I wrote the first few chapters of my book in a variety of different ways. On this page you will find the first two chapters of one of my old discarded experiments, which I think is nevertheless OK and need not go to waste. It's written as a dialogue between Socrates and the reader, but it's very easy to follow and not at all enigmatic, it's supposed to be Socrates for the modern world. It starts with some light hearted banter about "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure", which was a film that featured Socrates and talked about utopia. Some people tell me they enjoy the Bill & Ted example, others complain it's embarrassing and dated. The first chapter is designed to be an easy to read introduction which splits open the readers mind with an axe, in the second chapter I send in the JCB diggers to dismantle his Judeo-Christian foundations and an introduce the selfless resourceful utopian endpoint Socrates described. In the same way that new age doctors talk about the mind-bond-spirit relationship, one of the keys of Ancient Greek philosophy is to think about the sort of individual-society-spirit relationship that makes political philosophy possible. Many friends complained that the second chapter drifts around instead of laying everything out in a structured way like a modern textbook, but Ancient philosophy is way too psychologically complex to be presented in straight lines. For a philosopher style is, at best, simply a necessary evil. At the end of day if the reader says "Holy Cow I get it!" I judge the work a success, if not I judge the work a failure. So style is just a device for sucking the reader in, increasingly his attention span and concentration. For a genius, I think perhaps Plato's enigmatic style is the theoretical optimum, because it makes the reader work so incredibly hard, but Plato's presentation is simply light years ahead of the modern Western attention span, so something much easier is called for.
Anyway, I have now abandoned this casual dialogue format in favour of something even easier to read, but to be honest the problem with philosophy is not the style of authors, rather the minds of readers. I remember, not so long ago, getting stuck reading some of the analysis of poetry in Plato's Protagoras, which is one of his easiest dialogues by the way, and it took me a few days sitting in the garden, reading a couple of paragraphs over and over again, to figure it out. That's what proper philosophy is like, it isn't quick, and it can't be quick. Quick philosophy is like imagining an atheist going to Church one afternoon and coming out a Priest. In theory you can read the bible in a day, but in reality grasping Christianity requires a long personal journey. You need to think about the stories until they move you, philosophy, like religion, is an egotistical challenge and a self-actualizing psychological journey. Take Plato's Apology, for example, which not only describes Socrates as not only the wisest man in Greece, it describes both the masses and the elite as essentially mindless. It's an absolutely shocking claim, if you take what he says seriously it alters your entire perspective. If you read the Apology properly you feel like you just ran into Socrates on the street of Ancient Athens and he ripped you apart in debate and left you shivering in the horrifying realization that you are clueless. Anyway, as I sent my work back and forth to my ten second attention span friends, I tried to make my philosophy as quick as possible! In theory you can read it and wake up, but at the end of the day I don't think that I have ever succeeded in doing much more than scratching the surface of people's minds. Indeed, I don't think the written word is the right way to teach or learn philosophy, it should be by verbal debate.
Writing a book on philosophy is probably a bit like being a French Impressionist painter before Paul Gauguin made Art Nouveau trendy. In his lifetime Vincent van Gogh sold two paintings to his brother, today his sunflowers sell for a hundred million dollars. Modern artists are luckier, everyone is looking for the new artistic genius. But what people don't realise is that the internet isn't enlightening, surfing though an overload of information actually creates a sort of shallow attention deficit like disorder in society. So is the only hope for mankind academia? Imagine being able to interview Paul Gauguin today, how do you think he would explain the fact that he died reviled, yet had so much to offer? I guess Gauguin would blame it first and foremost on the academics, because it was the academics who called him absolutely nothing, yet they knew absolutely nothing themselves. So where is the hope for mankind? Gauguin died friendless, he was inspired by the Japanese, alas even they ignored him. But perhaps his friendless life was also the secret of his genius, because by separating himself completely, he alone could see through the illusions of society. Perhaps the hope for mankind always lies far from the madding crowd.
What a paradoxical world we live in. You can be sitting there in despair tearing you hair out one minute, and suddenly you switch your attention from yourself to the chirping of a bird, and in that moment as you loose yourself the happiness comes flooding in. Socrates said: Be of good cheer, try simply to die better than you were born, and leave the rest to God.
Socrates and the Reader are in conversation. The reader has asked Socrates
to teach him about philosophy. After testing the reader’s knowledge, Socrates
has decided they should start again, right at the very beginning.
Reader: Socrates, times have changed, please keep it simple!
Socrates: I will do my best, let’s call upon the Gods for help! Oh Zeus, help us
to see our way through the many obstacles before us! Oh Aphrodite, help us to
feel our way toward the one truth we seek!
And now I will start from the beginning, I won’t assume any prior knowledge of
Ancient or Modern philosophy, and I will try to illustrate our ideas with real
world examples as frequently and as colourfully as I can.
Let’s begin by talking about the idea of ‘philosophy’ itself.
Tell me: What do you think philosophy is? What is its value to mankind?
R: I think most people would say that philosophy is a dry academic subject with
little relevance to real life. To be honest, I think it’s a lot of talk about
pointless unanswerable questions. Philosophy has been long since eclipsed by
other subjects, such as Physics, Psychology, History, Poetry etc. In summary, I
have to say that the value of modern philosophy seems to me to be zero, but I am
happy to listen to you try and persuade me otherwise!
S: What a commendable description, in a discussion between friends honesty is
welcomed. If you were to disguise your words for the sake of my feelings I might
misunderstand you, but with descriptions like this I run no risk!
Your description in fact reminds me of a film I once made. Did you see “Bill and
Ted’s Excellent Adventure” by any chance? If you did, can you remember what it
was about?
R: I did see that film Socrates. It was a very silly very funny 1980s American
high school comedy. Keanu Reeves played Ted, it was his first big part and I
think it launched his career.
Bill and Ted are “metal heads” who come across a time machine and travel back in
history collecting famous characters for their high school history project. They
pick up Napoleon, Billy the Kid, yourself (whom they call “So-crates”), Genghis
Kahn, Joan of Arc, Sigmund Freund, Beethoven and Abraham Lincoln.
Once they have picked up all these famous historical characters, they take them
to a shopping mall to experience modern America. Genghis Kahn trashes a sporting
goods shop testing out baseball bats, Beethoven improvises to Bon Jovi etc.
Eventually Bill and Ted manage to get everyone back to their school for the
history project presentation. The characters are brought onto the stage one by
one, giving speeches or demos of swordplay etc, it’s a storming success and they
pass their exam with flying colours.
S: Remember the film opens in 2688AD. The first scene is set in a futuristic
world full of crystals, it’s a utopian society based on peace, love,
cleanliness, and heavy metal. This marvellous new world order, we learn, was
founded hundreds of years ago by Bill and Ted.
Apparently Bill and Ted went on to start a rock band after finishing high
school. Eventually they developed a new musical sound which lifted the
consciousness of mankind and united the world. In 2688AD someone from the future
decides to pop back in time and help the “Great Ones” complete their high school
history project.
R: Didn’t the people from the future have to go back and help Bill and Ted pass
their history exam, or the future would turn out very differently?
S: Yes, it seems to me that early writers and filmmakers felt that if ever time
travel became possible it would be impossible to change the destiny of mankind.
Do you remember a film called “The Time Machine” with Guy Pearce? His fiancée
was killed, he tried to go back in time and rescue her but she always died
another way. Perhaps the idea here is the Gods control destiny, and you can’t
outwit them.
Then it became popular to think about people being able to alter history even in
the most outrageous ways. Remember “Back To Future II”? Somebody steals the time
travelling Delorean car and gives his teenage self a sports almanac, turning him
into the richest man in the world, and creating an alternative tyrannical
future. In this model the Gods don’t control fate, if they even exist, and
anything is possible.
Now ‘time tautologies’ are fashionable. The future happens because people in the
future made it possible, it’s a sort of captivatingly irrational conspiracy
theory. The Bill and Ted film takes that angle, as does the famous film
“Terminator”. Being a philosopher I find these tautologies frustrating, but lots
of people think they add intellectual depth.
So the plot turns on the idea that if Ted fails his history presentation, his
father will send him to an Alaskan Military Academy. If this happens Bill and
Ted will never be able to start their band and the new consciousness will not
develop. So Rufus, a special agent from 2688AD, wearing sunglasses of course, is
sent back in time to ensure that Ted does pass his exam. Also, because Ted is
failing so badly, he needs an exceptionally successful presentation, and
rounding up the most famous people in history guarantees him the highest
possible score. The world is apparently headed toward economic chaos, and if
Bill and Ted don’t get the new enlightened cosmopolitan philosophy embodied by
their music off the ground, the world will become a violent fascist tyranny.
R: Yes, I remember noticing that it wasn’t the Blade Runner or Robocop vision of
futuristic filth, chaos and anarchy. In both these films capitalism had turned
into tyrannical monopoly, and society revolved around it like rats on a ship.
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure instead featured the idealistic vision of
cleanliness, harmony and cohesion. One line really summed it up for me: “The
future’s so bright even the dirt is clean!”
So Bill and Ted were really the Alexander the Greats of 21st Century. Except
they conquered the world with heavy metal not Macedonian armies!
S: Well I don’t know how much you can remember about Ancient Greek philosophy,
but politics was one of my specialities. I was a utopian idealist too, in fact
one of my students, a chap called Aristotle, taught Alexander the Great. So one
night I was at the bar with the cast trying to persuade the director to think
about philosophy.
You can’t imagine what it’s like when you make movies. You rock up in some small
town and everybody and their aunt comes out to have a look. You go for a night
out at the local bar, for you it’s just a drink, but for the locals it’s the
most important thing that ever hit their town. Security are under instructions
to admit only the prettiest girls, Bill and Ted have their guitars out. Nothing
is too outrageous, the top people feel like Gods, and there is a never ending
supply of people happy to worship them or submit to them.
As you can imagine, it’s pretty hard to have a conversation about philosophy in
this kind of atmosphere. Nevertheless, one night the Gods were on my side and I
managed to hold everyone’s attention for at least five minutes.
I asked the director what he though philosophy was. He smiled at me in a
mischievous way and began telling me a story. He said that when he was at
university he had three friends. One was an artist, another a physicist, another
a philosopher. He said on nights out the artist drank, the physicist paid, and
the philosopher drove everyone nuts by asking them if there ‘really were’ any
drinks on the table.
Eventually they gave their philosopher friend an ultimatum: find something
useful to do or ‘bugger off’. So he tried to master the art of persuading
waitresses that the bill doesn’t exist- but he failed and was never seen of
again.
When the director had finished telling this story everyone fell about laughing.
Then Bill said: “Face it So-crates, no one cares about your theory of Forms”. To
which Ted said: “Haha, lets do a whole scene on ‘Is there a Form for Dirt?’”.
R: Poor old Socrates, at least you are getting lots of ‘screen time’ in this
book.
S: Yes, but is anyone paying attention? Anyway let me go on with the story.
There was, working with us, an old hippy cameraman called Bertie. He had studied
philosophy at university in his youth, and he took considerable offence to all
these jokes.
The conversation carried on as follows:
Bertie: Don’t you knuckle heads realize that Isaac Newton was a philosopher?
Newton’s work was called “The Mathematical Principles Of Natural Philosophy”. Do
you think that Isaac Newton was a fool?
Bill: Sorry dude, I guess Newton was OK.
Ted: Didn’t Newton try to turn lead into gold?
Bertie: No Ted, he was a Neo-Platonist Rosicrucian mystic, turning lead to gold
was just a metaphor for spiritual enlightenment.
But look guys, what I am saying is that as soon as definite knowledge concerning
any subject becomes possible, it stops being philosophy and becomes a separate
science. So the laws of mechanics are no longer part of philosophy. Likewise
long ago Immanuel Kant and other philosophers studied the human mind, but now
the human mind is left to psychologists. So to make fun of philosophers is to
ignore the fact that one day they might stumble onto the next big thing.
S: At this point in the conversation Bertie looked around. He was clearly having
an impact but there was still a lot of doubt in the air. So Bertie sort of
nodded his head in a meaningful way and took out this long rolled up cigarette.
He lit it, took a deep breath, and looked his opposition in the eye. The
conversation continued:
Bertie: Imagine philosophy as the study of dust. If you look hard enough you
will find dust everywhere, all things are covered in a layer of dust.
Philosophers peer into this dust and see things, like bits of insect or human
flesh. But then they find more dust on top of these things, and as they go
deeper and deeper the dust keeps on shrinking, the layer they study gets smaller
and smaller.
Haven’t you heard that many medicines are discovered by testing the chemicals in
soil samples, because dirt contains so many things. Likewise many secrets of the
universe are hidden in dust.
But it’s not just what they find in the dust that makes philosophy worthwhile.
The greatest benefit of philosophy is the effect that studying this disappearing
dust has on the people who study it.
Philosophers develop a new way of thinking, a way of thinking that spreads
through society like ink through water, from the philosophers to the people
around them, and from them to others, and so on.
To understand this sacred fruit of philosophical thinking, you have to imagine
all the people in the world who study real things instead of dust. Now you might
say to study real things is to know useful things and to be able to do useful
things, but for every positive there is a negative.
Those who live in the world of concrete loose their wings and grow strong legs
that keep them planted on the ground. To maintain balance a certain proportion
of society needs give up on practical things and live free.
To study dust is to elevate what doesn’t matter over what does matter, and learn
that what doesn’t matter doesn’t exist, nor can be known. The student of dust
frees himself from tradition, from convention, from opinion, and from all other
worldly things. In the philosopher you find an open mind, a mind without dogma,
a mind with detachment.
We need such men in society, so do not denigrate the study of dust, its value is
in its non-existence and intractability, so though it is invisible it is also
magical.
Bill: Dude, I heave heard many things, but nothing as bodacious as this. Be
excellent, party on, and long live the study of magical disappearing dust!
Ted: Why do we need to study dust to know nothing? That’s me already! For anyone
else, why don’t they just get a hold of some of that stuff that Bertie’s
smoking?
S: And so the conversation went. After Bertie’s magnificent speech I couldn’t
get a world in edgeways. Everyone went on and on about dust, and dirt, and sand,
and any other small thing they could think of. Did you notice the only speech I
got to do in the film was about dust?!
R: Socrates you sound as if you don’t approve. Are you suggesting Bertie is
wrong? Are you suggesting that philosophy is any more than a journey into
disappearing dust? Are you suggesting that, leaving aside new scientific genres
like Newtonian Physics, the fruit of philosophy is any more than the journey
itself? Are you suggesting that the observations philosophers make might have
some practical value?
S: Well I like the idea the idea of philosophy as a journey away from dogma, but
unlike Bertie I believe philosophy can answer important questions about human
life. In fact, Bertie is what I used to call a “Sophist”, my entire life was
devoted to disproving sophist philosophers and reawakening idealism. Let me give
you an example of the sort of thing I think philosophy is:
Bill and Ted supposedly changed the world by developing a new musical form,
whereas Alexander The Great employed armies. But I am not a historian who
focuses on whether or not the struggle between the Puritans and the Catholics
was won by Puritan music or Puritan armies. Instead I am a philosopher
interested in the ideas behind the opposing tunes or visions. I like to think
about the question: What was the difference between Puritan and Catholic
psychology, and which one was more in harmony with human needs at the time in
question?
The Puritans began triumphing over the Catholics in the early 1600s. Now in the
run up to the 1600s world population had recovered to pre-plague levels.
Increasing population strained food supply, and the Mini Medieval Ice Age only
compounded the problem. If you look back at history you see a great number of
famines across the world at this time. One particularly bad famine in Russia
wiped out a third of the population.
Now Saint Francis of Assisi articulated a very passive vision of Christianity,
he threw off his clothes and begged for scraps of food, he learned to make the
most of what he had rather than seek more. He was not at all corrupt, his vision
was genuinely spiritual; but the idea of personal surrender conflicted with the
prevailing challenges of life, man needed a more aggressive approach to survive;
and the Catholic Church became increasingly torn apart by doubt, cynicism and
corruption. Out of this vacuum the Protestants emerged, they built a whole new
vision of Christianity which revolved around hard working communal triumph
against adversity. Historians have noticed that the countries which embraced
puritan ideas became more successful economically than their Catholic fellows.
In fact, this contrast is still evident today.
Now Bertie would say that neither Saint Francis of Assisi, nor Martin Luther
were right, truth is unknowable. But an Ancient Greek or Eastern Philosopher
looks at it differently. We say that Saint Francis of Assisi and Martin Luther's
viewpoints are not unknowable, they are psychological perspectives that can be
broken down into various elements. In fact, for people who have learnt to break
down viewpoints, it's immediately obvious that Saint Francis of Assisi and
Martin Luther are in fact sort of yin and yang forms of Christianity. Perhaps
even now, before you have even begun studying philosophy, you can, if you
concentrate, pick up upon this basic observation?
R: Socrates perhaps I can. I think I can vaguely see that Saint Francis of
Assisi is passive, and Martin Luther is active. That they are two forms of some
sort of yin yang like duality.
S: Good, in that case you have already advanced beyond Bertie, you are beginning
to grasp basics of philosohpy. Now notice that neither of these alternative
psychological perspectives is better or worse that the other in of itself. For a
prisoner or slave Saint Francis of Assisi's idea of appreciating what you have
works, for a colonizer Martin Luther's idea works.
In a sense then, for those who believe there is such as thing as a true way of
being, philosophy begins by learning that truth exists not in being but instead
in becoming, truth exists only in a functional sense. Charles Sanderson Pierce,
a 20th Century American mathematician who studied Ancient Greek Philosophy,
invented the word "pragmatism" to convey this idea. Today pragmatism is often
described as the vital different between Eastern and Western philosophy. In the
West politicians fight about what is right and wrong in a sort of timeless way,
they try to hook voters with emotional messages. In China the politicians
scratch their heads and say there is no right and wrong, what are these crazy
people talking about? Truth can't be hooked, it must be netted!
R: Ah, so that's why you, Socrates, claimed to know nothing, yet still answered
many things.
S: Yes that's pragmatism. Now let's try to go a little further still. Philosophy
becomes a sort of complex multifaceted psychological game. For example, Plato's
Symposium begins with four speeches about the nature of love from four different
perspectives. If you are totally unfamiliar with his work it all just washes
over you or sounds absurd, you need to dig down behind what he is saying and
extract all the concepts. The philosophy is as much about the difference between
the speeches as it is the content of the speeches themselves. Plato is full of
hints or jokes to guide the reader. Think of his work as like a brilliant play
or film filled with meaningful coincidences. For example in Plato's Symposium
Aritophanes has the hiccups because he is represents the 'Air Principle' and the
the speeches were called for in the wrong order. He cures the hiccups by
sneezing, because hiccups and sneezing are opposite side of the duality, and the
last speakers has just been talking about how balancing psychological energies
is critical to health etc. If you weren't concentrating the comments about
hiccups would just fly by as a sort of meaningless background radiation event.
Plato don't flag anything, he makes the reader work extremely hard.
So philosophy is not what people sometimes call "Cartesian logic", it's all about
what people today sometimes call "aesthetic paradoxes". But philosophy is not unjustified divine inspiration
or intuition etc,
it's really a sort of highly advanced psychological mathematics which has yet to
be properly formalised. In Plato's Parmenides, for example, much of the dialogue
is organized into sections which take perfectly opposite viewpoints, and then
drill down to prove each position self-contradictory. Some Western philosophers
get so confused by the dialogue they think the whole thing is a joke designed to
demonstrate the uselessness of philosophy, but of course it's just a very
detailed and abstract demonstration of an important duality at work.
Reading Plato takes a great deal skill, think of it as the philosophical
equivalent of the Bible. It's a work one should devote one's life to, reading a
few pages each night, taking notes, thinking about the ideas all day. Even the
seemly simplest dialogues are extremely profound, over the years ones
understanding evolves. In this little book our goal is just to open your mind to
the sort of basic philosophical perspective readers of Plato need to begin.
R: How do your arch enemies the sophists fit into all this?
S: The sophist is not pragmatic, he rejects the concept of wisdom completely and
says whatever is, is a truth unto itself. The sophist is a sort of zealot who
has lost his faith in his primitive religion and transferred it to whatever he
feels inside himself. He says its OK to be whatever you like, he doesn't say you
must analyse what you are not, and try to become what is for the best. His faith
in his own urges leads him ever deeper into himself, into darkness not light. As
he surrenders to his impulses, he becomes an increasingly blinded brutish slave
of his lower nature, a tyrannical monster of abrupt emotion and instinct.
Don't worry if this all sounds terrible complicated, we will return to it.
Anyway, you can probably sense what I am saying, the sophists are like teenagers
who have discarded the moral intuitions of their parents, but have not yet
evolved a more advanced understanding of human life. The sophists are not wise,
they are extremely dangerous creatures degenerating in a vicious circle, and
they will destroy the world if their descent goes unchecked.
R: Goodness, this all sounds terribly dangerous.
S: In Ancient Greece there was a time when man believed in religion, but
gradually it went out of fashion, especially in Ancient Athens. A sort of
sophist like post modern nihilism took hold of society, and Ancient Greece began
failing socially, politically and economically.
Some people said that there is no justice except the interest of the stronger.
As time progressed, a poor traveller could find himself on a lonely road, and if
he came across an isolated tavern, the inn keeper would take a careful look at
him, and decide how much money he has, and how hungry he is, and charge
accordingly. There was no justice except what the inn keeper could get away
with, nor fair price except what the market would bare.
Other people focused on throwing off cultural taboos and traditions and
embracing individual freedom. As time progressed, theatre goers gave up on Homer
and Sophocles, and playwrights such as Aristophanes lampooned idealism. The
Athenians stopped thinking of sexual promiscuity as shameful and homosexuality
was flaunted. In Plato's Laws homosexuality is described as a dangerous activity
that creates a powerful lust in individuals and is better outlawed. Both I, and
my students Plato and Aristotle, were appalled not enthralled by the
transformations taking place in Ancient Greek culture.
In Plato's Republic I describe Athenian democracy as a place in which the minds
of the citizens became so sensitive that the least vestige of restraint was
resented as intolerable, till finally, in their determination to have no master
they came disregard all laws written or unwritten. So the Athenian search for
freedom turned in on itself, men became veritable slaves to their most primitive
urges, and philosophers who spoke about justice and virtue were ridiculed or
done away with.
The city state of Athens had once prided itself on puritan values and
intellectual and aesthetic idealism. Yet it began subjugating neighbouring
states in increasingly unjust ways, its great wealth and power was built on the
exploitation of its neighbours. The Athenians lost their stomach for hand to
hand combat and ran their empire with mercenary armies. When states rebelled
Athenian democracy would vote on what to do. Shall we punish them by turning
them into slaves, or just ethnically cleanse the entire territory? Your modern
world knows little of war and chaos, how to treat dangerous or failing states is
extremely challenging, democracy couldn't cope. Decision making became as
chaotic as it was unjust.
Eventually the very fabric of Athenian society unravelled in individualism,
materialism, hedonism, naivety, violence and other social ills. Athenian
intellectuals such as myself were horrified by the decline and although I
criticised Sparta for its traditionalism, all good men idealized Sparta's
courage, lack of materialism and cohesive idealism. Sparta was not a populist
democracy, screened candidates were elected for life on the basis of their
perceived virtue, so policymaking didn't slavishly follow public opinion. The
Oracle at Delphi predicted the destruction of Athens by Sparta, and said the
Gods will rejoice when Athens falls. Despite the prediction Athens went to war
with Sparta, and in a terrible thirty year conflict the likes of which the Greek
world had never known before, Athens lost.
Historians today like to imagine Ancient Athens in 430BC as the height of
Ancient Greek civilization, but Sodom and Gomorrah is a more sensible image. Nor
was Athens famous for philosophers, at least before myself. Great philosophers
are often born in stony ground just before the flood. So it was with me.
The famous Ancient Greek sophist called Protagoras said:
(1) There is no truth
(2) Even if there is truth, it can not be known
(3) Even if it can be known, it can not be communicated
(4) Even if it can be communicated, there is no incentive to do so.
But if this were true there would be no love, nor feeling of love, nor word for
love, nor reason to love. Yet is not the wise man one who is more aware of love,
more able to communicate it, and more devoted to communicating it? Do you not
see this absurd sophist nihilism is the philosophy of the beast, the very
antithesis of human evolution?
Born into the failing society of Athens and thinking about all this, I realized
that the reason people believed in all these things was individualism. These
ideas allowed the anarcho-capitalist materialists to get away with whatever they
liked, no matter how unjust. These ideas protected the liberal anarchists from
insecurity, because they could believe whatever they liked, no matter how absurd
or offensive, and no one could call them wrong.
R: So you built a new idealistic philosophy?
S: That right, I turned the philosophy of dust on its head, I built a philosophy
of not the least importance, but rather the most importance! Aristotle kindly
credited me with killing Sophist philosophy stone dead, he said I was the first
really successful philosopher of object thought, meaning the first philosopher
who used communicable understanding to analyze human nature and rigorously
answer moral dilemmas and other human issues.
R: Oh dear, now you want me to feel insecure because I know nothing about the
most important subject in the world.
S: Well you don’t need to- because even though it is the most important subject
in the world, the very pursuit and cultivation of wisdom (or what Eastern
mystics call enlightenment), no one knows anything about it!
R: That’s impossible, if everyone is ignorant of the most important stuff in the
world how could anyone function?
S: Do you think that when a cat hunts it understands what it is doing?
R: No, it hunts by instinct when it is hungry and it sees prey.
S: And human beings can do all sorts of marvellous things too. They are a lot
smarter than cats, but do they have any idea what they are actually doing here?
R: No, I guess not. Such things are said to be unknowable.
S: They are not unknowable, they are just said to be unknowable. Human life is
the evolution toward figuring such things out.
R: Well Socrates you were kicking around the world two and half thousand years
ago, and your student Plato wrote a great big book about all your ideas. I
personally haven’t spent much time reading it, but if you wrote all this down
how come you are not the world’s most famous person?
S: Alfred North Whitehead is arguably the most famous 20th Century Platonist
Philosopher. Whitehead famously said that all modern Western philosophy consists
of no more than “a series of footnotes to Plato”. Yet he also said that the
basic scheme of thought underlying Plato’s work remains a mystery, how Plato
arrived at the ideas scatted across his pages remains an enigma.
Now in this book we will set out the basic scheme again in a more contemporary
fashion, and hopefully this time you will get it.
R: You are asking me to seriously believe that all philosophy since you and your
student Plato is a just series of footnotes to your ideas?
S: And a most trivial set of footnotes at that! As we will see later in this
book, modern philosophers don’t understand even the concept of utility. Plato
opens with a utilitarian definition of government legitimacy in his Laws. But
then he points out that definitions of utility such as economic growth, material
contentment, or military power are all flawed. They are only imperfectly, and
certainly not monotonically, correlated with the real concept of utility. The
true measure of utility, the true target of government, which government must
aim at “like an archer”, is very different indeed.
Now many people today say that science and ethics are irreconcilable, so
utilitarianism is impossible and government must transcend reason. But I bring
together what you call ‘beauty’ and ‘reason’, solving your famous dilemma
between ethics and science. Without this realization philosophy can not even
begin, yet modern philosophers have no idea what either beauty or reason are,
nor how they are connected.
R: This is too radical!
S: Yes Platonist philosophy is radical. It open’s with Plato’s Apology, a
dialogue which described me, Socrates, as the wisest man in Greece. Plato
describes me as a Philosopher King, a person whose God like understanding has
made him perfectly principled and perfectly devoted to communal good, a person
who has conquered all human weakness and individualism, a person who lives in a
state of enlightened bliss.
Forget everything Bertie told you about philosophy. Think of me, Socrates, as
the Jesus or Buddha of Ancient Greece, a world saviour with a new vision of
human life, politics and God, not a stuffy old academic who studied dust! After
the Apology students of Plato should move onto the Phaedo, a dialogue which
contains one of my many proofs of the existence of God.
Plato's Symposium describes the words of Socrates as like the hallow statues of
the prophet Silenius... At first they strike you as ridiculous, he is always
talking about pack asses, blacksmiths, cobblers, tanners etc; he's always making
the same tired old points in the same tired old words. If you are foolish, or
simply unfamiliar with his words, you find it impossible not to laugh at his
arguments. But if you see them when they open up like the statues, if you go
behind the surface; you'll realize that no other arguments make any other sense,
that they are worthy of a God, and of the greatest importance to anyone who
wants to become a good man.
Modern philosophers steeped in relativism and scepticism fail to understand
Plato because they fail to open their mind to the vastness of his vision, they
refuse to open the statues because to do so is an egotistical challenge to their
sophist relativism. Plato is enigmatic, partly because the subject matter is
challengingly abstract, demanding a less straight line approach, and also
because it contains dangerous ideas which could destabilize society and which
are consequently hidden from unsophisticated eyes. Nevertheless it is not as
challenging as Alfred North Whitehead claims, the basic problem with the modern
world is that abstract thinking is still in its infancy.
Look even Immanuel Kant, a famous German philosopher by the way, said that
philosophy begins with an understanding of the human mind. Kant made some
observations, which he probably took from Plato, the world rejected them, and
the subject was dropped. Today the study of the human mind is left to
psychologists, but psychology has not answered this question. Immanuel Kant was
not wrong, your modern world has not even started studying philosophy.
Real philosophy has been hovering in the background, written up in Ancient
Greek, passed down through history, waiting patiently for you to understand it,
now your time has come!
R: What about the Chinese Sages?
S: Yes they were in another league. But Ancient Chinese philosophy is not
understood today, not even in China, nor has it been properly preserved and
passed down through history. Its paradoxical format also makes it virtually
impossible to study without a living master.
R: But our society has evolved, we have developed marvellous new technologies,
you didn’t have iPads in Ancient Greece or Ancient China!
S: Ah, you have forgotten the mythic story of Prometheus who was punished by the
Gods for unleashing the trinity of intelligence into humanity. He was punished
because the exercise of intelligence can cause human wisdom to regress. Haven’t
you heard of unwise scientists, or unwise poets, or unwise designers? The iPad
is not a medallion denoting wisdom.
R: Is there any proof of all this?
S: The best proof comes of course by understanding my philosophy. But it’s easy
enough to give a logical empirical proof of the regression of human wisdom, even
to those without any philosophical understanding.
R: Amazing, please elaborate!
S: All we have to do is prove that people in past were far wiser about human
nature than today. Don’t you think that’s obvious?
R: No, modern psychologists claim to understand human nature better than
everyone in the past. It’s not just about medicating people, they claim other
stuff as well.
S: Well modern psychologists don’t exist in a vacuum. If they understand human
nature better than everyone in the past it must have rubbed off on modern
writers. But do you really think any modern writer can hold a candle up to
Shakespeare’s understanding of human nature?
R: Probably not.
S: What about Mozart, is his music far in advance of all modern composition?
R: That’s true, but I am not sure how beauty and wisdom are connected.
S: Well let me give you a really simple example. Clearly men and women have
different outlooks on life. This statement has nothing to do with superiority or
inferiority, it is just a simple factual acknowledgement of a psychological
difference. It is not important in this discussion what the difference between
men and women actually is, all we need to comprehend is that there is a
difference. Do you agree?
R: Of course, just pick up a copy of “Men are Mars and Women are from Venus”.
S: Are men and women different because of biology or socialization? I mean if we
took a new born boy and girl, and put them into separate cages, and fed them
mechanically, and came back after a few years, would they still betray
fundamental psychological sexual characteristics, or is what makes boy and girl
psychology all down to the way we bring them up.
R: Of course they would be different. Boys are full of testosterone, we know
that when body builders inject themselves with these hormones they act
differently. It increases sex drive and levels of aggression etc. It doesn’t
stop there, brain scans show men a women have different shaped brains etc. The
differences are biological.
S: What if you didn’t have access to that scientific data. If we went back in
time before that data was known. Your argument no longer exists, does that mean
you wouldn’t know?
R: No Socrates. It’s obvious that women and men are psychologically different
biologically. Look I have two cats, one male and one female. I didn’t dress them
differently, but I can tell you the boy is always fighting and the girl prefers
to sit on my lap in the kitchen!
S: Is there any other way apart from looking at the animal kingdom.
R: I think the fact of a biological psychological difference between men and
women is obvious, maybe you can see it just by looking at them. Boys are
biologically frogs and snails and girls are biologically sugar and spice, you
would have to have Asperger's Syndrome to claim differently.
S: Yet during the 1970s the so called great minds of Western psychology, biology
and philosophy became concerned with the reason for the difference between the
sexes. Two points of view were espoused: one group claimed the difference was
biological, the other group claimed the difference was sociological.
By the end of the 1970s the nurture viewpoint was not just mainstream, anyone
who dared to rejected it was virtually branded a fascist.
Western psychology honestly and completely believed that women are feminine and
men are masculine because of their upbringing, not their biology. This was the
universally accepted viewpoint of Western academia. They retained this viewpoint
until the discovery, in the 1980s, of hormonal influences on psychology.
R: It is insane, but they wanted to believe it for political reasons.
S: Yes, of course, they wanted to believe it because it gave them pleasure to
believe it, and they just gave into themselves. But what you are saying is that
politically correct ideology turned the intellectuals of the day into Asperger's
Syndrome robots.
R: Yes I see that.
S: But it wasn’t just the academics who believed this insanity, they convinced
almost the entire population. There was hardly a person in the world who
screamed “the emperor’s got no clothes!”
R: So we have become a world of zombies.
S: Now imagine the Chinese sage, how does he compare with Western academics?
According to Chinese Astrology human development follows a surprising cycle. For
example, 2010 was the year of tiger, a year in which powerful ideologies clash.
The next year, 2011, is the year of the rabbit, a time of shifting alliances
based on the outcome of the previous years challenges.
I have been studying modern current affairs on my heavenly iPad, and in case you
are not aware of it 2010 was a seminal year. In Ancient Greece when I was a
philosopher liberal individualistic Athens was destroyed by the idealistic
disciplined Spartans, in 2010 the theme is, of course, America and China.
In early 2010 the widely respected historian Niall Ferguson wrote an article
saying: "I am trying to remember now where it was, and when it was, that it hit
me. Was it during my first walk along the Bund in Shanghai in 2005? Was it amid
the smog and dust of Chonqing, listening to a local Communist party official
describe a vast mound of rubble as the future financial centre of south-west
China? That was last year, and somehow it impressed me more than all the
synchronised razzamatazz of the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing. Or was it
at Carnegie Hall only last month, as I sat mesmerised by the music of Angel Lam,
the dazzlingly gifted young Chinese composer who personifies the Orientalisation
of classical music? I think maybe it was only then that I really got the point
about this decade, just as it was drawing to a close: that we are living through
the end of 500 years of western ascendancy."
So as it happens, not only was 2010 the year America lost an ideological war
with China, 2011 is shaping up as the year a humiliated America begins loosing
allies en masse (Eg in the Middle East).
This is not a proof of Chinese Astrology, but imagine for a moment that this
theory was true, or some similar such theory. Now can you comprehend of the
degree of insight into human nature it would have taken to form this theory?
School teachers looking out at their kids might feel every year has a different
personality, but to work it all out and put it all together is a monumental
achievement. This is a level of awareness than leaves even Shakespeare in the
dust.
Now compare this incredible sensitivity with the 1970s academics who debated
whether or not men and women are different by nature or nurture.
Do you see, if Chinese Astrology were true, the scale of modern regression is
utterly and completely staggering?
R: This idea of a regression in wisdom is an amazing theory.
S: It is not a theory! I just gave you an empirical proof of it with the 1970s
nature vs nurture debate. If you can turn a blind eye even to empirical logic,
how will you fair with the complexities to come?
R: What about our religions?
S: Suppose this thing I call philosophy exists, what kind of questions can it
answer?
R: Ultimately even questions about the meaning of life.
S: And which profession needs these answers most of all?
R: Religion?
S: And what is the function of this religion?
R: To tell us how to lead better lives.
S: And what would that achieve?
R: It would build a better world.
S: And who is in charge of the world?
R: The politicians.
S: Then why are politics and religion separate?
R: Well the Christian religion teaches “turn the other cheek” and “all men are
equal” and “love thy neighbour”. But these ideas don’t actually work in
practice, they don’t meet the needs of politicians. If we took them seriously we
would build a socialist utopia, and the Communists proved that doesn’t work.
S: Which means?
R: That the Christian religion doesn’t actually know much about ethics at least
in practice.
S: So their claim to wisdom is?
R: Basically false.
S: And not just basically false, we see over the course of this book that
Christian philosophy is in fact hopelessly false.
But this point about political failure is a critical one. All true philosophers,
such as myself and Confucius, were masters of politics. The hardest questions
are political questions, anyone who claims to be wise but can not answer the
life and death dilemmas of politics is lying.
R: So this book is about politics as much as philosophy?
S: The two are inseparable.
R: So Socrates you are here to try again? It’s the same goal as Bill and Ted,
but you will teach us by words instead of heavy metal? You are going to
enlighten us and make our world into a paradise?
S: That’s the plan.
Socrates: Tell me, what jumps into your mind when someone
says Eastern Philosophy.
Reader: How about reincarnation. Did you guys believe in that?
S: Absolutely, historians believe that the theory of reincarnation took off in
India and Ancient Greece more or less simultaneously during the sixth century
BC. Plato mentions reincarnation on many occasions, for example the “Myth of Er”,
which appears at the very end of Plato’s Republic, describes what you would call
today a “near death experience”. A soldier presumed to have been killed in
battle suddenly reawakens moments before his body is cremated. He then describes
his journey in the afterlife, including heavenly planes, reincarnation, karma
etc.
One of Plato’s best descriptions of reincarnation is found in his Phaedo. He
describes the physical world, or mortal world, as a sort of prison or school
into which we are born, and to which we return after death. At death we leave
the body and go up above the earth, we see the earth from space as a beautiful
spherical ball of three colours, and we meet our personal guide who is a spirit
who has been assigned to look after us. He takes us to be judged, then we spend
time in the heavenly worlds before eventually returning to earth. Those who are
deemed to have led an extremely pious life no longer need to reincarnate on
Earth. Those who have purified themselves sufficiently by the study of
philosophy go onto an even finer heavenly level. Man should repeat to himself
like an incantation: I am a spiritual being, bodily pleasure and ornamentation
are of no concern and may do more harm than good, let me be of good cheer and
remember that true pleasure is simply dieing better than I was born.
R: But what about Hades? I though the Ancient Greeks believed in crazy legends
and worshiped Dionysus the God of Wine. The history books I read didn’t mention
reincarnation or new age ideas, they had stories about murderous Gods and wooden
horses.
S: Sure we once had our traditional beliefs, but our thinking evolved. All
civilizations evolve, you can’t judge a civilization by its ancient myths!
Think about the evolution of thinking in your modern Western world. In the very
early days the Christian mystics didn’t have a complicated belief system, they
were just inspired by God. Then Christian philosophy began solidifying and the
gospel developed. Today the Christian gospel is regarded as allegorical by
average men, but your intellectuals have long since called Christian philosophy
completely absurd. For example, Friedrich Nietzsche said the idea of loving
Shepherd God died with Darwinian’s Theory of Evolution, the world is built on
pain, and pain is what makes us stronger. If God exists he or it is as heartless
as evolution.
You mention Dionysus the God of Wine, and it does sound silly to modern ears to
associate religion and wine. But even these very early ideas were not, in fact,
as silly as you think. Early mystics believed in untrammelled divine
inspiration, intoxication is a way to describe that process. The very early
Dionysians were pretty raw, they danced around naked in moonlight etc. But I
don’t think they were, in fact, so far from the spirit of early Christianity, or
even your 1960s hippy flower power movement. Of course capitalists call hippies
soft in the head and the heart, and things did evolve. The Dionysian religion
became increasingly traditional, then puritanical.
Then, in the sixty century BC, Ancient Greek thinking underwent a dramatic sea
change. The philosophy of Orphism replaced Dionysianism, it taught precisely the
sort of very dry intellectual detachment you today associated with Zen Buddhism
or Confucianism.
R: So Socratic and Platonic philosophy is in the more Eastern like Orphic
tradition, not the earlier Dionysian tradition. And the history books I read
don’t reflect the evolution of Ancient Greek thinking, they just pick up on
earlier stuff.
S: That’s right.
R: But many people today would say that reincarnation is just as silly as heaven
and hell, it’s all a lot of superstition.
S: In the Phaedo Plato writes: “No sensible man would insist that these things
are as I have described them, but I think it is fitting for a man to risk the
belief that this, or something like this, is true”.
In other words reincarnation is what your scientists would call a model, or what
your film directors would call a meaningful story. Sensible men don’t get
dogmatic about reincarnation, but it’s an interesting concept which seems to
have a lot of useful implications inside it.
R: Like what?
S: Well what’s the biggest question in philosophy?
R: I guess how to be happy.
S: Yes, and reincarnation offers insights into what that might mean. For
example, reincarnation agues that there is a thing called ‘wisdom’, and the
pursuit and cultivation of wisdom is the real source of human happiness.
R: Ah the old mystic’s idea that money doesn’t really make us happy, that there
is something more, that true happiness is found in enlightenment. It’s the sort
of metaphysical equivalent of the mountain climber who says real joy is climbing
not a warm bed and a full belly. It sounds marvellous, but most of us find
mountain climbing extremely painful and get our thrills watching other people do
it on TV.
S: Exactly, reincarnation claims that what the soul really craves is challenge
and growth. Mindless television is not fulfilling, inside every couch potato is
a soul desperately trying to escape. At first the lessons are gentle, but the
more stubborn the couch potato the more brutally the soul pushes, it will kill
him if it has to.
R: Terrifying! The world is full of couch potatoes slowly going mad.
S: It’s what you call karma, but from looked at, so to speak, from inside out,
not outside in.
R: Hum, I will think about that.
S: Fine, so in this chapter let’s talk about the idea of reincarnation in the
broadest possible way. We will consider it from both the individual and social
point of view, building a model that works both individually and politically. So
the end result is happiness everywhere.
R: Yes, I see how that fits in with the point you made in the first chapter. You
said that any religion or philosophy that cannot answer the ethical dilemmas of
society is not genuine. So it’s not just about reincarnation, it’s about utopia.
You need a model of happiness that works at all levels.
But it sounds to me as if you are presupposing the existence of a God who has
nicely designed a world in which happiness is possible. Capitalists, for
example, believe in endless pain and struggle not happy utopia.
S: Come now, even Bill and Ted believed in idealism.
R: Yes I suppose everyone dreams of utopia, but I find it hard to reconcile with
stories of Ancient Greece. Didn’t you guys keep slaves?
S: In Plato’s Laws it says anyone who keeps slaves should get up earlier than
his slaves, should go to bed later than his slaves, and should work harder than
his slaves. Think of slavery as no more than adults caring for children.
Furthermore, laws which are not established for the good of the whole state are
bogus laws, and when they favour particular sections of the community, their
authors are not citizens but party-men... those who make genuine laws are
usually referred to as 'rulers', but I call them 'servants', not to mint a new
expression, but because I believe the success or failure of the state hinges on
this point more than any other...
R: I get the idea, a man who keeps slaves is a servant not a ruler. But a
servant to whom, the slaves themselves or society in general?
Sparta, for example was so popular with Greek intellectuals, even Athenians such
as yourself, that even invented a world for it - Laconophilia – love of Sparta!
Since the 1940s, however, Sparta has gone right out of fashion- it reminds us of
violent nationalism.
Today Laconophilia is confined to film directors. They love retelling the story
of “The 300 Spartans”, the most fearless, most self sacrificing, most
disciplined, most idealistic warriors that ever lived, blah, blah, blah.
But for all this wonderful talk the Spartans didn’t treat their slaves well,
they called them “herlots”, and ritually mistreated, humiliated and even
slaughtered them! I hope Sparta is not your vision of utopia!
S: You forget the huge military challenges Ancient Greek city states faced, you
have never needed to fight for your country in hand to hand combat. Sparta can
not be easily understood by people today because people today know no hardship.
Nor can Sparta be compared with Hitler and Mao, it was the antithesis of naive
revolutionary populism.
Nevertheless, whilst many philosophers have admired the Spartans for their
communal idealism, I, for one, criticised them for traditionalism and
nationalism. My philosophical message wasn’t just for the Athenians, it was the
Spartans too. Alas Sparta failed to reform, it remained insular, and the real
flowering of Ancient Greek utopian philosophy only occurred under Alexander.
Alexander wasn’t traditional and nationalistic, he was cosmopolitan. Alexander's
speech at Opis in 324 BC, otherwise known as Alexander's Oath, given about one
year before his death, testifies to his cosmopolitan idealism. The main points
which he made in this speech are as follows:
• Now that the wars are over, I wish you to find happiness through peace.
• May all mortals live from now on in harmony, as one nation, for the sake of
common prosperity.
• Consider the world as your country, with common laws, governed by men of
merit, regardless of race.
• I do not distinguish between Greeks and barbarians, as do the narrow-minded.
• I am not interested in the country or race of origin of people.
• I distinguish people only according to their virtues.
• I wish you to be my partners and not just members of our commonwealth.
Of course in reality Alexander’s cosmopolitan empire crumbled after his death.
He didn’t build these ideas into society, most other Greeks considered
foreigners to be barbarians and treated them as such, and a few years later they
paid for their lack of idealism by becoming Roman slaves. Also, Alexander was
himself an impetuous youth who took Aristotle’s ideas and bit off far more than
he could chew. Nevertheless, it was an inspiring moment in world history.
R: To be honest, I don’t think democracy today would go for cosmopolitan. The
idea of sharing all one’s natural resources and rights with the world at large
sounds pretty un-sellable.
But it’s very interesting to think about these theoretical endpoints of human
evolution. I used to think of reincarnation from a purely individual
perspective, not from a social perspective as well.
But what about the fact that people don’t remember their past lives? If you
don’t remember something it doesn’t make a difference to you, so even if
reincarnation existed it would not matter, making it a pointless theory.
S: If you don’t remember something it doesn’t make a difference to you- that’s a
funny idea! Come now, they say that most people can’t remember anything before
they were four. Shall we then keep our children in sound proof boxes, and cut
out all the mess and hard work of childcare! Do you think it would make no
difference to them? Do you really think what we can’t remember has no effect on
us? Haven’t you heard of the unconscious mind, the idea that our conscious
thought processes and memory are just the tip of the iceberg!
R: Sorry Socrates, that was a silly complaint.
S: In fact, as the Phaedo describes, one of the intuitive reasons to believe in
reincarnation is that the “Tabula rasa”, or “blank slate” idea is as absurd as
the idea we talked about earlier, namely the idea once popular with Western
scientists that men and women are different by nurture instead of nature. The
“blank slate” theory says that everything we know is derived as a consequence of
sense perception observations, and until we start experiencing things we are
like a computer without a program.
The first modern Western Philosopher to pick up on this argument was Immanuel
Kant. He talked about the idea of “Synthetic Judgment a priori”, he said the
laws of mathematics, for example, are buried in the mind at birth, they are not
derived from empirical observation of the world around us. He said the sense
perceptions would not work with this synthetic judgement a priori.
In other words man is not born as a blank slate, he comes into this world with
knowledge inside him waiting to be applied and uncovered.
In the Phaedo I said: “before we began to see or hear or use the other senses we
must somewhere have gained a knowledge of abstract or absolute equality, in
order to begin comparing the equals which we perceive by the senses.” Or, if you
like, we can’t have a chicken without an egg.
Also: “When people are questioned, if you put the questions well, they answer
correctly of themselves about everything; and yet if they had not within them
some knowledge and right reason, they could not do this. And that this is so is
shown most clearly if you take them to mathematical diagrams or anything of that
sort.”
R: You mean in the same way animals have instinct, humans have the laws of
mathematics and physics and language and many other things embedded inside them
awaiting to be utilized?
S: But the difference is that humans evolve in a way animals don’t. Animals are
more timeless, humans seem to bring much more with them. For example, language
took a long time to develop, but now it comes naturally and rapidly to man.
Likewise many other skills including writing and mathematics now come far more
easily than they once did.
So instead of talking about instinct lets talk about our unconscious mind. The
power of the newly born unconscious does not on its own suggest reincarnation,
it could also come out of something like Carl Jung’s idea of the “collective
unconscious”. But the special gifts some are born with hint at something like
previous lives.
As Henry Ford put it: "I adopted the theory of reincarnation when I was 26
[years old]. Genius is experience. Some seem to think that it is a gift or
talent, but [I think] it is the fruit of long experience in many [past] lives."
Of course, there are lots of other arguments, for example the stories recalled
by those who have had “out of body experiences”, and the “near dead experience”
described in the aforementioned Myth of Er is but one of these.
R: But, there is the problem of increasingly population. According to
statisticians there are more people alive today than have ever lived before.
That makes reincarnation impossible!
S: Reincarnation does have serious problems, but that’s not one of them. There
are two obvious solutions, think about it for a moment and tell me what the most
obvious answer is…
R: I guess the most obvious answer is that not everyone has a past life.
S: Of course, even the “Myth of Er” talks about lots of new souls incarnating
for the first time. Since the goal of reincarnation is to escape the cycle of
earthly rebirth, without new souls we would have a constantly decreasing global
population.
R: But that creates another problem. If wise souls are dropping out all the
time, and population is expanding because new souls are coming on board all the
time, the world is not really evolving, it’s going backwards. Also the contrast
between the new people and the old people would be pretty dramatic. It would
make for a very disjointed world.
S: Let’s not get too involved in the mechanical detail of reincarnation at this
point. Let’s just talk about the idea in a broad philosophical way. For example,
Nietzsche used the idea of reincarnation as a thought experiment to argue that
suffering and loss are good.
R: Ah the famous Nietzsche idea that “What doesn’t kill you, makes you
stronger”.
S: That’s right, we touched on this same point a moment ago. The evolutionary
utility that pain serves points to a philosophical inconsistency between the
Christian model of a loving God and the evolutionary reality of earthly life,
and the philosophical inconsistency is solved by the reincarnation model.
R: But the Ancient Greeks didn’t know the theory of evolution, so they couldn’t
have made this Nietzschen argument connecting biological evolution and
reincarnation.
S: The Ancient Greeks were extremely talented big picture thinkers who guessed
many things such as the fact that matter is made out of tiny atoms surrounded by
space. They also developed a primitive theory of biological evolution which
included the idea of unfit species dying out.
R: That’s incredible!
S: I am not so sure, I think biological evolution is an intuitively obvious
idea.
R: Really?
S: Look when Darwin’s theory of evolution was announced it spread like wildfire.
In fact, it spread far faster through the masses than through the scientific
community. The masses didn’t understand it, in those early days even the
biologists didn’t even understand it, genetics hadn’t even been invented, yet
the theory just clicked inside people. Basically Darwin waved his hand and
everyone was hooked, he didn’t net them with proof. Why? Because evolution is a
deeply appealing philosophically intuitive idea.
Likewise the intuitively appealing theory of reincarnation is that mankind
evolves into God, or something along those lines. Today, seeing how modern
technology is making man more powerful, it is much easier to imagine such an
endpoint, so I think it is much easier for people to grasp the theory of
reincarnation today.
R: You mean mankind actually evolves into God, mankind becomes omniscient and
omnipotent etc?
S: Into God or something God like, it doesn't matter.
Notice that one of the big philosophical contrasts between Christianity and
Eastern religion is that the Eastern mystics say “follow me and become God”, the
Christian says “follow me and be saved by God”.
R: Yes, like the Gnostics. They think of men as caged Gods. It’s more ambitious
than Christianity.
S: In fact, in order to understand the basic philosophical principles underlying
reincarnation, let’s compare it with the simpler model of heaven and hell. It’s
much easier to understand things by talking about pairs of opposites rather than
single concepts.
I hope you don’t find this too controversial, but a discussion of the Christian
model of afterlife naturally begins with a discussion of the Jewish “slave
religion”. I will try to keep my tone under control, it’s all too easy to sound
like a Nietzschian misanthrope when discussing this subject.
The Jews were slaves, their master’s word was law, their life revolved around a
set of rules. The Jews had no money, no social status, no outlet for ambition or
creativity, they simply obeyed the rules and took what they could from the
remained of life.
The Jewish religion reflects this viewpoint, it revolves around a set of moral
laws which must be obeyed under all circumstances, yet outside of these laws the
individual is free to do whatever he lives.
Our reincarnation model focuses on the development of wisdom. At the height of
the Roman Empire stoic philosophers such as Marcus Aurelius championed personal
excellence and integrity. These “self development” concepts are scalar values
which run to infinity.
But the Jewish religion measures development along a binary scale. Obey the
moral laws and you’re good, break them and you’re bad. All those who obey the
rules are equally good, they all go to heaven at death etc. The scalar measure
of wisdom in missing, human life is no longer evolving, it’s a binary model
caught in timelessness.
Tell me, what do we call people who think in black and white not shades of grey?
R: Primitive, childish, or naïve people.
S: That’s right, the binary rather than scalar measurement of good etc is
primitive. In Ancient Greece we associated it with the slave mentality. Plato’s
Protagoras recalls a discussion of mine about binary thinking. It goes something
like this:
Do you realize that most people are not going to be convinced by us? Most people
are unwilling to follow what they think is for the best, instead they focus on
pain and pleasure in the simplest possible way. They don’t believe, as we do,
that wisdom should overrule pain and pleasure. Come, let’s try to persuade
people to take a more sophisticated viewpoint.
We are all idealistic philosophers, said my companions, why do we want to
investigate what ordinary people think? Going back to basics, I explain, will
aid the discussion.
So the opinion we want to investigate is the idea that good is whatever is
pleasant and bad is whatever is painful. Isn’t that what they say? They divide
the world into good and bad according to pleasure and pain, and pursue the good
and avoid the bad. Or perhaps it is enough to simply live a life without pain,
to avoid the bad. Yet this simple position is absurd.
Imagine oneself on the edge of a cliff with a dog and a steak. Steak is
pleasurable good, death is painful bad. But if one hurls the steak over the
cliff, and the dog is stupid enough, it will leap after the steak, enjoy a tasty
dinner, then plunge to its death. So life requires intelligence, life requires
calculation of future consequences, not mindless behaviourism.
In the same way pleasant things like food or drink can have ruinous consequences
if overindulged. Life is in fact a process of measurement, of weighing the
positives and negatives, both in the current moment and the future. Just as
objects which are far away appear smaller than objects nearby, so pleasure in
the now appears greater than pain in the future.
So our wellbeing relies on making intelligent decisions about pleasure/pain and
now/future, it’s a sort of arithmetic, an art of measurement.
So advanced philosophy talks about scalar concepts, and binary measurements of
good are primitive. Does that make sense?
R: Absolutely.
S: Now let’s look at how Jesus reformed the primitive Jewish religion. He
abolished most of the moral laws and said one should try to be as loving as
possible. So love became a metric not a binary measure, which meant that man was
always aspiring to greater love, he was never perfect. So Christianity became a
religion of “self development”.
Yet at the same time Jesus didn’t go so far as to say that the more loving man
was better or would be better rewarded in the afterlife, he kept the basic
principle of equality. So in Christianity everyone is living in sin, because
they are not infinitely loving, yet they are redeemed at death by God. Thus
Christianity is a mixture of “self development” and “divine redemption”.
Yet can you see that these two essences are self contradictory?
R: Yes, self development says we must be more that what we are, but divine
redemption says we are OK as we are anyway. It echoes the earlier argument about
the Eastern idea of man evolving into God compared to the Christian idea of man
remaining forever a child of God.
S: The more you think about Christianity the worse it gets. One of it’s biggest
failings is the goal of self development. How you would describe it?
R: The Christian goal is love.
S: And how do you describe this love?
R: As a warm emotional feeling which manifest in behaviour patterns such as
“turn the other cheek”.
S: Do you think that is a godlike perspective?
R: I see what you mean, it feels like a pretty one sided viewpoint on God. It
doesn’t sit at all well with the idea of evolution.
S: It’s hard to comprehend God in a warm emotional way, but even if leave God
out of it and focus on human evolution, over emphasis on warm emotional love is
destructive.
R: As you said in the first Chapter the Puritans rejected it, and embraced a
sort of tough love.
S: But do you really think evolution can be sensibly described as tough love?
Schopenhauer became a fan of reincarnation after focusing on the issue of
worldly suffering. Did God build a world in which physical pain and pleasure are
balanced? Imagine, he said, the feelings of pleasure felt by an animal eating
another animal, and the feelings of pain felt by the animal being eaten! So, my
friend, put that God forsaken image into your Christian love pipe and smoke it,
so to speak!
R: Christians who can’t cope with the “problem of evil” become atheists, they
don’t take up some new religious viewpoint with a different perspective on God.
How can God be non-loving, that’s blasphemy!
S: Ok, now it starts to get complicated. You have to look at the problem through
the hard eyes of the Zen Master, not the watery eyes of the ideologue. In the
last chapter we briefly came across the simple idea of a duality in Catholicism
and Puritanism, but now we have a really fearsome two headed monster to defeat.
Once you have truly conquered this prehistoric hermaphrodite you are cured of
Judeo-Christian nonsense forever, and can pin a silver medallion called
“Philosophy 001” to your chest.
You must defeat this monster by calm detachment, whereas the monster tries to
defeat you by simultaneously mesmerising you with one of its heads whilst
revolting you with the other. Many ideas in philosophy are bifurcated in this
way, and skilful Sophists can exploit these paradoxes to convince ordinary
people of anything in logical debate. This is why John Maynard Keynes urged his
fellow economists to treat life as a complex system and rely on statistics not
pure maths. This bifurcation is not the Jungian idea of the shadow, which is the
perverted version of a personality. It is the idea of the yin and yang duality,
the idea that truth can be approached from alternate perspectives, or truth is
composed of alternate essences. So:
Imagine a father and a mother caring for their children. The mother nurtures her
children, she protects them from harm, she treats them as equals, she lets them
play freely. The father, on the other hand, encourages his children to climb
trees even though they may hurt themselves, he is concerned with the evolution
of his children, he doesn't see them as equals, he makes them work.
In one case we have the Christian model of God - the loving shepherd who tends
to his flock. In the other case we have the Eastern model of God - the
Philosopher King who cares about the evolutionary advancement of humanity not
individual suffering. Maternal religions typically have a utopian paradise which
every worthy individual achieves at death, paternal religions typically have a
cycle of reincarnation in which individuals are gradually perfected by painful
challenge.
To the mother the father is a head in the clouds tyrant who does not care about
freedom and suffering. But to the father the mother is a down to earth fool who
does not care about truth or growth.
So think now not about nurturing maternal love, think about wise paternal love.
Imagine God as a detached paternal Philosopher King who takes his joy from human
evolution, the death of millions in plague is just a note in his marvellous
cosmic symphony. Death is an illusion, we reincarnate, wisdom is all that
matters. God is not really heartless, but comprehending his love requires the
enlightenment to transcend both individualism and time, to become aware of
ourselves not as mortal humans but as immortal atoms of God.
R: Socrates I think it’s clicked. I have both heads in view, but the right hand
head feels frightening. I can’t fault his logic and idealism, but we started by
talking about human happiness. How can this paternal love which brings so much
pain be happy? Are you throwing away the concept of happiness now? I want my
mother to run the world!
S: First, remember that real life has to mix these essences. Without a bit of
maternal love we wouldn’t survive long enough for our father to start hurting
us. Second, remember the viewpoint of the mountaineer who loves climbing more
than comfort. So it’s about blending pain and pleasure, and it’s also about
blending bodily pain and pleasure with pain and pleasure in the soul.
Schopenhauer is not wrong about pain, but he never quite grasped the totality of
it. For example, if a person is very wise, he notices that even the pains of old
age come with their compensations.
From Plato’s Phaedo: Socrates, whose legs had been in pain from the chains,
began feeling pleasure the moment he was released. Sitting up on the couch, he
bent and rubbed his leg, saying, as he was rubbing: How singular is the thing
called pleasure, and how curiously related to pain, which might be thought to be
the opposite of it; for they are never present to a man at the same instant, and
yet he who pursues either is generally compelled to take the other; their bodies
are two, but they are joined by a single head. And I cannot help thinking that
if Aesop had remembered them, he would have made a fable about God trying to
reconcile their strife, and how, when he could not, he fastened their heads
together; and this is the reason why when one comes the other follows…
R: It’s so radical.
S: No, the challenge is egotistical. Early Age of Enlightenment philosophers
couldn’t make the leap, Spinoza, for example, idiotically imagined a God who
didn’t care about humanity. You can make the jump by focusing on the appalling
failures of Christianity, allow you to break free of the Judeo-Christian Western
mindset.
The dogmatic maternal viewpoint of Christianity encapsulates many flaws
including the binary concept we talked about earlier. These flaws have their
roots both in the abstract model, and the mathematics connected with it. Take
the issue of infinity. At one time people felt that those improperly buried
would live in torment for eternity. But surely it’s obvious to you that this a
laughable idea incompatible with any intelligent model of God?
R: Yes it seems very silly, very primitive.
S: In fact any religious model which condemns a man to eternal suffering based
on choices made during a finite lifetime seems absurd does it not?
R: Yes, I think for anyone who understands mathematics it is a pretty silly
idea. Modern Christianity doesn’t talk with any degree of certainty about the
afterlife these days, I think they pretty much say everyone goes to heaven.
S: People who think about God in a maternal way can also develop an issue with
individualism. They start thinking they are God’s Gift instead of God’s Puppet.
I think a lot of people today could identify with this fault if they dared to
think about it.
R: Yes, the viewpoint that we are individuals, that we are all equal, and that
we live in the here and now, all connect with the idea that happiness is freedom
from physical pain instead of evolution.
S: That’s right. And this viewpoint also expresses itself in the nature of the
afterlife. The Christians talk about heaven as a sort of pointless paradise
where everyone is perfectly happy. Obviously it came out of the Judaic slave
religion which imagined life as pure suffering compensated at death with
paradise. But it’s hopeless.
But we could talk all day about the problems of Christian cosmological model,
instead I want you to imagine Christianity as a film.
R: What film?
S: A sort of sweet inspiring film which two thousand years ago inspired all the
slaves to greater idealism, but which is so full of holes that it is bound to
sink as the world advances. Have you seen the film Barbed Wire with Pamela
Anderson?
R: Maybe Socrates, but I fear it was instantly forgettable and I just can’t
remember.
S: Well let’s hope it hasn’t left a mark, like some kind of previous life,
because it was indeed a very bad film!
In one scene Pamela Anderson ducks behind a wooden table, and three men armed
with sub machine guns empty their magazines into the table from point black
range. When they have run out of ammo, and as they are trying to reload their
guns, Pamela pops up and shoots them all dead.
R: Yes films are not much good with things like that. Bullets don’t pass though
solid objects, helicopter gun ships empty zillions of rounds and rockets but
James Bond never gets hurt etc.
S: I don’t think the director of Barbed Wire thought the scene was comic, he
just was trying to project excitement, and he guessed the viewers wouldn’t
notice. But I have to say, it broke the spell for me.
Now I think Christianity is bit like this film. The average person today doesn’t
notice the problems and the spell is not quite broken. But for the more advanced
thinker the whole edifice comes crashing down.
Maybe Nietzsche thought there is something right about Christianity somewhere,
but he saw so many holes that it turned him into an anti-Christian zealot. It’s
been more than a hundred years since top thinkers like Nietzsche started getting
upset about the failure of Christianity, now even your scientists are picking up
on the problems. Richard Dawkins, for example, wrote a best selling, but
philosophically pitiful book called “The God Delusion”.
What we need is a new film for the more advanced thinker. In fact, this reminds
me of a conversation I had just the other day. I was at a heavenly airport
waiting for a flight down to you when a fellow from Eastern Turkey arrived on an
incoming flight and asked me if I had seen his spiritual guide. I suggested he
wait where he is and the guide would turn up sooner or later.
Can you believe, Mehmet had turned up in heaven wearing a shiny suit and
carrying his laptop! He was so proud of it he just couldn’t let do. It was ugly
as sin and covered in shop floor stickers. Have you noticed how some people keep
the stickers on their laptop, their phone and their TV? Steve Jobs knows a bit
about idealism, he wisely sells his gadgets without stickers just in case one of
them is bought by someone who doesn’t get it. Anyway, I hid my stickerless and
beautiful iPad as quickly as I could, I didn’t want to embarrass him, although
he probably wouldn’t have noticed.
We started talking about films, you know films and plays are a popular subject
up in heaven, they sort of remind us acting out reincarnation. Mehmet told me
his favourite film is “The Titanic”. I wasn’t there to judge him, but I like to
help people think a bit more deeply. So I asked him: “If any film critic were to
criticise The Titanic, what might they criticise it for”. Mehmet said he would
‘phone a friend’ on Skype. At first I though they were fighting, but then I
realised Mehmet talked loudly naturally. Maybe his friends and family don’t have
open minds, so he had learned to shout a little louder.
Eventually Mehment eventually reached a decision. He said: “I have discussed
this subject with several friends, and we have concluded that your question is a
conspiracy! The Titanic is the best film in the world, it has no flaws, and no
righteous critic could possibly claim it has any”.
After that Mehmet asked me what my favourite film is. I couldn’t decide, but he
had a short attention span so I just said “The Seven Samurai”. It’s a very
famous black and white Japanese film made by Akira Kurosawa in 1954, which must
have been an interesting time in Japanese history. The allied occupation of
Japan had only just ended, and the Japanese economic miracle was still a decade
away. The film itself is set at another interesting time in Japanese history,
the end of the Samurai era in the late 1500s. The grandeur is gone, the Samurai
are starving. For Westerns, the Eastern vision is intriguing, and for
traditional Christians it doesn’t come any more radical than Japanese
militarism.
It’s also a very a powerful film with lots of interesting psychological
dilemmas, it’s much more balanced than your average Western film which, for
example, either glorifies life or portrays it as hopeless. Every idea is shown
in contrast to its opposite, we have peasants and samurai, samurai and bandits,
weak and strong, emotional and intellectual fighters. It not a film that makes
you feel any particular one thing, except perhaps a sort of general joy.
One of the many interesting characters is a Samurai of exceptional talent who
has Zen like self control. We first see him in a wooden sword fight. Both
combatants strike at each other simultaneously and both blows connect. His
opponent claims victory but the master says: no you are wrong, I was clearly
ahead. His opponent flies into a range and demands they fight with real swords.
The master has no emotional reaction at all, he just says don’t be silly I will
kill you easily, it’s a pointless waste of your life. The opponent can not
contain his rage, he draws a real sword and is slain immediately and
effortlessly by the master.
Later in the film the master demonstrates exceptional courage, skill and
selflessness. Yet guns are just coming into circulation, and the master is
eventually slain by a shot. This remarkable life is snuffed in out in a moment
by a worthless bandit with a gun. Was the death of the samurai worth it, no one
can say, but they fought a marvellous battle marvellously, and died better than
they were born.
Mehmet had never seen the film, so he downloaded it on uTorrent. He was pretty
impressed with the internet connection up in heaven, and for the first time in
life he wasn’t a pirate, there’s no copyright upstairs. So the big moment came
and the magnificent film started up on his old laptop. A couple of Samurais
appeared, jumping around making noises with Japanese music in the background.
Mehment was obvious shocked, his face screwed up, he leaded back, then forward
looking at the screen trying to figure out what made these scratchy old images
of Japan so fascinating. After a few minutes he said to me “I am sticking with
the Titanic”.
I think Western culture is a bit like this story. You can’t read Plato anymore,
you miss the substance of it, the stories look as out of date to you as the
Seven Samurai did to Mehmet. Likewise the old visions of Christianity have
passed their sell by date. So the Church has built a new Christianity that looks
a bit like the Titanic, but it’s still as full of holes as Pamela Anderson’s
Barbed Wire.
So let build a new film. The theme is of course reincarnation. Instead of
thinking about the attributes of enlightenment, let’s think about the fruits of
enlightenment. What is the outcome of Christian love supposed to be?
R: Heaven
S: And what is heaven like? Is it individualistic or cohesive?
R: It says love thy neighbour, not oneself! It’s cohesive.
S: We need this cohesion too, remember we talked about reincarnation as the
coming together of individual and social happiness. So let’s think of a cohesive
picture, and add intellectual shape to this colour.
When a flock a birds flies they make a V shape in the sky. Because of
aerodynamic effects, the lead bird exerts the greatest effort, and as a
consequence of that the birds are forever changing position as they run low on
energy. Each bird gives everything it can, the flock is made from a selfless
hive of atoms which together achieve maximal efficiency by their communal
effort.
R: Beautiful, but exhausting. Shouldn’t utopian paradise be effortless?
S: Slaves think working is exhausting, but many freedmen love their work. Let’s
imagine that flying is pleasurable.
R: But isn’t this a big hole? If flying was pure fun there would be no incentive
to laze around. Utopia happens automatically.
S: Again imagine it as the mountain climber. His pleasure comes from both the
challenge and the successful climb. His time perspective extends beyond the
moment, likewise his perspective is bigger than himself, he grasps the bigger
picture.
R: Ok so our birds are enlightened, they have overcome the Schopenhauer dilemma,
they don’t care only about bodily pleasures in the here and now, they live for
all embracing eternity so to speak.
S: Great! Notice that our utopia needs to blend pleasure and pain, work and rest
and many other things, but there is another category of concepts which exist in
a sort of itself-by-itself way. These are our more sacred goals. For example, we
don’t want to blend wisdom and ignorance, nor individualism and collectivism,
nor justice and injustice.
Now in this utopian paradise what is that people do? I mean do they all do the
same thing or different things?
R: I am not sure, maybe they should all play the harp!
S: Everyone doing the same thing sounds boring doesn’t it? Don’t we want as much
creativity as possible? Let’s have people doing different things.
R: Then our vision is less a flock a birds and more a hive of bees!
S: That’s it exactly. Every member of society has his special skill, he devotes
himself to it completely and in the process takes pleasure from perfecting
himself in the pursuit of the common good.
R: What about flipping burgers? How can anyone get anything out of that?
S: There was a time when every American child started with a paper round and
then worked at McDonalds. It was a beautiful part of the American growing up
process. Of course we don’t want people being stifled, that’s the trick.
R: It’s the very opposite of modern political philosophy, which conceives of man
taking happiness from purchased materialistic pleasures. There is something a
bit non-human about all this, you are stripping away the ego in selflessness
intelligence and building the sort of perfect uncorrupted bureaucrat Max Webber
dreamed about.
S: Yes it the opposite of modern libertarianism. They talk about government
getting out of the way of the individual, imposing as few duties on him as
possible, and leaving his ego alone no matter how ugly it ends up. Also, they
claim all individuals abuse power and can only be kept in check by the laws of
capitalism.
R: That’s what they say, but no one really believes the laws of capitalism
create good. In practice they imagine the man turning into a robot and milking
him, trading pleasures for the communal good. It’s dark vision of painful
milking, but it’s regarded as a necessary evil for the individual and society to
hold together.
S: Whereas in our brave New Platonic Republic pleasure is virtuous work and it
delivers perfect justice. So there is no asymmetric conflict between the
individual and the state, the gap between the one and the many has vanished in
one pure light.
R: The problem is it relies on everyone being enlightened. Mehmet isn’t ready!
S: So the primary goal of government is?
R: To make people enlightened.
S: Which will make them?
R: Perfectly socially useful.
S: And?
R: Perfectly happy.
S: What do you think?
R: I think it’s a crazy film. All this communal idealism sounds nice enough when
you describe is as birds or bees, but what about ants? Have you come across the
Star Trek idea of the ‘Borg’? The Borg are cybernetically enhanced life forms
organized as an interconnected collective hive. They are eating up the universe,
forcefully assimilating all intelligent life forms in the search for self
perfection and mastery of the universe. They are supposedly the most powerful
force in the universe and “resistance is futile”. When the Borg capture new
planets they implant microchips into everyone they find, making them part of the
collective. Individual members always claim to live in bliss, they have no fear
of death or hardship, nor any individual needs, they are communal ants taking
over the universe! Funnily enough the rest of the universe prefers to stay the
way they are and Federation is engaged in a perpetual war against them which it
is gradually loosing.
I think there is there is something in this terrifying vision. When a Westerner
looks across at China the communal idealism is terrifying. In China, I hear,
they have entire cities devoted to the manufacture of just one thing, a plastic
toys city, a jeans city, a paper towel city, you name it. Hardly anyone earns
any money, all the profits are ploughed back into infrastructure, making the
country ever more powerful and economically unstoppable, it’s a bit like
socialism without a heart, and capitalism without freedom.
So China is the new vision of the Borg, your new Sparta I guess. So far they
haven’t started assimilating the world, but one day they might. We will all be
implanted with cybernetic chips made by Huawei, then everyone in the world will
work 18 hours a day without a break in pursuit of perfection, disabled children
will be terminated at birth, childcare will be collective, we will all have
flashing chips implanted into our hands, and anyone too old to work will be
disintegrated! Once the Chinese Borg has conquered the world, and we are all
living in sky scrapers five kilometres high, they will start flying around the
universe trying to assimilate anyone else they can find.
Of course I am exaggerating, but these Chinese really do seem to know almost no
limits. Did you hear about the Three Georges Dam? They moved one and half
million people out of their homes to build the words largest hydroelectric dam,
it’s designed to make as much electricity as twenty nuclear reactors. But the
people, or rather ants, were not given a choice, they were just told one day
that the cities, towns and villages they had lived in all their lives in would
be flooded. Protest was suppressed, it was done deal. Some elite scientist
dreams up some new idea and manifests it like a God, all humanity is gone.
S: Is China beautiful?
R: I don’t think so, it’s a concrete jungle with air pollution and billionaires
driving Lamborghinis. Why do ask?
S: Have you ever noticed, in films, that bad guys are always ugly?
R: You mean like Daft Vader, Lord Sauron, Dracula, the Wicked Witch etc?
S: That’s right. It’s an idea you see over and over, every poet talks about it.
Evil is ugly. I think Oscar Wild wrote a whole book about it.
R: So you are saying if our Utopia is good, if the people are really happy, it
will be beautiful?
S: That’s right?
R: And there is some kind of crazy Ancient Greek philosophical principle that
links good and aesthetics?
S: That’s right.
R: Insane.
S: But does it help? If you imagine our hive not as a dark ants nest, but rather
as a bright and beautiful clean and crystal filled utopia is it easier to
believe?
R: Strangely enough, somehow yes.