what is grace? some notes

“Now try to tell me about love,” he said.

“Is Love the love of nothing or of something?”

“Of something, surely!” “Then keep this object of love in mind, and remember what it is.”

…

“For there is nothing which men love but the Good.”

—Plato’s Symposium¹

• when we recognize something as “good,” we are axiomatically appraising it as valuable and designating it as an object worthy of love

• let “the Good” refer to the principle of value and the object of love, just as the principle of color is light and the end of seeing is visible things

• not to love the Good is never to have known it

∴ wisdom is “knowledge of the Good,” which is itself love for it

• to begin with, our wisdom, that is, “our knowledge of the Good,” is distorted

• because our knowledge of the Good is distorted, our our perception of the Good is warped, as when an image is seen in a funhouse mirror

  • as an aside, the correlation between knowledge and perception is, in many ways, the keynote of Theoria-press:

    theoria and “theory”

• but as we acquire wisdom, we can perfect this formerly distorted image so that we come to know the Good more perfectly and, by this same token, more perfectly to love it

  • or better said, come to love the Good in its reality rather than our own projections of it

• don’t think “wisdom” means something other than this

∴ the process by which wisdom (sophia, σοφία), is sought after and our perception of the Good is, in turn, perfected, was called “philosophy” (φιλοσοφία) by Plato and everyone who followed him

• and it means the same thing today to the extent that the sophists and adulterers and academicians have failed to reduce it to a vain obsession with verbal quibbles and acrobatic argumentation and dialectical fluency

• but here’s the rub: the whole sequence forms a sort of hermeneutic circuit

  • as Schiller says,

    • Sie müßten schon weise sein, um die Weisheit zu lieben: eine Wahrheit, die Derjenige schon fühlte, der der Philosophie ihren Namen gab.

    which is, being interpreted,

    • To love Wisdom, they must have been wise already—a truth understood by the one who gave Philosophy her name.”

  • wisdom tells us what to love

  • hence, to love wisdom enough to go through the trouble of pursuing it, we must already love it

  • but the very thing we’re seeking is only the thing that could motivate us to seek the same

  • we wouldn’t seek something if we had it already, nor, quod erat demonstrandum, would we seek it if we didn’t

  • what can move us from beyond our knowledge to trouble ourselves with something that we would certainly do ourselves if only we did have this knowledge?

    

    Photo by Sebastien Gabriel on Unsplash

1. 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.