= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
GabrielDuquette comments on Rationality Quotes November 2012 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (898)
Teachings of Diogenes
Another from the same site — on free will:
The real irony of the story is a historical context I think most readers these days miss: that when the real Plato paid court to a 'king' - Dionysius II, tyrant of Syracuse - it went very poorly. Plato was arrested, and barely managed to arrange his freedom & return to Athens.
Twice.
And supposedly Plato was sold into slavery by the previous tyrant.
This works until the king sends armed men to confiscate your vegetables.
What king ever sent armed men to confiscate the vegetables of one poor dude?
Damn near every one of them through the systemical implementation of taxation?
You can't get blood from a stone. So sometimes it pays to be a stone.
EDIT: Anyway, this is missing the point. Diogenes is preaching self-sufficiency and a variant of keeping your identity small. Sycophancy isn't a reliable way to hold onto one's vegetables and one's dignity.
You can dynamite stones as an example to other would be stones.
They still won't give you any blood. They're stones. No blood up in 'em.
"Would be". As in, "don't become a stone; if I can't get blood from you I'm liable to blow you up instead".
Leaving you with more stones.
Which would be a problem if the dynamiter was trying to minimize the number of stones rather than maximizing the amount of blood, I suppose.
But you can destroy the stone, and put something you can get blood from in its place.
Depends on the size of the stone. You might not even notice it if it's small enough.
Well, you might be bulldozing the whole area.
The stone in question will hitch on ride on the bottom of a workman's boot, eventually ending up on his well-tended lawn where it will reside comfortably for decades.
"Once, Chuang Tzu was fishing the P’u River when the King of Ch’u sent two of his ministers to announce that he wished to entrust to Chuang Tzu the care of his entire domain.
Chuang Tzu held his fishing pole and, without turning his head, said: 'I have heard that Ch’u possesses a sacred tortoise which has been dead for three thousand years and which the king keeps wrapped up in a box and stored in his ancestral temple. Is this tortoise better off dead and with its bones venerated, or would it be better off alive with its tail dragging in the mud?'
'It would be better off alive and dragging its tail in the mud,' the two ministers replied.
'Then go away!' said Chuang Tzu, 'and I will drag my tail in the mud!'"
Translation recommendation for Zhuangzi? (I've been reading Burton Watson's.)
Maybe undignified, but my favorite translations are from Tsai Chih Chung's series of manhua interpretations of the Chinese classics, specifically Zhuangzi Speaks: the Music of Nature and The Dao of Zhuangzi: the Harmony of Nature
The kind of formal distance one usually sees in academic translations distorts Zhuangzi's message. The comic book form suits it very well.