anything, indulge any lust, maneuver oneself into any position of
power that commands respect? Suppose one could become invisible
while secretly committing every manner of criminal and unethical
deed and that doing so allowed one to publicly command ever more
respect, and even to be praised as virtuous by the masses. Imagine
also that persecution and even a torture worse than death were
the reward for actual y being virtuous, rather than merely seeming
so while raping and plundering in stealth. Who would prefer to
actual y be virtuous rather than seem so while being wicked? Even if
we grant that being ethical requires habituation from childhood and
the mirror of personal relationships throughout life to sustain, could the god-like virtue required to be this ethical be a matter of habit or having the right kind of friends?
If there are individuals who seem to have a transcendent virtue,
people who are ethical y exemplary, it also seems that for any one
of them there are many others who are at the opposite extreme:
people who no amount of proper habituation can render ethical and
who are incapable of entering into any but the crassest and most
convenient friendships. We are going to contemplate whether, as
Plato and Aristotle think, sometimes entire societies are dominated
by such people – societies so viciously oppressive that the cultivation 23
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of virtue is impossible in them. If a society needs exemplary
individuals even in order to cultivate ethical habits in others, doesn’t it make a very great difference whether the political system is one
that encourages exemplary leadership or one where the most vicious
elements in a society are allowed to harness the vilest impulses in
the masses to create conditions that make life impossible for ethical
paragons. Can a true democracy ever be ethical?
The United States of America is often mistakenly considered a
democracy. Even some of our recent Presidents have spoken as if
this is a democracy and one of them called for spreading the fire
of democracy around the world. Wel , we have seen what kind of
fire that policy has spread in the Middle East. In fact, the United
States is not a true democracy and most of the founding fathers
of America considered “democracy” a dirty word. They were
students of classical Greek and Roman thinkers like Plato, Aristotle,
Xenophon, and Cicero who reasoned that democracy was pretty
near to the worst form of government there is. Only tyranny is
more vicious than democracy from a classical perspective, and the
founding fathers viewed democracy as a “tyranny of the majority.”
Those with a poor education in history think that democracy was
some shining accomplishment of the Greeks, when in fact almost all
Greek intellectuals were harsh critics of democracy.
Analysis of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the various writings (including the private letters) of the founding
fathers make it clear that rather than being a democracy, this nation
is grounded on the concept of Natural Right – sometimes also
known as the Rights of Man. This has been more recently reframed
by the United Nations as Universal Human Rights but in a way that
is less clear and coherent than the Natural Right conception of the
founders. The founders of the American constitutional Republic,
and by the way also some of their French revolutionary colleagues,
saw Natural Right as a universal ethical standard. In his book The Rights of Man, Thomas Paine, who set off the American Revolution with his more widely read pamphlet Common Sense, explicitly and publicly states what others of the founders privately believed: Natural 24
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Right is so universal that it applies even to all of the other intelligent beings throughout the Universe, so that the bell of liberty rung by
the American Revolution is not even limited to all of the oppressed
individuals on the planet Earth – it reverberates throughout the
Cosmos.
For Deists and Freemasons such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas
Jefferson, George Washington, and other key founders, the “Creator”
in the Declaration of Independence was not the God of the Bible
but the macrocosmic rational order reflected in the microcosm
of reason that allows us to perfect ourselves. This relationship
between a reason inherent in Nature at large and the rational faculty
characteristic of human nature is at the core of the idea that we have certain rights that are “inalienable” – in other words, not given by
any government and therefore not justly ignored, withdrawn, or
violated by any government. Even if a 99% majority of people in this
country were to vote through their elected representatives to strip
individuals of their natural rights, their votes would be null and void.
Military officers who have sworn to uphold the constitution could
legitimately disempower a congress or President that acknowledged
such a majority vote. So, again, the United States is very far from
a democracy. It is a constitutional government dedicated to the
protection of the Natural Rights of Man, where “man” means not
just men and women but each and every intelligent being in the
Universe.
This basic conception of Natural Right or a universal Ethics was
most careful y crystalized by Immanuel Kant in his argument for a
Categorical Imperative. In the third unit, we will look at how Kant
thinks that his universal ethics would be truly universal, namely
that it would apply to every form of extraterrestrial intelligence
regardless of their biological differences from Homo sapiens. How
tenable is this claim considering what we now know about evolution?
Couldn’t there be forms of extraterrestrial intelligence that are much more similar to terrestrial insects with a hive mind than they are to
humans on Earth, and given the horrifying amorality of interactions
within insect colonies wouldn’t it be absurd to claim that the beings
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constituting them would be bound by the ethical standards of
anything like the Bill of Rights or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
Furthermore, aren’t emergent biotechnologies giving us the
power to so radical y alter the human genome that a speciation of
our own race could present us with beings of a common ancestry
that are as alien to us as any extraterrestrials? In the second half of the third unit we will look together with Francis Fukuyama at how
the technologies of embryo selection, cloning, genetic engineering,
and genetic hybridization call into question whether there is any
essence or metaphysical nature that we all share as humans in the
first place – the kind of nature that would ground Natural Right or
Human Rights. If our so-called ‘nature’ is only an evolutionarily
contingent and technological y malleable biological nature, what
legitimacy do such conceptions of universal ethics have in the first
place? We may be able to use legislation to keep these technologies
at bay (although that is unlikely), but even so, such legislation only covers over the power of such technologies to reve
al something
much more fundamental to us about ourselves – something with
profound ethical implications. Emergent biotechnologies even
give us the power to create new forms of intelligent life, to be the
designers of new species of sentient beings. What if we were to find
out that we ourselves are the artifacts of more advanced beings? Is
there something about each of us that is uncreated and a bearer of
pre-political ethical rights, irrespective of whether or not the human race was someone else’s pet project? Prometheus created the human
race in his own image; what are the ethics of a Promethean, of a
superman alien to the human condition?
26
THE PHARMAKON ARTIST
“The safest general characterization of the European
philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes
to Plato.”
– Alfred North Whitehead
For too long now has this quote from Whitehead sounded
as if it were a cliché. Historical y, doctrinal y, and
temperamental y, there are many branches in the tree
of Philosophia –between Neo-Pythagorean Platonists
and Aristotelian Neo-Platonists before Descartes, between
analytic and continental thought after Kant, between Marxist and
Existentialist thinkers after Hegel. Nevertheless, they all recognize
their common heritage in the solid trunk of the dramatic dialogues
of Plato before disappearing into subterranean Pre-Socratic roots.
A radical reinterpretation of Plato, then, has an obvious bearing on
any attempt to revolutionize the philosophical tradition as a whole.
If it could be shown that the dialectical development from out of
Platonic idealism and into other forms of rationalism and intuitive
understanding was in some way anticipated by Plato himself, even
designed by him as a vast social conditioning mechanism, the whole
of intellectual history would have to be rethought. I do not claim to
attain this aim in the present essay, but I do paint in broad strokes
some indispensable path marks to that end.
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The essay is divided into five sections. The first three sections
are closely related and form the initial phase of my argument. In
them I interpret Plato’s development of the Theory of Forms in
terms of the metaphysics of the two foremost Pre-Socratic Greek
thinkers, Heraclitus and Parmenides. The first section offers a
concise sketch of the life-affirming worldview of Heraclitus and of
the Eleatic school’s transcendentalist reaction against it, beginning
with Parmenides. In the interests of a point made later in the essay,
I preface this with an even briefer evocative glimpse at the Greek
mind in the Homeric age.
Since this essay is already ambitious in the scope of its treatment
of Plato, to give more attention to the Pre-Socratics than I do here
would seriously compromise its coherence. For the reader who is
basical y unfamiliar with this background to Plato’s thought, and
who needs more than the refreshers that I offer in the first section of this paper, I recommend Friedrich Nietzsche’s lectures on The Pre-Platonic Philosophers1 as well as his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks 2 – a very short posthumously published book that he wrote contemporaneously with his famous study of Greek drama. My own
understanding of the Pre-Socratics, or as Nietzsche called them the
‘Pre-Platonic’ philosophers, has been profoundly influenced by these
two works, especial y his view therein of the relationship between
Heraclitus and the Eleatic school of Parmenides.
The second section argues that the Platonic “form” or “idea”
( eidos) was something devised with a view to Parmenidean notions of enduring unity, and on the basis of a tacit acceptance of a
Heraclitean view of the world of sensuous experience as a perpetual
flux. In itself, this is no great revelation, but what I suggest is
something more. Namely, that Plato deliberately misinterprets the
ontology of Heraclitus, privileging Becoming to the total exclusion
of Being whereas for Heraclitus Becoming is a concealing or
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Pre-Platonic Philosophers (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001).
2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, 1998).
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sheltering aspect of Existence. Likewise, he perversely distorts the
meaning of Non-Being in Parmenides from a negatively infinite
ontological Nothingness to a finite cipher in the context of indexical reference (i.e. as that which is not being presently referred to, but
which nonetheless exists as a counterfactual referent).
Following clues in certain remarks made by Aristotle concerning
Plato’s Heraclitean pedigree, I excavate the Heraclitean world-view
tacitly accepted by Plato from between the lines of the dialogues
Theaetetus, Cratylus, and Phaedo. I then turn to the dialogues Parmenides and The Sophist to see how Plato appears to respond to this vision of a world in perpetual flux, a world where certain
knowledge of definite objects is impossible, by taking recourse to
a rational y apprehensible transcendental realm that endows each
object with its distinctive cohesive unity. The reader unfamiliar with academic philosophy will be duly forewarned that this exposition
is by far the most abstract and abstruse section of the essay, and
may seem – to those who even invest the effort in following it – to
consists of platitudes concerning the relationship between the One
and the Many and other fundamental points of Logic. The simplicity
is, however, a deceptive one and careful y following Plato on these
points is important for appreciating the more substantive claim of
the next section.
That claim is the following. The Theory of Forms can be seen as
arising out of an attempt to find a middle way between uprooted and
straw-man versions of Heraclitean and Parmenidean ontology, one
which acknowledges the Heraclitean realm of sensuous experience,
which Parmenides rejected as sheer il usion, while also securing the
Parmenidean unity and simplicity indispensable to the definitions
required for rational knowledge of objects. To this end, as we see
perhaps most clearly in Timaeus, Plato develops the concept of a plurality of perfect unities – “forms” or “ideas” – that formatively
define pure matter, which would otherwise be in an ungraspable
state of perpetual flux. The soul on a quest for knowledge is at the
crux of the mixture of form and matter, and is consequently impure.
Nevertheless, she may seek purification through the rational
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lovers of sophia
element within her. However, Plato admits that perfect knowledge
– which is the indispensable standard or sine qua non of any inferior
‘knowledge’ as such – cannot be attained insofar as intellection
remains mediated by sensuous experience. I show how at one point
in Phaedo, Plato makes the bold claim that knowledge by means of the pure intellect apart from anything bodily or sensory is possible
after death, but he quickly contradicts this claim by consoling his
&n
bsp; disciples with a sensory account of the afterlife.
I then insist that the metaphysics implicit in the latter statement
cannot simply be dismissed – apart from its consoling moralistic
content – because it is on a continuum with the tale of Er, which
plays a key role in Republic, with its Pythagorean account of the unambiguously sensory state between death and (even the highest)
rebirth (as a philosophical Guardian). Remaining in Republic, two key sets of passages on “the Good” are then examined toward the
end of showing how Plato actual y conceived of the “forms” as
constructs or postulates akin to those employed by geometers,
and that these cannot even be viewed as leading one to a rational
comprehension of the form of the Good. This “form of forms” is
itself incomprehensible and inexplicable. So, briefly put, the forms
are not only inescapably contaminated by matter where it counts,
namely in the soul, but rational knowledge of that which the forms
are postulated in order to apprehend is itself basical y impossible.
The third section concludes with significant citations from two
of Plato’s private Letters, which suggest that the upshot of his entire method of dialectical inquiry in terms of the forms is actual y a
moment when mystical insight flashes upon the mind confronted
with paradoxes that are bound to seem irresolvable within the limits
of conceptual understanding or rational analysis. This requires
as a prerequisite, not only a fine-tuning of intellect, through
contemplation of the postulated forms and dialectical discourse with
others, but also an intimately communal life among devoted seekers.
That is the point of departure for the second part of the essay,
which consists of its fourth and fifth sections. Together they forward the proposal that this irrational intuition that Plato is trying to
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provoke is essential y an aesthetic intuition. The fourth section explores this in terms of the account of the pursuit of the form of the Beautiful in Symposium, with a focus on the relationship between that dialogue and another text named after Alcibiades – who is the most significant character in Symposium besides Socrates himself. It is argued that through Alcibiades’ eulogy, amidst an unprecedented
honesty of intoxication, Plato offers us an insight into the profoundly Dionysian character of Socrates. We also have a shocking admission
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