/lit/ - Literature

>>24043404
>No. It means that those things are preferable insofar as there is someone to prefer them.

I'm not sure I've understood your meaning here. Things are preferable just because we prefer them. Is this some sort of Protagorean relativism? If we prefer bad arguments and bad faith, should we pursue and believe those instead?

Presumably, good arguments are good because they tend to lead us to truth.

>take his argument in the proper context - the critique of thinkers who sterilize life through a belief in some objective reality derived from logic. Logic is a model of reality that happens to be accurate enough.

Sure, that would be a mistake. But this is a position he ascribes to thinkers who clearly don't believe anything like this. In the classical tradition, Goodness, Beauty, and Truth are predicated analogously, we aren't reducing anything to some univocal calculus. His critique is a good one, as far as it applies to a certain sort of Enlightenment thought (and contemporary analytical thought), but he then applies it mistakenly to the Christian tradition and Platonism (funny since Plato delivers all his messages through dialogue and poetry and denies the ability to speak properly of metaphysics using language in the Seventh Letter).

Nietzsche, like Hume, relies a lot of false dichotomies like this. Either the Logos is just a univocal calculus or we embrace irrationalism (fideism with God removed). Either morality deals with the passions or reason, but never both. Etc.

But for Plato reason is so important precisely because it is transcedent. It cannot be reduced to logic. It is our ability to always go beyond current beliefs and desires, beyond appearances and what is said to be good, in search of what is truly best that allows us to transcend the given of what we already are and become truly self-determining and like God.

This is even more potent in Christianity. As Saint Athanasius says, "God became man that man might become God." Becoming like God is the telos of man, not denying his own essence and desires, but getting what is truly most desirable.

>>24036845
By pursuing what is truly good instead of what merely appears to be good or is said good by others. By unifying the soul through the rule of the rational part, which has rightful authority, that the passions and appetites may truly have what will most fulfill them. By training the virtues as one trains the body (the word asceticism comes from athletic practices). By spending time in contemplation of what is truly Good, Beautiful, True, and One.

Books are only so useful, as Plato allows in the Seventh Letter. Nonetheless, many are useful: the Phaedrus, the Republic, the Symposium, the Apology, Aristotle's Ethics and St. Thomas' commentary, Boethius' Consolation, Epictetus' Enchiridion, Dante's Divine Comedy (if properly studied), etc.

But reading simply to extract the useful, to leverage wisdom for some *other* good, will always be deficient. Philosophy, the love of wisdom, is sought for its own sake. Wisdom that seeks only power to achieve some other good is no wisdom, but sophistry.

As Saint Paul puts it in Romans 7, we are "dead" in sin when we do what we hate, unable to do that in which we truly delight. We are resurrected to autonomy and personhood by Christ, the Logos.

>>24019492
>>24019390
>>24019432
Sounds like shitty memeified Hegel blended with post-modernism and just generic political-science, psychology, sociology, etc. dressed up to seem "so out there bro!" edgy, and memey.

You can make Hegel into sci-fi. The Absolute as some sort of universe wide cosmic consciousness. You can do this in scary ways or as an ecstatic vision. Honestly, it's more interesting to ground this conviction in thermodynamics, information theory, a sort of cosmic selection process, and maybe even the Von-Neumann-Wigner interpretation of QM where all possibility collapses towards the inevitability of perfect consciousness of all being, being knowing itself as being, the Aristotelian perfect Thought Thinking Itself, only now at the "end of history" as final goal.

But doing this means surface level reading of the original sources, to have missed what Plato, Artistotle, Plotinus, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Eriugena, and even Hegel himself actually saw.

It's basically to deflate God, to fall into mistaking Hegel's "bad infinite" for what is truly "without limit," the truly transcedent. To define the infinite in terms of the finite, to make the transcedent ABSENT from what it transcends.

This leaves a deflated husk.

Land is simply a victim and preparator of post modern sophistries. The real future is the Neo-neoplatonic Thomistic Hegevagelion of classical metaphysics, the analogia entis and Doctrine of Transcendentals, wed to scientific progress (science as primarily an intellectual virtue) and the alignment of technology towards the Good, the Beautiful, and the True.

>>23890473
It would seem not, or at least that their freedom is rather limited, since they are often fully enthralled to instinct, appetite, passion, circumstance, and ignorance. All men are slaves to these things but one can become more or less self-determining by overcoming them and knowing why one acts and acting for what one knows is truly good not just what seems to be good or is said to be good by others.

>>23846725
Nietzsche didn't even understand Plato lol. His Plato is a world and body hating "two worlds" Platonist that has to ignore much of the Platonic corpus to be palatable.

And the Christians were generally even less "body and world" hating since God's creation is pronounced "very good" in Genesis 1 and because the resurrection of the body implies that the body is essential to the fulfillment of the human telos. Hence even more Platonist thinkers like St. Gregory of Nyssa speak to the good of the body explicitly. Indeed, St. Augustine, like many of the Church Fathers, is comfortable speaking of God in sensuous terms precisely because God is the source of all such sensuous, finite goods, which are signs pointing back to their ultimate cause. Concupiscence is the ultimate issue, which involves settling for lesser goods, including lesser goods in terms of the appetites and passions.

For example, Confessions Book X, Chapter XXVII:

Too late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient, O Beauty so new.
Too late have I loved you! You were within me but I was outside myself, and there I sought you!
In my weakness, I ran after the beauty of the things you have made.
You were with me, and I was not with you.
The things you have made kept me from you – the things which would have no being unless they existed in you!
You have called, you have cried, and you have pierced my deafness.
You have radiated forth, you have shined out brightly, and you have dispelled my blindness.
You have sent forth your fragrance, and I have breathed it in, and I long for you.
I have tasted you, and I hunger and thirst for you.
You have touched me, and I ardently desire your peace.

---

Such sensual poetry is common across the tradition, and often invokes the beauty and wonder of nature, e.g. St. Francis' poetry.

>>23841740
>they still constitute a very much *better* good than the inane squandering of life under capitalism

Well, this we can agree on.

However, Marxist regimes have a pretty atrocious track record on the whole "allowing people to seek spiritual goods," thing, what between the propaganda and active suppression of the Church, Buddhism, etc.

Good starting point for atheists and those raised outside the faith or with only a very shallow understanding of the faith (e.g. "God is simply an all powerful being sitting over and against the world and you do what he likes to avoid extrinsic punishment and attain future extrinsic rewards).

I would pair it with Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy. Once one has understood the "God of the Philosophers," that is primarily the God of the Platonists and Stoics, one is ready to understand how the promises here are actually fully fulfilled in the Incarnation of the Divine Logos (Clement of Alexandria, Origen, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, St. Bonaventure, St. Maximus, St. Denys, etc.)

Even for the faithful this learning is of use, for it helps one grasp the anagogic meanings in Holy Scripture and all fruits of reason are fruits of the one Logos who is Christ, our Lord and Saviour, the Good itself and Being Itself (Ipsum esse subsitens).

>>23825015
It's weird how he slides into this sort of post-modern cope on religion. Seems more like he doesn't want to disappoint his Christian fans and donors than any real conviction, except for the conviction that Christian principles are "good for success," in a strictly materialist sense. We all want to be lobsters with feel good chemicals in our brains and lots of sexual partners and a high ability to consume, etc.

It strikes me as very sad that he wasn't led towards Aristotle, Plato, Boethius, St. Augustine, the Patristics, etc. He could have been a C.S. Lewis of sorts, advocating for the classical tradition for a new generation. Instead he became a grifter and anger porn merchant.

I can see why people have difficulty accepting the Christian message in our current background. But many elements of the classical position fit in fine with the dogmas many people have unknowingly consumed, and are a good first step on any journey towards true freedom (not simple freedom to consoom more and be a better slave to the appetites and passions), spiritual growth (growth towards a transcedent Good, metanoia and hesychasm, not mere coping), and the development of the virtues. St. Augustine was far from the only Church Father whose journey began in earnest with "the Platonists," (Justin Martyr, etc.). But instead he is stuck lacking all the courage of his convictions, turning into the very image of post-modern man he hates.

I feel like the world is very much waiting for someone who can take Neoplatonism and Patristics thought seriously and present it as a living philosophy for this generation. Wallace, Perl, Schindler, etc. are all good but they are way too academic, particularly Schindler (his attempt at an accessible introduction to the Doctrine of Transcendentals is still going to sail over people's heads I hear).

Interestingly, there is a big revival of interest in the classical education amongst Christians (notably Evangelicals too), so maybe something broader can come of it.

>>23810370
The problem is that the best arguments for God aren't easy and they aren't the sort of thing you can really just read. Plato says the same thing of metaphysics in general in Letter VII. That's why he writes dialogues and not dissertations, and had people live with him for years, etc. Ascetic discipline, time spent in meditation and contemplation, etc. were all considered key to metanoia, change of mind, with the early Christians.

Nowadays people expect that they be able to have God "proven" in the space of some YouTube video.

People seem to get this for Buddhism. They get that practiced monks are better teachers than just anyone born into the religion. They get that you aren't going to "get it" just by reading a book. But for Christianity they expect literally any Christian to be a spiritual guide capable answering all questions.

>>23760021
Best description I've seen, from pic related. Eric Perl's "Thinking Being" and D.C. Schindler's "Plato's Critique of Impure Reason."

---

By calling what we experience with our senses less real than the Forms, Plato is not saying that what we experience with our senses is simply illusion. The “reality” that the Forms have more of is not simply their not being illusions. If that’s not what their extra reality is, what is it? The easiest place to see how one could suppose that something that isn’t an illusion, is nevertheless less real than something else, is in our experience of ourselves.

In Republic book iv, Plato’s examination of the different "parts of the soul” leads him to the conclusion that only the rational part can integrate the soul into one, and thus make it truly “just.” Here is his description of the effect of a person’s being governed by his rational part, and therefore “just”:

>Justice . . . is concerned with what is truly himself and his own. . . . [The person who is just] binds together [his] parts . . . and from having been many things he becomes entirely one, moderate, and harmonious. Only then does he act. (Republic 443d-e)

Our interest here (I’ll discuss the “justice” issue later) is that by “binding together his parts” and “becoming entirely one,” this person is “truly himself.” That is, as I put it in earlier chapters, a person who is governed by his rational part is real not merely as a collection of various ingredients or “parts,” but as himself. A person who acts purely out of appetite, without any examination of whether that appetite is for something that will actually be “good,” is enacting his appetite, rather than anything that can appropriately be called “himself.” Likewise for a person who acts purely out of anger, without examining whether the anger is justified by what’s genuinely good. Whereas a person who thinks about these issues before acting “becomes entirely one” and acts, therefore, in a way that expresses something that can appropriately be called “himself.”

In this way, rational self-governance brings into being an additional kind of reality, which we might describe as more fully real than what was there before, because it integrates those parts in a way that the parts themselves are not integrated. A person who acts “as one,” is more real as himself than a person who merely enacts some part or parts of himself. He is present and functioning as himself, rather than just as a collection of ingredients or inputs.

>>23756108
>>23756075
Honestly, dumping on the classical and medieval thinkers is still preferable to trying to reimagine that they were all secretly secular atheists. I've seen people trying to reread Plato as an "ironic" post-modernist who doesn't believe in truth or goodness (and even some attempting to do this with Aristotle, which is even less plausible). I had an English professor who was convinced that Dante was actually a secular humanist and that he was writing about Nietzschean overcoming instead of Thomism. I've even seen it implied that Boethius' Consolation, written while awaiting a gruesome death, is mere post-modernesque satire, or that Plotinus' One (and thus that of Calcidius, Porphry, Iamblichus, Proclus, etc.) is just a mechanistic principle totally bereft of intentionally and thus perfectly inline with modern reductionism (directly contradicting much of Plotinus, who never separated being and experience of being in the mode of modern subject/object dualism, knowing this to be a mistake).

>>23725228
To use an analogy, just because a guy is too reserved and is missing out on life due to anxiety does not mean that the answer is to tell him to act on his impulses, whatever appetite or passion feels strongest in the moment. You might make your classic anal retentive personality a bit better off by bringing them out to parties, giving them some drinks or some coke, and having them "live a little." They might even thank you for it. But ultimately, this is not the final solution.

Plato gets this with the Phaedrus metaphor. The goal isn't to kill or enslave the twin horses of passion or appetite. It's to have them working together, as a unity, because only through this can they take flight and truly be satisfied. Nietzsche has always seen very hollow to me on the "therapeutic" front because he completely misses this reflexive aspect of freedom. He is a great diagnostician of problems, and has little by way of solutions outside of a sort of small and sad extreme voluntarism that likes to dream itself grand and powerful—man as god, but a very small and little god for all that.

Pic related's reading of Plato, or the vision in Boethius' Consolation seem far more compelling, not least because Boethius has a far more compelling vision of the man whose happiness is no longer contingent on Fortune and external goods.

One of y'all recommended this to me, and then later I found Perl's Thinking Being here too. Any more like this? Any on the later Christian Platonists, St. Bonneventure, Eriugena, etc.? Or even St. Thomas?

>>23683138
Deely's red book is really good.

>>23683135
Pic related is really good. For the more mystical/esoteric Harmless' Mystics is excellent. His book on the Desert Fathers is quite good too (as is the Augustine one). Light From Light is another good mystical compilation.

The Magee edited Cambridge Handbook of Esotericism is probably the best overview. The Boheme chapter is quite good.

>>23674405
Yes. Probably the best example I can think of is Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy. If it seems overly sanguine, recall that the guy wrote it while awaiting a grizzly execution and had likely already been undergoing torture. He was a guy who had it all, he was basically second in command of the remnants of the Roman Empire. He had both his sons names consul. He was wealthy, a respected philosopher in his own right, happily married, etc.

And the reason he was going to be killed was because he tried to do the just thing and crack down on corruption and abuses by powerful allies of the king. So he is facing the problem or why he is suffering for doing the right thing, but moreover why the wicked prosper. Boethius was a Christian but Christianity is interestingly absent as he tries to justify the Good on purely philosophical grounds.

This was the most copied book of the Middle Ages outside the Bible, 800 years on the best sellers list. It might seem a little dated in style, but it's mix of dramatic dialogue and poetry is beautiful once you get into it.

The key for modern readers is to not mistake Boethius for something like Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss. He doesn't just think this is "the best of all possible worlds," but rather than being good is what is more important, and that this is what makes a man most free and self-determing. A man dependent on a romantic partner, health, wealth, honor, etc. for happiness is dependent on a fortune that lies outside his control. Thus his happiness isn't stable. It is shallow, collapsing with a shift in fortune.

The man who seeks wisdom and knows the good and loves it is happy in a self-determining way. Take for example Socrates who chooses death despite being able to escape it easily because it is the virtuous thing. Or take St. Paul or St. Ignatius sublime happiness even as they await torture and death, writing from prison cells.

It's easy to write this off from a modern framework so I might recommend pic related too because it really gets at what Plato is talking about vis-á-vis true reflexive freedom (freedom over the self) as well (the Hegel parts are neat but skippable).

Another rec in this vein would be St. Augustine. His corpus is huge so I would recommend Harmless' Augustine in His Own Words as a summary. But that is much more religious so you might find that a bit grating.

Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning is often recommended here and I do think it is worthwhile but it doesn't really give a complete answer. I would instead suggest Plato's Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Republic, Phaedrus, and Symposium for a look at both suffering but also love and goodness. Aristotle's ethics is another one that is hard to miss.

>>23674588
The wise man gains knowledge of the good. At least this is how it is framed for most of the history of Western philosophy (and ancient Indian and Chinese philosophy actually isn't that far away on this respect). Not all beliefs about what is good are equal.

The virtuous man is not necessarily wise since there are many virtues, although prudence is required to prefect any of the virtues. But Aristotle allows that some people have a natural talent for the virtues (literally "excellences") such that some are naturally brave (as opposed to cowardly or rash) and some are naturally friendly (as opposed to being irritable or too obsequious), etc. Yet the virtues can also be trained and educated.

One no more "decides" the Good than one can "decide" that having rectal cancer is good and that health is bad. Likewise, that we prefer truth to falsity is not something we decide, nor that we prefer pleasure to pain or sickness to health. The excellent man decides what to do and he does it in accordance with prudence, wisdom, bravery, generosity, etc. as opposed to acting while driven by vice. At the limit, the virtuous man chooses what he thinks is "truly good," not just what others say is good or what appears to be good because he is ruled over by the rational part of the soul as opposed to being driven by a mere part of himself, e.g. being a slave to appetite or passions.

Hence the excellent man is the only man who is truly free because he is not ruled over by circumstance, desire, instinct, and appetite but rather acts in accordance with the Good. We can always question if something is truly true or truly good. This is the power of reason, that it is transcendent. It allows us to go beyond what we already are, what we currently believe and desire, in search of what is truly best. And in transcending the given in pursuit of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True man goes beyond being merely a bundle of causes, becoming more self-determing.

You see this in adulterated form in Kierkegaard. Also in Hegel with the true infinite determining freedom. And it's in a castrated form in Kant's focus on the good will that wills itself. But it comes through in a more complete form in Plato, Plotinus, Anselm, and Augustine.

>>23637610
You might consider Plato's distinction between what is good in virtue of something else (e.g. money is only useful when one parts with it for some other good), that which is good in itself, and that which is good both relative to other things and for its own sake.

The Absolute is not some "noumenon," reality as set against mere appearance. The Absolute necessarily includes all appearance and reality, the relative and the in-itself.

Anyhow, perhaps a quote from pic related can shed some light on how the classical tradition is NOT talking about Lockean objectivity.

----

By calling what we experience with our senses less real than the Forms, Plato is not saying that what we experience with our senses is simply illusion. The “reality” that the Forms have more of is not simply their not being illusions. If that’s not what their extra reality is, what is it? The easiest place to see how one could suppose that something that isn’t an illusion, is nevertheless less real than something else, is in our experience of ourselves.

In Republic book iv, Plato’s examination of the different "parts of the soul” leads him to the conclusion that only the rational part can integrate the soul into one, and thus make it truly “just.” Here is his description of the effect of a person’s being governed by his rational part, and therefore “just”:

>Justice . . . is concerned with what is truly himself and his own. . . . [The person who is just] binds together [his] parts . . . and from having been many things he becomes entirely one, moderate, and harmonious. Only then does he act. (Republic 443d-e)

Our interest here (I’ll discuss the “justice” issue later) is that by “binding together his parts” and “becoming entirely one,” this person is “truly himself.” That is, as I put it in earlier chapters, a person who is governed by his rational part is real not merely as a collection of various ingredients or “parts,” but as himself. A person who acts purely out of appetite, without any examination of whether that appetite is for something that will actually be “good,” is enacting his appetite, rather than anything that can appropriately be called “himself.” Likewise for a person who acts purely out of anger, without examining whether the anger is justified by what’s genuinely good. Whereas a person who thinks about these issues before acting “becomes entirely one” and acts, therefore, in a way that expresses something that can appropriately be called “himself.”

In this way, rational self-governance brings into being an additional kind of reality, which we might describe as more fully real than what was there before, because it integrates those parts in a way that the parts themselves are not integrated. A person who acts “as one,” is more real as himself than a person who merely enacts some part or parts of himself. He is present and functioning as himself, rather than just as a collection of...

Pic related has a pretty good explanation of why Hume's view is deficient. It is the view of a slave, one ruled over by instinct, desire, and circumstance.

And then read Plato.

>>23625278
It doesn't solve the problem of evil. It makes the Monad/Entirety into something that emanates in ignorance, it emanates like a toddler wetting the bed or one domino knocking over an other. Since it creates evil through the Demiurge (via Sophia) it is essentially either ignorant or what it does or callously indifferent. Either way, it is less than fully perfect and is determined by what it is not to the extent it is indifferent to it.

Plotinus' view of the One or what would become the mainline Christian view is far more coherent. God is transcendent and transcends its own limits, eternally willing Itself in perfect freedom and love. For man to be a finite copy of God, a "moving image or eternity," man must learn to transcend his own nature in the pursuit of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True (e.g. St. Anselm) and attain to perfect freedom. Such a self-determing capacity to transcend the self in drawing near to the Good required the Fall.

Note that Eve is tempted by the Serpent with the promise that she shall "become like God." But this is the very promise of Christ, theosis. God becomes man and suffers eternal humiliation and death at the hands of man that we might be saved. Nietzsche was right, he had just affirmed Christianity. God was indeed born of man. God is dead and we have killed him. But Nietzsche forgot the last proposition, "He is risen."

>>23522290
Yes. For me at least, it has been life changing. But it certainly doesn't come all at once. The first time I encountered Boethius' Consolation, I was able to dismiss it on modern, relativist grounds. But I also didn't really understand the classical tradition at all, and was laboring under the defective, incoherent modern conception of freedom as pure potency. Pic related was a good starting point for me on finally starting to actually "get" Plato and the classical tradition. But then the more practical authors, St. John of the Cross and Thomas Merton in particular, were quite important too. What could be more life changing, more valuable, than finally getting a glimpse of the Good, of that which has true authority?

>>23522516
I think the philosophy helps for understanding the mystical authors. For example, I was introduced to St. Bonaventure's The Mind's Journey Into God by Harmless' great book Mystics, but it only actually made sense to me after I had mastered the Neoplatonic tradition. Understanding it in terms of a "magical spirit realm" very much cheapens it and makes it seem at most like edifying fiction.

That all said, I will admit that I still find St. Aquinas and Aristotle quite dry. I do get valuable sights from them, but I have never had fun reading them the way I do with Plato, St. Augustine, or the mystics. Nietzsche was the first philosopher I ever read in depth and I can certainly see why he is the most popular with the public at large in terms of both style and message (although I've come to see that message as deeply defective).

>>23515591
You seem to be assuming that people would "freely" chose the bad over the good. How is that supposed to work? Who seeing the better chooses the worse?

Certainly, people can choose the worse out of incontinence, being consumed by appetites or passions, or through ignorance, but then being led by ones appetites (a mere part of oneself, not the whole) or being led by ignorance (that which lies outside the self, which implies a lack of self-determination) is not freedom.

It would seem that rapists or murderers are not free to the extent that they fail to know the good or fail to be able to get themselves to act in accordance with the good they know—slaves to desire, drive, and circumstance or else slaves to ignorance. But to be free means not to be determined by ignorance, nor by a mere part of oneself. To be free means being able to truly choose what is best.

Do yourself a favor and read the Patristics instead. The good parts of Gnosticism are orthodox and became part of orthodoxy.

Pic related is good. So is William Harmless' Mystics and his book on Augustine.

>>23494238
>Incel black pilled.
>"I am totally beyond stupid ideologies bro."
Let me help you with this bro.