Posted on 12/26/2003 4:58:06 PM PST by Federalist 78
On the birthday of Christ, it is appropriate to compare Jesus with four Westerners who influenced the mental development of the world.
The Athenian philosopher Plato was admired at Western universities throughout the millennium of their existence. Plato ascribed his wisdom to Socrates, who was generally considered, among the educated in the West and Russia even in the 20th century, the wisest person who ever lived, the sage of sages.
Published in 1987 by Professor Allen Bloom was a study entitled "The Closing of the American Mind." What is the cause? American universities do not pay sufficient attention to Plato and Socrates.
The best-known book of Plato-Socrates, written by Plato, since Socrates did not write but expressed himself orally, describes the ideal State and hence is entitled "The State," mistranslated into English as "The Republic," though "republic" is a Latin, not Greek, word that appeared after Plato’s death.
The ideal State of Plato-Socrates resembles the tyrannical Sparta, a mortal enemy of Athenian democracy, but this ideal State of Plato-Socrates is far more Spartan than Sparta. It is a countrywide cattle-breeding farm on which pedigree human cattle are raised.
Men and women live separately, and a man and a woman, selected by the proper authorities to produce pedigree progeny, meet only for this "pairing" or "coupling," the resulting child being taken away from them for proper collective upbringing and education – provided the child satisfies the pedigree standards; otherwise, the child is destroyed. If it is born without the due pairing or coupling authorization, it is destroyed ipso facto then and there.
If someone is so sick that he or she cannot work, he or she should not be treated, but should be allowed to die as not fit for survival. If alive, he or she will mar the pedigree purity of the human cattle as a whole. The weak, the sick, those unable to work must die off and thus make the pedigree human cattle as a whole stronger and healthier.
About 23 centuries after Plato, an English clergyman studying nature and named Darwin discovered that man had evolved from the monkey. All the more reason to breed human cattle on a countrywide cattle-breeding farm (or a zoo?). Darwin’s contemporary (and disciple!) Nietzsche contended, with triumph, that man is the most predatory animal, a super-beast, a "bestia."
The Romans used to say, "Man to man is a wolf." But wolves have not been especially noted for attacking one another. On the other hand, a Mongol army, a pack of Mongols, would attack a city and, unless it surrendered, the attackers not only killed its entire population but also smashed all the buildings into stones so small that it was impossible to find that the city ever existed.
If wolves could invent and write down proverbs, a wolf, wishing to put down wolves, would say: "Wolf to wolf is a man."
Marx invented not a ruthless war of nations or religions, but a ruthless war of classes. The rich are the enemy. The rich do not surrender. The rich should be destroyed. As sung in "The Internationale," the anthem of communism, "The entire old world of coercion we will raze to the ground." As the Mongols razed to the ground a city that would not surrender.
Christ was born to a Jewish woman, named in English "Mary"; grew up as a Jew; spoke, read and wrote no language except Hebrew; lived his life and died in a Jewish country and had only Jews as disciples.
According to Luke 2:47, when Jesus was 12, Mary and Joseph discovered the boy in the Temple (in Jerusalum), "sitting among the Teachers" – the rabbis. Jesus was a prodigy, matching at 12 the Teachers of 40 or 80: "Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers."
Jesus did, indeed, become, when he was "about thirty years old" (Luke 3:23), a Teacher, teaching his disciples not within orthodox synagogues but in the streets and the bosom of nature. Jesus said that he was not to "abolish the Law and the Prophets [that is, Judaism], but to fulfill them." (Matthew 5:17).
To put this into modern lay language, it can be said that thus a scientist of genius does not abolish the science created before him, but "fulfills" it. Accordingly, the Christian Holy Bible consists of the Judaic (Hebrew) Old Testament Christ knew so well already at the age of 12, and the New Testament Christ created, to "fulfill" the Old Testament.
What was it that Christ created to "fulfill" Judaism?
Nietzsche applied to himself the name "anti-Christ." He used to say that Christianity is the worst evil in history. Had Jesus been an essayist, able to see his opponents for 20 centuries ahead and five centuries behind, he would have called himself anti-Plato, anti-Nietzsche, anti-Darwin and anti-Marx.
The first and the last (in the social hierarchy or in Plato’s opinion) may be the last and the first (in human value). If you are rich, give away your wealth to the poor. Do not resist evil with equally evil or more evil evil. Blessed are not the strongest fighting men, but the weak (such as women and children), the meek, the suffering, the poor, the unfit for survival, and they need thy compassion, pity and help.
Of course, for example, the notion of charity looms large in Judaism. But Christ made it a critical spiritual need, as did Nietzsche when he protected a horse against blows with his own body (see below).
To the four opponents, Christ would have said:
What happened in the fourth century is as strange as Nietzsche’s attempt to protect a horse with his own body. The Roman Empire, obsessed with power, including wars of expansion, and with wealth, including wars of acquisition of wealth, adopted the teaching of Christ after three centuries of Christian persecution, beginning with the crucifixion of Christ.
How did Christianity change Christendom? Wars continued, but there appeared a Christian-aristocratic knighthood, chivalry, rules of war – while two Chinese colonels published at the close of the 20th century the book "Unrestricted Warfare," denying any rules. Infectious microbes were discovered in 19th century Europe, which has not, however, waged bacteriological war.
Christendom never practiced Mongolic, Chinese, Nazi or Soviet mass exterminations, though the British Empire came close in its imperial zeal, helped by Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase "the struggle for the survival of the fittest," used by Darwin as basic to his theory of evolution. Spencer argued that the British were the fittest for survival, and a high death rate among colonial nations merely contributed to the pedigree health of the human race.
Charity became a common notion, as it was in Judaism. Many Americans do not understand that "democratic socialism" and Christian Socialists in Europe had nothing to do with Marx. The word "socialism" came into use in France and England soon after 1825 and had been probably coined by Auguste Comte, a mathematician and the founder of sociology (also his word).
What has been called in the United States "social benefits," "social security," "welfare," etc., can also be called socialism, which sprang from the same Judaic-Christian notion of charity. The manifesto that Marx and Engels published in 1848 was entitled "The Communist [not Socialist!] Manifesto" and proclaimed a world proletarian revolution – that is, a world class war to seize power all over the world. They condemned peaceful socialism, stemming from the Christian notion of charity, and Christianity itself as enemy devices to delay a world proletarian revolution.
Lenin and his Bolsheviks, or Communists, persecuted the Russian democratic socialists as their worst foes, traitors and criminals.
As for sociology, even after the death of Marx and Engels, the orthodox Marxists (in Soviet Russia and post-1949 China, for example) considered it a "bourgeois pseudo-science" up to the 1960s!
The suspension of Christianity in Lenin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany, as well as the advent of Marxism in Mao’s China, led to class or ethnic mass exterminations, with the implication that human beings can be exterminated the way animals are, for human beings are animals that should be bred like cattle, and the war for survival must be as ruthless as unrestricted warfare in the two Chinese colonels’ recent book.
The Western metaphysical line of Plato and Aristotle down through Descartes is incredibly influential on our patterns of thinking. As rich as that heritage is, you could drive a truck through the holes in it. Martin Heidegger is the most learned modern philosopher to critique metaphysics and he touted the Presocratics. For example, his Identität und Differenz brings out Parmenides' unvarnished take on the identity of being and thought.
What I mean, specifically, is that I really believe that Socrates' recurring character, as intended by Plato, was very similar to the character of Dr. Smith in the the TV show Lost in Space, and that his statements were intended to be interpreted in that way.
Maybe one day I'll do a line-by-line analysis and deconstruction of Lysis and Sophist to try and attune the reader to the form of Plato's satire, then it will be easier to see in The Republic. 'Til then, I'll just stick to the assertion, and only justfy it with, "Isn't it obvious?"
Aren't we all?
That remark was offered in the larger context of this thread, which is predicated on a Christian perspective against Plato.
"Irrespective of any religeous affinities, it is discernible that Plato was not exploring the notion of an optimal State in The Republic, but, rather, satirizing Sophists and the lesser intellects upon which they prey."
" Our intellectual skyline has been altered by German-thinkers........" (Bloom)
Bloom takes on "value relativism" as a German infection. I had always thought Fitche was the demon of German philosophy but Bloom thinks otherwise.
Haven't read it.
after everyone has had their say and most of his friends have left, and its near dawn, and Socrates begins to speak of the importance of both the serious and the unserious, that is when his last remaining friends fall asleep.
Ah, the irony!
Less today than ever before as Pandoras Box is more fully opened. I do not care to mix it up with you as I have allways respeted your thoughts on our forum and consider you a first rate thinker on FR.
We do indeed have all of the writings of Jesus. He certainly read Hebrew because he read the scrolls in the synagogues. If one knows how to read Hebrew, one can also write it. Aramaic and Hebrew were similar. Since Jesus spoke in Aramaic from the cross, he obviously knew it. Finally, in what language did Jesus converse with Pilatus? Likely Greek. The Roman commander of Antonia was surprised that Paul spoke Greek and responded back to him in Greek.
The facile speculation that Jesus was illiterate simply because there currently exists no scroll signed "Yours Truly, Jesus," is made by only the most unlearned or hostile minds.
Son of Socrates
I haven't read Bloom. But I am such a Heidegger partisan that I knowingly put myself in "harm's way" as his apologist. To me, the boldest indictment of relativism is Kierkegaard's exploration of leveling in his The Present Age. In no way does Heidegger refute that work; quite the contrary.
It is said that MH's only comment on the Holocaust was something like: Sure that was bad. But so is mechanized agriculture.
That certainly is a stupid moral equivalence, if it is meant to be an equivalence. Moreover, George Orwell came to a more humane conclusion about mechanized farming when he figures out how an outmoded plow (found in an abandoned Spanish barn) is intended to be operated. Hmm, I seem to have strayed off-topic.
Anyway, Heidegger staunchly condemned the dehumanizing tendencies of modernism alluded to in the Lev Navrozov article of this thread.
I'm making the secular case that much of Plato was written with the intent to make you laugh!
Plato portrays Socrates over and over as a pretentious, sardonic old chicken-hawk fag who spread smart-sounding confusion and stupidity wherever he went. Socrates was a Sophist, and The Republic makes fun of him and the way in which others gullibly aquiesce to his sophistry.
Maybe I was lucky to have read the translated works directly, without much exposure to the analyses of others first. It's been obvious to me, since the first time I read The Republic, that it was written as comedy.
Plato considered his teacher the greatest man who had ever lived.
In The Symposium, Socrates seduces a young man away from sex, to wisdom. The young man (Alcibiades? I can't remember) assumes Socrates wants to seduce him, and the older man lets the younger cling to that assumption, but in fact has nothing of the sort in mind.
Looks like some great minds, among them Adams and Jefferson, see Plato the same way I do! Ha!
I have read some of Aristotle's Politics and decided that was all of the Greek wisdom I needed. Nietzsche, Darwin and Marx are worthless.
http://www.booknotes.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1386
LAMB: When you speak of the founders, name the ones that are the most important to you.
Prof. WEST: Well, I mean--by the founders, I just mean those Americans who were prominent in the writing of the fundamental
documents that governed the nation in the founding era. The top people obviously would be Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Washington,
Hamilton. Those would probably be the top four.
http://www.booknotes.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1667
LAMB: But the thing I could not find -- I just wanted to ask you about it. There's no reference to David McCullough's "John Adams." Was that on purpose?
NOVAK: No, I did this before David McCullough's book.
LAMB: OK.
NOVAK: In fact, I -- I had a conversation with David McCullough when he was doing the book -- he was planning to do the book on Jefferson and Adams, and I was leaning myself towards Adams. I remember expressing to him some enthusiasm for Adams and...
LAMB: But you made a -- a reference in the -- about there's not much been written about John Adams.
NOVAK: Yes. Well, I -- in fact, I wrote a book review at the time I was writing this book, in "the Weekly Standard" on July 4th, I guess, 2000, I think it was, talking about Adams as the neglected Founder, and certainly one of the top four, with Washington -- Washington, Madison and Jefferson. Adams certainly ought to be the fourth leg of that stool. It was a disgrace that we knew so little about him.
http://www.booknotes.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1237
LAMB: Go back to the Founding Fathers -- the Madison, Washington, Jefferson group -- and who in that group would best reflect what you think today? Or who would you look to for guidance?
EVANS: Well, it's hard to pick any one of the founders. They were all so good and all so wise, and it's amazing how wise and good they were. If you consider that at that time this country had a population of less than three million people, and yet there must have been 300 people of the very first rank at that time who were very learned scholars of these matters, who were very good, wise statesmen, who understood this tradition that I'm talking about andbasically established the institutions that made that tradition live in America under our Constitution. So it would be tough to pick any one, but certainly John Adams; James Madison, I think, represents the center of that; but I would include Jefferson.
unlearned or hostile minds.
Indeed! Minds that absorb Plato, Nietzsche, Darwin and Marx and not Christ, can only excrete that which is suitable for the sewer.
I, too, have made a wee-little book from the same materials, which I call the Philosophy of Jesus; it is a paradigma of his doctrines, made by cutting the texts out of the book, and arranging them on the pages of a blank book, in a certain order of time or subject. A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen; it is a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus, very different from the Platonists, who call me infidel and themselves Christians and preachers of the Gospel, while they draw all their characteristic dogmas from what its author never said nor saw. They have compounded from the heathen mysteries a System beyond the comprehension of man, of which the great reformer of the vicious ethics and deism of the Jews, were he to return on earth, would not recognize one feature.
You sometimes see parts of this cited to make the point that Jefferson was an orthodox Christian, but it's precisely orthodox trinitarianism that he takes issue with. Jefferson's Jesus was something like a Unitarian and his Platonists include most of the Fathers of the Church.
Jefferson also noticed the authoritarian and totalitarian elements of The Republic and rightly hated such restrictions on human freedom. But it seems to me that we need both Plato and Jefferson: Jefferson to criticize the authoritarianism implicit in philosophical systems that claim to have the whole truth, and Plato to point out the self-indulgent, sophistical, overly relativistic, and destructive side of democracy. Just how Plato's concern for truth and Jefferson's passion for freedom should be combined is beyond me, but combine them we must.
How one should read Plato is a complicated question. Is one to take him at his word, or is his Republic a metaphor or teaching device? Or is it simply to be considered a natural result of his detestation of the democracy that put Socrates to death? I don't know, but from what I've seen, scholars tend to read the Republic metaphorically and to give Plato the benefit of the doubt. That's why Plato's Republic has become one of the key works in Western education. People who read it literally either are appalled or become appalling.
And loved Nazism.
Unfortunately, these two books are almost completely ingore by the education institutions of this nation.
It is one of the major tragicities of our time.
Unfortunately, these two books are almost completely ingore by the education institutions of this nation.
It is one of the major tragicities of our time.
But since you register no such charge, you merely inject his Nazism as a factlet, there is no point in responding.
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