Category: Non classé

Excerpts from the Diotime – Socrates dialogue of the BANQUET de PLATON (205b) on the effects of love.

What advantages does Love bring to men?

The one who is a lover of beautiful things, what does he love?

• Let them become his.

And what about the one who will have the good things become his?

• He will be happy. It is indeed through the possession of good things that happy people are happy.

Do you think that this wish and this love is something common to all men and that all wish a perpetual possession of good things?

• That is also my opinion, I replied: they are something common to all men.

Since this is so, why, Socrates, of all people, do we not say that they love? Yes, if it is true that they are all in love with the same things and always in love? why, on the contrary, why do we say of some that they are in love, and do we not say of such others?

I too am not surprised!

Well,” she said, “you shouldn’t be surprised. After having, you can see, apart from a certain form of love, we call it love, attributing to it the name of the whole; while for the other forms we have recourse to other denominations.

What is comparable? I asked.

This is it. You know very well what a multiplicity of meanings the idea of creation has. Undoubtedly, what is the cause of its transition from non-existence to existence is in any case a creation.

-You’re telling the truth!

However, you know very well, she continued, that they are not called creators but poets.

You are right! I said.

And now it is the same in the case of love. In general, all that is desire for good things and happiness is what Love is. Some who, in many different ways, orient themselves towards him, whether in the field of business or in that of a penchant, either for the exercises of the body or for the culture of the mind, are not told that they love, they are not called lovers, while others, whose actions, whose zeal is ordered to a single form, are the ones who retain the name of all, love, they are said to love, they are called lovers.

It may well be, I said, that you are right!

Undoubtedly, she continued, there is a doctrine according to which those who seek half of themselves are the ones who love. My own doctrine states that love is neither love of a half nor of a whole, unless in some way, comrade, they are precisely a good thing! For what everyone’s aspirations are about is not, I think, what belongs to him, unless it is the good that is called clean and to himself, but the stranger, on the contrary the bad: proof that nothing, in truth, except the good is loved by men! Is that your opinion about them?

Yes, by Zeus! I wrote to myself, but I have no other!

But, she continued, is it like that all of us unite, that we talk about the love of men for what is good?

Yes, I said.

What?” she said again? Shouldn’t we add that they like what is good to be theirs?

It must be added.

But, she said again, not only that it should be theirs, but that it should be theirs forever?

That is what needs to be added.

Consequently, she concludes, the object of love is, on the whole, the perpetual possession of what is good.

• Nothing could be truer than this language!

“The physicist holds his world for real, he attributes the deletions, additions, irregularities and accentuations of the other versions to the imperfections of the perception, to the emergencies of the practice or to the poetic license.

The phenomenalist holds the world of perception as fundamental, and the deletions, abstractions, simplifications and distortions of other versions result from scientific, practical or artistic interests.

For the man in the street, the versions of science, art, and perception, deviate from the familiar and convenient world he has built of odds and ends with pieces of scientific tradition and artistic and where he struggles for his own survival.

Most often, it is this world that is considered real; because reality in a world, like realism in a painting, is largely a matter of habit.

Nelson Goodman

You can now find me online in the ArtMajeur Art Gallery! If you fancy artistic shopping, do not hesitate to take a look !

My profile: https://www.artmajeur.com/norbert-engel

“MEN ARE LOOKING FOR LIGHT IN A FRAGILE GARDEN WHERE FRESH COLORS” Jean Tardieu

The above table: acrylic on canvas 130cm * 162cm
is not a swallow flight.
But like the mime that can depict a flight of bird, this picture refers to a dance between three swallows materialized by three points , red, yellow and blue, by a beautiful spring morning.

“Abstract art includes so many different ideas and interpretations that the so-called” abstract “painter tends either to reject this title or to wear it as the imposed costume of the condemned. […] If it is the abstract term as a pure creation of an independent “object” (Arp, Kandinsky, Mondrian) and which they themselves have aptly named “concrete”. […] If it is the term “abstract” as the rise of the unconscious (surrealism). The young school of French painting called “abstract” does not seem to me to respond to these different meanings of the term. But, If it is to open the external reality of things to let perceive the inner world that is hidden there. If it is a question of exposing, by means of authentically plastic means, the spiritual equivalents of the external world and of a more interior world and rendering these correspondences intelligible by transposition and transmutation. [….] Fear-be, then, the term “abstract” would correspond to more reality with respect to them. ”

Alfred MANESSIER (1911-1993).

The line, whose most elaborate form is writing, always implements thought.

Out of thought, made of various conditionings, can be an obstacle to apprehend the essence of the poetic message.

Watching without thinking, so without prejudging, allows more direct access.

The color, opening the space, facilitates the letting go and the access to the work. Sensitive space pure, the color allows us to go beyond the tangible.

Having no formal content, it becomes a runway to an infinite space.

The white light of the sun, contains all the colors.

The painter sometimes sees his colors come alive with a desire for power to reach a preeminence, sometimes absolute, it is then the birth of a monochrome.

Watching is an art.

Look without thinking, in total mental immobility, you reach a deep silence.

“To be attentive to one’s thought, without the reaction of thought intervening, is the art of observing, of giving absolute attention: there is no center that listens …

Here is the silence that I have sought everywhere, in the books, with the masters and in myself.

I found many things, but never.

This silence occurred without searching for it.

Have I lost my life for unimportant things?

You have no idea of ​​what I imposed on myself: fasts, privations, the practice of virtue.

I understood the inanity a long time ago, but I have never been in the presence of such silence.

What must I do to keep myself in him, let him live my heart? … the will is inoperative in this area …

At this moment I am fully conscious of this sacred silence; through him I see the stars, the trees, the river.

The observer is the observed.

I finally understand what that means. the bliss that I seek is by no means the quest. ”

Krishnamurti

• what is the good of all this?
• Am I really a painter?
• why am I painting?
• why am I painting?
• who do I paint for?