@Tolstoy:
Oh, I'm not saying he wasn't lewd in his plays--he's probably one of if not the single dirtiest writer in the English language, which when you think about it says something interesting about mankind to think that we've held such palys as being so "beautiful" for so long--but Tolstoy, as well as 18th century critics such as Samuel Johnson, seem to use "lewd" to mean "lewd for the sake of lewdness," whereas most of the time--not all, especially in the comedies, the Bard wasn't above a quick, easy laugh sometimes--Shakespeare's lewd or gortesque for at least some reason.
@Putin:
"What makes a human is its ability to consciously produce its environment."
Do you mean that what makes human beings what they are is their ability to conceive of and thus construc their own sense of reality, ie, believing an heriloom to be of some magnificent importance or beauty or power when it is, in all relative fact, just an old, antiquated thing, and possibly could be seen by others as junk, but to YOU, since you construct this idea of importance around the object, it BECOMES important?
Something like that?
Because if that's where you're going I totally agree, that was going to be part of my response, that and I think another defining characteristic of human beings is their ability to project themselves through space and time via influence, or what I'd call an "artistic influence," taking that "create a sense of importance" idea above and extending it through works that act upon and influence others, the fruits of which works influence others, which influences others, and so on, all the while keeping the essence of the original "art" and "artist" intact.
For example, if I write a book that inspires millions, and one of those millions is in turn inspired to write a book that features some of the themes of my book, and someone, in turn, is inspired by THAT and takes up the mantle and writes their own book based off of THAT previous work, it would seem to follow that since Work A influenced Work B, and Work B has some elements of Work A, and Work C was influenced by Work B, Work C would have been influenced by Work A and, if it carries the influence of Work B, chances are it also carries, inadvertently or not, the influence of Work A.
In this way, every time we philosophize, then, Plato is recalled, or Socrates, or some other figure, as even if I cite someone else, Nioetzsche or Locke or even--God forbid--Rand, that Plato influenced nearly all philosophy in the West to follow, and that all philosophy is built upon that foundation, agreeing or disagreeing or ammending or suppressing or otherwise dealing with so many of the ideas presented by Plato, if artistic influence works in the manner I describe, Plato's very much immortal and projected through space and time via artistic influence, which is a construct of human creativity and our ability to, as you said, assign importance to this and that and conceive, which animals do not...Monkey X probably doesn't care about a Monkey A that lived 2,500 years ago, and can assign him no importance, and so monkeys die off in a way that human beings, in a sense, perhaps don't.
Or at least I find that an optimistic, religion-free way of thinking that there's something after death, maybe not consciously and a real life and everything else, but at least influence menas that, if you attempt to extend yourself, you stand a chance of lasting through time, at least to some extent; most will never approach the influence and reach of Plato, perhaps, but still, if you're a slave in Ancient Egypt and you're building the Pyramids, we may say that every stone, in so0me way, grants a sort of immortality and rememberance to the efforts and even the trevails of those slaves--anonymous people, lowly in their own time, and yet we can remember then extended trhough time because we can assign importance not only to their work, but to the difficulty and triumphant completion and even the tragedy and suffering and enslavement of their work.
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