This was not Strauss’ own opinion. From Bloom’s encomium to him: “He was able to do without most abstractions .... — Leghorn
If there are no permanent entities, if everything is in flux, there can be no knowledge. Knowledge, or science, requires universals of which the particulars are imperfect examples; as knowing beings we care only for the universals. The ideas give reality to the universals and hence make it possible to explain the fact that man possesses knowledge. The ideas give reality to the universals and hence make it possible to explain the fact that man possesses knowledge. The ideas are the being of things. They constitute an account of the first causes of things which also does justice to the observed heterogeneity of the visible universe … And it is in the quest for the universal principle that the theoretical man first meets the opposition of the unphilosophic men
Thomists and other critics of Ockham (i.e. nominalism) have tended to present traditional realism, with its forms or natures, as the solution to the modern problem of knowledge. It seems to me that it does not quite get to the heart of the matter. A genuine realist should see “forms” not merely as a solution to a distinctly modern problem of knowledge, but as part of an alternative conception of knowledge, a conception that is not so much desired and awaiting defense, as forgotten and so no longer desired. Characterized by forms, reality had an intrinsic intelligibility, not just in each of its parts but as a whole. With forms as causes, there are interconnections between different parts of an intelligible world, indeed there are overlapping matrices of intelligibility in the world, making possible an ascent from the more particular, posterior, and mundane to the more universal, primary, and noble.
In short, the appeal to forms or natures does not just help account for the possibility of trustworthy access to facts, it makes possible a notion of wisdom, traditionally conceived as an ordering grasp of reality. Preoccupied with overcoming Cartesian skepticism, it often seems as if philosophy’s highest aspiration is merely to secure some veridical cognitive events. Rarely sought is a more robust goal: an authoritative and life-altering wisdom. Notice: even if contemporary philosophers came to a consensus about how to overcome Cartesian doubt and secure certainty, it is not clear that this would do anything to repair the fragmentation and democratization of the disciplines, or to make it more plausible that there could be an ordered hierarchy of sciences, with a highest science, acknowledged as queen of the rest—whether we call it first philosophy, or metaphysics, or wisdom. — Joshua Hothschild, What's Wrong with Ockham
We live in a strangely fragmented lifeworld. On the one hand, abstract constructions of our own imagination--such as money, "mere" facts, and mathematical models--are treated by us as important objective facts. On the other hand, our understanding of the concrete realities of meaning and value in which our daily lives are actually embedded--love, significance, purpose, wonder--are treated as arbitrary and optional subjective beliefs. This is because, to us, only quantitative and instrumentally useful things are considered to be accessible to the domain of knowledge. Our lifeworld is designed to dis-integrate knowledge from belief, facts from meanings, immanence from transcendence, quality from quantity, and "mere" reality from the mystery of being. This book explores two questions: why should we, and how can we, reintegrate being, knowing, and believing?
The general tendency of modern thought has been the deprecation of the idea of universals. In the conflict between nominalism and scholastic realism, nominalism carried the day, and nominalists - such as Bacon and Ockham - were the forerunners of today's empiricism. It is now so embedded in our way of thinking such that the alternative is not even comprehended most of the time. — Wayfarer
The subject matter is very difficult and presupposes an understanding of the doctrine of ideas as a whole … Let us assume for one moment that the ideas are noetic atoms, i.e., they cannot be divided anymore. You cannot divide the idea of man without destroying the essential meaning. As atoms these noetic ideas are infinite in number. Since the infinite cannot be comprehended we may say that the ideas are not susceptible of being comprehended or understood … If the idea of the good is not truly knowable, then we cannot transcend opinion. I think this is what Plato really means
We must now turn to what is the most difficult subject of today’s assignment, and I am by no means certain that I can be of real help here. This concerns the discussion of the idea of the good….
So, you want me to read what Strauss says or what Bloom says that Strauss says??? :grin: — Apollodorus
On Strauss’s reading, the Enlightenment’s so-called critique of religion ultimately also brought with it, unbeknownst to its proponents, modern rationalism’s self-destruction. Strauss does not reject modern science, but he does object to the philosophical conclusion that “scientific knowledge is the highest form of knowledge” because this “implies a depreciation of pre-scientific knowledge.” As he put it, “Science is the successful part of modern philosophy or science, and philosophy is the unsuccessful part—the rump.”
What secular reason is missing is self-awareness. It is “unenlightened about itself” in the sense that it has within itself no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments. “Postmetaphysical thinking,” Habermas contends, “cannot cope on its own with the defeatism concerning reason which we encounter today both in the postmodern radicalization of the ‘dialectic of the Enlightenment’ and in the naturalism founded on a naïve faith in science.”
By privatizing an unmediated relationship between more individualized Christians and a more transcendent God, Luther’s emphasis on salvation-by-faith-alone eliminated the intricate web of mediation – priests, sacraments, canon law, pilgrimages, public penances, etc. – that in effect had constituted the sacred dimension of this world. The religiously-saturated medieval continuity between the natural and the supernatural was sundered by internalizing faith and projecting the spiritual realm far above our struggles in this world.
The newly-liberated space between them generated something new: the secular (from the Latin saeculum, “generation, age,” thus the temporal world of birth and death). The inner freedom of conscience was distinguished from our outer bondage to secular authorities. “These realms, which contained respectively religion and the world, were hermetically sealed from each other as though constituting separate universes”. The sharp distinction between them was a radical break with the past, and it led to a new kind of person. The medieval understanding of our life as a cycle of sin and repentance was replaced by the more disciplined character-structure required in the modern world, sustained by a more internalized conscience that did not accept the need for external mediation or the validation of priests.
As God slowly disappeared above the clouds, the secular became increasingly dynamic, accelerating into the creative destruction that today we must keep readjusting to. What we tend to forget in the process is that the distinction between sacred and secular was originally a religious distinction, devised to empower a new type of Protestant spirituality: that is, a more privatized way to address our sense of lack and fill up the God-shaped hole.
By allowing the sacred pole to fade away, however, we have lost the original religious raison d’etre for that distinction. That evaporation of the sacred has left us with the secular by itself, bereft of the spiritual resources originally designed to cope with it, because secular life is increasingly liberated from any religious perspective or supervision. — David Loy, Terror in the God-Shaped Hole
"The subject matter is very difficult and presupposes an understanding of the doctrine of ideas as a whole … Let us assume for one moment that the ideas are noetic atoms, i.e., they cannot be divided anymore...."
- L. Strauss, Seminar on Plato’s Republic, April 30 1957, p. 6. — Apollodorus
The idea that he was a member of some type of Pythagorean cult is nonsense — Metaphysician Undercover
I’ve only ever encountered Leo Strauss through forums, however reading the SEP entry doesn’t lend a lot of support to your villification of him. — Wayfarer
The provider of truth to the things known and the giver of power to know to those who know is the Form of the Good. And though it is the cause of knowledge and truth, it is also an object of knowledge (508e)
On the contrary, I see it as a diversionary tactic deployed by anti-Platonists who have run out of arguments against Plato and who insist on construing his teachings as somehow logically "incoherent" or "problematic". — Apollodorus
By privatizing an unmediated relationship between more individualized Christians and a more transcendent God, Luther’s emphasis on salvation-by-faith-alone eliminated the intricate web of mediation – priests, sacraments, canon law, pilgrimages, public penances, etc. – that in effect had constituted the sacred dimension of this world. The religiously-saturated medieval continuity between the natural and the supernatural was sundered by internalizing faith and projecting the spiritual realm far above our struggles in this world. — David Loy, Terror in the God-Shaped Hole
I don't think I am "vilifying" him — Apollodorus
he was making money from lecturing on Plato whilst at the same time ridiculing his teachings. Without Plato he would have remained unemployed! — Apollodorus
In other words, Plato's philosophical inquiry starts from the premise that ultimate reality or the Good is knowable. This does not mean that it is knowable to everyone in practice or that it is knowable without practice. — Apollodorus
Plotinus, or the Simplicity of Vision (PSV) importantly anticipates many of Hadot’s later arguments on ancient philosophy. Hadot tells us in the autobiographical interviews of The Present Alone is Our Happiness that as a young man, he had undergone some kind of mystical experience (PAH 5-6). This was an experience that shaped Hadot’s own initial scholarly research, including several of the first French-language articles on Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and his continuing interest in “unitary experience.” It can, arguably, be seen to underlie Hadot’s repeated, central claim that the classical philosophies were rooted in certain paradigmatic experiences of existence (4b). In any case, Hadot argues in PSV that the famous Neoplatonic metaphysics of the One, the Ideas, and the world-psyche is not the abstract, purely theoretical, otherworldly construction it is often presented as being. Rather, Hadot claims, in Plotinus’ Enneads the language of metaphysics “is used to express an inner experience. All these levels of reality become levels of inner life, levels of the self” (PSV 27).
For all of Hadot’s evident enthusiasm for Plotinus’ philosophy, however, PSV concludes with an assessment of the modern world’s inescapable distance from Plotinus’ thought and experience. Hadot distances himself from Plotinus’ negative assessment of bodily existence, and he also displays a caution in his support for mysticism, citing the skeptical claims of Marxism and psychoanalysis about professed mysticism, considering it a lived mystification or obfuscation of truth (PSV 112-113).
Were these communities "projecting the spiritual realm far above our struggles in this world?" — Valentinus
(The reference is to The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch. He also mentions a book The Unintended Reformation, by Brad Gregory, which I have, but all this material is very dense reading!)By privatizing religious commitment and practice as something that occurs primarily “inside” us, modern Christianity encourages the public/private split and aggravates the alienation of subject from object. When religion is understood as an individual process of inner faith-commitment, we are more likely to accede to a diminished understanding of the objective world “outside” us, denuding the secular realm of any sacred dimension. With fewer and fewer spiritual identity-markers left outside our own psyches, we are supposed to find or construct an identity “inside,” a challenge not easy to meet:
“On the one hand, modern identity is open-ended, transitory, liable to ongoing change. On the other hand, a subjective realm of identity is the individual’s main foothold in reality. Something that is constantly changing is supposed to be the ens realissimum.” (1979, 74)
The basic problem with the sacred/secular bifurcation has become more evident as the sacred has evaporated. The sacral provided not only ritual and morality but a grounding identity that explained the meaning of our life-in-the-world.
And let’s not forget that he was making money from lecturing on Plato whilst at the same time ridiculing his teachings. Without Plato he would have remained unemployed! — Apollodorus
What is the sacred dimension? Who or what marks it off? How does it differ from what is esteemed? — Fooloso4
Even regardless of that caveat, Hadot's emphasis on the role of the 'unitive vision' is key. You still find that in Buddhist and Hindu teachings that are disseminated in the West - in fact I think that's why they found such a ready audience in the West, because they're providing something that had been lost in Western culture. The idea of spiritual practice as 'union' is the meaning of 'yoga' (in the philosophical sense, not the downward-facing-dog sense.) But it's almost entirely absent from philosophy as taught in the West, as Hadot says. There's a missing dimension. Like a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional object. That's what I think underlies much of the misrepresentation. — Wayfarer
In any case, it seems to presuppose a relation of identity between the unified elements which makes sense if we take the individual mind to be a microcosm of the universal mind. — Apollodorus
Could the column of light symbolize the light of consciousness and could this be related to the experience of Plotinus and other mystics? — Apollodorus
Open thou the crystal fountain
Whence the healing stream shall flow;
Let the fiery, cloudy pillar
Lead me all my journey through
Needless to say, they aren't going to get very far .... :smile: — Apollodorus
Given that what separates the individual mind from the universal mind is the experience based on identification with the physical body and the thoughts etc. associated with it, we can see why Socrates (or Plato) advises philosophers to intellectually and emotionally detach themselves from the physical body and appurtenances, and inquire into the Forms with the pure unalloyed reason alone, when the soul is undisturbed, “itself by itself” and in the company of realities like itself (Phaedo 65c ff.). — Apollodorus
One important component of what we know as the secular came from centuries of people killing each over as a way to discuss what is sacred. — Valentinus
Years ago, there was a web page with excerpts from the Charter of the Royal Society, the world's first real scientific organisation. It explicitly excludes consideration of anything 'of concern to churchmen', or something along those lines. — Wayfarer
Since you talk about "comfortability", the people in the cave most probably felt "comfortable" too, since they didn't know another world, neither was anyone to tell them that the world they were seeing was naccurate or something lik that. In fact, with this rationale, we can say that man always felt comfortable "inside the cave".Yet, modern day man seems comfortable inside the cave. — Shawn
If they have to go to a shrink to resolve their problems, why then you say the people seem to be comfortable inside the cave? That's a contradiction, isn't it? But iby inverting the comfort into discomfort, the visits to shrinks can then make more sense! :smile:Indeed, nowadays man has a tendency to resolve one's issues in the cave, conversing with a psychologist about the shadows ... — Shawn
I suppose that the first question by now refers to the discomfort. Otherwise, why would he need to unshackle and free himself, right?Why is this so? Why can't the prisoner unshackle and free himself? — Shawn
I assume that you mean that philosophy doesn't seem to be able to solve these problems and that is why it is considered of little value. And of course, you are talking wbout the Western philosophyWhy is philosophy still associated with no inherent value, or even more practically, valued so little? — Shawn
Something has been forgotten so thoroughly that we've forgotten that it's been forgotten. — Wayfarer
The secular city walls off anything regarded as religious as being essentially an individual matter. That is of course preferable to any form of religious government, but it also leads to an impoverished culture which is technologically advanced but spiritually empty. — Wayfarer
This is the way Eastern philosophy works. Eastern philosophy has little talk and more practice, training, experiencing, realization. This is why people in the West started to turn to Eastern philosophies, esp. Buddhism: they were either disappointed or just couldn't find solutions to their problems with the Western philosophy. Indeed, the need to turn to East for help has grown enormously in the last century and continues to grow. The Eastern philosophies show people their true self, the spiritual part of the human being, whereas the Western philosophy is stuck obstinately to its materialistic foundations. — Alkis Piskas
Or can spirituality exist on an individual basis? Or does it rather require the support and participation of the community? — Leghorn
Would the world be a better place...? — Leghorn
In modern day language, dharma is equated, quite unfairly, with religion. Organized religion demands adherence of the followers to the Book and the Prophet. Anything outside the boundaries of a faith is considered irreligious, if not downright sinful. It is believed that salvation lies only through the body of the Prophet or His words. History of mankind is often a gory testament of destruction wrought by the zealots in pursuit of faith. It is a testament of dividing people and converting them, of persecution, intolerance and subjugation, or of burning at the stake: of the contest between the ecclesiastical and the temporal, the doctrine of two swords and of intrigues. Religion has been one of the most potent divisive forces in all history.
Why Dharma is Different?
Dharma, however, is different. It is different because it unites. There can never be divisions in dharma. Every interpretation is valid and welcome. No authority is too great to be questioned, too sacred to be touched. Unlimited interpretative freedom through free will is the quintessence of Dharma, for Dharma is as limitless as truth itself. No one can ever be its sole mouthpiece.
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