rhapsody on the war between the Gods and the Giants
“There is always, Theaetetus, a tremendous battle being fought about these questions between the two parties.”
on attaining to an adequate idea of Truth
It is not uncommon to hear people declare that, unlike scientific or mathematical problems, philosophical problems have no correct answer, and to couch all of their assertions of any moment behind the phrase “this is my truth.” There is perhaps a standpoint from which this is correct but in this case it might be more fruitful to consider one of the ways in which it is wrong because this approach promises to illuminate a far more critical issue which would otherwise be overlooked if we simply settled into a complacent and ultimately deleterious subjectivism on all important matters. The issue I would like to bring to light by refusing to abide by this bovine unconcern for intersubjectivity or objectivity in truth is that most people who take this stance appear neither to have ever seriously considered an alternative position and are perhaps not even equipped to do so even if they had the will.
The reason for this incapacity has, at least in part to do with the fact that you have to look for something in the right way if you expect to find it. It’s hard to deny that the theoretical framework and tacit standards and expectations by which we evaluate a question like “truth” have been so thoroughly flattened and enfeebled by the attitude of soi disant “empirical science” that it is unlikely that anyone who has not engaged with a tradition outside of this one will recognize an answer if he came upon it. Any successful perception, as Goethe, Steiner, and later phenomenologists elucidated, is the result of a theoretical or conceptual intentionality that is already active in organizing and directing our attention even before the phenomena is recognized—as a condition of its being recognized, as illustrated by Bortoft’s notorious giraffe, for instance.
General relativity can adequately conceptualize the macrocosmic movements of inanimate physical bodies, but it cannot accurately predict the collapse of the wave function, and neither can Schrödinger’s wave function account for the orbit of Saturn. If these two grand theories cannot even be unified within the domain of physics, how much less do the have to say about whether it is better for a ruler to be fear than loved, which is the best Beatles record, or whom a person should marry. It is necessary, so to speak, to have in hand the right tool for the job if one is to have any hope of meeting the task at stake. In just this manner, the problem of epistemology and the nature of truth requires the right approach if it is to yield any fruit, and if we insist on seeking an “answer” to these problems, we may be confronting them with an ill-fitting idea, and, by this very same foreclosing the possibility of recognizing and perceiving features of these phenomena when we encounter them.
Perhaps we should not expect an propositional answer but rather an experiential encounter. What if we consider the possibility to “dwell with the truth,” or “to be in the truth” along the same pattern as we describe the state of “being in love”? That's not so much an “answer” as a stance we take, an attitude we assume, and a relationship which we enter. This is no longer a question of believing our thoughts, but in questioning them and believing instead in our thinking and its impetuous ability to re-think, refine, and correct these thoughts ever anew. Indeed, we must already hold a tacit faith in this very thing, as evidenced by anyone’s confidence in the claim the “there is no truth” or “that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”
on the besetting sin of literal-mindedness
We should not understand everything literally as it is written, but rather that we should see, concealed inside the bodily exterior of the narratives, the hidden providence and eternal knowledge which guides all so too we shall in the future come to know and be aware of many things for which our present understanding will be seen as contrary to what it will be then; and the whole ordering of things yonder will undo any precise opinion we possess now in our supposition about Truth.
—St. Isaac the Syrian
Sadly, the people today is beset by two evils and it is necessary to pass between Scylla and Charybdis if we are to have any hope of deliverance from this exile.1 Some people harbor such antipathy against Christian doctrine, or, more specifically, their conception of it, that they will bristle at the mere mention of Christian terminology or thinkers and thereby render themselves incapable of engaging with the actual issues at stake. From the other side, some self-proclaimed pious believers are so ready to affirm the doctrine that they, paradoxically, foreclose their ability to do just that through their premature assent and end up professing Christ in name alone because it is impossible to assent to something that you don’t know what it is. It's not enough to be able to pronounce some words with your lips, but this over-zealous sympathy condemns people to perform this outward act and then stop at it and as Christ himself sayeth,
This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me.2
on Wisdom, Philosophy, and the Idea of the Good
Wisdom is “an adequate idea of the Good,” and all of our love is love for the Good, as Diotima says.3 That’s what “good” means—something that is worthy of our love. Even if we love bad things, it’s not the bad in them we love but the good, or, crucially, the perceived good. And there’s the rub, because our perceptions can be distorted. The mind should be “the mirror of nature,” but to begin with, it is more akin to a fun-house mirror than a faithful one as a result of accumulated trauma and ignorance. Again, we never love things because they’re bad, but only because they seem—parts of them, anyway—good to us. The distortions in our perceptions reveal reason we need philosophy. Philosophy can be technically defined as the attempt to refine and perfect our ideas of the Good, and thereby “order our loves,” as Augustine wrote,4 towards the true Good and not its illegitimate likenesses. And finally, gratitude is the spontaneous reaction of the soul to the recognition of (1) its own existence and (2) the Good in the world and (3) the fact that it did nothing to deserve any of these things but that they were rather given as gifts from above.
I appreciate the corporate metaphor for the Idea of the Good that Saint Paul sets forth because it illustrates, in concrete terms, both the natural diversity of manifestations of the Good, as well as how the universal Good is attained through the true personal Good and not at its expense: a thumb cannot flourish in a decrepit body and neither can a body flourish without the general flourishing of its members. Of course, the fly in the ointment is that we need wisdom in order to perceive these relations, which are otherwise as insignificant to us as a mirror to a blindman. And wisdom is not easily got, for it is, proverbially, “more precious than rubies.”5 It is, as it were, exceedingly difficult for the thumb to attain to an intuition of the whole of whom it could say: “in him we live, and move, and have our being.”6 That is to say that without an adequate Idea of the Good, we risk pursuing what seem to be personal goods but which ultimately lead to our individual and collective perdition. Ultimately the good of a finger is the same as the good of the body and there is no such thing as personal salvation in this world. This is now redundant, I hope.
I understand the resistance that many people harbor against the Idea of ultimate Truth or the ultimate Idea of the Good. It is a reservation many people today share, and the same reservation is behind the arguably well-meaning intent to profess ideals of “tolerance” and “diversity” from sea to shining sea, and to suspend all pursuit of these lofty Transcendentals7 and accept a theory of moral and epistemological relativism. But because something is easier doesn’t mean its better or more correct, and because something is less trouble today doesn’t guarantee it won’t create more trouble tomorrow. Philosophy is best defined as “the pursuit of wisdom,” and wisdom is best defined as “an adequate Idea of the Good.” So philosophy is the project of refining and perfecting our ideas of the Good. It might seem unattainable to achieve the perfect vision of the Good. But even if that’s true, it’s no reason in itself to despair of trying. Consider, by analogy, the question of love. For most people, the observation that perfect love is either unattainable or attainable only for fleeting moments does not lead them to throw up their hands and say, “therefore I can’t love at all.” Ideals don’t need to be achieved to provide value; instead they unselfishly overflow their virtue and bestow it onto anyone who seeks them.
All religious teachings and practices are premised on the perceptions that there exists a moral structure to the cosmos just as there exists a physical structure. The latter is the purview of science and object of scientific investigation and the former is, simply, not. When scientists hold forth about the existence or non-existence of non-physical phenomena, laws, and relationships, they have either ceased to speak as scientists and should therefore be awarded no more initial authority than a person chosen at random from the population, or they have failed to understand the compass and scope of their professional disciple, in which case they should arguably be awarded even less credibility than a random person because it is a stupid mistake. The moral structure of the cosmos isn’t contained in three dimensions of physical space any more than the physical structure of it is contained in the dimensions of moral space, and why should we expect it to be? As we might also expect, these dimensions have different qualities and we inhabit them differently. For instance, a definition of “freedom” in the purely physical dimensions, if the term can mean anything in this context, would necessarily correspond to Spinoza’s axiom that “freedom is necessity,” as instantiated by a being expressing its inherent nature with its activity. Of course, the inherent nature was not chosen or attained by that being and so “freedom,” when constrained to this world, means something very different than what we ordinarily understand by the term and arguably is rendered almost meaningless within the scope of purely physical dimensions. But this doesn’t matter very much except to people who superstitiously believe that these dimensions are the only ones and thus persist in their ham-fisted efforts to cram everything into these, like the giants in Plato’s Sophist, who
drag down everything from heaven and the invisible to earth, actually grasping rocks and trees with their hands; for they lay their hands on all such things and maintain stoutly that that alone exists which can be touched and handled; [246b] for they define existence and body, or matter, as identical, and if anyone says that anything else, which has no body, exists, they despise him utterly, and will not listen to any other theory than their own.8
But their lackeys notwithstanding, everyone else understands that we are not solely inhabitants of the physical world, but also the moral one, and it is only here that the idea of freedom can really be manifest. “Freedom,” in this context, consists in the power and ability to do the Good. A condition for exercise of this freedom is the recognition that our power to do the Good is not something inborn in us, but rather something that must be won through dint of effort and reflection. This consists in, foremost, “refining our Idea of the Good”—which is, as already indicated, a paraphrase of philosophy as such—to correct for the manner in which our imperfect ideas of the Good that distort our perception of it. So we see that in the moral world, unlike the physical one, to be a “law abiding citizen” is an act that we perform rather than a fact about nature; we are bound to follow physical laws while we can choose to follow moral ones and that is just what makes each one of these things what it is. Indeed, when the scientists began to speak of “laws of nature” in the seventeenth century, they were appropriating a word with a perfectly intelligible meaning and than compelling it to signify something else. After all, a law is, traditionally, something that can be broken but which ought not to. By definition, a law of physics cannot be broken. We know this because, in case this happened, scientists would never conceive of this as a moral act on behalf of the offending phenomenon. Instead go back to the drawing board and conclude that “what we thought was a law of physics is in reality not one,” or, more probably, “we were very close and with the very small amount of tinkering, we can continue to save the appearances.”
Cf. Homer, Odyssey, Book VII: “Is there no way,’ said I, ‘of escaping Charybdis, and at the same time keeping Scylla off when she is trying to harm my men?”
Matthew 15:8
Plato’s Symposium, 206a-b:
…since what men love is simply and solely the good. Or is your view otherwise?’
“‘Faith, no,’ I said.
“‘Then we may state unreservedly that men love the good?’
“‘Yes,’ I said.
Augustine sets forth the ordo amoris as “the definition of virtue.” Cf. Augustine, City of God, XV.22, trans. Marcus Dods:
And thus beauty, which is indeed God’s handiwork, but only a temporal, carnal, and lower kind of good, is not fitly loved in preference to God, the eternal, spiritual, and unchangeable good. . . . For though it be good, it may be loved with an evil as well as with a good love: it is loved rightly when it is loved ordinately; evilly, when inordinately. . . . But if the Creator is truly loved, that is, if He Himself is loved and not another thing in His stead, He cannot be evilly loved; for love itself is to be ordinately loved, because we do well to love that which, when we love it, makes us live well and virtuously. So that it seems to me that it is a brief but true definition of virtue to say, it is the order of love.
She is more precious than rubies: and all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her.
(Proverbs 3:15)
Cf. Acts 17:22-29
22Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars' hill, and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. 23For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you. 24God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; 25Neither is worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; 26And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; 27That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: 28For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring. 29Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man's device.
traditionally, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, though also, esoterically, Oneness; these were conceived to be conveyed tacitly, if not expressly, in Plato’s dialogues.
Plato writes in the Phaedrus, for instance:
The wing is the corporeal element which is most akin to the divine, and which by nature tends to soar aloft and carry that which gravitates downwards into the upper region, which is the habitation of the gods. The divine is beauty, wisdom, goodness, and the like; and by these the wing of the soul is nourished, and grows apace
Saint Thomas Aquinas, posited six transcendentals: ens, res, unum, aliquid, bonum, verum; or “being,” “thingness,” “oneness,” “somethingness,” “goodness,” and “truth.”
Cf. Plato’s Sophist (246a-247a):
Stranger
And indeed there seems to be a battle like that of the gods and the giants going on among them, because of their disagreement about existence.
Theaetetus
How so?
Stranger
Some of them drag down everything from heaven and the invisible to earth, actually grasping rocks and trees with their hands; for they lay their hands on all such things and maintain stoutly that that alone exists which can be touched and handled; [246b] for they define existence and body, or matter, as identical, and if anyone says that anything else, which has no body, exists, they despise him utterly, and will not listen to any other theory than their own.
Theaetetus
Terrible men they are of whom you speak. I myself have met with many of them.
Stranger
Therefore those who contend against them defend themselves very cautiously with weapons derived from the invisible world above, maintaining forcibly that real existence consists of certain ideas which are only conceived by the mind and have no body. But the bodies of their opponents, and that which is called by them truth, they break up into small fragments [246c] in their arguments, calling them, not existence, but a kind of generation combined with motion. There is always, Theaetetus, a tremendous battle being fought about these questions between the two parties.
Theaetetus
True.
Stranger
Let us, therefore, get from each party in turn a statement in defence of that which they regard as being.
Theaetetus
How shall we get it?
Stranger
It is comparatively easy to get it from those who say that it consists in ideas, for they are peaceful folk; but from those who violently drag down everything [246d] into matter, it is more difficult, perhaps even almost impossible, to get it. However, this is the way I think we must deal with them.
Theaetetus
What way?
Stranger
Our first duty would be to make them really better, if it were in any way possible; but if this cannot be done, let us pretend that they are better, by assuming that they would be willing to answer more in accordance with the rules of dialectic than they actually are. For the acknowledgement of anything by better men is more valid than if made by worse men. But it is not these men that we care about; we merely seek the truth. [246e]
Theaetetus
Quite right.
Stranger
Now tell them, assuming that they have become better, to answer you, and do you interpret what they say....
Here, I was wondering where is Max and his more prolific display. Glad to see it twice in one day! Kind regards, and you always give the "Appian Way" for response. This is the military venture, like we have in the Gaza region these days, and takes my time. It all seems related.
very interesting. thank you for this essay