Pickstock Chooses Radical Orthodoxy

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 10, 2000 | by James P. Lucier

CP: That's a very good question. The answer is really twofold. You mentioned that philosophy is generally seen as a sort of neutral speculation. In fact, one of the things that Plato sought to attack was the notion that philosophy is a neutral enterprise. I think that for him the highest philosophy is the love of the good. And by definition that's not a neutral stance at all. It does have implications for how he sought to organize the city. In his later dialogue, The Laws, it is clear that he sees that file best political organization is not the one he put forth in his earlier dialogue, The Republic, which proposed a secluded philosopher-guardian and a group of very elite people who are to run the city. Rather, in The Laws he says that the whole of the city -- that is, every single citizen -- should be a philosopher, and the word "philosopher" in that dialogue doesn't mean again a neutral, reflective person. It means, rather, a committed person who is perpetually offering praise to the divine.

Insight: Then why did he ban poets?

CP: The reason he banned poets in The Republic is because he was against forms of idle imitation. He was against all arts which constructed false summations and divided the soul from itself. And so he was suspicious of the dramatists, for example, because in the plays of Euripides and Sophocles, in Plato's view (or Socrates' perhaps, we can't tell), the audience's emotions were being falsely manipulated. In The Laws, by contrast, he says the city (not the stage) is the site of true tragedy -- and that's a direct reference back to the false tragedies of the Greeks of Athens, where he thought the emotions were being manipulated. In The Laws, he sees the true battles of good vs. evil actually being fought out in real lire, not simply being represented on the stage.

Insight: And so the poets and, by implication, the rhetoricians and the political leaders could use this this falsification of reality to control and manipulate people?

CP: Yes, exactly.

Insight: You mentioned that the philosopher/citizen is giving praise to the godhead. Why was the giving of praise so important to the running of society?

CP: I think, in Plato, if you are offering praise, you cannot by definition be divided from yourself. Praise is something you can't offer disingenuously. If you want to worship something, it means you wholeheartedly abase yourself before that worshiped thing. If that thing is mysterious, indeed it is all the good. For Plato, the good is a mysterious thing.

Insight: So it is a civic obligation to join in this praise?

CP: He also specifically thought that a city of this kind is liturgical, in which every day is articulated by various feasts, so that the whole of time is articulated by specified festivals, and even every day the rime of day is punctuated by liturgical action. Everything must be perpetually referred to a divine and mysterious origin. So I think what Plato envisaged was a city in which conflict was being perpetually checked against individual rivalries and competitive forces. I think also this perhaps refers us to later parts of the tradition up to Aquinas. If everything has been pointing to a supreme goal in file good, or, in Christian terms the Final Judgment, then in a way we live much more in actuality. We're not constantly thinking that things might be otherwise better, or questioning the way things have turned out. It was after Aquinas that that kind of questioning started to happen.