Logos Tomeus

Source
Ananda Coomaraswamy mentions the Logos Tomeus (Separating Word) of Plato in his letters. I am not sure why the writer of Hebrews would have had to read Plato - in that culture, Plato was part of the air that was being breathed by the soul.

Justin the Martyr:
"I shall give you another testimony, my friends, from the Scriptures, that God begot before all creatures a Beginning, [who was] a certain rational power [proceeding] from Himself, who is called by the Holy Spirit, now the Glory of the Lord, now the Son, again Wisdom, again an Angel, then God, and then Lord and Logos..."

Being & Logos

Leithart
According to Gadamer (Truth and Method (Continuum Impacts), 405), philosophy essentially began with a nominalist move. The “earliest” view saw an “intimate unity of word and thing,” so intimate that the “true name was considered to be part of the bearer of the name.”

Philosophy “more or less began with the insight that the word is only a name – i.e., that it does not represent true being. This is precisely the breakthrough of philosophical inquiry into the territory over which the name had undisputed rule. Belief in the word and doubt about it constitute the problem that the Greek Enlightenment saw in the relationship between word and thing. Thereby the word changed from presenting the thing to substituting for it.”

This inevitably raised the question of whether language can be true at all, and the pressure of this question led Plato away from language to ideas as the locus of truth:

Having rejected the alternative accounts of language in the Cratylus, “Plato wants to demonstrate that no truth . . . can be attained in language – in language’s claim to correctness . . . – and that without words . . . being must be known purely from itself” (p. 407).

And this, Gadamer thinks, is the source of the problems of skepticism, objectivity, and truth in Western philosophy, problems that can only arise when one needs to compare what we say about a thing to what the thing is, a comparison only possible on the assumption that we have non-linguistic access to the thing to which we can compare our linguistic descriptions.

Philosophy begins not with forgetfulness of Being, but with forgetfulness of Logos, in the specific sense of language. Philosophy begins from forgetfulness of the truth that “in the beginning was the word.”

Is Leithart saying (here) that Plato was mistaken, & that his move was a nominalist, minimalist account of the power of Logos, moving away from seeing that the Word is identical to the Thing? If he is, my understanding of Plato is that this is overly simplistic to the point of error. Plato isn't saying that (for example) chanting the names of God or praying the prayer of the heart can't lead one to a realization of the divine shekinah. He is saying that one must first transcend one's own mentation and linguistics, prior to "seeing" God. This means that the "Logos" is not "wordy"or empirical. The Logos is the Divine Idea of God. Augustine canonizes this tradition, later on, and Plotinus explicates it in more nuance.

Plato Maligned Again

"Back in 1984, Culianu defined himself as one of the rising stars of the academic firmament with a book titled Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. The academic study of Renaissance magic had been a hot field since the Sixties, when Frances Yates finally blew the lid off a generations-old habit of scholarly disdain for occultism, but even by the standards of the Eighties Culianu’s book was startling. It took magic seriously as a system of psychological manipulation that used the cravings and desires of its target—the “eros” of the title—to shape human behavior. It suggested on that basis that modern advertising, which does exactly this, is simply the current form of magic, and that contemporary Western nations are “magician states” governed by the magical manipulation of public consensus...."

Even the archdruid isn't getting it quite right.

"In the dialogue Meno, to note only one example, Plato has Socrates demonstrate a point about the deep structure of the human mind by walking an illiterate servant boy through a geometrical proof. The boy doesn’t know a thing about geometry, but he is able to follow Socrates’ logic, and by the end of the process has understood what at that time was cutting-edge mathematics. Socrates’ point is that anyone, anywhere, could be taught the same thing—and that’s a point for which Plato’s Republic has no room at all. In the Republic, reason is for the few; honor and social commitments are for another minority, separate from the first; the majority has nothing but appetite. It’s therefore fair to say that in the Republic, nobody is allowed to be more than one-third of a complete human being.

That’s always the problem with utopian schemes; the inhabitants are never allowed to be fully human, though the restrictions are rarely handled with the geometric precision Plato displayed. When a utopian scheme is put into practice, in turn, what inevitably happens is that whatever dimension of the human is supposedly abolished happens anyway, and defines the fault line along which the scheme breaks down. Marxism is a great example; in theory, people in Marxist societies are motivated solely by noble ideals; in practice, getting people to go through the motions of being motivated solely by noble ideals required an ever-expanding system of apparatchiks, secret police and prison camps, and even that ultimately failed to do the job. One way or another, trying to create heaven on earth reliably yields the opposite; whatever resembles Plato’s Republic on paper turns into Pluto’s Republic in practice."

The problem with this analysis (and I heartily recommend his distinction between theurgy and thaumaturgy, Culianu and Ficino!) is that it assumes that societies can be run on "geometry" - that what is true in mathematics is true in the social sphere, legal sphere, etc. Certainly, anyone can learn mathematics - most men (for instance) are fairly good at it, as opposed to women.

While I heartily recommend his theurgy/thaumaturgy distinction (later in article), note that mathematics isn't governed by the same laws as the sphere of human action. This is a pervasive problem with all critiques of caste orders or traditionalism - they simply don't accept the fact that very, very, very few people have the aptitude or ability to govern themselves, let alone other people.

Plato and Fool's Gold

"The pursuit of gold (chrematistics) became the all-powerful incentive for action for at least a part of society. This change in the public spirit, according to Plato, gives rise, even in an aristocratic society, to a class of people whose gods are money, which they honor secretly with crude passion. The money chest of the rich, filled with gold soon begins to exert its fascination on the whole community. A substantial competition for material possessions is unleashed which constantly increase the avarice; whereas on the other hand, the ideal goods (the arete) sink in the public esteem. For where one bows down before the riches of the rich one must naturally look with disdain on the virtue of the good." - Plato, quoted on From Egypt to Eire

Plato and Thought

Plato invented thought.

I am not sure that this writer is a true "perennial". This needs more consideration. However, the point is taken that Plato certainly elevated discourse noetically, past mimesis, and into gnosis.

Ἀνταίος

There exists in every age, in every society, a small, still choir of reason emanating from a few scattered thinkers ignored by the mainstream. The collective voices, when duly discovered a century or so too late, reveal what was wrong with that society and age, and how it could have been corrected if only people had listened and acted accordingly. ~ John Simon

Plato has never had success as a revolutionary and never will do so. But Plato himself will always live throughout the centuries of human history... and will be in each century the companion of the young and old who love pure thought, seeking only the light which it comprises." In other words, you can never really have a "revolution" of people oriented to the white point of wisdom discussed in yesterday's post. For one thing, it is an individual endeavor, not the sort of thing that could ever occur on a mass scale. And the left is a mass movement, which automatically condemns it to mediocrity and banality. It is led by a conformist herd of elites who imagine themselves superior, but nothing could be more foolish-- and self-contradictory -- than the idea of "mass excellence." In contrast to Plato, Karl Marx has enjoyed over a century "of astonishing success and has revolutionized the world. He has swept away millions -- those who went to the barricades and trenches in civil wars, and those who
went to the prisons, either as jailers or as prisoners."Really, can you name another philosopher who has enjoyed such a literally smashing success in such a short span of time? But you -- yes, you there -- "as a solitary human soul, a soul of depth and sobriety, what do you owe Karl Marx?"I don't know yet. Ask me next April 15th.The point is, "Plato illumines, whilst Marx sweeps away. Again, vertical man never obsesses, let alone enters the state of perpetual hysteria of leftist man. As Eliot wrote, "we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph." Nevertheless, vertical man naturally frets about the deteriorating conditions of the interior of the human world, and its seemingly unimpeded slide into barbarism, spiritual exhaustion, scientistic magic, neo-paganism, self-worship, the cult of the body, abstract materialism, and a vapid and rudderless subjectivism. ~ One Cosmos

There is a lesson here, somewhere, Pogo, son...

As I was mentioning in an earlier post, there seems to be a sort of Platonic Renaissance stirring. The Radical Orthodoxy movement, Marion & other European theologians (like von Balthazar), Schuon & the traditionalists, etc. There is a growing recognition, in other words, that a surprisingly well-weathered and attractive alternative to Darwinian competition or Heckular Sub-manism is, actually, Plato. A lot has been said against Plato, although Pieper defended him in his book. G. Parkin Grant was basically a Platonist. And a great many people feel they understand him intimately - "Oh, he's that guy that believed that Ideas were more real than People, that's nuts. The real world isn't static & timeless, it's flux & change..." Which we are shortly to have even more and more of. Isn't Eternal Change about as Static as you can possibly get? I've asked this question before, and no one has a good answer. Why in the hell won't people listen to those who know? It's an old problem. You know it's bad when a classic liberal humanist like Fabius Maximus starts pulling a Moldbug and dredging up George Bernard Shaw with his Time Machine.

Still, no one has an answer to the ghosts of the past (Why were they so much more, oh, I don't know, "cultured"?). Why do they seem & loom so large to us? At least, those of us who still have an imagination left:

For as Schuon writes, the rationalist merely "calls 'reason' his lack of imagination and knowledge, and his ignorances are for him the 'data' of reason." When the unimaginative mentality grinds away at ignorance, the result is the kind of highflown philosophistry Russell spent his life producing and defending.

Yes, tidies & bundlemen, that's B. Russell. Who (even he) admitted that Size was a terrible snobbery to base one's epistemology or spirituality upon, which is common among his worshippers. The question really boils down to whether you conceive (or, in the worst cases, can even begin to imagine) that there may be something outside of us that is "bigger" which provides an ato-mo-sphere for the "Self". No God, no self. No Christ, no body. No Spirit, no soul. That sort of thing.

But if Progress is all there is, or all we can really know for sure, then there really isn't any kind of rebuke or truth that one can speak to Power. Which was really Plato's (and Polybius') point so long ago.