On 04-20-98 Hal White wrote to Day Brown... 
 
 HW>    I take it you haven't read Plato's Timaeus or Symposium. 
I have, but it has been quite a while. 
 HW>    What do you make of Socrates' references to his daemon? 
The Greeks had the idea of the 'Muse', which was not a god, or an 
angel, but a rather impersonal robotic force with no motive; a 
kind of Murphy's law animator, and I see his daemon more in that 
way- nothing devilish.  There was a lot of wondering about where 
it is that an *idea* comes from, or what it was exactly that the 
conscious was, and while I have some idea today, I have not made 
all that much progress. 
 HW> Plato's Republic suggest direct access to the Form of the Good... 
 HW> Do you find this a _truth following from the presentation of logic? 
I agree, and I think Neitzsche saw too, some problems on deciding 
just what the good was, and how long it was to be good for.  That 
was likely one of the problems he had dealing with Dion, who made 
political decisions everyday. 
 
 HW>    I don't know where you are going with this,... but yes each nation 
 HW> does have a "flavor" to its thought/writings.  OTOH both Jews and 
 HW> Greeks 
 HW> have produced both visionaries and philosophers;  indeed it's 
 HW> not always clear how to separate the two roles. 
The separation is, that I do not see any Jew who does not claim 
to speak in God's name, nor any Greek with the chutzpah to. 
 
As to where I am going.  Yeah I wonder too.  It is one thing to 
say that ends should be selected before seeking means, but that 
begs the question of how to select ends.  One could spend life in 
the pursuit of a method, and never achieve any end at all. 
 
Religion acts as if unintended consequences do not exist, that it 
is a single end worth seeking.  Neitzsche suggests that we're all 
either victims or victors, and that the latter state's preferable 
given the usual consequences.  One of the advantages of victor is 
that one will have the power to seek a method, whereas the victim 
is always re-acting rather than *acting*. 
 
If I peel the layer of motivation back one order of magnitude, it 
looks like the pursuit of a method *is* an end, and that anything 
that I can do to expose that method is to the perfect good, which 
Plato assumed to exist. 
 
Remember too, that Plato had been a Mystai, and assumes that his 
readers were Greek, and had also been to Eleusis.  There was some 
common bond, and common vision promulgated by the experience that 
virtually all of the literate class had, but which they were all 
mandated never to write about.  Like trying to understand the 
'Yellow Submarine' movie by the Beetles without LSD. 
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