Aristotle and Politics, and Repeat, and Repeat, and Repeat, and . . .

The return of a friend from abroad has re-sparked my desire to write. Some years ago, he was your average american, ie, a deft creation of ignorance and apathy. Today, he is considerably more well informed and, who knows, he may actually give a shit. The reason why I bring him up is because the subject, and the word, friend, has been weighing heavily on my mind for many months. I've been having an existentialist crisis and have been consulting the "experts". I've been doing an enormous amount of reading. "What is Called Thinking? by Heidegger, "Thus Spake Zarathustra" by Nietzsche, "The Myth of Sisyphus" by Camus. In order to liven it up a little I began to read "The World as Will and Representation" by the greatest optimist (wink)of all time, Schopenhauer. (If you got that joke, good. Hi Lenz. If not, you...um, well, you missed it.) As Whitehead said (I'm paraphrasing)- all philosophy is a footnote to Plato. Because the problems of friendship, life, love, happiness, have been tackled by greater minds than our own when they sat down and thought of these things long ago, I find myself going back to the Ancient Greeks. Aristotle said a friend is one soul in two bodies. This is poignant to me because if one follows this statement through, friends who cease being friends are tearing a soul apart.

It turns out Aristotle was pretty damn smart. He wrote something called Politics which of course has no rival except maybe the Republic (Plato). Aristotle looked at all political systems in his book, and basically comes to the conclusion that he didn't like any of them and they all sucked, which in my eyes begs the question, Aristotle came to this conclusion a long time ago. Aristotle basically defined western civilization (no really) as we know it today, why hasn't anyone ran with this conclusion?



P.S.

The above picture is Heraclitus correctly pronounced EE-RA-KLEE-TOS.
In response to my rhetorical question (which Aristotle literally wrote the book on) my answer is Πάντα ῥεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει.
Speaking of responses, in response to Whitehead's quote about Plato, G.E.M. Anscombe said that all philosophy is a footnote to Parmenides. Leave it to a woman to split hairs and play dirty.