The Two Realms

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“We shall even find, in Parmenides and in Plato, the belief that the changing world we live in is an illusion, and that behind it lies a more real world which does not change.” - Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies

“Everything,” said Thomas [Aquinas], “that is in the intellect has been in the senses.” - Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe - Thomas Cahill

Words can be relied upon only so long as one is sure that their function is to reveal and not to conceal. - Hannah Arendt

Schools of philosophy, and schools of politics belong to one of two realms: An outlook most famously expressed by Plato, or an outlook represented in modern times by the Enlightenment and its characteristically empirical approach. Popper, above, paraphrases Plato’s philosophical idealism, while Aquinas in the second selection rejects Plato’s teaching that the senses belong to the realm of “appearances,” concerning which there can be only opinion, not knowledge.

To summarize, Plato taught that the table we think is real is an effect—in the parable of the cave a “shadow”—of a pre-existing immaterial template of the table. The template is usually referred to as a form (idea in Greek, producing the term philosophical idealism).

Cahill: In the Platonist model of knowledge, the real physical thing which you can see or touch is only an “appearance” generated by a hidden Form.

 Of philosophical idealism Aristotle said:

This form, which exists in the carpenter’s mind, is the formal cause of the table—but it can have no existence except in the carpenter’s mind and at length in his work. To speak otherwise—to say that there is an absolute Tableness floating somewhere that gives form to all particular tables—is “to speak abstractly and idly.” - Thomas Cahill, Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter

There is an ancient quarrel, as Plato might have said, between the empirical view of the world, whose adherents Plato called “lovers of sights and sounds,” and the theoretical, a priori doctrines grounded in undetectable, immaterial “forms.” The difference is as fundamental as it could possibly be: each concept of what the world is really like has an ontology (concept of the nature of reality) and an epistemology (concept of how human beings can know reality) which can’t be reconciled with the other, and which results in a radically different politics. The empirical view, as argued in The Liberal Founding, is associated with liberal democracies. The regime produced by an outlook based on the eternal, perfect, immutable forms is a stark contrast:

In the Republic and the Laws, [Plato] paints a detailed picture of the ideal Greek polis, a state without a whiff of democracy, solidly built on enlightened Socratic-Platonic principles. Most people ... need to be governed by guardians, philosopher-kings who have been strictly educated to know always what is right and just for themselves and for others. ... The great mass of humanity will remain ... hopeless “lovers of sights and sounds,” mistaking the paltry pleasures of evanescent physical phenomena for truth. Because of such inherent human weakness, Plato reluctantly banished all poetry, art, and music from his ideal state; these things only lead people into trouble. ... Besides the guardians, Plato's society has two lesser classes . . . - Cahill, ibid.

This politics is a ramification of Plato’s ontology—the forms, which alone are real, are intangible—and his derived epistemology: the philosopher, unlike those who know only the illusory world of the senses, is able to apprehend the forms directly. As I.F. Stone recounts in The Trial of Socrates, Socrates said the polis should be ruled not by the few nor the many but by as he put it in Xenophon's Memorabilia “the one who knows.” By Plato’s theory of knowledge, only the philosopher-king can be qualified to rule* the polis.

[Plato's disapproval of political democracy was explicit. Book 8 of The Republic: “These and other kindred characteristics are proper to democracy, which is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.”]

One of the consequences of the Platonic view of the world is top-down thinking and organization. There is a foregone conclusion that the many do not know and are not qualified to participate in political decisions.
Another consequence of the primacy of the forms may not be evident at first sight. The problem is suggested by the following lecture note:

Socrates begins his argument in both dialogues [Theaetetus & Phaedrus] with the truism that you cannot make shoes without knowing what a shoe is, nor can you be a trader in horses without knowing what a horse is. But to know what a shoe or a horse IS, for the purpose of shoemaking or horse-trading, is it necessary to meet the impossible standards of Socratic logic by coming up with an absolute and perfect definition of either shoes or horses?

www.wbenjamin.org/nc/nov30.html

In other words, the horse trader thinks that his expertise is the sweating, whickering horses he sells, but the real issue is something else which is hidden to him: the Form of the horse. The political philosophies of the Platonist realm (I’m finally getting back to the Two Realms) are about something else:

And that brings us to the Marxist/Freudian axis. In a Marxist model of knowledge, the superstructure—the tangible products of culture—camouflages and reinforces the hidden reality of class warfare. In a Freudian model, the manifest content of a dream is a cover or disguise for its latent meanings. ... [In the model of knowledge presented by deconstruction or postmodernism], in contrast to the Marxist or Freudian schemes, there is no ultimate meaning to which one can penetrate. There is only the constant deferral of meaning. - Richard Wolin, The Terms of Cultural Criticism

If you think you’re talking about a horse, in Plato’s context you’re talking about the Form of the horse. If you think you’re talking about the Bill of Rights, to a Marxist you’re talking about false assurances which are an instrument of class warfare. If you think you’re talking about how your boss pushes you around, to a Freudian you’re talking about your neuroses. If you think the proposition that light travels faster than sound is a fact, a Nietzschean will say, “There are not facts, but only interpretations,” and adherents of deconstruction or postmodernism will point out that language cannot refer to anything outside itself. (As an exasperated observer remarked, they inhabit a conceptual world where “nothing is anything and everything is everything else.”) Welcome to the realm of the hidden, shifting topic. Welcome to Plato’s Realm.

(*)  Modern states do not have rulers. The British are quite clear that the Queen reigns but does not rule. Can you name the ruler of France? Germany? Likewise, no one in our society is called a ruler. And properly speaking, the people do not rule: they govern.
However, when university courses discuss “Who should rule?” the one answer which is seldom seen is: “nobody.”

Snippets 7/27/12

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Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.

Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?

Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof;

When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? - Job 38:4

Over the plain, through the wind

Black pony, red moon

Death looks down from the towers of Cordoba.

- Adapted from Lorca’s Canción de Jinete

I drink to our ruined house, to the dolor of my life, to our loneliness together, and to you I raise my glass, to lying lips that have betrayed us, to dead-cold, pitiless eyes, and to the hard realities: that the world is brutal and coarse, that God in fact has not saved us.

- Anna Akhmatova, in Red Square by Martin Cruz Smith

The subject was how victorious commanders throughout history had achieved their successes. [John] Boyd discerned a common pattern of thought and action among all of them, from Hannibal to Patton. The key to success was time. A successful military organization operates at a higher tempo than its opponent and can change its actions or maneuvers more quickly. The opponent is thus confronted with a series of unexpected actions and becomes confused and disoriented; his reactions are always too late. - Ronald Spector

Conscience and Language: Orwell

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“Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind. … If one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.”

The tragedy of Marxist teaching is that it is alien to any dialogue. Marxism only conducted a monologue and never listened. It was always right...always claiming to know everything and to be able to do everything, thus proving its totalitarian essence. - Yakovlev, The Fate of Marxism in Russia, p. 8.

Robert Pirsig remarks, in Lila, that “truth stands independently of social opinion.” George Orwell understood that to speak or write without fear of social opinion incurred the risk of being accused of heresy, or of being anti-social. Furthermore, orthodoxy, whether it is the political correctness of the “progressive” or the dogma of movement conservatism, tends to involve something which is “always right,” regardless of evidence. As Yakovlev noted, it doesn’t listen. Where such commitment to the received wisdom prevails, the victim is the concept of truth.

In a second selection, Belle Waring assesses the notion that reasoned, evidence-based argument—as contrasted with argument based on feelings—is unfeminine.


George Orwell’s The Prevention of Literature:

In the past, at any rate throughout the Protestant centuries, the idea of rebellion and the idea of intellectual integrity were mixed up. A heretic — political, moral, religious, or aesthetic — was one who refused to outrage his own conscience. … From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. ... 

Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. …

The imaginative writer is unfree when he has to falsify his subjective feelings, which from his point of view are facts. He may distort and caricature reality in order to make his meaning clearer, but he cannot misrepresent the scenery of his own mind; he cannot say with any conviction that he likes what he dislikes, or believes what he disbelieves. If he is forced to do so, the only result is that his creative faculties will dry up. …

Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always the danger that any thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought. ...

If one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.

A lively post by Belle Waring:

There's just one way to check whether something holds together, and that's to try and shake it apart. You can do it yourself, but you have blind spots, so why not engage in a community barn-levelling effort and let your colleagues help?

I'm not winding up to any big conclusions here, but I'll try to disentangle a few strands. First, if you are a woman (or a man) who genuinely thinks it's “mean” to offer counter-arguments or counter-examples, or to ask tough questions after talks are given, then you are confused and you have a serious problem. The problem is not male power or structures which privilege the male voice. You have badly misunderstood the nature of the whole enterprise. There is nothing your male colleagues can do that will make this be OK for you unless you retreat into a charmed circle of like-thinking people hedged round with forbidding jargon. Please don't. There are enough of those already and they are cluttering up the landscape. Relatedly, it is the rankest sexism to say that rational argumentation is inherently male while woolly, nurturing conversations about personal experiences are inherently female. It wouldn't make it any better if that "math is hard" Barbie were being sold by N.O.W.

Secondly, being afraid to speak up even when you have a good idea is not some special women's way of knowing that's really great. It is a drag, a handicap. It's the mental equivalent of having bad body image. Women who preface their statements with self-deprecating remarks like "you've probably all already noticed this, but..." and such like are suffering from intellectual dysmorphia: they look in the mirror and see a stupid person even though we can all see they're perfectly smart. Losing this negative attitude would not result in becoming more masculine; it would mean becoming more free.

- homepage.mac.com/jholbo/homepage/pages/blog/giant%20thoughts/tannen.html    [Belle Waring, around 2004. The above URL no longer works]

Also check Waring’s great blog post on libertarianism: delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/10/libertarian-ponies-what-still-may-be-the-best-weblog-post-ever.html

The Liberal Founding

Preliminary note: To comment, send an email to JohnMH127@gmail.com. Apropos comments and dissents may be cited as Andrew Sullivan’s blog The Dish does, i.e., A reader writes . . .

“The spirit of liberalism suffused the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights”

Professor Charles K. Rowley:

In 1993, in his book, Post-Liberalism, [John] Gray poked around among the rubble of classical liberal philosophy to determine what, if anything was left. He concluded that none of the four constitutive elements of doctrinal liberalism — universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism (or human flourishing) — could survive the ordeal by value pluralism and that liberalism, as a political philosophy, therefore was dead.

To start, preliminary remarks on liberalism. The underlying propositions:

1. The liberal Enlightenment of the eighteenth century was an outgrowth of the scientific revolution of the latter half of the seventeenth century
2. In this blog the term ‘liberalism’ means Enlightenment liberalism. Liberalism is substantially different from the outlook of the left, and from Marxism, progressivism, libertarianism, and conservatism (as Historian Fritz Stern writes, “Extremists of the right and the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy.”)
3. The Declaration and Constitution, recognized by scholars as representative Enlightenment documents, embody liberal principles. As Stern’s and Ferris’s notes below suggest, the Founding was an expression of the new liberal values of the Enlightenment
4. The underlying assumptions and working principles of the United States are liberal. The present tendency to use ‘liberal’ as a derogatory epithet suggests a fundamental problem for the working of our society

Timothy Ferris, The Science of Liberty:

This book argues that the new ingredient was science. It maintains that the democratic revolution was sparked—caused is perhaps not too strong a word—by the scientific revolution. … Science arose to prominence immediately prior to the Enlightenment—as would be expected if, indeed, science was the one indisputably new ingredient in the social and intellectual ferment that produced the Enlightenment and the democratic revolutions that followed. (p. 2, p. 6)

Fritz Stern was born in Breslau, Germany in 1926, and moved with his family to the United States in 1938 in response to the rising anti-semitism of the Third Reich. As he wrote in The Failure of Illiberalism:

It may be that the accident of German birth gave me an added incentive to work in this extraordinary field. It certainly left me with strong memories. I was seven when Hitler came to power; for the next five years I lived under the two faces of Fascism. ... In school I saw the smiling face of Nazism, as fellow students reveled in their uniforms, sang their songs, and prattled their litany of love and hate. I sensed their exultation and felt their cruelty.

From Fritz Stern Op-Ed New York Times September 4, 1988 (in response to George H.W. Bush’s derogatory use of ‘liberal’):

Liberalism—one of “America's noblest traditions,” I insisted, often defined as a state of mind—had “transformed the world . . . [I]ts greatest victory has been the American Revolution; its greatest pronouncement, the Declaration of Independence; its greatest bulwark, the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.” It had “stood for freedom against tyranny. At its best . . . a force for change and progress, seeking the institutional defense of decency.” [...] In America's liberal premises the world had seen “the best promise of the West.”

New York Times ad purchased  October 26, 1988 by Fritz Stern and C. Vann Woodward:

A Reaffirmation of Principle

We speak as American citizens who wish to reaffirm America's liberal tradition. At our country's founding, the spirit of liberalism suffused the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These principles, thus embodied, have inspired the respect of much of the world.

We regret that the President of the United States has taken the lead in vilifying one of our oldest and noblest traditions. He made sport of “the dreaded L-word” and continues to make “liberal” and “liberalism” terms of opprobrium. We are deeply concerned about the erosion and debasement of American values and American traditions that our country has long cherished.

In the past and at its best, liberalism has sought the institutional defense of decency. Everywhere it has fought for the freedom of individuals to attain their fullest development. It has opposed tyranny in all forms, past and present. Liberal policies require constant scrutiny and sometimes revision. Liberal principles—freedom, tolerance, and the protection of the rights of every citizen—are timeless.

Extremists of the right and the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy. In our own time liberal democracies have been crushed by such extremists. Against any encouragement of this tendency in our own country, intentional or not, we feel obliged to speak out. We hope that others will do so as well.