Friday, September 24, 2004 Measure of a day

Friday, September 24, 2004

How do you measure the worth of a day? How do you determine if you received full measure for the effort you exerted on any particular day? I got up this morning an hour later than is my usual time, 6:24 AM—but my alarm clock is five minutes advanced so it was 6:19 AM. I have been delaying the time I rise each morning owning to an injury to my left leg sustained while jogging last Sunday. I had been running at a reduced pace to facilitate the recovery of a mishap the previous Thursday. The earlier injury had been a pulled muscle in the middle of my calf. The most recent one was a pulled muscle closer to the ankle. Both annoyed me no end since both reduced my ability to jog each morning and I was getting impatient to resume my daily regimen.

I could conclude that my inability to conduct a morning ritual had reduced the quality of the past eight days. But I realize that because I had stopped my morning run I had begun to write on a daily basis, hence the journal recorded for the past several days. I noticed too that I had deliberately begun to take more notice of the world around me. I had completed the James Campbell book Exiled in Paris. I had resumed listening to the recorded lectures on ancient Greek and Roman culture. The two most recent lectures discussed Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, and Virgil.

Plato and Socrates provide one worldview and Aristotle and Virgil each added another dimension to the view. Socrates and Plato attempt to arrive at an understanding of the world through rigorous analytical questioning. They describe the individual as having a basic set of needs—Eros, which comprise the need to satisfy hunger, lust, comfort, etc. If a community can be likened to a human, then the Eros would include farmers, artists, and others that provide for the social needs of the community. Above Eros the individual and community also have a more developed need called nomos—the need for self-preservation and self-assertion. In the community, this would be the equivalent of the police force and army. Finally, above all of this is the need to make sense of the world the individual inhabits. This Plato and Socrates described as the need for reason in the individual, enlightened leadership based on reason for the community.

Through reason, both philosophers sought to replace the arbitrary Greek deities as the model for how mankind should behave.

Through reason, Plato and Socrates examined the way in which individuals achieved an understanding of the world they inhabited. From the earliest time, the individual categorizes every sensory perception he has: a chair, a bird, the sound of bird songs, the sound of a trumpet, the sound of a harp, the feel of ice, the feel of fur, the taste of bitter, the taste of sweet, the smell of rosemary, the smell of humans, the smell of cats, etc. He categorizes behavior; aggression, anger, cowardice, etc.; as well as states of being; good, bad, indifferent, etc. Everyone has within his/her mind created categories for everything that he/she has learned, experienced or otherwise acquired. Plato contends that there exists within each of us idealized forms for every one of these categories we’ve created: the form of a chair, the form for aggressive behavior, the form for the taste of sour, etc. By examining these manifested versions of these forms through rigorous logical processes, each individual can arrive at a more enlightened understanding of the true form of, for example, “good,” “bad,” “truth,” etc.