if the owner of the soul lived a deserving life.

Plato also advocated metempsychosis (reincarnation) for those souls who aren't worthy of returning to its home star.

Plato's cosmology is similar to M-theory and other string theories that rely on mathematics.

Plato vacillates in the Thaetetus on his theories of perception. Sometimes he is a phenomenalist (we perceive mental images of the world, not the world itself). Sometimes he is a naive realist.

Despite his waffling on the notion of perception he remains staunchly a rationalist - all permanent knowledge comes through thought.

Being a rationalist, Plato had to come up with reasons for error. He claimed that errors arose from memory misapplication.

Knowledge - that which we believe, that which is true and that which we can clearly identify.

The Phaedrus condemns writing because writing is complete. Philosophy is always a process and therefore never complete. As such, dialoge is the best tool for philosophical discovery.

Plato had a long and varied influence:
- Origen developed a neo-platonic theology
- Galileo embraced Plato in his anti-Aristotelian view
- Hegel's dialectical philosophy

Aristophanes & Euripides

(Originally written June 6, 2016 in Book 26)

It's been nearly nine years since I've written in this particular journal. To the archivists (Ha!) I'm sorry for the lapse. I just didn't want to leave so much blank space in journal 26 on up and waste paper. But, I haven't been completely idle in nine years. Anyway, I've been primarily digitizing my journals recently; thus, I haven't studied much. Currently I'm midway through Salman Rushdie's Fury. It's a pretty riveting book and much newer than most of my reading this year.

As I state, primarily I've been working to bring my journals all into a comprehensive blog, tagged with numerous categories in case I ever want to research a topic. This way I can pull up my notes and move from there. Books 3, 4 and 5 have a lot of notes from 2006 on Bertrand Russell's The History of Western Philosophy and lo and behold, ten years later I'm reading it again, It's somewhat coincidental and definitely gives it a comical symmetry. Iv'e read the introduction which covers the PRe-Socratics and am now starting the part on Socrates, Plato and Aristotle Additionally, I'm reading my books from History of philosophy at Taylor (A History of Western Philosophy by W.T. Jones) to get a fuller depth of understanding. It is there I'll actually begin.

The Classical Mind
W.T. Jones

Ch. 2 - Education by Violence

Aristophanes

Aristophanes held that democracy was destroying the state.

Aristophanes was a playwright during the violent chaos of the Peloponnesian War and its aftermath. It is for this reason he so avidly opposed the unruliness and inefficiency of democracy.

He criticized the Athenian practice of paying people to be on the j tries because it led to lazy, incompetent and ignorant juries, making a travesty of justice.

Aristophanes used many of his plays to attack the mass democracy and the ills it foisted on Athens. But in Ecclesiazusae he offered a solution that anticipated Plato's Utopia and is akin to communism:
- land, money and private property became common to all
- no rich or poor
- women belong to all men in common
- "Athens will become nothing more than a single house, in which every thing will belong to everyone" (Jones, 51).

Euripides

Euripides (480-406 BC) was a playwright during the Peloponnesian War. Initially his plays were optimistic and patriotic to the Athenians, but after the brutal subjugation of the Melians by the Athenians his tone changed.

Euripides believed in a moral order which was a natural order. He used the gods and goddesses as an embodiment of that order, dishing out justice and punishment.

In his play Trojan Women  he points out the doubly futile nature of war. First, its consequences are greater than the spark which ignited the war in the first place. Second, ti generally does not achieve the desired ends.

The war caused Euripides to lose his faith in the natural order, the moral order and religion. This profound loss contrasted Euripides from an earlier generation. While they were sure and optimistic in light of the Pax Athenica, in spite of many flaws, Euripides was a product of the horrors of war.

Euripides clings to the Greek ideal of moderation, but taught by war, mourns its loss.

The Birth of Tragedy Section 13-19

(Originally written July 4, 2007 in Book 15)

The Birth of Tragedy
Friedrich Nietzsche

Section 13

Through Socrates and Euripides the Greek culture placed greater emphasis on enlightenment and knowledge.

Socrates found that the 'wisest' of all Greeks really know nothing and only operated by instinct.

Socrates is the anti-mystic. Rather than relying on instinctive wisdom as the mystic does he uses consciousness to develop a hyper logical system.

The dying Socrates replaced all the old hero of Greece and became the image to which every young Grecian strived for.

Section 14

Socrates and his followers despised tragedy, but found solace and joy in the fables of Aesop.

"Poems are useful: they can tell the truth by means of parable to those who are not very bright" (Nietzsche, 90).

Socrates saw that tragedy did not tell the truth and that it was aimed at those who were not very bright. For these reasons it is doubly contemptible.

Plato also held tragedy in contempt, but his own artistic impulses necessitated him to create an art that was borne of the old ones.

Plato saw art as an imitation of a shadow and thus lower than even the contemptible empirical world.

Plato's dialogues blended narrative, lyric, drama, prose and poetry. He broke the strict law of uniformity of linguistics and created a whole new genre of art.

Plato's dialogues served as the savior of old poetry and the template for the novel.

The Apollonian tendency withdrew to logical schematism and the Dionysian transformed into Naturalism.

The optimistic maxims of
1) Virtue is knowledge
2) Man sins only from ignorance
3) The virtuous man is happy man served to fully kill tragedy.

Optimism destroys the essence of tragedy.

Though harsh against art in life at death Socrates obeyed the divine call to music asking, "Perhaps art is even a necessary correlative of, and supplement for science" (Nietzsche, 93).

Section 15

The Socratic way of life which exists today prompts a constant regeneration of art. The infinite of Socrates guarantees the infinity of art.

Socrates, to be recognized as truthful, must be viewed as the "theoretical man whose significance and aim it is our task to try and understand" (Nietzsche, 94).

The artist clings to the mystery while the theoretical man clings to what was once mystery and is non-known.

Lessing [who is Lessing?] is the most honest theoretical man because he announced that he cared more for the search for truth then for truth itself.

With Socrates, a profound illusion was born. This illusion holds that through unshakeable through using causality one can penetrate the deepest abyss of being and can furthermore correct the errors in being.

This metaphysical illusion accompanies science as an instinct and leads science time and time again to its limits where it must transform into art.

Socrates was the first man to live and die by the instinct of science. The dying Socrates is admired because he has absolved all fear of death through knowledge and reason.

Socrates stands as the turning point of history.

Pessimism in a practical sense will take over wherever art does not appear, especially as religion or science.

Socrates is the anti-pessimist. His optimistic faith that nature is intelligible and that sin is error, which is correctible denies pessimism a foothold.

Science needs art to protect it from its own boundaries. At the boundaries of science man becomes pessimistic if not reminded by art.

Section 16

There is a dichotomy between an insatiable lust for optimistic knowledge and the tragic need for art.

Apollo is the genius of the principium individuationis in which redemption through illusion is truly obtained. Dionysus is the mystical union in which the Apollonian principle is broken. It is from these two sources in which all art is born.

We may regard nature and music as two different expressions of the same thing.

Music is a universal language. It resembles geometrical figures and numbers as a definitive universalism. Music as a universal language is experienced a priori.

Music is not a copy of the physical world, but a copy of the will itself. As such, it stands in relation to the world as the will stands in relation to the world.

The world is embodied music as the world is embodied will.

Music, according to Schopenhauer, is the immediate language of the will.

Image and concept attain a higher significance under the influence of a truly corresponding music.

Music incites to the symbolic intuition of Dionysian Universality and music allows the symbolic image to emerge in its highest significance.

Music gives birth to the myth, most importantly the tragic myth: "the myth which expresses Dionysian knowledge in symbols" (Nietzsche, 103).

It is only through music that individuals can understand the joy of the annihilation of the individual.

Apollonian art triumphs the joys of this life by overshadowing suffering with beauty. Dionysian art overcomes the suffering of this life through the belief in the eternal life of the unified will.

Section 17

Dionysian art seeks to convince of us of the eternal joy of existence. But as Apollonian art does this through phenomena, Dionysian art seeks this from behind phenomena.

Myth was annihilated by the faith in science. Music is the way for myth to be reborn.

Aristophanes saw Socrates, Euripides and the music of the New Dithyrambic poets which mirrored phenomena, not the will itself, as enemies and destroyers of art.

By setting music to be descriptive of phenomena, music has been robbed of its power to create myth.

Music which merely represents phenomena is wretchedly poorer than the phenomena itself.

In Euripides, we see the triumph of scientific knowledge and the demise of artistic reflection. The phenomenal particulars win out over the universals.

Tragedy revealed a metaphysical comfort through music. But with music stripped of its myth-bearing power there is no metaphysical comfort and knowledge leaves us rawer than before we knew. There is no solace in science apart from art.

The new spirit of Greek art, deprived of myth, was to seek comfort in an earthly, phenomenal dissolution of tragedy. The hated deus ex machina replaced the metaphysical comfort.

The Dionysian spirit having been banished from the stage fled into the degenerate form of cult.

With the deus ex machina the Dionysian spirit was driven underground and individualism heralded the deus ex machina as the true comfort.

Metaphysical, universal comfort was lost and replaced by momentary particular comforts.

Section 18

There are three cultures:
1. Socratic (Alexandrian)
2. Hellenic (Artistic)
3. Tragic (Buddhistic)

The Alexandrian culture idolizes the theoretical man, reason, knowledge and science above all else.

The Socratic culture is delusional optimistic in believing that it possesses limitless power.

Myth is the necessary prerequisite of religion.

The tragic (Buddhistic) culture replaces science with wisdom at its highest end.

The Socratic culture will tremble with fear once its optimism has been shattered by learning of its power limitations.

Section 19

The Socratic culture is the culture of the opera.

The Socratic culture endures the music of opera to hear the words. All the while he trembles at the thought of giving the music too much appreciation and undoing the base of his culture.

The art of the opera responds to a powerful need, but it is a non-aesthetic need. It responds to the need for faith in the existence of the artistic and good man.

The origin of opera is the fulfillment of a non-aesthetic need: the glorification of man. It stands contra to the dogma of the inherently corrupt and lost man.

Opera is a birthing of the theoretical man, not the artist. The non-musical heroes of Opera demand t hat words are nobler than the tones as the soul is nobler than the body.

The opera is a crude unmusical combination of image, music and words.

"The premise of the opera is a false belief concerning the artistic process: the idyllic belief that every sentient man is an artist" (Nietzsche, 117).

The cultured Renaissance man let himself be led back to the primitive artistic man by imitation of Greek tragedy.

The opera does not touch sorrow as art ought to, but rather emphasizes the cheery optimism of eternal rediscovery.

Those who seek to destroy the unmusical opera would have to destroy the whole of the Socratic culture.

Art in the Socratic culture is empty because it is void of its true purpose: "to save the eye from gazing into the horrors of night and to deliver the subject by the healing balm of illusion from the spasms of the agitation of the will" (Nietzsche, 118).

Music is powerless when it is alienated from its true dignity as the Dionysian mirror of the world and as an expression of the will itself.

Music cannot be a slave to the phenomena or be a mere imitation of the formal characteristics of phenomena.

The Socratic culture cannot explain nor tolerate the reemergence of the Dionysian spirit which has taken place in music from Bach to Beethoven to Wagner.

The Dionysian spirit of this German music is the sole purifying fire in the Alexandrian culture of knowledge lust.

"All that we now call culture, education, civilization must some day appear before the unerring judge, Dionysus" (Nietzsche, 120).

Kant and Schopenhauer made it possible for the spirit of German philosophy to destroy Socratic scientific optimism.

The oneness of German music and philosophy points to the emergence of a Hellenic society. The Alexandrian age seems to be receding backwards to the Dawn of a new tragic age.

The Sophists

(Originally written September 6, 2006 in Book 10)

The Sophists

• Sophism was a byproduct of the disintegration of morality in Greece.
• The Sophists were neither scientists nor philosophers. They are traveling teachers.
• Sophists were paid, a novel idea in Greece and an affront to the ancient nobility and the intelligentsia.
• The sophists were teachers of "virtue". They taught how to influence people.
• The sophists varied in their beliefs. There was no common doctrine.

I'm tired. Why?

• The sophists were received warmly by the newly wealthy merchant class and by eager young learners.
• They are met with hostility by the superstitious and devout.
• The mob rule in Athens often tried sophists for atheism and treason, making no distinction between the two.

Estimation of the Sophists

• The sophists' interest in rhetoric or oratory skill made them pay more attention to the nature of language.
• Plato learned that language played a large part in framing a problem and the solution to the problem.
• They were practical. They swept away superstition, but had nothing to replace it.
• They were extremely skeptical.
• Science debunked the notion of gods as causal agents. Aristophanes noted, "when Zeus is uncrowned, chaos succeeds to his place" (Jones, 65).
• "Xenophanes' discovery that every man makes god in his own image had led him to conclude that god transcends all human grasp, it led others to the conclusion that god is only a figment of the human mind" (Jones, 65).
• Skepticism undermined the Greek religion, but was left unchecked to undermine everything. Science could not replace the moral code of Greece, though it had debunked anthropomorphic origin stories and causal relationships. Science and skepticism freed Greece from mythology, but rendered it utterly corrupt and devoid of morality.
• But since science was not uniform people began to become skeptical of it. Science was ripped to bits by skepticism and further exacerbated by paradoxes from Parmenidean logic. Man was hopeless in his quest for comprehending the universe. Both the gods and science were gone; what did they have left?

Protagoras

• One of the earliest sophists
• Worked out a theory of sensory perception that was based on Heraclitean physical theory.
• The theory led to skepticism
• He held that neither reason nor perception gave truth about the world; thus, objective knowledge of a public reality was impossible.
• "Man is the measure of all things" was the battle cry of Protagoras. It was a complete rejection of Thales and like philosophies.
• Everyone since Thales held that 1) there is a public, objective reality and 2) reality is intelligible by the human mind. Protagoras denied all of this.
• He also rejected Parmenides' theory of logical consistency as the test of reality, maintaining that human opinion was the test.
• He relied on common sense and denounced anything that was against what really appeared to be true, as the unchanging reality of the Parmenidean one was.
• He believed that one should participate in their local religion because they can't know the absolute truth anyway. That way they won't offend anyone unnecessarily. The same was true of social customs.
• Conformity was the "goodness" that Protagoras taught.

The Younger Sophists

• The younger sophists were much more radical than the social conservative Protagoras, and equally skeptical.
• They are concerned with figuring out if law was 'physis' or 'nomos' 
• Physis was what was real. it was a term used in science and lent weight to the question.
• Nomos was meant to mean a social convention or man-made.
• No educated man could believe that the gods existed or gave laws and thus law would have to be mere convention. So, if it is a mere convention, why should we obey it?
• They did not fully reject Protagoras' view, just reinterpreted it. Protagoras followed the rules, not because they were good, but because it was advantageous for him to do so. The other Sophists said, "don't follow the rules because it is advantageous for you not to".
• The discarded aristocratic youth, skeptical of science and cynical of democracy denounced this sophism.
• These men learned what they wanted to know, "There is no real justice or right, that these are only names applied to local and changing conventions, and that the only real authority in the world is force" (Jones, 69). Callicles and Thrasymachus are of this sort.
• Callicles calls justice consists in the strong having more than the weak.
• Moderation was foolish to Callicles. Bodily pleasures are the good in life and that which enlightened man aims at.
• Thrasymachus holds justice being a a morally binding way of life as utterly illusionary. He calls justice on these terms linguistic in nature, pure language play.
• Sophistic teaching was a symptom of the Greek's moral decline, no so much a cause.

The Peloponnesian War & its sons

(Originally written September 6, 2006 in Book 10)

The Peloponnesian War

• Athens' strength grew after Greece defeated the Persian Empire, in which Athens played a pivotal role.
• Athens was beginning to rival and even surpass Sparta in power, 
• Athens dominated the trade of Greece.
• Sparta and Corinth convinced many other states to fight against "the tyrant city".
• The Peloponnesian war began in 431 B.C.
• Pericles, tyrant of Athens opted to concede territories to the Spartans and her allies. He moved all Athenians within the city walls and executed Naval raids on the Spartans. He opted for a war of attrition. Unfortunately, the overcrowded city was decimated by a plague. Then Pericles died. Athens fell into the hands of ill-equipped demagogues
• In 415 B.C. Athens made the mistake of attacking Sicily and wasted troops and money. Within two years of the attack the mighty Athenian navy had been decimated.
• The war continued for ten years simply out of bitterness on the Athenian side.

The Old Oligarch

The Old Oligarch was an unknown author who criticized the Athenian democracy. He concluded that a state has to make a choice between freedom an good governance.

Aristophanes

• Criticized the Athenian democracy for being inefficient, indecisive and irresponsible
• Aristophanes was not as mild mannered in his criticisms as the Old Oligarch was
• Aristophanes preferred the country gentleman to the urban aristocrat. He hated ignorance wherever one lived, but despised the urban leaders of the Assembly for being disloyal and without piety, hell bent on destroying tradition
• Aristophanes attack on democracy: He hates the jury system of paying poor people to serve jury duty. While the jurors claim to be powerful, Aristophanes calls them slaves of the demagogues. 
• Aristophanes' solution: He offers a communism, very similar to Plato's Utopia, with common houses, women and meals.

What War does to Man

Spartan idealism and Athenian idealism split cities in two. The aristocrats sided with sparta as the common man sided with Athens.

"War which takes away the comfortable provision of daily life is a hard master, and tends to assimilate men's characters to their conditions" (Jones, 54).

Intelligence is no longer a virtue.

Importance of political unity

Thucydides was shocked by the brutality and savagery of the war and even more so that it was a civil war in Hellas. 

The unity of a city-state was a difficult achievement as men still held family and clan loyalties, which had held over since a more primitive time.

Class warfare between rich and poor also prevented city-state unity.

The polis played an integral part in every Greek's life and unity was a huge aspiration for every individual polis.

The "New" Man

The old man was a conservative like Aristophanes and held virtue as esteemed, loved a simple life, had respect for law, religion, customs and was deeply patriotic.

The New man, born of civil war was a tyrannical cynic. He was self-serving.

Euripides 

Horrors of War: The Trojan Women

Early on, Euripides had been pro-Athens and anti-Sparta. He was patriotic and optimistic. The Trojan Women was a stark difference. He was no longer hopeful.

He believed in a moral order and that the moral order was a natural order. He held that the Greeks were violating that natural order.

He believed war to be futile.

He mentions a dichotomy between reason and passions. Passions lead to destruction.

The war shook his belief in the moral order and the existence of the gods. He doubts because of the war.

Euripides must have been a deeply religious man and his loss of faith must have been excruciating to him.

Euripides contrasted with Sophocles

Aeschylus (b. 525 B.C.) fought in the Persian War and believed religion to be benign and enlightening.

Sophocles (b. 495 B.C.) represents a belief in Athenian greatness. He believed in a transcendent divine law.

While Sophocles was only fifteen years older than Euripides, he was vastly different in his outlook on life.

The Dissolution of the Old Ideal

Egoism had destroyed the Greek unity of the polis and patriotism. 

The passions here destroyed the Greek reliance on reason.

The orderliness of Greece decayed as the Civil War ground ever on.