The 'good' and the 'bad' in art

Abstract

'Didn't we say that a good man who loses his son, or anything else dear to him, will bear the misfortune more equably than other people?' In this question Plato uses 'good' as synonymous with rational. He continues to draw a distinction between the use of reason and the irrational in man and arrives at the conclusion that in the human mind there is a rational and an irrational part. The former is 'good', the latter 'Dad'. 'So the part of the mind which contradicts the measurements cannot be the same as the part which agrees with them . . . But the part that relies on measurement and calculation must be the best part of us, and the part which contradicts them an inferior one. When man is confronted with the complexities of nature and life around him he usually tries to use reason, his intellect, or logic to break it down into human dimensions, to analyse, enumerate, categorize, generalize, and simplify to understand better, to create a certain order in this 'chaos'. What man does not realize, is his inability to understand life completely and that this apparent chaos is governed by an absolute or perfect balance hardly'tangible for us mortals. Often enough this search for an understanding of this perfect balance, which he consciously feels, results in over-simplification with attendant bewilderment, utter confusion, and total incomprehension.