Readings: Frot with Pain

In my previous post I wrote that I would be following up with some excerpts from Jack Kerouac's Buddhist notebooks which resonate with the excerpts from Cervantes and Plato offered there. The first of these is:

HOLD STILL AND DON’T THINK

which is the analog of the circular motion described by Plato.

Next is

Society is a system of lures,
I’M THROUGH WITH IT

which relates directly to Plato's cautionary

When a man is always occupied with the cravings of desire and ambition, and is eagerly striving to satisfy them, all his thoughts must be mortal...

which insight is reflected in Kerouac's desperate pledge:

No more the cupidity and self caress of “hearing about me” in articles of critics and chitchats of friends---The complete cessation of all striving and effort in the system of lures which is the society of the world…

Finally, Platonism and the Buddhism in which Kerouac was striving to immerse his pain share the concept of reincarnation, of the incorporal soul being lured back into time and materiality by the lust for flesh that is perhaps the most potent of all the appetites aroused by the five senses. Thus Kerouac wrote:

A B C’s of Truth:-

A Creamy thighs of beautiful young girl =

B Baby crying because it doesn’t want to be born =

C Corpse decaying in grave

Seen from this perspective, time is merely an aspect of the pain it takes, after innumerable tumbles down the fleshly chute into error, to finally turn the soul away from that vision of opening thighs and the musky, pheromonal fragrance that escapes along with the siren song of a narcotizing moan. Time, duration, is as illusory and unreal as the flesh into which we plunge again and again, only to have it melt away into the void of eternity: Où sont les neiges d’antan?

Readings: The World Is Too Much With Us

Compare the wisdom of Don Quixote below to the excerpt from Plato's Timaeus that follows it:

Cervantes:

In response to hearing the confession of a character driven into a life of banditry “by a lust for vengeance,” Don Quixote says, “once a man recognizes his infirmity and consents to take the medicines prescribed by his physician, he has taken the first great step toward health. You are sick; you know your infirmity, and God, your physician, will apply medicines that, provided you give them time, will certainly heal you. For sinners who are men of understanding more easily mend their ways than fools, and as your superior sense is manifest, be of good heart and trust in your recovery.

Now, Plato:

When a man is always occupied with the cravings of desire and ambition, and is eagerly striving to satisfy them, all his thoughts must be mortal, and, as far as it is possible altogether to become such, he must be mortal every whit, because he has cherished his mortal part. But he who has been earnest in the love of knowledge and of true wisdom, and has exercised his intellect more than any other part of him, must have thoughts immortal and divine, if he attain truth, and in so far as human nature is capable of sharing in immortality, he must altogether be immortal; and since he is ever cherishing the divine power, and has the divinity within him in perfect order, he will be perfectly happy. Now there is only one way of taking care of things, and this is to give to each the food and motion which are natural to it. And the motions which are naturally akin to the divine principle within us are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe. These each man should follow, and correct the courses of the head which were corrupted at our birth, and by learning the harmonies and revolutions of the universe, should assimilate the thinking being to the thought, renewing his original nature, and having assimilated them should attain to that perfect life which the gods have set before mankind, both for the present and the future.

Plato speaks of "the revolutions of the universe" as being the motion "akin to the divine principle within us." Circular motion, rather than linear, is the motion that moves us towards peace of mind and salvation. One who is "driven into a life of banditry by a lust for vengeance" is one who has lost control, who is moving forward, not through exercise of his own will, but "driven" like a farm animal.

It is our appetites, whether for vengeance, fame, wealth, power, food, copulation, entertainment, or even spiritual greatness, that prod and lure us ever further away from "the divinity within" us. This divinity is our sun, around which we must orbit, and the pure light energy of which is our proper and perfect food.

I have been reading Don Quixote, the Timaeus, and Jack Kerouac's Buddhist notebooks, Some of the Dharma, simultaneously. As Kerouac studied the Buddhist scriptures with a patently desperate yearning toward enlightenment, he was struggling against--and repeatedly defeated by--his appetites for fame, success, booze, sex. A subsequent post will excerpt and reflect the pain inflicted by Kerouac's inner contradictions. It is relevant, for the sources of his pain are the sources of ours.

Readings: Staunchly Equivocal

At the conclusion of this post, I wrote:

“I am hopeful that Murdoch, herself being the author of some really kick-ass novels, will pull art's fat out of Plato's fire by the end of the essay.”

I have since gone on to other essays, and other books, without ever tying up that loose thread. To do so, it would seem to be sufficient to merely let Murdoch put the matter to rest with the closing paragraph of the essay in question, “The Fire and the Sun”:

Plato feared the consolations of art. He did not offer a consoling theology. His psychological realism depicted God as subjecting mankind to a judgment as relentless as that of the old Zeus, although more just. A finely meshed moral causality determines the fate of the soul. That the movement of the saving of Eros is toward an impersonal pictureless void is one of the paradoxes of a complete religion. To present the idea of God at all, even as myth, is a consolation, since it is impossible to defend this image against the prettifying attentions of art. Art will mediate and adorn, and develop magical structures to conceal the absence of God or his distance. We live now amid the collapse of many such structures, and as religion and metaphysics in the West withdraw from the embraces of art, we are it might seem being forced to become mystics through the lack of any imagery which could satisfy the mind. Sophistry and magic break down at intervals, but they never go away and there is no end to their collusion with art and to the consolations which, perhaps fortunately for the human race, they can provide; and art, like writing and like Eros, goes on existing for better and for worse.

Murdoch kind of fudges it in the end, don’t you think? She seems to be saying, You can have art, but be aware, at the same time, that all art is essentially an idolatry, the aesthetic consolations of which are a stumbling block to the pilgrim on the way to perfection. Art is for individuals who are willing to make compromises with Existence and to settle for second best; it is not for aspiring saints.

Art: Murdoch voted for it before she voted against it.

Reflections: Socrates as Rock Star

As a lover of art – especially the art of prose fiction – I have always been somewhat put off and confused by Plato’s banishment of the poets from his ideal Republic. Poetry, words, it seemed to me, were the wheels on which we might hope to be carried towards the truth. Fiction had the capability of embodying myth; myth had the capability of embodying eternal Truth. Not much of what is written rises to that level, as I well understood. But still it seemed to me that, at the very least, the poets should be exiled on a case-by-case basis, and not across the board.

Although it is a very long essay, and she is unfolding her thesis slowly and carefully, I believe that I can confidently assume from the point I’m now at, that the “fire” of Iris Murdoch’s piece “The Fire and the Sun”—that is, the lesser light in Plato’s “Myth of the Cave” – represents the upper limit of what art can achieve. She writes:

The Good (truth, reality) is absent from us and hard of access, but it is there and only the Good will satisfy. This fact is concealed by the consoling image-making ego in the guise of the artist whom every one of us to some extent is. Art with its secret claim to supreme power blurs the distinction between the presence and the absence of reality, and tries to cover up with charming imagery the harsh but inspiring truth of the distance between man and God.

She discusses this not only in terms of “poetry” in the broadest sense of the word, but also with reference to other arts, such as painting. Even philosophy itself is apparently suspect:

The strongest motive to philosophy is probably the same as the strongest motive to art; the desire to become the Demiurge and reorganize chaos in accordance with one’s own excellent plan.

Wow. I mean, I was aware that many a rock star first picked up a guitar more in the hope of one day getting "access" to most any chick that caught his fancy, than of making great music. But philosophers with ulterior motives? Who knew?

I am hopeful that Murdoch, herself being the author of some really kick-ass novels, will pull art's fat out of Plato's fire by the end of the essay.

Reflections: On the Imperfection of Existence

From the ridiculousness of my last two posts, back to the sublime of Plato. Here, through the agency of the character Timaeus, Plato contemplates the origins of the physical universe:

Timaeus: Let me tell you then why the creator made this world of generation. He was good, and the good can never have any jealousy of anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all things should be as like himself as they could be. This is in the truest sense the origin of creation and of the world, as we shall do well in believing on the testimony of wise men: God desired that all things should be good and nothing bad, so far as this was attainable.

Monotheists in the tradition of Abraham will note that Plato's creator—the Demiurge—is good, but is not omnipotent. Everything that he constructs, using the raw materials available to him, is good only so far as good things can be made of imperfect material. He is making beautiful, but essentially imperfect, copies, modeled on the Ideas of the Intellect or Mind Most High. So our world is neither created ex nihilo, nor is there any need of a Fall to explain the presence in our world of that which is less-than-good.

As for the situation in which we find ourselves relative to existence, Iris Murdoch notes in her essay “The Fire and the Sun” that:

Order is obviously more beautiful and good than disorder… Our participation in [this joy] must, however, be seen as modest. The contact with changeless truth brought about through insight into pure living mind can only for incarnate beings be limited and occasional, and we are likely to see more of necessary causes than of divine causes. The truth which we can grasp is something quiet, small in extent (Philebus, 52 C), and to be found only in the lived real moment of direct apprehension out of which the indirectness of mimetic art and writing and perhaps language and discursive thought itself always tends to remove us. Those who want to be saved should look at the stars and talk philosophy, not write or go to the theater.

Necessary causes that bind us to the material, to contingency—expressed by Simone Weil as that “gravity” of downward motion which impedes the upward-tending desire for grace—keeps us trapped, and moving horizontally, in a linear motion across time; time which is the created ape of eternity. Circular motion around an axis being infinitely more perfect than progress from point A to point B, the best we can hope for is to keep to the straight and narrow path on our journey—avoiding as best we can the many temptations gesturing from the shadows beneath the glittering lights of the broad way to perdition.

The conservative, then, as symbolized by circular motion, should be more perfect than the progressive. What is the cause of conservatism’s failure to partake of a larger portion of the grace offered by the beauty and the goodness of existence? Why does conservatism fail so badly in the service of love?

Readings: from the Timaeus

Check it out:

What is that which always is and has no becoming; and what is that which is always becoming and never is? That which is apprehended by intelligence and reason is always in the same state; but that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is. Now everything that becomes or is created must of necessity be created by some cause, for without a cause nothing can be created. The work of the creator, whenever he looks to the unchangeable and fashions the form and nature of his work after an unchangeable pattern, must necessarily be made fair and perfect; but when he looks to the created only, and uses a created pattern, it is not fair or perfect.

...

As being is to becoming, so is truth to belief.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Reflections: The Marriage of Politics and Religion

I recall once making what I thought to be the non-controversial observation that Plato was a "religious philosopher" in a comment box discussion, only to have the jamoke with whom I was arguing tell me flat-out that I was wrong. I wish that I had had Iris Murdoch's essay on Plato, "The Fire and the Sun" on hand at the time so that I could have backed up my statement with the following excerpt:

Plato's work is...largely concerned with ways to salvation. We may speak of a (democratic) "way of justice" which, without necessarily leading to enlightenment, is open to anyone who is able to harmonize the different levels of his soul moderately well under the general guidance of reason. The characteristic desires of each level would not be eliminated, but would in fact, under rational leadership, achieve their best general satisfaction. The baser part is really happier if rationally controlled. The reasonable egoism would be accessible to the lower orders in the Republic. Plato certainly thought that few could be 'saved', but allowed that many might lead a just life at their own spiritual level.

That should settle things for the religiously minded. Any philosophy that is "largely concerned with ways to salvation" is certainly concerned with the "religious."

That said, on the same page Murdock throws out some tidbits for the intractably political, particularly those of a partisan bent. Plato, she says, taught that "most people want power not virtue and must be trained by pleasure and pain to prefer justice." That's grim enough. "Political systems make men good or bad", she adds. I agree completely. It is the role of the progressive (the good) to train the bad (the conservative) to "prefer justice" by the application of pain (confiscatory taxation). At this juncture do religion and politics form an uneasy union, allowing us to get on with the daunting task of making a better world for men at every spiritual level.

Readings: Logos as Mediation

As a further elucidation and extention of some of the ideas presented in the previous couple of posts below, here, without my additional comments, are a series of excerpts from the next essay:

~ Simone Weil, On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God, “Notes on Cleanthes, Pherecydes, Anaximander, and Philolaus” [pp.144-147]


[“God is ever a geometer.” ~ Plato]

This is the discovery that intoxicated the Greeks: that the reality of the sensible universe is constituted by a necessity whose laws are the symbolic expression of the mysteries of faith.
(This had probably always been known, but preserved in secret doctrines; and the Greeks perhaps rediscovered it.)
It was certainly still known by the first Christians.
There would seem to be an allusion to symbolism of this kind in the marvelous and incomprehensible words of St. Paul:

‘That ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge.’ [Ephesians 3. 17-19]

The number of wonderfully beautiful, and today totally unintelligible, texts in the New Testament shows clearly that an infinitely precious part of the Christian doctrine has disappeared.
It is very probable that it was systematically destroyed by the Roman Empire in the process of domesticating Christianity.

….If the gates of Hell have really not prevailed, this can only mean that the true faith still lives in secret in the hearts of a few hidden beings. But they are well hidden.

….The two catastrophes in the history of Christianity have been Constantine’s decision to make Christianity official, and the war against the Albigensians accompanied by the Inquisition. St. Augustine came after the first catastrophe, St. Thomas after the second.

….Harmony encloses together God and matter in one and the same world. It is evident, therefore, that it is the Logos.

(Note: Weil translates “Logos” as “Mediation” and says:

"…the divine Mediation descending… into the world, pervades everything. It unites God to God, God to the world, and the world to itself; it constitutes reality in every domain.
"All of this is to be found expressed in the single term Logos * as the name of the second Person of the Trinity.)"

*note: this is in Greek in the original

Religion: All Greek to Me

As a Christian Platonist, Simone Weil found the theme of a divine mediator to be essential to her religious philosophy. In the essay “God in Plato” from the anthology On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God, Weil quotes Plato’s Symposium:

“God does not communicate directly with men, but all intercourse and converse between the divine and the human is effected through [an] intermediary.” [p.130]

A bit further on, she states in her own words:

“The idea of mediation is essential in Plato because, as he says in the Philebus, it is important not to proceed too quickly to the one.” [ibid., p.131, emphasis hers]

She subsequently turns to the Timaeus, making this rather striking observation:

“The Timaeus is an account of the creation. Its source appears to be so different that it is unlike any of Plato’s other dialogues. Either he was inspired from a source unknown to us or else between the other dialogues and this one something had happened to him. It is easy to guess what. He had come out of the cave and seen the sun and returned to the cave. The Timaeus is the book of the man who comes back into the cave from above. …

“In the Timaeus there is a trinity: the Artificer, the Model of the creation, and the Soul of the world.” [ibid., p.132]

She next quotes a passage from the Timaeus containing a proof of God’s existence. Because I have no Greek, I will eliminate the Greek words she incorporated to clarify her translation, but I will flag their locations with [*]:

“First of all we must, in my judgment, make this distinction. What is that which is eternally real but never coming into existence, and what is that which is always coming into existence but is never real? The one is apprehended by thought with the help of reason [*] since it is eternally self-consistent reality, whereas the other is a subject of opinion based on unreasoning sensation, since it becomes and perishes without ever possessing real existence. Again, everything which becomes [*] must necessarily have some author [*] since it is quite impossible for there to be a becoming without a cause.” [ibid., p.132, emphasis added]

Plato is, Weil says, “expounding a theory of artistic creation and, by analogy, of the divine creation.” She goes on to develop her explication of this analogy thusly:

“In creating a work of art…the artist’s attention is oriented towards silence and the void; from this silence and void there descends an inspiration which develops into words or forms. Here the Model is the source of transcendent inspiration—and therefore the Artificer fitly corresponds to the Father, the Soul of the World to the Son, and the Model to the Spirit. A model which is ultra-transcendent and unrepresentable, like the Spirit.

“ …This Model is a living Being, it is not a thing. “ [ibid., p.133]

The Soul of the World, in Weil's words, is "the engendered God who is related to the creation as mediator, at the intersection of the other world and this world." She has pointed out, just above, that Plato refers to the Soul of the World in the Timaeus as "the only son [*] which has been, is, and will continue to be." [ibid., p.135]

We can see that a divine trinity corresponding to the Christian concept of the Triune God is explicit in Plato. In the Hebrew scriptures of the Old Testament, however, this concept, if found at all, is found only by looking backward, after the established fact, to find text that can be interpreted as being vaguely referential to the persons of the Holy Trinity. In fact, the God of Israel is One, so far as Judaism is concerned. The Messiah of the Old Testament is not God, but a temporal warrior-king. The Holy Spirit, as such, is unknown. The Jews have yet to develop the doctrine of a divine trinity out of their own sacred scriptures. And it is at this point where I become a quasi-Marcionite.

Reflections: Of Things Past

Here's another little bit of Simone Weil under the spell of Plato:

"Oblivion:; another image of unfathomable profundity. What we have forgotten of the past -- for example, an emotion -- has absolutely no existence. And yet everything of our past that we have forgotten retains none the less its full reality--the reality proper to it, which is past reality but is not existence, because the past does not exist today."

~Simone Weil, On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God, p. 122, "God in Plato"

Weil writes this after quoting a passage in the Phaedrus containing this: "But it is not easy for every soul to remember the things it saw when it was up there [i.e. in heaven, prior to birth or rebirth], either because it only saw them for a short time or else because it has suffered some misfortune since it fell down into this world." The "things it saw" are the things of the Realm of Ideas; the Real Forms, of which the transitory things of this world are only pale reflections.

But it occurred to me upon reading this that memory works this way within our temporal lives, too. Any person who has ever picked up a journal or diary that he kept decades in the past and begun reading realizes how much of that, now long past, experience, which was so important to the formation of who he is today, has been completely forgotten. When we fall down into adulthood, we suffer many misfortunes, indeed. Not that our youth was heaven--far from it!--but that it was, perhaps, less jaded, less defensive, more open to...grace.

Since I can put my hands on such a journal, I decided to put these ideas to the test. I quickly found the following entry, written during the summer prior to my senior year in high school, which I probably haven't read since the day I wrote it:

"I've been thinking about prayer tonight. It seems to me that if you have a soul with a potential for godliness, then you also have the ability to find, within yourself, the answers to the questions which you might ask in prayer. Especially those questions that you would ask in deciding between wrong and right. God does not have to tell you directly what is wrong and what is right because you already know subconsciously. In prayer you are forced to face the facts truthfully and you cannot help but make the correct decision, which is built into you. God has really answered the question for you before you even think to ask it."

Natural Law from the mouths of babes. It is any wonder that I went on to admire Plato and Simone Weil?

Matthew 18:3 -- Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.

Readings: Gittin' Zippy Wid It

Over on Zippy Catholic, Zippy has an interesting discussion going on under a post entitled “Material Prosperity Is Immoral.” In the penultimate paragraph of his post, Zippy writes: “The bottom line is that poverty is a sign (though not a dispositive sign) of virtue, and wealth is a sign (though not a dispositive sign) of vice: not merely in the case of individuals but in the case of economic systems. If we are not self consciously making choices that we know are reducing our material prosperity from what it could be, we are doing evil.” I will readily admit that the reasoning which gets him to that point is soaring way over my head. However, when Zippy says, in response to one of his commenters, “…greed is immoral” he strikes a responsive chord in me.

Just now, as I continued my reading in Simone Weil’s essay “God in Plato” I was provided with words that are descriptive of the problem that I have with the pursuit of “material prosperity” (whatever that is). Weil’s context here is an exposition on the grace of the beauty of the natural world as a source of spiritual energy:

“Various objects can be sources of energy, but of energy on different levels. For example, in war a decoration is really a source of energy (in the literal, physical sense of the word) on the level of military courage; it stimulates movements for which otherwise one would lack the strength. Similarly money, for work.”

I don’t know if I can buy her idea that medals provide soldiers with physical energy; but I certainly agree that money is an effective motivator of work. She continues:

“In a general way, whatever there is a desire for is a source of energy, and the energy is on the same level as the desire. Beauty as such is a source of energy on the level of spiritual life, and the reason is that the contemplation of beauty implies detachment.”

I’m going to give her this, if only because I whole-heartedly agree with the conclusion to which this statement leads her:

“The energy supplied by other objects of desire can only be transmuted into spiritually usable energy through an act of detachment or refusal—declining the decoration or giving away the money.”

In other words, the pursuit of objects of desire (other than beauty), including material prosperity (however one defines it) might be seen as “immoral” in that it tends to exhaust the energy that might otherwise be available for the pursuit of spiritual advancement. One has, in effect, chosen against the Good. I think that this can also be seen as applicable to transcendent entities, such as nations. I have no idea if this is compatible with what Zippy is getting at, but his is how I see it.

Readings: If You're So Smart...

Here, from the same source, are some additional ideas relating to those posted on Wednesday, September 19th:

"By using the expression 'the good' when he refers to God, Plato expresses as strongly as it is possible to do that for men God is the object to which loves directs itself."

...and,

"Further, it is only in so far as the soul orients itself towards what ought to be loved, that is to say in so far as it loves God, that it is qualified to know and understand. Man cannot exert his intelligence to the full without charity, because the only source of light is God. Therefore the faculty of supernatural love is higher than the intelligence and is its condition. The love of God is the unique source of all certainties. (Plato's philosophy is nothing else but an act of love towards God.)

"That being (reality) which proceeds from the good is not the material world, for the material world is not being but is a perpetual interchange of becoming and perishing. It is change. Nor does the being which proceeds from the good consist of those conceptions which our intelligence is able to manipulate and define; because later on Plato compares the most precise of these notions to shadows, to images reflected in water."
--Simone Weil, "God in Plato" from On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God [all emphases in the original]


In terms of dualism, as we considered it below, Weil points out in this piece that Plato characterized the body as the prison of the soul. Also, she says that in Plato, as in the Hindu concept of karma, "The reward for good consists in the fact that one is good and the punishment for evil in the fact that one is evil; and the reward and punishment are automatic (I do not judge; they condemn themselves)."

Conclusion: all fact is temporary. And, in so far as we are empiricists, we see in our rigorously gathered data--as though through a glass darkly--only imperfectly reflected images of real being. Our only means of direct relationship with the Real, that is, with the Good, that is, with God, is love.

Why I am Here

I enjoy being a disembodied consciousness. I like to express what is in my mind, and on my mind, without having my thought-words colored and reworked by the perceptions, opinions, or preconceptions of who I am that may develop in the minds or emotions of my interlocutors, based on how I look and sound--my style, my body language, my physical beauty, or lack thereof--or upon any relationship that is on-going in the material world.

It has been my habit for some time to rise at 4:00 a.m. in order to read and think, while most of the world sleeps silently in the darkness without. Not long after instituting this practice, I began taking notes on my readings, jotting down those things which resonated, or harmonized, with something already intellectually, or spiritually, internalized, and thus perceived as partaking of Truth. I now plan to incorporate some of that material here. In this way, I will slowly sketch in the outlines of the self-portrait of a mind.

Should any other cognitive entity somehow stumble across this site and wish to visit for the purpose of discussing what is posted here, such discourse will be welcomed:

[The master of dialectic] must be able to distinguish the essential nature of Goodness, isolating it from all other Forms; he must fight his way through all criticisms, determined to examine every step by the standard, not of appearances and opinions, but of reality and truth, and win through to the end without sustaining a fall. If he cannot do this, he will know neither Goodness itself nor any good thing; if he does lay hold upon some semblance of good, it will be only a matter of belief, not of knowledge; and he will dream away his life in a sleep which has no awakening on this side of that world of Death where he will sleep at last for ever.
--The Republic of Plato, chapter XXVII