It's sexually a bit violent for me, but I find it very difficult to apply moral criteria in discussing art. It's extremely well acted, it's very beautifully produced, it has everything - personal relationships, the fighting scenes are interesting, the diplomacy scenes are interesting. I love "Game of Thrones." I also read the books. ![]() Elsewhere." Any time you have 144 hours, I'll give you the discs. But as we get farther from them and we no longer see them as direct representations of the world, we realize that there is art in what they have to offer us. When the novel came about in the 18th century, it was hugely criticized. The same thing happened with photography, to cinema, to jazz - all those things started out as popular arts that were looked down upon by the higher establishment. It's the mother of all arguments against popular culture - which is what Greek tragedy was, in many respects, at the time. Plato outlaws dramatic and epic poetry from his ideal city for three reasons: it conflates the authentic and the fake it's only good for representing sex and violence and it perverts and destroys the life of those who are exposed to it. The first thing I did was connect the criticisms of TV with Plato's criticism of poetry in "The Republic" because they are very similar. I said to myself, "If I don't make anything out of all this watching that I've done, I will have wasted a large part of my life." I was writing a book, and by the evening I was usually exhausted, so I started watching a serious amount of TV. In 1983, I sublet a place that had a big color TV. ![]() When I first came to America I thought that only stupid people watched television. Then I ended up liking it. When my son was very young, he asked me, "What do you do when you do philosophy?" I said, "Well, you think about the most important things in the world." And he said, "Like soccer?" I didn't like economics very much, but even more, economics didn't like me. At Swarthmore, I majored in economics and philosophy. When I was growing up in the 1960s, Greece became famous for shipowning - Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos and all those big names. I went to college with the idea that I was going to join many Greeks by becoming a shipowner and then retire early and do philosophy. I said: "Something that I don't understand completely must be very deep. I couldn't understand the Latin or the Greek. My interest in philosophy started in high school with a copy of Spinoza's "Ethics," which is written in Latin with a Greek translation on facing pages. I would give the same advice to students. You will always find more in it if you keep at it." I still practice it. When I was 14, he said: "Never trust your first impression of a text. If I ever wrote a memoir, I'd mention the advice of a teacher of Greek. I was brought up in the center of Athens but my parents sent me to boarding school only five miles away when I was 8 until age 18.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |