Communist manifesto - Summary

The Communist Manifesto

1.      History of class struggle

2.      They fought constantly until, eventually, they either destroyed themselves or transformed society into a new and better stage.

3.      Manifold gradation of social rank (Rome and middle age)

4.      Bourgeois sprang from the ruins of feudalism. New forms of oppression

5.      Simplified antagonism with the splitting into two great class: Bourgeois and Proletariat

6.      Things bourgeoisie developed…

7.      Feudal system not sufficient, manufacturing system established

8.      Then steam and machinery

9.      Various adv due to discovery of America and industrial revolution; This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended

10.  Buorgeoise the product of long course of development of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.

11.  Bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

12.  The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.

13.  Torn asunder feudal tie that bound man to his “natural superiors”; and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man only self-interest of "cash payment". No religious fervour, chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism but only egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

14.  All respected jobs into paid wage labourer.

15.  Family relation into money relation

16.   

17.  The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.

All relations, venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away

 All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned,

Man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his, real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind

18.  Bourgeois have to globalize

19.  Replace all old forms by new when they globalize

20.  Barbarians into civilization with cheap prices of commodities\

Compels them to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

21.  One dependent on the other

22.  It has agglomerated population, centralized the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralization.  Power in hands of few

23.  Many invention that past generation couldn’t discover

24.  Feudal way were creating obstacles so burst asunder

25.  Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.

26.  A similar movement is going on before our own eyes: bourgeois and proletariat.

The history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule.

In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of over-production.

There is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.

The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

27.  The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself

28.  It has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons - the modern working class - the proletarians.

29.  Workers equal to commodity

30.  He becomes an appendage of the machine. Wage only to the means of subsistence that he requires for maintenance, and for the propagation of his race.  in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labour increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by the increase of the work exacted in a given time or by increased speed of machinery, etc.

31.  Hierarchy.

 Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself.

32.  After getting low wage that portion also taken by shopkeeper  and others of bourgeois society

33.  Many people fall under the proletariat

34.   With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.

35.  the workers begin to form combinations (Trades' Unions) against the bourgeois.

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. into one national struggle between classes.

 But every class struggle is a political struggle.

36.  This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves.

 But when it  rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier, It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself.

37.  The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries.

 In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena.

The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.

38.  The ruling class  supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.

39.  Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour of dissolution going on within the ruling class, a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class.

Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.

40.  Proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry

41.  The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, are  not revolutionary, but conservative or  reactionary

42.  The "dangerous class’ are bribed tool of Bourgeois

43.  The proletarian is without property; his relation to family.

 Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.

44.   The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation.

 They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.

45.  All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.

46.  Communist are accused of taking away property earned by hard work

47.  But the development of industry has already done that to a great extent

48.  Or do you men private property of Bourgeois

49.  No property for labourers

50.  You say this is abolition of individuality and freedom

51.    

52.  Freedom developed by B

53.   But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. 

54.    

55.   U say individuality vanished with property

56.  That means individual equals B

57.  It only deprives him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations.

58.  It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property, all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.

59.  sheer idleness; for those those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything do not work.

60.  the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture.

61.  That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine.

62.  the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, &c.are your very ideas

63.  The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property

What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property.

64.  The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality.

65.  The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got.

Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.

66.  National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.

67.  The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.

68.  the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.

69.  The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.

70.  changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life doesn’t change it

71.  all these ideas have been  the ideas of its ruling class.

72.  Ideas replaced by new ones.

73.  Christianity.

Only forms change.

74.  religious, moral, philosophical, and juridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical development. But religion, morality, philosophy, political science, and law, constantly survived this change

75.  eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience."

76.  The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs.

77.   

78.  The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.

79.   

80.  We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.

81.   

82.  riot

83.  These measures will, of course, be different in different countries.

84.  Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable:

85.  1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.

86.  in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation.

 If the proletariat can makes itself the ruling class and sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.

87.  In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

88.  S

89.  S

90.  S

91.  Openly state that they will win at any cost

92.  All working men should unite

The birth of tragedy

Artistic creation depends on a tension between two opposing forces, which Nietzsche terms the “Apollonian” and the “Dionysian.” Apollo is the Greek god of light and reason, and Nietzsche identifies the Apollonian as a life- and form-giving force, characterized by measured restraint and detachment, which reinforces a strong sense of self. Dionysus is the Greek god of wine and music, and Nietzsche identifies the Dionysian as a frenzy of self-forgetting in which the self gives way to a primal unity where individuals are at one with others and with nature. Both the Apollonian and the Dionysian are necessary in the creation of art. Without the Apollonian, the Dionysian lacks the form and structure to make a coherent piece of art, and without the Dionysian, the Apollonian lacks the necessary vitality and passion. Although they are diametrically opposed, they are also intimately intertwined.

Nietzsche suggests that the people of ancient Greece were unusually sensitive and susceptible to suffering and that they refined the Apollonian aspect of their nature to ward off suffering. The primal unity of the Dionysian brings us into direct apprehension of the suffering that lies at the heart of all life. By contrast, the Apollonian is associated with images and dreams, and hence with appearances. Greek art is so beautiful precisely because the Greeks relied on the appearances generated by images and dreams to shield themselves from the reality of suffering. The early, Doric period of Greek art is dull and prim because the Apollonian influence too heavily outweighs the Dionysian.

The Greek tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, which Nietzsche considers to be among humankind’s greatest accomplishments, achieve their sublime effects by taming Dionysian passions by means of the Apollonian. Greek tragedy evolved out of religious rituals featuring a chorus of singers and dancers, and it achieved its distinctive shape when two or more actors stood apart from the chorus as tragic actors. The chorus of a Greek tragedy is not the “ideal spectator,” as some scholars believe, but rather the representation of the primal unity achieved through the Dionysian. By witnessing the fall of a tragic hero, we witness the death of the individual, who is absorbed back into the Dionysian primal unity. Because the Apollonian impulses of the Greek tragedians give form to the Dionysian rituals of music and dance, the death of the hero is not a negative, destructive act but rather a positive, creative affirmation of life through art.

Unfortunately, the golden age of Greek tragedy lasted less than a century and was brought to an end by the combined influence of Euripides and Socrates. Euripides shuns both the primal unity induced by the Dionysian and the dreamlike state induced by the Apollonian, and instead he turns the Greek stage into a platform for morality and rationality. Rather than present tragic heroes, Euripides gives his characters all the foibles of ordinary human beings. In all these respects, Nietzsche sees Socrates’ influence on Euripides. Socrates effectively invented Western rationality, insisting that there must be reasons to justify everything. He interpreted instinct as a lack of insight and wrongdoing as a lack of knowledge. By making the world seem knowable and all truths justifiable, Socrates gave birth to the scientific worldview. Under Socrates’ influence, Greek tragedy was converted into rational conversation, which finds its fullest expression in Plato’s dialogues.

The modern world has inherited Socrates’ rationalistic stance at the expense of losing the artistic impulses related to the Apollonian and the Dionysian. We now see knowledge as worth pursuing for its own sake and believe that all truths can be discovered and explained with enough insight. In essence, the modern, Socratic, rational, scientific worldview treats the world as something under the command of reason rather than something greater than what our rational powers can comprehend. We inhabit a world dominated by words and logic, which can only see the surfaces of things, while shunning the tragic world of music and drama, which cuts to the heart of things. Nietzsche distinguishes three kinds of culture: the Alexandrian, or Socratic; the Hellenic, or artistic; and the Buddhist, or tragic. We belong to an Alexandrian culture that’s bound for self-destruction.

The only way to rescue modern culture from self-destruction is to resuscitate the spirit of tragedy. Nietzsche sees hope in the figure of Richard Wagner, who is the first modern composer to create music that expresses the deepest urges of the human will, unlike most contemporary opera, which reflects the smallness of the modern mind. Wagner’s music was anticipated by Arthur Schopenhauer, who saw music as a universal language that makes sense of experience at a more primary level than concepts, and Immanuel Kant, whose philosophy exposes the limitations of Socratic reasoning. Not coincidentally, Wagner, Schopenhauer, and Kant are all German, and Nietzsche looks to German culture to create a new golden age.

We have no direct understanding of myth anymore, but we always mediate the power of myth through various rationalistic concepts, such as morality, justice, and history. So far, the tremendous influence of Greek culture has done very little to shift our own culture’s opposition to art because we tend to interpret the Greeks according to our own standards and read tragedies as expressions of moral, rational forces rather than expressions of the mythic forces of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Myth gives us a sense of wonder and a fullness of life that our present culture lacks. Nietzsche urges a return to our deeper selves, which are entwined in myth, music, and tragedy.

Analysis

Nietzsche’s concept of the Dionysian, which he refines and alters over the course of his career, stands as a pointed counterbalance to the thoroughgoing rationality that is so prominent in most philosophy. In most scholarly investigations, the importance of truth and knowledge are taken as givens, and thinkers trouble themselves only over questions of how best to achieve truth and knowledge. By contrast, Nietzsche questions where this drive for truth and knowledge come from and answers that they are products of a particular, Socratic view of the world. Deeper than this impulse for truth is the Dionysian impulse to give free rein to the passions and to lose oneself in ecstatic frenzy. We cannot properly appreciate or criticize the Dionysian from within a tradition of rationality because the Dionysian stands outside rationality. As much as the civilized world may wish to deny it, the Dionysian is the source of our myths, our passions, and our instincts, none of which are bounded by reason. While the civilizing force of the Apollonian is an essential counterbalance—contrary to some stereotypes of Nietzsche, he is firmly against the complete abandonment of reason and civilization—Nietzsche warns that we lose the deepest and richest aspects of our nature if we reject the Dionysian forces within us.

For Nietzsche, art is not just a form of human activity but is rather the highest expression of the human spirit. The thrust of the book is well expressed in what is perhaps its most famous line, near the end of section 5: “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.” One of Nietzsche’s concerns in The Birth of Tragedy is to address the question of the best stance to take toward existence and the world. He criticizes his own age (though his words apply equally to the present day) for being overly rationalistic, for assuming that it is best to treat existence and the world primarily as objects of knowledge. For Nietzsche, this stance makes life meaningless because knowledge and rationality in themselves do nothing to justify existence and the world. Life finds meaning, according to Nietzsche, only through art. Art, music, and tragedy in particular bring us to a deeper level of experience than philosophy and rationality. Existence and the world become meaningful not as objects of knowledge but as artistic experiences. According to Nietzsche, art does not find a role in the larger context of life, but rather life takes on meaning and significance only as it is expressed in art.

By attacking Socrates, Nietzsche effectively attacks the entire tradition of Western philosophy. While a significant group of Greek philosophers predate Socrates, philosophy generally identifies its start as a distinctive discipline in Socrates’ method of doubt, dialogue, and rational inquiry. While Nietzsche acknowledges that Socrates gave birth to a new and distinctive tradition, he is more interested in the tradition that Socrates managed to replace. Greek tragedy as Nietzsche understands it cannot coexist in a world of Socratic rationality. Tragedy gains its strength from exposing the depths that lie beneath our rational surface, whereas Socrates insists that we become fully human only by becoming fully rational. From Socrates onward, philosophy has been the pursuit of wisdom by rational methods. In suggesting that rational methods cannot reach to the depths of human experience, Nietzsche suggests that philosophy is a shallow pursuit. True wisdom is not the kind that can be processed by the thinking mind, according to Nietzsche. We find true wisdom in the Dionysian dissolution of the self that we find in tragedy, myth, and music.

Nietzsche wrote The Birth of Tragedy at a time when he was most heavily under Wagner’s influence. Nietzsche had met Wagner as a young man and was deeply honored when Wagner chose to befriend him. Wagner impressed his own views on life and art on Nietzsche, and The Birth of Tragedy is, in many ways, a philosophical justification for the work Wagner was carrying out in his operas. Over the course of the 1870s, however, Nietzsche became increasingly disillusioned with Wagner, and his mature works, starting with Human, All-Too-Human, show Nietzsche finding his own distinctive voice, free from Wagner’s influence. In particular, Nietzsche became disgusted with Wagner’s shallow pro-German nationalism and his anti-Semitism. In contrast to Nietzsche’s later biting attacks on nationalism,The Birth of Tragedy bears Wagner’s influence in its pride in German culture and its hope that a purified German culture can rescue European civilization from the deadening influence of Socratic rationalism.

Apollo was the Greek god of truth, light, and order; Dionysus, the god of fertility, passion, spontaneity, and rebellion. Apollo and Dionysus represent polarities of the human personality: the logical, orderly side, and the intuitive, spontaneous side. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche originally made the distinction between these two gods and their characteristics. Inside each of us, he said, Apollo and Dionysus wage a war for dominance, with the two sides vying with one another for dominance in various aspects of our personal lives, including activities as simple as walking.The obvious solution is to strive for a balance between these two mighty forces, a struggle made more difficult by the fact that these opposing elements also manifest themselves in institutions such as religion and education. The study of the humanities can help balance these oppositions because even if the content of much art is full of Dionysian emotion, its form is Apollonian.

Main article: The Birth of Tragedy

Nietzsche's aesthetic usage of the concepts, which was later developed philosophically, was first developed in his book The Birth of Tragedy, which was published in 1872. His major premise here was that the fusion of Dionysian and Apollonian "Kunsttrieben" ("artistic impulses") forms dramatic arts, or tragedies. He goes on to argue that this fusion has not been achieved since the ancient Greek tragedians. Nietzsche is adamant that the works of Aeschylus and Sophocles represent the apex of artistic creation, the true realization of tragedy; it is with Euripides, he states, that tragedy begins its "Untergang" (literally "going under", meaning decline, deterioration, downfall, death, etc.). Nietzsche objects to Euripides' use of Socratic rationalism in his tragedies, claiming that the infusion of ethicsand reason robs tragedy of its foundation, namely the fragile balance of the Dionysian and Apollonian.

The relationship between the Apollonian and Dionysian juxtapositions is apparent, Nietzsche claimed in The Birth of Tragedy, in the interplay of Greek Tragedy: the tragic hero of the drama, the main protagonist, struggles to make order (in the Apollonian sense) of his unjust and chaotic (Dionysian) Fate, though he dies unfulfilled in the end. For the audience of such a drama, Nietzsche claimed, this tragedy allows us to sense an underlying essence, what he called the "Primordial Unity", which revives our Dionysian nature - which is almost indescribably pleasurable. Though he later dropped this concept saying it was “...burdened with all the errors of youth” (Attempt at Self Criticism, §2), the overarching theme was a sort of metaphysical solace or connection with the heart of creation.

Different from Kant's idea of the sublime, the Dionysian is all-inclusive rather than alienating to the viewer as a sublimating experience. The sublime needs critical distance, while the Dionysian demands a closeness of experience. According to Nietzsche, the critical distance, which separates man from his closest emotions, originates in Apollonian ideals, which in turn separate him from his essential connection with self. The Dionysian embraces the chaotic nature of such experience as all-important; not just on its own, but as it is intimately connected with the Apollonian. The Dionysian magnifies man, but only so far as he realizes that he is one and the same with all ordered human experience. The godlike unity of the Dionysian experience is of utmost importance in viewing the Dionysian as it is related to the Apollonian because it emphasizes the harmony that can be found within one’s chaotic experience.

Apollo (Apollonian or Apollinian): the dream state or the wish to create order, principium individuationis (principle of individuation), plastic (visual) arts, beauty, clarity, stint to formed boundaries, individuality, celebration of appearance/illusion, human beings as artists (or media of art's manifestation), self-control, perfection, exhaustion of possibilities, creation, the rational/logical and reasonable.

Dionysus (Dionysian): chaos, intoxication, celebration of nature, instinctual, intuitive, pertaining to the sensation of pleasure or pain, individuality dissolved and hence destroyed, wholeness of existence, orgiastic passion, dissolution of all boundaries, excess, human being(s) as the work and glorification of art, destruction, the irrational and non-logical.

Allegory of Cave

Plato (Allegory of the Cave)     Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is, one of the philosophical writings in the form of allegory. An allegorical writing is the type of writing having two levels of meanings: literary and allegorical meanings. A literary meaning is the content or the subject matter and allegorical meaning is the symbolic or metaphorical suggestion. In allegorical writing characters, actions and setting are used as symbols and they should be interpreted to make the allegorical meaning. In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato has given a description of the cave of the cave world. The cave is very dark because there is little light inside it and hardly seen objects. There are some chained people on their necks as well as feet, these chained people cannot move easily. Similarly, there is also another world out of the cave world, but between these two worlds, a wall is raised. On the wall, many other people move with different things on their hands and their shadows fall in the cave world. The people inside the cave cannot raise their head completely so that they can only see the shadows like illusion, which they believe, as real but it is just their illusion.  In the outer world, there is light and everything is clearly visible. If one of the chained people is released from the cave world, and if he is taken to the outer world he cannot see anything at first because his eyes dazzle in the light. But if he stays in the outer world, slowly and gradually he begins to identify everything and he comes to realize that the outer world is the real world and the cave world is the unreal world. He becomes gratified with himself and remembers the other people in the cave. He gives pity and sympathy over the cave people who are lost in darkness. He thinks that it is better to be the slave in the outer world rather than being the king inside the cave. Even though, he does not want to go back to the cave world, his eyes dazzle more if he is taken back to the cave world, and he can’t count anything inside darkness. If he attempts to persuade the people inside the cave saying that the outer world is the real world, and the cave world is unreal, his ignorant friends kill him.     The allegory of the cave has also allegorical meaning because so many symbolic suggestions are used in this writings. The dark cave symbolically suggests the contemporary world of ignorance and the chained people symbolize ignorant people in this ignorant world. The raised wall symbolizes the limitation of our thinking and the shadow symbolically suggest the world of sensory perception which Plato considers an illusion. In his opinion, the appearance is false and reality is somewhere, which we cannot see. Plato as an ideal philosopher says that the appearing world is just the imitation or photocopy of the real world. The shadows represent such photocopy and, the reality is possible to know with the spiritual knowledge. The chains symbolize our limitation in this material world so that we cannot know the reality to know reality; we have to break the material world. The outer world of the light symbolically suggests the world of spiritual reality, which we achieve by breaking the chains that are used to tie us. The dazzling of our eyes for the first time symbolizes difficulty of denies the material world. The second time dazzling of the eyes symbolizes our difficulty to accept ignorance after knowing the reality. Hence, in allegory of the cave Plato has given a criticism over our limited existence in the material world.      In Allegory of the cave, Plato has also described about our perception. He says that there are two types of perception: sensory perception and spiritual perception. Sensory perception is the world of appearance, which we perceive, with the help of our sensory organs. For this, world is the world of illusion. It is the world of shadows so in Plato’s view it is the world of falsehood. The reality or truth is impossible to perceive with our senses, it is possible through spiritual perception, which is divine enlightenment. Spiritual perception is possible when we reject the world of sensory perception so until and unless we break all the material chains we do not get spiritual perception. It is the ideal philosophy of Plato and his spiritual perception as an ideal concept.     Plato also talks about true education or true philosophy. In his opinion education is the process of learning spiritual knowledge so he even calls true education as true philosophy. He says that the learning power is the world of becoming and education is the process of learning called world of being. In other words, what Plato says is that each and every individual is given the learning power in to his soul by the divine so that our learning process differs from one another. A man can learn up to a certain limit and after the limitation is crossed, he cannot learn more. This concept of learning process differs from one another. Contemporary professors of education who believed that there is not predetermined, rejected this concept of learning process that true education is the spiritual enlightenment, which we learn from the heart. It is also called true philosophy, which has certain qualities. A true philosophy is able to make the difference between truth and falsehood, right and wrong as well as justice and injustice. More over true philosophy makes a person spiritually illuminated so that he is not concerned with the material world.     Plato also talks about an ideal state, which is a utopian world. In an ideal state, there is equality among the people because no one is superior or inferior in this world. There is free flow of knowledge justice and truth, everywhere in the ideal state. Plato is also known as the first communist because of his concept of equality among the people. In the ideal state, rulers are also true philosopher whose wealth is not money or gold but spiritual knowledge. Those are the best rulers to rule the ideal state because they are reluctant to rule and active to serve the people as true servants. In other words, the rulers at the ideal state are never thirsty to exercise power, they do not want to impose cruelty over the people but instead they are worried of the condition of the people and the welfare of the state. These rulers are based because for them ruling is not imposing power but it is serving the people. But it is just an ideal state so practically there is no possibility of such state as such ideal rulers are rarely found, these true philosophers are not only the rulers but also best teachers, who should go to the dark and ignorant world to enlightenment the ignorant people.

Leda and the Swan

Leda and the Swan Poem Summary

Preview of Leda and the Swan Summary:       

William Butler Yeats’s daring sonnet describing the details of a story from Greek mythology—the rape of Leda by the god Zeus in the form of a swan—was written at the height of the poet’s career, the same year he received the Nobel Prize for literature. “Leda and the Swan” is a violent, sexually explicit poem that has all of the lyricism and complexity of Yeats’s later work, with its plain diction, rhythmic vigor, and allusions to mystical ideas about the universe, the relationship of human and divine, and the cycles of history. It can be seen as a poem about the way a single event is to be understood as part of a larger scheme; the result of the god’s assault on Leda is the birth of Helen of Troy, the subsequent destruction of early Greek civilization, and the beginning of the modern era. It has also been suggested that the poem, which was first written (and later revised in this present form) during the Irish Civil War of 1922–1923, is intended to draw attention to the violence that beset Yeats’s homeland during that time.

“Leda and the Swan” has been considered one of the most technically masterful poems ever written in English. In the work, Yeats uses the fourteen lines of the traditional sonnet form in a radical, modernist style. He calls up a series of unforgettable, bizarre images of an immediate physical event using abstract descriptions in terse language, while at the same time offering a distanced view of that occurrence in the sweep of time. Yeats himself considered the poem one of his major accomplishments, and in addition to praising its economy of language and skillful use of rhythm, critics have seen it as a fine example of how ideas that were central to the poet’s life found expression in his poetry.

Leda and the Swan Summary

Title
The title of the poem is important, because it is the only indication of the characters who are the subject of the poem. In the poem, Yeats assumes that the reader is familiar with the myth referred to in the title. Throughout the fourteen lines, he never uses the names of either of the characters. Zeus’s name in fact appears neither in the title nor the text of the poem; the reader is expected to understand that the swan is an incarnation of the all-powerful god.

Lines 1–4
The structure of the sonnet is Petrarchan, an Italian form of the sonnet that characteristically divides its theme into an octave, in which a problem or emotion is stated, and a sestet, in which the problem or emotional tension is resolved. There is a clear separation between the first eight lines (the octave) and the final six (the sestet).

The octave is divided into two four-line stanzas, or quatrains. The first quatrain opens with a recounting of the occurrence in mid-scene. It begins abruptly, as the swan assaults Leda with “a sudden blow,” which is most likely a reference to an act of sexual penetration. The use of that simple, powerful phrase (not a complete sentence) and a break before the line continues emphasizes the explosive violence of the act.

Line 1 continues with a description of the great swan hanging in the air above the girl with its wings beating. There is a pun on the word still; the bird’s wings continue to beat and are also still as it hovers above without moving. In line 2 there is a description of Leda that indicates her physical (and perhaps psychological) state, as she staggers under her assailant. The swan has its body over Leda as she falters under him; he caresses her thighs with his webbed feet. There is an almost sensuous description in the phrase “her thighs caressed,” but this is followed immediately by the grotesque image of the swan’s “dark webs” in line 3 and the image of Leda’s neck in his bill as he holds her helpless against him. The swan is never referred to directly as a swan, but its presence is expressed in ordinary images like “great wings” and “dark webs” that in the context of the poem seem quite extraordinary. Leda is simply “the girl” who is caught in the bird’s beak like a small helpless animal. In line 4 the crushing movement of the girl pinned against the bird is reinforced by the repetition of the word breast as the two are joined together unwillingly.

Lines 1-4

The structure of the sonnet is Petrarchan, an Italian form of the sonnet that characteristically divides its theme into an octave, in which a problem or emotion is stated, and a sestet, in which the problem or emotional tension is resolved. There is a clear separation between the first eight lines (the octave) and the final six (the sestet).

Title

The title of the poem is important, because it is the only indication of the characters who are the subject of the poem. In the poem, Yeats assumes that the reader is familiar with the myth referred to in the title. Throughout the fourteen lines, he never uses the names of either of the characters. Zeus's name in fact appears neither in the title nor the text of the poem; the reader is expected to understand that the swan is an incarnation of the all-powerful god.

In Greek mythology, Leda (Λήδα) was daughter of the Aetolian king Thestius, and wife of the king Tyndareus (Τυνδάρεως), of Sparta. Her myth gave rise to the popular motif in Renaissance and later art of Leda and the Swan. She was the mother of Helen (Ἑλένη) of Troy, Clytemnestra (Κλυταιμνήστρα), andCastor and Pollux (Κάστωρ καὶ Πολυδεύκης, also spelled Kastor and Polydeuces).

Leda was admired by Zeus, who seduced her in the guise of a swan. As a swan, Zeus fell into her arms for protection from a pursuing eagle. Their consummation, on the same night as Leda lay with her husband Tyndareus, resulted in two eggs from which hatched Helen (later known as the beautiful "Helen of Troy"), Clytemnestra, and Castor and Pollux (also known as the Dioscuri (Διόσκουροι). Which children are the progeny of Tyndareus, the mortal king, and which are of Zeus, and are thus half-immortal, is not consistent among accounts, nor is which child hatched from which egg. The split is almost always half mortal, half divine, although the pairings do not always reflect the children's heritage pairings. Castor and Polydeuces are sometimes both mortal, sometimes both divine. One consistent point is that if only one of them is immortal, it is Polydeuces. It is also always stated that Helen is the daughter of Zeus.

Leda also had other daughters by Tyndareus: Timandra (Τιμάνδρα), Phoebe (Φοίβη), and Philonoe (Φιλονόη).

In Homer's Iliad, Helen looks down from the walls of Troy and wonders why she does not see her brothers among the Achaeans. The narrator remarks that they are both already dead and buried back in their homeland of Lacedaemon, thus suggesting that at least in some early traditions, both were mortal.

Another account of the myth states that Nemesis (Νέμεσις) was the mother of Helen, and was also impregnated by Zeus in the guise of a swan. A shepherd found the egg and gave it to Leda, who carefully kept it in a chest until the egg hatched. When the egg hatched, Leda adopted Helen as her daughter. Zeus also commemorated the birth of Helen by creating the constellation Cygnus (Κύκνος), the Swan, in the sky.

Leda and the swan and Leda and the egg were popular subjects in the ancient art. In the post-classical arts, it became a potent source of inspiration.

See also Leda and the Swan for the motif in the visual arts and the poem by William Butler Yeats.

In poetry

Ronsard wrote a poem on La Défloration de Lède, perhaps inspired by the Michelangelo, which he may well have known. Like many artists, he imagines the beak penetrating Leda's vagina.

"Leda and the Swan" is a sonnet by William Butler Yeats first published in the Dial in 1924. Combining psychological realism with a mystic vision, it describes the swan's rape of Leda. It also suggests that this event leads to the murder of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra (the latter being the daughter of Leda)  The poem is regularly praised as one of Yeats's masterpieces. Camille Paglia, who called the poem "the greatest poem of the twentieth century," and said "all human beings, like Leda, are caught up moment by moment in the 'white rush' of experience. For Yeats, the only salvation is the shapeliness and stillness of art."

Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío's 1892 poem "Leda" contains an oblique description of the rape, watched over by the god Pan.

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) also wrote a poem called "Leda" in 1919, suggested to be from the perspective of

In the song "Power and Glory" from Lou Reed's 1992 album Magic and Loss, Reed recalls the experience of seeing his friend dying of cancer and makes reference to the myth, "I saw isotopes introduced into his lungs / trying to stop the cancerous spread / And it made me think of Leda and The Swan / and gold being made from lead"