English Science and Literature club🤓✍️📖

275.

October 24, 2024 (14237)
The surest way to engage in psychopolitics, assuming that one is already closely familiar with great thinkers of one’s mother tongue, is to write a personal history, rooted in the history of psychopolitics in a second language. One the international level, the second language must have enough power to challenge the dominance of the first. Ideally, these two languages have to be long-term rivals like Greek and Latin, for example.
As we know, in 222 BCE, the Spartan king, Cleomenes, was defeated in the Battle of Sellasia by the Macedonian king Antigonus Doson. In 197 BCE, Titus Quinctius Flamininus, a Roman politician and general, defeated Macedonians at the Battle of Cynoscephalae and proclaimed the freedom of Greece. In 171 BCE, the Macedonian king, Perseus, rebelled against Rome, but was crashed at Pydna in 168 BCE. In 148 BCE, Macedonia became a province of Rome. In 147 BCE, the Achaean League, which helped Rome to defeated Macedonians, rebelled against Rome, was crashed by Lucius Mummius in 146 and Greece itself became a province of Rome.
Cicero was born in 106 BCE in Arpinum, which was captured by the Romans in 305 BCE and granted “civitas sine suffragio”. It’s like to be born in the late 2020s in Canada, forty years after Germany became a sort of province of the US. Formally, Germany, of course, is independent from the US. However, in April 2008, when it was necessary to decide an important military issue, has anybody really cared about what Germans or even French said on the issue?
Since 146 BCE, Greece was under control of pro-Roman elites, it preserved its language and played an important role in Seditio Romana. Cicero began to study Greek philosophers and quickly realized that the Greek language at the time was superior to Latin. Many great thinkers who now study German philosophers (Kant, Goethe, Fichte, Heine, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche) are coming to conclusion that German, as far as philosophy is concerned, is superior to English. How many of us, after reading what Nietzsche says about Bacon, Hobbes, Hume and Locke in Beyond Good and Evil (252) are going to study them and take them seriously? “An abasement, and a depreciation of the idea of a “philosopher” for more than a century”? How much the contention between English and German great thinkers contributed to the devastating conflicts of the first part of the 20th century? And what did Cicero say about Epicurus, who arguably was more popular in the Greek language than Plato and Aristotle during “the Crisis of the Roman Republic (134 - 44 BCE). Was the crisis primarily about the contention between patricians and plebeians? Just after Romans conquered way more sophisticated Greeks? C’mon! Who’s going to be a new English version of Cicero in 2070s?

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4 viewsVladimir Svetashev, edited  Oct 24, 2024 at 10:18

275.

October 24, 2024 (14237)
The surest way to engage in psychopolitics, assuming that one is already closely familiar with great thinkers of one’s mother tongue, is to write a personal history, rooted in the history of psychopolitics in a second language. One the international level, the second language must have enough power to challenge the dominance of the first. Ideally, these two languages have to be long-term rivals like Greek and Latin, for example.
As we know, in 222 BCE, the Spartan king, Cleomenes, was defeated in the Battle of Sellasia by the Macedonian king Antigonus Doson. In 197 BCE, Titus Quinctius Flamininus, a Roman politician and general, defeated Macedonians at the Battle of Cynoscephalae and proclaimed the freedom of Greece. In 171 BCE, the Macedonian king, Perseus, rebelled against Rome, but was crashed at Pydna in 168 BCE. In 148 BCE, Macedonia became a province of Rome. In 147 BCE, the Achaean League, which helped Rome to defeated Macedonians, rebelled against Rome, was crashed by Lucius Mummius in 146 and Greece itself became a province of Rome.
Cicero was born in 106 BCE in Arpinum, which was captured by the Romans in 305 BCE and granted “civitas sine suffragio”. It’s like to be born in the late 2020s in Canada, forty years after Germany became a sort of province of the US. Formally, Germany, of course, is independent from the US. However, in April 2008, when it was necessary to decide an important military issue, has anybody really cared about what Germans or even French said on the issue?
Since 146 BCE, Greece was under control of pro-Roman elites, it preserved its language and played an important role in Seditio Romana. Cicero began to study Greek philosophers and quickly realized that the Greek language at the time was superior to Latin. Many great thinkers who now study German philosophers (Kant, Goethe, Fichte, Heine, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche) are coming to conclusion that German, as far as philosophy is concerned, is superior to English. How many of us, after reading what Nietzsche says about Bacon, Hobbes, Hume and Locke in Beyond Good and Evil (252) are going to study them and take them seriously? “An abasement, and a depreciation of the idea of a “philosopher” for more than a century”? How much the contention between English and German great thinkers contributed to the devastating conflicts of the first part of the 20th century? And what did Cicero say about Epicurus, who arguably was more popular in the Greek language than Plato and Aristotle during “the Crisis of the Roman Republic (134 - 44 BCE). Was the crisis primarily about the contention between patricians and plebeians? Just after Romans conquered way more sophisticated Greeks? C’mon! Who’s going to be a new English version of Cicero in 2070s?

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