All Knowledge is a Footnote to Reality

Change my mind.

How can one presume to dispatch Plato in a single post? You can't. But as Whitehead said, since all of western philosophy is but a series of footnotes to Plato anyway, this will be just one more. 

Now, what did Whitehead even mean by that quip, and was he being serious? Let's examine the full context, for he adds that he is not referring to any fully articulated system -- since there isn't one -- but rather, to "the wealth of general ideas scattered through" Plato's dialogues, and to their "inexhaustible mine of suggestion." 

Considering that in ancient times there was no science, no printing press, and no other modern distractions, would this make philosophizing easier or more difficult? Plato didn't know he was a Platonist, rather, just a guy with a lot of questions and sufficient slack to pursue them. Remember, back then there was little slack for the average person. 

Philosophy is the last word in freedom -- the most liberal of liberal arts -- but it first requires the material kind of liberty. To put it in negative terms, you can't free your mind if you haven't first freed your ass. 

I'm thinking of something Charles Krauthammer says in his Things That Matter. Presuming you're not tenured or otherwise soul dead, You Will Have Noticed that politics

dominates everything because, in the end, everything -- high and low, and most especially, high -- lives or dies by politics (emphasis mine).

Thus, we "can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures" -- and I'm old enough to remember when we did -- but "get your politics wrong" and "everything stands to be swept away." 

And here we are.

It's the same with art, science, medicine: in one sense they are obviously higher than politics, but in another, they are "fundamentally subordinate. In the end, they must bow to the sovereignty of politics."

In short, when politics is rightly ordered it allows the higher things to flourish, but "when malign, to make all around it wither." Or maybe you haven't noticed, like those three university presidents, who are but synecdoches for the rest. 

Which is why we say, with brother Gilbert, that 

Or, politics, religion, and philosophy.  

For Voegelin, Plato's conception of philosophy "does not exist in a vacuum, but in opposition to the sophist." It is not so much the content, but again, a way of life, an "active struggle for truth," whether moral spiritual, or intellectual. 

Way back in The Day, I remember reading a book called The Platonic Quest, which says that "for Plato, philosophy had little meaning except in relation to what we call religion," in that his whole approach was predicated on the distinction between reality and appearances (or absolute and relative, necessity and contingency, eternal and temporal, etc):

As an objective idealist, Plato held that through deep reflection upon abstract and noumenal realities, one is better able to re-order the realm of the concrete and the phenomenal (Urwick).

I call this Job One of philosophy: "Plato intimates that there is a truth beyond sense, pertaining to the eternal noumena which underlie earthly phenomena, a deeper realm of reality which cannot be apprehended except by the philosopher who has been initiated into the Blessed Mysteries..."

This implies that in our first approach to the world, it seems to be divided into three: appearances, reality, and nous (intellect). 

AM I WRONG?

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that any and every philosophy, whether implicit or explicit, and even the very possibility of philosophy, must respect and rest upon this fundamental trifurcation.

To put it another way, any utterance that pretends to express a truth of reality will reflect this triune structure of reality-appearances-knowledge -- even any assertion that denies this structure. Go ahead and try.

Thus, "To 'discern' is to 'separate': to separate the Real and the illusory, the Absolute and the contingent, the Necessary and the possible, Atma and Maya" (Schuon).

Being-intelligibilty-intellect are a bit like sun, rays, and eye, for the rays are at once separate from the sun, but looked at another way, just its prolongation to the periphery, so to speak. You could say that we are ultimately inside the sun, for where is its literal boundary, and who says? 

Analogously, we are at once inside and outside reality, for appearances are of reality, precisely. And we know it.  

As usual, we didn't get far, but what's the rush?