WHY PHILOSOPHY
A talk I gave on philosophy, Liverpool, UK, 2010
Philosophy has been described as being 'brain-breakingly' difficult. And it is.
1) CEM Joad Guide to Philosophy
The philosopher C.E.M. Joad wrote that 'over half of what passes for philosophy is unreadable'.
And I have the books to prove it.
Joad explains why philosophy can’t be simplified.
Page 10
'Philosophy is an exceedingly difficult subject and cannot with the best will in the world be made into an easy one.
For one thing, the understanding of philosophy is frequently found to entail some knowledge of a number of other subjects.
Physics and theology, history and biology, aesthetics and literature—all these are intermittent grist to the philosopher's mill, and he who would follow its grindings must have at least a nodding acquaintance with them.’
‘For another, it is exceedingly abstract. There are many … who will always find philosophy largely unintelligible. The twists and turns of the speculative reason, the hair-splitting distinctions, the abstractness of the thinking, the remoteness of the conclusions reached from the interests of ordinary life
, the absence of agreed results-—all these cannot but seem to many at best a monument of energy misplaced, at worst an irritating perversion of the powers and faculties of the human mind.’
2) Plato The Last Days of Socrates
I want to start with Socrates.
The Greek comic playwright Aristophanes, in his play The Clouds, said that Socrates and philosophers in general, lived in an imaginary world called "Cloud-Cuckoo-Land".
He was wrong.
Philosophers may be ‘up in the clouds’, but the ideas that they generate don’t stay there.
The revolutions that really change the world begin in the head.
Philosophy is a way of redrawing the map of humanity with ideas, showing the path to freedom through reason.
Socrates’ great contribution was to separate moral principles from physical causes.
Greek science had massive achievements to its name
Thales, Anaximander the earth is made of one substance,
Democritus with his atoms, Pythagoras had plotted the way night followed day to show that the world was round.
Science thought it could explain everything.
But it couldn’t explain why Socrates was in prison awaiting execution.
If the body’s purpose was survival, then Socrates’ bones and sinews should have been well away.
Socrates was in prison for reasons science cannot begin to explain – moral principle. He was their by personal choice, not by physical necessity.
And it is this morality and rationality that defines the human species, homo sapiens,
human beings as creative agents in some way autonomous of nature and physical cause.
3) Antonio Gramsci Prison Notebooks
Antonio Gramsci argued against the view of philosophy as the specific intellectual activity of specialists and professionals. Instead ‘all men are "philosophers"'. And women.
It is the assumption of a rational capacity on the part of each and all that allows us to interpret Plato’s ‘Philosopher-Ruler’ as the democratic notion that philosophy should rule.
In becoming philosophers, we make the world philosophical.
Gramsci defined the fundamental question of politics:
‘Is it the intention that there should always be rulers and ruled, or is the objective to create the conditions in which this division is no longer necessary?’
Prison Notebooks page 144
This question is going to be running through this talk and discussion.
This recalls Aristotle’s definition of the citizen as one who rules and is ruled in turn.
Self-assumed obligation - the idea that human beings are only bound by laws that they themselves have had a hand in making.
– freedom as something negotiated between each other.
4) Leszek Kolakowski Why is there Something Rather than Nothing
page 1 and 2
‘My first great philosopher is of course Socrates. The two great pillars of European culture, Jesus and Socrates, never wrote a word; we know them only through secondary sources.’
‘Socrates .. was perhaps the greatest architect of European culture, and is regarded as such even by those who do not share his philosophical views… not so much because of some specific doctrine he expounded as because of his way of seeking the truth.’
Socrates famously never wrote a word.
For him, philosophy was not merely about abstract reason and reasoning, but an everyday practice.
Socrates was no ivory tower professor, but took philosophy to the people by meeting them on the streets or in the market place.
‘Socrates did not set up grandstands for his audience and did not sit upon a professorial chair; he had no fixed timetable for talking or walking with his friends. Rather he did philosophy sometimes by joking with them, or by drinking or by going to war or to the market with them’ (Plutarch)
Plato was also wary of writing. He suspected that, in the way it objectified philosophy, it could become an excuse not to live it.
Philosophy is a way of life, something that you practice.
Question: So what is philosophy?
Reduced to basics, philosophy addresses two fundamental questions concerning reality and knowledge.
The main branches of modern philosophy are:
METAPHYSICS
metaphysics, which inquires into reality and its nature, and includes ontology, the nature of being.
Metaphysics concerns the ultimate or the underlying reality.
The term is Greek and means ‘after the physics’.
5) EW Tomlin The Approach to Metaphysics
‘Apart from metaphysical presuppositions there can be no civilisation’
page 264
There is an objective reality, and ultimate truth and therefore an absolute morality.
Metaphysics is the scourge of relativism.
This begs the question of what we know and how we know it.
EPISTEMOLOGY
The word 'epistemology' is derived from two Greek words, episteme, meaning knowledge, and logos, meaning rational account.
epistemology investigates the nature of knowledge; what do we know, what can we know and how can we know it.
6) Descartes The Meditations
‘The sceptical doubt is put in place in order to help the reader attain distance from the ordinary conception of nature, so that a new conception might more easily be grasped..
Descartes’ cognitive exercises involve sceptically purging the cognitive faculties, achieving intellectual illumination through the use of the ‘light of nature’, and training the will to affirm only those metaphysical propositions that are perceived with clarity and distinctiveness by the intellect.
Descartes indicated that his readers must learn to “withdraw the mind from the senses” in order to perceive the necessary truths of metaphysics.’
page xiv xv
Descartes was looking for clear and distinct ideas.
Separating the intellect from the senses to access the necessary truths of reality.
Attaining distance from the ordinary perception of nature and withdrawing the mind from the senses in order to perceive through the intellect the necessary truths of reality.
Some issues in epistemology overlap with some issues in metaphysics.
Thus, an examination of the way that the mind shapes the reality it cognizes leads into an examination of the limits of human knowledge (Immanuel Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason).
LOGIC AND LANGUAGE
logic, which establishes the principles of valid reasoning;
language and concepts, what can we meaningfully say.
Logos is Greek, meaning reason, rational account.
7) ER Emmet Learning to Philosophize
The world of words and ideas,
the use of language,
how to handle concepts in order to ask the right questions.
The analytic tradition reduced the scope of philosophy so much that Wittgenstein claimed that:
'The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.'
‘If a question can at all be put, it can for that reason be answered’.
This represents a massive retreat from the big questions.
The problem is that the bulk of the crucial questions, from God to the good life, are beyond analytical meaning.
[Take Socrates in his prison awaiting execution – he is there for moral reasons. Or was he just misunderstood when he was charged with impiety?].
Analytic philosophy is important in clarifying what we can say with meaning.
But this elucidation of concepts is merely the surface of philosophy.
The greatest philosophers proceed from this clarification to go much deeper
and question the most fundamental aspects of our existence and our experience.
ETHICS
ethics, the study of moral values and principles.
Why be good? What is justice? What is the good life?
What are the virtues? How do you cultivate the virtues?
The modern understanding is of duties and rules and codes.
The term is Greek, ethos, and means the customs and habits of a people, a way of life, a practice.
Ethics implies politics.
What sort of political and social order embodies the virtues?
8) Leo Strauss What is Political Philosophy
According to Leo Strauss, the goal of political philosophy is to acquire knowledge of the good life and of the good society.
Note the distinction between opinion and knowledge.
Page 10
‘All political action is .. guided by some thought of better and worse. But thought of better or worse implies thought of the good. The awareness .. which guides all our actions has the character of opinion … it proves to be questionable. [This] .. directs us towards such a thought of the good as is no longer questionable—towards a thought which is no longer opinion but knowledge. All political action has then in itself a directedness towards knowledge of the good: of the good. life, or of the good society. For the good society is the complete political good.’
What sort of political and social order embodies knowledge, truth, the good?
Plato’s Republic is the first and most famous attempt to answer the question.
9) John Jacques, Plato’s Republic
page 150
Plato was responding to the view of Thrasymachus that ‘justice is the interest of the strongest’.
Why does it pay to be good?
Virtue is its own reward.
The point of The Republic is to show why ethics matters.
‘Morality is the royal road to happiness …. because the highest and best part of human nature is reason and morality is life guided by reason. Since happiness comes when we fulfil the best that is in us, then it is the good life alone that will achieve it for us.’
If reason is the best part of human nature,
Then the good life is morality as the realisation of reason, leading to happiness.
But before I come to Plato I want to mention Pythagoras.
10) Pythagoras
Page 13
Pythagoras taught the means to attain freedom through rational conduct and the philosophic life. Philosophy as a way of life.
Pythagoras' metaphysics enables the Intellect to know the ultimate truth.
His moral precepts ensure conformity with the perfect goodness.
To complete the trinity, he also adored the supreme beauty which inspires the Muses as they do our Arts.’
Music, art and architecture a open our souls to the cosmic principle of harmony – the music of the spheres.
I want to read this and give you a little test.
Disobedience to harmonic laws leads to ugliness, which is a .. denial of the divinely beautiful order of the cosmos.
Obedience to harmonic laws presupposes a state of soul open to Intelligible Beauty
Harmonic laws - The divinely beautiful order – intelligible beauty
11) Plato Symposium
Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. Or is it?
I think I’ve tracked the quote to source
"the contemplation of beauty absolute; a beauty which if you once beheld, you would see not to be after the measure of gold”
But what if man had eyes to see the true beauty—the divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the colors and vanities of human life—thither looking, and holding converse with the true beauty simple and divine? Remember how in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may.”
12) Agnes Heller A Radical Philosophy
Heller defines philosophy as the ‘rational utopia’, the ideal ‘ought to be’ which challenges the reality of the ‘is’.
Truth, Beauty and Goodness is the Platonic trinity – the divine intelligible order of Forms accessible by our innate concepts.
Let’s just sum up:
We have seen:
Descartes’ ‘clear and distinct ideas’ of the intellect apart from the senses,
the distinction between opinion and knowledge,
appearance and reality,
how morality and rationality achieve happiness in the good life.
This is all in Plato.
13) Plato The Republic
A row of prisoners are chained in a cave.
They can only look forwards.
Behind them is a fire and behind that is the mouth of the cave. The fire casts shadows onto the cave wall, and this is all that the prisoners can see.
For Plato, this is the normal way in which things are experienced in everyday life:
our sense experience gives us shadows, not reality itself.
A prisoner escapes. He sees the fire and he sees the objects which are casting the shadows on the wall.
When he goes into the sunlight, it becomes clear to him that his former way of perceiving was only of shadows, not of reality.
Plato’s point is that philosophy is the journey from seeing particular things to seeing the eternal realities.
Plato's Cave
The cave is the world of particulars.
Outside is the world of Ideal Forms.
The cave is the world of appearance – the shadows on the wall.
Outside is the world of reality.
The world of particulars is accessible by the senses and generates only opinion.
The world of Forms is accessible by reason, innate concepts, and generates knowledge.
There is here a distinction between opinion (doxa) and knowledge or reason (nous).
Sense experience in the world of particulars can only give us opinions.
Reason through our innate knowledge of concepts can give us knowledge of the Forms, the ideal entities that are the true reality.
The world around us, the world of particulars presented to the senses, is not the real world, but a shadow-like copy of the ultimate reality.
It’s like mistaking what you see in a mirror as the true object rather than as the reflection of it.
Sense experience merely shows us the appearance of reality.
Reason/concepts give us the reality is the realm of the Ideal Forms.
(This is a book. A particular book belonging to the world of particulars. It is not the book. The book is an Idea or Form, ideal entities we know conceptually).
These concepts do not derive from experience of the everyday world of particulars around us.
We don’t form concepts by classifying experiences, we classify experiences by already having concepts.
If concepts did derive from experience, we would all form different concepts since we all have different experiences.
But then how can we talk to each other and share ideas?
We can communicate because human experience is intersubjective and mediated by something that we all share, innate concepts giving us knowledge of the Forms.
The meaning of Plato's cave is clear enough.
The cave represents 'the realm of Becoming'
- the visible world of our everyday experience, a shadow reality where we live in a world of illusion, capable only of opinion.
The world outside the cave represents 'the realm of Being'
- the intelligible world of perfect, eternal and unchanging truth.
We are prisoners in this world.
[What value democracy when we are capable only of opinion? Thomas Jefferson refers to manacling people by their own consent]
It’s the world of knowledge which we can access through reason, the nous.
If we look at the picture of Plato's Cave, we see not only the shadows on the wall, but how these are shaped by the puppeteers.
The puppeteers are the rulers, who manage the masses through the manipulation of images.
When we see the puppeteers, the question of the illusions becomes the question of who shapes the illusions.
The puppeteers have the capacity to define the image and hence shape not the reality, but the perception of reality, the way that we perceive reality.
There is a view that “The ability to persuade people that your representation is the right one is an important source of influence and power.” (Ron Noon).
To me, this reduces politics to a clash between different illusions in the world of opinion.
14) George Orwell The Road to Wigan Pier
Orwell defined the purpose of politics as making lies sound truthful and murder respectable.
Orwell gives you the tools to see through the way that politicians manipulate language in order to manipulate people.
15) Aristotle Politics
page 36 37
My definition of politics is Aristotle’s – polites meaning those interested in public affairs (i.e, capable of seeing the bigger picture, the common good). Idiotes – meaning those interested only in private affairs.
Aristotle defines the human being as a zoon politikon, a social and political animal who realises himself/herself in relation to others in a politikon bion, a public life, a social space which embodies the common good.
The puppeteers are politicians in the Orwellian sense.
Plato shows us how to beat them.
I want to develop the distinction between a ruling elite who are the makers of images and who govern by manipulating opinion and the demos as the makers of reality and who govern by knowledge.
The elite mediate reality and rule by falsehood.
The demos create that reality and rule by truth.
We all have to become philosophers.
For Plato, the way to penetrate the veil of illusion is through reason, our rational faculty, our innate concepts.
We can go beyond opinion and gain knowledge.
In the cave, we are the prisoners.
Our rulers control us by shaping images.
But this power of illusion is merely the illusion of power.
If we interpret our innate concepts as actively creating the world that is cognized,
then ultimate reality, the world of Being, is already in some part a human creation, a co-creation and not an eternal given. Human beings are co-creative agents in a participatory and ceaselessly creative universe.
We emancipate ourselves by using our innate concepts to apprehend ultimate reality in the light of the sun.
As the journey to the sun outside the cave, the goal of philosophy is enlightenment.
16) Kant Political Writings
page 54
This is expressed in Kant’s motto of enlightenment - "Sapere aude" or 'Have the courage to use your own reason!'
Kant taught not so much philosophy as how to philosophize.
Enlightenment is for Kant "the human being's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity".
Maturity is defined as the "ability to make use of one's own understanding without direction from another.
17) Bertrand Russell A History of Western Philosophy
The passage that really got me interested in philosophy came from Plato discussing the ideal world of forms.
"how can he who has magnificence of mind and is the spectator of all time and all existence, think much of human life?"
Are we spectators or participants?
18) Spinoza Ethics
To me this notion suggests something of Spinoza’s freedom as the rational appreciation of reality as one single substance - Deus sive Natura – God and Nature as interchangeable and all life united as one within the one single substance.
In the Ethics, Spinoza argues that:
'It is of the nature of reason’ to rise above the illusory perspective which sees things ‘under the aspect of time’ (sub specie durationis) to achieve that ‘absolute viewpoint’ which sees the universe as God sees it, 'under the aspect of eternity' (sub specie aeternitatis).
Only with the intellectual love of God/Nature will human beings be truly free.
The human individual is nothing but an aspect of God/Nature, governed by the laws which govern everything.
This view is remarkably similar to James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, nature as a self-regulating organism of which we ourselves are a part.
What Stephen Hawkings refers to as ‘the mind of God’ is also similar to Spinoza’s idea of a pure and disinterested reasoner.
The American physicist Frank Tipler makes this suggestion: 'People talk of God as the creator of life. But maybe the purpose of life is to create God.'
Theoretical physics advances the idea of the participatory universe, in which everything is the observer and everything is the observed.
Let’s see how this is possible using philosophy.
Think back to Plato’s innate concepts and imagine these as actively shaping the world.
Kant took this reasoning further.
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argued that this purging of all reference to the subject is neither possible nor desirable:
the world is my world and your world, it’s a human world created by conceptual capacities innate to the human mind and is shot-through with human purpose, design and consciousness.
Let’s look at evolution.
For Darwin, evolution is a descent with modification from a common source.
How about interpreting evolution as an ascent with addition to a common end? A co-evolution in which we grow together.
Maybe the ‘mind of God’ is our own mind in unison, using the intellect to go beyond sense experience and grasp true reality.
19) Kant The Metaphysics of Morals
Kant argued for the existence of God in terms of the moral law implanted within each and every individual as a condition of their humanity.
Kant shows us how we create God by achieving the universal in a realm of ends.
At the heart of the moral law is the categorical imperative.
The categorical imperative in its various formulae requires that we act only on those "maxims" or principles of action that can be "universalized," because that is the way to treat every person, always as ends and never merely as means.
Submitting our principles to the test of universality ensures that the pursuit of private ends no longer results in conflict but instead generates a harmony of free and rational wills in a ‘realm of ends’.
Within a political framework, the function of moral law is to harmonize the freedom of each individual with the freedom of others, leading humankind from the state of individual rivalry to the state of universal harmony.
20) Kant Critique of Pure Reason
page 312
Kant offers the Idea of a republican constitution, which allows 'the greatest possible human freedom in accordance with laws by which the freedom of each is made to be consistent with that of all others' (A316/B373, tr.).
This is the perfectly just constitution which establishes a commonwealth.
21) Marx The Communist Manifesto
page 105
‘an association in which the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all’.
No one person is free unless all are free.
22) Rousseau The Social Contract
‘The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before’.
This is freedom as something negotiated between each and all, freedom in relation to each other.
This is what Aristotle called liberty as distinct from the licence of individual wants and desires.
Games theory shows how individual freedom/rationality can generate a collective unfreedom/irrationality.
Two prisoners kept apart given the deal
Both keep quiet = 2 + 2 years = 4 years
One splits on the other = 0 + 6 years = 6 years
Of course, the reasoning is symmetrical, they both think the same way.
The self-interest of each leads them both to split on the other
– therefore
= 6 + 6 years = 12 years
Self-interest generates the worst possible or least optimal outcome
Individual choice on the part of each can generate results that inhibit the freedom of all.
So we need to obey the general will to ensure the common good.
Page 175
‘Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.’
Rousseau argued for equality in terms that no one should be so rich as to be able to buy another and no one should be so poor as have to sell themselves.
‘no citizen should be rich enough to be able to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself’ (SC II.II).
Rousseau is attempting to piece together a public community whose moral and social grounds had been torn asunder by modern bourgeois relations.
My old history tutor at A Level, Brother Victory, emphasised to us, as we bandied about the word 'commonwealth', that this great word and principle, beloved of socialist revolutionaries like William Morris, referred to the common weal, meaning the common good.
23) Thomas More Utopia
p66
‘when I compare Utopia with a great many ,a capitalist countries which are always making new regulations, but could never be called well-regulated, where dozens of laws are passed every day, and yet there are still not enough to ensure that one can either earn, or keep, or safely identify one's so-called private property when I consider all this, I feel much more sympathy with Plato, and much less surprise at his refusal to legislate for a city that rejected egalitarian principles.
It was evidently quite obvious to a powerful intellect like his that the one essential condition for a healthy society was equal distribution of goods - which I suspect is impossible under capitalism. For, when everyone's entitled to get as much for himself as he can, all available property, however much there is of it, is bound to fall into the hands of a small minority, which means that everyone else is poor.
And wealth will tend to vary in inverse proportion to merit. The rich will be greedy, unscrupulous, and totally useless characters, while the poor will be simple, unassuming people whose daily work is far more profitable to the community than it is to them.
Rousseau refers to the representation of sovereignty as its alienation.
24) Hegel
page 97
‘I am at home in the world when I know it, still more when I have understood it’.
For Hegel, the objectification of our powers is also an alienation, so that human beings create a world that is alien to them.
We lose control of our products – the state, economy, towns and cities – and they come to control us.
We need to take moral responsibility for our powers.
The progress of reason to the consciousness of freedom.
We come to understand the world as our own product.
Marx was very much an Hegelian in his early life, writing that "A state which is not the realization of rational freedom is a bad state." In time, in his work as an economic journalist, Marx came to understand that the state's role as the ethical agency of the universal interest had been subverted by private economic interests - the reason of state was a rationalisation of private powers, rendering the state an 'illusory general interest'. Overcoming the basis of that illusion in a class divided society entailed a transformation of the social metabolic order that would put an end to the state as a body alienated from civil society.
Hegel looked to reason, Marx looked to labour as the demiurge. The problem lay not in some general and ahistorical reason but in an alienated system of production.
25) Marx Early Writings
page 234
‘Only when man has recognised and organised his forces propres (own powers) as social forces so that social force is no longer separated from him in the form of political force, only then will human emancipation be complete’.
Political force is Plato’s cave as the state.
Sovereignty and labour are alienated social powers created the state and capital.
The practical reappropriation of this alienated power and its reorganisation as social power is the Big Society.
Compare to
26) Nietzsche
From Stauth and Turner, Nietzsche's Dance
‘Opposition and resistance to the iron cage of state-managed rationality is to be found in human embodiment, reciprocity and the concreteness of the everyday world’.
The reference to the iron cage is a reference to Max Weber’s view of modernity as a steel hard cage embracing subjectivities of each and all.
27) Weber The Protestant Ethic and the Rise of Capitalism
page 181 182
Weber refers to ‘the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.’
No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: "Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved."
Nietzsche argued that human beings should only have such power that they can creatively live up to.
Means of production have been turned into means of destruction.
The US has a trillion dollar arms industry.
And this is what Nietzsche was getting at when he referred to the ‘death of God’ as a tragedy.
What he meant was that the collapse of an absolute foundation for morality – Plato’s world of Being as an objective reality - means that we must, in some way, become gods ourselves.
Well, we have not become gods.
Instead we make Faustian bargains with the new gods of the state, industry, economic growth, science, technique.
These are our own powers in alien form.
Technique is not a philosophy, an ethos, a way of life.
This is the fundamental reason why the instrumental approach of money and power does not deliver meaning of itself.
It’s on the wrong side of the subject/object, fact/value, material/spiritual divide.
We live with more knowledge but with less wisdom.
Our technical capacities have outstripped our moral powers.
We are now ruled by abstractions instead of being dependent upon each other in community.
And there’s a price to be paid for any Faustian pact.
28) Derek Sayer Capitalism and Modernity
Page 154/5
‘The ultimate measure of the awesome power, and the fundamental violence, of unfettered abstraction is to be found in the millions upon millions of nameless corpses which this most vicious of centuries has left as its memorial, human sacrifices to one or another of Weber's renascent modern gods. War itself is not new, modernity's contribution is to have waged it, with characteristic efficiency, under the sign of various totalizing abstractions which name and claim the lives of all.’
This is why it matters to see through and break through the illusions.
The implications are spelt out by Karen Armstrong in A Short History of Myth:
‘In Guernica, humans and animals, both victims of indiscriminate, heedless slaughter, lie together in a mangled heap, the screaming horse inextricably entwined with the decapitated human figure. Even the sacrificial bull is doomed.
So too — Picasso may be suggesting — is modern humanity, which ... was only just beginning to explore the full potential of its self-destructive and rationally-calculated violence.’
Now that’s what I mean about the repression of the instincts having its revenge.
The modern world is increasingly abstracted from true realities and more and more absorbed in the manipulation of shadows and illusions.
It’s alienation. And it’s self-destructive.
The wielders of this modern violence remain those elite rulers, the manipulators of images and people in Plato’s allegory of the cave.
We are constantly being told about the real world, political realities concerning business, competition, foreign policy and war.
But these are not realities, they are what are known as ‘false fixities’, imperatives of particular institutions and systems in a particular time and place, neither natural nor inevitable.
Which begs the question as to what we are being told now as being inevitable and unalterable but which can in fact be changed.
We are the makers of our world, by reason and by labour.
The imperatives are illusions,
the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave,
perceptions of reality shaped by the elite rulers to manage and manipulate the people.
I want to end with a call to enlightenment as to the nature of reality, and as a return to the morality and the practices of the virtues - a practical reason embedded in community - by quoting Alasdair MacIntyre.
29) Alasdair MacIntyre After Virtue
MacIntyre concludes After Virtue by drawing parallels between the current era and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages.
Page 263
If we accept the collapse of the tradition of the virtues and the commitment to the common good in the modern age and its replacement by egoism and individualism, then
‘what matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.
And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope.
This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.
And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.’
This is why it matters to see through the illusions and to see through the people who shape the illusions.
The puppeteers, the politicians.
And if they are pulling our strings, who or what is pulling theirs? Who are the puppet masters? And what forces drive them?
Well, becoming conscious is becoming enlightened. An enlightenment that is rooted in our common moral reason.
It’s time to realise the goal of Socrates and bring philosophy down from the heavens and make the world philosophical,
see the world around us as our world, our creation,
and take moral responsibility for our powers.