The Saunterer

Aristotle on how war gives people meaning

    For escape from being lonely and unloved, some go to war. Really? So believed Aristotle:

Aristotle said that only two living entities are capable of complete solitude and complete separateness: God and beast. Because of this the most acute form of suffering for human beings is loneliness. The isolated individual can never by adequately human. And many of war’s most fervent adherents are those atomized individuals who, before the war came, were profoundly alone and unloved. They found fulfilment in war, perhaps because it was the closest they came to love. (Quoted from War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges. New York: Public Affairs. 2002. p.161.)

    For a brief biography of Chris Hedges, click here.

Edgar Allan Poe on the pleasure of beauty

    Edgar Allan Poe wrote in his essay “The Poetic Principle”:

That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the Beautiful. (Quoted from “The Poetic Principle,” by Edgar Allen Poe, published in Sartain’s Union Magazine of Literature and Art, John Sartain ed., 1850. p. 234.)

    For a brief biography of Edgar Allan Poe, click here.