Posted on 05/16/2007 6:54:51 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
Good article. Good thread. Good. Life is good.
Justin Martyr certainly thought Plato was the best school of philosophy for anyone seeking God. And then of course, he heard the Master's call and became Christian. In retrospect, he noticed some Christian symbolism in Plato's writing. That would not surprise me at all since God is certainly able to work such things together according to His will, e.g. language and concepts.
For me, each time the concepts of "being" and "becoming" are brought to mind, I find myself drawn to a Name of God, I AM, and our part in creation, this heaven and earth - and the heaven and earth to come.
nofoolindatmon!
He says Kant tries to bracket existence, but what quickly happens after the existence of the cosmos is taken for granted is that nature is made one with existence. That's a divine cosmos.
It's a real pickle. Gilson cites Hume: "the will of God is the sole real foundation for the existence of the world. The divine will is something. The existing world is something quite different. Yet the one is posited by the other." Gilson asks, "How can such a relation be conceived?
. . . If the order of existence is radically other than that of essence, no essence can entail its own existence, not only in things, but even in God. Had any one of these philosophers remembered what another philosopher, now lost in the darkness of the Dark Ages, had said on the question, it might have altered their whole outlook on the problem. But they could not remember that, while no essence entails its existence, there might well be such an existence as is both its own essence and the source of all other essences and existences. They could not remember it because the very men who were supposed to hold that truth in trust had themselves very long ago forgotten it.
Nobody from Plotinus to Heidegger let that slip by. Not even Kant the physicist. Being, though, that's another matter.
Does Plato think this Beyond exists?
Evidently Plato had (cognitive) experiences of this Beyond. In terms of purely human language, we then could say that this Beyond must be said "to exist" in some fashion. But if it "exists," it does not do so in the same manner that creaturely nature exists.
Unless you want to say that the "Unknown God," the God of the Beyond, is self-caused and totally self-subsistent, and is therefore the complete cause and ground of itself, just as it is the complete cause and ground of all of nature.
But we understand causation as contingent on space and time, and God, being eternal, is not in space and time. So to me, such a formulation -- that god is self-caused -- is really pretty senseless. It would be natural for us to ask, "caused out of what, and when?", which questions would be unanswerable. So I don't know what it gains one to think of God in such terms.
In any case, it seems Plato does not take this route. The problem for Plato seems to have been that he could sense the presence and have "contacts" with the god; and on the basis of reason alone could recognize the goodness and truth of the god; but discover that any adequate description of him in purely human language is impossible, for the simple reason that no adequate concepts exist. So Plato in his wisdom provides no details of the god, but only of his relations with it (i.e., the helkein -- the "drawing" or "pull," of which we also hear in the Gospel of St. John -- and the resulting zetesis -- the search for god).
Plato lived well before the Incarnation of Christ, manifestly a self-revelation of God, wherein He freely tells us about Himself. Of course the Holy Scriptures also provide a self-revelation of God. But these were evidently unknown to Plato because, by and large, they were compiled after his own time.
It is extraordinary to me that Plato could get so far on the basis of reason alone, ultimately to find reason insufficient; and (it seems) to tacitly acknowledge this.
Well, that's how I'd answer your question cornelis, FWIW. Thank you ever so much for writing!
Indeed! Lanza's got a piece of the puzzle, IMHO. What we observe -- and just as importantly, choose not to observe -- affects the information we have about the world. We choose what we observe, and in so doing obscure the reality of what we chose not to observe, which becomes information unavailable to us, not only in the present moment, but forever after (i.e., the information "lost" at the time of the collapse of the wave function is irretrievable).
Now we make a description of what we have observed as if "the missing information" did not exist; we communicate our experiences to others with a false confidence that we really know what we're talking about. Thus we "reduce" reality to a partial description. In effect, this is a falsification of reality; if it becomes socially effective, the way we think about the world, and the way we act within it, may actually have the power to transform it.
Marxists, social progressives, and all other constructors of Second Realities actually depend on this process in order to make a new world that is "better" than the one God made for us. Their faith in this possibility has already changed the world in innumerable ways, including having effects, not only on human societies, but also on physical nature (e.g., through the destruction of war, and the exceedingly high rates of environmental pollution in communist states, for examples).
It seems very clear to me that human consciousness can actually have an impact on the world at the macrolevel, just as it certainly does at the microlevel.
It's strange; that's all I can say for now. Thank you so much for your elegant essay-post, my dearest sister in Christ!
Thank you so much for writing!
Revelation is revelation, the only kind there is.
No, not necessarily. But don't forget, I put great stock in the complementarity principle.
Notwithstanding, I must also mention that of the two saints, Anselm is closer to my heart.
Where it seems (to me at least) that Aquinas was "constructing a [rational] system," Anselm simply said: "Speak to my desirous soul what you are, other than what it has seen, that it may clearly see what it desires." And again, "O Lord, you are not only that than which a greater cannot be conceived, but you are also greater than what can be conceived."
That is certainly true, RightWhale. On the other hand, there's nothing in this acknowledgement that precludes one from inquiring into the source of the relevation. It seems to me that the quality and truth of the relevation is dependent on the quality and truth of its source. FWIW
Heidegger came in the wake of Hegel and Nietzsche as a type of existentialist who wanted to do without a metaphysics, whose experience of the world was always and ever an experience of space-time existence and nothing but. He’s one of those characters who are willing to shift the old meanings. Transcendence, if anything is an arch-epoch of human existence in time.
Kant, who said he finished what Plato began, is really an Aristotle who works inside after declaring the outside inaccessible. But his reasons are different for finding things inaccessible. It isn’t a practical consideration as it was for Aristotle. It is more logical and conceptual. Like Aristotle, Kant accepts the givenness of the world, but it is through conceptualization whereby the contradictions or paradoxes are resolved. Such is the hallmark of a scientistic “metaphysics.” The nous has become the fully revealing god of a phenomenal kingdom. Who cares about noumena after that?
In short, three different socks that don’t match.
I simply don't know enough even to know what it is that I don't know. I am interested, but don't know where to start.
I read Kierkegaard on Don Juan in 10th grade. It kind of turned me off on philosophy for awhile--just as Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Years kept me from enjoying Gulliver's Travels...
Or, to quote science fiction author Keith Laumer:
"I didn't know you read Kant."
"Can't read, you mean."
Cheers!
If cornelius, RightWhale, Alamo_Girl, & Betty Boop could give me a couple of 3rd grade level primers to start with, I'd promise to put them on my ever-burgeoning "to read" pile. :-)
(Full Disclosure: Just had a very successful job interview in Minneapolis yesterday...might have to put off the reading until I've relocated...)
Cheers!
Now that was funny ... and worthy of my College Philosophy teacher who thought the discipline to be the only subject deserving of college status outside of science and math classes. He was always hungover.
This has been the mystery of painters and poets as well as string theorists and other inspirationalists all along. James was on the right track, as was Whitehead, as was Vico, and Leibniz should be read so. Claustral permission appears to be the locus. That is what we call revelation, satori, inspiration. Everything we attribute to creativity is from sensation, which is all from Nature. Of course we create nothing, not even our society (all attempts are doomed), that is the baliwick of the Divine.
I am aware that none of this makes any sense at present.
I approach the quandary from a different perspective, i.e. what a beginning means.
In the absence of time, events cannot occur.
The origin of space/time is a more fundamental issue in every discipline than is the origin of energy, the origin of information and the origin of life v. non-life/death in nature.
In making a beginning of “all that there is” – both spiritual and physical, God created space, time, causality, events and things - i.e. existence.
Which is to say, existence has no meaning apart from space/time, which is geometry. Even spiritual beings and eternity itself cannot "be" apart from time.
Moreover there is nothing of which any of these can be made but God Himself or more specifically, God’s will – whether His creative will or His permissive will or some other type of will of which I am unaware.
No God, no existence; no Beyond, no here. To that extent, they are complementary – but the reverse does not hold. God is (I AM) when every other existence is not, i.e. in the absence of time, God is. He is the only possible uncaused cause of "all that there is."
Those philosophers and scientists who formed their theories and systems before the measurement of cosmic microwave background radiation in the 1960’s could appeal to a steady state universe and thus rationally justify a reduced sense of reality that “all that there is” is that which can be perceived by physical senses or mental reasoning, i.e. rationalize their atheism and politics or ideologies based on it.
Since then, the ever consistent, accumulating evidence is that space/time is created as the universe expands. And it is not just expanding, but accelerating. IOW, there was a beginning of real space and real time – and therefore, physical causality, energy/matter, things and events. At the very minimum, there had to be an uncaused cause of the geometry, i.e. God.
Nowadays, all the atheists can do to justify their hope that God does not exist, is to theoretically push the beginning backwards to prior universes, prior causations. This is the plentitude argument, that anything that can happen, did. However, the plentitude argument requires an infinite past (space/time) and thus, these theories are merely obfuscations because whether brane theory or something else, all cosmologies rely on geometry for physical causation!
In sum, without an infinite past, no one can rationalize denying God the Creator. And there can be no existence - spiritual or physical - apart from God's will.
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