On Fresh Air: A founding principle of Enlightenment liberalism

Monday's transcript of Terry Gross' Fresh Air, interviewing Tom Hicks on his new book Churchill And Orwell: The Fight For Freedom, quoted his conclusion: "The fundamental driver of Western civilization is the agreement that objective reality exists, that people of goodwill can perceive it and that other people will change their views when presented with the facts of the matter." (Emphasis added)

Remember the central problem of our current politics—that conservatism in its current form, in Congress, is driven by a rigid ideology and won't listen to the American majority? Instead of a Republican party which constitutes the loyal opposition characteristic of democracy, we have a totalitarian mindset which is "alien to any dialogue":

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.

"I alone can fix it," Trump declared in his nomination acceptance speech, "claiming to know everything and to be able to do everything."

"People of goodwill can perceive [reality] ... other people will change their views when presented with the facts of the matter." The foundation of democracy is our common experience of the world. The foundation of democratic prudence is that all citizens, no matter what their "beliefs," will honor evidence by changing their views when those views are shown not to comport with reality.

This is one of Enlightenment liberalism's most fundamental principles. It is echoed when the Declaration (a representative Enlightenment document) proclaims, "let facts be submitted to a candid world." But it is one of the ways the illiberal left disagrees with democratic principle. A tendency toward radical skepticism is shown in a recent post which noted rejection of the rule of law; privileging narratives on ad hominem rather than factual grounds; and claiming there are no neutral, objective claims about the world. On campus, postmodernism denied the relation between reality and language in Derrida's "There is nothing outside the text." (A scholar joked that a postmodernist is someone who spends the day telling students that language cannot refer to reality, then leaves a message on his wife's answering machine asking if he should pick up a pizza on the way home.)

This is not a separate problem of left politics and right politics, but prior. It stems from the ideological cast both have assumed. Ideology privileges belief over reality and, lacking any true principles, will opportunistically assert either omniscient knowledge—Trump claiming to be able to fix everything above—or deny the possibility of knowledge—Trump recently suggested that “nobody really knows” if climate change exists.

Foundation on cognitive prudence—objective reality exists and tends to make it possible for people of good will to agree and work together—is not just a principle of Enlightenment liberalism. The Enlightenment was the birth of "our universal civilization." Mr. Ricks concludes by arguing that holding that objective reality tops the dogmas of ideology. Right ideology and left ideology have no legitimate claim whatsoever, because ideology is inherently unprincipled:

If there's anything I have to say I learned from this experience of reading and re-reading thousands upon thousands of words by Churchill and Orwell over the last three and half years, it's that. That's my conclusion - that this is the essence of Western society and, at its best, how Western society operates.

And it's - you can really reduce it to a formula. First of all, you need to have principles. You need to stand by those principles and remember them. Second, you need to look at reality to observe facts and not just have opinions and to say, what are the facts of the matter? Third, you need to act upon those facts according to your principles.

Narrative, Humanity, and Liberal Modernity

“Humans appear to pay attention to related details in a movie for much longer than monkeys do, suggesting that humans integrate events over time in a fundamentally different way.” In other words, it seems that what makes people different is our ability to follow a narrative. ... People fixate on one actor and integrate complex events over time. ... “Monkeys were reacting moment-by-moment instead of assembling and testing a narrative explanation for the scene before them,” the researchers wrote. - Asif Ghazanfar, HT to Andrew Sullivan

With the development of narrative, we became the animal that knows that it will grow old and die, and thus the animal that has art and religion. ... With the development of narrative, we also become the animal that imagines laws and ethics. (Vide infra)

Brandon Watson has a helpful rundown of the most common theories.  I'd like to sketch another, which I might call narrative theory. The paradox of fiction, as Brandon explains it, is that we feel for things we know don't exist.  Narrative theory, as I define it, posits 1) that fictional characters do exist, not as literally existing beings, but as narrative entities and 2) that real people like you and me are also narrative entities. We lovers of fiction and fictional characters have something in common: we're narrative beings. - Kyle R. Cupp

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. www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_01_1_rowley.pdf

It seems to me that the character of Imperial Germany after 1878 can best be caught in the term "illiberal." [[I am using the term as the dictionary defines it: "Not befitting a free man . . . not generous in respect to the opinions, rights, or liberties of others; narrow-minded." The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1967)]] - Fritz Stern, The Failure of Illiberalism, p. xvii

A major factor in the development of the technological modern world we experience was the symbolic ordering of nature by science. (See earlier post The Liberal Founding.) What is seldom realized is that all of us are constantly ordering the world. We don't live in the world as it is, but in a narrative drama which we construct by "integrat[ing] events over time." In this gestalt formation we perceive connections between the past and the present, and to a certain extent become able to know about the future.

As Ghazanfar and the other researchers argue:

The bulk of the overlap was driven by the two species’ shared interest in complex scenes, particularly faces, body movements, and social interactions.

But the researchers also found two intriguing differences between the monkey and human gaze paths.

First, “humans appear to look at the focus of actor’s attention and intentions to a much greater extent than do monkeys,” Ghazanfar and Shepherd wrote in a fascinating review published in the film journal Projections. Second, “humans appear to pay attention to related details in a movie for much longer than monkeys do, suggesting that humans integrate events over time in a fundamentally different way.”

In other words, it seems that what makes people different is our ability to follow a narrative. Whereas monkeys look and react to scenes quickly, people fixate on one actor and integrate complex events over time. In a clip showing two monkeys, for example, people tended to look squarely on the monkey sitting quietly in the center of the screen. Monkeys, in contrast, looked at the more active second monkey, even thought it was jumping out of view of the camera. “Monkeys were reacting moment-by-moment instead of assembling and testing a narrative explanation for the scene before them,” the researchers wrote.

With the development of narrative, we became the animal that knows that it will grow old and die, and thus the animal that has art and religion.

Part of postmodernism's attack on liberal western civilization was the attempt to deconstruct "metanarrative." In the current Wikipedia, "A metanarrative is a grand narrative common to all. The term refers, in critical theory and particularly in postmodernism, to a comprehensive explanation, a narrative about narratives of historical meaning, experience or knowledge, which offers a society legitimation through the anticipated completion of a (as yet unrealised) master idea."

In this point of view, narrative at times goes beyond projecting the future as a continuation of a pattern emerging in the past, visualizing what ought to be. With the development of narrative, we also become the animal which imagines laws and ethics.

"As you read a log," blogger Andrew Sullivan wrote, "you have the curious sense of moving backward in time as you move forward in pages—the opposite of a book. As you piece together a narrative that was never intended as one, it seems—and is—more truthful. Logs, in this sense, were a form of human self-correction. They amended for hindsight, for the ways in which human beings order and tidy and construct the story of their lives as they look back on them. Logs require a letting-go of narrative because they do not allow for a knowledge of the ending." [Emphasis added]

Orwell argued that to write clearly is a political act: "To think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers." The well-structured, coherent novel of "one increasing purpose" is the verbal art form of our time. Its antithesis is deconstruction's concept of the postmodern novel, fragmented, ironic and self-refuting.

A "truth" becomes true by its connection to other elements of knowledge—in effect, by its place in an ordered narrative. The concept of a free citizen of a liberal society, capable of self-government, comes from the acceptance of an ordered narrative describing a rational, informed, ethical being capable of acting in the name of the public good out of enlightened self-interest.

As Richard Wolin wrote in The Terms of Cultural Criticism, to deconstruct the narrative of the autonomous self is profoundly antiliberal:

In the New Republic, Tzvetan Todorov deplored the “dogmatic skepticism” he finds in the academy—the attitude that “there is no such thing as truth or objectivity.” Todorov dramatized the danger by recalling that in George Orwell’s 1984 Big Brother crushes the idea that reality is “something objective, external, existing in its own right.” … Tzvetan Todorov writes that “it is not possible, without inconsistency, to defend human rights with one hand and deconstruct the idea of humanity with the other.” Deconstruct humanity—reduce the autonomous self to the status of a fiction—and you are left with an entity no more responsible for its actions than a puppet manipulated by an unseen master.

After the turning point in our history of September 11, 2001, people hoped for a return to what was fundamental. Some asked, "Is this the end of irony?" What ordered narratives do you credit?

First Quarter 2013 Wrap

The year began with the lengthy Intellectual Prudence: MetaIntellectual Analysis of Intellectual Subculture, which noted the fashionable nonsense peddled by many humanities academics. It accused today's humanities departments of

• Anti-intellectualism: Countenancing the notion that power can impose its own truth (cf. Nietzsche et al.)
• Anti-intellectualism: Failure to enforce a global prohibition on all argument by fallacy, including ad hominem
• Anti-intellectualism: Rejection of Kant's observation that a good will is the one indispensable intellectual quality, as all the others can be subverted to anti-intellectual and unethical ends
• Anti-intellectualism: Lack of comprehension that the intellectual realm defines an implied ethical order (cf. the cynicism of German idealism). As Benda cried, “humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good. This contradiction was an honor to the human species, and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world.”

Two articles on "passing" defended the right to personal independence, the first of which noted, as differences between liberalism and the assumptions of the left:

It's a free country, and this means that Barry Goldwater gets to be an Episcopalian and Madeleine Albright gets to live as a gentile (when a media discussion arose concerning the fact that Albright is of Jewish descent, someone remarked, "She doesn't want to know from Jewish"). People of African-American descent who don't look black are free to just live as a person and need not deal every day with the identity issues which would arise if they did not pass as white. ...

Privacy is a freedom of enormous value. Privacy means that one is free from being arbitrarily identified with some group, supposed to be in dire plight. It means that one is free from being saddled by others, or by what John Stuart Mill called "social tyranny," with an involuntary obligation to alleviate that plight. As Jim Sleeper observed in Liberal Racism, the assumption that each person of color is to be treated as a "racial delegate" is just wrong. ...

A signature difference between liberal and left is that liberal does not care about identity. As mentioned in these pages before, liberalism is public and civil. One's subculture, race, gender, religion or irreligion, esthetic taste, etc., may be freely enjoyed or ignored under the aegis of the liberal society, but are not otherwise of public concern. "We live . . . free," as Pericles said.

Theoretical Mathematics vs Empirical Mathematics developed a proposition from MetaIntellectual Analysis, above:

Absent convincing evidence to the contrary, it is best to consider every deduction a concealed induction. The general principles of the theoretical approach (and of what was once called Theory) were arrived at by experience. They can in principle be falsified by a future experience. ...

The "problem of induction" is that what is demonstrated by experience can never provide metaphysical certitude. It can be certain for all practical purposes. We can even bet our lives on it (and we do, every day). But that perfect knowledge we would like to have is not attainable. ...

The error of Plato's abstract theory of reality is that it assumes that the real can start with deduction, escaping the provisional nature of the physical. This is an elemental intellectual error.

Executive Power and Imminent Threat argued that administration drone policy looked suspiciously like outmoded notions of the Benevolent Despot:

Non-imminent imminence, extra-judicial capital punishment by the chief executive of people who have not been charged with a crime, are part of a lack of transparency concealing arbitrary exercise of power solely on the basis of the presumed decency, trustworthiness, and inerrant ability to detect guilt, of the person in power. ...
This is not a new theory. It was in vogue for centuries before the rise of modern liberal democracies, before the American colonies rose up against similar presumption of the English King. It is the theory of the Benevolent Despot—the fond hope that a wise and good absolute ruler might be the best form of government of all. ...
It should not be difficult to see what is wrong with this. The question is whether this is a free country. The question is whether we are a free people, with our freedom protected by the indispensable concomitant of freedom, the rule of law.   

"Be proud, do not apologize" noted dissenters to politicized Islam such as Ibn Warraq, who declared:

A democracy cannot survive long without freedom of expression, the freedom to argue, to dissent, even to insult and offend. It is a freedom sorely lacking in the Islamic world, and without it Islam will remain unassailed in its dogmatic, fanatical, medieval fortress; ossified, totalitarian and intolerant. Without this fundamental freedom, Islam will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality; originality and truth. ... Do not apologize. This raises another more general problem: the inability of the West to defend itself intellectually and culturally. Be proud, do not apologize. ... The west is the source of the liberating ideas of individual liberty, political democracy, the rule of law, human rights and cultural freedom. It is the west that has raised the status of women, fought against slavery, defended freedom of enquiry, expression and conscience. ... By defending our values, we are teaching the Islamic world a valuable lesson, we are helping them by submitting their cherished traditions to Enlightenment values. [Original link no longer functional: http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,398853,00.html]

Wafa Sultan drew attention to a barbarism which cannot be excused under the rubric of "faith":

We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people. The Muslims have turned three Buddha statues into rubble. We have not seen a single Buddhist burn down a Mosque, kill a Muslim, or burn down an embassy. Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people, and destroying embassies.

Footnotes to Plato: Is Your Child's Humanities Professor Scornful of Your Values? expanded on another theme of MetaIntellectual Analysis, citing an intellectual critic of intellectualists, Frederick C. Crews:

The rise of “theory” has resulted in an irrationalist climate in the strictest sense—that is, an atmosphere in which it is considered old-fashioned and gullible to think that differences of judgment can ever be arbitrated on commonly held grounds.

The Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom, in the spirit of John Adams' "Arts, Sciences useful to Men, ameliorating their condition," discussed some of the signs and wonders of science, including Euler's intriguing equation, e^(πι) = -1, and rejected the claim of runaway scientism that science disproves free will, noting "science is [not] an a priori discipline."

A reprise of the discussion of movement conservatism cruelty argued:

And this is the cruelty of such a mind-set: expanding affordable health care to most Americans, alleviating unnecessary suffering from treatable illness and reducing premature death, is not a factor. Where decent people see a benefit to what Washington called "the public good," these miserable Social Darwinist elitists see only a cynical bribe of the poor. 

“What You Can Touch Is Mere Appearance”: Does Science Refute Free Will? argues that there is a Platonist source for this anti-humanist position:

The “manifest image” doctrine relegates human experience—including free will and, as we shall see, ethics—to the realm of illusion. It is the anti-science of Plato—his rejection of the material world of human experience and of scientific experiment—masquerading as science. ...

The idea of the "noble lie" has characterized elite intelligentsia esotericism ever since Plato: the people's naive belief in a moral order is to be encouraged on consequentialist grounds, says a brighter class of people who are too sophisticated to believe in such outmoded notions. (As always, the retreat to consequentialism suggests a weakness in the principle it shies away from.)

In The Peculiar Claim That Conservatism Simply Is a certain kind of high-flown anti-intellectualism reminded the Dissenter:

Frederick C. Crews parodied this position in 1970 (when aficionados of the Youth Movement began showing up in university classrooms):

Though it is only a short step from this state of mind to the virgin anti-intellectualism of our freshmen who regard all discourse as a profanation of selfhood, we believe our lack of curiosity to be more sophisticated and high-principled. - from "Do Literary Studies Have an Ideology?"

(See The First Six Months' Wrap for earlier posts.)

Intellectual Prudence: MetaIntellectual Analysis of Intellectual Subculture

Honest people just get out, leaving the field to those who don't mind deception or don't recognize it. - Linda Seebach, "Scientist Takes Academia for a Ride with Parody"

Last August's Intellectual Prudence discussed Literary Critic Frederick C. Crews' remark on the "Nietzschean scorn" often leveled by humanities intellectuals at what he called "intellectual prudence." Last week, in slate.com, Ron Rosenbaum warned "against the kind of grad school-nurtured exegesis of Shakespeare most egregiously represented by James Shapiro in the section of his book, 1599, wherein he purports to read Shakespeare’s mind and discover that Shakespeare would have wanted to cut, trash, delete, and disappear Hamlet’s final soliloquy; one of the high points of the play and of Shakespeare’s entire oeuvre." Rosenbaum concluded:

But grad school for literature, I can't advocate. I escaped Yale before it became the center of the frenzied fad for French literary theorists, as a result of which students read more about arcane metaphysics of language, semiotics and the like than the actual literature itself. But, even though many of the most sophisticated contemporary intellectuals who once bought into this sophistry (such as Terry Eagleton) have abandoned it, the tenured relics who imposed this intellectual regime are still there, still espousing their view that literature itself is only to be understood through their diminishing deconstructing lens. I can testify to it, having sat through enough seminars at the Shakespeare Association of America conferences to last a life time. Please don't waste your life this way.

Extreme as this may sound, it resonates with my own experience. I attended two humanities classes of a major state university the day after the historic presidential election of 2008, certain that there would be at least some reaction to the opening of the presidency to minorities. After all, isn't diversity a mantra of the academic left? But it was business as usual.
In Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Robert Pirsig called the university the "church of reason," devoted to the disinterested search for truth. A church of reason would, as Socrates said, "follow the argument wherever it leads," without regard to the conventional wisdom or to social pressure. But the inhabitants of the faculty lounge are as much a subculture as any other, a vested interest which logically would be subject to sociological study in much the same fashion as an anthropologist studies the folkways of a stone age tribe. Such a meta-intellectual analysis of the intellectual would ask, as Crews once did, "Do Literary Studies Have an Ideology?"
But there is resistance to this. The Dissenter was once accused by a philosophy TA, in fact, of harboring the notion of a "meta-intellectual" examination of the way academic philosophy is taught. Anyone who did not realize that such a critique is self-evidently wrong, he implied, reveals intellectual inadequacy.
Much of what we consider the intellectual heritage violates the principles of the intellectual discipline. It is true that there are intellectuals who critique the intellectual tradition (Crews, Orwell, Popper—who spoke of "intellectualists"—and others) but the pressure not to break ranks is strong.
Here is a rough draft, written some time ago, critiquing Great Books-ism:

• Most of those who claim to participate in intellectual endeavors are metaphysically confused: 1. No clear concept of what the realm of the senses does and does not tell us; 2. Failure to distinguish between the kinds of knowledge afforded by nature, by the aesthetic, and by the mystical, and failure to distinguish between the knowledge methods applicable to each; 3. Using, impermissibly, metaphysical certitude as a standard of deductive proof; 4. Inattention to the cognitive problem posed by the difference between mathematics as an incorporeal conceptual order and mathematics as a predictor of the behavior of real physical systems (2 + 2 = 4 by the rules of the game mathematics, but 2 oranges + 2 oranges = 4 oranges is a falsifiable prediction about the future). Mathematics is not reality. It is a description of the possible relationships between real things.
• Iron age ontology and epistemology (i.e., Plato's philosophical idealism and such descendants as postmodernism)
• Inadequate definition of fact/truth
• Failure to examine the sociology of the great thinkers and of the intelligentsia
• Absence of meta-intellectual analysis
• Complacency about the reckless mind
• Inattention of the intellectual class to its own methodology. For example, are evidence and reason an indispensable starting point or simply one of many approaches which may be adopted?
• Treating propositions unworthy of critical inspection as if they were holy writ
• Reverse ad hominem; that is, treating the notions of canonical figures as indiscussable
• Failure to define the standards of the intellectual discipline
• Incoherence: Failure to recognize that two great, mutually inconsistent ideas cannot both be true
• Anti-intellectualism: Countenancing the notion that power can impose its own truth (cf. Nietzsche et al.)
• Anti-intellectualism: Failure to enforce a global prohibition on all argument by fallacy, including ad hominem
• Anti-intellectualism: Rejection of Kant's observation that a good will is the one indispensable intellectual quality, as all the others can be subverted to anti-intellectual and unethical ends
• Anti-intellectualism: Lack of comprehension that the intellectual realm defines an implied ethical order (cf. the cynicism of German idealism). As Benda cried, “humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good. This contradiction was an honor to the human species, and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world.”
• The intellectual tendency to embrace esotericism and with it, elitism
• Crime against humanity: the Leo Strauss doctrine that intellectuals are the only humans that matter and therefore, as a kind of Herrenvolk, are entitled to treat the rest of the human instrumentally (as Kant said, as means only, and not also as ends).

Any one of these could in itself be the subject to one or more posts. However, "reverse ad hominem" may have a bearing on the lack of response to Obama's precedent-shattering election noted above. Where ad hominem purports to discredit a proposition by discrediting the person who propounds it, reverse ad hominem implies that a proposition is valid because of the greatness of its author.
For example, Plato, whom many humanities academics may consider the greatest thinker of all time, dismissed political democracy. It is quite possible that the historic election of 2008 was dismissed in the classes I witnessed because they were influenced by Plato's attitude toward democracy.
Does this seem preposterous? See "Scientist Takes Academia for a Ride with Parody", by Linda Seebach:

Physicist Alan Sokal of New York University meticulously observed all the rules of the academic game when he constructed his article on postmodern physics and submitted it to a prestigious journal of cultural studies called Social Text.
The people he cites as authorities in cultural studies are the superluminaries of the field, the quotations he uses to illustrate his argument are strictly accurate and the text is bristling with footnotes.
All the rules but one, that is: Sokal's article is a parody. Under the grandiloquent title "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," it appeared in the Spring/Summer 1996 special issue of the magazine, one entirely devoted to "the science wars," as the editors term the tension between people who actually do science and the critics who merely theorize about it. ...

Sokal's successful spoof calls into question the intellectual standards of the whole field.
If you're chuckling, but inclined to think it's just professors doing their usual angels-on-a-pinhead thing, please do think again. Tuition and fees at the priciest private universities run nearly $1,000 for each week of class. Taxpayers pick up a big chunk of the bill for public universities. Many of those classes are being taught, it appears, by professors who deny the distinction between truth and falsity and consequently can't distinguish double-talk from rational argument.
Maybe some of the junior professors and the graduate students do know what they're hearing is nonsense, but think it would be harmful to their careers to speak out. Living with such deception, possibly for a lifetime, is profoundly corrupting. Honest people just get out, leaving the field to those who don't mind deception or don't recognize it. ...
There is a political point to Sokal's demonstration, but it's not the right-wing one he's sure will be attributed to him. He's proud to call himself a leftist, and his resume includes a stint teaching mathematics at the National University of Nicaragua under the Sandinistas. "If you take up crazy philosophies you undermine your ability to tackle questions of public policy, like ecology," he said. "It really matters whether the world is warming up."
I don't remotely share Sokal's political views, but I agree with him that the corruption of clear thought and clear language is dangerous. And corruption has to be exposed before it can be cleaned up.

One might also note that Thomas Jefferson was horrified by what he found in Plato, noting that "Education is chiefly in the hands of persons who, from their profession, have an interest in the reputation and the dreams of Plato. They give the tone while at school . . . "

I amused myself [recently] with reading Plato's Republic. I am wrong, however, in calling it amusement, for it was the heaviest task-work I ever went through. I had occasionally before taken up some of his other works, but scarcely ever had patience to get through a whole dialogue. While wading through the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work, I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this? How the soi-disant Christian world, indeed, should have done it, is a piece of historical curiosity. But how could the Roman good sense do it? And particularly, how could Cicero bestow such eulogies on Plato? Although Cicero did not wield the dense logic of Demosthenes, yet he was able, learned, laborious, practiced in the business of the world, and honest. He could not be the dupe of mere style, of which he was himself the first master in the world. With the moderns. I think, it is rather a matter of fashion and authority. Education is chiefly in the hands of persons who, from their profession, have an interest in the reputation and the dreams of Plato. They give the tone while at school, and few in after years have occasion to revise their college opinions. But fashion and authority apart, and bringing Plato to the test of reason, take from him his sophisms, futilities and incomprehensibilities, and what remains?In truth, he is one of the race of genuine Sophists, who has escaped the oblivion of his brethren, first, by the eloquence of his diction, but chiefly, by the adoption and incorporation of his whimsies into the body of artificial Christianity. His foggv mind is forever presenting the semblances of objects which, half seen through a mist, can be defined neither in form nor dimensions. * * * Socrates had reason, indeed, to complain of the misrepresentations of Plato; for in truth, his dialogues are libels on Socrates. - Jefferson writing to John Adams

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.”