Schiller Institute Plato Translatoin- Sophist part 3 of 3

...As I shall illustrate that point within the following pages, the most important concept in all science, is the principle underlying the notion of the perfect sovereignty of the cognitive processes of the individual human mind. As I have already emphasized, in the preceding section, those are: cognitive processes by which an individual mind discovers a principle which solves an ontological paradox, a noëtic process which can not be observed in action by the senses of any other person. That is what I identified, in the preceding section, as the principle of Classical humanist education.

One individual's act of discovery can be known by another person, but only if the second person undergoes his, or her own, sovereign individual act, of re-enacting the discovery and its experimental validation.

This principle of sovereignty has still deeper underlying implications, implications which, if understood, define the method for solving the kinds of mass pathology which have been pushing the U.S. to the present brink of ruin, over the course of the recent thirty-odd years. To situate those deeper implications, we must return attention, for a moment, to the subject of physical economy.

If we accept a rational meaning for the word "economy," that word implies the development of methods by means of which we increase the potential relative population-density of a society, or of humanity as a whole. By "rational meaning for the word `economy,' " we signify a notion of a lawful function, as determined by some multiply-connected set of universal principles. Then, we are speaking of a form of organized physical action, by means of which the individual acts to express mankind's increased power to exist, in and over the universe, as measured per capita and per-square kilometer of relevant surface-area. These functionally defined forms of organized physical action, are bundles of interacting universal physical principles, combinations of principles also expressed as the technologies which those discovered principles subsume. All increments in the power of the human species to exist, depend upon the socially determined result of the discovery and application of such principles and their subsumed technologies.

In that degree, those actions express the sovereign cognitive development of the individual person. However, the paradox is: society is not a collection of individuals; the individual is a product of a process which is called society. From the standpoint of what is customarily called physical science and technology, it is the transmission, to the present, of the discoveries which were made as far distant as millennia or even longer in the past, which produces the developed individual intellect in the student and others today. The ability of society as such to use a discovered principle effectively, depends upon the re-enactment of that discovery in the minds of others, even very many others. That is the social process within which the existence of the individual is defined.

Hence, the decisive role of a universal Classical humanist mode of education, in fostering the physical-economic productivity of the labor-force as a whole. The content of the transmission of those ideas rightly defined as universal physical principles, depends upon the faculty of cognition in both the person who prompts the discovery of a principle in the mind of the other, and the function of those sovereign cognitive processes on which the other depends for his, or her ability to re-enact that discovery. Without that medium of transmission of discoveries of universal physical principle, the medium of cognitive creation, neither the discovery, nor its actual transmission were possible.

Thus, in that way, the perfect sovereignty of the individual personality persists, but efficient communication of cognitive thought occurs as a functionally efficient coupling without breaching that sovereignty. The larger process expressed by such modes of cognitive communication, is the foundation of the social process upon which civilized forms of cultures and societies depend.

This is a uniquely human quality of function. Excepting the human species, no living species has the power of cognition expressed by the original discovery of an experimentally proven-to-be universal physical principle. No other species has the power to discover and transmit a universal physical principle; no other species has the ability to increase its species' potential relative population-density by an act of individual free will. Man is, as Genesis 1 insists, a very special creature.

There is nothing magical about the power of the individual mind to generate valid discoveries of universal physical principles. For example, the collection of the dialogues of Plato, if acted as Classical actors would act a play, is a complete course of the comprehensive, preliminary training of the adolescent and adult mind, both to think cognitively, and to transmit such valid discoveries of principle to others.[30] This is the most natural method imaginable; it is the natural expression of human nature, both perfectly sovereign individual human nature, and the nature of humanity as an historical, social process. This principle of cognition, in and of itself, sets man, as a species, apart from, and above all other species. This cognitive link, not only among contemporary persons, but of the present to both the future and the past, defines the only meaningful use of the term "history," the only competent method for study of history, and the only competent basis for defining those universal principles of historical method which should govern all aspects of statecraft.

From the study of the human social process in this way, we are confronted with certain principles, which are universal principles in the same sense as those we associate with a universalized mathematical physics. This second set of principles, is the topic emphasized in the present section of this report. However, this emphasis is made without generating any functional separation between such principles of historically situated cognitive processes, and the multiply-connected manifold of universal principles we associate with the physical universe in which we exist, and upon which we act.

It is from this standpoint, that we must judge societies and cultures, as such, as either sane, or not.

As I shall now show you, it is important to recognize the three crucial features of the moral superiority of Plato's dialogues over the Classical tragedies. Once the reader has recognized those dialogues as a form of Classical drama, my argument on this point becomes clear.

The first two of the three words which identify this absolute quality of moral superiority of those dialogues, are, in English, the sublime, and, in the New Testament Greek, as also in Plato's dialogue, agape. The sublime and agape are congruent conceptions, but have slightly different forms of application; they are distinctly different facets of one and the same gem. Plato uses the term agape to signify a quality of justice, which he contrasts, through the mouth of Socrates, to the opposing principles of the characters Thrasymachus and Glaucon.[31] This Socratic principle of justice, called agape, is inseparable from the principle identified by a third word, truthfulness, the notion of the existence of cognitively discoverable truth. Such a notion of agapic truthfulness, defines an absolutely higher authority than any government, than any court, than any tradition, than absolutely anyone's mere opinion. It is the basis for what is rightly called natural law.

It is important, for understanding how to overcome the pathologies of U.S. popular behavior today, to see the equivalence of this notion of agape to the notion of the sublime, and the coherence of both with the principle of the obligation of us all, to be governed by a cognitively knowable standard of truthfulness. This use of "cognitively knowable truthfulness," ought to be recognized as nothing other than the only proper definition of "reason."

The simplest way to explain this most crucial point of statecraft, is to identify the nature of Plato's view of the moral failures of the Classical tragedians who preceded him.

All great Classical tragedies, including those of Shakespeare and Friedrich Schiller, are focussed upon the same problem which I identified by reference to the goldfish-bowl syndrome in the U.S.A. today. In the typical Classical tragedy of the tradition of Sophocles and Aeschylus, there is a potentially fatal, self-inflicted flaw in the culture, the flaw which is the subject of the drama. This flaw is represented by a leading figure, or figures, figures in the position of authority to make the changes in policy by which the tragedy is averted, but who, because the figure, or group of those figures, shares the fatal cultural flaw of the nation, he, or she fails to take the possible action by means of which the national disaster could have been averted.

Do not be deceived by foolish commentators on such plays, by moralizing critics and others who, through ignorance or malice, trivialize great artistic works, by demanding that you focus upon some alleged symbolic meaning, or the alleged "character flaw" of the leading character of a drama.[32]

All Classical tragedy deserving of the name of art, is historically specific. The drama is situated truthfully either within a real-life time and place in history, or in relative historical specificity of some legend, such as the Homeric epics. The flaw which defines the tragedy, is historically specific, and can not be attributed to times and places other than that. The characteristics of the leading characters of a Classical tragedy are specific to that setting; therefore, they can not be freely transported to different historical settings.

The foolish commentators attempt to project an essentially symbolic significance to the characteristics they claim to recognize in the relevant characters of the play. In respect to Classical drama, they would mislead you into overlooking the fact, that the essential flaw is that of the culture, in which that character is in a leading position to avert the plunge into national disaster, but fails to do so. He fails because he, or she capitulates to the influence of the historical specificity of the tragic culture in which he is situated. Just so, has the putative leadership of the U.S.A. failed, during the specific interval of the recent thirty-five-odd years.

Thus, in Schiller's Don Carlos, all of the characters but the French-born queen are terribly flawed, and represent the same moral decadence of that Sixteenth-Century, post-Isabella I Spain of the Inquisition, which Miguel Cervantes addresses by his use of the fictional figures of Don Quixote (the Spanish Hapsburg monarchy of the Carlist tradition) and Sancho Panza (a people corrupted into virtual stupidity by their hedonistic impulses). In Don Carlos, the queen serves as a figure, situated such that she, although queen, lacks the official authority to compel a change in the other principal characters, but who sees the tragedy. The assessment of Spain in that play conforms to the actual period of history to which the drama refers, just as Cervantes' Don Quixote addresses the same tragic quality of that nation during that same specific period of its history addressed by Schiller.

The same is true in Shakespeare's Hamlet. It is not some eccentric personal character flaw of Hamlet which is tragic; Hamlet's "flaw" is that he is typical of the whole pack of ruling institutions and circles of that kingdom. The character flaw is that of the kingdom, as the contrasted declarations of the characters Fortinbras and Horatio point toward the persistence of a folly, which continues to live in that condition of the Danish nation after the death of Hamlet removes him from the situation. The same folly which had taken over the nation prior to the opening scene of the play, continues to prevail after Hamlet's role has ended. That nation's problem is not Hamlet; Hamlet's problem is that he reflects the character of that nation, in that implied historically specific time and place.

Sometimes, the apparent exception proves the rule. Under pressure from the censor, Giuseppe Verdi transports the actual historical setting of one of his plays, Un Ballo in Maschera, from the drama's historically actual location, Sweden, to Massachusetts. The censor's intervention thus weakens the resulting alteration of the opera. Despite that drawback, the authority of the opera as a Classical tragedy, lies in its historical specificity governing the composer's intention in crafting that composition, and is preserved in that fashion.[33]

Up to a point, learning from such Classical tragedy, and other valid expressions of Classical artistic composition, continues to be an integral part of the qualifications for the practice of statecraft, or writing of accounts of history. The tragedies of Sophocles and Aeschylus, for example, are indispensable requirements for the practice of law and other crucial elements of statecraft today; but, as it is said, "they left room for improvement." Plato, and Friedrich Schiller later, focussed attention upon the needed improvement.

Contrast such tragedy by Sophocles, Aeschylus, et al., with Schiller's notion of the sublime, as expressed in both real history and drama, alike, in that case of Joan of Arc which I have treated in an earlier location.

Joan is no tragic figure; exactly the contrary. In real life, and in Schiller's drama, she is a girl inspired to save the nation and people of France from Plantagenet (Anjou) predators,[34] by persuading her foolish king to become a real king. For that, in real life, as in the play, she is butchered by the corrupt Inquisition; but, she changes history, both by her effect on the processes leading into the mid-Fifteenth-Century Council of Florence, and making possible the establishment of the first sovereign nation-state, Louis XI's France, based on the principle of the general welfare. She gave her life to achieve a noble purpose for mankind; she was no tragic figure. She spent her life in a way which achieved a great fulfillment of her having lived. That is sublime.

We should not wish to be burned alive by the Inquisition, as she was, nor devoured by lions in Nero's arena, nor crucified for Christ's sake. Yet, that aside, it were the true purpose of any mortal human life, that it be lived as sublime, as Joan's was. We are going to die anyway; therefore, wisdom lies in choosing the way one spends the talent given to you, your mortal life. Choose the mission which is your part to play, for the benefit your living might contribute to your nation, and for historical humanity as a whole. Be as you were an angel. That is the sublime definition of the good individual person, and of the good nation. That is the quality of agape.

In the drama which supersedes the tragic principle by the sublime, the gripping tension of the well-performed Classical tragedy, is continued, and, as in the case of Joan, the crucial figure may suffer a brutal end. The difference is, that, as in Joan's case, in her actually heroic life, and in that same heroine's life and actions on stage, are not a waste.

Yet, as Schiller demonstrates this case, what may be called the mechanism of the composition of all great Classical tragedy, is retained. The situation presented has many of the same features; there is the threat of a tragic outcome. However, this time, the central figure does not fail to offset the tragic outcome, but is willing and able to accomplish this at whatever price the hero must pay to bring about this sublime result.

See the contrast between the Classical tragedies of Greece and Plato's dialogues, in that light.

Express that same principle, of the distinction between the merely tragic and the sublime, in another way. This time, I strike closer to home. Consider the following question: Why is what is called morality, especially thunderously Bible-belting morality, often the enemy of the good?

If it is moral, not to kill, nor steal, nor lie, for example, does seemingly perfect observation of those rules, that repertoire of "single issues," make one good? Take the case of a publicly avowed admirer of the racist legacy of the Confederacy, such as Attorney General John Ashcroft; accept, provisionally, the claim of his supporters, that he does not intend to violate the Ten Commandments, even when he kills. Overlook, if only for a moment, his repeated lying sophistries. Is he to be assessed as "a good man," simply because his duped admirers consider him as wielding "a banner of Christian morality"? Absolutely not! Anyone who does not serve the principle, that all men and women are made equally in the image of the Creator, is no Christian! When you defame the image of man, as all racists do, you defame the image of God. "Hypocrite" were too gentle an epithet, in Ashcroft's case.

It is necessary to guide children, so that they do not step off cliffs, or into the front of oncoming automobiles, and so on. It is necessary to advise young persons similarly, for their own good, during that perilous journey near the outskirts of insanity, called adolescence. If it is also necessary to housebreak and train pet cats and dogs, that should not be used as a pretext for degrading morality to the form of do's and don't's for household pets, or for persons whom you attempt to degrade to the status of trained human cattle. Put to one side, for a moment, the fact that Ashcroft is not exactly housebroken, even by four-footed standards for morality; were he less a hypocrite, that would still not qualify him as "a good person."

The problem is, that he is not a person of good intentions. Obeying a set of rules, or merely seeming to adhere to such rules, does not define a good person. All the single-issue prescriptions which might be imagined, provide no test of goodness. As it was said of Adolf Hitler, Satan never lowers himself to commit little sins; he saves his energy for the really big ones. He leaves the practice of lesser sins to little people.

Take, for example, the bi-polar, strictly church-going Bible-belter, who belts his wife and children religiously, at whim, on Saturday night, and then weeps over the bruises and broken bones he has successfully inflicted, even while he pontificates, "I'm sorry, but you made me do it." On Sunday, we find his sanctimonious self sitting upright, posing as a paragon of smug rectitude, in church.

Contrary to the enormous number of such and comparable cases, the fact remains, that man is naturally good. That spark of goodness is already in the newborn child, but it awaits development through infancy, childhood, and adolescence, into what should become true adulthood, approximately a quarter-century later. How could man fail, as he usually does, somewhere along the road between birth and biological maturity? Or, to restate that question, why does the individual fail, so awfully often, to reach the moral maturity which was his or her potential at birth?

Virtually all of us have come to understand, somewhere along the way between infancy and adulthood, that, as each of us is born, each of us will die, and that rather sooner than later. This fact should prompt any reasonably sane and intelligent individual to ask himself, "What, then, will have been the meaning of my having lived?"

In a famous fable, a monk asks a youthful woman to look into a mirror, and think of her aging and mortality. She accepts the monk's observation, and makes her decision accordingly, seeking pleasures while she might. The existentialist sees himself as Hannah Arendt's friend, the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger, did, as the individual "thrown into life in society," into a realm in which that individual not merely denies, but defies the existence of truth. The notion that life in society has some social purpose, some mission, is denied. Or, like the woman of the fable, she seeks a substitute for immortality in sensual diversions which die like Autumn leaves.

Heidegger, like his beloved Friedrich Nietzsche, and like his follower Jean-Paul Sartre, typify immorality in the extreme. Yet, it is the ugly reality of today's U.S. life, for example, that the individual who is asked to identify his or her self-interest, has tended, more and more over the recent decades, to locate self-interest in terms of "immediate self-interest" within a world ruled by pleasure and pain. In other words, such unfortunate people seek reality within the shadow-world of sense-perception, and they themselves thus come and go as shadows do. They seek in shadows, an identity which has no substance, and, so, if they succeed in that attempt, when they have passed, they leave nothing of real moral substance behind.

At the best, most of our citizens of earlier generations, defined their interest in the future prospects for their children and grandchildren, and defined their reciprocal relations to their own parents' and those of their parents' generation, accordingly. Willingness to put one's life at risk, whether in war, for the sake of the future, or simply to act for the good when that challenge is set before you, typify those symptoms of goodness many of my generation had come to expect of one another. Yet, that is not enough to make a society, or a religious body a moral one.

Try to answer my question from the standpoint of what I have described as the implications of the Classical humanist method in education. If we are decently educated and experienced, who are we, really? If our relation to the past is defined in terms of our re-enacting the original discoveries of principle, by persons from earlier generations, even millennia earlier, we know that we embody that re-enacted experience from their lives within ourselves. If the re-experiencing of such creative moments in science and Classical artistic composition, is the core of our educational development, then our intimate relationship with the sovereign cognitive processes of persons long deceased, defines our moral sense of conscience.

So, a child thinks of a departed grandparent looking down upon, smiling, from somewhere beyond. That is a simple expression of the essence of goodness. It is a sense of the sublime, a sense that the quality of the sublime is the essence of true beauty in art, and in life...

Dialogue by PLATO

THE SOPHIST

Translated by Leslie B. Vaughan

"HOW TO DEFINE A PHYSICAL-ECONOMIC COLLAPSE

Marat, De Sade, And 'Greenspin'