<aside> <img src="/icons/priority-high_lightgray.svg" alt="/icons/priority-high_lightgray.svg" width="40px" />
Welcome to my Great Books journey! As someone deeply passionate about classical education but pursuing it outside traditional academic channels, I've embarked on a self-directed study of the foundational works that have shaped Western thought and literature. This page serves as my digital commonplace book, tracking my progress and reflections as I work through these timeless texts.
While I'm not affiliated with any formal institution, I've structured my reading around established Great Books curricula, particularly drawing inspiration from programs like St. John's College and Mortimer Adler's approach while interjecting the work of John Vervaeke and Richard Tarnas. The database below captures my progress, annotations, and evolving thoughts as I navigate through these works.
I'm particularly meticulous about choosing the right translations, as I've learned how significantly they can impact one's understanding and enjoyment of these texts. Within each page, you'll find my notes on the specific editions I've selected, along with brief explanations of why I chose them.
Feel free to follow along with my journey, use my translation recommendations, or engage with the ideas I'm exploring. This is very much a living document, so keep checking back for updates!
</aside>
The concept of flow state, much like the ancient Greek pursuit of excellence, represents a heightened state of consciousness where insight and intuition merge. This cognitive state bears striking parallels to classical philosophical practices, where direct engagement with one's environment leads to deeper understanding. Similar to how Greek philosophers sought to understand patterns in nature, flow state involves implicit pattern recognition and learning. When we enter this state, whether through physical activities like rock climbing or through contemplative practices reminiscent of ancient rituals, our minds form new neural connections and insights.
These moments of insight, comparable to the sudden understanding (nous) valued in classical philosophy, occur as bursts of clarity that transcend ordinary conscious thought. The process creates a self-reinforcing cycle where intuition and explicit knowledge work in harmony, much like the Greek ideal of combining practical wisdom (phronesis) with theoretical understanding (episteme).
The brain forms novel connections during flow states, similar to how ancient thinkers bridged seemingly disparate concepts through metaphor
This enhanced state of consciousness can be accessed through various practices, from physical engagement to contemplative exercises
The resulting insights often transcend conventional cultural frameworks, allowing for deeper understanding of complex patterns
Related Ideas
<aside> <img src="/icons/ear_gray.svg" alt="/icons/ear_gray.svg" width="40px" />
<aside> <img src="/icons/book-closed_gray.svg" alt="/icons/book-closed_gray.svg" width="40px" />
“…the most crucial turning point in history; it was then that man as he is today was born … the “axial age.”
—Karl Jaspers, “The Axial Age of Human History”
The idea of an axial age was first introduced to the world by the German existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers in the period just after the Second World War. Jaspers had just lived through a period marked by barbarism, nationalism, and fanaticism. He was concerned, in the aftermath of the war, to identify something that modern human beings hold in common—something that might unify humanity and help us all to move forward together peaceably. He believed that he had discovered what was needed, not in any single religious or philosophical system, but in a specific historical experience: the axial age. Modern human beings stand, he proposed, on the far side of this crucial turning point in history (the period 800–200 BC). This is the period which produced the basic categories within which we modern human beings still carry on our thinking—the period that saw the emergence of world religions. The cultures that experienced this new beginning constantly return to it in order to renew themselves.
Excerpt From Convenient Myths: The Axial Age, Dark Green Religion, and the World That Never Was
“This was the age in China of both Confucius and Laozi (the founder of Daoism). In India it was the age of the Upanishads and Buddha; in Iran, Zoroaster; in Palestine, the Hebrew prophets; and in Greece, Homer, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, Thucydides, and Archimedes. It was an era, therefore, during which what are still the fundamental categories that we use in our modern thinking were developed. It was the era of the beginnings of the world religions by whose teachings we have lived until the present time—an age in which “a step was made towards the universal.” The age of myth was over. Rationality and practical experience now battled against myth, and religion became informed by ethics. The human condition was transformed in a way that may be described as a spiritualization. There are great differences among the various faiths that arise out of the axial age, Jaspers acknowledges, but “they all alike come to serve as instruments by which man transcends himself, by which he becomes aware of his own being within the whole of Being, and by which he enters upon pathways that he must travel as an individual. … What took place in this axial age was the discovery of what was later to be called reason and personality.”
Excerpt From Convenient Myths: The Axial Age, Dark Green Religion, and the World That Never Was Iain Provan
Really to see the axial age, to gain it as a foundation for our universal view of history, means: to gain something that is common to all mankind above and beyond all differences of faith. It is one thing to see the unity of history only from the background of one’s own faith; it is quite another to conceive the unity of history in communication with every other human background, combining one’s own consciousness with that which is foreign to one. In this sense, it may be said of the centuries between 800 and 200 BCE that they constitute the empirically ascertainable axis of history for all men.
-KARL JASPERS
The birth of Classical Greek civilization also marks the birth of the rational and analytical elements which are characteristic of Western civilization in general.
It is generally said that Greek architecture, art and literature moved toward, and then successfully embodied, the Classical ideal. This concept is notoriously difficult to put into words. The term can have at least three different meanings, all of which embody some aspect of our reactions to ancient Greek culture.
In the first instance, when applied to all the arts, the Classical ideal means a degree of idealization, so that not only objects, but also characters and events, are presented in their noblest and most elevated aspects. They are also presented in ways that suggest they sum up what is presented without unduly exaggerating mannerisms or characteristics which might distract the spectator from the essential qualities of what is being shown.