9781945186240

There are undeniably good passages, even in those writers, but what was
the point of it all—the script and staging alike?
7. It stares you in the face. No role is so well suited to philosophy as the
one you happen to be in right now.
8. A branch cut away from the branch beside it is simultaneously cut
away from the whole tree. So too a human being separated from another is
cut loose from the whole community.
The branch is cut off by someone else. But people cut themselves off—
through hatred, through rejection—and don’t realize that they’re cutting
themselves off from the whole civic enterprise.
Except that we also have a gift, given us by Zeus, who founded this
community of ours. We can reattach ourselves and become once more
components of the whole.
But if the rupture is too often repeated, it makes the severed part hard to
reconnect, and to restore. You can see the difference between the branch
that’s been there since the beginning, remaining on the tree and growing
with it, and the one that’s been cut off and grafted back.
“One trunk, two minds.” As the gardeners put it.
9. As you move forward in the logos, people will stand in your way.
They can’t keep you from doing what’s healthy; don’t let them stop you
from putting up with them either. Take care on both counts. Not just sound
judgments, solid actions—tolerance as well, for those who try to obstruct us
or give us trouble in other ways.
Because anger, too, is weakness, as much as breaking down and giving
up the struggle. Both are deserters: the man who breaks and runs, and the
one who lets himself be alienated from his fellow humans.
10. The natural can never be inferior to the artificial; art imitates nature,
not the reverse. In which case, that most highly developed and
comprehensive nature—Nature itself—cannot fall short of artifice in its
craftsmanship.
Now, all the arts move from lower goals to higher ones. Won’t Nature
do the same?
Hence justice. Which is the source of all the other virtues. For how
could we do what justice requires if we are distracted by things that don’t