Dialogue ~ 12

I began my previous blog with, “In Plato’s allegory of the chariot, there is an indication that tensions are at work in the human psyche; our task is to comprehend their nature and become capable of flourishing. There is not a suggestion that the tensions are representative of any inherent flaws of being human or are unhelpful, simply that they are potentials which can shape experience and character.”

We can discern that ‘the charioteer’ (of Plato) is responsible for bringing coherence to his/her journey, through freedom of how they engage with a capacity for reason and desire. In the midst of mastery, a charioteer’s journey will enter new terrain, in that it moves into and explores the essence of relationship with one’s own will; a navigational feat made even more extraordinary, in that for the most part people desire to live within a cosmopolitan or diverse and yet stable, thriving (coherent) society.

Carl Jung said, “No rules can cope with the paradoxes of life. Moral law, like natural law, represents only one aspect of reality.”

I have written previously, “Is there a way of interpreting ‘the way in which we have viewed a problem’ that is different again from simply accounting for the presence of multiple worldviews or perspectives?” And, “Is it possible then, that it is the framework itself, by which we view who we are and how life is and to which we have historically attributed meaning, that is adjusting? Isn’t that what is meant by a paradigm shift?”

The American poet, singer and civil rights activist Maya Angelou said, “… If you don’t know where you’ve come from, you don’t know where you’re going. I have respect for the past, but I’m a person of the moment. I’m here, and I do my best to be completely centred at the place I’m at, then I go forward to the next place.”

Maya’s quote is reminding me of something that I had written recently, “It is not that there is too much complexity in the world. It is that once we believe that we have found meaning, we tend to make it our truth. It becomes our foundation and orientation in the world. We take a ‘snapshot’ of reality and are confused when this image of the world breaks down and it no longer makes any sense. We are convinced that we are perceiving cause when reality is unbroken.”

Clinging to an idea of cause is fruitless if we do not allow ourselves to engage with events as they are moving through us (this is ‘being’ in the present moment). It is for this reason that we say that individuals don’t learn from their mistakes and are destined to keep experiencing what feels like ‘groundhog day’. Time gives an impression of movement and yet an individual is caught up in a freeze-frame of their own making or ‘becoming’. It is not that events in themselves hold power, but they are opportunities for us to become clear as to how we are perceiving life in general (which is always in the context of relationship).

The personality or ego is one example of how meaning can become truth and consequently our foundation and orientation in the world. Contrast this with what the ancient Greek philosophers had to say about the essence of being (or reality or truth) and the self.

Heraclitus has often been referred to as ‘the obscure’ because of the paradoxical nature of his philosophy and the ‘weeping philosopher’ because of his lament over the unnecessary unconsciousness of humanity. He held that all existing entities are characterised by pairs of contrary properties (a unity of opposites whereby the ‘path up and down are one and the same’) and that ‘all entities come to be in accordance with this Logos’ (literally word, reason or account – but consider intent). Change or impermanence is the fundamental essence of the universe.

Parmenides explained that there are two views of reality. In one, existence is timeless and unchanging. In the other, the ‘way of opinion’, there is a world of appearances, in which one’s sensory faculties (one’s subjective experience) leads to concepts which are false or ‘sinful’.

Plato (in his dialogue ‘the Republic’) described the ‘form of the good’ as that which is not clearly seen or explained, until it is recognised as the form which allows one to realise all other forms. In another dialogue, Plato provided an analogy of the form of the good with the sun, in that it is the sun which allows for us to see things i.e. to have sight;  it is important to recognise that the sun itself is not sight, but is the cause of sight itself. Whilst the sun is in the visible realm, the form of the good is in the intelligible realm.

Plato’s form of the good is what permits one to know the knower and is the truth of what is known. Another way of saying this is that the form of the good is an object of knowledge and is also the cause of knowledge and truth.

Heraclitus, Parmenides and Plato might have had differing perspectives or ways of communicating about an origin of knowledge and truth, but the reality of what they were conveying was remarkably similar; that it is not any of our constructs of knowledge and truth that should be prized as expressions or forms of the highest good, so much as an illumination or aspect of consciousness which reveals knowledge and truth to us. 

Remember what Jung had said: “… Moral law, like natural law, represents only one aspect of reality.” The same could be said of any doctrine, whether it be religious or political, in which its fundamental tenet is to prescribe the highest good.