Overcomes Tyranny |
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This essay provides an answer to the question that so many of us are presently asking: In the face of presumably invincible fascistic tyranny, what can we do? That a seemingly powerless entity such as philosophy is actually able to overcome tyranny is indeed surprising and heartening. It requires a discerning mind to grasp how philosophy is able to conquer unrestrained repressive power. But the potency philosophy possesses to overcome tyranny is real--not some ethereal metaphysical conjecture meant to soothe and befuddle the credulous.
We'll first locate philosophy within a larger domain: the Perennial Tradition. Following that, we'll see how modern tyranny is attempting to destroy the genuine teaching and learning of Platonic philosophy. Last, we'll examine precisely how philosophy is able to conquer tyranny and what part we can play in this cosmic struggle.
"We have spoken of 'Plato's philosophy' and "Platonic teaching', but this is only a manner of speaking, for the philosophy, the teaching does not belong to Plato, it is not his creation. His is a sublime formulation of something which was there before him, which has always been and which will remain even if his name be forgotten."
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In earliest times certain sages discovered the fundamental nature of ultimate reality. Their successors have taught select students how to reawaken organs of perception, resulting in a higher state of consciousness. This higher consciousness enables the student to discern that what we take to be reality is actually a kind of illusion and that there are higher dimensions of being.
| The secret legacy which teaches this transformative process, the single stream of initiatory teaching flowing through all the great schools of philosophy and mysticism, is the Perennial Tradition. 1Perennialist teaching material and teaching methods are the outcome of creative adaptation by initiated teachers of the identical stream of Perennialist truth to contemporary needs. Each Perennialist teacher develops a different embodiment of the fundamental truths, not because she is borrowing from her predecessors and building her own philosophical system on the basis of their ideas, 2 but because the needs of her students, relative to their own time and place in history, require new compilations and techniques. Plato, 3 who originated the disclosure of the Perennial Tradition named philosophy, taught select students how to attain a state of higher discernment that was termed wisdom. Instruction in attaining this state was named philosophia, the quest for wisdom. |
"Suhrawardi's life (1154-1191 CE) and Suhrawardi's thought were intimately connected, just as they were for Pythagoras and many later philosophers who believed that philosophy required a philosophical life. Philosophy for him was the love of wisdom and implied the obligation to live his philosophy; it was not simply the love of talking about wisdom. To pursue the Illuminationist philosophy, it is necessary to seek enlightenment from the divine lights." |
Tyrannies 4 of many stripes have--throughout history--attacked Perennialist teachings in general, and philosophy in particular, because they understood them to be inimical to their ruthless manipulation and exploitation of the masses. A partial list would include:
To understand why tyrannies throughout the ages have attacked philosophy, we'll examine in detail the murderous attack on Plato by agents of despotism.
Political and religious tyrannies overwhelmed humankind in the Dark Ages. It was only when Perennialist teachings such as the Hermetic corpus and Plato's writings again became available that we in the West were able to pull ourselves up out of barbarity and depravity to a more enlightened existence.
In earlier essays, we've seen how the underlying bases of contemporary political systems are founded on Plato's concept of a natural, divine law which humans must follow to achieve justice and right government. We've examined his ideas concerning the human powers of reason, self-awareness, and language--which have shaped our entire Western civilization.
Immediately following Plato, beginning with his student Aristotle, the degradation of philosophia into scholastic philosophy began. Philosophia, properly understood, involves a transformation of one's inner being, a pursuit that rules every aspect of one's life. This acquisition of mystical knowledge does not come from doing research in a university library; it involves a special method of meditative contemplation and an entire way of life.
Plato understood that only a few people are able to authentically practice philosophia--the love of and the search for wisdom.
"The genuine practitioners of philosophy will be but a small remnant. . . Those who belong to this small class have tasted how sweet and blessed a possession philosophy is."In the same book, Plato elaborates on how difficult it is to practice true philosophy, resulting in a very small number of genuine philosophers. He also explains that even this small number of true philosophers are not recognized and their ideas are not used by the masses.
Plato, The Commonwealth, VI
"Suppose you now take this parable [of the mutineering seamen] to the gentleman who is surprised at finding that philosophers have no honor in their cities; explain it to him and try to convince him that their having honor would be far more extraordinary. . .Say to him, that, in deeming the best votaries of philosophy to be useless to the rest of the world, he is right; but also tell him to attribute their uselessness to the fault of those who will not use them, and not to themselves. The pilot should not humbly beg the sailors to be commanded by him -- that is not the order of nature; neither are 'the wise to go to the doors of the rich' -- the ingenious author of this saying told a lie -- but the truth is, that, when a man is ill, whether he be rich or poor, to the physician he must go, and he who wants to be governed, to him who is able to govern. The ruler who is good for anything ought not to beg his subjects to be ruled by him; although the present governors of mankind are of a different stamp; they may be justly compared to the mutinous sailors, and the true helmsmen to those who are called by them goodfornothings and stargazers."
Modern tyrants who've seized 
illegitimate political, economic, and military power--the group I've delineated as the Demonic Cabal--recognize the continuing force of Plato's influence--and hence its danger to their depraved manipulation of human minds and their insane totalitarian offensives.
They've deliberately established counterfeit "philosophers" such as Martin Heidegger, Karl Popper, and Leo Strauss and others to try to distort, obfuscate, and obliterate genuine teaching of the Platonic philosophy from our universities and colleges. In this, they have been exceptionally successful--so much so that the only genuine teachers of the Platonic philosophy today are to be found outside academia. 5
To give too much attention to these counterfeit sophists would be to bestow on them an importance totally beyond their true worth. But we must understand why these attacks by tyranny have been made on philosophy and how they can be counteracted--how philosophy ultimately defeats tyranny.
Orthodox "philosophers," beginning with Aristotle, employed a process of weeding out, as they put it, the esoteric and mystical and proclaiming logic as the supreme methodology. Aristotle and his successors believed that they were purging human thought of mythical rubbish and replacing it with hard-headed, rationalist explanations which met the tests of logic and common sense. So, from that time till today's inert, useless college course in analytic philosophy, the counterfeit has been sold as the genuine.
Modern academic philosophers have a deservedly bad name throughout the world at present--much like their ill repute during the time of Plato. In The Commonwealth, Socrates explains how spurious philosophy--sophism--has turned people off, because of its counterfeit nature. Since unthinking people identify sophism with philosophy, they think it is useless.
"The modern philosopher is a professional pedant, paid to instruct the young in philosophical doctrines and to write books and articles. He is a professor of philosophy, not so very different from a professor of biology or of marketing. He need not reshape his inner being to the model of the doctrines he discusses in his classes. If pressed, he will perhaps claim that he is useful because he teaches the young to think more clearly and, less plausibly, that he forces his fellow professors in other departments to clarify their concepts. The proud cities of metaphysics were long ago abandoned as indefensible and have fallen into ruin. The philosophers have for the most part retreated to the safer territory of language and logic, creating for themselves a sort of analytical Formosa." |
We've been trained to try to blow back to life the mere imagination of long-dead coals called Classical Philosophy or Classical Science until these areas of study have become mere "disciplines" within a university curriculum, the dead seeking to resurrect the dead.
A number of thinkers--including Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Russell, Heidegger, Rorty and Derrida--consider Western philosophy at a dead end. Their various accounts of the bankruptcy of that tradition range from seeing it as springing from intellectual fallacies at long last exposed and refuted, or as the long-standing corruption of an original human wisdom now standing in need of radical reconstitution.
While we must surely acknowledge the bankruptcy of modern academic philosophy into inane word analysis (P implies ~ ~P) or pop psychology (everybody has his own conception of reality), it's necessary to distinguish this counterfeit type of philosophy from genuine philosophy--as Plato did during his own time. Through many centuries of identifying casuistry, polemics, and scholasticism as philosophy, along with the loss of the ability to recognize or understand genuine philosophy, most contemporary thinkers lack the capability of grasping the true nature of the teachings of Perennialist sages such as Plato.
Though modern academic "philosophy" has been deliberately debased and disfigured to the point of almost total uselessness, the continuing, pervasive influence of Platonic philosophy is so powerful a force for reason and just government, that the agents of tyranny feel it necessary to try to destroy it in any way possible. The absurdity and wrong-headedness of Plato's self-appointed critics is masterfully described by Francis L. Jackson in his essay, "The Post-Philosophical Attack on Plato."
"The task to which post-Hegelian thinking thus enthusiastically applied itself was the discovery of the adequate critique of the Western spiritual and intellectual tradition, such as could lay the basis for a new ultra-spiritual standpoint both comprehensive of it and liberated from it. The common metaphor is a 'return to nature' in some fashion, whether through the romanticist invocation of an ante-historical spirit--the preeminence of culture--or the substitution of natural science for metaphysics as absolute knowledge. The former seeks to disclose and rehabilitate a pristine life and wisdom alleged to have been suppressed and corrupted by a domineering modern intellect which 'murders to dissect.' The latter opposes any such great leap backward and proposes a revolutionary emancipation from everything past, appealing to a new theology and psychology of the natural, Darwinian man. But the wish common to both is altogether to have done with
"This ultra-modernist program is of course ambiguous at its core. It is one thing simply to abandon thought as empty and useless activity. But how could it ever be possible to demonstrate the invalidity of philosophical reason; by what new standard and in what other form of discourse could the case be made against it?
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The fake philosopher Heidegger (seen in a Nazi group photo above) was a long-term member of the Nazi party.
"In spite of its prima facie implausibility, this tragic, high-operatic account of the intellectual history of the West still exercises enormous influence upon contemporary thinking; the more recent heroes of continental philosophy still perpetuate it.6With both Nietzsche and Heidegger the beginning is typically made with a claim to an epoch-making insight into the essential 'nihilism' of modernity as the final embodiment of a legacy of spiritual degeneration going back in time.7 The root cause of this cultural decay, or at least its crucial symptomatic expression, is declared to be epitomized in the historical cult of philosophy which as a matter of course elevates thought above life, plays down the sensible world as 'mere appearance', and seeks to comprehend and subordinate living reality under intellectual principles, the so-called ideas. The history of philosophy is thus, as Nietzsche puts it, the history of a lie whose consequence is just nihilism, the culture-negative culture of modernity."
The incompetence and incoherence of these critics of Plato is plain for anyone to see. Academic philosophy has become completely infested with such learned imbeciles. I recommend Francis L. Jackson's essay referenced above, which intelligently refutes the Plato-critics' specious arguments and exposes them as pretentious frauds.
One other misfit merits a brief mention, because he is the "philosophical godfather" of some of the vilest thugs in power within the Bush II junta.
Leo Strauss (1899-1973) began his career in Nazi Germany. He was powerfully influenced by three philosophers admired by the Nazis: Friedrich Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt. The Nazis worshipped Nietzsche as their hero.As a young man, Strauss fell under Heidegger's influence. Heidegger was an avowed Nazi and continued to teach in Germany under the Hitler regime. Carl Schmitt, the Nazi philosopher of law, arranged a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship for Strauss to study Thomas Hobbes in France in 1932 and in England in 1934. Strauss entered the United States in 1937, ending up at the University of Chicago in 1949. |  the Rockefeller-funded |
Using such frauds as Leo Strauss, the Rockefeller-dominated demonic cabal deliberately set out to destroy the genuine teaching and learning of the Platonic philosophy, just as they purposely attempted to destroy American education in general.
A number of the Bush II junta--or fellow-travelers--are devotees of the Straussian, anti-Platonic ideology, including Paul Wolfowitz, Supreme Court Justic Clarence Thomas, Judge Robert Bork, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, William Bennett, William F Buckley (National Review), Alan Keyes, Francis Fukuyama, ex-Attorney General John Ashcroft, Ken Masugi, Michael Ledeen, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone, Abram Shulsky and Richard Perle of the Pentagon, Elliott Abrams of the National Security Council, George Will, Newt Gingrich, Robert Kagan, and even Clinton advisor William Galston and fellow Democrat, Elaine Kamark.
Leo Strauss is the “Fascist Godfather of the neoconservatives.” His neocon disciples believe that an elite should use deception, religious fervor and perpetual war to control the credulous American population. The primary goal of Strauss and his disciples is to turn back the clock of history to before the Enlightenment, when ancient tyrannies ruled without restraint.
A Leo Strauss could only become a professor of philosophy in a demented age in which people in general and scholars in particular cannot see through his nonsense. Strauss, for example, claimed to have "discovered" a Plato without a doctrine of ideas or immortality of the soul, a Plato without metaphysics. I do not recommend that you read Strauss's works; they are nothing more than illiterate, obfuscating efforts to deliberately destroy philosophical discourse, sponsored by modern fascist rulers.
Strauss believed that liberalism, as practiced in the advanced nations of the West in the twentieth century, contains within it an intrinsic tendency towards relativism, which leads to nihilism (shades of Nietzsche). This is the same brand of nonsense peddled by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger we reviewed above. We get a clear impression of Strauss's intellect when we learn that he believed that the Nazi Martin Heidegger possessed the greatest mind of the 20th century.
Strauss recommended the study of Plato only for the purpose of recovering the nature of political life which he believed had been perverted by Plato. Strauss's goal was to explicate the essence of modernity, which originated in the transformation of political philosophy effected by Machiavelli. Strauss believed that Machiavelli was a genius who redirected political philosophy from an essentially contemplative or theoretical consideration of political elements to an active transformation of reality. Machiavelli replaced human will for nature as the source of cultural standards, Strauss claimed.
Strauss said (to paraphrase) that modernity is founded on the internalizing of the sources of morality within human subjectivity, and, as the necessary correlative of this, results in the oblivion of nature and total historicization of all moral and political standards. In terms that make sense, Strauss believed that people in power determine what's right or wrong and impose their will on weaker people.
That last concept should sound familiar, because it was a theme examined in several of Plato's dialogues: the belief that justice is the will of those in power. From this we can understand that all of the "modern" political-social-religious-philosophical issues that so fiercely exercise us today were discussed in Plato's writings and most of the ideals and values at the base of Western civilization originated from Plato's solutions to those issues.
Like all Perennialist teachers, Plato presents ideas that are non-ordinary. His ideas provide the occasion--with persons who are prepared--for psychic upheaval into a higher state of consciousness.
As we'll see, Plato's concept of reality--when genuinely understood--produces a shock.
Most of Plato's ideas have been misunderstood because we fail to take Plato at his word--we fail to take him literally. We assume his meaning for a term such as "reality" is what we understand it to mean. As we'll see, what he meant by reality is something completely different. We assume that we can grasp his meaning of reality easily. Actually, it's a concept that requires considerable effort to understand.
1. The world of truth 2. The world of delusion and tryanny |
In The Commonwealth, Plato identified a genuine philosopher as "one whose heart is fixed on reality itself." It's clear that what he means by "reality" is not what we now take it to mean in ordinary thought.
"What is at issue is the conversion of the mind from the twilight of error to the truth, that climb up into the real world which we shall call true philosophy."Plato speaks of "ordinary reality" as a "twilight world" and the higher world which only seekers of wisdom can discern, "the truth," "the real world," or "true philosophy."
"When the mind's eye rests on objects illuminated by truth and reality, it understands and comprehends them, and functions intelligently; but when it turns to the twilight worldof change and decay, it can only form opinions, its vision is confused and its beliefs shifting, and it seems to lack intelligence."
To understand what Plato meant by reality, it's necessary to consider what he intends to convey through the concept of the "twilight world" of delusion, ignorance, and tyranny.
Most people assume that Plato is denigrating "ordinary reality" by saying that it participates in such qualities as change, mere opinion, and time. They think Plato is describing the "sensible world" by contrasting it to his "World of Forms"--which many identify as a realm of unreal ideas that are actually (as Aristotle claimed) mere generalizations and conceptualizations abstracted from "hard" realities such as shoes and ships and sealing wax.
We can only understand what Plato meant by "twilight world" if we think clearly about our current political-social situation. At present, we are faced with a demonic cabal which has created a false reality in which:
We must work with this conception of a "false reality" made to appear as the "true reality" to comprehend what Plato understood the world of untruth to be. For Plato, the deception, ignorance, and tyranny of a gang of fascist thugs such as the Bush junta is precisely what he meant by "false reality."
We tend to think that Plato's conception of false reality as a "twilight world" involves only philosophical elements such as change, opinion, belief versus knowledge, and so on.
When we look carefully at Plato's writings--considering the structure as well as the content of his dialogues and letters--it becomes clear that Plato's overarching intention was a continuing struggle against the false world of tyranny and ignorance, just as we are experiencing today.
We must continually keep in mind that Plato had already lost his dearest friend and teacher Socrates in the battle against unrestrained oppressive power. This was not a dilletantish discussion or dainty debate; Plato's struggle against tyranny was a matter of life or death. He understood that he was battling against oppression in many forms to win the minds of young people who would be the future leaders.
Plato saw the philosophical shortcomings of the "ordinary world," but he also struggled against social, political, and cultural corruptions which were a part of that deranged world. His fight against tyranny is clearly seen, for example, in his Gorgias.
The world of delusion, ignorance, violence, and tyranny is so pervasive at present--has infected and deformed so many people's minds and souls--that most Americans don't even see it--or do anything about it even if they happen to notice it for a moment.
As I am writing this essay, I happened to watch (for an instant) the Larry King Live TV "news" program where Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice simply lied without compunction--and Larry King didn't call her on her lies or register surprise or indignation that a lie had been perpetrated on his program. The basic premise of the TV part of the World of Untruth is that lying is perfectly acceptable behavior. Members of the Bush junta do it every day of the week.
Following the 2000 coup d'etat that allowed Bush II to seize power illegally and the 2004 election in which Karl Rove's Nazis rigged the votes and the vote counting, an entire "shadow world" has been systematically created in which lies are truths, crimes go entirely unnoticed, the destruction of Constitutional liberties is ongoing, men and women are sent to Iraq to die for oil and Halliburton profits, and working class Americans are ground into the dirt. People throughout the world have become so accustomed to and benumbed by this "shadow world" of ignorance, repression, and tryanny that they no longer see the real world of truth clearly if at all.
The essence of Plato's philosophy was an ongoing battle against exactly the same kind of twisted, unreal, counterfeit world that we presently face. Philosophy--the search for wisdom and truth--arises out of the resistance of the soul to its destruction by a perverted world. The situation Plato faced--and we now face--is the life-or-death of our very being.
"To be deceived or uninformed in the soul about true being means that 'the lie itself' has taken possession of 'the highest part of himself' and steeped it into 'ignorance of the soul.'"
Plato, Gorgias (382a-b)
Not working to discover the truth and not having reasoned opinions about what is happening in the world is a way of being complicit in the tyranny that is going on.
Philosophy must be engaged in social-political analysis--among other things--because the order or disorder of a society shapes its citizens' minds and souls. All persons who want to safeguard their minds and their souls must engage in philosophy, in the sense of searching assiduously for the truth: what is really happening in the world.
Ordinary people can be "philosophers" through resisting the mind-manipulation of any of the members of the cabal. A philosopher is any one who resists the attempt by the world of untruth to corrupt his soul, his higher self. Any genuine philosophy at present must struggle against the world of untruth created by the demonic cabal. If you read something by a so-called contemporary philosopher that isn't battling against the current form of tyranny, then you know that he or she is not genuine.
We must realize that we're in a battle not merely for whether this particular puppet regime of the demonic cabal starts this pre-emptive war or that, but with whether or not our very being will be subverted by lies and false values.
A depraved society--such as we now face--can destroy a person's soul, because the disorder of society is a disease in the psyche of it members. The philosopher guards her own soul against the degradations of the surrounding society which press on her. The philosopher diagnoses the health and disease in her personal soul and at the same time examines disorder in a deranged society.
Plato reminds us that our resistance to a deranged world depends for its success on a precise comprehension of those against whom we struggle. One of the requirements for discerning the true essence of our antagonists is to describe their beliefs and actions in a straightforward manner. We must, in other words, refer to what is happening today by its true nature--totalitarianism--instead of masking it with such lies as "incompetence," "receiving false intelligence," and "well-intentioned but bungling efforts."
That's why I've chosen to refer to the gang that has seized power in America as the demonic cabal and to describe their vile behavior in forthright terms such as murder, lying, and deliberate destruction of people and social structures.
Part of what the demonic cabal tries to do is to appear to set the standards for polite discussion. They claim that using such terms as "demonic," "criminal," "cabal," or "murder" is uncouth or belies the disturbed mind of a conspiracy theorist. At the very moment their totally biased representatives are verbally attacking anyone who dares to speak forthrightly about the demonic cabal's perfidies, they smile and smile and continue to commit the most villainous acts.
Plato's writings--like no other--provide us with a clear understanding of the salient aspects of the world of deliberate ignorance, delusion, and tyranny. We read Plato's dialogues to see how we can struggle against soul-destroying ignorance in our present experience.
The manner in which Plato attacks the false world of delusion and oppression is extraordinary and contains subtleties which require our careful study. Plato created short dramas in which representatives of the two worlds meet to do battle--this is one of the major elements within his dialogues. He set the stage for his struggle against tyranny and laid out the terms of the discourse. This is essential because the actual members of the world of delusion and oppression--then and now--never enter an arena where they're required to present their true beliefs or values. A David Rockefeller, a Jim Baker, a Karl Rove, a Henry Kissinger, or a George W. Bush never allow themselves to get into a situation where they would be forced to speak the truth. So, to do battle against them, we must create our own universe of discourse.
That means that we must not allow representatives of the world of untruth--the demonic cabal--to set the stage when we're engaged in battle against them. It would be the height of foolishness, for example, to think that one could present a reasoned argument on propagandizing programs such as the Bill O'Reilly fiasco, the Sean Hannity farce, or the Hardball farce with the totally uncultured Chris Matthews. The only mainstream news program where it's possible to engage in reasoned argumentation 8 is on
Keith Olberemann's Countdown show.
The demonic cabal is able to control all mainstream means of communication in their "twilight world." And the only purpose of observing their lies and distortions is to understand those who see us as their enemy. Part of what Plato is doing in the dialogues is making it clear that he does not approach the other participants as hated enemies. Socrates sees himself as a participant in a struggle for the souls of humans, including those who hate him so much that they threaten to murder him.
In our ongoing struggle against tyranny, we must communicate and act in ways that are consonant with the "world of truth."
We cannot use the vocabulary or the principles of the criminal cabal or accept their deranged world as reality. In Plato's dialogues, Socrates constantly remained within his own universe of understanding even when speaking with persons from the shadow world of lies and oppression. In the Gorgias, Socrates states what appears to Polus and the other participants in the dialogue to be an absurdity.
"A man who does evil does not what he truly wills. For a man can truly will only what is good; if he commits evil acts in the mistaken belief that they serve his interest, he reveals thereby that he is powerless to do what he truly wills. Hence the tyrant is powerless."
When Polus hears this, he can't restrain himself. He starts sneering at Socrates.
"As if you, Socrates, don't wish you had the power to do whatever you'd like to do; as if you aren't jealous when you see someone killing or plundering or jailing people at his pleasure!"
Polus sneers at Socrates because he considers his personal vileness to be the measure of human success and decency. Polus believes that he knows what he wants and that he has the power to do what's best for himself. Like all persons corrupted and debased by the world of untruth, Polus projects his own baseness onto others. He can't believe that every person wouldn't indulge in vile acts if he had the chance to get away with them. This is why later in the Gorgias, Socrates will present the myth of the people who are invisible--and can get away with anything.
What appear to Polus and Callicles to be Socrates' absurd beliefs about humans only willing what they consider good, is actually Socrates' refusal to accede to the view of humankind perpetrated by the world of untruth--that all men are totally self-centered, know what is good for them, and can best live in a dog-eat-dog universe. Socrates is saying: "No, the higher reality of a human is his soul--not his undisciplined sensual desires and behaviors. A person truly wills--in his essence--what is good for him, and if he commits evil acts, thinking they serve his best interest, he has become deranged."
Socrates also defines the universe of discourse on his own terms when he refuses to be intimidated or silenced by Polus's or Callicles's jeering at him:
"Look at you, a penniless, powerless flatterer of the people. All the best people agree with us--and most of the common people as well. You're simply moving against the current of the times and no one of any importance listens to you. You're a nobody--especially compared to a great, popular ruler like Archelaus!"
Socrates will not be overpowered by onslaughts from the world of untruth. Unscathed, he persists in his assertions--which seem absolute nonsense to Polus and Callicles--that for a corrupt man such as Archelaus doing injustice is worse than suffering injustice, and that doing injustice without suffering the pangs of remorse and reformation of character is the worst of all fates.
Callicles begins a vicious verbal attack against Socrates, feeling defensive at Polus' poor showing in the ongoing debate (as they see it). Socrates refuses to bow to Callicles's attempts to overwhelm him with false principles: "whatever most people believe must be true," and "all intelligent people would agree with us." Socrates states very straightforwardly that the basis of their interchange cannot be specious shibboleths such as those Callicles is asserting, but the honest search for the truth. Otherwise, Socrates says, he will discontinue trying to participate in a farce based on catchphrases and false assumptions.
Plato sees that the issue at stake is whether genuine communication and intelligibility can be maintained in a decadent society. Are the fundamental differences between Socrates and Callicles--between persons in the present who desire to seek the truth and those who wish to despoil the people--irreconcilable? Is the chasm between these two worlds so wide and deep that a bridge of common humanity connecting them is impossible?
Plato makes it clear that only if the denizens of the world of untruth are at least willing to try to adhere to principles of common decency and reasoned discourse based on the common experience of all humans, should a philosopher attempt to engage in communication with them. Otherwise it would be a waste of time and effort.
As we'll see, degenerate persons who have their being in the world of untruth and destruction cannot control themselves, so that they break their agreement to follow common principles of reasoned discourse whenever their passions overpower them.
Callicles agrees to discourse with Socrates because he sees him as a possible danger to his world. For Callicles, the degree of corruption which his world has attained is necessary and desirable. One of the few threats to this congenial connivance in criminality can be a man like Socrates who tries to persuade people that their world is corrupt and evil. If an appreciable sector of the people should agree with Socrates' ideas, the situation might become unpleasant for Callicles and his fellow-criminals.
Callicles hopes to destroy both Socrates' argument and Socrates himself as a threat to his world. He dismisses the conventional definition of justice as a ploy to terrify the stronger man who otherwise would get the better of the weaker. Justice is defined so that it appears shameful and unjust if a man desires to have more than others (pleonektein). In the conventional definition, justice is the desire for equality and injustice is the desire to gain as much as possible (pleonexy).
On the contrary, Callicles asserts, the principle of unlimited profits and possessions is real justice. In the animal realm as well as among humans, the rule of the stronger over the weaker is supreme. In the world of ignorance and destruction--both in Plato's time and in ours--the economic standard is vulture capitalism.9
"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all."
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According to Callicles--and the vulture capitalist of our time--a man has no need for self-discipline. On the contrary, goodness and justice consist in the satisfaction of any and every desire.
"Luxury, license and freedom' (tryphe, akolasia, eleutheria), if provided with means, are virtue and happiness (arete, eudaimonia); whatever is said to the contrary is the ornamental talk of worthless men ."
Callicles in Plato's Gorgias, (492c)
Pointing out how the same words have entirely different meanings in the world of truth and the world of delusion, Plato defines goodness and badness in terms of advancing or degrading the order of a society. A statesman is good if under his rule the citizens become better; he is bad if under his rule the citizens become worse, in terms of their everyday life and their moral fibre.
As we must do in understanding our own modern society, Socrates reviews the men who were the pride of Athenian history: Themistocles, Pericles, Cimon, Miltiades. Applying his criteria he finds that they were bad statesmen in the sense of building the infrastructure of the city, but ignoring justice and temperance. The conclusive proof for the evil character of their rule is what Athenian citizens have become. The present corrupt generation of Athenians, Plato says, is heir to the evils that have accumulated through the successive rule of such "great" statesmen.
Such an analysis and indictment of the "founding fathers"--of Athens or the United States--is the height of patriotism: the assessment of what has been done and what must be revised and what perpetuated and extended. The current condition of American society--with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer--is an indictment of the plutocratic nature of the American Constitution, as created by a small cabal at the beginning of our nation.
One of the few positive benefits of watching TV "news" programs is to sharpen our capacities to see through the lies which the Bush II junta members broadcast to the public. Our struggle against the current world of ignorance and destruction must include discernment of what it is they are hiding and making the truth available to those who wish to understand.
From this aspect of Plato's thought and activity we gain the insight that genuine philosophy is not the preaching of right doctrines, but continuous effort to identify and analyze the forces of good and evil. A large part of our effort is to train the soul to recognize the shape and substance of the world of untruth and, consequently, understand how we must work in opposite ways to discern the truth.
Philosophy does not exist in a social vacuum, but in opposition to the world of tyranny. Justice is not defined in the abstract but in opposition to the concrete forms which injustice assumes in our time. In The Commonwealth (often mis-translated as The Republic), Plato was not creating an "ideal order" of a city state, but discovering the elements of right order in concrete opposition to the elements of disorder in the surrounding society. Plato explains that just as the principles of right order for a city-state are discovered in combat against the fundamental principles of tyranny, so the forms (eidos) of virtue in the soul are discovered in opposition to the many forms of disorder in the soul.
Philosophy illuminates truth by opposing it to untruth, perpetuating the tradition of Perennialist sages who discover and disseminate truth in their resistance to the conventions of their time. As in Plato' experience, so with us, philosophy involves the new embodiment of the truths of the Perennial Tradition under extremely anarchic and chaotic conditions. Between the age of Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Heraclitus and the age of Plato there had occurred a century of sophistic moral and political degeneration, just as in American society the demonic cabal has for a century deliberately worked to destroy our culture.
Genuine philosophers arise in opposition to sophists--those who teach and direct the destruction of society. A genuine philosopher develops a contemporary concept of justice for the purpose of opposing the current sophistic disorder; the meaning of fundamental realities such as justice and truth must be understood in relation to their opposites within a specific era.
Plato defined disorder in the world of tyranny as polypragmosyne, the seizing of power by those who presume they possess wisdom in all things. In modern terms, this has been clearly illustrated in the case of the demonic cabal, which assumes that it has the understanding of how Americans--and the world--ought to order their lives and therefore possesses the mandate to seize control of American society and the world. 10 What polypragmosyne means in practice is that the unskilled, unenlightened, and depraved seize the rule of a society to its detriment and final destruction.
When the same principle of disorder (polypragmosyne) is applied to the soul, it refers to appetites and desires directing the course of human action and claiming the rulership of the soul which properly belongs to wisdom. True justice (dikaiosyne), on the other hand, covers right order at all levels --the harmony of the soul and society.
We gain exceptional insight from Plato's concepts as we examine our own world of untruth. And we retain the concreteness of Plato's thought by translating his terms in reference to current examples of corruption. We can, for example, identify certain modern tyrants in direct reference to Plato's dialogues: David Rockefeller as Cephalus, Karl Rove as Gorgias, Kissinger as Callicles, Dubya as Polus, etc.
Plato quite accurately included the purveyors of popular culture--what we would today identify as the world of mindless TV and barbaric movies--with the sophists as the source of disorder in the soul and society. To restore order to the deranged souls of the world of untruth, we must begin at the strategic point of the "ignorance of the soul" by setting aright the relation between man and his Higher Self. This is the problem which dominates The Commonwealth as a whole; the attack on the corrupt society is not directed against this or that political abuse but against a disease of the soul.
Philosophy, in Plato's time and ours, comes into being as the resistance of the soul to its destruction by a deranged world. Philosophy, as the continuing, most effective embodiment of the Perennial Tradition, possesses two distinct expressions:
"Every one of Plato's dialogues is a protreptic 11 because its purpose is to aid the reader in affectively identifying with his own intelligence. The philosophical dialogue never addresses the reader solely as a solitary individual, but always as a member of a free, self-governing, political community. The irony of Socrates and the dialectic method of Plato are in the service of the protreptic."Emil J. Piscitelli, "In Praise of Love: A Conversation With Plato's Symposium" |
"He will gladly take part in and enjoy those which he thinks will make him a better man, but in public and private life he will shun those that may overthrow the established habit of his soul.""'Then, if that is his chief concern,' he said, 'he will not willingly take part in politics.'"
"'Yes, by the dog,' said I, 'in his own city he certainly will, yet perhaps not in the city of his birth, except in some providential conjuncture."
" 'I understand,' he said; 'you mean the city whose establishment we have described, the city whose home is in the ideal; for I think that it can be found nowhere on earth.'"
"'Well,' said I, 'perhaps there is a form of it laid up in the spiritual domain for him who wishes to contemplate it and so beholding to constitute himself its citizen. But it makes no difference whether it exists now or ever will come into physical reality. The politics of this supersensual city only will be his and of none other.'"
Plato is the founder of a supersensual community 12 of philosophers--truth-seekers--that lives through the ages. Socrates and Plato maintain the sovereignty of this higher realm through their creation of an entire way of life--philosophia: the love of and the search for wisdom.
"Follow me then, and I will lead you where you will be happy in life and after death, as dialectic reveals. And never mind if some one despises you as a fool, and insults you, if he has a mind; let him strike you, by Zeus, and do you be of good cheer, and do not mind the insulting blow, for you will never come to any harm in the practise of virtue, if you are a really good and true man. When we have practised virtue together, we will apply ourselves to politics, if that seems desirable, or we will advise about whatever else may seem good to us, for we shall be better able to judge then. In our present condition we ought not to give ourselves airs, for even on the most important subjects we are always changing our minds; so utterly stupid are we! Let us, then, adopt dialectic as our methodology, which has revealed to us that the best way of life is to practise justice and every virtue in life and death. This way let us go; and in this exhort all men to follow. . ."
Plato, The Commonwealth
Only philosophers gain awareness of and participation in this supersensual commonwealth, because only they possess the intellectual and spiritual qualities which make this possible. For example, our disturbing passions must be restrained by Sophrosyne: excellence of character and soundness of mind combined in a well-balanced personality. If egomania and greed are unrestrained, we will lead the life of a predator, one who loots everyone, friend or foe.
"Such a man cannot be the friend (prosphiles) of God or other men, for he is incapable of communion, and who is incapable of communion is incapable of friendship (philia) (507e)."
Philia, fidelity to oneself and others, is a prerequisite for entry into the higher community. Philia is the effectual bond between humans and between Heaven and Earth, God and man. It is because fidelity (philia) and order pervade true reality that the universe is a cosmos--an ordered realm--and not an anarchical chaos (akosmia, akolasia).
The Socratic-Platonic supersensual community has been created by their lives and teachings--and by subsequent Perennialist adepts. Socrates revealed by his actions and his words that a true philosopher constantly practices the art of living in the soul apart from the body. By realizing our unity with the Higher Self, we gain an awareness of Forms: principles of being. There will be a few just and honorable men in the terrestrial realm--such as Aristides, son of Lysimachus, during Plato's day--but most of the dwellers in the supersensual commonwealth will be those who have lived before us.
Over against this higher spiritual domain of the community of philosophers stands the world of delusion, oppression, and obliteration. Members of this evil world, such as Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles--Rockefeller, Bush II, and Kissinger--stand convicted as the accomplices of tyrannical murderers and destroyers of their society. These monsters represent a depraved disorder, and no one should credit their words or follow their decrees.
The genuine authority of public order lies with Socrates and Plato--and modern philosophers who follow in the same tradition. The personal and social Forms advocated by Plato have survived Athens and are still the most important norms in the traditions of Western civilization. While society at any given time seems to be the last judge of what is right and who is important, history proves that certain individuals are more important--and more correct in their judgements--than the entire society during their lives (history, of course, as truly interpreted by genuine philosophers, not popular "historians").
The assumption of power by Socrates and Plato is a genuine spiritual revolution. It is much different from most social revolutions in which new political forces struggle for power against older ones. Plato's revolution is a radical call to spiritual regeneration. Most of the people of Athens--and most of the people of twenty-first century America--have lost their souls. All they can do is lead lives of unquiet desperation, destroying everything of value. A deranged Athenian democracy can kill a man physically--as with Socrates--but this act is seen to have no moral authority. The lone philosopher overcame the tyranny of his time and the supersensual community of philosophers--living and dead--overcomes tyranny throughout time.
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1 See the author's recently published book, The Perennial Tradition
2 "Greek philosophy is autochthonous [An entity depicted as having originated from the ground it inhabits, from itself; hence of independent origin]. That Plato traveled in Egypt need not be doubted, but that he went to Phoenicia, Chaldaea, and Persia to study philosophy is mere guesswork. What Plato thought of the Egyptians he has told us himself in The Republic (436) when he says that the special characteristic of the Greeks is love of knowledge, of the Phoenicians and Egyptians love of money. If he borrowed no money, he certainly borrowed no philosophy from his Egyptian friends."
3 Some Greek sources assert that Pythagoras referred to his system of thought as philosophia. Plato appears to have studied Pythagoreanism--as well as other systems of thought--and probably drew on those other schools to develop his own methodologies which he called philosophia. We have only scattered bits of Pythagoras' ideas. Plato's writings are the basis of what we can identify as the essence of philosophy.
4 Tyranny: oppressive power unrestrained by law or moral principles
Tyrant: an absolute ruler unrestrained by law or constitution who
5 "Even now so much of the thought which has the best title to be called philosophical is
contained in the works of authors who are primarily students of a science other than philosophy--theologians, mathematiciams, natural scientists, or Platonic and Aristotelian scholars--as might well give a colour to the suspicion that philosohy is not itself a science at all, but a certain critical spirit or synoptic habit of mind, which can be exercised and developed only in the pursuit of a study other than itself."
Also, see Chapter Eleven, "Philosophia: The Love of and the Search for Wisdom," in the author's book, The Perennial Tradition
6 "The post-philosophical attack on Plato's legacy relies principally on the doctrine, now virtually a universal belief, that thought is really no more than language and philosophical discourse no more than a certain type of language-use. Heidegger's generation would insist philosophy turn to semiotics as a means of resolving ontological and other issues. Derrida would go even further toward a strict identification of philosophy with language. 'Philosophy is first and foremost writing', he declares, 'though a peculiar kind of writing whose effect is to isolate the signified from its sensory verbal signifier, thereby to generate an illusory realm of meaning independent of language, the so-called world of spirit, thought and ideas.'"
7 "Ambivalence with respect to terms like 'spirit' or 'spiritual' pervades the whole tradition represented by Nietzsche and Heidegger. Like most post-Hegelians they were generally loathe to use the word except disparagingly; yet they were equally clear the crisis they would describe and address was a 'spiritual' one, in the sense it was at once intellectual, moral, political, aesthetic, religious i.e., 'cultural'. The new worldliness to which they would lead the return is not a materialism but wholly presupposes a concrete freedom: 'spirit' in the distinctively Hegelian sense. Heidegger himself will declare "World is always the world of spirit", but see Derrida's revealing account as to how he continually vacillated over whether or how to use the term: whether negatively, positively, figuratively etc. Of Spirit, Heidegger and the Question, tr. Bennington/Bowlby, 1989). Ibid.
8 See the author's recently published book Progressive Awareness.
9 In the seventeenth century CE, the problem of pleonexy (vulture capitalism) reappeared. Locke propagated pleonexy as conventional justice; he institutionalized the "desire to have more than the other man" by transforming government into a protective agency for the gains of pleonexy.
10 There is nothing more absurd than a Henry Kissinger, a Zbibniew Brzezinski, or
a Paul Wolfowitz--mandarins of the demonic cabal--pontificating on how the world ought be run. The supposedly
superior groups of foreign policy advisors--Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission,
Bilderberg group--are farcical in their presumption of knowledge and understanding.
11 Protreptic discourse: both directive and didactic but also associated with rational inquiry, in which minds are directed toward an instructive purpose
12 The Greek words referring to this spiritual domain are: theia tis sumbęi tuchê
