To comment, send an email to JohnMH127@gmail.com
“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.”]
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?
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.”
