Theory of Knowledge: An Alternative Approach

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The November 2024 TOK Essay Prescribed Titles

A few notes of warning and guidance before we begin:

The TOK essay provides you with an opportunity to become engaged in thinking and reflection. What are outlined below are strategies and suggestions, questions and possible responses only, for deconstructing the TOK titles as they have been given. They should be used alongside the discussions that you will carry out with your peers and teachers during the process of constructing your essay.

The notes here are intended to guide you towards a thoughtful, personal response to the prescribed titles posed. They are not to be considered as the answer and they should only be used to help provide you with another perspective to the ones given to you in the titles and from your own TOK class discussions. You need to remember that most of your examiners have been educated in the logical positivist schools of Anglo-America and this education pre-determines their predilection to view the world as they do and to understand the concepts as they do. The TOK course itself is a product of this logical positivism.

There is no substitute for your own personal thought and reflection, and these notes are not intended as a cut and paste substitute to the hard work that thinking requires. Some of the comments on one title may be useful to you in the approach you are taking in the title that you have personally chosen, so it may be useful to read all the comments and give them some reflection.

My experience has been that candidates whose examples match those to be found on TOK “help” sites (and this is another of those TOK help sites) struggle to demonstrate a mastery of the knowledge claims and knowledge questions contained in the examples. The best essays carry a trace of a struggle that is the journey on the path to thinking. Many examiners state that in the very best essays they read, they can visualize the individual who has thought through them sitting opposite to them. To reflect this struggle in your essay is your goal.

Remember to include sufficient TOK content in your essay. When you have completed your essay, ask yourself if it could have been written by someone who had not participated in the TOK course (such as Chat GPI, for instance). If the answer to that question is “yes”, then you do not have sufficient TOK content in your essay. Personal and shared knowledge, the knowledge framework, the ways of knowing and the areas of knowledge are terms that will be useful to you in your discussions.

Here is a link to a PowerPoint that contains recommendations and a flow chart outlining the steps to writing a TOK essay. Some of you may need to get your network administrator to make a few tweaks in order for you to access it. Comments, observations and discussions are most welcome. Contact me at butler.rick1952@gmail.com or directly through this website.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-8nWwYRUyV6bDdXZ01POFFqVlU

A sine qua non: the opinions expressed here are entirely my own and do not represent any organization or collective of any kind. Now to business…

The Titles

1. Does our responsibility to acquire knowledge vary according to the area of knowledge? Discuss with reference to history and one other area of knowledge.

Title #1 has four key concepts involved in it: 1. responsibility; 2. to acquire, acquiring; to take possession of; 3. knowledge; 4. vary. You are asked to relate these four key concepts to history and one other area of knowledge.

When we say that we have a responsibility to acquire knowledge to ensure that we construct an accurate record of the past we ask ourselves “why?”. What is the end of an “accurate” account of the past whether it be our own or that of others? For what end is it our responsibility to know our History and learn from the past? Why do we not allow ourselves to remain ‘intentionally ignorant’ of the past if its learning is not convenient for us in the present?

“Responsibility” is inherently an ethical concept for it involves a being-with-others and a sense of otherness itself, something beyond ourselves. It implies a directive for ‘right’ action, an “I should do this” as the ‘ability’ to ‘respond’. The ability to respond was called dynamis by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. The ability to respond with moderation and wise judgement is what was known as ‘virtue’ to the ancients, what we understand as ‘human excellence’ today. The ability to respond involves the deeper question of justice since the sense of responsibility derives from the sense of a ‘debt owed’ to someone or something. To whom? to what? for what end?

At the moment, many of you are probably experiencing the “responsibility” to acquire knowledge from the “debt” you feel you owe to your parents for making your education possible. It is ‘right’ that you should do your best in your studies and take actions that will contribute toward that end. You have a ‘duty’ because you are ‘indebted’ to your parents. Or you may feel no sense of ‘indebtedness’ to anyone or anything. Or you may feel an indebtedness to yourself in that you do not want to be perceived as a moron and wish to achieve some social prestige through attempting to be the best that you can be in your studies. This desire is from our relations in our being-with-others. Stupidity is a moral phenomenon, not an intellectual one, and this is the essence of this question.

If stupidity is a moral phenomenon, then human beings have an obligation to acquire and take possession of knowledge. An obligation is a course of action that someone is required to take, whether that action be due to the legal or moral consequences or constraints inherent in the outcomes of the action or the not taking action. An obligation is an act of making oneself responsible for doing something. Human beings are under an obligation to think; we are not fully human if we do not do so. Obligations are constraints; they limit freedom. The obligation to think as the essence of human being is contrary to the notion that the essence of human being is freedom. Truth itself and its revealing is a constraint upon our freedom.

Those who are limited and intolerant in their thinking view knowledge of their History as limited by “subjectivity” and that it is only composed of the opinions that have become the “collective memory” of the society of which, by chance, they happen to be a member. Because of these subjective elements, they find that it is not essential to acquire knowledge of their past in order to build what they hope will be a “successful” future; self-knowledge is not essential to their happiness nor to their success. This is the ‘ignorance is bliss’ position where they believe their own empowerment will be the foundation of their future happiness; and their own goals and principles are decidedly short-term and entirely mutable depending upon the circumstances in which they find themselves. The lack of self-knowledge and the lack of a moral compass are one and the same thing.

As there are various types of human beings and various ways of thinking, there are also various areas of knowledge. In the IB, they have been identified as six areas of knowledge with further sub-divisions within each i.e. the Natural Sciences are sub-divided into Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. The ancients called these areas of knowledge the Seven Pillars of Wisdom for they made up a ‘knowledge of the whole’; wisdom is knowledge of the whole. The ancients arranged these pillars in a hierarchy; and while we do not speak of a hierarchy, it is easy to see that we hold knowledge in the sciences and mathematics and their applications as the most important areas of study in what we call the acquisition of knowledge today. Any analysis of IB enrollment statistics will demonstrate this.

The sense of “responsibility” for acquiring knowledge in the sciences may be based on the belief that such knowledge will contribute to the continual development of human beings and continue to lead them toward “human excellence” or what the ancients once called ‘virtue’. It is an interesting irony in the history of the West that what was once considered the ‘masculinity’ of a man became the ‘chastity’ of a woman. This belief developed in that period of History known as the Renaissance. It is one of the foundations of what we call “humanism”, and from it flowered that way of being-in-the-world that we call “technology”. The relief of human beings’ estate through technology was a key to an understanding of justice. We felt, and still feel, an obligation and a responsibility to be just.

Our being-with-others is what is studied in the area of knowledge we call the Human Sciences. The Human Sciences, however, are unable to give us an account of what is the best manner or way of our being-with-others. This is due to the fact/value distinction that dominates their theoretical viewing of the world. They are incapable of answering this question, the ancient question of “what is the good life and how do you lead it?” since our sense of responsibility or duty is a ‘value’ that we have chosen or created and it has no ‘reality’ or validity in the world of ‘facts’. One manner of living or choice is equal to another; we call them ‘lifestyles’. The concept of ‘lifestyles’ is from the German philosopher Nietzsche. A pre-requisite for knowledge and success in the Human Sciences is moral obtuseness.

History is an account or narrative, the collective memory, of the significant actions that other human beings have taken and that have occurred over time in our being-with-others. It is more properly called ‘historiography’ (written history) as opposed to an understanding of ‘time as history’. The outcomes of those past actions have contributed to how we have come to understand and interpret, to have acquired and taken possession of, the meaning of those past actions and how they have impacted our understanding of ourselves. For example, who cannot be grateful for the stupidity of the Nazis which led them to understand Einstein’s and Heisenberg’s physics as ‘Jewish science’ and prevented them from funding research into the building of atomic weapons during WWII? Such stupidity was providential in that it prevented the Nazis from taking the ‘responsibility to acquire knowledge’ and it also prevented them from acquiring world domination.

Both History and the Human Sciences today are determined in their seeing by the ‘fact/value’ distinction where statements of fact regarding human actions are distinct from the ‘values’ that are the result of those actions. “Values” are what are subjective. In this perception, they are driven by what has been chosen to be the most highly ‘valued’ form of ‘knowledge’ which is to be found in the objective stance of the Natural Sciences. My statement above regarding the Nazis is a ‘value judgement’, a subjective statement. That I approve that it was good that the Nazis did not achieve world domination is a value judgement.

With the introduction of the word ‘good’ a whole host of other questions arise. For some, the fact that the Nazis didn’t achieve world domination was not a good end. A Europe in ruins was a better end than a Europe re-built from the ashes of those ruins. Similar thoughts are prevalent among many in today’s world. Social scientists in the USA prevent themselves from commenting upon the character of a man like Donald Trump since such comments would not be ‘professional’ but only ‘value judgements’. To have such a mentally disturbed man be their leader and their inability to warn against such outcomes reflects the madness that is deep within American society and the Social Sciences themselves.

The responsibility of acquiring knowledge is dependent upon what good end will result from our acquisition of that knowledge i.e. how will that knowledge contribute to our eudaemonia or happiness?. The type of end depends on the type of knowledge that is to be gained and applied. If I wish to make use of a banking app to do my banking then I have a ‘responsibility’ to learn how to make use of that app through becoming familiar with the knowledge of the procedures involved. The procedures and the theory are already embedded in the app i.e. the end is already embedded in the app. There is no choice involved other than the wish to make use of the app. There are many who will remain intentionally ignorant if the acquisition of whatever form knowledge may appear in does not contribute to their empowerment in some way for we equate empowerment with ‘happiness’.

In other writings on this blog, I have suggested that the lack of a moral compass so prevalent in today’s world, where there is no responsibility to acquire any knowledge other than that which allows one to seize and maintain power, is a primary result of the fact/value distinction, that beholding which is prevalent in the Human Sciences and History. Since domination and control is at the very heart of the stance of the physical sciences and these areas of knowledge wish to mirror those sciences, this should not be surprising. When good becomes a ‘value’ and ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, then the outcome is not one of ‘universal tolerance’ but one of command and control, authoritarianism and fascism. Whether one is on the left or the right in their political thinking is irrelevant to this ultimate outcome.

The Canadian writer Margaret Atwood once said that ‘all writing is political’. The desire to write down something is a desire that it be communicated to others at some point in time. Even a personal diary is a communication to a future ‘different person’ than the one producing the work of the diary in the present. It is an aid to memory. History is an aid to Memory, and contributes to our self-knowledge. The keeping of a diary may be said to be a first step on the journey to self-knowledge. This desire for self-knowledge is a recognition of the responsibility or ‘debt owed’ to oneself and others with regard to the compulsion we feel of the need to be fully human. This compulsion is our desire to seek ‘completeness’ and ‘perfection’ as a human being, which is not possible as we are the ‘perfect imperfection’ in our natures.

In other writings on this blog I have attempted to show that the key difficulty in receiving the beauty of the world today is that such a teaching and learning is rooted in the act of looking at the world as it is while the dominant sciences are rooted in the desire to change it. Our sense of ‘responsibility’ hinges on this dilemma. We cannot know or love an object or resource. In our research to learn the historical sources of the objects of the Arts around us, this study is merely for “aesthetic” purposes and enjoyment, not the fulfilment of a responsibility of having these works teach us about the beauty of the world or any notion of justice. We can learn about the past in such study; we cannot learn from the past. In other writings I have called this the two-faced nature of Eros.

2. In the production of knowledge, is ingenuity always needed but never enough? Discuss with reference to mathematics and one other area of knowledge.

The ‘production of knowledge’ are the ‘works’ that are the results of our ‘work’, the “produce” of our human making which mirrors the “produce” of Nature’s making. The production of knowledge is the products of our minds and hands. “Ingenuity” is a synonym for ‘novelty’, the ‘new’, the ‘creative’ which is an element brought to bear by the clever in our societies. To say that we are overwhelmed by the ‘novelty’ of technology today would be something of an understatement. We just begin to master all of the possibilities of our iPhones when another model is introduced.

But the corollary of all this novelty and ingenuity is an ever-increasing sense of mass meaninglessness, for we fail to find any real purpose for our novelty except that novelty as an end in itself.

The work that precedes the bringing forth of the ‘work’ is what is called ‘research’ in common parlance. This ‘research’ is conducted in multiversities and corporations throughout the globe. The “ingenuity” or “novelty” of the research is driven by the ‘vested interest’ that the individual, along with the institution, has in the outcomes of the research. In the past, research in History for example was a waiting upon the past so that we might find in it truths which might help us to think and live in the present. With the dominion of the fact/value distinction, such an end becomes lost; and with it, what we call our ‘moral compass’ becomes lost. Why?

All societies are dominated by a particular account of knowledge and this account lies in the relation between a particular aspiration of thought (the mind) and the effective conditions for its realization (the work of the hands): the work and its work. The work is knowledge, ‘the word made flesh’ so to speak. Our tools are an extension of our hands. We find the archetype and paradigm of thought and what we call thinking and, by extension, what we call knowledge in modern physics. Modern physics is the mathematical project. To pro-ject is ‘to throw forward’. The aspiration of our ‘throwing forward’ is ’empowerment’. In this throwing forward, some violence is done.

Our account is that we reach knowledge when we represent things to ourselves as objects, summonsing them before us so that they will give us their reasons for being as they are. To do so requires well defined procedures. This is what we call research. What we think knowledge is is this research for it is an essential effective condition for the realization or pro-duction of any knowledge. The work is the bringing forth or production of such knowledge bringing it to its completion. The bringing forth to completion was what was understood as ‘justice’ by the ancients. That which is brought forward is somehow ‘fitting’ for its purpose, its end. Justice is ‘fittedness’. In the technological society, the ingenuity behind the bringing forth has come to be an end in itself.

There are boundless examples of the varieties of ‘ingenuity’ that go into the research conducted in the sciences and the humanities. We live and breathe this novelty in our day-to-day lives. The calculus involved in mathematics results in the many apps brought forth to assist us in our use of our technological tools: the tools are the predicates of the technology and come to be through that technology; they are not technology itself in its essence.

The ‘knowing and making’ that is the word technology shows itself in the humanities in a dizzying number of theses with ingenious perspectives on the meaning of Beowulf (although any number of other examples could just as easily be found). The problem in the humanities is that when the work being examined is laid before us as object and our research is based on a review and critique of its historical sources, that work becomes dead for us. We can learn about the past; we cannot learn from the past: we can learn about the play King Lear, but we cannot learn from the play King Lear. The commandeering stance with regard to the past, which is necessary to research, kills the past as teacher and no amount of ingenuity will overcome this. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, that which is beautiful is represented to a commandeering subject from a position of its own command and, thus, we cannot learn anything from the beautiful or that which makes it beautiful. The world as it is presented to us in the sciences has no place for the word ‘love’.

Most often, ‘ingenuity’ reveals itself in the paradigm shifts that occur in the histories of our areas of knowledge. A paradigm shift is not only a new way of thinking but a new way of viewing the world in which we live. The most dominant manner in which our world is viewed today is the ‘mathematical projection’. The ‘ingenuity’ within this world-projection is what we call by the cliche ‘thinking outside of the box.’ The history behind this viewing of the world is ‘ingenuity’ itself.

The mathematical projection and the ingenuity involved in it does not occur out of nowhere or out of nothing. Newton’s “First Law of Motion”, for instance, is a statement about the mathematical projection the visions of which first began to emerge long before his Principia Mathematica. Newton’s First Law states that “an object will remain at rest or in uniform motion in a straight line unless acted upon by an external force”. It may be seen as a statement about inertia, that objects will remain in their state of motion unless a force acts to change that motion.

But, of course, there is no such object or body and no experiment could help us to bring to view such a body. This is the ‘ingenuity’ in its view. The law speaks of a thing that does not exist and demands a fundamental representation of things that contradicts our ordinary common sense and our ordinary everyday experience. The mathematical projection of a thing is based on the determination of things that is not derived from our experience of things. This fundamental conception of things is not arbitrary nor self-evident. It required a “paradigm shift” in the manner of our approach to things along with a new manner of thinking. This is true ‘ingenuity’.

Galileo, for instance, provides the decisive insight that all bodies fall equally fast, and that differences in the time of the fall derive from the resistance of the air and not from the inner natures of the bodies themselves or because of their corresponding relation to their particular place (contrary to how the world was understood by Aristotle and the Medievals). The particular, specific qualities of the thing, so crucial to Aristotle, become a matter of indifference to Galileo.

Galileo’s insistence on the truth of his propositions saw him excommunicated from the Church and exiled from Pisa. Both Galileo and his opponents saw the same “fact”, the falling body, but they interpreted the same fact differently and made the same event visible to themselves in different ways. What the “falling body” was as a body, and what its motion was, were understood and interpreted differently. None denied the existence of the “falling body” as that which was under discussion, nor propounded some kind of “alternative fact” here. Galileo’s ingenuity consisted in his ability to view things in a very different way.

In Galileo, the mathematical becomes a “projection” of the determination of the thingness of things which skips over the things in their particularity. The project or projection first opens a domain, an area of knowledge, where the things i.e. facts, show themselves. What and how things or facts are to be understood and evaluated beforehand is what the Greeks termed axiomata i.e. the anticipating determinations and assertions in the project, what we would call the “self-evident”, the axioms. This self-evident, axiomatic viewing requires that things themselves lose any virtues that they may have in their particularity.

The mathematical projection provides the framework, the picture, that is the lens through which the world is viewed. Ingenuity is only acknowledged within this framework for knowledge production since outcomes must be reported in the language of mathematics. Ingenuity or novelty whether in an artistic process or the scientific method involves the discovering of innovative ways of devising experiments or utilizing clever analogies to explain complex concepts within these AOKs. Those who succeed in doing so are given Nobel Prizes as the result of their efforts.

3. How might it benefit an area of knowledge to sever ties with its past? Discuss with reference to two areas of knowledge.

Does Title #3 present a silly suggestion that it is possible for an area of knowledge “to sever its ties with its past” and that this severing may somehow be beneficial to it? is it possible for knowledge to occur in a vacuum? The fact that it is an “area of knowledge” implies that it has a past whose ‘picture’ has already been established for it. What we come to call ‘new knowledge’ is the change in perspective on the viewing of that which is permanently there. (See the Galileo example in Title #2.) Is this change of viewing what is meant by ‘severing’ here? Are we talking of paradigm shifts here? It should not be forgotten that everything will appear in a new light when that light is dimmed.

Much of what is said regarding Mathematics and the Natural Sciences in Title #2 would then be applicable here. Is Picasso’s cubism a severing of his ties with Art’s past? Does it not bring along with it the traditional viewing of three dimensional space and provide a new fourth dimension? Picasso’s theme of war in his Guernica has not changed. His viewing of a specific example of what war is presents a unique and horrible view of this ever-permanent subject. As human beings we live within a world which in itself does not change; our perspectives on it change, but the world itself does not. That we can now destroy other human beings with nuclear weapons does not change the permanent theme of our destruction of other beings. The lack of clarity in this question would cause me to avoid it or to question the lack of clarity itself.

The historian Thucydides believed that there was something essential in the nature of human beings, an essence, that was not subject to change. He also believed that the same was the case with regard to war and its causes. Modern historians do not believe there are such things as “essences” and so view the world in a very different way. Is such a different viewing a ‘severing’ of the ties with Thucydides? Or does it ultimately bring the modern historian finally into the position where Thucydides began his work? While we may desire to sever the ties with the past in our pro-duction of knowledge (is this due to our desire for novelty and ingenuity?) such a severing may not be possible if one is to continue pursuing the truth of things. Things will always appear different when they are viewed in a ‘new light’ even though that light may be dimmer.

Is modern atomic physics a ‘severing’ of its ties to the Newtonian physics of the past or the superstructure built upon the findings of those physics? Einstein is considered to be a completion of Newtonian physics while quantum physics is considered to be a more radical ‘severing’ of the viewing that had occurred in what is called classical physics. In the case of modern physics, this severing is due to its unique findings regarding the concepts of time and space and the object that is viewed with regard to the production of knowledge.

The rigor of mathematical physical science is exactitude. This has always been the case with science. Science cannot proceed randomly; it cannot sever its ties in its methodology, a methodology that has its roots in the past. All events, if they are at all to enter into representations as events of nature, must be defined beforehand as spatio-temporal magnitudes of motion. Motion is time. Such defining is accomplished through measuring, with the help of number and calculation. Mathematical research into nature is not exact because it calculates with precision; it must calculate in this way because of the adherence to its object-sphere (the objects which it investigates) has the character of exactitude and that exactitude is the mathematics itself.

In contrast the Group 3 subjects, the Human Sciences, must be inexact in order to remain rigorous. A living thing can be grasped as a mass in motion, but then it is no longer apprehended as living. The projecting and securing of the object of study in the human sciences is of another kind and is much more difficult to execute than is the achieving of rigor in the “exact sciences” of the Group 4 subjects. This is why statistics are used as the form of the disclosure of the conclusions that have been reached in the Human Sciences. In some investigations, the matrix mathematics of quantum physics is sometimes used to try to gain a precision into the analysis of the phenomenon under study with, usually, disastrous results. Such was the case in the economic recession of 2008. This is due to the fact that the domains of physics and of the human sciences are radically different.

The applications of the discoveries of modern physics have realized the new “ages” in which we live, the Atomic Age and the Information Age. As with all new “ages” in human history, something is gained but something is also lost. The highest point to which we look up to in our communities is no longer the church steeple or the statue of the Buddha; it is the ubiquitous communications towers sending the signals of our information to each other across the globe. When Galileo skipped over the viewing of the particular thing in its uniqueness in his effort to view the world mathematically, what was skipped over was a looking at the world as it is. This gave to human beings the difficulty, the deprival, of receiving the beauty of the world as it is. The removal of the love of and for the beauty of the world as it is was replaced by the desire to change it through domination and control.

As with all the things which human beings make, their viewing and their making is a double-edged sword: we are easily lulled into an appreciation of the benefits brought about by their realization at the cost of an inability to view how in fact we may be deprived by their realization. What deprivals are we witnessing in the discoveries of our new communications apparatus? What are the benefits resulting from mass meaninglessness and our understanding of knowledge as “information”? We can all see the benefits of artificial intelligence, but what deprivals are we experiencing with the arrival of this new technology?

4. To what extent do you agree that there is no significant difference between hypothesis and speculation? Discuss with reference to the human sciences and one other area of knowledge.

The English word hypothesis comes from the ancient Greek word ὑπόθεσις hypothesis whose literal or etymological sense is a “putting or placing under” and hence a providing of a foundation or basis for an assertion, claim or an action. Such a provision of foundations will be based on the historical knowledge that one has received and possesses with regard to the domain or area of knowledge that is under investigation.

“Speculation”, on the other hand, is the forming of a theory or conjecture without firm evidence. An hypothesis is ‘justified opinion’, while speculation is ‘unjustified opinion’. The word ‘speculation’ is usually associated with economics and is based on those judgements made by individuals which involve a substantial amount of risk since evidence is not available as to the ultimate outcome of the action that will be taken by an individual in their desire for gain in wealth and, subsequently, power. An hypothesis, on the other hand, depending on the domain or area of knowledge in which it is asserted, usually has historical findings to ground it. It is grounded in the principle of reason and looks for exactitude and certitude in its outcomes. The element of chance in speculation suggests that the opinion, claim or assertion is not fully grounded in the principle of reason. A current example would be investors placing their money in the DJT stock on Wall Street. There is an irrationality about it.

“Speculation” is sometimes based on ‘a gut feeling’. It is sometimes preceded by a “they said….” without any mention of who the ‘they’ are who have done the ‘saying’ and whether these ‘they’ are reliable or not in their speaking. There is a lack of surety, certainty in the grounds of the assertion because the assertion is not based on the principle of reason as no evidence or sufficient reasons are provided to justify the claim.

While both speculation and hypothesis are based on ‘theories’, an hypothesis is formed from a “theory” and a theory is a way of viewing the world from which develops an understanding of that world. The principle of reason provides the grounds or foundations for the ‘saying’. Theories or views (understandings) may produce true or false opinions. Our views of the world are based upon opinions, opinions that may or may not be justified. We cannot, for example, believe the assertion that Californian wildfires are caused by Jewish space lasers because sufficient reasons cannot be provided for the making of such an assertion. Such an assertion is mere speculation, and it is ‘risky’ due to its political implications in our being-with-others. An hypothesis requires evidence from experiment or experience that will provide sufficient reasons for the assertion contained in the hypothesis.

In both experience and experiment, a sufficient reason is sometimes described as the correspondence of every single thing that is needed for the occurrence of an effect (i.e. that the so-called necessary conditions are present for such an effect to occur). In the wildfires/Jewish space lasers example, there is no sufficient correspondence present between the effect and its possible cause. What is lacking is the ‘truth’ of the event: there are insufficient reasons for the correspondence theory of truth to apply. With speculation, nothing is ‘brought to light’ because no light is present.

We could, perhaps, also apply such a view to the indeterminacy principle of Heisenberg as long as randomness is incorporated in the preconditions that are mathematically included in the calculus. Such events occur at the sub-atomic level but they do not occur in our encounters with the objects that are present in our real experience of things. In our experience, the principles of Newton’s classical physics still apply. These conditions and their sufficient reasons do not apply at the sub-atomic level.

When we are asked ‘to what extent’, we are being asked for a calculation which can be expressed statistically or in language, a ‘this much…’. It implies a possibility of knowledge of the whole. Both hypothesis and speculation demonstrate similar content in some respects but they are ‘different’. If we claim that there is ‘no significant difference’, then we are saying that they are the Same. While some may presume a semantical equivalence between the two terms (which is the foundation of the question), it would appear that the submission of a hypothesis involves less risk in the truth or falsity of its claim than mere speculation which may be based on a ‘wishful thinking’ as to its outcome. Hypothesis relies on the surety of past knowledge and its discoveries while speculation rests in the hoped for gains that will result if such a speculation proves to be true.

5. In the production of knowledge, are we too quick to dismiss anomalies? Discuss with reference to two areas of knowledge.

In recent years, the discoveries of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have produced a great number of anomalies for astrophysicists to attempt to resolve and which cannot be ignored especially with regard to the Big Bang Theory of the universe. The dates of the origin of the universe and the formation of galaxies are now being questioned. Often, rather than investigating anomalies further and considering an overhaul of existing knowledge, anomalies are dismissed as ‘exceptions’ to the rule rather than a justification to question the rule itself. Such discussions are now occurring among the scientists in the world of astrophysics. Such anomalies and discussions will provide theoretical work for scientists for years to come and may require or provide a paradigm shift in the area of knowledge called astrophysics.

Anomalies are often the prompt for a paradigm shift in the sciences causing us to challenge existing beliefs and ideas. In Physics, perhaps the greatest anomaly lies in the Heisenberg indeterminacy principle. In the experiments conducted in the early 20th century, results often occurred which could not be corresponded to the physics of Einstein. With Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle, the mathematical account for those outliers could be accounted for and shown mathematically.

In everyday life, calculating the speed and position of a moving object is relatively straightforward. We can measure a car traveling at 60 miles per hour or a tortoise crawling at 0.5 miles per hour and simultaneously pinpoint where the car and the tortoise are located. But in the quantum world of particles, making these calculations is not possible due to a fundamental mathematical relationship called the uncertainty principle.

Formulated by the German physicist and Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg in 1927, the uncertainty principle states that we cannot know both the position and speed of a particle, such as a photon or electron, with perfect accuracy; the more we nail down the particle’s position, the less we know about its speed and vice versa. Because sub-atomic particles behave like waves in quantum viewing, the measurements we make appear to be uncertain or inaccurate, but this is the case with wave-like properties. In the world of our experience, a chair behaves like a chair. There is a gap present between the behaviour and the nature of sub-atomic particles and the objects of our common everyday experience.

In the Human Sciences, Donald Trump is seen by many as an ‘anomaly’ outside of the normal political activity of the community that is the USA. Is this really the case? Is he really an ‘anomaly’? If so, how is it possible that he is the Republican nomination for President? That Donald Trump is the fertilizer that brought about the flowering of the growth that was the corruption already present within the institutions of the American system of government is more of an indication of the failure of the seeing, the consciousness and conscience, present in the ‘wishful thinking’ of those who observe American politics whether they be media, academics or political pundits. Is it possible for a true outlier to achieve political power or must there be common elements present in both the aspirer for power and in those who will hand that power over to him? Was Adolf Hitler an ‘outlier’ in the German politics of the 1920s and 1930s?

Because of the manner of our viewing of the world, we usually cannot see what we are not looking for, so anomalies are often missed and when they are sighted they are usually met with the response “That’s odd”. If they are seen, they are usually ignored because people and their institutions and organizations are predisposed to confirmation bias, focusing on what aligns with their mental models rather than what violates them. In the Human Sciences, for instance, the word “anomaly” is most often used to dismiss a data point as unrepresentative and irrelevant. Even if we do not ignore anomalies, we may not try to interpret or explore them. Does an anomaly such as Donald Trump get over 70 million votes in a democracy? Why, for example, did it take so long for the symptoms of PTSD (Post-traumatic Stress Disorder) to be recognized and to be systematically dealt with?

6. In the pursuit of knowledge, what is gained by the artist adopting the lens of the scientist and the scientist adopting the lens of the artist? Discuss with reference to the arts and the natural sciences.

Van Gogh’s Sunflowers: Pb(NO3)2(aq) + K2CrO4(aq) –> PbCrO4(s) + 2 KNO3(aq)

The Arts and the Sciences have complementary histories of evolution. This history may be understood as the manner in which both of these human activities have pursued knowledge with regard to their understandings and relationships to what is understood and interpreted as Nature or Otherness. Just as Art pursues “object-less” representations of abstractions conceived in the mind so, too, does science attempt to understand our being-in-the-world through the projection of mathematical abstractions on what we think ‘reality’ is. Both art and science see themselves as ‘theories of the real’. While art must withstand the question Is it art? science, too, must withstand the question Is it science? particularly with regard to the Human Sciences. The responses to these questions can be either profound or downright silly.

Science is what we understand by ‘knowledge’, ‘knowing’. Art is what we understand by ‘making’, the performance that results in a ‘work’, whether that work be a painting, a musical composition, or a pair of shoes. Knowing and making are what we mean when we speak of “technology”, the combination of the two Greek words techne or ‘making’ and logos or ‘knowing’. The combining of these two words is something that the Greeks never did and would never do. The word was first coined in the 17th century with the rise of humanism. The ‘adopting of the lens’ of the artist by the scientist, or of the scientist by the artist is, obviously, a constant in the modern world since the outcomes or products of technology are the objects that we see all about us and which we use on a daily basis. The scientist’s knowing and the artist’s making are on display before us at this very moment if we are using a computer, an iPad or a handphone to read this blog.

The pursuit of science is the human response to a certain mode or way in which truth discloses or reveals itself. Science arises as a response to a claim laid upon human beings in the way that the things of nature appear. The sciences set up certain domains or areas (physics, chemistry, biology) and then pursue the revealing that is consistent within those domains. The claim laid upon human beings is to reveal truth, for it is in the revealing of truth that we are truly human. We are not fully human if we do not do so.

The domain, for example, of chemistry is an abstraction. It is the domain of chemical formulae. Nature is seen as a realm of formulae. Scientists pose this realm by way of a reduction; it is an artificial realm that arises from a very artificial attitude towards things. Water has to be posed as H₂O. Once it is so posed, once things are reduced to chemical formulae, then the domain of chemistry can be exploited for practical ends. We can make fire out of water once water is seen as a compound of hydrogen and oxygen. In the illustration of Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers”, we have the chemical formula for the physical composition of Van Gogh’s yellow paint. While interesting, it tells us absolutely nothing of the painting itself and of the world or the artist that produced that painting. This is the situation with many recent discoveries in science, particularly the Human Sciences: their discoveries are interesting but tell us absolutely nothing meaningful about the world we live in.

The things investigated by chemistry are not “objects” in the sense that they have an autonomous standing on their own i.e. they are not “the thrown against”, the jacio, as is understood traditionally. For science, the chemist in our example, nature is composed of formulae, and a formula is not a self-standing object. It is an abstraction, a product of the mind. A formula is posed; it is an abstraction. A formula is posed; it is an ob-ject, that is, it does not view nature as composed of objects that are autonomous, self-standing things, but nature as formulae. The viewing of nature as formulae turns things into posed ob-jects and in this posing turns the things of nature, ultimately, into dis-posables. The viewing of water as H₂O, for example, demonstrates a Rubicon that has been crossed. There is no turning back once this truth has been revealed. That water can be turned into fire has caused restrictions in our bringing liquids onto airplanes, for instance, for they have the capability of destroying those aircraft.

“What we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Our scientific work in physics consists in asking questions about nature in the language that we possess and trying to get an answer from experiment by the means that are at our disposal.”–Werner Heisenberg

What is the physicist Heisenberg saying here? The language that the scientist possesses is the mathematical projection or abstraction that is placed over the object that is questioned, but the object that is questioned can only appear in a manner pre-ordained by the nature of the questioning itself. Through experiment, the response to the question posed must be in the form of the mathematical language used: nature must respond ‘mathematically’. But what that nature is is not what has been traditionally understood as ‘nature’. The response must be consistent. The logos that is mathematics is this consistency.

For Heisenberg, what has been called nature has been ordered to report mathematically and this is the first level of abstraction. The mathematical viewing of nature makes the ob-ject of science non-intuitive. What does this mean? In the example above of Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers”, the color yellow is reduced to a formula describing a variety of chemical reactions between various compounds. In physics, the color yellow would be reduced to a formula describing a certain electro-magnetic wave. A person can then possess a perfect scientific understanding of the color yellow and yet be completely color blind i.e. they could not experience Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” in its ‘reality’. In the same fashion, a person who knows yellow intuitively by perceiving yellow things such as sunflowers will fail to recognize the scientific formula as representing her lived experiences of the color yellow. This is what is meant to say that science is non-intuitive and is, thus, an abstraction.

Like the abstractions of the mathematical projections in physics and the projection of formulae in chemistry, abstract art is an art form that does not represent an accurate depiction of visual reality, communicating instead through lines, shapes, colours, forms and gestural marks. Abstract artists may be said to use the lens of the scientist with their varieties of techniques to create their work, mixing traditional means with more experimental ideas. Their work is a product of the mind (or the unconscious) and does not correspond to the Otherness that is what we understand as our being-in-the-world. Jackson Pollock described abstract art as “energy and motion made visible.” Pollock’s art, in a way, attempts to approach the art that is available for us through the cinema.

The examples provided are what we might call the “pure” theoretical scientists or the “pure” abstract artists. What is ‘gained’ by such ‘abstract’ attempts? What is gained is that through the discoveries of the scientists and the artists many applications of their findings are brought into our real world in a great variety of forms and products. The computer before us is a product of the application of the discoveries of quantum mechanics. It is a seamless connection between knowing and making, art and science, the lens of the scientist and the lens of the artist.

It is easy to see what has been ‘gained’ in the coming together of the arts and sciences that we know as technology. It is much harder to see what has been lost in this development. As I have shown in other writings on this blog, an indispensable condition of a scientific analysis of the facts is moral obtuseness. The lens of both the modern day scientist and the modern day artist are not moral lens. Modern art, in its following or mirroring of the seeing of the sciences, contributes to this moral obtuseness among human beings. Since art is essential in our being-with-others in a ‘real’ world, this does not bode well for the future.

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A Commentary on the Sefer Yetzirah: Chapter 2

Text:

2.1 The foundations are the twenty-two letters, three mothers, seven doubles, and twelve single letters. Three mothers, namely A, M, SH, these are Air, Water, and Fire: Mute (Hums) as Water, Hissing as Fire, and Air of a spiritual type, is as the tongue of a balance standing erect between them pointing out the equilibrium which exists.

Alt. Trans.: Twenty-two foundation letters, Three Mothers, Seven Doubles, And Twelve elementals: The three Mothers are Alef, Mem, Shin. Their foundation is A pan of merit (fullness) A pan of liability (need) And the tongue of decree deciding between them.(mediation)

Three Mothers: Alef, Mem, Shin: Mem hums, Shin hisses And Alef is the Breath of air deciding between them.

Wescott Trans. 2.1. The twenty−two sounds and letters are the Foundation of all things. Three mothers, seven doubles and twelve simples. The Three Mothers are Aleph, Mem and Shin, they are Air, Water and Fire. Water is silent, Fire is sibilant, and Air derived from the Spirit is as the tongue of a balance standing between these contraries which are in equilibrium, reconciling and mediating between them.

Commentary on 2.1

The foundations of the created world are revealed through the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet by means of the 10 Sephirot. The image created is one of a balance, a scale, the symbol of Justice. The Tree of Life itself is a symbol of this. The Three Mothers represent the three columns into which the Sephirot are divided and come to constitute the three pillars of the Tree of Life. Boaz is the pillar of Mem (water), Jakim is the pillar of Shin (fire) and Keter is the breath (air) or Spirit (the Logos) which judges between them. Water moves downward; fire rises. The movement, as we perceive it, is clockwise.

The ‘tongue of balance’ or the ‘tongue of decree’ is a metaphor for the Logos. The function of the Logos is as a reconciler and mediator. It is the ‘speaking silence’ that is the Beauty of the World, as well as the Law of decree that is Necessity. It is the Torah and the Ain Sof.

Blake Illustration for The Book of Job: Job’s Bad Dreams

The Scale here is the Law of Necessity, the law which rules over all created things. It is the schema or plan which creation and created things must follow. It is the Divine Will. The justice of the law of Necessity is one of the most difficult things for human beings to comprehend. It raises questions such as: if God is all Good, why does He allow the innocent to suffer? Why does He allow the wicked to prosper? The evil Demiourgos of the Gnostics and the questions of the “Book of Job” come to mind. (“The Book of Job” is originally in Greek with God’s answers to Job written in Hebrew. Needless to say, God’s answers to Job are not “psychologically satisfying” to the suffering human being who is crying out for justice!)

Examples of the Sternness of Necessity are all about us, while examples of Mercy can sometimes be hard to find. The “hissing” of Fire is caused by water’s contact with it. The implication is that mercy, love, and charity are always present and there is strife between the elements of water and fire which is mediated by air (“of a spiritual type”, which means that it is ‘no-thing’). This is one of the bridges between the spiritual and the physical. The emphasis is on holding things in harmony and of the reconciliation between them. It is through the meeting of fire and water that earth is formed.

Shin and Mem also denote the name “Shem”. Shem is one of the sons of Noah who participated in Noah’s spiritual experience, his direct contact with God. Some Kabbalists give the writing of the Sefer Yetzirah to Shem who taught it to Abraham (which is close to how the Sefer Yetzirah is being understood here if the non-Hebrew influences are taken into account within the final Hebrew text). The word “Shem” designates “name”, to name things. It is through the “naming” of things that things are brought to presence and are revealed. It is through “names” that we can grasp the spiritual essence of a person or object, if by “names” we mean the logos.

The pronunciation of the letters is also said to be a valuable meditation technique similar to the word “Om”, for instance, or the Gregorian chants of medieval Christians. Meditation is thought, contemplation, attention, prayer and it is distinguished from the thinking that is involved in the realm of yetzirah or the realm of knowing and making, the world of ‘formation’.

If we compare what is said here to Plato, the Sephirot are the Ideas which are limited to 10 and which beget all numbers and all enumeration. The Ideas beget the eidos or the outward appearances of things that brings things to a stand and give us “understanding”. Understanding is formed from the middle pillar of Keter, the logos, which is the air or “spiritual breath” that speaks the “judgement” of what things are. The logos is composed of number and speech and these are seen as identical. From the logos is physical creation identified and made.

Text 2.2:

2.2 He hath formed, weighed, transmuted, composed, and created with these twenty-two letters every living being, and every soul yet uncreated.

Alt. Trans.

Twenty-two Foundation letters: He engraved them. He carved them, He permuted them, He weighed them, He transformed them, And with them, He depicted all that was formed and all that would be formed.

Wescott Trans. 2.2. He hath formed, weighed, and composed with these twenty−two letters every created thing, and the form of everything which shall hereafter be.

Commentary on 2.2:

“He engraved them”: the letters are written on a tabula rasa a blank slate, no-thingness. They are “carved” out and separated (things that are given form and separated, the process of thinking known as diaresis to the Greeks). The letters are “permuted” or “arranged” so that words are formed. The words give names to things so that they are “weighed”, measured, and defined i.e., judged. Once measured, they can be ‘transformed’. The outward appearance of a thing was what Plato called the eidos of the thing, the ‘form’ of the thing, what allows a thing to be “measured”, “weighed” and “composed” . The Forms and Ideas of Plato are distinctive concepts, not identical or the same as is commonly understood. The Forms are the emanations of the Ideas and begot from the Ideas.

From the letters, all that was formed and all that will be formed was always already there. The things that are formed are “depicted”, “from the picture”, given an outward appearance (eidos in Greek), so that the things can be seen in images and pictures (as well as the letters themselves) and thus could be visualized so that understanding and knowledge could take place. The emphasis is on seeing or viewing. Prior to the seeing, a form must first be in place and this shape must be accompanied by colour or the light. This form is a product of the logos and can be understood through the geometry of the ancients. Geometry deals with space; weighing and composing deal with place and with Time. Place is understood as topos in Greek, and it is the site of human beings’ making in their various worlds.

Text 2.3:

2.3 Twenty-two letters are formed by the voice, impressed on the air, and audibly uttered in five situations (places): in the throat, guttural sounds (Alef, Chet, Heh, Eyin); in the palate, palatals (Gimel, Yud, Kaf, Kuf); by the tongue, linguals (Dalet, Tet, Lamed, Nun, Tav); through the teeth, dentals (Zayin, Samekh, Shin, Resh, Tzadi); and by the lips, labial sounds (Bet, Vav, Mem, Peh).

Wescott trans. 2.3. These twenty−two sounds or letters are formed by the voice, impressed on the air, and audibly modified in five places; in the throat, in the mouth, by the tongue, through the teeth, and by the lips. (31)[1]

[1]31. This is the modern classification of the letters into guttural, palatal, lingual, dental and labial sounds.

Commentary on 2.3:

Here the passage speaks of oral communication, voice, speech. The movement is from inner to outer, from hidden within the throat, to revealing upon the lips, the audible. Voice is the third action that is mentioned following the creation of the whole (the One God) and the formation of letters (the Logos). The Voice gives rise to creation itself.

The Sefer Yetzirah speaks of five Loves: Keter, Chakmah, Chesed, Tiferet, and Netzach which represent “fullness” as I understand it. The other column represents the five Judgements: Binah, Gevurah, Hod, Yesod, and Malkhut which I call “needs”, but the use of the word “judgement” here indicates the essence of the principle of reason and its site of truth. One could understand “judgement” as “outcome” or “end”. The judgements are sometimes called “Strengths” which can be seen as force or power, the bringing into reality or completion of those urges which we experience in everyday life, those desires which are related to ‘will’, or the potentiality and possibility related to Aristotle’s dynamis brought to completion as energeia or “work”, “works”. This may be related to the natural desire to overcome needs. The desire, the aspiration of thought, and its fulfillment is a “movement” and indicates the combination of being and time.

When inscribed within a sphere and the sphere is then rotated clockwise, fullness is the result. When the sphere is rotated counter-clockwise, evil or need is the result. The Wheel of Fortune #10 is not to be conceived as a two-dimensional circle but rather as a sphere. The following chart relates to the Sephirot’s relation to their position in space within the sphere:

Keter – Malkhut Good -Evil Ethical

Chakmah – Binah Past-Future Time

Chesed – Gevurah South-North Space

Tiferet – Yesod Up-Down Space

Netzach – Hod East-West Space

Text 2.4:

2.4 These twenty-two letters, the foundations, He arranged as on a sphere, with two hundred and thirty-one modes of entrance. If the sphere be rotated forward, good is implied, if in a retrograde manner evil is intended.

Alt. Trans. Twenty-two foundation letters: He placed them in a sphere Like a wall with 231 Gates. The sphere oscillates back and forth. A sign for this is; There is nothing in good higher than Delight There is nothing evil lower than Plague.

Wescott trans. 2.4. These twenty−two letters, which are the foundation of all things, He arranged as upon a sphere with two hundred and thirty−one gates, and the sphere may be rotated forward or backward, whether for good or for evil; from the good comes true pleasure, from evil nought but torment.

The first chapter of the Sefer Yetzirah speaks of the spiritual realm, the ruler of which is “the heart”. The heart acts like a general in battle in dealing with the strife that is created between the different urges and desires created by the “will” or eros that is the condition of the embodied soul of human beings. The “heart” can act out of “fullness” or “need”. The heart is the Sephirot Tiferet. The human form is a microcosm of the macrocosm that is the created world. One is reminded of the words of the English poet William Blake from his poem “Auguries of Innocence”: “God appears and God is light/ To those poor souls that dwell in night/ But does a human form display/ To those who dwell in realms of day.”

The second chapter of the Sefer Yetzirah deals with Space and Time. In space and time we deal with contraries, the deprivations of the qualities from each other. The sphere is said to oscillate back and forth: fullness and need oscillate within time and the movement is cyclical. Time is cyclical in the Sefer Yetzirah, not linear i.e., going from past to present to future, although this appearance is given in the movement from Chakmah to Binah where the past of Chakmah moves through the present of Keter to the future that is Binah. Oscillation is movement in place. These movements can be illustrated by the motions of a gyre.

The circumference of the circle/sphere is “like a wall” with 231 gates. The mathematical formula for this is: n (n – 1) / 2; 231 = 22 x 21 / 2 gates. The “wall” is the limit imposed on the unlimited, on Necessity. All of our arts and sciences develop from how we know, understand, and deal with Necessity. There are 22 points within the the sphere and the things of the world are brought to appearance within/on the circumference (the horizon). 3 points; 4 points=6 lines; 5 points=10

The number of lines that can connect the 22 letters is 231 which are the paths (letters) and gates of the Sephirot. Two letters can be combined in 231 ways. Each of the combinations is also a triangle: two letters plus the third that is part of “the wall”, one of the mother letters. The 0 is not a number, per se, but a placement indicator. The Egyptians and the Greeks rejected the concept of 0, so a 10 is not a 1 + 0, but a placement that allows the cyclical movement of the numbers to take place. (Knowledge of binomial and binary combinations would be useful here since this is the mathematical language of computers.) In this case, the number and the letter are interchangeable. One can have a 08 as well as an 80. They are not references to quantity but to quality i.e., they are not subjects (nouns), but predicates (adjectives, adverbs).

As has already been indicated, one cannot have number without space since number deals with quantity, and number must have an Other besides the One. The One itself is beyond the second one composed of the triune of Keter, Chakmah, and Binah, which constitute both space and time and these are contained within the sphere of Creation: their end is their beginning so the 1 is in the 10 and the 10 is in the 1. Time gives being to beings in space, and this Time is the moving image of the eternity of the One in its essence. Time is the dynamis (possibility and potentiality) and the kinesis (movement, action) of Life itself.

In the legend of the formation of the Golem, one is to proceed around the circle of the sphere chanting the letters from Alef to Tav; to unmake the Golem, one reverses the direction from Tav to Alef. (There is a correspondence here between the ‘creation’ and the decreation of the human being). The Golem appears to be not only the making of a soulless human being or other animal (since only God can give “soul” to beings since “soul” is eternal like Himself and part of Himself), but also the making of any made thing accomplished through the numbers and the letters.

The Golem would be a general term for the artifacts of man which do not have their origin in Nature: genetic splicing is but one manner of accomplishing the making of a “Golem”; Artificial Intelligence would be another. Cybernetics is but another synonym for the making of the Golem. The Golem appears to be something akin to the voodoo doll or the Orcs and Gollum of Tolkien, yet at the same time the Golem might suggest that through meditation one is able to visualize the “perfect human being”, the beings that are the perfection seen in Greek statues or Da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man”. Human beings in their being are the perfect imperfection. (The Golem reminds one of the condition of the prisoners of Plato’s Cave being “unconscious” and “soulless”.)

A Christian might see a vision of God as Christ i.e., in the form of man. The goal of the whole of the Sefer Yetzirah is the formation of the “spiritual Golem”. I would suggest that it is rather the attainment of the revelation of the Mediator (Christ) as body or the bringing of the Mediator (Christ) into actual presence or parousia. This is done through the “fullness” and “need” that is Eros. This presents us with a problem, however, if we are Christians. One does not go in search of Christ but rather prepares oneself to be found and received by Him. The sheep does not go in search of the Shepherd; it is the Shepherd’s task to find the sheep. The sheep bleats in order to be found. The bride (the embodied soul, Psyche) prepares herself in order to be received by the bridegroom (the Divine, Eros).

What is confusing about the Sefer Yetzirah is whether there are three or ten Mothers as to their relation to the Hebrew alphabet. The Mothers are the connectors between the paths: two columns, 231 gates. Mem and Shin connect Chakmah and Binah (Alef), Mem and Alef connect Gevurah and Chesed (Shin), and Alef and Shin connect Hod and Yesod (Mem). These crossroads are the points of separation of the three worlds of Asiyah, Yetzirah, and Beriyah. A rebirth, conversion, and a baptism is required to access these different realms. These rebirths are of the “water and of the Spirit”, of the “fire and of the water” or of the Logos (Breath) and of the spirit.

Some Kabbalists include an eleventh Sephirot named Da’at in their composition of the Tree of Life. Da’at is sometimes called “the Void”, but Da’at appears to be the web of Necessity itself, the limit or law which rules over all created things. What we call “knowledge” derives from our understanding of these limits whether in the physical or psychological realms. The two columns of Jakim and Boaz are comprised of these eleven Sephirot twice over i.e., the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The first eleven are said to represent the “front” (the face, the look, the outward appearance of things, what Plato called the eidos). The second eleven are the “back”, the contraries or the deprivations of things. (This would coincide with Eros as two-faced, looking in different directions and in his representation as Fullness and Need). The name “Israel” itself signifies the whole of created things, not what we understand as the state of Israel today.

When the Sefer Yetzirah states that “there is nothing in Good higher than delight”, this can be understood in a similar fashion to the Greek word eudaimonia or “good spirits”, what we understand as “happiness”. The deprivation of happiness is affliction, what is referred to as “plague” in the text of the Sefer Yetzirah. In Hebrew, the word for “delight” is oneg; the word for affliction or “plague” is nega. One obtains the words by rotating the letters back to front.

The sphere of creation is oscillating, rotating. One must be within the sphere, at the centre, to be unmoved by its oscillations or rotations, and Tiferet is the centre of this sphere, both the height and depth. From the centre, inside, there are no directions, no contraries. Only when one is off-centre, outside, is this perception possible and one is subject to the oscillations or turnings of the wheels upon wheels that are within the sphere itself. (King Lear Act 5 sc. iii and Act 4 sc. vii “But I am bound upon a wheel of fire,/ That mine own tears do scald like molten lead”.). Along the journey, the “dark night of the soul” as experienced by the saints occurs the closer one gets to Keter. They report that there is a complete disconnect with God (Christ’s “Father, why have you forgotten me?”, St. John of the Cross, Simone Weil). Following the dark night, the revelation is received. The dark night would occur at the third crossroads on the upward motion and the first crossroads on the descending motion on the Tree of Life.

Text 2.5:

2.5 For He indeed showed the mode of combination of the letters, each with each, Aleph with all, and all with Aleph. Thus, in combining all together in pairs are produced these two hundred and thirty-one gates of knowledge. And from Nothingness did He make something, and all forms of speech and every created thing, and from the empty void He made the solid earth, and from the non-existent He brought forth Life. He hewed, as it were, immense columns or colossal pillars, out of the intangible air, and from the empty space. And this is the impress of the whole, twenty-one letters, all from one, the Aleph.

Wescott trans. 2.5. For He shewed the combination of these letters, each with the other; Aleph with all, and all with Aleph; Beth with all, and all with Beth. Thus in combining all together in pairs are produced the two hundred and thirty−one gates of knowledge. (32)[1]

See the notes to the Wescott translation below.

Wescott trans. 2. 6. And from the non−existent (33)[2] He made Something; and all forms of speech and everything that has been produced; from the empty void He made the material world, and from the inert earth He brought forth everything that hath life. He hewed, as it were, vast columns out of the intangible air, and by the power of His Name made every creature and everything that is; and the production of all things from the twenty−two letters is the proof that they are all but parts of one living body. (34)[3]

[1]32. The 231 Gates. The number 242 is obtained by adding together all the numbers from 1 to 22. The Hebrew letters can he placed in pairs in 242 different positions: thus ab, ag, ad, up to at; then ba, bb, bg, bd, up to bt, and so on to ts, tt: this is in direct order only, without reversal. For the reason why eleven are deducted, and the number 231 specified, see the Table and Note 15 in the edition of Postellus.

[2]33. Non−existent; the word is AIN, nothingness. Ain precedes Ain Suph, boundlessness; and Ain Suph Aur, Boundless Light.

[3]34. Body; the word is GUP, usually applied to the animal material body, but here means “one whole.”

Commentary on 2.5:

Passage 2.5 is a summary of all that has been said up to now in the Sefer Yetzirah. The combining together of the pairs of letters produce the 231 gates of knowledge, but all are from the one Alef. The formula for the combinations is n (n – 1) / 2. Within Alef are the three elements of air, fire and water indicating the Pythagorean understanding of numbers as a triune (and the One God as a Trinity). The physical universe, earth, substance, is created from these three elements. “The void” is Chakmah or the unlimited, space without definable limits; it is of the element water. It is no-thing. To make no-thing into some-thing requires the imposition of language and number so that they can be measured and weighed and then named, “the shape of water”. This shaping is called the Beriyah level of the Universe, the creation of something from nothing (Atzilut, Yetzirah, and Asiyah being the other three). Binah and the Beriyah level of creation are simultaneous. “From non-existence (“no-thing”) He brought forth Life” as well as Language, and both occur simultaneously.

“He carved (hewed) immense columns or colossal pillars”: “Wisdom has built its house; it has carved its seven pillars” (Proverbs 9:1) The great pillars of Wisdom are the seven subjects of education, and hence Understanding: grammar, logic, rhetoric (Language), arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy (Number). Wisdom is realized through the study of the 7 subjects. The 7 pillars are also said to correspond to the lower 7 Sephirot of created things. The 7 days of the week are the “light of the world”, the reflected light of Malkhut (Time) from the primary light of the Sun of Tiferet. The 7 doubles of the alphabet are the vertical lines of the Tree of Life derived from the three Mothers. The three Mothers are associated with the past, Time. Together they spell out the word “last night”. Understanding is the shared knowledge that we would deem “historical knowledge”, and it is comprised of the 7 pillars of Wisdom; it comes from the past and is part of the communities of which we are members.

The illustration on the left indicates the horizontal lines of Alef, Mem, and Shin. The movement is from right to left on the Tree: from Chakmah to Binah (Shin), from Chesed to Gevurah(Alef) , from Netzach to Hod (Mem).

The One Name of God is YHVH: tetra (four), gramma (letters) or Tetragrammaton. The whole of language and number is said to develop from the combinations made through this name. The name invokes the shape of Alef: two Yods with a Vav as a diagonal barrier between them.

In the passage, the initiate “foresees, transforms and makes”. To “foresee” is to “pre-dict”; to “transform” is to change in order to “make” – pro-duction. The forming and making in the realm of Yetzirah and Asiyah is what we understand as the “technological”, the “knowing” and “making”. What is implied in human making is that the human bringing into being of things is that those things were always already there and that the human being merely reveals that which is part of “every thing that will ever come into being”. The Balinese, for example, celebrate their Honda motorcycles as ‘a gift from the god’. Honda did not ‘create’ the motorcycles; they were always already there and Honda merely revealed them and made them.

Human beings make from “another”; Nature makes from itself. The human being does not create; he “makes” from the seeing (foreseeing, pre-diction), the arranging (transforming), and the production or bringing forth into being or revealing that which was always there. (From this one could say that J. R. R. Tolkien is literally correct in saying that technology is “black magic”! In the past, permission was required from on High to make an actual physical Golem, but that does not seem to have stopped modern day scientists. Note the similarities of the words Golem and Tolkien’s Gollum. The ‘eye of Sauron’ and the techne of Saruman would appear to be the seeing that is the technological.)

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Summary of A Sketch for a Portrait of Evil: Section VIII

In the painting of “The Red Dragon and the Beast of the Sea”, the English poet and artist William Blake shows us that the Dragon is the combination of Church and State militancy, the ‘armed prophet’ of political Christianity and the establishment of the theocratic regime. Historically, we may say that this is the Roman Church when it succumbed to the third temptation of Christ and sought control of all the kingdoms of this world, the creation of the universal, homogeneous State. In the Beast’s hands are the sword of secular power and the crozier of religious power. In Blake’s mythology, Urizen, what we understand as ‘human rationality’, finally sinks to this inhuman form as does Milton’s Satan in Blake’s understanding of his Paradise Lost.

According to the Book of Revelations, the Whore of Babylon rides on a beast with seven heads and ten horns. Blake identified the Beast with the Dragon. In another sketch of her, the fumes from her cup drive human beings to hatred and war; as they fight, the Dragon devours them. The Dragon is the anti-Christ or the anti-Logos. The Beast of the Sea is the Leviathan, “King over all the Children of Pride.” The Dragon and the Beast are two different entities. In marginal notes to his reading of the Book of Job, Blake writes that the “cloud barriers shall be scattered” and “the emptied shells of the Sea of Time and Space will be the deliverance from the material body”. (See my commentaries on the Sefer Yetzirah where time and space are viewed as “husks”.)

If our sketch of this portrait of evil has brought any of the many outward faces of evil from out of the darkness and into the light, then we should be able to see how the bringing of evil to the light is part of human “consciousness” or “cognition” and is the essence of what “human excellence” is; it is moral or ethical awareness because the world itself is essentially moral and ethical, and to have knowledge of this is to have “self-knowledge”. Blake, with his figure of Urizen, shows how what we understand as ‘rationality’ or what we conceive the essence of modern science to be, is productive of “Newton’s sleep”, a somnambulistic state of being similar to the prisoners in Plato’s allegory of the Cave. All human excellence is an act of rebellion of some sort, and this excellence is to be found in the development of “consciousness” and with it “conscience”. This consciousness and conscience is not to be found in the submission of conformity nor in the donning of the cloak of “intentional ignorance”, the modern version of the wearing of the Ring of Gyges.

“Consciousness” is inseparable from “conscience”. “Consciousness” is present at all times and in various stages of development and degrees for all human beings. “True consciousness” is self-knowledge or “cognition” as Socrates called it; the lack of “consciousness” and the lack of self-knowledge is to be among ‘the dead’, the walking, waking dead. What we call “consciousness” is a somnambulism, a walking with shadows and delusions, or “Newton’s sleep” as the poet Blake referred to it. Newton’s sleep is induced by Urizen.

When we read or hear from the saints, we are surprised at their “consciousness” of their sinfulness for to us they appear to be human beings without sin. This awareness of their sinfulness is their higher state of consciousness. When we read the Irish writer, James Joyce, we can discover how his protagonist Stephen Daedalus carried out his mission of going forth “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscious of my race” through the final writing of his Finnegans Wake, a book that requires us to engage in the discovery of the logos as if we, too, lived in a perpetual state of “consciousness” or “wakefulness” and were able to bring about a perpetual state of bringing forth epiphanies rather than living in the “somnambulism” that is modern waking life.

In the modern, the possibility of self-knowledge was gifted a cup of poison by Sigmund Freud with his notion of the id and his depiction of the human personality; and this cup of poison was handed over to Eros. It is not surprising that Freud’s final thinking was focused on Thanatos or the “death instinct”, nor is it that the logos of artificial intelligence is focused on ‘dead language’ or meta-language. In my living in Singapore for 30 years, I was always in amazement at its state of efficiency and I came to realize that this was the result of its attempt to dominate and control eros through technology. Eros is messy, and the technological abhors messiness. The experience of Singapore for many is that it is ‘soulless’, even though there are few, if any, cities that can match it for its effectiveness and efficiency.

When Socrates was admonished by the oracle at Delphi to “know thyself” and was told that he was the wisest of mortals because he knew that he knew nothing, this admonishment was the command and call to begin the journey to “consciousness”. Consciousness gives to us a sense of the reality of being and a sense of the being of reality. What we understand reality to be is crucial for our understanding of ourselves and of our being-in-the-world and our being-with-others in that world. It gives to us our notion of what is good and evil and of what is human excellence. This reality is not to be found in many of the tools and gadgets that technology has brought into being; for technology, like the logos and eros itself, is “two-faced”.

Thinking and self-knowledge are correlated and inseparable, as are “consciousness” and “conscience”. When true thought is not present, there is no self-knowledge. Where there is no self-knowledge, there is no sense of “reality”. Where there is no sense of reality, there is no re-cognition (memory) or knowledge of good and evil, there is no possibility for human excellence or arete. Without a sense of “human excellence”, there is no strife or polemos within the individual soul or mind to resist the temptation to succumb to evil and subsequently to evil actions. One’s “moral compass” is lost.

In this writing, we have attempted to show how the gradual falling away of “consciousness” (call it if you will “attention”, or “contemplation”, or “prayer”, and with it ‘dialectic’) through the dominance of the principle of reason in the technological, causes “conscience” and the “moral compasses” of the human beings associated with this “conscience” to be replaced by “values” which, having no “factual” basis in ‘reality’ according to the reasoning of these sciences since they can only be constructions of the imagination, lack the strength to confront and strive against the needs for “effectiveness” and “efficiency” required by the technological. What is called “critical thinking’ is only the beginning of this journey to “consciousness”.

In the battle between technology and “values”, values will always lose out because technology’s root is power and empowerment. The shallow ‘reality’ of the values which are the products of imagination will always be of less power and strength than the necessity of the values of technology. As was shown in our discussion of Eichmann, technology is indifferent to whether a shipment is of coal or of human beings; both are resources. The “values” of technology are what Being itself, the conjoined faces and forces of the lower eros and logos, has given to human beings.

The question of “what is virtue or human excellence?” is identical with the question of “what is the principle of all value judgements?”; and the discovery of the principle of value judgements has much to do with the gaining of a “consciousness” and recognition of what is evil. We moderns distinguish judgements of “fact” from judgements of “value”. This “fact – value” distinction results in the lack of a “moral compass” so prevalent today among the powerful or among those who possess the potentia of the dynamis (what we call “agency”) for making things happen. Judgements of value require a greater attention, contemplation and thought than those judgements that derive from the regarding of judgements of “fact” i.e. the thinking that is done in the sciences, and thus derive from a thinking that is antithetical to those sciences. Meno’s low understanding of virtue, for example, adheres to the most common understanding of virtue. Adherence to the most common understanding of virtue results in the tyrant as was shown to us from the myth of Er at the conclusion of Republic.

The “fact/value distinction” of the social sciences is a lowering of human “consciousness”. The social sciences are a predicate of the subject technology. Artificial intelligence, the apogee of technology, is the elimination of “consciousness” altogether. This elimination of consciousness is the ultimate goal of the technological. What is the definition of “artificial intelligence” if not the removal of “conscience” from “consciousness” and the replacing of “conscience” and “consciousness” with “rationality” and the “rationality of values”?

Without “consciousness” there is no possibility for human excellence, no possibility of sophrosyne moderation and phronesis wise judgement. Technology’s tools and gadgets lessen those moments that human beings have for those activities which require attention; look at the people around you and their use of handphones in moments when human conversation is possible or might be possible. Look at the loss of the quality of solitude and the use of imagination in our day-to-day lives and the subsequent loss of reading skills and our moments of engagement with the logos. The death of the Russian novel is not hyperbole.

This weakening of the moral compass which was initially intended to point to the good causes the moral compass to decay and become ineffectual since there is no good to point to since it has become a ‘value’, that is, a product of the human imagination, a matter of choice, of chance, of taste. Modern notions of ‘freedom’ are bound up in this illusion of choice and matters of taste, the philosophy of aestheticism. This will eventually produce the ‘happy tyranny’ that is the ultimate outcome of the technological future: the fulfilling of the appetitive consumption and the abdication of the responsibility to think.

Thoughtlessness and the lack of self-knowledge are characteristics found among those who succumb to the temptations of evil. Reason is not thought as it was understood by Plato. For us, the Self, understood as subject, grounds all that is in being through the principle of reason: nihil est sine ratione “nothing is without (a) reason”. It is this Reason of the Subject which spreads ‘like a fungus’ (in Hannah Arendt’s words) through all that is in being transforming all that is into an object, a problem to be fixed or solved. This was shown to us in the works of William Blake and his mythic figures of Urizen and Orc (whose origin is not from J. R. R. Tolkien as many believe but was originally from Blake. Both Tolkien and Blake were involved in the same task: to create an English mythology, to create a consciousness and conscience for English-speaking peoples. Orc is derived from cor, meaning ‘heart’, and the Orc is the ‘misplaced heart’ of human hatred in Blake’s work). The Reason of science is the two-legged stool upon which our modern world totters.

As was shown in our long discussion of Plato’s Divided Line in Part I, this principle of reason is the essence of technology, the invisible “knowing” combined with the visible “making” to bring forward or “produce” the ready-to-hand things, the artifacts that are the ‘goods’ of our world. These artifacts (including the invisible metaphysics, schema) determine the shadows that are displayed on the walls of our Cave (the Cave is phusis, Nature) in Plato’s allegory. The artifacts and their shadows are produced by the artisans and technicians whose self-ignited ‘fire’ creates the light that casts the shadows of the ‘opinions’ (doxa) that have become the “orthodoxy” of those who rule and those who have power. These opinions rule because they ‘work’ and produce ‘works’. The pre-dictive powers of the sciences is the ‘prophecy’ that we now bow down to. “Prophecy” is the highest human logos, the highest speech. The artifacts of technology are destructive of dialectic. Drugs and other pharmaceuticals, for example, are used to ‘cure’ human beings of the mass meaninglessness which has enveloped their lives through this destruction of dialectic. In their consumption, only the symptoms are briefly overcome; the disease remains unchecked. The ‘drug problem’ is but one manifestation of the human need for meaning in their lives.

The doxa of the artisans and technicians determines the logoi of technology’s apogee - artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence combines with the ‘consciouslessness’ of cybernetics to eliminate human beings from their interference in the efficiency and effectiveness of the creation of the technological world. The “thinking” which will interfere with this efficiency and effectiveness needs to be eliminated. Technology is, in its very essence, tyrannical.

“Conscience” has been replaced by reason. These doxa of the artisans and technicians are the determiners of the kind of making that will occur, ‘the stamping of becoming with the character of being’. These doxa develop the mass meaninglessness which envelops us and causes our humanity to seep away unless we struggle to hold on to it. We have given some examples of these doxa in our discussions of the ‘fact/value distinction’ and ‘malignant narcissism’ so prevalent in our being-with-others today. They are examples of that nihilism that is the sea in which we swim.

Christian Nationalism and Machiavelli’s “Armed Prophet”

In this writing I have alluded to the relationship between “Christian nationalism” and the “armed prophet” of Machiavelli. There is a relationship between the ‘malignant narcissism” so prevalent in the world today and of those who believe that they are in sole possession of the truth. Knowing that one does not know is the first step to “consciousness” and to self-knowledge. Believing one already possesses the truth provides the certainty required by the will which is necessary for the establishment of technological values, the values that see themselves beyond good and evil, the will to power.

‘Christian nationalists’ are to be found in a number of countries throughout the world. Even Vladimir Putin of Russia is a self-proclaimed “Christian nationalist”. Christian nationalism may be said to be “fascist theocracy”, with its followers quite satisfied in their blasphemy of placing the Great Beast which shows itself as the “fatherland” or “motherland” and the cult of personality of their leader before the eternal verities of their faith. There is nothing more antithetical to Christian nationalism than the Sermon on the Mount.

Machiavelli’s name is synonymous with deception, treachery, cunning, and deceit, and not without reason. He was, and is, a teacher of evil. Machiavelli compared himself to Christopher Columbus; and like Columbus, he sought to establish a new world order that would replace the ancient order that he had inherited. The old world order that he had inherited was the universality of the Holy Roman Empire, the successor to the Roman Empire of the Caesars. Machiavelli himself was a man without faith.

When it came to the idea of human excellence, Machiavelli wrote: “”Many have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in truth (e.g. Plato’s Republic, Augustine’s City of God). For it is far from how one lives to how one should live. That he who lets go of what is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation” (italics and examples mine).

Machiavelli required the domination of necessity, fortuna, but he did not realize that this transition or jump from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom (the great revolution of the Renaissance) would be the death of the possibility for human excellence. He knew that it would require new codes and norms. What he did not know was whether or not his new world was inhabitable for human beings. Machiavelli will equate the self-preservation of the Prince with the goal of the preservation of the state for the Prince is the State, the tyrant is the nation or country. The technology of the helmsman will be that which will guide this brave new world in its novel domination of necessity from out of human beings’ freedom and any notion of excellence will be derived from this ‘freedom’.

Machiavelli turns virtú or human excellence on its head by showing that human beings should live according to necessity rather than aspiring to the good of what ‘should be done’. For Machiavelli, self-preservation is the good above all other goods and this self-preservation can only be assured by possessing and maintaining power. For Machiavelli, the self-preservation of the polis or ‘fatherland’ is prior to the self-preservation of the individual. Machiavelli’s virtú is Meno’s second response to Socrates’ question regarding arete virtue or human excellence. Like Meno, his virtú dispenses with any requirement for justice. His Prince is a handbook for wanna’-be dictators or tyrants.

Machiavelli is a kind of step-grandfather of modern-day social science and his thinking has ultimately led to the “fact/value” distinction (the distinction between what ‘is’ and ‘what should be’, between how men in fact do live and any notion of how they should, in fact, live). As has been shown in this writing, an indispensable condition of a scientific analysis of the facts is moral obtuseness. It is the distinction between “consciousness” and “conscience”; and while it does not lead to depravity and evil on its own, it is bound to strengthen the forces of depravity and evil as we have tried to show with the example of the American Psychology Association and Donald Trump.

Machiavelli defines virtues as qualities that are praised by others, eudoxa or ‘good opinions’, such as generosity, compassion, and piety. Machiavelli’s ‘piety’ is merely an early form of ‘gaslighting’. He argues that a prince should always try to appear virtuous, but that acting virtuously for virtue’s sake can prove detrimental to the principality and to the Prince himself. We have shown similar characteristics in our commentary on the Meno. We can say further that, in fact, Machiavelli does not bring to light any political phenomenon of any fundamental importance which was not fully known to the classics. All things will appear in a new light if they are seen for the first time in a dimmed light.

The closing down of the horizon of thinking to only that which is given in the lower portion of the Divided Line from that of the whole only appears as an enlargement of the horizon. It is in fact a great lowering or leveling of horizons. Machiavelli’s silence regarding the soul in his writings reveals the soulless nature of his thinking, its lack of “consciousness” and “conscience”.

Concurrent with Machiavelli’s life and thinking was the enactment of a Papal Bull known as the “Doctrine of Discovery” by Pope Alexander VI. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-primary-source/doctrine-discovery-1493 . Alexander VI was the first “armed Pontiff” and he conspicuously lacked any “goodness” according to historians. In Machiavelli’s view, the rule by the priests or a “theocracy” was more tyrannical than any other regime. Priestly government cannot be responsible to a citizen body. For Machiavelli, priestly governments are most easily attained or conquered and ruled without virtue. Has this in fact occurred with Donald Trump and his alliance with the Christian Nationalist movement in the USA?

White supremacy has Christian roots and creates those principalities most easily conquered by a tyrant. The Doctrine of Discovery 1493 was established by a Papal Bull that claimed that European civilization and western Christianity were superior to all other cultures, races, and religions. Its evil rested in its stating that it was God’s will that Spain (beginning with Columbus, and later the rest of Europe would follow) could and should engage in imperial expansionism, the slave trade, and the genocide of the Native Peoples of the North American continent which was “discovered” by Columbus the year before. The doctrine was carried into effect with missionary zeal. The evil, the blasphemy, still so prevalent today among evangelicals and Christian nationalists was to believe that God’s will is scrutable and that the good end justifies any means. The moral parallel to this belief is the teaching of Machiavelli.

“The Doctrine of Discovery” said “…that in our times especially the Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread, that the health of souls be cared for and that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself.” ”The Doctrine of Discovery” furnished the foundational lie (which was hardly a ‘noble lie’) that America was “discovered” and that its discoverers were the “pioneers” who were ‘nobly innocent’. One example of their “noble innocence” was their leaving behind clothing infected with the smallpox disease for the Native peoples to pick up.

The foundational lie for white North Americans could not be a “noble lie” because there was no “autochthony”, no being and living with the land, the soil, before conscious memory as there was in Europe itself, nor as there was in the Athens of Plato. The best that could be done was the creation of shabby myths regarding freedom such as America presenting itself as “the shining beacon on the hill” and other such nonsense. The North American example illustrated Machiavelli’s original premise that all Principalities began or begin with a great crime.

It is not surprising to find that the current Christian nationalists in the USA have a number of neo-Nazis and their organizations as their members. The movement has no problem accommodating atheists. There is a direct connection between Christian nationalists and authoritarian or totalitarian regimes and this was noted long ago by Machiavelli.

Francis Bacon in his “13th Essay” of 1612 was able to write: “…one of the doctors of Italy, Nicholas Machiavel, had the confidence to put in writing, almost in plain terms, That the Christian faith had given up good men in prey to those who are tyrannical and unjust.” We see a repetition of that history in the world today. The original fear of God was to be replaced by the fear of the “leader”. Such is the reason for the prevalence of “cults of personality” among the far-right today, be it in Russia or the USA. That there are those who believe that Donald Trump is a ‘saviour’ indicates that such madness has been present among human beings since ancient times and is not unique to our time nor to the totalitarian regimes of the early 20th century. What distinguishes ancient tyrannies from modern tyrannies is the presence of technology which makes the tyranny more pervasive and oppressive. The ability to think outside of technology is almost well-nigh impossible, and this is the great strife or polemos in our living in the world today.

Along our journey to try to compile an image for a sketch of a portrait of evil we have noted that evil is associated with death and nihilism. We have noted that evil is anti-life and anti-logos, and we have said that this is revealed in the two-fold, two-faced nature of both Eros and of the Logos. We have noted that “consciousness” and “conscience” involve both the logos and eros, and that life at all times involves a choosing of which of the faces of these two one is looking at; for as we live we find that life is a sowing and a reaping, a giving birth and a dying, a loving and a hating, and so on. Our souls need to discern which is the ‘fullness’ and which is the ‘deprivation’. Although we cannot see the peak of the mountain upon which we climb because it is often obscured by clouds on most occasions, we are able to distinguish a mountain from a molehill and are capable of making moral judgements in doing so. We are capable of knowing when we are ascending and when we are descending.

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Sketch for a Portrait of Evil: Part IV

The Red Dragon and the Beast from the Sea

Donald Trump and the USA

“Have you never observed in those who are popularly spoken of as bad, but smart men, how keen is the vision of the little soul, how quick it is to discern the things that interest it, a proof that it is not a poor vision which it has, but one forcibly enlisted in the service of evil, so that the sharper its sight the more mischief it accomplishes?” (Republic 518d-519a)

“A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and, in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal. And it all comes from lying – lying to others and to yourself.”

“The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he’s in prison.”

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“What else is misery but the desire and possession of evil?” Plato, Meno 78b

This will probably be the most controversial of any of the four parts of this portrait of evil for it deals with contemporary events, events which have not yet become part of history for their outcomes are still uncertain. The analysis of Trump’s character and his actions that is presented here must be read in the light of what has already been written in the previous sections of this portrait of evil. Those who have specific counter-claims to the points made here are free to post them in the comments section below provided by the blog. Providing specific sources for the evidence to the counter-claims would be useful in properly bringing things to light.

The story of Donald J. Trump is that of the playboy who squandered his father’s fortune and who became an incompetent, vicious clown as the ruler of his people. His story is truly the stuff of myth; and it is a story that has been heard and recorded throughout history on a number of occasions and in various cultures. It is a story which continues to be ongoing.

Trump’s story is that of a “malignant narcissist” who comes to power to represent a regime or polis that has devolved into a mass “malignant narcissism” itself: the soul reflects the regime and the regime reflects the soul. One of the questions which needs to be asked is: what is the relationship between mass malignant narcissism and technology? How and why is mass malignant narcissism a response to the meaninglessness at the heart of the nihilism that is technology? Another question is: how is malignant narcissism a manifestation of evil as a lack of self-knowledge and an acceptance of mass thoughtlessness?

Trump is a playboy who had seen at an early age that he has no possibility in the regime as it currently stands (what could this “possibility” mean since he has achieved the highest position of power in that regime and has been assumed to be ‘sane’ by the mental health professionals within that regime?) and who, because of this, emerges as a demagogue whose nihilism mirrors the mass nihilism present in his followers. It ultimately seeks the destruction of the regime and the order that is brought about by the rule of law which is crucial to the regime’s survival.

Trump is a “true” white American. His malignant narcissism is rooted in his racism: early in his life he denied housing to African Americans because they would lower his property values, and he begins his political career challenging the authenticity of the first Black President of the USA Barack Obama’s birth certificate, for Trump fears that what he is and what he will become has no place in the multi-racial, multi-cultural society that is present-day America. Many of his fellow Americans agree with him, for they too see no reflection of themselves in the regime as it now stands (which one may best describe as ‘totteringly’).

His slogan becomes MAGA: “make America great again”, although the time when America was great is never clearly established, and it appears to have some roots in the time when America was a Confederacy prior to the first Civil War (I say ‘first’ for the followers are looking for a second Civil War). Trump’s story is not unique nor are his methods for securing power, and in examining him we can get more details for our sketch for our portrait of evil.

Trump cannot distinguish between right and wrong actions. He believes that cheating, lying, and “risky behaviour” are not wrongful if the wrongdoer (himself) does not intend to cause harm (in legal language, there is no mens rea) or if no harm results. (This is his defense at a number of his trials.) Trump, like Meno and Eichmann before him, clearly cannot see beyond himself. He is incapable of seeing ‘the big picture’ and this is shown in the errors that his judgement has made both in the past and present. He has no sense of good and evil (unless it is actions done against him where he perceives himself as the ‘victim’) and he does not believe that the laws apply to him for he has no sense of justice for he does not believe he ‘owes’ anything to anybody. He does not ask God for ‘forgiveness’ because he himself is perfect.

One may assert that Trump is unable to distinguish right from wrong because of his “bad upbringing”. Some of his critics say he is unable to make accurate normative judgements because he has been taught the “wrong values”. Trump’s education in the “wrong values” (primarily from his father, Fred Trump, and from his father’s consigliere Roy Cohn) causes him to make inaccurate judgements about the world in which he lives. He has, nevertheless, gained great success in that world and become one of its most powerful people. Because Trump is able to successfully and efficiently function in his society or world indicates that he is not insane or mad, according to most psychiatrists and social scientists today.

People who have been taught the “wrong values” are people suffering from a psychosis where “conscience” and “consciousness” have become separated. They are divided selves. Because their “consciousness” is not of a “real” world, like psychotics they are unable to make accurate judgements about the world in which they in fact do live. They lack what the Greeks called sophrosyne moderation and phronesis wise judgement, essential components of self-knowledge and arete or human excellence, virtue. They are, to paraphrase the psychiatrist R. D. Laing’s assessment, examples of that ‘Insanity (that) is a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world’.

A study by the U.S. Department of Education in 2020 found that 54% of Americans could not read prose beyond the Grade 5 level; that is the age of an 11 or 12 year old. Trump exhibits many of the characteristics of an ill-bred 11 year old bully who has never been able to go beyond his Oedipal attachments and conflicts and the fears that arise at that age. Indeed, the American political scene at the moment exhibits many of the same characteristics of a primary or middle school playground where bullies and their followers attempt to impose their wills on the majority of the other children. They wish to impose barriers on that ‘open space’ that is the playground through the banning of books and other forms of human discourse.

The American polis’ attachment to the logos is very weak to begin with since it has been primarily formed by the opinions promulgated in the mass social media; and with its lack of attachment to the logos, a weak attachment to what may be called “the real world” has long been established. This is found in their responses to the world of the mass media in which they dwell. They are like the two young fish who do not know “what the hell” water is.

As Hannah Arendt noted in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.” This disbelief in the mass media was greatly exacerbated by the USA media’s coverage of the Iraq war during the period 2003-2011. The press’s failure to do its due diligence with regard to weapons of mass destruction being in the hands of Saddam Hussein (which became the “public” cause for the war rather than the control of the oil fields on behalf of the large multi-national oil conglomerates as the real reason behind the invasion and the ‘war on terror’) made the masses distrust the media to the point indicated by Arendt. Arendt in her quote from 1951 was referring to the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini.

American universities, where thought and the logos should be discussed and taught, chose to model themselves after the German universities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries so that they became “multiversities”, institutions dominated by the teaching of “useful” techne and, in turn, their primary activities became dominated by the money from the vested interests of the multi-national corporations, since research is expensive. In the pursuit of money and power, the original purpose of a ‘uni-versity’ became lost. In fact, the relative education of the German population at the time when Hitler came to power in the 1930s was much higher and stronger than is America’s at present. America has essentially failed in its ‘social contract’, and this is not only revealed by its wealth disparity but also by its lack of concern for the education of its citizens in favour of production and consumption.

Trump, a conman and a showman (qualities so appropriate to a political leader of the 21st century where politics has become the politics of the gutter, the realpolitik, and the glitter of the visual screen), follows a long line of flimflam artists first shown most hilariously by Mark Twain in his characters of the Duke and the Dauphin in Huckleberry Finn. Whether or not Trump’s tarring and feathering is in the cards has still not been decided for, at the time of this writing, he remains the top candidate of the Republican Party for President of the United States once again. How is this possible?

Gaslighting and the Media

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist, was the first to formulate what has become known as the Big Lie, so popular among populist movements in the world today. Goebbels’ Big Lie runs: ““If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

One or many of the components of Trump’s Big Lie are promoted on a daily basis in American media through the sophistic technique known as “gaslighting”. Gaslighting is a technique of rhetoric, a sophism which uses fallacious arguments with the goal of attempting to deceive. While the term has been around since the title of a 1938 play and the movies based on that play, the plots of which involve a man attempting to make his wife believe that she is going insane, the term did not really find roots in English parlance until Donald Trump became a politician and decided to run for the Presidency of the United States i.e. around 2015.

Gaslighting requires both lying and fraud, characteristics of Donald Trump’s entire life both on a personal and social level, and in this specific instance involve the transference of a malignant narcissism from the individual to the nation or tribe/clan . For this transference to happen, the malignant narcissism must already be present in the souls of the individuals so that they may be ‘yoked’ together in an ersatz form of the true dialectic that we have spoken about in Part I of this writing.

Trump has been able to hone in on Americans’ growing sense of “meaninglessness” and nihilism to create an abusive relationship between Americans, their country, and their politics. His followers sense of “victimhood” arises from their sense of “entitlement” which, in turn, breeds a meaninglessness and ressentiment resulting from that meaninglessness and nihilism when that entitlement is not realized. From out of the despair of their meaninglessness, they lash out at that world they believe is the cause of that meaninglessness.

In modern forms of deception and manipulation such as fake news and deepfake, the idea of a deliberate conspiracy to mislead has made gaslighting useful in describing lies that are part of a larger plan such as Trump’s Big Lie regarding the 2020 election. Gaslighting is the form that modern day political rhetoric has taken, but it is also present in many of the interactions that human beings have among themselves both in their private and public spheres. Unlike lying which, before Trump, had tended to be between individuals, and fraud, which tended to involve organizations, gaslighting applies in both personal and political contexts and may be analyzed according to its parts, much like Aristotle analyzed the rhetoric of his day. Today’s gaslighting is a manifestation of what has been called here the antilogos.

The evil of gaslighting can be seen in a number of parallels between private and social political contexts and the transformation of what was once gutter politics into the present malignant narcissism. The first technique of gaslighting is called “countering”: this is when someone questions a person’s memory. “History” is the national memory, the shared opinions that members of a national entity have been given (usually in mythic form) regarding their past. We have already discussed in detail the importance of memory to thinking and to self-knowledge in other sections of this sketching of a portrait of evil.

“Countering” occurs when an authority or perceived “friend”, a person of trust, may say things such as, “Are you sure about that? You have a bad memory,” or “I think you are forgetting what really happened.” In the public sphere, there is an effort to re-write history so that the truth of the facts can be obscured. As Goebbels observed, facts are an enemy of the authoritarian state. Trump has shown many times that he has no knowledge of history whether it be of America or the World. Because he lacks such knowledge, his actions on the world stage are rash on many occasions because of his lack of phronesis or wise judgement.

“Countering” can also take the form of misplaced emphasis such as “The preservation of States’ rights was the main cause of the Civil War” rather than the acknowledged fact that “Slavery was the main cause of the Civil War” and the acknowledged economic benefits and power in competitive relations that followed from the ownership of the labour of slaves. Slavery was also present in Washington D. C. in 1862 prior to The Emancipation Proclamation. The main goal of gaslighting is the destruction of the possibility of “dialectic” and of the logos, the speaking and saying that allows truth to emerge by bringing light to things.

On the political and social level, during and after the 2020 election and throughout his administration, Trump has led a sustained campaign of political gaslighting. Gaslighting as an “elaborate and insidious technique of deception and psychological manipulation” used to “undermine the victim’s confidence in his own ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, right from wrong, or reality from appearance, thereby rendering him psychologically dependent on the gaslighter” allows the malignant narcissism already present in the “victim” to be transferred to that of the “leader”. This is leading to the destruction of democracy in America. (Many of those convicted of crimes committed on January 6, 2021 are now claiming to have been victims of gaslighting.) Trump is supported in his gaslighting efforts by a number of social media outlets. The ultimate goal of the gaslighter is the power to dominate, manipulate and control. Trump has made no secret that he will seek retribution for his perceived wrongs from his perceived enemies should he regain power.

Gaslighting requires the weakness of the sense of self and self-knowledge of the victim of the gaslighting. Trump uses gaslighting to make American voters doubt their memory of his past actions and positions. Trump has been accused of rape by a number of women (and found guilty of the rape of E. Jean Carroll in a civil case in the courts) and has been abusive of women throughout his life. These facts do not affect his followers’ view of him, for to his followers, his victims’ statements are not “facts” even though the notorious “Access Hollywood Tape” has shown the potential for such acts by Trump is highly possible.

Trump refuted basic scientific facts on the effects of Covid, for example, where over 1 million Americans died from the disease while he was President. This number was the highest number in the world, even though America lauds itself on the quality of its healthcare system and its bio-medical research. The distrust of the truth of science is but one facet of rejecting any light that might question the “reality” of Trump’s followers’ world-view. Science, bound within the confines of the corporation and greed for profits, has also been responsible for placing itself in this position.

Trump has led his followers to distrust reliable sources of information on the outcomes of the 2020 election, for example. The ultimate aim is to give himself a monopoly on “truth” which he, in his own malignant narcissism, hopes will ultimately lead to his attainment of authoritarian or dictatorial power. Authoritarian and totalitarian power structures (as we have seen from Joseph Goebbels’s definition of the Big Lie) require a monopoly on a “truth” which is not a truth at all. Again, it is a truth which is the enemy of the logos. Winston Smith, the hero of George Orwell’s 1984 works in the “Ministry of Truth”.

When confronted with the truth, Trump engages in gaslighting. “Withholding” involves someone pretending that they do not understand the conversation, or refusing to listen, to make a person doubt themselves. For example, they might say, “Now you are just confusing me,” or “I do not know what you are talking about,” or “I do not know this person”. An example was shown when Trump, under oath, mistook a photo of E. Jean Carroll for one of his wives even though he claimed “She’s not my type”.

Withholding is done on a massive scale in those media bent on the Big Lie. Withholding requires “intentional ignorance” in both the private and public realms. Putin’s regime in Russia, for example, uses ‘troll factories’ of intelligence agents and thousands of computer-programmed bots to attack the logos and to overload online discourse with anger, noise and misinformation, to defuse any constructive effort at opposing the regime. Genuine discourse is drowned out by conspiracy theories and vitriol, and users disengage and become apathetic. And this apathy is the goal.

The “malignant narcissism” characteristic of Trump and his followers can be found in his trivializing of important matters which are seen by those who he perceives as his political enemies. Trivializing occurs when a person belittles or disregards how someone else feels about certain things. They may accuse them of being “too sensitive” or overreacting in response to valid and reasonable concerns on a private level. The fear of the destruction of democracy in America is seen as ‘over-reacting’ by Trump’s political supporters and the heads of many of America’s largest corporations. The disgust shown by many over Trump’s comparison of himself to Nelson Mandela and to Alexey Navalny, the Russian dissident murdered by Vladimir Putin, has been called ‘over-reacting’ by many of Trump’s followers.

Trivializing was used extensively in Trump’s response to Covid resulting in America, which had one of the top-ranked medical infrastructures in the world, having the highest number of Covid deaths in the world. In a ‘rational world’, such an outcome should not have been possible; but with Trump, one does not dwell in a ‘rational world’. The age of his political rival Joe Biden (when both men are relatively of the same age) and the questioning of Biden’s ‘fitness for office’ based on his age are some of the truly striking examples of the massive gaslighting currently going on in American politics.

In both the public and private spheres, denial is a phenomenon common to those who gaslight. Trump’s denialism has the aspects of a comedy that is a clown show; and while it is funny, its dangerous consequences are ever present. Denial is central to Trump’s playing of the “victim” in his destructive relations with America. Denial involves a person refusing to take responsibility for their actions. They may do this by pretending to forget what happened, saying they did not do it, or blaming their behavior on someone else. Trump’s use of denial reminds us that he is, mentally, a 12 year old child in the body of an old man, and it shows the meeting point of his gaslighting and his malignant narcissism.

In the confrontation with the logos that is to be found in the dialectical or private sphere, the gaslighter may chose the technique of diversion. This also occurs in the public sphere where a politician will attempt to change the topic from a discussion of a controversial subject not conducive to the politician’s views to another topic. “What about-ism” is a common example of diversion. With this technique, a person changes the focus of a discussion by questioning the other person’s credibility. For example, they might say, “That is just nonsense you read on the internet. It is not real.” Grasping what is real is essential to any self-knowledge and the development of a ‘moral compass’. Trump simply has no moral compass that can be discerned. His focus is on “what’s in it for me” and if others should benefit, all well and good.

Gaslighting typically uses stereotyping as one of its techniques. Trump constantly uses negative stereotypes about someone’s gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, or age to gaslight them and he seems to have particular problems dealing with powerful women especially if they are of another race. Trump, through his gaslighting, demonstrates that he is primarily a surface phenomenon who has no depth and he has no depth because he lacks arete virtue or human excellence. He appeals to a populace who cannot read beyond the grade 5 level, particularly of white American men who have come to view themselves as “victims”, even though their “victimization” is the outcome of their own previous choices based on their own sense of ‘entitlement’. A great deal of their ressentiment has developed from their loneliness.

Trump and “the Big Lie”: Gaslighting in Operation

How is it possible that an obvious con man and social clown could achieve the highest political office in the USA? Trump has been indicted for his ‘incitement to insurrection’ on January 6, 2021. A copy of the indictment can be found here: https://www.justice.gov/storage/US_v_Trump_23_cr_257.pdf

In looking at the charges brought by a Grand Jury against Trump (contrary to Trump’s insistence that it was Joe Biden who brought the charges against him), we can see how Trump has constructed the current Big Lie in the U.S. and how his Big Lie operates by looking at its constituent parts.

Trump’s Big Lie begins with the lie that fraud changed the outcome of the 2020 election, that Trump “had actually won,” and that the election was “stolen.” (Pages 1 and 40-41 of the indictment) Trump’s claim of a stolen election whose winner was determined by massive fraud was (and continues to be) his overarching lie about the election. The majority of members of his political party believe him, not wanting to face the “reality” that the facts pose to them (for this would be the shame of admitting that they were conned), even though over 60 cases brought before the courts have been thrown out. The indictment asserts that Trump knew as early as November 2020 that his narrative was false – and had been told as much by numerous senior officials in his administration and allies outside the federal government – but he persisted in deploying it including on January 6, 2021 itself. This transference of fraud to his political enemies is part of an overall “strategy” (if one could call it that, for a strategy requires thought and Trump’s transference is entirely emotional).

A second component of the Trump lie was that fake pro-Trump Electoral College electors in seven states were legitimate electors. (Pages 5 and 26) The indictment alleges that Trump and his alleged co-conspirators “organized” the phony slates of electors and then “caused” the slates to be transmitted to Vice President Mike Pence and other government officials to try to get them counted on January 6, the day Congress met to count the electoral votes. Pence refused to accept the phony slate of electors and, for the moment, preserved American democracy by preventing a Constitutional crisis.

A third component of the Trump lie was that the Justice Department had identified significant concerns that may have affected the outcome of the election. (Pages 6 and 27) Attorney General William Barr and other top Justice Department officials had told Trump that his claims of major fraud were simply untrue. The indictment alleges that Trump still sought to have the Justice Department “make knowingly false claims of election fraud to officials in the targeted states through a formal letter under the Acting Attorney General’s signature, thus giving the Defendant’s (Trump’s) lies the backing of the federal government and attempting to improperly influence the targeted states to replace legitimate Biden electors with the Defendant’s.”

A fourth component of the Trump lie was that Pence had the power to reject Biden’s electoral votes. (Pages 6, 32-38) Pence had repeatedly and correctly told Trump that he did not have the constitutional or legal right to send electoral votes back to the states as Trump wanted. The indictment notes that Trump nonetheless repeatedly declared that Pence could do so – first in private conversations and White House meetings, then in tweets on January 5 and January 6, and then in Trump’s January 6 speech in Washington at a rally before the riot – in which Trump, angry at Pence, allegedly inserted the false claim into his prepared text even after his advisors had managed to temporarily get it removed. This led to members of the mob shouting “Hang Mike Pence” as the rioting was going on.

A fifth component of the Big Lie was that “the Vice President and I are in total agreement that the Vice President has the power to act.” (Page 36) The January 6th indictment alleges that the day before the riot, Trump “approved and caused” his campaign to issue a false statement saying Pence agreed with him about having the power to reject electoral votes – even though Trump knew, from a one-on-one meeting with Pence hours prior, that Pence continued to firmly disagree.

A sixth part of the Trump lie was that Georgia had thousands of ballots cast in the names of dead people. (Pages 8 and 16) The indictment notes that Georgia’s top elections official – Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger – a Republican – explained to Trump in a phone call on January 2, 2021 that this claim was false, but that Trump repeated it in his January 6 rally speech anyway. Raffensperger said in the phone call and then in a January 6 letter to Congress that just two potential dead-voter cases had been discovered in the state; Raffensperger said in late 2021 that the total had been updated and stood at four.

A seventh component of Trump’s Big Lie is the lie that Pennsylvania had 205,000 more votes than voters. (Pages 8 and 20) The indictment notes that Trump’s acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue had both told him that this claim was false, but he kept making it anyway – including in the January 6 rally speech.

An eighth component of the Big Lie is the lie that there had been a suspicious “dump” of votes in Detroit, Michigan. (Pages 9 and 17) The indictment notes that Barr, the attorney general, told Trump on December 1, 2020 that this was false – as CNN and others had noted, supposedly nefarious “dumps” Trump kept talking about were merely ballots being counted and added to the public totals as normal – but that Trump still repeated the false claim in public remarks the next day. Barr wasn’t the only one to try to dissuade Trump from this claim. The indictment also notes that Michigan’s Republican Senate majority leader, Mike Shirkey, had told Trump in an Oval Office meeting on November 20, 2020 that Trump had lost the state “not because of fraud” but because Trump had “underperformed with certain voter populations.”

A ninth component of Trump’s Big Lie was the lie that Nevada had tens of thousands of double votes and other fraud. (Page 9) The indictment notes that Nevada’s top elections official – Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, also a Republican – had publicly posted a “Facts vs. Myths” document explaining that Nevada judges had rejected such claims.

A tenth component of the Big Lie was the lie that more than 30,000 non-citizens had voted in Arizona. (Pages 9 and 11) The indictment notes that Trump put the number at “over 36,000” in his January 6 speech – even though, the indictment says, his own campaign manager “had explained to him that such claims were false” and Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, a Republican who had supported Trump in the election, “had issued a public statement that there was no evidence of substantial fraud in Arizona.” Since that time, all legal cases brought suggesting voter fraud in Arizona have failed for lack of evidence.

Another component of the Big Lie (the 11th) was the lie that voting machines in swing states had switched votes from Trump to Biden. (Page 9) This is a reference to false conspiracy theories about Dominion Voting Systems machines, which Trump kept repeating long after it was thoroughly debunked by his own administration’s election cybersecurity arm and many others. The indictment says, “The Defendant’s Attorney General, Acting Attorney General, and Acting Deputy Attorney General all had explained to him that this was false, and numerous recounts and audits had confirmed the accuracy of voting machines.” Fox News agreed to a settlement of a fine of $787 million for promoting the Big Lie regarding the voting machines.

A twelfth component of Trump’s Big Lie was the lie that Dominion machines had been involved in “massive election fraud.” (Page 12) The indictment notes that Trump, on Twitter, promoted a lawsuit filed by an alleged co-conspirator, whom CNN had identified as lawyer Sidney Powell, that alleged “massive election fraud” involving Dominion – even though, the indictment says, Trump privately acknowledged to advisors that the claims were “unsupported” and told them Powell sounded “crazy.”

A thirteenth component of the Trump Big Lie was the lie that “a substantial number of non-citizens, non-residents, and dead people had voted fraudulently in Arizona.” (Page 10) The indictment alleges that Trump and an alleged co-conspirator, whom CNN has identified as former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, made these baseless claims on a November 22, 2020 phone call with Bowers; the indictment says Giuliani never provided evidence and eventually said, at a December 1, 2020 meeting with Bowers, “words to the effect of, ‘We don’t have the evidence, but we have lots of theories.”

A fourteenth component of Trump’s Big Lie was the lie that Fulton County, Georgia elections workers had engaged in “ballot stuffing.” (Pages 13 and 14) This is the long-debunked lie – which Trump has continued to repeat in 2023 – that a video had caught two elections workers in Atlanta breaking the law. The workers were simply doing their jobs and, as the indictment notes, they were cleared of wrongdoing by state officials in 2020 – but Trump continued to make the claims even after Raffensperger and Justice Department officials directly and repeatedly told him they were unfounded. Rudy Giuliani who promoted this aspect of the Big Lie has since been fined $148 million dollars for doing so. Trump’s indictment is pending for the same fraudulent claims.

A fifteenth component of the Trump Big Lie was the lie that thousands of out-of-state voters cast ballots in Georgia. (Page 16) The indictment notes that Trump made this claim on his infamous January 2, 2021 call with Raffensperger, whose staff responded that the claim was inaccurate. An official in Raffensberger’s office explained to Trump that the voters in question had authentically moved back to Georgia and legitimately cast ballots.

A sixteenth component was the lie that Raffensperger “was unwilling, or unable,” to address Trump’s Big Lie claims about a “‘ballots under the table’ scam, ballot destruction, out of state ‘voters’, dead voters, and more.” (Page 16) In fact, contrary to this Trump tweet the day after the call, Raffensperger and his staff had addressed and debunked all of these false Trump claims.

A seventeenth component of Trump’s Big Lie was the lie that there was substantial fraud in Wisconsin and that the state had tens of thousands of unlawful votes. (Page 21) Both accusations were false. The indictment notes that Trump made the vague fraud claim in a tweet on December 21, 2020, after the state Supreme Court upheld Biden’s win, and he repeated the more specific claim about tens of thousands of unlawful votes in the January 6 speech.

An eighteenth component of Trump’s Big Lie was the lie that Wisconsin had more votes counted than it had actual voters. (Page 21) This, like Trump’s similar claim about Pennsylvania, was not true. But the indictment alleges that Trump raised the claim in a December 27, 2020 conversation with acting attorney general Rosen and acting deputy attorney general Donoghue, who informed him that it was false.

A nineteenth component of the Trump Big Lie was the lie that the election was “corrupt.” (Page 28) The indictment alleges that when acting attorney general Rosen told Trump on the December 27, 2020 call that the Justice Department couldn’t and wouldn’t change the outcome of the election, Trump responded, “Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.” (Deputy attorney general Donoghue noted the reported Trump remark in his handwritten notes, which CNN reported on in 2021 and which were subsequently published by the House committee that investigated the Capitol riot. Trump continues to tell his followers that all of the evidence compiled by the January 6 committee has been “destroyed”. This, of course, is false.)

A twentieth component of the Trump Big Lie is the lie, and one believed by most Republicans, that Trump won every state by hundreds of thousands of votes. (Page 34) The indictment says that, at a January 4, 2021 meeting intended to convince Pence to unlawfully reject Biden’s electoral votes and send them back to swing-state legislatures, Pence took notes describing Trump as saying, “Bottom line-won every state by 100,000s of votes.” This was, obviously, false even if Trump was specifically talking about swing states won by Biden rather than every state in the nation. That Republicans believe in this component of the lie has not been damaged by their subsequent lack of success in the elections following November 2020.

A twenty-first component of the Trump Big Lie is the lie that Pennsylvania “want[s] to recertify.” (Page 38) Trump made this false claim in his January 6 speech. In reality, some Republican state legislators in Pennsylvania had expressed a desire to at least delay the congressional affirmation of Biden’s victory – but the state’s Democratic governor and top elections official, who actually had election certification power in the state, had no desire to recertify Biden’s legitimate win.

Gaslighting and Trump’s Big Lie are inseparable. Throughout history, those in power have often sought to mislead and deceive people, but political gaslighting only meaningfully emerged in a modern, psychological sense under the authoritarian states of the 1930s and 40s. In his novel 1984, George Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith works at the ‘Ministry of Truth’, rewriting and deleting historical documents to fit the ever-changing party line. The ultimate goal of gaslighting is to create dependency on the abuser. When people are paranoid, angry and distrust all media, the MAGA tribe becomes an anchor of belonging and certainty, and thus the transfer of malignant narcissism is completed.

Trump and the American Collective

“If, then,” I said, “the man resembles the state, must not the same proportion obtain in him, and his soul teem with boundless servility and illiberality, the best and most reasonable parts of it being enslaved, while a small part, the worst and most frenzied, plays the despot?” —Republic Bk. IX 577d

In our discussion of the dialogue Meno, we showed how the character of Meno (and the historical Meno) suffered from malignant narcissism, a modern term though the Greeks were thoroughly familiar with its essence. Malignant narcissism, a term coined by the German psychologist Erich Fromm, is a form of narcissistic personality disorder that is highly abusive. Meno, at times in the dialogue, shows his abusive nature. Xenophon in his Anabasis claimed that the historical Meno was an abusive personality. People with this personality supposedly get a sense of satisfaction from hurting others and may manipulate people or lie to gain money, acclaim, and other things they desire, things that were characteristic of the historical Meno according to Xenophon.

Campbell’s Psychiatric Dictionary suggests that malignant narcissism includes traits of narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder. Narcissistic personality disorder causes a person to seek constant acclaim and admiration, often by whatever means necessary. It also includes elements of antisocial personality disorder, which causes a person to engage in harmful, and sometimes criminal, behavior. Facts from Trump’s biography show him to have such a social pathology in abundance. HIs entire life has been one of fraud and deceit.

The separation of “consciousness” and “conscience” is clearly evident with a malignant narcissist, whether it be a single individual or the millions that compose a nation. Fromm states that malignant narcissism demonstrates “tendencies which are directed against life, which form the nucleus of severe mental sickness, and which can be said to be the essence of true evil.” (The Heart of Man, p. 27) In our writing here, we are calling this malignant narcissism nihilism. Malignant narcissism, according to Fromm, is a “syndrome of decay”, “the quintessence of evil”; and it is the “root of the most vicious destructiveness and inhumanity.” (Fromm, Ibid) It is to be found in the necrophilous, “the lover of death”. It is one face of the two-faced Eros.

That madness which arises from and is necessitated by the separation of “consciousness” and “conscience” in technologically advanced societies, where technology has achieved its apogee, is a madness which runs deep for it gives the appearance of being based on ‘rationality’. What is artificial intelligence by definition if not rationality without consciousness and conscience? ‘Rationality’ is but one face of the two-faced Logos that we have been speaking about in this writing.

One of the attractions of a man like Trump is that, in his individual malignant narcissism, millions of Americans find their “identities” as projections of their own malignant narcissism, one characteristic of which is their apparent unlimited capacity and willingness to kill or to do violence and destroy. At the time of this writing, this capacity remains merely at the fantasy, wish-fulfillment stage for most, but it is waiting to flourish, perhaps in a second Civil War for the USA. We hear of daily threats of violence from Trump’s supporters when he is challenged in the courts or in the public realm. Trump is not the flower of the tree that has been growing for over a century in what is called “the American right”. He is merely the fertilizer which has brought about that tree’s blooming and flourishing.

In other writings on this blog I have used the metaphor of the American ship of state as being the Titanic. After the Titanic struck an iceberg and was certain of sinking, the gates allowing access for the third-class passengers to the decks where the lifeboats were available were ordered locked, for the authorities on board were aware that there were insufficient lifeboats for all of the passengers on board. This resulted in a disproportionate number of the victims coming from the third-class passengers. At a recent meeting in Davos, Switzerland, a number of American billionaires said that Americans need not fear another Trump presidency. Those billionaires will have access to the lifeboats so they have nothing to fear from a second Trump presidency; the third-class passengers, on the other hand, may have something to think about. This does not change the essential metaphor that I am using that America is the Titanic and it has struck an iceberg and it will inevitably sink. Like the Titanic, the reason for its sinking was in its original design and its overlooking of the real world of facts at its conception.

As the German philosopher Nietzsche once stated: “Technology is the highest form of will to power…the will to stamp becoming with the character of being”. ‘Rationality’ does this stamping. Nietzsche also recognized that this ‘rationality’ was the root of nihilism. The illusion which rationality creates is of a world where the structured, functional growth of life is in operation, but what is in fact occurring is the ‘killing’ of that world through its being turned into ‘object’ and the mass meaninglessness that results from doing so. The turning of the world into object requires the separation of “consciousness” and “conscience”. (This is where I disagree with Fromm for I do not think he has given an adequate consideration as to what technology is in his analysis of malignant narcissism.) The turning of the world into an object must be achieved in order for human beings to have power and dominance over all that is in being and to take possession of all that is in being. It is the desire to turn the organic into the inorganic. To repeat, one cannot love an object.

As was shown in Part III of this writing, Eichmann demonstrated the separation of consciousness from conscience for “he was a man fascinated by bureaucratic order and death. His supreme values were obedience and the proper functioning of the organization. He transported Jews as he would have transported coal. That they were human beings was hardly within the field of his vision, hence even the problem of whether he hated or did not hate his victims is irrelevant.” (Fromm, ibid p. 30-31) The structured, functional growth of life comes at the cost of the killing of Eros. In advanced industrial societies, this “structured functional growth” is the spreading of the “fungus” that is the ubiquity of evil or the banality of evil in Hannah Arendt’s words. Eros is the enemy of the anti-Logos that is the technological.

The phenomenon of narcissism, first developed by Sigmund Freud, illustrates the impact of the separation of consciousness from conscience on both the individual and social planes. Since these concepts deal with human behaviour, we can say that they deal with what “human excellence” or what arete is conceived to be in modern technological societies. Racism and scapegoating, done through the gaslighting of the Big Lie, for example, are necessities for the self-narcissism that projects itself into the national, political, and tribal collectives of modern day America.

The symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder include a lack of empathy for others. Meno, Eichmann and Trump simply do not have the ability that many human beings have of being able to put themselves in someone else’s position. They use relationships primarily as a tool for gaining self-esteem which is ultimately realized in power and recognition. They have little interest in others’ experiences, needs, or feelings since they believe themselves to be superior to others. They crave attention so they often indulge in attention-seeking behavior believing that any publicity is better than no publicity. They have feelings of entitlement or being special. Trump has a habit of walking out of courtrooms before the jury exits, a sign of his contempt for his fellow citizens and for the laws.

A narcissist only cares about himself, only decides on his own welfare, has an inflated sense of his own worth, a deep need for admiration and lack of any feeling for anyone else. He thinks everything is about him; he needs to claim credit for anything “good” and denies responsibility for any failure. Beneath apparent self-confidence — even brashness — is a fragile self-esteem that is threatened by even the slightest criticism. Examples of how these qualities are shown in Trump are daily news in America.

The need for attention and love is also present for people with malignant narcissism. However, how they go about getting this attention tends to be more aggressive, and they show less regard for the rights of others. Trump has been found guilty of sexual abuse and the rape of E. Jean Carroll in the courts. His antisocial personality traits cause him to abuse others willingly, and sometimes happily during his rallies before his adulating fans, for his own pleasure and personal political gain. His defamation of his victims shows all of the characteristics of malignant narcissism.

The phenomenon of mass malignant narcissism can also be found in some of Trump’s evangelical Christian followers who have anointed him as “a child of god” or as “a gift from God” without considering the implications and consequences their blasphemies have for their faith. Trump has not humbly shied away from such comparisons. This blasphemy is part of the syndrome of narcissism, the “syndrome of decay”, that is prevalent in America.

Many sects of evangelical Christianity are nihilistic; the ‘rapture’ is the thousand year old Reich in another form. Regarding malignant narcissism, Fromm states: “It is a madness that tends to grow in the lifetime of the afflicted person. The more he tries to be god, the more he isolates himself from the human race; this isolation makes him more frightened, everybody becomes his enemy, and in order to stand the resulting fright he has to increase his power, his ruthlessness, and his narcissism.” Trump displays his paranoia on a daily basis through his posts on “Truth Social”. We have spoken of this as the Ring of Gyges phenomenon earlier in this writing. If elaborated on, it might explain the need for anonymity and trolling in our mass social media today. In an exact parallel to the Gyges’ myth, Trump was said to have wanted Melania to parade about the pool at Mar-a-Lago in a bikini so that other men could see how beautiful she was.

An example of narcissism can be found in the response of Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba who, when asked whether it was more important to be beautiful or smart, responded: “Beautiful. You can always fake smart.” She is finding that such is not the case. What is common to all forms of narcissism is a lack of interest in the ‘real’, outside world and this real outside world is brought to presence through genuine discourse. There is a lack of interest in real, genuine discourse in the malignant narcissist and this lack of interest is exacerbated by the tools of discourse which technology has created and continues to create. Habba’s response shows the connection of the narcissist with the ‘surface phenomenon’ that is beauty, something we have seen in our discussion of Meno earlier. A woman who has been gifted by chance with natural beauty may look into a mirror and be convinced that that is all that she is; a woman not so gifted when looking in the same mirror knows that that, in fact, is not all that she is.

The bringing of things to light is “consciousness”. The saint is more aware of their sinfulness than any ordinary human being because they are more “conscious” than most human beings. Consciousness and conscience are the same. You cannot have one without the other. Donald Trump has nothing to ask for forgiveness for because he is ‘perfect’. This indicates how far from consciousness the man really is. The Irish writer James Joyce began his artistic mission with the goal “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race”. This led to his writing of Finnegans Wake, a work he spent 17 years in making where the state of human being is one of perpetual epiphany such as the perpetual reading of his circular text and the reader being perpetually engaged in bringing the logos to light.

“Normal” people do not become angry when something they have done or
said is criticized, provided the criticism is fair and not made with hostile intent. The narcissistic individual, on the other hand, reacts with intense anger when he is criticized. (We are reminded of Bonhoeffer’s observations on “stupidity” in his letter quoted in Part I of this writing). He tends to feel that the criticism is a hostile attack, since by the very nature of his narcissism he cannot imagine that it is justified. The intensity of his anger can be fully understood only if one considers that the narcissistic person is unrelated to the world, and as a consequence is alone, and hence frightened.

It is this sense of aloneness and fear which is compensated for by his narcissistic self-engrandizement, his braggadocio, his need for lies. If he is the world, there is no world outside which can frighten him; if he is everything, he is not alone; consequently, when his narcissism is wounded he feels threatened in his whole existence. This explains the “stubbornness” of these individuals when one attempts to engage them in conversation; the stakes are of such paramount importance for them, for they are nothing less than that individual’s very existence.. This phenomenon is the ersatz form of that true gnosis that occurs when true thought and thinking achieves its goal.

When the one protection against his paranoia, his “self-identity”, is threatened, the fear emerges for the narcissist and results in intense fury. This fury is all the more intense because nothing can be done to diminish the threat by appropriate action; only the destruction of the critic—or himself—can save him from the threat to his narcissistic security. This is at the root of Trump’s insane “immunity” claim regarding the presidency, the “immunity” claims of the tyrant, and perhaps explains the reactions of his followers to the legal threats that Trump is facing in the American courts. These threats are against their own self-identifies and their very sanity is at stake.

Another component of the illness that is malignant narcissism is paranoia. Paranoia is a way of thinking and evaluating people and situations. It is persistent regardless of external conditions, unrelated to real danger, only connected to perceived danger. It moves along a spectrum from ideation to delusion to psychosis and the degree of paranoia equates with the degree it will interfere with “normal functioning”. Evidence of Trump’s paranoia includes his constant preoccupation with conspiracy theories and constant identification of himself as a “victim”. The malignant narcissist will harm any who defy, criticize or try to hold him responsible. He attacks them verbally and invites others to attack them physically. Trump’s daily musings abound with such threats.

Much has been said and written about Trump’s “fitness for the office of President of the United States”. Trump’s need to find believers and followers, to transform reality so that it fits his narcissism by attacking and attempting to destroy the institutions which prevail in America, and to destroy all his critics, is so intense and so desperate because it is his personal attempt to prevent his own outbreak of insanity. Trump’s ‘sanity’ is a surface phenomenon. Whether or not Trump goes to jail is secondary. If he should go to jail, he would already be a dead man, a mere shell of a man, since his world and his identity in that world would be destroyed. He is relying on nothing less than a second Civil War to prevent this from happening.

Paradoxically, the element of insanity in such leaders as Trump makes them also successful. Their insanity gives them that certainty and freedom from doubt which is so impressive to the average person. Trump really believes he did not lose the 2020 election because he has to believe it. The need to change the world and to win over others to share in one’s ideas and delusions requires also talents and gifts that the average person, psychotic or non-psychotic, lacks. Trump’s talent lies in the effortlessness behind his lying and fraud and his knowledge of the effects of modern mass media, that great tool for the creation of delusion and fraud.

If a person is “great” because of some quality they have, and not because of something they achieve (the quality of being handsome or beautiful as our Alina Habba and Meno examples illustrated), they do not need to be related to anybody or anything; they need not make any effort. Trump began his adult life with a half a billion dollar inheritance. In maintaining the picture of their “greatness”, they remove themselves more and more from reality and they have to resort to deception, illusion and lying in order to be better protected from the danger that their narcissistically constructed ego might be revealed as the product of their empty imaginations.

The malignant narcissism of a Trump is not self-limiting and in consequence it is crudely solipsistic, racist as well as xenophobic. Any examination of Trump’s speeches show these characteristics. A person who has learned to achieve cannot help acknowledging that others have achieved similar things in similar ways—even if his narcissism may persuade him that his own achievement is “greater” than that of others. One who has achieved nothing will find it difficult to appreciate the achievements of others, and thus he will be forced to isolate himself increasingly in narcissistic splendor. As has been shown in the courts, Trump’s “achievements” were based on deceptions, frauds and lies. His belief is that because others willfully participated in these deceptions, this fact makes them “legal”.

Malignant narcissism also includes characteristics of narcissistic personality disorder. Narcissistic personality disorder is a disorder in which a person has an inflated sense of self-importance. Trump’s “I alone can fix it” is an example of such a disorder. Narcissistic personality disorder is found more commonly in men. Symptoms include an excessive need for admiration, disregard for others’ feelings, an inability to handle any criticism, and a sense of entitlement. Treatment involves “talk therapy”, a euphemism for what we have been calling “dialectic” here. (We use the term “euphemism” here, for some may find the obligation to think offensive in these circumstances.)

Tyrants suffer from such a disorder according to Plato. The tyrant is the unhappiest of human beings for Plato for he has lost all sense of “otherness”. The loss of the sense of otherness, as Socrates observed, is the misery that results from desiring evil and obtaining it. Such misery is the inability to love. The inability to love creates the mass meaninglessness which is this misery on the social level. We can also see this disorder in the quotes from Dostoyevsky which begin this writing on Trump. Such a loss is possible for all and, therefore, forgiveness should also be possible for all.

A person with malignant narcissism may harm others to gain attention, feed their sense of superiority, and get what they want. Trump provides examples of these characteristics in abundance. For this reason, a person who is a malignant narcissist may also have traits of antisocial personality disorder. Individuals with this illness disregard or are hostile toward the rights of others; they tend to be aggressive and at times violent; they show a lack of remorse for harming others, a tendency to lie, repeatedly break the law, are chronically irresponsible and are impulsive or reckless in their actions. The biography of Trump and his daily actions provide copious examples of these characteristics.

A person with malignant narcissism may also appear superficially charming. We saw such superficial charm in the character of Meno and our discussion on that dialogue. Trump, too for some, is found to be charming. Malignant narcissists may manipulate people to gain praise through the use of gaslighting or lie about others to depict themselves in a more flattering light. We ask how 74,000,000 Americans could have voted for Trump a second time. Narcissists are sometimes charming. They are plausible, or the grift they use wouldn’t work. They show confidence and creativity as well as arrogance, impulsivity, irritability and diminished judgment. Americans refuse to recognize the evidence which is before their eyes regarding Trump. They forgive his behavior. They rationalize for him because they do not wish to believe he is who he appears to be even though he explicitly shows himself to be what he really is.

People who have a narcissistic personality crave attention and acclaim. They believe they are special and want others to believe this, too. After all, they have been told since they were infants that they are special by the mere fact that they have been born. They do not have to achieve anything and they may feel that they are due this recognition from all of those about them. Their mantels are filled with “certificates of participation” which they have convinced themselves mean more than what they do. As they grow older, they may seek the attention they want through positive strategies, such as getting a good job or being charming; or negative ones, such as lying to others or abusing loved ones.

A man saying he knows “more about ISIS than the generals” and “I alone can fix it” is grandiose to the point of pretension. (Experts on interior decoration might be able to expand on this with regard to Trump’s “Versailles” taste in appointing his residences. He shares more than the flimflam with Twain’s Duke and Dauphin.) His repeated lying reflects his constant need for attention. Lack of empathy is evidenced in the constant violation of the rights of others from grabbing women to grabbing babies from their mothers’ arms. Absolute disregard for others is demonstrated in his constant grifts: tricking others out of their money without remorse or any acknowledgement of the harm he is doing to them. Trump’s insistence that he is entitled to whatever he wishes to possess, such as the nation’s top-secret documents without regard for national security, is another example.

Trump and the Fact/Value Distinction:

The social sciences’ need for the fact/value distinction, rooted in the separation of “consciousness” from “conscience”, prevents them from making judgements on sociopaths or psychopaths since this would require them to judge a person’s moral character or conscience (what we have been calling arete or “human excellence” in this writing), neither of which science can objectively prove the existence of or judge. Such an inability shows a deprivation of “consciousness” in those sciences themselves and is their required moral obtuseness.

When the judgement was made by the psychologist John Gartner that “Trump suffers from malignant narcissism, a diagnosis [that is] far more toxic and dangerous than mere narcissistic personality disorder because it combines narcissism with three other severely pathological components: paranoia, sociopathy, and sadism”, his diagnosis was dismissed by the American Psychology Association. According to Fromm, when combined with paranoia, sociopathy and sadism, this perfect storm of psychopathology defines the ‘quintessence of evil,’ the closest thing psychiatry has to describing “a true human monster.” Such a description of Trump was immediately attacked in “official” psychological circles.

Gartner goes on to describe Trump’s narcissism: (he knows “more about everything than anyone” and “has empathy for no one but himself”); paranoia (“his demonization of the press, minorities, immigrants, and anyone who disagrees with him, are all signs of paranoia”); sociopathy (“a diagnosis that describes people who constantly lie, violate norms and laws, exploit other people, and show no remorse”); and sadism (“He takes gleeful pleasure in harming and humiliating other people. He is undoubtedly the most prolific cyberbully in history.”)^.

Allen Frances, the chair of the task force that wrote the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV, wrote in the NY Times: “I wrote the criteria that define this disorder, and Mr. Trump doesn’t meet them. He may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn’t make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose a mental disorder.” (This presumes that because Trump is able to “function” effectively and efficiently in our world, he lives in a “real world” and not the world that he, through his sycophants, have constructed for themselves.) For Mr. Frances, apparently, threats of violence and abusive actions against women, for instance, do not make a human being “mentally ill”; they do not create “distress and impairment” for the abuser and the abused. Mr. Frances continues: “Psychiatric name-calling is a misguided way of countering Mr. Trump’s attack on democracy. He can, and should, be appropriately denounced for his ignorance, incompetence, impulsivity, and pursuit of dictatorial powers.” “In other words, his behavior may be bad, but that does not mean that he’s mentally ill.” I myself can only add that madness can only run deep in a society which holds forth its opposite. The Tarasoff rule, which requires psychiatrists to notify the appropriate authorities and individuals (in this case the American people) of a man who presents a clear and present danger to the them does not apply in Trump’s case evidently. The American Psychiatric Association’s chief funding is from the pharmaceutical industry which was quite supportive of Trump’s anti-Medicare and anti-Medicaid positions. The authoritarian state requires corruption and nepotism.

Trump and the Christian Nationalist Movement

The Christian evangelical movement strives to make America into a fascistic theocracy which is somewhat ironic since its sworn enemies are those other national theocracies (Iran, China) that have put their own idols in place for their own worshipping, be those idols of a religious or political nature. Religion is what we bow down to or what we look up to, and this is why the virtue of piety is linked to what we have come to understand as human excellence. Piety and virtue arete have always been held together.

Human beings cannot live without some meaning of some kind. Mass meaninglessness seeks for something that will provide it with the sole truth regarding the nature of the things that are and give meaning to those things and to the the worlds in which those things appear. The Christian nationalists seek to turn Christ into an “armed prophet” rather than the failed “unarmed prophet” of the New Testament and in doing so leave their Christianity and the Christ of the New Testament behind them.

The distinction between “armed” and “unarmed” prophets was first noted by the Italian political philosopher Machiavelli in his writings. For Machiavelli, Christ the “unarmed” prophet failed in establishing a kingdom while other “armed” prophets were successful in doing so. The best example was Moses. In Machiavelli’s lifetime, Pope Alexander VI turned the Roman Catholic Church into the “armed prophet”, and the later horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, which began in 1478, could be said to be primarily of his doing. (More will be said about Machiavelli and Pope Alexander VI in the summary comments on these writings.)

That Machiavelli, the first philosopher of power, was evil goes without saying; he himself says as much about himself. The evangelical Christians appear to have forgotten the three temptations or tests of Christ that we spoke about in Part I of our “Sketch”. Where Christ succeeded, they have failed; where Christ failed, they are hoping to succeed.

Christian Nationalism has created a mythological version of American history. It runs roughly as follows: “America was founded as a Christian nation; the founders were traditional Christians; the founding documents are based on Biblical principles; America has a special role to play in history; it has therefore been blessed with enormous power and prosperity; however, those blessings and those missions are endangered by the presence of non-whites, non-Christians, and non-native born people on American soil.” It should not be surprising to see the connections with neo-Nazi movements and the acceptance of those movements by the Christian Nationalists.

Christian Nationalism is powerfully associated with various political positions including: opposition to immigration, abortion, gun control, and mask-wearing and support for punitive policing, mass incarceration, capital punishment, gerrymandering, voter suppression, and—as should be obvious by now—support for Donald Trump.

While American evangelicalism has not been Christian Nationalist per se, its support for Donald Trump has been moving it closer to the desire for a fascistic theocracy. This change has been an evolutionary process over the century for evangelicalism. Donald Trump and American evangelicals have never been natural allies. Trump has owned casinos, flaunted mistresses in the tabloids, and clearly has not read the Bible in his lifetime for when asked to quote his favourite verse he said “It’s too personal” and evaded the question.

In 2016 many people doubted whether Trump could gain the support of evangelicals, whose support he needed. He chose Mike Pence, an evangelical Christian, as his vice-presidential running mate. Eight years later, evangelical support for the former president and current Republican frontrunner is no longer in question, and the Covid 19 pandemic had a lot to do with it. Evangelicals saw the Covid shut down as an attack upon them using “godless science” and leftist philosophies, and they rebelled against it. This process has gradually evolved to where there are now prominent evangelical leaders who have come to believe that Trump is “God’s instrument on Earth.”

Like the Holy Roman Church 500 years before it, many in the evangelical Christian movement have succumbed to the third temptation of Christ. Many of its leaders suffer from the paranoia and sociopathy that characterizes malignant narcissism present in today’s world, and their relationship to Trump is entirely transactional. This has given the appearance of ‘a cult of personality’ surrounding Trump.

The evangelical concerns have become manifest in the ‘culture wars’ that are ongoing in the USA and have intensified since the election of Barack Obama, a black President, in 2008 and Trump’s “descent down the golden escalator” to announce his candidacy for President of the United States in 2015. The lines separating the evangelical movement and white Christian Nationalism have become very blurry indeed. Judge Arthur Engoron’s judgement that Trump’s “lies and lack of remorse border on the pathological” was a conservative assessment of the man’s character, but this characterization apparently does not affect the support given to him by evangelical and Christian nationalist followers.

When Trump’s part in history is finished, it will be hard to look upon the man as a tragic figure rather than as the clown or buffoon of a comedy. (In a survey of professional historians, Trump was voted the worst President in the history of the United States.) The hero of a tragedy must be an essentially good man who, through his own lack of moderation sophrosyne and wise judgement phronesis, his own lack of self-knowledge, misses the mark in his judgements of how things really are and thus brings about his nemesis or “just desserts” which is usually his death.

One is hard-pressed to find aspects of goodness in Trump’s character. Trump is the quintessential “human being as surface phenomenon” and his life has been consistent in this aspect of his character and his actions; it has been one of image and deceit, lack of depth. His capacity for bringing about evil and mischief was demonstrated by his choice to enter politics in the USA. His being elected as leader was an example of technology’s effect on the human soul of human beings. That a fraud and villain could be seen as a model of human excellence says much not only about the situation in the USA but also about the condition of human beings whose being is determined by the technological in the modern age.

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Sketch for a Portrait of Evil: Part III

Adolf Eichmann of Nazi Germany

“Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet–and this is its horror–it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think.”― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

“Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.”― Hannah Arendt

As there is an inner connection between consciousness and conscience, there is also an inner connection between the ability or inability to think and the problem of evil. Since thinking’s end is to bring to presence, to bring to unconcealment, evil abhors this effort since evil abhors the light. Evil requires shadows, illusions, obfuscations; it is the enemy of truth and unconcealment, and such unconcealment is “consciousness”. Evil abhors the light and flies from the light which is “consciousness” itself. Contrary to the “nothingness” of evil that Arendt finds (this is merely its nihilism), we find that evil is ubiquitous and that its presence is everywhere. This ubiquity makes evil only appear to be banal and contributes to its banality. Because of the horror shown in its unconcealment, it remains unspoken and is, literally, the ‘unspeakable’. If there is anything demonic about evil, it is its ‘unspeakableness’.

For Arendt, the faculty of thinking (the dynamis of thinking, the possibility and “potentiality” of thinking) is not the erotic “thirst” for knowledge; it is a potentia of every human being and not the privilege of only a few. (This is a somewhat erroneous view of Plato and of Aristotle since both see ‘the desire to know’, the eros for knowledge, as the essence of human being itself and not just a characteristic of the few.) The roots of Arendt’s thinking are to be found in the neo-Kantians of 19^th century Germany, the Hermann Cohen school of Kant at Marburg, Germany where Arendt famously (and notoriously) attended classes held by Martin Heidegger.

Arendt believes that if Kant is right and the faculty of thought has a “natural aversion” against accepting its own results as “solid axioms” (because they are merely the “opinions” of Plato), then we cannot expect any moral propositions or commandments, no final code of conduct from the thinking activity, least of all a final definition of what is good and what is evil. For Arendt, good and evil are “values” which the thinking activity creates as principles for its conduct from out of the principle of reason (technology), and not self-existing realities which thinking must attempt to comprehend. If it is true that thinking deals with invisibles, it follows that it is “out of order” in Arendt’s view since Arendt believes that we move in a world of appearances in which the most radical experience is that of the disappearance that is our death. By ‘radical’, we interpret Arendt to mean ‘most real’, ‘most deep’, ‘most grounded’. Contrary to Arendt’s thinking, the most radical experience for the ‘thinker’ is the experience of the absence of God which later becomes ‘the death of God’.

Arendt’s analysis of evil focuses on the evils which result from systems put in place by totalitarian regimes. That these regimes are predicates of the subject technology as we have stated here, the systems that those regimes put in place must also contribute to the “metaphysical” ends of that technology which are the logistics in preparation for warfare. In her early analysis, she does not address the character and culpability of individuals who take part in the perpetration of evil within those systems.

**View of the entrance to the main camp of Auschwitz (Auschwitz I), bearing the motto “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work makes one free)**

In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Arendt turns her attention to individual culpability for evil through her analysis of the Nazi functionary Adolf Eichmann who was tried in Jerusalem for organizing the deportation and transportation of Jews to the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. Arendt went to Jerusalem in 1961 to report on Eichmann’s trial for The New Yorker magazine. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, she argues that “desk murderers” or “schedulers of trains” such as Eichmann were not motivated by demonic or monstrous motives. They were motivated merely by ambition and recognition, common motives among human beings. Instead, according to Arendt, “It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed Eichmann to become one of the greatest criminals of that period” (Arendt 1963, 287–288). According to Arendt, Eichmann’s motives and character were banal or trite rather than monstrous. She describes him as a “terrifyingly normal” human being who simply did not think very deeply about what he was doing.

Plato distinguishes between thinking and knowing, between reason with its representational images composed of numbers and words (logos), the eros the urge or need to think and to understand, and the intellect which is capable of certain, verifiable knowledge. Plato separates knowing from thinking as knowing is an action or event that has occurred in the past (gnosis), while thinking is an action that occurs in the present. Knowing and thinking are associated with our being- in- time, and it is through our knowing (gnosis) with the aid of memory that we are able to transcend time.

Historically, thought has become understood and dominated by the idea that it is “reason” due to the Latin understanding and translation of logos as “reason” and the subsequent essence of human beings’ being described as the animale rationale. As we have tried to show up to this point, in the modern, thought is determined as logic and logistics, the theoretical episteme of “knowing” and the logistike or technai of “making” or “making happen”.

Through history, the pistis or “faith” and “trust” established by the schema, the metaphysical underpinnings of representational thinking that has become technology, the framing, requires the certainty and correctness of the correspondence between the mind’s thinking and the object that is thought. This agreement is the correspondence theory of truth. The technological is one aspect of being’s revealing. The irony is that it is through this view of reason that we have discovered that human beings’ essence may not, in fact, be reason; and because of this, in the ‘eye of reason’ so understood, human beings have become dispensable, usable, and disposable resources. Nietzsche is the philosopher who thought through this and shows this most clearly.

The metaphysical underpinnings of representational thinking attempt to ‘stamp becoming with the character of being’, which Nietzsche asserted as technology, the ‘highest form of the will-to-power’. For Nietzsche, technology as will-to-power requires a thinking and a willing that is beyond good and evil. We can see how this view of thinking and willing can be derived from Plato’s Divided Line if we view it from only one direction, with only one side of the face of Eros. In such thinking, the other face of Eros simply does not exist for it has not been experienced.

“Consciousness” and “conscience” (“with knowledge”) in Plato are the same thing; one cannot be ‘conscious’ and not have a ‘conscience’. The two have become separated, and “conscience” ceases to be the word of the logos in the soul and becomes Kant’s “practical reason”. A man such as Eichmann was simply not ‘conscious’ (in a Platonic sense) and therefore had no ‘conscience’ even though Eichmann insisted that his moral position derived from Kant, perhaps revealing the inadequacies of Kant.

The interior dialogue of thought which is true consciousness can only be done when one has gone home and examines things, when one takes a moment to stop and think. This stopping to think is antithetical to technology. Thinking, reflection, attention and contemplation is a private act and so technology bores ever more into the privacy of individuals to destroy it. Someone who does not know the discourse of the interior dialogue or monologue between the “me and myself” will not mind nor care about contradicting himself and he will never be able or willing to give an account of what he says or does, nor will he mind committing any crimes since he is sure they will be forgotten the next moment. Such was the condition of Adolf Eichmann, and such is the condition of Donald Trump. Social pathologies are present in both and they were there before they arrived on the scene. In these pathologies, they mirror the societies of which they are members.

Thinking in its non-cognitive, non-specialized sense is a natural need eros of human life and is given to every human being. Specialists in thinking are also subject to the inability to think as it is an ever present possibility for everybody. However, this non-wicked “everybody” is capable of infinite evil. As Arendt notes regarding Eichmann: “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.” The lack of a “conscience” was present in its absence just as “consciousness” was present in its absence among the many, the “everybody” and the “nobodies”.

The most massive moral failure of European history was “the final solution of the problem of the Jews”. This “final solution” was made possible through technology and was a predicate of that technology. The Jews were perceived as ‘a problem’ that needed to be fixed; successfully fixing this problem was the motivation behind Adolf Eichmann’s ambition in the day-to-day details of his life. The ‘fixing’ of this problem first required the eradication of any consciousness that the Jews were, in fact, other human beings. They might just as well be coal or any other resource that the regime needed at the time to ‘fix a problem’. The “otherness” of the Jewish people as human beings, as neighbours, had to be taken away from them. Once this was done, ‘conscience’ had no role to play since “consciousness” was no longer present, and Eichmann remained unrepentant for the remainder of his life for he believed he had done nothing wrong and was ‘only following orders’ or directives from the higher-ups in the regime.

As human beings, we all have the potential to think…or not to think, to be conscious or not be conscious. This is the essence of our freedom as was shown in our discussion of the Meno. For a great many human beings, the need to earn their daily bread causes them to be caught up in massive corporate or bureaucratic structures that enable evil’s flourishing. These structures are the products of, or the outcomes of, the technology that has led to their being; just as our computers and handphones are the tools made possible by that technology and which owe their being to that technology: they are not technology itself. The eradication of human beings is the ultimate goal required by technology and, thus, the destruction of “conscience” and “consciousness” is a requirement for this realization for these are the essential elements of what human beings are. As this decaying and eradicating process slowly unfolds, human beings become less humane.

Lack of self-knowledge and thoughtlessness go hand in hand. In the technological, the logos that distinguishes human beings from all other beings is brought to presence as cliches, stock phrases, and the adherence to standardized codes of expression and conduct. (Meno’s learning from Gorgias as an example; Eichmann’s responses to the questions put to him at his trial; Donald Trump’s media events.) The human being is made to fit the “brand” or image of the corporation or public entity to which they belong; if they do not, they are not “true Nazis” or RINOs. When they do not do so, they will no longer be a part of that entity.

The corporations (and the higher institutions of learning that have modelled themselves upon it such as the Harvards and Yales of the world who have so obviously failed in their goal to “educate” the public) have replaced the polis as the determiner of the character of those who belong to it; the regime in which the corporation happens to be placed is secondary. This ‘fitting in’, this ‘fittedness’ (the perverse, evil, ersatz form of ‘justice’) has the socially recognized function of protecting us against “reality” by giving to us an ‘alternative reality’ against consciousness and conscience when we come up against reality. The individual’s thinking attention is an inhibitor and an enemy to the efficiency and effectiveness of the technology that interprets the “reality” (gives it its meaning) that the facts and events make by virtue of their existence in their certain way. (Arendt, The Life of the Mind). As Arendt notes, “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” Arendt is here describing the technological human being, or humanity in the technological age.

There appears to be a clear connection and relationship between the fact-value distinction (the separation and distinction between judgements of “fact” from judgements of “value” so necessary for the seeing and thinking of our modern day social sciences), and the separation of “consciousness” and “conscience” as it reveals itself in our day-to-day lives. Since science is unable to objectively prove the existence of a person’s “moral character” or “conscience”, science is unable to pass judgements on the actions that human beings are capable of committing or on the acts that human beings have committed. Science, by necessity, must be morally obtuse. The terms “good” and “evil” simply have no meaning for it because they are “values” not real existent things or beings; they are surface phenomenon only. In this they follow Nietzsche’s influence on 19th century thought, but its roots are from much earlier in Western thinking.

As we have shown in our discussion of the Meno, this inability to determine what human excellence is is at the root of the lack of a “moral compass” among so many human beings living today. Since the modern day social sciences are a predicate of the subject technology, this is an example of technology’s determining or shaping of the logos or language over the last several centuries. In the USA, the American Psychological Association’s application of the Goldwater Rule towards the book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump is an example. The APA is fully capable of giving advice with equal alacrity to tyrants or monarchs (and because it does so, it receives its annual grants and dispensations from various sources, primarily the pharmaceutical industry, to carry on as it does. Drugs are a necessity to counteract the mass meaninglessness that the technological society has produced.)

In describing the evil that was Adolf Eichmann, that separation of ‘consciousness’ and ‘conscience’, Arendt stated in Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil regarding Eichmann: “For when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain.’ Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is ‘banal’ and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, this is still far from calling it commonplace… That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.” (italics mine). In her description of Eichmann here, Arendt is careful to make a distinction between Eichmann and the other Germans who were caught up in the events of their time. She strongly asserts that “if all are guilty, then none are guilty”. Eichmann is specifically guilty because his thoughtlessness as a ‘scheduler of trains’ put him in the position of committing the greatest evils. His actions showed him to have lived out his life within the ring of Gyges. As Arendt stated: “…the greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons”. By not being a person one is, in a sense, invisible, anonymous.

The difficulty we have with Eichmann is whether or not to conclude that there is an Eichmann in each of us waiting for the appropriate socio-historical conditions to emerge. This, at least, urges us to thoughtfulness and provides us with the moral mission to prevent a repetition of genocidal murder by shaping the world’s political systems to allow for and to protect individual rights and freedoms, things that are currently in great danger of being lost in the USA today.

Eichmann was shaped by the forces of Nazism, and as a “follower” this determined his sense of identity as a self. Under the conditions prevailing during the Third Reich, only “exceptions” could be expected to react “normally”. The Nazi regime was not “normal”. While on the stand before the court in Jerusalem, Eichmann could not reveal anything new about himself because he had chosen an “unchanging” identity, an identity as a starting point by which he established his “self-knowledge” (as was seen in the character of Meno) and not the end point which reveals the true knowledge of the self that is gained through thinking. This lack of self-knowledge leads to an inability to think which leads men like Eichmann to act in the way that they do: erroneously and horribly.

The sense of self-identity in Eichmann was weak: his lack of success in his education and his lack of natural gifts led to his lies about himself about who he really was. “Bragging had always been one of his cardinal vices.” (Arendt, Eichmann p. 49) Eichmann appears to share this vice with Meno and Donald Trump, the other figures that we are exploring in our attempt at a portrait of evil. The facts surrounding Eichmann’s background are varied. Eichmann never harboured any ill feelings against his victims and he made no secret about this fact. He was an ambitious man and his early life failed to realize those ambitions. Like Donald Trump, he was not a reader of books but read newspapers and was a fan of the films of Leni Riefenstahl. He was someone who was prepared to sacrifice everything and everybody for an “ideal” and that ideal had been given to him by the Nazi party.

The distinction between a “movement” and a “party” is that a “movement” is not bound by a policy or program. Nazism was such a movement. (The Republican party of the USA is not bound by a “program” or “policy” currently, and they have no specific one that can be pointed to as their goal. They have devolved from the ‘party of Lincoln’ into a “movement”. The result is a chaos that mirrors the chaos of German politics prior to Hitler’s coming to power. When in power, the regime unified itself behind the military-industrial complex with the goal of righting the wrongs of the Treaty of Versailles.)

It has been noted by biographers that Eichmann was lacking any sense of “otherness”; he was unable to look at anything from the other fellow’s point of view. (Arendt Ibid, p 65) He dwelt within the “bubble” of the “world” created for him by Nazi propaganda. Modern propagandists or “sophists” differ from ancient sophists. As we saw with Meno, the ancient sophist was satisfied with a verbal victory in the moment at the expense of truth whereas the modern propagandist/sophist wishes for a more lasting victory at the expense of reality or the revealing of truth. The truth must, of necessity, remain hidden.

The dual discourse that is the logos shows itself in the modern as it did in ancient times. “Officialese” became Eichmann’s language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché, much in the manner of Meno. He could believe that he was not lying and not deceiving himself for he and his world were in perfect harmony. Trump and his MAGA followers experience this same harmony of lies. The implementers of the “final solution” were not ignorant of what they were doing; they were just prevented from equating it with their “normal” knowledge of murder and lies for their sense of “otherness” had been destroyed.

As was pointed out previously in Part I, the multitude or the “mob” or the “social collective” is what Plato described as the Great Beast. In his day, this was perceived as the polis and the deme that constituted the polis, the town and country. Today we see it as the State, the Nation, etc. The Great Beast that is the collective (no matter which name it goes by) requires “the big lie”, whether it be “the noble lie” of Plato or “the Big Lie” of Joseph Goebbels or that being created by Donald Trump in the USA today, the ‘us vs. them’ lie.

Plato’s “noble lie” is the founding myth of the civic identity of a people grounding that identity in the natural brotherhood of the entire indigenous population (they are all autochthonous, literally “born from the earth”, from before conscious memory), making the city’s differentiated class structure a matter of divine dispensation based on the arete or “excellence” of each individual soul in its ability to carry out its work or function (the demiourgos who molds them puts different elements in their souls in varying strengths such as fire, air, and water; the body is composed of the element of earth). If people can be made to believe that they are brothers, they will be strongly motivated to care for their city and for each other because one’s chief concern is for “one’s own”.

In the Nazi vision of the world, the lack of autochthony of the “wandering” Jews was at the root of the German belief that the Jews were “poisoning the blood” of the German people and could justifiably be exterminated because they were perceived as a threat. They were perceived as aliens and enemies, and certainly not one’s brothers. African and Native Americans were made to suffer the same fate in the USA.

In the history of misinformation there is probably no other document which has caused more evil than The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (which many neo-Nazis today still believe to be fact) and which became a “gospel” of world-wide anti-Semitism. This writing which originated in Russia in 1905 remains as well-read today as it was during its early period. The Protocols is entirely a work of fiction, intentionally written to blame Jews for a variety of ills. It claims to document a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. The conspiracy and its alleged leaders, the so-called Elders of Zion, never existed. In 1903, portions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were serialized in a Russian newspaper, Znamya (The Banner). The version of the Protocols that has endured and has been translated into dozens of languages, however, was first published in Russia in 1905 as an appendix to The Great in the Small: The Coming of the Anti-Christ and the Rule of Satan on Earth, by Russian writer and mystic Sergei Nilus. (Holocaust Encyclopedia)

At the heart of Nazi propaganda was “the Big Lie” as it was formulated by Joseph Goebbels: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” Lies, particularly the Big Lie, and the suppression of truth are necessary for the Great Beast to thrive, for truth is the greatest enemy of the Great Beast. The Great Beast requires the Anti-Logos for its health.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt states what the impacts of the Big Lie were and could be:

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

Her words are prophetic for what is currently happening in America. The Internet and social media has exacerbated the effects of the Big Lie among those who do not wish to take on the responsibility of thinking.

The great wars of the 20^th century were the “technological wars”. Their outcomes were determined by technology. From the catastrophe of WW I, totalitarian regimes emerged. The totalitarian regimes of the 20^th century are not the same as the tyrannies spoken of by the ancient Greeks, and the essential difference between the two is the presence of technology. Within the technological, the evil that came to presence and showed itself in Nazism and in the events of WW II, entered the world stage. The evil that showed itself as Adolf Eichmann is an ever-present strife for all human being-in-the-world, for an Eichmann is present in all of us waiting only for the proper historical circumstances and contexts to come forward. Who among us is not motivated by ambition and a “good reputation” (eudoxa)?

As we have seen from our earlier discussions of Plato’s Divided Line “morality”, when conceived as a fixed body of principles and aims for conduct based on trust and faith fixed by an authority or by choice whether collective or individual (arete as “orthodoxy”), is distinguished from “philosophy” and thinking. Thinking does not prescribe norms or “values”; it is itself the “ethical”, a radical ethics, in that the course of “action” or praxis is already determined and made present by the thinking.

The representational thinking that is the essence of the technological (the “picturing” and “framing”), the lower form of Eros, delivers technological human beings over to mass society that can only find meaning through the gathering and ordering of all their activities and plans (logos) in a way that corresponds to technology. This has resulted in the “mass meaninglessness” characteristic of technological societies at their apogee. This also is the essence and danger of artificial intelligence; it is the precursor to the great evils to come since it will be destructive of the essence of humanity and of any sense of human “excellence”.

What is the relationship between thinking and practical behaviour? Thinking is a praxis a deed, an activity, but it surpasses all other types of praxis in that it is part of the essence of what “human excellence” or “virtue” is, that which allows human beings to surpass and overcome their mere humanity . Thinking itself is two-faced. On the one hand, it permeates action and production and measures these by their grandeur and the utility of their outcomes. At the same time, thinking illuminates itself in its humility, in ‘knowing that one does not know’.

As was shown in the Divided Line, the praxis of thinking can be either theoretical or practical thinking, the enframing application of thought as techne, and the conjunction of these two ways of being-in-the-world. Thinking is also meditation, contemplation, and attention with careful concern for the logos, for speech and its truth. Thinking is not merely a “producing” or “bringing forth” activity, but is rather the arete of the essence of human being. Thinking, when compelled by eros the urge to know, is not “of its own”. When thinking is of its own, it is not always productive of truth. When it is productive of truth, it does so because it is given a “dispensation”. Under the conditions of tyranny, it is far easier to act than to think. “Just do it” is a very apt slogan for the human being-in-the-world under the tyranny of technology. As Socrates notes in the Meno: “what is being miserable but desiring evil and obtaining it?”

The “knowing” and “making” and “making happen” that is technology (that combination of the Greek words techne and logos) shows itself to us as no mere “means” but as a way of revealing the world and thus a way of being-in-the-world. Through the history of Western philosophy and science, the world came to reveal itself as a ‘disposable object’, a picture, an idea of producing, a product of the imagination and reason. (We have attempted to show this in our previous discussion of the Divided Line.) The West at some point (perhaps in that period known as the Renaissance) made a choice that it would concern itself with the lower form of eros and attempt to bring about that justice that appeared absent from the Necessity of the world’s “reality”. Science became “the theory of the real”. Human beings became the centre of that world; but at the same time, they themselves became an object within that world-view.

The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supplies energy that can be extracted and stored as such. But does this not hold true for the old windmill as well? Its sails do indeed turn in the wind; but they are left entirely to the wind’s blowing. The windmill does not “unlock energy” from the air currents in order to store it. Agriculture became the mechanized food industry and we have seen a number of counter movements to this view of agriculture such as the “organic food” movement. In the our daily activities, air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium; uranium is set upon to yield atomic energy, which can be released either for destruction or for peaceful use. The earth and the human beings within it are viewed as “resources”, disposable resources.

There is a strange, uncanny interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil and that appearance which appears to be thought (the “imitative thought” of technology) and how it is related to the essence of evil. The 20^th century’s greatest philosopher, Martin Heidegger, showed this uncanny relation in a comment made in his Black Notebooks which has made quite a scandal in academic circles and persists in being scandalous due to Heidegger’s silence regarding the Shoah in the post-war years: “Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry, in essence the same as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of countries, the same as the production of hydrogen bombs”. To be clear, Heidegger does not say that the Holocaust is identical to modern agriculture. He is saying that they share the same ‘essence’, that is the essence of technology, what in German is called Gestell the ‘enframing’, the ‘schema’. What the essence of technology is is the banality-of-evil that Hannah Arendt speaks of, “the evil that spreads like a fungus” throughout everything. These aspects of evil share the same essence but they are not identical with evil itself nor are they identical to each other, just as an oak or a willow are not identical even though they share the same essence of treeness.

In The Human Condition Arendt says: “Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but anti-political, perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political forces.” Love, attention, thought deal with the private rather than the public sphere. The private and public spheres are constantly in strife with each other. It is the private aspect that gives to love the ‘unworldly’ character that Arendt speaks about. Since the public sphere is concerned with turning all that is into an “object”, the individual is faced with the constant challenge to remain engaged with it. One cannot love an object. Because the seeking of truth is what makes human beings human we can say that the seeking of truth, whether from the lower or upper forms of Eros, is done because it is good.

Corruption is an essential requirement for evil to flourish. Historical documents from the times of the Nazi regime show the horrible comedy of some of the meetings between Eichmann and the leaders of the Jewish communities in the various countries under German occupation. The shameful role of the Vatican throughout the Holocaust exemplifies the lack of morals and ethics that occurs when one compromises with the “earthly powers” of geo-politics: the Church’s concern for its members in Germany allowed them to overlook what was occurring to the Jewish people even though they were well aware of it. (As a note, Martin Heidegger was a Catholic.)

The issue of thinking and thought and its relation to evil asks the question of whether or not it is “possible” to carry out evil “thoughtlessly”. Socrates long ago asserted that “no one knowingly does evil”, and this assumes that there are two types of “thinking” being discussed by those who assert that Eichmann knew full-well what he was doing during his time as “the scheduler of trains” and those who assert that he was neither “conscious” nor had a “conscience” regarding his actions. In the Third Reich, evil had lost the quality by which most people recognize it–the quality of temptation, which is the ‘consciousness’ and ‘conscience’ in which it is commonly recognized. Eichmann was successful in organizing the chaos that was ‘the final solution’ because his office organized the “logistics”, the means of transportation that were behind the massacre. He did not determine who would work, or who would die for he did not hold any such extraordinary power. Doing evil became equated with ‘doing one’s duty’, with ‘getting on with the job’, and the evil involved in this was not discernable because there was no thinking involved in doing one’s job.

The success of the Nazi regime required the compliance of the Wehrmacht, the State, and the industrial bureaucracies: the military/industrial complex as a predicate of its subject technology wherein it finds its essence. This compliance was forthcoming due to the universal rage at the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The sheer injustice of the Treaty made this rage justified to some extent. Is the same justification for rage present in the followers of Trump and the Christian nationalists in the USA today? Is their rage dependent on their perceived loss of power in their country, their fear of the threat of becoming ‘meaningless’ in the country in which they were born, of their being ‘replaced’? what are the roots of their ressentiment? The USA is not autochthonous because its making as a country did not occur before conscious memory (as is the case with the polis in Plato’s ‘noble lie’ regarding autochthony or rootedness and with many European nations).

The technological administrative massacres of Eichmann are not unique to the 20th century. The conquest of North America began with the genocide of its Native Peoples and the establishment of its colonies based on slavery. While these ‘facts’ are evil enough in themselves, the attempts to be ‘intentionally ignorant’ of those evils further exacerbates the difficulty of coming to some sense of self-knowledge of who one is as a North American, and it weakens the capacity and the capability of thinking regarding one’s own actions.

Within the parameters of the social sciences’ “fact/value” distinction, there are many people who want to abandon the concept of evil because they may be overwhelmed by the task of understanding and preventing evil or they are overwhelmed by the calling to do so and would rather focus on the less daunting task of questioning the motives of people who still use the term. This is part of the quixotic nature of the task of trying to make evil a visible phenomenon. This is strange, uncanny since evil is the most prominent of ‘surface phenomenon’ and has no depth. It, nevertheless, is ‘radical’ in nature. Arendt, following Kant, denies the radicality of evil.

The problem we have is that evil persistently refuses to be an abstract concept try as we might to make it as such. This is because evil is not a “value”, not something of human knowing and human making but something which has an essence of its own and exists as and in its own. Evil, like the idea of technology, has many predicates. We may try to look at “evil actions” and throw some light on them by contrasting them with arete or “human excellence”. We may look to the “evil personality” and try to show the agency of thoughtlessness behind evil’s flourishing. We may look at analyses of “evil institutions” and seek to determine the origins of evil in those places.

Those ‘fact/value’ scientists who are skeptical of using the term evil find that the concept of evil requires unwarranted metaphysical commitments to the notion of a devil or daemon, or notions of “possession” by dark spirits. We have tried to show here aspects of what “possession” may, in fact, mean through our discussions of the various faces of Eros and the Logos. The urge to turn all that is into an ‘object’ so that it will give us its reasons for being as it is causes many individuals to abandon any notion of trying to come to terms with evil for evil resists “explanation”; like life itself it remains uncanny, mysterious even though it surrounds us like the sea surrounds a fish. (A joke: Two young fish are swimming lazily when another older fish passes by and says “Morning boys, how’s the water?” The two young fish continue swimming for a moment when one turns to the other and says “What the hell is water?”)

The modern day social scientist is uncomfortable with “uncanniness”. The concept of evil is “useless” because of its uncanniness. In true modern day social scientific fashion, the American Psychological Association or APA, sees the concept of evil as harmful or dangerous when used in moral, political, and legal judgements or contexts, and so, it has recommended that it should not be used in those contexts, if at all i.e. the ‘fact/value’ distinction must rule. Modern day social science requires moral obtuseness.

The final stage of evil’s corruption is perversity or wickedness. Donald Trump’s speeches to his MAGA followers illustrate this aspect of evil’s projection onto others as Donald Trump constantly calls his political enemies ‘perverse’ and ‘wicked’. As we have seen with our discussion of the Meno, someone with a perverse will inverts the proper order of the incentives that might be present. Meno, instead of prioritizing the moral law over all other incentives, prioritizes self-interest over the moral law. His actions conform to the moral law only if they are in his perceived self-interest. Someone who acts only out of their perceived self-interest need not do anything wrong because actions which best promote their self-interest may conform to the moral law in place at the time. But since the reason he performs morally right actions is self-interest and not because those actions are morally right, his actions have no moral worth and, according to Kant, his will manifests the worst form of evil possible for a human being. Kant considers someone with a perverse will an evil person (Kant 1793, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone Bk I, 25).

For Arendt, radical evil involves making human beings as human beings superfluous. Again we reiterate: this is the end of technology. This superfluidity is accomplished when human beings are made into living corpses who lack any spontaneity or freedom, when “consciousness” and “conscience” are separated. According to Arendt, a distinctive feature of radical evil is that it isn’t done for humanly understandable motives such as self-interest, but merely to reinforce totalitarian control and the idea that everything is possible. Here we can see radical evil’s connection with technology. Totalitarian and authoritarian regimes are predicates of the subject technology. The future technological world, if it can come into being before it destroys itself, will be a great tyranny. The ‘mass meaninglessness’ required by it will fulfill Socrate4s’ saying regarding evil: “What is being miserable but desiring evil and obtaining it”.

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Sketch For a Portrait of Evil: The Essence of Evil: Sections V – VII

The text describes the connection between justice, language, and evil as portrayed in Plato’s Republic. It explores how justice is linked to human society and outlines the temptations of Christ as depicted in the Christian Bible. The relationship between language, technology, and thought is scrutinized as a driving force for evil in modern society. It presents language as a transformative tool that influences human existence and understanding.

Section V: The Collective and Evil

If injustice is an evil that can experienced by human beings, then justice must be a social virtue or excellence of human beings. To understand what this excellence or virtue is one must understand the society in which justice is present. If justice is the rendering of what is due to other human beings, what is ‘fitting’ for them, then the question of what is due other human beings comes to the fore. What is our “debt” to other human beings; what do we “owe” them? This can only be determined by our being-with-others in the world. No society or collective is possible without some form of justice, some form of “debt” to others. Even the Mafia requires justice in order to achieve its unjust ends. Donald Trump exhorts his followers to violence in order to protect himself from his own injustice. Thinking and understanding in our being-with-others are more important than enthusiasm or spiritedness when it comes to the bringing about of justice.

In the Republic, a city is necessarily founded in speech for there are no actual cities that are just. The Republic outlines the essential limitations of a political society and these limitations are imposed by Necessity itself and by the being-of-human-beings by nature, what we are as human beings. The dialogue of the Republic is delivered by Socrates to Plato’s brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus, so it would appear that Plato is concerned about ‘looking after his own’ i.e., his own family. The Republic is a most anti-erotic text, but we must understand this in light of the two-faced nature of Eros itself. In examining the one type of eros that is spoken against, we will come to understand the nature of the Eros that is being spoken for in the dialogue.

In the Republic, the regime mirrors the character of the individuals living within and under the regime. This principle must be kept in mind in order to understand the particular individuals who will be explored in this writing. Meno of Thessaly, Eichmann of Nazi Germany, and Donald Trump of the USA are all products of the regimes of which they are members. This outcome, that the individual will reflect the regime and vice versa, is not surprising given the outline of the Divided Line that Socrates proposes and due to the dual nature of Eros that is in operation at all times within human beings.

Plato lists five types of regimes corresponding to the five main character types of the human soul: 1. Kingship; 2. Oligarchy; 3. Timocracy; 4. Democracy; and 5. Tyranny. There are many more various types of regimes, but these are the main ones and the other regimes may be found to be an admixture of the five. Because of the lack of the virtue of moderation sophrosyne to be found in the cities, Plato thought that “…it is inevitable that such cities constantly rotate
between tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy, and that those ruling such cities are unable to bear the very mention of a just government based on equality under the law.” (Seventh Letter 326d) Such rotations or revolutions are due to the cities being based on the opinions or doxa that have been derived from the lower form of eros, the appetites, and from the notions of the good that arise through the opinions that develop from such an ethos. The ethos develops from the logoi of the artisans and technicians and determines what arete or human excellence will be conceived to be within the collective. Satisfaction of the needs that arise from the lower form of eros, which is the chief characteristic of oligarchies, democracies and tyrannies, create a laziness on the part of the soul that leads it into a further withdrawal from its desire to unite with the Good.

The Great Beast

\The collective or the social, the polis, is described as a great beast in Bk. VI of Plato’s Republic (493 a-e). The polis is the great corruptor of the souls of human beings, and this corrupting, decaying influence is done primarily through how “education” is perceived to be within the polis:

“Each of these private teachers who work for pay, whom the politicians call sophists and regard as their rivals, inculcates nothing else than these opinions of the multitude which they opine when they are assembled and calls this knowledge wisdom. It is as if a man were acquiring the knowledge of the humors and desires of a great strong beast which he had in his keeping, [493b] how it is to be approached and touched, and when and by what things it is made most savage or gentle, yes, and the several sounds it is wont to utter on the occasion of each, and again what sounds uttered by another make it tame or fierce, and after mastering this knowledge by living with the creature and by lapse of time should call it wisdom, and should construct thereof a system and art and turn to the teaching of it, knowing nothing in reality about which of these opinions and desires is honorable or base, good or evil, just or unjust, [493c] but should apply all these terms to the judgements of the great beast, calling the things that pleased it good, and the things that vexed it bad, having no other account to render of
them, but should call what is necessary just and honorable, never having observed how great is the real difference between the necessary and the good, and being incapable of explaining it to
another. Do you not think, by heaven, that such a one would be a strange educator?” “I do,” he said. “Do you suppose that there is any difference between such a one and the man who thinks
[493d] that it is wisdom to have learned to know the moods and the pleasures of the motley multitude in their assembly, whether about painting or music or, for that matter, politics? For if a man associates with these and offers and exhibits to them his poetry or any other product of his craft or any political service, and grants the mob authority over himself more than is unavoidable, the proverbial necessity of Diomede will compel him to give the public what it likes, but that what it likes is really good and honorable, have you ever heard an attempted proof of this that is not simply ridiculous?” [493e]

In establishing an outline for a portrait of evil, it is necessary to discuss Plato’s Great Beast as well as the three temptations of Christ from the Gospel of Matthew in the Christian Bible. In the Republic, Thrasymachus is the character who acts like the city of Athens and his behavior is, initially, that of a beast. He is the representative of the polis as he is a rhetorician, and he is among those who form the opinions of the polis for pay. He is dependent on the polis for his
livelihood and his livelihood is dependent on his technē, to initiate the opinions that the polis will eventually uphold. Socrates eventually ‘tames’ Thrasymachus through shame, for this is a quality that distinguishes human beings from other animals or beasts: we are capable of feeling shame.

Those who succumb to the Great Beast are those who think and act in conformity with the prejudices and reactions of the multitude to the detriment of the individual search for truth and goodness that is the essence of thinking. The modern day phenomenon of “intentional ignorance” is an example of the Greek expression of “Diomede’s necessity”. Because Odysseus was essential for the destruction of Troy Diomedes, the admiral of the Greek navy, refrained
from punishing him. From this action was said to have arisen the Greek proverbial expression “Diomedes’ necessity”, applied to those who act contrary to their inclination for what they perceive as the greater good. For the Greeks, the Trojan War was a great evil, a great error. The implication is that the pre-conceived conception of the ‘good end justifying any means’ is among the greatest of evils.

Because the social is transcendent to the individual, conformity to the social or the collective or to any of the powers which happen to reside in it, is an imitation of the true act of Divine Grace; and the individual who does so conform feels as if they have received a divine gift. Thoughtfulness is a danger to conformity and is thus a danger to the Great Beast which is founded upon opinion and ignorance.

One of the errors that human beings make is that they fail to recognize the perfection of their imperfection; that is, they fail to recognize their need for otherness. This need for otherness is rooted in the recognition of the beauty of the world and the recognition of beauty in general. This failure of acknowledging the urge of the higher Eros accounts for their succumbing to or
conformity with the Great Beast, for the false sense of self-sufficiency destroys the Eros that urges them to greater human excellence (virtue) and causes them to lack a sense of otherness or justice in its true sense. In the traditional religions of the world, this is understood as ‘sin’. Sin is, literally, the denial of the light. Thoughtfulness is the enemy of “opinion” or doxa. Tolerance for every opinion is impossible, contrary to what might be believed by the liberals of today. The fact/value distinction ultimately leads to intolerance rather than to any ‘value neutral’ thinking.

The desire for Totalitarianism is the desire for the destruction of thought, the elimination of the thinking individual. It is “sinful” both in the collective and in the individual sense. Totalitarianism desires to destroy thought and thinking because thought is dangerous to it. Because societies rest on opinions, the historical knowledge which is the orthodoxy that devolves into dogma, they are subject to change, revolution (what the artist/poet William Blake represented through his figure of Orc). The movement from “orthodoxy” to dogmatism is a natural or necessary descent. The nihilism at the base of these totalitarian regimes is exhibited in “the thousand year old Reich” etc. which believes if it cannot exist, then nothing should or will exist. This is a similarity that these regimes share with many cults. The cult element must be present within them.

In the Divided Line of Plato, we can see a distinction between what Plato called the ‘true’ arts and those he called the ‘sham’ arts. For example, medicine is a ‘true’ art for it seeks the health of the body; cookery is a ‘sham’ art for it seeks pleasure in its hopeful end of contributing to the body’s health. In the Republic the character of Glaucon, one of Plato’s brothers is shown, due to his misguided erotic nature, to succumb to both duress and temptations. Glaucon is depicted as the ‘democratic man’. The Republic itself is Plato’s most anti-erotic dialogue, but the two-faced eros which is attacked in it is that eros that shows its most debased side, the lower eros. In its structure, the Republic resembles the spiraling gyres illustrated here showing an ascent and a descent. The peak of the ascent in Republic occurs in Bks. VI and VII while the descent occurs from Bks. VIII-X, ending in the myth of Ur.

In modern day regimes, in those societies leaning toward totalitarianism and authoritarianism, we see an alliance between the mob and the elite, the convergence of the intellectuals (in America, the lawyers of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton) and the gutter born movements of the radical left and right. There is a shared contempt for “parliamentary politics” and the rule of law based on the belief in the “phoniness” of the appeals made by the bourgeois to the “public interest” or the “common good”. In the oligarchic, democratic and tyrannic regimes, politics becomes subservient to the appetites i.e. the political sphere becomes the administrative and protective apparatus required by the technological and economic realms. The activities of production and
consumption come to dominate the lives of ordinary citizens and political leaders; and given the determining need for efficiency and speed, the obesity of the citizens through the fast-food industry conjoins with the addictive hope of gambling industry for the individuals who are striving for some form of meaning in the meaninglessness that dominates their living moments.

Section VI: Christianity and the Three Temptations: Contours in the Portrait

Since we will be discussing ‘Christian nationalism’ and its connection to evil in Part IV, a few words are necessary in order to clarify what is meant by ‘Christianity’ in this writing. To understand the metaphysical underpinnings of Christianity, its grounds, one needs to recognize that there are three realms within it: the realm of Necessity in which beings dwell (including human beings, AB of the Divided Line) and are given over to its laws (such as gravity),
the realm of Being wherein lie those things that do not change (our principle of reason and the mathematics that result from it, for instance, CD) and the realm of the Good which is beyond both Being and Necessity and is the realm of God. The existence of and dominion over these three realms correspond to the existence of the Triune God or Trinity: the Father (God, the Good), the Son (the Father’s Creation, “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the Earth”, “the Word made flesh”, the Logos), and the Holy Spirit (Grace, the Word). The Father is the Good, the Son is His creation and is the Word made flesh, and the Holy Spirit is the mediator between the two and is the bringer of Grace to human beings.

This is a Platonic interpretation of Christianity. Plato insists that there is a great gulf separating the Necessary from the Good and yet, paradoxically, they are related to each other. In Christian dogma we may say that this is the gulf between God and His Crucifixion. In Christianity, this relation is understood as the Holy Spirit who gives the gift of tongues (the logoi) to those who receive His grace through the parousia (being-present-alongside, being present-
within) of Christ’s crucifixion. (Logos) In His creation of the world, God withdraws from His creation, the realm of Necessity, in order to allow it to be. He is, in a way, the great Artist who like any ordinary artist must also withdraw from his creation in order to allow it to be. The true act of creation is a denial of the Self; it is allowing something to be other than one’s self and is a recognition of “otherness” itself. (This is the most painful reality of the act of abortion: the refusal to allow another being to be for the sake of one’s own self.) The greatest obstacle to our unification with the Good itself is our ego, our “personality”. Through the trials and tests of suffering and affliction, this ego is destroyed. We have this principle given to us in our great Art such as the play King Lear. God’s withdrawal is the example that He gives to us in our relation to ourselves and to the world: we must deny our Selves in order that we may be united with Him.

Because creation is from God, it must be Good for He is all Good and the good is One. Those artists who create from themselves and do not withdraw from their art do not create great art, and this is the foundation of one of our mistaken approaches to appreciating the works of art created where we focus on the biographical, historical, social contexts, and the techniques of artists, thus turning the art into an object over which we stand demanding of it to give us its
reasons for being as it is i.e., its “meaning”. This is what we call the philosophy of “aesthetics” or the “sensual” and its appearance is concurrent with the coming to be of the principle of reason in our philosophy, arts and our sciences. Without this withdrawal of Self from that which is created, there can be no creation and certainly no great creation. There is only a “making” or that which resides in AB of the Divided Line.

When God interacts within the web of Necessity and its physical laws, He Himself is subject to these laws and He submits to these laws. Without such submission on the part of God, a great injustice would occur since only human beings would suffer God’s creation and not God Himself. But God does suffer His creation and has chosen to do so. The most prominent and
important example of this is the crucifixion of Christ where God Himself accepts the death of His Son without intervening to prevent it from happening even though Christ requests that God intervene on His behalf. God’s presence is His absence and silence in the crucifixion. The Lamb is slain from the foundation of the world (creation) (Rev 13: 8) and is the creation itself. Creation is a suffering being.

This preamble is to prepare us for an interpretation that will lead to an understanding of the three temptations of Christ, and from this interpretation of these temptations to get a much clearer outline of some of the characteristics necessary for any portrait of evil. Fyodor Dostoevsky has written on the three temptations of Christ in his masterpiece “The Grand Inquisitor” from his great novel The Brothers Karamazov. One may find a link
to this text here:

http://www2.hawaii.edu/~freeman/courses/phil100/11.%20Dostoevsky.pdf.

The three temptations or “trials” and “tests” of Christ are all united by their relationship to “power” and of human beings’ possession and relationship to it and, in fact, whether or not human beings can have a true possession of it. The three temptations are related to Necessity, the Self, and the Social. The three temptations or “tests” of Christ focus on: 1. “bread” or food for the body (an essential need of the body) and its relation to grace or the “food for the soul”; 2. “gravity” and the web of Necessity’s relation to the body and to the Self; and 3. political power, or the Self and its relation to the living of human beings in communities. They speak of our needs, or perceived needs, as human beings, and they distinguish between the lower and the higher forms of Eros that we have spoken of earlier.

The Greek word that presents the difficulties for us is “πειρασθῆναι (peirasthēnai)” in the three temptations of Christ. It is translated as “to be tempted”, but it could also be understood as “to be tested” in the way that we test something to ensure its genuineness, its trueness, its authenticity. We might say that the three temptations of Christ are “tests” of Christ in order to
ensure His genuineness or authenticity prior to His Ministry on Earth. As human beings we, too, are tested by these very same temptations at various points throughout our lives. They are our tests of genuineness, authenticity and “human excellence”.

The text from Matthew is as follows:

Matthew: 4:1 Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. 2 After he fasted forty days and forty nights he was famished. 3 The tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become bread.” 4 But he
answered, “It is written, ‘Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

5 Then the devil took him to the holy city, had him stand on the highest point of the temple, 6 and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down. For it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you’ and ‘with their hands they will lift you up, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’” 7 Jesus said to him, “Once again it is written: ‘You are not to put the Lord your God to the test.’”

8 Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their grandeur. 9And he said to him, “I will give you all these things if you throw yourself to the ground and worship me.” 10 Then Jesus said to him, “Go away, Satan! For it is written: ‘You are to worship the Lord your God and serve only him.’”11 Then the devil left him, and angels came and began ministering to his needs.
The Gospel of Matthew 4: 1-11

The text of the three temptations suggests that it is the “Spirit” (the Holy Spirit, understood here as Eros in its higher form) that leads Christ into the “wilderness” to be tested by the devil. The “wilderness” as the place of temptation or the test is present in many of our fairy tales and myths, such as “Little Red Cap” (“Little Red Riding Hood”). It is sometimes metaphorically
presented as “the dark woods” or “the belly of the Beast” and so on, and it is the place where the tests occur. Our stories and our cinema continue this tradition of the place of tests in multivarious forms and guises. Plato’s Cave in Republic is the “belly of the Great Beast” (the social) and the test is whether to recognize the light of truth coming from the Sun (the Good) and to begin one’s journey toward the Good, or to return to the world of the “shadows” and its
pleasures and rewards ( this is related to the third temptation). Without the tests or temptations, the soul becomes flabby and weak and loses its “excellence”.

“Every word that comes from the mouth of God” is through the Holy Spirit, and it is His grace that is given to us at every moment of our lives. The logos that comes from “the mouth of God” is Love. This “spiritual bread” is as necessary to the soul as is the bread that is the staple food required of our bodies if we are “to live”. If we are famished we could very well wish that the stones before us would become bread; but they will not do so (the miracles of manna from heaven, the loaves and the fishes, etc. aside), for our hunger, the stones
and the lack of bread are of the realm of Necessity, the realm of time and space.

To insist that the stones before us become bread is to deny the will of God and to attribute evil to God: why does He feed others and not me? It is very easy for us to feel that we are favoured by God when we are well fed. But this, too, is a failure to pass the test: God’s justice is to visit rain upon the just and unjust, the fed and the unfed, in equal amounts. We fail the test in not being able to distinguish the realm of Necessity from the realm of the Good. The “spiritual
bread”, in the form of the Word that comes from the mouth of God, is omnipresent and available to anyone who asks. God is quite capable of turning stones to bread, but to turn stones to bread requires that God cross the vast distance that separates Himself from the Necessity of His creation and He must submit to Necessity’s laws when He does so. Given the recent discoveries of the JWST, one can gain an appreciation of how great a task the crossing of that distance is.

This separation of the realm of Necessity from the realm of the Good and the crossing of the gap between the two realms is highlighted in the second temptation. It is the temptation or test of suicide, an act that we have within our capability but which is denied us because we are not our own. The belief that we are our own, both body and soul (if we still believe in such a thing as a soul) is one that dominates our thinking and actions in the modern age. “To be or not to
be” (and this speech of Hamlet’s encapsulates much that is trying to be said here and is Hamlet’s error, that which makes him a tragic hero) is a temptation or test of God to intervene on our behalf and to deny the law of gravity or the laws of Necessity that separate God from us. When the devil takes Christ to the top of the temple of Jerusalem and asks Him to throw Himself down, Christ’s response is that such an act is a “temptation” of God, and we are denied
putting God to the test: it is God who tests us, not we who test God. To test God is a sin. Our submission to Necessity is our submission to the will of God, and this submission on our part is one of our greatest tests. The denial of the will of God for our own desires is one of our greatest temptations.

The third temptation is that temptation or test given to us regarding our living in communities. The kingdoms of the world and their grandeur, their splendour, belong to Satan, and they, too, are products of Necessity and subject to the same laws that rule over all material things (gravity, for instance).

There is n0 figure in Greek mythology that aligns with Satan. The closest is Hades/Pluto; and in his own realm, he is equivalent in power to Zeus himself. Satan’s temptation is to “test” us in our desire to serve him or to serve God. Satan can give to us the kingdoms of this world because they are his to give. He cannot give us the Good, only imitations and false facsimiles, the surface phenomenon. He will give us these kingdoms if we are loyal to him. Money, fame, rewards, recognition, “social contacts” are all in his realm as he is the “god” of these things.

The sin here is our deceiving ourselves that we have the power to achieve the Good ourselves: “the good end justifies any means”, a sin that has resulted in the deaths of countless millions of human beings throughout history for it is a sin that comes about through the worship of false gods, the pledging of loyalty to Satan in whatever form he may happen to appear at the time. It is the placing of our “interests” before our “values” and “principles” (to use a common phrase nowadays) of those who choose to fall prey to this third temptation which is thinking that they have it in their power to bring about the Good themselves. It is the sin of the Christian nationalists at the moment. It is the sin that results from the deception that one is in possession of the sole truth, the highest light. It is to place oneself higher than Christ Himself who during His crucifixion utters the cry: “My God, my God why have you forgotten (forsaken) me?”

To recapitulate: the three temptations of Christ involve the three realms of Necessity, Being, and the Good which correspond to the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity. Each temptation has to do with the phenomenon of power and of human beings’ relationship to it. The temptations or tests occur because we are beings in bodies who must decide to serve God’s will or our own. To overcome the temptations or tests which the Spirit gives us, Christians are given the Lord’s Prayer, the Word. Similar examples of gifts from the Divine are to be found in all cultures where human beings are still free to think.

Section VII: Language and the Collective

“I would not give a cent for the mortal whom empty hopes can set afire.”
Sophocles Ajax

The language of the collective or the social is rhetoric and prose, while the language of thinking and thought is dialectic and poetry. Plato never speaks of language; he speaks of the logos. Language is characteristic of a people within a nation i.e., German, English, Greek, Persian. Plato speaks of “human speech”. The individual language, the distinct words of various languages, is determined by convention; language itself or speech is determined otherwise and beyond human convention. The distinctions between rhetoric and philosophy and poetry and philosophy are made throughout the works of Plato and are important for understanding the use of language in the collective. In Plato the right life is the “philosophic” life or being on the way to philosophy, not the political life for the language of philosophy is dialectic while the language of politics is rhetoric.

The Republic provides examples of the angry rhetorician in the person of Thrasymachus. Anger is a very important emotion in the Republic. In the two-faced nature of Eros, eros the lower order of needs and urges, is the tyrant incarnate. The other face of Eros is the true king, the Eros wedded to Psyche, the Soul. The compulsion of Necessity drives the lower face of eros, and
this is mirrored in the compulsion of the Divine Eros which drives the need for the care and concern for the otherness of human beings and their worlds i.e. justice. Philosophy is not “logic” and the love of technē; philosophy is nothing more (nor less) than a living thoughtfulness, done with gentleness and magnanimity. It is required that the philosopher possess both the dialectical as well as the rhetorical arts. In the Divided Line of Plato, the strife between the need to distinguish the imaginative from the real in the spiritual realm (which forms the heart of thoughtfulness) encompasses the lives of living human beings.

The great question of Republic is how or if the collective can be ruled by thoughtfulness. The metaphor of the Great Beast suggests that this is not possible: rhetoric may tame the beast but it will not be able to bring it to thought. The only possibility is if a “Muse” of thoughtfulness, a daemon of thoughtfulness, can establish the relation or proportion between thought and the multitude. Through this divine proportion or relation, the thoughtful person assimilates themselves to the divine and the divine takes possession of the person, not the collective. But this assimilation cannot be done with or within the multitude.

One of the great difficulties regarding language for liberal societies is that if you limit the right to freedom of speech to the freedom of true and honest speech, you admit the right of censorship as a matter of course. The philosopher who was the most severe moralist, Kant, taught that lying is absolutely wrong (a renunciation of his ‘categorical imperative’); but legally, the right to lie must be protected. Just as the Republic is a “utopia” (literally “no place”) politically, it is also a “utopia” philosophically for it demonstrates that ‘perfect imperfection’ that is human being: the striving after that completion which can never be achieved i.e., the Good and the good polis. (In the Bible, no human being sees the face of God and lives. Exodus 33:20, “He [God] said, “you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live. ‘”)

In Bk. V of Republic, the lover of knowledge is distinguished from the lover of gossip, of hearsay. The lover of knowledge loves the ideas which beget the beautiful in the outward appearance of the eidos of things. The ‘reality’ of the things becomes manifest through the eidos and thus their truth is revealed. The lover of gossip, of hearsay, loves the shadows, merely. This is the distinction between the two faces of eros and Eros. Plato’s doctrine of the ideas is that the
essence of human beings is Eros, the desire for completion, the desire for something perfect.

The philosopher is distinguished from others who ‘love to see’ (Aristotle, Metaphysics Bk I) by the manner of her seeing. This manner of seeing is determined in the admixture of Being and Becoming, in the BC section of the Divided Line, the distinction between the eide and the ideas, between the ‘here’ and ‘there’. Philosophy is not merely the means for the bringing about the just life; it is the just life itself, the good life itself. For human beings, political activity is a life of praxis or doing, while the philosophic life is one of contemplation or beholding what is always. In the realm of political activity, what is always is Necessity which is the schema or pattern, a permanence over that which is always changing. Necessity itself does not change: Time is the moving image of eternity. The goal of political action is to establish “here” laws which are in accord with the “there” of the “the beautiful, the just and the good” and to preserve those laws which have already been so established. (Republic Bk VI 484 c-d)

Justice as action or praxis is a by-product of philosophy. Historians of philosophy and professors of philosophy are not philosophers, although some rare individuals may be. For Plato, the sophists would be what are called “intellectuals” today. The “philosophic soul”, on the contrary, and the way of being of the philosopher are indistinguishable. The philosophic soul has the love of the whole and all its parts first. Second, the philosophic soul hates the lie, for it loves the ‘light’. Third, since the love of the pleasures of the soul is in the philosophic soul’s very being (Eros), it will be much more powerful than the love of the pleasures of the body i.e., wealth, for instance (eros). Sophrosyne moderation will be the key for the philosophic soul. In one of the accounts of the myth of Psyche and Eros, it is Eros that is responsible for Psyche’s becoming immortal. Fourth, the philosophic soul will not be petty. It will not lose itself in the world of anonymity and self-interest for its own sake. The philosophic soul will be magnanimous in character. Fifth, it will not fear death but will face it with courage. Sixth, the philosophic soul will be just and gentle; it will be merciful if required for it has care and concern for other beings
and with their being-in-the-world. Seven, the philosophic soul will be a good learner for learning will help in the strife that is being-in-the-world. To be a good learner requires a good memory and the philosophic soul will generally have a good memory.

In the Republic, the poet is the most universal “imitator” because his knowledge/wisdom is that of the human soul. The poet is called a “sophist” in Bk X because he represents those for whom “gain” is most important and these are those citizens of the oligarchic, democratic, and tyrannic regimes. When the focus of eros is lowered upon desiring the most unnecessary of necessities,
the “death of the soul” arises from injustice due to a lack of moderation sophrosyne and wise-judgement phronesis, and injustice is evil. This injustice is coeval with the deprival of the soul from its sense of the good as the sense of the good withdraws further from the soul into oblivion.

The soul is an ‘embodied soul’ and as such its natural condition is to be constantly in strife. Without this strife or polemos (war, confrontation), the soul becomes lethargic. This implies that for some human beings, while they may still be alive, their souls are, in fact, quite dead. If the soul is to be ‘saved’, it must be turned about, ‘converted’ and compelled to see the true light of the things that are. Plato was well aware of the different natures of human souls and his writings are designed to say different things to different souls. Unlike other writings, the Platonic dialogue cannot become the subject or content of ‘artificial intelligence’ because it involves thinking itself, “consciousness” itself. Treatises and essays can become the subject of ‘artificial intelligence’ because they say the same thing to everyone. ‘Artificial intelligence’ says the same things to everyone. This, for Plato, was the great danger of writing and it is the great danger of language.

When we wish to give thought to language and the collective and its relation to evil, we need to give thought to the relationship between language and technology and its relation to thoughtfulness and thoughtlessness. The very essence of what we are as human beings, our ontology (onto-logos), our being-in-the-world is contained in our language and in our relation to, and understanding of, language. We need to dwell on the two-faced nature of the logos that is pointed out to us in Plato’s Divided Line.

To understand language within the collective is a matter of how we understand what “education” is. Plato’s allegory of the Cave is, after all, about the importance of education, for it is education (from the Latin educare “the leading out”) that will bring us to thoughtfulness. When giving thought to education, we contrast “instruction” with “teaching”; and to do so is to
recognize that “instruction” sees itself as “useful” while teaching is to be characterized as “useless”; and it must be “useless” in order to allow the true learning and thinking in the teaching to happen.

To reflect on the issue of “uselessness” and “usefulness” is to connect these seemingly irrelevant themes to the status of education in our modern technological age and what we think education is today. In order to begin this reflection, we must think upon language and rethink language. We must reflect upon the two-faced nature of the logos. If our way of thinking is one that values only that which is immediately useful, then language is only conceived and appreciated from the perspective of its usefulness for us. More importantly, this
suggests it is the essence of technology as framing that somehow determines the “transformation of language into mere information.”

How does our understanding of language and technology contribute to our understanding of evil as a phenomenon? In our understanding of the role of language and its relation to evil as a ‘surface phenomenon’, we must be mindful of the Divided Line’s sections AB, AC and A. This requires that we look at the two-faced nature of the logos or language and how it relates to knowledge and thinking. This requires that language must first be re-thought.

The rethinking of language takes place from and within the rethinking of technology so that we are able to understand that technology’s flowering in ‘artificial intelligence’. This flowering requires the removal of human beings from the formation and construction of the technological world. The relation between technology and language is crucial for a rethinking of language in
our modern technological age. It is therefore necessary to talk about that technological language, which defines a language that is technologically determined by what is most peculiar to technology, that is, by framing (or “positioning” or enframing, the schema), what we have been calling Necessity in this writing. It is imperative that we ask what is language and in what
special way it remains exposed to the dictates of technology. Such imperatives to our thinking about language are only met in the rethinking of the current conception of language that we might characterize in the following way:

Today we think of speech logos as a faculty, an activity and achievement of human beings. It is the operation of the instruments for communication and hearing (artificial intelligence). Speech is the expression and communication of emotions accompanied by thoughts (dispositions) in the service of “information” and in the passing on of information. Speech is a representing and portraying (picturing, the making of pictures) of the real and unreal. Because human beings live within societies, this necessitates that they have language of some kind.

The traditional connection of subjects “the things” + predicates “the qualities of the things”, the categories, (the sentence, the statement) illustrates how reason has come to determine the relationship between language and thinking. Thinking is commonly regarded as the human activity of representing objects in this view (AB and AC of the Divided Line). and thus language or logos has been seen as a means for conveying information about objects. “In-form-ation” results from our providing a “form” in order to “inform” regarding what we call “data”. This provision of a form is what we call “classification”, a providing of definitions or the limits and horizons of things.

Traditional historical thinking places thinking as “reason” (reason, “logic” which has its root in “logos” which in Greek is “language”, “speech”) as the determining factor (the “-ation” or “aitia” in Greek, “that which is responsible for”) in the relation between language and thinking. Reason provides the “form” in a calculative way so that the data (the content) can be structured so that it may “inform”. This is shown in our current conception of language as an
“instrument of expression” in the “service of thinking”. The common view believes that thought uses language merely as its “medium” or a means of expression, an instrument. Thought is seen as logic, reason in this view. This instrumental view of language and thinking is the thinking that has made possible artificial intelligence. For the poet William Blake, it was “Newton’s sleep”; for Plato, it was the enchainment of the prisoners in the Cave.

We assume that language is a tool used by human beings to communicate information. We think that the same fact can be expressed in many different languages, even though we know that this is not the case at the present time. Artificial intelligence will seek to create the univocal meta-language so that this will indeed become the case in the future. We think a competent speaker is in control of language and can use it efficiently to convey data to his/her
audience. This is the essence of rhetoric as techne.

In the quest for efficiency in communication, we have devised artificial languages that give us more control over language. Symbolic logic, computer programming languages, and the technical languages of the sciences are set up as systems in which each sign can be interpreted in only one way. Each sign points clearly to what it represents so that the sign itself becomes completely unobtrusive. The perfect language in this view is a technique for perfect representation. We have discovered that language in algebraic calculation.

The conception of language as a mere means of exchange of information undergoes an extreme transformation in our modern technological age that is expressed in the definition of language as “information”. This is the levelling of language, the logos, to a “surface phenomenon”. The analytic school of thought on language offers a prime example of a “metaphysical-technological
explanation” of language stemming from the “calculative frame of mind.” This view believes that thinking and speaking are “exhausted by theoretical and natural-scientific representations and statements,” and that they “refer to objects and only to objects.” Language, as a tool of scientific-technological knowing–which must establish its theme (thesis, theory) in advance as a
calculable, causally explicable framework– is only an instrument that we employ to manipulate objects. We refer to this as an algorithm: the world is looked upon as a calculable, causal framework that gives us a problem that must be solved.

This must be thought about in relation to what we understand as “artificial intelligence” or AI: how does or will our understanding of what reason and language are determine the nature of what is called “artificial intelligence” and of the machines that will use it? In the age of cybernetics, human beings will be the materials that will be ordered and disposed of i.e. the human resources, the human capital.

If we think about what we call “dead” languages for a moment, we will notice that they are called “dead” because they are no longer subject to changes in meaning. Any “living” language will have changes in meaning and interpretation according to the historical time in which it occurs. As the poet T. S. Eliot wrote:

“Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,

Will not stay still.”

Our modern attempts to fixate language into an unambiguous tool for communicating information regarding the representation of beings/things illustrates our desire to fulfill the revealing of truth as representation, to follow the correspondence theory of truth and the principle of reason. This is the segment AC of the Divided Line. There is “truth”, but how we understand what this truth is is relative to the historical situation in which it occurs; it is not a “subjective” truth, but a communal, collective truth: that is, it is not based on personal knowledge or gnosis but is the knowledge that we all share, the doxa or opinion that has been handed over to us. In our current situation, this is the global “revealing” through technology and this revealing drives us to realize the “global village” or “internationalism” along with what we call “international mindedness”. The “system” which results from the “framing” that is the technological requires no individual thinker or thinking. In science, time and place are not important and scientists from disparate locations can carry out their work with the certainty that their “accounts” will be correct when properly following the method established within the framing. This is because the language which they use is fixated. In our portrait of evil, we can say that this is the phenomenon of evil ‘spreading like a fungus’ over all things.

The quest for a universal, unambiguous language such as that which AI determines and requires can only succeed in creating stillborn languages. These languages are locked into a particular interpretation of the world and the things in it (representational revealing) and are incapable of responding creatively to new experiences and events. Artificial languages (and one might say artificial intelligence since it will be based on these languages) are not more “objective” than natural languages—they are just narrower and more rigid because their goal is certainty and efficiency.

Living language is fundamental to our revelation of the world; it is an essential part of what enables us to be someone, to be a human being, to have access to self-knowledge and to notice things in the world in the first place. It is essential to our self-knowledge. Language has the power to reveal our world and transform our existence. But the lucid and creative moments are few for individuals and fewer still for societies; the rest is inauthentic and derivative. Every day “idle talk” is a pale, dull reflection of the “creative meanings” that are first revealed and achieved in the language of poetry.

Where does the understanding of language as representation come from? As the “doctrine of the logos” in Aristotle is interpreted as assertion or statement, logic is the doctrine of thinking and the science of statement (or the making of statements—propositions, the creation of “pictures”), that is, “logic” (the principle of reason) provides the authoritative interpretations of thinking and speaking that rule throughout the technological. More specifically, logistics has as its basis the modern interpretation of the statement or assertion as the “connection of representations” (the correspondence and coherence theories of truth).

The general form of what is called modern thinking is thus a “scientific-technological manner of thinking.” This thinking, this world-picture, threatens to “spread to all realms” thereby magnifying the “deceptive appearance which makes all thinking and speaking seem objectifying.” This thinking and speaking finds its full realization in algebraic calculation. It is this
form of objectifying thinking that strives to “represent everything henceforth only technologically-scientifically as an object of possible control and manipulation.” With it, language itself takes a corresponding form: it becomes “deformed into an instrument of reportage and calculable information”. However, while the form that language takes is thus instrumental, in such a form of thinking, language itself exerts its own influence insofar as it is
“treated like a manipulable object to which our manner of thinking must conform.” Language itself allows itself to be treated in such a way. Language and reason are, in the end, inseparable. This is the two-faced nature of the logos.

There is a kind of language that, as the expression of this form of thinking, is itself one-tracked and one-sided and thus loses sight of the two-faced nature of the logos. One “symptom” of the growing power of the technological form of thinking is in our increased use of designations consisting of abbreviations of words or combinations of their initials in acronyms. Our text messaging and our love of acronyms is a technological form of language in the sense that these herald the ordering in which everything is reduced to the univocity of concepts and precise specifications. This reduction and ordering also leads us to view all activities we engage in to be leveled to one level: the student who is asked to create a work of art either in words or other media, sees their activity as nothing more significant than their being in a shopping mall or at a supermarket. The activity ceases to have any priority in importance. In this view, “speed reading” and the use of AI to carry out projects will come to flourish since we cannot learn from texts anything other than “information” and this “learning” must be done as “efficiently” and quickly as possible.

All that remains of language as information is “the abstract form of writing that is transcribed into the formulae of a logic calculus” whose clarity “ensures the possibility of a secure and rapid communication” (our text messaging and our public discourse as media bytes). The principles transforming language are technological-calculative. It is from the technological possibilities of the tools that technology has produced, its equipment, that the instruction (command) is set out as to how language can and shall still be language. Such instruction (command) spells out the absolute and overriding need for the clarity of signs and their sequences; the algorithm dominates. The fact that the equipment’s structure conforms to linguistic tasks such as translating (i.e. whether the command/instruction is in Chinese or English does not matter) does not mean that the reverse holds true. For these commands are “in advance and
fundamentally bound up” with the equipment itself. With the “inexorability of the limitless reign” of technology comes the insatiable technological demand for a technological language, so that its power increases to the point that the technological language comes to threaten the very essence of the other face of logos, language as Saying-Showing that is to be found in the CD section of the Divided Line. It is “the severest and most menacing attack on what is peculiar to
language,” for language becomes “atrophied” into the mere transmission of signals. This Evil is the anti-Logos.

Moreover, when information (in the form of command) is held as highest form of language on account of its univocity, certainty and speed, then we have a “corresponding conception” of the human being and of human life. Norbert Wiener, a founder of Cybernetics, said that language “is not an exclusive attribute of man but is one he may share to a certain degree with the machines he has constructed.” This view is itself possible only when we presuppose that
language is merely a means of information. This understanding of language as information represents, at the same time, a “threat to the human being’s ownmost essence.” The fact that language is interpreted and used as an instrument has led us into believing that we are the masters of language and of technology, but the truth of the matter might well be that technology takes language into its management and masters the essence of the human being
creating a fundamental change in human ontology (human being-there-in-the-world).

The gripping, mastering effect technological language has over our very essence as human beings makes the step or leap to thoughtfulness extremely difficult. Language itself denies us its essence and instead surrenders itself to us as our instrument of domination over beings. When this is passed on to the machines that we make they, too, will become instruments of domination over whatever ends they themselves will direct themselves toward.

It is extremely difficult for us in the modern age to even begin to understand the other face of the logos, a non-instrumental conception of language. The interpretation and form of “language as information” and of “information as language” is, in this sense, a circle determined by language and in language, within “the web of language.” Hence, Heidegger has referred to language as “the danger of all dangers” that “necessarily conceals in itself a continual danger for itself.” In fact, “we are the stakes” in the “dangerous game and gamble” that the essence of language plays with us, for the essence of evil is alive within it.

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Sketch For A Portrait of Evil: The Essence of Evil: Sections I and II

“If they [Plato and Aristotle] wrote about politics it was as if to lay down rules for a madhouse. And if they pretended to treat it as something really important, it was because they knew that the madmen they were talking to believed themselves to be kings and emperors. They humoured these beliefs in order to calm down their madness with as little harm as possible.”

“We know too little to be dogmatists and we know too much to be
skeptics.”—Blaise Pascal Pensées

“—and, in fact, the condition of most men’s souls in respect of learning and of what are termed “morals” is either naturally bad or else corrupted,—then not even Lynceus1 himself could make such folk see. In one word, neither receptivity nor memory will ever produce knowledge in him who has no affinity with the object, since it does not germinate to start with in alien states of mind; consequently neither those who have no natural connection or affinity with things just, and all else that is fair, although they are both receptive and retentive in various ways of other things, nor yet those who possess such affinity but are unreceptive and unretentive—none, I say, of these will ever learn to the utmost possible extent.”
1 Lynceus was an Argonaut, noted for his keenness of sight; here, by a playful hyperbole, he is supposed to be also a producer of sight in others.

Section I: General introduction

Two young fish are swimming lazily by when an older fish passes and says “Morning boys, how’s the water”? The two young fish continue to swim on when one turns to the other and asks “What the hell is water”?

This writing will attempt to show the what and the how of the necessity for thinking and the role that thinking plays in our human being-in-the-world and our being-with-others, and how these come together in the strife (polemos) that is our encounter with evil in our lives. That is, it will attempt to show what ‘human excellence’ (arête) or ‘virtue’ as it relates to our human being-in-the-world is. As the examples of the three historical figures chosen illustrate (Meno of Thessaly, Eichmann of Nazi Germany, and Donald Trump of the USA), without thinking there is no moral judgment because reality cannot be critically assessed; and when human beings are unable to grasp the reality of the world in which they live day-to-day, human beings cannot distinguish right from wrong, good from bad. The ability to think and tell right from wrong is what, according to Hannah Arendt (1982), ‘may prevent catastrophes’ when political and social conditions and contexts arise that may bring about catastrophic possibilities.

The conceptualization of evil (and particularly the claim being made here that thoughtlessness constitutes an important pre-condition and source of evil-doing) should encourage educators and students in the IB program overall, and in its Theory of Knowledge component in particular, to examine the contexts of human-being-in-the-world through the exploration of various aspects of contemporary and historical evil. Recognition of these characteristics or aspects of evil can make students aware not only of the dire consequences emerging from an incapacity to think critically, but also of their own possible complicity and responsibility in the emergence of evils, rather than claiming and blaming ‘victimization’ or blaming a single villain or the whole society as is often done nowadays. The three examples provided here are three examples of the concrete manifestations of the aspects of evil (the particular) which, at the same time, reveal evil in its essence (the general).

Through the three historical examples provided here – Meno, Eichmann and Trump – we can gain a view of the characteristics of the “depravity” and “vice” of evil men and of the properties of evil as a psychological and social phenomenon. The lack of depth of evil mirrors the lack of depth in the human soul of the “depraved” man and how this depravity is manifested in their actions. The ancient Greek Meno is a paradigm. All three men show an inability to learn, poor memory, a threatening posture when confronted, speak in cliches and “they said” opinions, and have a vicious quality about them. In the dialogue Meno, the slave-boy demonstrates more arête virtue, “human excellence” and true freedom than Meno himself because the slave-boy is willing to learn.

The three examples provided see, firstly, evil as the Great Beast of the political social collective being-with-others of human beings (being-with-others recognized as being a necessity for human beings) in the writings of Plato and the dialogue Meno in particular. Secondly, characteristics of “the banality of evil” as described by Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil where she indicates that ‘when all are guilty, no one is’ points to more specific historical details of evil’s preponderance. Arendt’s account of the banality of evil and the individual responsibility for it offers opportunities for educators and students in the IB Program (through the critical thinking required in the Theory of Knowledge component that is an important part of the IB Learner Profile i.e. what the IB has come to define as arête or “human excellence”, virtue) to become aware of their own responsibilities as members of a society or social group. The IB Learner Profile is how the IB has come to resolve the knotty question of “what is human excellence?” and whether human excellence or virtue can be taught or learned which is the subject of the dialogue Meno. As the examples of the graduates from the universities that many IB students aspire to have shown very clearly, neither “human excellence” nor thinking is going to be a product of their education should they choose to attend these institutions.

As I am attempting to show here, Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ might be more properly termed ‘the ubiquity of evil’, for its ‘spreading like fungus’ (as Arendt said of it) appears to be our experience of the phenomenon in today’s world. Through the learning from that history of the past, the modern manifestations of evil today in the right-wing Trumpism of American politics and other neo-fascist, authoritarian leanings in other societies and on other continents can be seen in countries throughout the world. This begs the question: Is the thinking required to resist evil even possible in authoritarian regimes or is it possible in the institutions of higher learning today?

All political action is concerned with preservation and change: “change for the better”; “avoiding something worse”. All political action has as its goal knowledge of the good and the good political society. The “common good”, the “one good”, determines our being-with-others and is our conception of what we think “virtue” or “human excellence” is. What we are witnessing today is the destruction of any notion of a “common good”.

What is evil? This writing will attempt to get at this most elusive of phenomenon. Perhaps it is a quixotic mission. What the essence of evil is is not revealed in the effects that evil brings about or causes, but these must be examined to some extent in order to trace the preliminary outlines that will lead to a sketch for a portrait of evil which will, hopefully, reveal evil in its essence. The difficulty of the task is obvious: evil, by its nature, flees from the light, and light is necessary in order to allow a thing to emerge, to be seen, to allow the truth of something to show itself, and to give us knowledge of that thing. In the Divided Line of Plato, this light is both a metaphor of the Good and Love, and this light is related to both ‘sight’ and to ‘hearing’. From these we can learn that evil is not the opposite of the Good but is the deprivation of the Good.

Arendt once remarked in a letter that evil lacks “depth”, that it is a “surface phenomenon” that “spreads like fungus” over things and over the human interactions with those things. To use the language of Plato, evil is a “shadow” phenomenon that has no being: something which lacks substance or “depth” and is ultimately related to nihilism. To say this is to say something extraordinary and leads one to perplexity. How can something which has no being be so manifestly present to us in our everyday lives?

The relation of evil to “lack of depth” is why Plato’s images of the Divided Line and the Great Beast from Bk VI of his Republic are used here. The Divided Line shows how “thoughtlessness” can come about and, through this “thoughtlessness”, how human beings can succumb to the temptations of the Great Beast. “Thoughtlessness” is related to the phenomenon of “stupidity”, and both are related to the concept of arête or “human excellence” or to the lack of “human excellence”; arête is usually translated as ‘virtue’. These two conceptions of arête are used interchangeably here.

The opposite of thoughtfulness is stupidity, and stupidity is related to the phenomenon of “intentional ignorance”. “Intentional ignorance” and “stupidity” are “moral” phenomenon, not intellectual phenomenon. In this writing, the concept of “opposite” is best seen as a “deprivation” for there are no truly “opposite” things just as there are no truly “equal” things. Intentional ignorance occurs when individuals realize at some level of consciousness that their beliefs are probably false, or when they refuse to attend to speech or information that would establish their falsity. People engage in intentional ignorance because it is perceived as useful. “Stupidity” and “intentional ignorance” are not intellectual but moral phenomena and properties; that is, they do not deal with thinking or the intellect but with actions. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged by Hitler in 1945 in one of his concentration camps, once wrote:

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice… Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed- in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one.”

We can see the phenomenon of stupidity described here by Bonhoeffer illustrated in the three examples we have chosen for our sketch: Meno, Eichmann, and Trump; and we can also see it in the quote from Plato’s “Seventh Letter” which begins this writing.

Thinking and self-knowledge are co-related. Where true thought is not present, there is no self-knowledge. Where there is no self-knowledge, there is no sense of “reality”. Where there is no sense of “reality”, there is no knowledge or recognition of good and evil. Where there is no knowledge or recognition of good and evil, there is no possibility of “human excellence” or
arête. Without a sense of “human excellence”, there is no polemos or strife within the individual mind or soul to resist the temptation to succumb to evil actions.

Section II: Evil and the Individual: Thinking and Thoughtlessness

Since we are proposing that thinking is an antidote to the sickness or illness that is evil in the soul, we must try to be clearer on what thinking and thoughtlessness are as they are used here. Science, technology and its apogee, artificial intelligence, does not think, and the “thinking” that is understood in the sciences is not an antidote or solution to the problem of evil. This means that, substantively, sociology, psychology, and political science are, for the most part, “useless” to us and for us as we engage in the strife that is the polemos or confrontation with evil, though they may provide some descriptors or colours for our palette as we journey to sketch our portrait.

One is not thinking if one does not rank the objects of thought in terms of thought-worthiness. This point flies in the face of many contemporary accounts of “rationality”, for they suggest that one can be thinking well as long as one is following the right method. The emphasis today is on the method of what is called thinking. What one thinks about does not provide the standard for the role of such “ratio-inspired” accounts of thinking; indeed, critical thinking has come to mean “critical whatever method-following thinking” instead of “critical whatever essential thinking”. Such “means-ends accounts” of thinking involve and propagate a distortion; a life spent rationally researching the history of administrative memos and emails is not a thoughtful life. We shall see later that Adolf Eichmann did not lead a “thoughtful life” in his seeing himself as “a scheduler of trains”. In rationally pursuing anything and everything we are not thinking.

The experience of thinking in our technological age has been shrunk to that of using a tool to operate within an already-fixed network of ends. This, for example, is the essence of artificial intelligence. This age and the evil concurrent with it, in other words, is more thought-provoking because in it ratio (as one side of a two-faced Logos) has triumphed over legein, the speaking, gathering; thinking has become so severed from the being-thoughtful that the thoughtful being is in danger of being entirely eclipsed. In the Divided Line of Plato, this two-faced nature of Logos is comparable and parallel to the two-faced nature of Eros. The logos associated with number is separated from the logos associated with “speaking”, with word. The arts are distinguished from the sciences as revealers of truth. Human being as the animale rationale, “the rational animal”, has become separated from human being as the zoon logon echon, “the animal capable of discursive speech”.

Because we are “embodied souls”, it is Memory that is associated with our understanding of need, or the urge that is behind the eros of our needs. Our memory retains our immediate experience based on sense perceptions. It is the repository of the knowledge acquired in one’s lifetime and of what was learned during the journey with the god prior to our lifetime (Plato, Phaedrus). It is the source of our desires which depend on previous fulfillment and insight.

Learning is the removal of forgetfulness and is a quest. The journey toward the light cannot be undertaken by “rote learning” i.e. memorization. This merely results in the learning of the opinions of others that result in stock phrases, cliches, the language of the meme. It results in oppression, not freedom. (See the commentary on the Meno in Part II of this writing.) The acquisition of skills, the gathering of information of all kinds, the convictions and practices which govern the conduct of our lives, all depend on the medium of accepted opinions. Our memory is the repository of those opinions. The action of learning conveys the truth about learning. It is not a “theory of knowledge” or “epistemology” but the very effort to learn itself.

In the works of Plato, the purpose of education is the formation of character. Institutions and their accompanying bureaucracies are secondary. Without evil or vice there is no higher development of human beings. The danger of evil and the action (or inaction) against evil contribute to the development of human beings, and this is our “excellence”, our “virtue”. Mere innocence is incompatible with the higher development of humanity. Self-knowledge and its acquisition (or lack thereof) is at the root of all thoughtlessness, and thoughtlessness contributes to the degeneration of human beings making them less humane.

Lack of self-knowledge and its relation to thinking is “thinking that one knows what one does not know”. This lack of self-knowledge is sometimes manifested in those who believe they are in possession of the truth, those that we would call ‘fanatics’ and ‘gaslighters’ today. Self-knowledge is tied with our knowledge of good and evil, better and worse, what we have come to call our “values”. These supposed “values” have been given to us from the historical knowledge of the society, the historical opinions, of which we happen by chance to be members. This historical knowledge involves “memory”. The “orthodoxy” of the historical opinions we have inherited becomes the dogmatism of the present.

Because we are “embodied souls”, beings in time, memory holds us in our essential nature as human beings. If the battle against evil most requires thought, we are experiencing a turning away from thought and seeing a subsequent rise in evil’s pervasiveness and perseverance in our being-with-others and in the “inner” worlds of our being with and within ourselves, our own self-knowledge. This is partially due to the destruction of memory. To learn means to respond to the most important and pressing things that address us at any given moment. The rise of evil is one of these most pressing things.

As Martin Heidegger once said, “Science does not think: and this is its blessing.” If science actually thought, we would cease to have science as we know it. And if this should happen, we would no longer have clean toilets, penicillin, and all of the wonderful discoveries of science. The type of
thinking that science does is an absolute necessity for our lives today. The type of thinking that science does accompanies ‘common sense’, and both are necessities in the conduct of our day-to-day lives. Science does not think because, if we look at Plato’s Divided Line, the grounding of science is in a faith: its belief, its trust, in that what is “real” is what it reveals. Science is the theory of the ‘real’.

Thinking is an action that can only be done by doing it. We shall never learn “what is called swimming”, for example, or “what calls for swimming” by reading a book on swimming. Only a leap into the deep end of the pool will tell us what is called swimming and what calls for swimming; action or praxis, conduct is key. The question of what thinking and thoughtfulness are can never be answered by proposing a definition of the concept “thinking”. As Plato makes clear in his Seventh Letter, thinking cannot be brought to language; if it could be, he would have done so.

In the West, the thought about thinking has been called “logic” based on the principle of reason (“Nothing is without reason”). This “logic” has received its flowering in the natural and human sciences under the term “logistics”. Logistics, today, is considered the only legitimate form or way of knowing because its results and procedures ensure the construction of the technological
world. Logistics is an interesting word in that its use as a noun implies “symbolic logic” (mathematical algebraic calculation) and it is also related to the conduct of warfare. Its use as mathematical calculation is found in what is called logical positivism which is a recent branch of the branch of philosophy that was previously known as empiricism. The thinking in logical positivism is the thinking expressed as algebraic calculation: only that which can be calculated
can be known and is worth knowing. To elaborate how this has come to be the case would require an analysis of 17th century philosophy and mathematics beyond what we intend in this writing. Suffice it to say that this is part of our inherited shared knowledge, our historical knowledge or memory that we have received from the philosopher Rene Descartes.

Today we think that thought is the mind working to solve problems. We can see this in many of the quotes that are looked to as words of inspiration for young people. Thought is the mind analyzing what the senses bring in and acting upon it. Thought is understanding circumstances or the premises of a situation and reasoning out conclusions, actions to be taken. This is thinking, working through from A to B in a situation. In Plato’s Divided Line, thoughts are
representations of the world (real or not doesn’t matter, only the mind’s action does), or considerations about claims or representations (knowledge issues or questions), and the conclusions or judgements that are made. We think we know exactly what thought and thinking are because they are what we think we do. And as the animal rationale, the “rational animal”, how is it possible for thinking to be something we can fly from as it is our nature? It must be
remembered that in our flight from our nature, we become less humane.

When we use the word ‘thinking’, our thought immediately goes back to a well-known set of definitions that we have learnt in our lives or in our studies, what we have inherited from our shared or historical knowledge, what is stamped in our memories. Definitions provide the limits to things, their horizons, so that they can be known to us. These limits we call “meaning”. To us thinking is a mental activity that helps us to solve problems, to deal with situations, to
understand circumstances and, according to this understanding, to take action in order to move forward. It is algorithmic. Thinking for us also means to have an opinion, to have an impression that something is in a certain way. Thinking means reasoning, the process of reaching certain conclusions through a series of statements. Thinking is “a means of mastery” or control over the ‘problems’ which confront us and stand as obstacles in our achieving our ends.

The German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, once wrote: “Thoughtlessness is an uncanny visitor who comes and goes everywhere in today’s world. For nowadays we take in everything in the quickest and cheapest way, only to forget it just as quickly, instantly. Thus one gathering follows on the heels of another. Commemorative celebrations grow poorer and poorer in thought. Commemoration and thoughtlessness are found side by side.” (Discourse on Thinking. Trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund. New York: Harper and Row 1966, p. 45) That the greatest thinker of the 20th century could succumb to the evil that was National Socialism and who implicitly approved of the gas chambers of the Holocaust (since he concluded that there were simply some human beings to whom no justice was due) indicates the difficulty of the task that the polemos against evil presents to us. For Heidegger, thoughtlessness is nihilism. (A fictional parallel to Heidegger’s historical failure can be seen in Frodo Baggins’ failure to destroy the Ring of Sauron in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. In both cases, it is difficult to rush to the judgement of final condemnation when discussing both their failures.)

If we view our current thinking and approach to thinking in the light of Plato’s Divided Line and his Allegory of the Cave, we can see that the risk for humanity in our current approach to thinking is to be uprooted not only from our reality, from our world, but also from ourselves and from our natures as human beings. With this, the destruction of any possibility for self-knowledge occurs. If we think ‘poetically’, however, we allow ourselves to be aware of the risk implied in the technological age and its usefulness and we can, hence, act upon it. We can experience some of the freedom which is spoken about in Plato’s allegory when we are brought out into the Open where the light of the Sun shines and things are shown to us in their own being as they really are.

We recognize that in today’s world technological machineries and devices are indispensable. We need just think of computers and hand phones and their usage in our daily activities to be convinced, beyond any doubt, that “we depend on technical devices”. By thinking calculatively, we use these machineries and devices (tools, equipment) at our own convenience; we also let
ourselves be challenged by them and shaped by them, so that in this challenging we are urged to develop new devices that will be more suitable for a certain project or more accurate in the carrying out of certain research.

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates states that philosophers are quite “useless” to the city as the city is the polis of artisans or technites, those who are concerned with knowing (in their way) and making. When we hear the word “acting”, we immediately relate it to a familiar concept of action, such as the one that thinks of action as that which produces some kind of result, which means that we understand action in terms of cause and effect, and that action is the product of
agency.

In the “Letter on Humanism”, Heidegger defines the essence of action as
“accomplishment”, and he unfolds the meaning of accomplishment as “to unfold something into the fullness of its essence, to lead it forth into this fullness – producere”. It is the action that nature carries out when it brings a rose to blossom. This “accomplishment” in our actions is close to what is meant by arête or “human excellence” in this writing. “Higher acting” is not, therefore, an undertaking towards a practical doing, but is a ”higher acting” as accomplishment, in the sense of the leading forth of some thing into the fullness of its essence, including ourselves. Thinking is but one aspect of the fullness of the essence of human beings, and the leading to thought is a ‘natural’ activity for human beings.

“Thought” to us today usually means having an idea, a view, an opinion or a notion. Pascal, the French mathematician and contemporary of Descartes, in his journals given to us as Pensées,
searched for a type of “thinking of the heart” that was in conscious opposition to the mathematical thinking prevalent in his day. Thought, in the sense of logical-rational representations (concepts), was thought to be a reduction and impoverishment of the word “thinking”, just as “chemistry” was a reduction of the thinking occurring in “alchemy” and
“astronomy” of “astrology”. Thinking as it is understood here is the giving of thanks for the lasting gift which is given to us: our essential nature as human beings, which we are gifted through and by thinking for being what we essentially are. It is this gift that we are in danger of giving away, for in our thoughtlessness we are gradually becoming less humane.

To sum up what has been said so far, in the works of Plato, the purpose of education is the formation of character toward thoughtfulness. Without evil or vice there is no higher development of the souls of human beings. The danger of evil and the action (or inaction) against evil contribute to the development of human beings, and this development is human beings’ “excellence”, their “virtue”. Mere innocence is incompatible with the higher development of humanity. Self-knowledge and its acquisition (or lack thereof) is at the root of all thoughtlessness, and thoughtlessness contributes to the degeneration of human beings, making them less humane. Lack of self-knowledge and its relation to thinking is “thinking that one knows what one does not know” since this contributes to their illusion of control. This lack of self-knowledge is sometimes manifested in those who believe they are in possession of the truth, those that we would call ‘fanatics’ today. Self-knowledge is tied with our knowledge of good and evil, better and worse, what we have come to call our “values”. These supposed “values” have been given to us from the historical “knowledge” of the society, the historical opinions, of which we happen by chance to be members. This historical knowledge involves “memory”. The “orthodoxy” of the historical opinions we have inherited becomes the dogmatism of the present, and this dogmatism becomes rooted in an intolerance of the opinions of others in our being-in-the-world. Both those on the right and the left in their political leanings are guilty of this intolerance.

The lack of self-knowledge results in the lack of a “moral compass”. Our “moral compass” is, presumably, pointed toward the good; but if the good is “subjective”, then the “moral compass” will, by extension, be “subjective” also; it will become a “value” which we create in our day-to-day lives which will ultimately succumb to the urges of power and its attainment. This “subjectivity” results in moral weakness and allows one to easily succumb to the machinations of evil and evil-doers. Because the individual lacks self-knowledge, they act out of “duty” or “conformity”. They look to “belong” to a group, a clan, a nation, a political party which they believe is in possession of the truth. Within this sense of belonging, the evil that we do seems to be something simple, natural. “Only following orders”, working behind a desk as a “scheduler of trains” (Eichmann), it is the sense of duty that compels us to evil actions at times. In our actions, we have no comprehension that what we are
doing is “evil” as long as the actions we are doing are done efficiently and effectively i.e., they produce the desired results. Evil, when we are in its power, is felt as a necessity, a duty, not evil.

The individual who lacks self-knowledge does evil “unknowingly”, for “no one knowingly does evil”, as Socrates asserts in the dialogue Gorgias. When we do evil, we do not know it because evil flies from the light. Evil requires opaqueness, obfuscation and illusion. Evil deals with shadows, illusions, and delusions. The individual is a threat to evil if he or she thinks. But from where and from what do these appearances of evil arise? The evil that we do seems to be an illusion or is analogous to an illusion. When we are the victims of an illusion, we do not feel it to be an illusion but reality.

An example of the difficulty of bringing evil to light so that its essence and its truth may be seen both in the individual and the collective is found in the myth of the Ring of Gyges from Book II of Plato’s Republic. When given a ring, a shepherd named Gyges becomes invisible and anonymous. Through his invisibility he seduces a queen, kills her king, and takes over the kingdom. The argument is made that the Ring of Gyges – invisibility and anonymity- is the only barrier between a just and an unjust person. We are “just” out of fear of the laws and that it is only the laws which make us virtuous or “good” human beings. We are in fear of being exposed to the law because we have and retain some sense of shame. The master criminal is the person who is never suspected, the most respectable man in the community, the pillar of society.
Gyges’ ring finds other literary and mythical equivalents in the Ring of Sauron from The Lord of the Rings, the cloak of invisibility from the Harry Potter series, and the supposed “anonymity” of the internet (which accounts for the intolerance and violence prevalent among the trolls there). The myth and its implications say a great deal regarding the distinction between the ‘private’ and the ‘public’ spheres.

The Gyges myth and its mythical equivalents illustrate how the belief in anonymity skews the “moral compass”, the ability to distinguish good from evil, good from bad of individuals when they become “followers”. The act of setting aside, setting oneself aside, from the crime or evil one commits (sin) and not establishing the connection between the crime or action and its
results is at the root of much of the evil that occurs in our being-with-others in our being-in-the-world. This false anonymity is an “empowerment” that allows the individual to deny responsibility for the acts which they commit as they are directed toward the attainment of power in the belief that power is the dynamis (the “potentiality”) which allows them to attain the “good things” of life, one of which is that power or control itself. The “good things”, however, are susceptible to corruption because they are not the good itself. The connection between the evil and its result can only be made with thought and thinking. Thoughtlessness is essential to the proliferation of evil.

The desire for anonymity is the evil ersatz form or appearance of the mystery that is the destruction of the self (ego) in its desire to become one again with the whole of things. This destruction is best shown to us in Shakespeare’s King Lear where the once proud, tyrannical king is brought low to a “no-thing”. The play shows us that the tempests of Nature are not “evil”, but are deprivations of the good, ‘necessity’s harsh pinch’. The “evil” present is demonstrated in the machinations of human beings, and by the end of the play all truth, goodness, and justice have been destroyed (with the exception of the character Edgar, who must cloak himself in anonymity through disguise in order to survive). The two plots of the play, the Lear and Gloucester plots, parallel the “double” viewing that will be discussed in other parts of this writing. Today, we refer to human beings as “persons” or “personalities”, a term derived from persona, a mask used in ancient theatre. The term indicates that we view human beings as “surface phenomenon”, as objects, and not as “embodied souls”

The ultimate end of technology is the effacement of human beings, and this may be one of the reasons why anonymity has come to the fore in our age. We rightly abhor the killing of innocents by terrorists face-to-face and yet seem somewhat indifferent to the “collateral damage” enabled by the individual who sits behind a desk and pushes an enter key that sends a missile directed towards a target in which innocents are killed: there is a disinterested dehumanizing evil prevalent here, somewhat akin to the Ring of Gyges. Evil as the requitement
for evil does not produce the good, nor is evil to be seen in terms of “magnitude” just as the Good cannot be understood in terms of magnitude. The stories of “The Princess and the Pea” and The Lord of the Rings illustrate that the greatest good can be found in the “smallest” of things.

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Plato’s Divided Line and The Golden Mean

Note to Readers:

Many teachers of Theory of Knowledge begin their programs or courses with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Plato’s Allegory is from Bk VII of Republic. To understand Plato’s Allegory, I believe it is necessary to gain an understanding of the Divided Line that Socrates discusses in Bk VI of the dialogue. The Divided Line is the logos (the “word”) that is prior to the praxis (the “deed”) of the Allegory. Understanding the Divided Line will help to answer many of the questions that may arise from any discussion of the Allegory.

In the writings of Plato, the link between learning and “studious effort” is emphasized, and education is a necessity for the citizens of a political community who are in a constant strife against the evil of tyranny, a danger co-eval with living in communities. Learning is a “quest”, a journey, the goal of which is the acquisition of knowledge at some future point in time. This quest is both an individual and communal endeavour. The “quest” is prompted by a “question”, and by the perplexity that is a result of not knowing.

The greatest obstacle to knowledge and to the quest is “ignorance”. The greatest ignorance is thinking that one knows something while not knowing it. Knowledge of knowledge and ignorance is inseparable from knowledge of what is good and what is evil. That which is not known to us is present, though hidden, “within” us and can be brought out by “remembrance” and “re-collection”. Knowledge is a “whole”. Only knowledge as “wholeness” can securely guide our actions so as to make them beneficial and good. Knowledge is arete: “human excellence” or virtue. Knowledge of our ignorance is linked to a knowledge of an all-embracing good on which everything we call good depends. Socrates is aware of the immense distance which separates him from the goal which he wishes to attain: he knows the immense distance which separates the necessary from the Good. He claims expertise only in the knowledge of eros, the ‘neediness’ of human beings, who are the perfect imperfection.

The outline of the quest for knowledge has been given to us in various forms in our myths and narratives. Socrates opens Bk. VII of Republic with the following introduction: “Next then, I said, here is an image to give us an aspect of the essence of our education as well as the lack thereof, which fundamentally concerns our Being as human beings.” We see in this introduction to the parable or allegory of the Cave the necessary connection between education, our being as human beings, and our being-in-the-world. In the telling of this tale, there is no separation of “facts” and “values”, no separation of our being as human beings and our being in communities. They are both, ultimately, inseparable. Ontology, epistemology, and ethics are inseparable.

On any given weekend, we can go to our cinemas and hope to see some example of what the Greeks called arete, “human excellence”, “competence”, or “virtue” in the many heroes on display there. These images or myths are mirrors which throw a reflected light on the conditions and predicaments of our being-in-the-world, our human lives. The monsters in myths are various projections of the human soul (the Minotaur in the labyrinth, for example, as an image of the individual human soul, or the Great Beast of Bk VI of Republic being the image of the ‘collective soul’), and in the unfolding action we hope to see some suggestions and solutions to the predicaments of our lives which are embodied in the agon with these monsters. The action of learning conveys the truth about learning. It is not a “theory of knowledge” or “epistemology” but the very effort to learn, to engage in the quest. It is a way of being-in-the-world. We have called it the desired goal of becoming a ‘life-long learner’; we believe that this is what “human excellence” is. The Divided Line of Plato in Bk. VI of Republic and the allegory of the Cave in Bk. VII are parallel and represent images or eikones of the quest towards knowledge, primarily knowledge of the Good. Both images involve action of some kind and these actions involve the unconcealment of truth at various levels.

In the dialogue Phaedrus, Socrates tells a story regarding the invention of writing. The story is said to be of Egyptian origin and regards the invention of writing by Theuth and the criticism of that invention by Thamus. Thamus’ criticism rests in that he believes writing brings about “forgetfulness” and substitutes external marks for ‘genuine re-collection’ from within the human soul. This lack of re-collection (anamnesis through dianoia) erodes that conversation among friends (dialectic) that leads to truth. Socrates mocks Phaedrus by saying that “today’s young in their sophistication…look less to what is true than to the personality and origin of the speaker”. One could further mock the youth of today and say that with today’s social media, artificial intelligence, and the internet, not even the origin and personality of the “speaker” is questioned as there is a preponderance of anonymity prevalent and a preponderance of referring to the “they” in the “they said…”. This lack of concern for truth on the social or communal level impacts the individual concern for arete or what may be conceived as human excellence on the individual living in the community.

There is an analogy here between Thamus’ criticism of writing in the story of Theuth and the arrival of artificial intelligence today: the destruction of genuine “re-collection” and thought within leads to a lack of self-knowledge which, in turn, destroys the potential for the thoughtful conversation and engagement between “friends”, the dialectic necessary for the attainment of the Good. The “imitated” thought is not a thought, and artificial intelligence is nothing more than “imitated thought”. The beginning sense of wonder is corroded because one thinks one knows what one does not. (The Fool of the Tarot and the ascent of the divided line is parallel to the journey out of the Cave to a vision of the Good and the descent back into the Cave. This image of ascent and descent is represented by the two cones and triangles embodying the square illustrated below. One should reflect on the connection between these figures and Da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” provided later in this writing.)

Plato’s discussion of the Divided Line occurs in Bk VI of his Republic. In Bk VI, the emphasis is on the relation between the just and the unjust life and the way of being that is philosophy. It is emphatically ethical for the just life deals with deeds, not with words. The philosophic way of being is erotic by nature. To be erotic is to be “in need”; sexuality is but one manifestation of the erotic, though a very powerful manifestation of this human need. Socrates must chide his interlocutor Glaucon on a number of occasions in this part of the dialogue, for Glaucon is ‘erotic’ and is driven by militaristic and sexual passions and, because of such drives, he has a predilection for politics, for seeking power within the community or polis, from which our word ‘politics’ derives.

Bk VI of Republic emphasizes the relation between the just and the unjust life and the life that is philosophy. The just life is shown by “the love of the learning that discloses (unconceals) the being of what always is and not that of generation and decay.” Those who love truth and hate falsehood are erotic by nature i.e., they are ‘needing’ beings by nature; they feel that something is missing; they feel that they are not ‘whole’. Care and concern develop from this; the love of the whole (the Good) is a great struggle or polemos in its attainment. To love the “part” is to be “channeled off” in another direction. This two-fold or “double” learning is captured in the two types of thinking that are referred to as dianoia and diaresis. This two-fold or “double” possibility of learning is emphasized in the construction of the Divided Line and is illustrated by the different directions of the gyres shown previously.

The philosophic soul in reaching out for knowledge of the whole reaches for knowledge of everything divine and human. It is in need of knowledge of these things, to experience and to be acquainted with these things. The non-philosophic human beings are those who are erotic for the part and not the whole. They are deprived of knowledge of what each thing is because they see by the light of the moon and not the sun (the dialogue of the Republic takes place over night and ends with the rising of the sun in the morning); their light is a reflected and dim light. They have no clear ‘pattern’ in their souls and they lack the experience (phronesis or “wise judgement”) that is tempered with sophrosyne or moderation that they have acquired through suffering or through the experience of need. The philosophic soul has “an understanding endowed with “magnificence” (or “that which is fitting for a great man”) and they are able to “contemplate all time and all being” (486 a). They are “prophets”. The philosophic soul has from youth been both “just and tame” and not “savage and incapable of friendship”. (See the connection to The Chariot card of the Tarot where the two sphinxes, one white and one black representing the mystery of the soul, are in contention or strife (polemos) with each other. The sign over Plato’s academy properly reads that “No one enters unless they are capable of friendship”).

In looking for the philosophic way of being in the world, Socrates concludes: “…let us seek for an understanding endowed by nature with measure and charm, one whose nature grows by itself in such a way as to make it easily led to the idea of each thing that is.” (486 d) The philosophic soul is such by nature i.e., it grows by itself. Is this all souls or only some souls? Are all souls capable of attaining the philosophic way of being? The modern answer to this question has been a “yes”, while the ancient answer appears to be a “no”.

The philosophic soul is “a friend and kinsman of truth, justice, courage, and moderation.”(487 a) The philosophic soul is able to grasp what is always the same in all respects. (B and C in the Divided Line) The distinction between the philosophic soul and its “seeing” is shown by its contrast to the “blind men” who are characterized as: 1. Those who are erotic for the part and not the whole; 2. Deprived of knowledge of what each thing is; 3. See by the light of the moon or by the opinions established by the technites’ fire, the fire of the artists and technicians; 4. Have no clear pattern in the soul; and 5. Lack experience phronesis or “wise judgment” tempered with sophrosyne or moderation.

Socrates uses an eikon (AB of the Divided Line) to indicate the political situation prevalent in most cities or communities. The eikon uses the metaphor of “the ship of state” and the “helmsman” who will steer and direct that ship of state. The rioting sailors on the ship praise and call “skilled” the sailor, the “pilot”, the “knower of the ship’s business”, the man who is clever at figuring out how they will get the power to rule either by persuading or by forcing the shipowner to let them rule. Anyone who is not of this sort and does not have these desires they blame as “useless”. They are driven by their “appetites”, their hunger for the particular (i.e., what Plato described as human beings when living in a democracy. This is the reason Plato places democracy just above tyranny in his ranking of regimes from best to worst, tyranny being the worst, since both of these regimes are ruled by the appetites and not by phronesis and sophrosyne. Democracy’s predilection for capitalism is a predicate of the rule by appetites).

The erotic nature of the philosophic soul “does not lose the keenness of its passionate love nor cease from it before it has grasped the nature itself of each thing which is with the part of the soul fit to grasp a thing of that sort, and it is the part akin to it (the soul) that is fit. And once near it and coupled with what really is, having begotten intelligence and truth, it knows and lives truly, is nourished and so ceases from its labour pains, but not before.” (490 b) The terminology used here is that of love, procreation and childbirth. The grasping of the ‘real’ is not the taking possession of abstract concepts. With regard to the Divided Line, this is the analogy of B=C: the world of the sensible, the visible “is equal to” the world of the Thought or Thinking: the mathemata or “that which can be learned and that which can be taught.” There is a world which is beyond that which can be learned and that which can be taught. Socrates sees himself as a mid-wife, helping to aid this birthing process that is learning. (Notice that this indicates the descending motion within the cones that were shown in the earlier illustration after a gnostic encounter with the Idea of the Good.)

By examining Plato’s dialogue Meno, we can see the “double” nature of learning as understood in the Greek term anamnesis or “re-collection”. Meno, a Greek from Thessaly history tells us, was an unscrupulous man eager to accumulate wealth and subordinated everything else to that end. He is known to have consciously put aside all accepted norms and rules of conduct; he was perfidious and treacherous, and perfectly confident in his own cunning and ability to manage things to his own profit. He was also notable for being extremely handsome. In coming upon Socrates in one of his visits to Athens, he asks Socrates what Socrates thinks “human excellence” or arete is. Arete is usually translated as “virtue”. Notice the irony present here.

In the Meno dialogue of Plato, Socrates attempts to show how learning is “re-collection” by using one of Meno’s slave boys as an illustration of how learning can come about. In the example given, Socrates’ question to the young slave boy is: “Given the length of the side of a square, how long is the side of a square the area of which is double the area of the given square?” (85d 13 – e 6) As we know (and Meno does not), the given side and the side sought are “incommensurable magnitudes” and the answer in terms of the length of the given side is “impossible” (if post-Cartesian notions and notations are barred). The side can only be drawn and seen as “shown”:

Stage One: (82b9 – a3) The “visible” lines are drawn by Socrates in the dust emphasizing their temporality, their being images, eikones. There are two feet to the side of the “square space”. The square contains 4 square feet. What is the side of the “double square”? The slave boy’s answer: “Double that length.” The boy’s answer is misled by the aspect of “doubleness”. He sees “doubleness” (as we do) as an “expansion” of the initial square rather than a “withdrawal” of that square to allow the “double” to be. We need to keep this “double” aspect in mind when we are considering the seeing and meaning of the Divided Line later on.

Stage Two: When the figure is drawn using the boy’s response (“double that length”), the size of the space is 4 times the size when only the double was wanted. The side wanted will be longer than that of the side in the first square and shorter than that of the one shown in the second square. In this second stage, the boy is perplexed and does not think he knows the right answer of which he is ignorant. Being aware of his own ignorance, the boy gladly takes on the burden of the search since successful completion of the quest will aid in ridding him of his perplexity. Socrates contrasts the slave boy and Meno: when Meno’s second attempt at finding the essence of “human excellence” (arete) failed earlier in the dialogue, Meno’s own words are said to him; but Meno, knowing “no shame” in his “forgetfulness” of himself, resorts to mocking and threatening Socrates. (This resort to violence is characteristic of those lacking in self-knowledge.) One cannot begin the quest to know when one thinks one already knows. The “conversion” of our thinking occurs when one reaches an aporia or “a dead end” and falls into a state of perplexity, becomes aware of one’s own ignorance, and experiences an erotic need for knowledge to be rid of the perplexity. The quest for knowledge results in an “opinion”: a “justified true belief”. The human condition is to dwell within and between the realm of thought and opinion, in the very centre of the Divided Line.

Stage Three: The boy remains in his perplexity and his next answer is “The length will be three feet”. The size then becomes 9 square feet when the boy’s answer is shown to him by Socrates as he draws the figure shown on the left.

Stage Four: Socrates draws the diagonals inside the four squares. Each diagonal cuts each of the squares in half and each diagonal is equal. The space (4 halves of the small squares) is the correct answer. It is the diagonal of the squares that gives the correct answer. The diagonals are “inexpressible lengths” since they are what we call “irrational numbers”. We note that the square drawn by Socrates is the same square that is present in the intersection of two cones and their gyres that were shown previously. The diagonal is the hypotenuse of the right-angled triangle that is formed: a^{2 +}b^{2 =}c². Pythagoras is said to have offered a sacrifice to the gods upon this discovery for to him it showed the possibility of true, direct encounters with the divine and true possibilities for redemption from the human condition, the movement from thought and opinion to gnosis.

For the Pythagoreans, human beings were considered “irrational numbers”. They believed that this best described that ‘perfect imperfection’ that is human being, that “work” that was “perfect” in its incompleteness. This view was in contrast to the Sophist Protagoras’ statement that “Man is the measure of all things”, for how could something incomplete be the measure of anything. The irrational number (1 + √5)/2 approximately equal to 1.618) was , for the Pythagoreans, a mathematical statement illustrating the relation of the human to the divine. It is the ratio of a line segment cut into two pieces of different lengths such that the ratio of the whole segment to that of the longer segment is equal to the ratio of the longer segment to that of the shorter segment. This is the principle of harmonics on stringed musical instruments, but this principle also operated, the Pythagoreans believed, on the moral/ethical level also. “The music of the spheres” which is the world of these harmonic vibrations and relations provided for the Pythagoreans principles for human action or what the Greeks called sophrosyne, what we understand as ‘moderation’. The Philosopher’s Stone (or Rock), long a subject of myth and narrative, is the human soul itself. A statement attributed to Pythagoras is: “The soul is a number which moves of itself and contains the number 4.” One could also add that the human soul contains the number 3 which was the principle of movement (Time) for it consists of three parts (past, present, and future), thus giving us 4 + 3 = 7, the 4 being the res extensa of material in space. 7 was a sacred number for the Pythagoreans for it was both the ’embodied soul’ of the human being and the ‘Embodied Soul’ of the Divine, the human soul being the mirroring microcosm of the macrocosm.

In terms of present day algebra, letting the length of the shorter segment be one unit and the length of the longer segment be x units gives rise to the equation (x + 1)/x = x/1; this may be rearranged to form the quadratic equation x² – x – 1 = 0, for which the positive solution is x = (1 + √5)/2) or the golden ratio. If we conceive of the 0 as non-Being, we can conceive of the distinction between modern day algebra and the Greek understanding of number. For the Pythagoreans, the whole is the 1 and the part is some other number than the 1. It should be noted that the Greeks rejected Babylonian (Indian) algebra and algebra in general as being ‘unnatural’ due to its abstractness, and they had a much different conception of number than we have today. (The German philosopher Heidegger in his critique of Plato’s doctrine of the truth and of the Good shown in Bk VII of Republic, for example, deals with the Good as an abstract concept thus performing an exsanguination on the political life and the justice that is shown in the concrete details of Bk VI of Republic. Is this the reason that Heidegger failed to recognize the Great Beast that was Nazi Germany in 1933? and was it this unwillingness to recognize this fact that allowed this philosopher to tragically succumb to that Beast?)

The Pythagoreans and their geometry are not how we look upon mathematics and number today. Our view of number is dominated by algebraic calculation. The Pythagoreans were viewed as a religious cult even in their own day. For them, the practice of geometry was no different than a form of prayer or piety, of contemplation and reflection. The Greek philosopher Aristotle called his former teacher, the Greek philosopher Plato, a “pure Pythagorean”.

This “pure Pythagoreanism” is demonstrated in Plato’s illustration of the Divided Line which is none other than an application of the golden mean or ratio to all the things that are and how we apprehend or behold them. I am going to provide a detailed example from Plato’s Republic because I believe it is crucial to our understanding of the thinking that has occurred in the West.

At Republic, Book VI, 508B-C, Plato makes an analogy between the role of the sun, whose light gives us our vision to see and the visible things to be seen and the role of the Good in that seeing. The sun rules over our vision and the things we see. The eye of seeing must have an element that is “sun-like” in order that the seeing and the light of the sun be commensurate with each other. Vision does not see itself just as hearing does not hear itself. No sensing, no desiring, no willing, no loving, no fearing, no opining, no reasoning can ever make itself its own object. The Good, to which the light of the sun is analogous, rules over our knowledge and the (real) being of the objects of our knowledge (the forms/ eidos), the offspring of the ideas or that which brings the visible things to appearance and, thus, to presence or being and also over the things that the light of the sun gives to vision:

“This, then, you must understand that I meant by the offspring of the good that which the good begot to stand in a proportion with itself: as the good is in the intelligible region with respect to intelligence (DE) and to that which is intellected [CD], so the sun is (light) in the visible world to vision [BC] and what is seen [AB].”

E. The Idea of the Good: Agathon, Gnosis “…what provides the truth to the things known and gives the power to the one who knows, is the idea of the good. And, as the cause of the knowledge and truth, you can understand it to be a thing known; but, as fair as these two are—knowledge and truth—if you believe that it is something different from them and still fairer than they, your belief will be right.” (508e – 509a)
D. Ideas: Begotten from the Good and are the source of the Good’s presence (parousia) in that which is not the Good. The Good is seen as “the father” whose seeds (ἰδέαι) are given to the receptacle or womb of the mother (space) to bring about the offspring that is the world of AE (time). The realm of AE is the realm of the Necessary. (Dialogue Timaeus 50-52 which occurs the following morning after the night of Republic)	D. Intellection (Noesis): Noesis is often translated by “Mind”, but “Spirit” might be a better translation. Knowledge (γνῶσις, νοούμενα) intellection, the objects of “reason” (Logoi) (νόησις, ἰδέαι, ἐπιστήμην). “Knowledge” is permanent and not subject to change as is “opinion” whether “true” or “false” opinion. Opinions develop from the pre-determined seeing which is the under-standing of the essence of things.
*C. Forms (Eide): Begotten from the Ideas (ἰδέαι) . They give presence* to things through their “outward appearance” (ousia). There is no-thing without thought; there is no thought without things. Human being is essential for Being. Being needs human being. “And would you also be willing,” I said, “to say that with respect to truth or lack of it, as the opinable is distinguished from the knowable, so the likeness is distinguished from that of which it is the likeness?”	*C. Thought (Genus)* Dianoia is that thought that unifies into a “one” and determines a thing’s essence. The eidos of a tree, the outward appearance of a tree, is the “treeness”, its essence, in which it participates. We are able to apprehend this outward appearance of the physical thing through the “forms” or eide in which they participate. Understanding, hypothesis (διανόια). The “hypothesis” is the “standing under” of the seeing that is thrown forward, the under-standing, the ground.
B. The physical things that we see/perceive with our senses (ὁρώμενα, ὁμοιωθὲν)	B. Trust, confidence, belief (πίστις) opinion, “justified true beliefs” (δόξα, νοῦν). Opinion is not stable and subject to change. The changing of the opinions that predominate in a community is what is understood as “revolution”. “Then in the other segment put that of which this first is the likeness—the animals around us, and everything that grows, and the whole class of artifacts.”
*A. Eikasia* Images Eikones:** Likenesses, images, shadows, imitations, our vision (ὄψις, ὁμοιωθὲν). The “icons” or images that we form of the things that are. The statues of Dedalus which are said to run away unless they are tied down (opinion). It is the logoi which ‘ties things down’.	*A. Imagination (Eikasia):* The representational thought which is done in images. Our narratives, myths and that language which forms our collective discourse (rhetoric). Conjectures, images, (εἰκασία). The image of a thing of which the image is an image are things belonging to eikasia. We are “reminded” of the original by the image. “Now, in terms of relative clarity and obscurity, you’ll have one segment in the visible part for images. I mean by images first shadows, then appearances produced in water and in all close-grained, smooth, bright things, and everything of the sort, if you understand.”

Details of the Divided Line

The whole Line may be outlined into five sections: a)The Idea of the Good : to the whole of AE; b) the Idea of the Good : DE; c) DE : CD; d) BC = CD; e) BC : AB. The whole line itself (AE) is the Good’s embrasure of both Being and Becoming. The Good is beyond Being and Becoming (i.e., space and time), and there is an abyss separating the Necessary from the Good. Within the Divided Line, that which is “intellected” (CD) is equal to (or the Same i.e., a One) as that which is illuminated by the light of the sun in the world of vision (BC). Being and Becoming require the being-in-the-world or participation of human beings; B = C. That which is “intellected” (the schema) is that which comes into being or can come into being through imagination and representational thinking, through images (or the assigning of numbers or signs to images as is done in geometry or algebra) or through the logoi or words of narrative and myth as well as rhetoric. This representational thinking in images is what we call “experience”. Every thought and all of our thinking is a product of or “re-collection” (anamnesis) from experience: we have to first experience before we can “re-collect” that which we have experienced. This re-collection is what is referred to as dianoia. This may account for the confusion between the concepts of eidos and ἰδέαι in the interpretations of Plato. The ἰδέαι is number as the Greeks understood them; the eidos is number as we understand them: the two concepts represent the “double” nature of thinking and the distinction between thought and Intellection. The ἰδέαι begets the eidos and like a father to his offspring, they are akin to each other and yet separate. Intellection is akin to thinking yet separate from thinking.

Eide + logoi + idea: the things seen and heard require a “third”. “Light” is the “third” for seeing as well as what we understand as “air” for hearing. “The outward appearances of the things” + “the light” which “unconceals” them + the idea as that which begets both the outward appearance and the unconcealment. The Sun is an image of the Good in the realm of Becoming because “it gives” lavishly and “yokes together” that which sees and that which can be seen. Neither sight itself nor that in which it comes to be (the “eye”) are the sun itself. The sun is not sight itself but its “cause” (aitia understood as “responsible for”). The sun is the offspring of the Idea of the Good begot in a proportion with itself: The Good = 1 : the Sun the square root of 5/2 (1 + √5)/2). The two together give the Divine Ratio. 508 c. “As the Good is in the intelligible region with respect to intelligence and what is intellected, so the sun is in the visible region with respect to sight and what is seen”. (The Sun = Time; and from it things come to be and pass away. “Time is the moving image of eternity” i.e., the Sun is Time which is the movement of that which is permanent or ‘eternal’, i.e., The Good. “Faith is the experience that the intelligence is illuminated by Love.” Pistis trust or faith is the “experience”, the “contact with reality” that the intelligence realizes when it is given the light of Love or the Good. This truth aletheia is proportional to the truth aletheia which is the unconcealment of things of the senses in the physical realm when revealed by the Sun i.e., the beauty of the world.)

The soul, “when it fixes itself on that which is illuminated by truth” and that which is, “intellects”, knows, and appears to possess intelligence (gnosis). When it fixes itself on that which is mixed with darkness, on coming into being and passing away, it opines and is dimmed. What provides truth to the things known and gives illumination or enlightenment to the one who knows is the Idea of the Good. The Idea of the Good is responsible for (the “cause of”) knowledge and truth. It is responsible for the beautiful and that which makes things beautiful. But the Good itself is beyond these. It is the Good which provides “the truth” to the things known, truth understood as aletheia or unconcealment. As the eye and that which is seen is not the sun, so knowledge and the things known are not the Good itself i.e., those things that are “goods” for us. When Glaucon equates the Good with “pleasure”, Socrates tells him to “Hush” for he is uttering a “blasphemy”. It is clear that what is being spoken about here is a “religious phenomenon”.

In the “double” manner of “seeing”, the soul uses images of the things that are imitated to make “hypothesis”, “to place under” its suppositions; and from this placing under makes its way to a “completion”, an end (telos). This is the world of the scientists and artisans, the technites, the world of “formation”, the “making” and “knowing” that is technology. This is a movement downwards. The movement upwards “makes its way to a beginning”, “a starting point”, a “principle”, a “cause” by means of the eidos and “forms” themselves i.e., it begins from the beauty of the “outward appearances of the things”. Beginning from the assumed hypotheses, the geometers end consistently at the object towards which their investigation was directed. “The other segment of the intelligible” is grasped by “dialectic” (the speeches or dialogues/conversations with others; the discussion among friends; the two or three gathered together). The hypotheses are “steppingstones and springboards” in order to reach the “beginning” which is the whole (the Good). The “argument” that has grasped the good is the argument that depends on that which depends on this beginning: it descends to an end (with the grasping of the good) using the eide throughout “making no use of anything sensed in any way, but using the eide themselves, going through forms to forms, it ends in forms, too.” 512 b (This is the descent described in the allegory of the Cave.)

Using Euclid’s Elements, we can examine the geometry inherent in the Divided Line and come to see how it is related to the notion of the golden ratio. Notice that the Idea of the Good is left out of the calculations conducted here.

“Let the division be made according to the prescription:

(A + B) : (C + D) : : A : B : : C : D.

From (A + B) : (C + D) : : C : D follows (Euclid V, 16)

(1) (A + B) : :C : (C + D) : D. From A :B : : C: D follows (Euclid V. 18)

(2) (A + B) : B : : ( C + D) : D. Therefore (Euclid V, 11)

(3) (A + B) : C : : (A + B) :B and consequently (Euclid V, 9)

4) C= B.

Since C = B, the inequality in length of the “intelligible” and “visible” subsections depends only on the sizes of A (Imagination) and D (Intellection). If, then, A : B : : B : D or A : C : : C : D, A : D is in the duplicate ratio of either A : B or C : D (Euclid V, Def. 9). This expresses in mathematical terms the relation of the power of “dialectic“, the discursive conversations between friends, to the power of eikasia, the individual and collective imaginations of human beings. (To put it in modern terms and our relations to our thought and actions, it is the difference between the face-to-face conversations among friends and the collective conversations of social media chat groups.) If we imagine the Divided Line as two intersecting gyres, we may be able to see how this ‘double’ thinking, learning and seeing is possible. Thinking can be either an ascent into the realm of ideas aided by the beauty of the outward appearances of things (eidos) and the dialectical conversation of friends, or thinking can be a descent into the realm of material things using the imagination (eikasia) and the rational applications of the relations of force (Necessity), our common understanding of thinking.

At the end of Book VI of the Republic (509D-513E), Plato describes the visible world of perceived physical objects and the images we make of them (what we call representational thinking). The sun, he said, not only provides the visibility of the objects, but also generates them and is the source of their growth and nurture. This visible world is what we call Nature, physis, the physical world in which we dwell.

Beyond and within this visible or sensible world lies an intelligible world. The intelligible world is illuminated by “the Good”, just as the visible world is illuminated by the sun. The sun is the image of the Good in this world. The Good provides growth and nurture in the realm of Spirit, or that which is Intellected. For Socrates and Plato, the world is experienced as good, and our experience of life should be one of gratitude. The world is not to be experienced as a “dualism”, for a world without human beings is no longer a “world” and human beings without a world are no longer human beings.

The division of Plato’s Line between Visible and Intelligible appears to be a divide between the Material and the Ideal or the abstract. This appearance became the foundation of most Dualisms, particularly the Cartesian dualism of subject-object which is the foundation of modern knowledge and science. To see it as such a dualism overlooks the fact that the whole is One and the One is the Good. Plato is said to have coined the word “idea” (ἰδέα), using it to show that the outward appearances of things (the Greek word for shape or form εἶδος) are the offspring of the “ideas”, and are akin to the ideas, but they are not the ideas themselves. They are the Same, but not Identical. The word idea derives from the Greek “to have seen”, and this having seen a priori as it were, determines how the things will appear to the eye which is “sun-like” i.e., it shares something in common with the light itself and with the sun itself. This commonality is what we mean by our understanding and experience.

The upper half of the Divided Line is usually called Intelligible as distinguished from the Visible, meaning that it is “seen” and ‘has been seen’ by the mind (510E), by the Greek Nous (νοῦς), rather than by the eye. Whether we translate nous as ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’ has been a topic of controversy in academic circles for many centuries. The translation as ‘mind’ seems to carry a great deal of baggage from our understanding of human beings as the animale rationale.

In modern English, the word “knowledge” derives from “to be cognizant of”, “to be conscious of”, or “to be acquainted with”; the other stems from “to have seen” (See endnote). The first is the cognate of English “know” e.g., Greek gnosis (γνῶσις), meaning knowledge as a direct contact with or an experience of something. For knowledge, the Greeks also used epistέme (ἐπιστήμη), the root for our word epistemology. Gnosis and episteme are two very different concepts: gnosis can be understood as direct contact with, while episteme is more related to the results of “theoretical knowledge” which are abstract and reside in the realm of opinion.

This stem of “to have seen” is what is rooted in the idea of “re-collection” with the associated meanings of “collecting” and “assembling” that are related to the Greek understanding of logos. Logos is commonly translated as “reason” and this has given it its connections to ‘logic’ and ‘logistics’ as the ‘rational’ and ultimately to human beings being defined as the animale rationale, the “rational animal” by the Latins rather than the Greek zoon logon echon, or “that animal that is capable of discursive speech”. Discursive speech, dialectic, and logos in general are not what we understand by “reason” only. “Intellection” as it is understood in Plato’s Divided Line is not merely the principle of cause and effect and the principle of contradiction.

In Republic, Book VI (507C), Plato describes the two classes of things: those that can be seen but not thought, and those that can be thought but not seen. The things that are seen are the many particulars that are the offspring of the eidos, while the “ones” are the ideai which are the offspring of the Good. As one descends from the Good, the clarity of things becomes dimmer until they are finally merely ‘shadows’, deprived of the light of truth because of their greater distance from the Good. As there are many particular examples of human “competence” or “excellence” (arete), there is the one competence or excellence that all of these particular examples participate in. This “one” is the idea and the idea is itself an offspring of the Good, the original One. The idea is the ‘measure’ of the thing and how we come to “measure up” the thing to its idea. (Our notion of ideal derives from this.) It is through this measuring that the thing gets its eidos or its “outward appearance”; and in its appearance, comes to presence and to being for us.

At Republic, Book VI, 508B-C, Plato makes an analogy between the role of the sun, whose light gives us our vision to see (ὄψις) and the visible things to be seen (ὁρώμενα) and the role of the Good (τἀγαθὸν). The sun “rules over” our vision and the things we see since it provides the light which brings the things to ‘unconcealment’ (aletheia or truth). The Good “rules over” our knowledge and the (real) objects of our knowledge (the forms, the ideas) since it provides the truth in this realm:

“This, then, you must understand that I meant by the offspring of the good which the good begot to stand in a proportion with itself: as the good is in the intelligible region to intellection [DE] and the objects of intellection [CD], so is this (the sun) in the visible world to vision [AB] and the objects of vision [BC].” As the sun gives life and being to the physical things of the world, so the Good gives life and being to the sun as well as to the things of the ‘spiritual’ or the realm of the ‘intellect’. That which the Good begot is brought to a stand (comes to permanence) in a proportion with itself. These proportions are present in the triangles of the geometers.

At 509D-510A, Plato describes the line as divided into two sections that are not the same (ἄνισα) length. Most modern versions represent the Intelligible section as larger than the Visible. But there are strong reasons to think that for Plato the Intelligible is to the Visible (with its many concrete particulars) as the one is to the many. The Whole is greater than the parts. The part is not an expansion of the Whole but the withdrawal of the Whole to allow the part to be as separate from itself, or rather, to appear as something separate from itself since the part remains within the Whole. In this separation from the Whole, the part loses that clarity that it has and had in its participation in the Whole. (It is comparable to the square spoken of earlier from the Meno dialogue: the original square withdraws to allow the “double” to be.)

When Plato equates B to C, we can understand that the physical section limits the intelligible section, and vice versa. We cannot have what we understand as ‘experience’ without body, and we cannot have body without intellect. We place the intelligible section above the physical section for the simple reason that the head is above the feet.

Plato then further divides each of the Intelligible and the Visible sections into two. He argues that the new divisions are in the same ratio as the fundamental division. The Whole, not being capable of being ascribed an “image” by a line, is to the entire line itself as the ratio of the Good is to the whole of Creation. The whole of Creation is an “embodied Soul”, just as human being is an “embodied soul” and is a microcosm of the Creation. Just as the Good withdraws to allow Creation to be, Creation withdraws to allow the human being to be.

Later, at 511D-E, Plato summarizes the four sections of the Divided Line:

“You have made a most adequate exposition,” I said. “And, along with me, take these four affections arising in the soul in relation to the four segments: intellection in relation to the highest one, and thought in relation to the second; to the third assign trust, and to the last imagination. Arrange them in a proportion, and believe that as the segments to which they correspond participate in truth, so they participate in clarity.”

We can collect the various terms that Plato has used to describe the components of his Divided Line. Some terms are ontological, describing the contents of the four sections of the Divided Line and of our being-in-the-world; some are epistemological, describing how it is that we know those contents. There is, however, no separation between the two. Notice that there is a distinction between “right opinion” and “knowledge”. Our human condition is to stand between thought and opinion. “Right opinion” is temporary, historical knowledge and thus subject to change, while “knowledge” itself is permanent. The idea of the Good is responsible for all knowledge and truth. Such knowledge is given to us by the geometrical “forms” or the eide which bring forward the outward appearances of the things that give them their presence and for which the light of the sun is necessary. “Knowledge” as episteme and knowledge as gnosis are also distinguished.

By insisting that the ratio or proportion of the division of the visibles (AB:BC) and the division of the intelligibles (CD:DE) are in the same ratio or proportion as the visibles to the intelligibles (AC:CE), Plato has made the section B = C. Plato at one point identifies the contents of these two sections. He says (510B) that in CD the soul is compelled to investigate, by treating as images, the things imitated in the former division (BC):

“Like this: in one part of it a soul, using as images the things that were previously imitated (BC), is compelled to investigate on the basis of hypotheses and makes its way not to a beginning but to an end (AB); while in the other part it makes its way to a beginning that is free from hypotheses (DE); starting out from hypothesis and without the images used in the other part, by means of forms (idea) themselves it makes its inquiry through them.” (CD)

Plato distinguishes two methods here, and it emphasizes the “double” nature of how knowledge is to be sought and how learning is to be carried out. The first (the method of the mathematician or scientist and what determines our dominant method today) starts with assumptions, suppositions or hypotheses (ὑποθέσεων) – Aristotle called them axioms – and proceeds to a conclusion (τελευτήν) which remains dependent on the hypotheses or axioms, which again, are presumed truths. We call this the ‘deductive method” and it results in the obtaining of that knowledge that we call episteme. This obtaining or end result is the descent in the manner of the ‘double’ thinking that we have been speaking about; we descend from the general to the particular. This type of thinking also involves the ‘competence’ in various technai or techniques that are used to bring about a ‘finished work’ that involve some ‘good’ of some type. It is the ‘knowing one’s way about or in something’ that brings about the ‘production’ or ‘making’ of some thing that we, too, call knowledge be it shoemaking and the pair of shoes or the making of artificial intelligence. The end result, the ‘work’, provides some ‘good’ for us in its potential use.

In the second manner, the “dialectician” or philosopher advances from assumptions to a beginning or first principle (ἀρχὴν) that transcends the hypotheses (ἀνυπόθετον), relying on ideas only and progressing systematically through the ideas. The ideas or noeton are products of the ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’(nous) that the mind or spirit is able to apprehend and comprehend due to the intercession of the Good as an intermediary, holding or yoking itself and the soul of the human being in a relationship of kinship or friendship. The ideas are used as stepping stones or springboards in order to advance towards a beginning that is the whole. The ‘step’ or ‘spring’ forward is required to go beyond the kind of thinking that involves a descent. The beginning or first principle is the Good and this is the journey to the Good or the ascent of thinking towards the Good itself. In his Seventh Letter, Plato uses the metaphor of ‘fire catching fire’ to describe this ascent.

Plato claims that the dialectical “method” (and it is questionable what this “method” is exactly), which again must be understood as the conversations between friends, between a learner and teacher for example, is more holistic and capable of reaching a higher form of knowledge (gnosis) than that which is to be achieved through ‘theoretical knowledge’ or episteme. This possibility of gnosis is related to the Pythagorean notion that the eternal soul has “seen” all these truths in past lives (anamnesis) in its journey across the heavens with the chariots of the gods. (Phaedrus 244a – 257 b)

Plato does not identify the Good with material things or with the ideas and forms. Again, these are in the realm of Necessity; Necessity is the paradigm or the divine pattern. The Good is responsible for the creative act that generates the ideas and the forms (identified as “cause” in the Bloom translation of Republic used here). The ideas and the forms are ‘indebted to’ the Good for their being and from them emerge truth, justice, and arete or the virtues of things and beings.

If we put the mathematical statement of the golden ratio or the divine proportion into the illustration (1 + √5)/ 2), the 1 is the Good, or the whole of things, and the “offspring of the Good” (the “production of knowledge” (BC + CD) is the √5 which is then divided by 2 (the whole of creation: Becoming, plus Being, plus the Good or the Divine), then we can comprehend the example of the Divided Line in a Greek rather than a Cartesian manner. Plato is attempting to resolve the problem of the One and the Many here.

“does not lose the keenness of his passionate love nor cease from it before he grasps the nature itself of each thing that is with the part of the soul fit to grasp a thing of that sort; and it is the part akin to it that is fit. And once near it and coupled with what really is, having begotten intelligence and truth, he knows and lives truly, is nourished and so ceases from his labour pains, but not before.” (490 b)

The terminology used is that of love, procreation and childbirth. Socrates ironically refers to himself as a “mid-wife” assisting in the birth of intelligence and truth. The passage quoted above shows the inadequacy of translating the Greek nous as “intellection”, for the concept seems to be much broader than something associated with only the mind or intellect. The soul is a tripartite entity, and in its grasping of the things that are must have a part of itself that is “akin” to that which is being grasped. The various parts of the soul are that which engages in the various aspects of being-in-the-world. This engagement is an erotic one in the sense that human beings ‘need’ this engagement in order to be fully human beings. The separation of thought and practice is not possible or ‘real’. In the Divided Line, the gnosis that comes to presence through nous is beyond thought and what we traditionally understand by thinking.

The city’s outline, or the community in which human beings dwell, should be drawn by the painters who use the divine pattern or paradigm which is revealed by Necessity(500 e). In the social and political realm, the individual must first experience the logoi in order to become balanced in the soul as far as that is possible. This experience, this speech with others, will provide moderation (sophrosyne), justice (recognition of that which is due to other human beings) and proper virtue (phronesis) which is ‘wise judgement’.

Socrates says (510B) that in CD the soul is compelled to investigate by treating as images the things imitated in the former division (BC). In (BC), the things imitated are the ‘shadows’ of the things as they really are. These are the realms of ‘trust’ and ‘belief’ (pistis) and of understanding or how we come to be in our world. Our understanding derives from our experience and it is based on what we call and believe to be “true opinion”, ortho doxa.

There is no “subject/object” separation of realms here, no abstractions or formulae created by the human mind only (the intelligence and that which is intellected), but rather the mathematical description or statement of the beauty of the world. In the Divided Line, one sees three applications of the golden ratio: The Good, the Intelligible, and the Sensible or Visual i.e., the Good in relation to the whole line, The Good in relation to the Intelligible, and the Intelligible in relation to the Visible. (It is from this that I understand the statement of the French philosopher Simone Weil: “Faith is the experience that the intelligence is illuminated by Love.” Love is the light, that which is given to us which illuminates the things of the intelligence and the things of the world, what we “experience”. This illumination is what is called Truth for it reveals and unconceals things. There is a concrete tripartite unity of Goodness, Beauty and Truth. The word ‘faith’ in Weil’s statement could also be rendered by ‘trust’ or pistis.)

The Golden Ratio

This tripartite yoking of the sensible to the intelligible and to the Good corresponds to what Plato says is the tripartite being of the human soul and the tripartite Being of the God who is the Good. The human being in its being is a microcosm of the Whole or of the macrocosm. The unconcealment of the visible world through light conceived as truth (aletheia) is prior to any conception of truth that considers “correspondence” or “agreement” or “correctness” as interpretations of truth. (See William Blake’s lines in “Auguries of Innocence”: “God appears and God is Light/ To those poor souls that dwell in night/ But does the human form display/ To those who dwell in realms of day.”)

The golden ratio occurs in many mathematical contexts today. It is the limit of the ratios of consecutive terms of the Fibonacci number sequence 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13…, in which each term beyond the second is the sum of the previous two, and it is also the value of the most basic of continued fractions, namely 1 + 1/(1 + 1/(1 + 1/(1 +⋯. (Encyclopedia Britannica) In modern mathematics, the golden ratio occurs in the description of fractals, figures that exhibit self-similarity and play an important role in the study of chaos and dynamical systems. (Encyclopedia Britannica)

One of the questions raised here is: do we have number after the experience of the physical, objective world or do we have number prior to it and have the physical world because of number? The original meaning of the Greek word mathemata is “what can be learned and what can be taught”. What can be learned and what can be taught are those things that have been brought to presence through language and measured in their form or outward appearance through number. Our understanding of number is what the Greeks called arithmos, “arithmetic”, that which can be counted and that which can be “counted on”. These numbers begin at 4.

The principles of the golden or divine ratio are to be seen in the statue of the Doryphoros seen here. The statue of the Doryphoros, or the Spear Bearer, is around the mid -5^th century BCE. Its maker, Polycleitus, wrote that the purpose or end of art was to achieve to kallos, “the beautiful” and to eu (the perfect, the complete, or the good) in the work and of the work. The secret of achieving to kallos and to eu lay in the mastery of symmetria, the perfect “commensurability” of all parts of the statue to one another and to the whole. Some scholars relate the ratios of the statue to the shapes of the letters of the Greek alphabet. We can understand why this would be the case from what has been previously said here. Writing is mimesis, a copying, imaging and ‘playfulness’. There is ‘playfulness’ in the mathematical arts as their figures are images. but because they “imitate”, they are also unreliable.

The Egyptian connection to the geometry of the Pythagoreans is of the utmost importance to Western civilization and also to what we are discussing here. The Pythagorean theorem, a²+ b²= c², is the formula whereby two incommensurate things are brought into proportion, relation, or harmony with one another and are thus unified and made the Same i.e., symmetria. What is the incommensurate? Human beings and all else that is not human being are incommensurate. For the Pythagoreans, human beings are irrational numbers. Pi, the circumference of a circle, is an irrational number, and the creation itself is an irrational number because it was viewed as circular or spherical and Pi represents its limit or circumference . The Pythagoreans did not see the earth or the world as “flat”; it was spherical. The human being as an irrational number is a microcosm of the whole of the creation (or what is called Nature) itself.

The meanings of the word “incommensurate” are extremely important here. It is said to be “a false belief or opinion of something or someone; the matter or residue that settles to the bottom of a liquid (the dregs); the state of being isolated, kept apart, or withdrawn into solitude.” An incommensurate is something that does not fit. Pythagorean geometry was the attempt to overcome all of these “incommensurables” in human existence, an attempt to make them fit or to show that they are fitted, to yoke them together. “Fittedness” is what the Greeks understood by “justice”; and the concept of justice was tied in with “fairness” (beauty), what was due to someone or something, what was suitable or apt for that human being or that thing. To render another human being their due was a ‘beautiful’ action. The beginning of this rendering is the initial recognition of the otherness of human beings.

From their geometry, the Pythagoreans were said to have invented music based on the relations of the various notes around a mean i.e., the length of the string and how it is divided into suitable lengths as to allow a harmonic to be heard when it was plucked. This harmony found in music by the Pythagoreans was looked for in all human relations between themselves and the things that are, including other human beings. This harmony was the relation of ‘friendship’ established between two incommensurate entities; in human relations, that which makes us ‘in tune’ with one another. It was a reflection in the microcosm of the ‘music of the spheres’.

When we speak of the “production of knowledge” in the modern sense, we are speaking of technology and the finished products that technology brings forth. “Knowledge’ is the finished or completed ‘work’ that is the result of the “production” that technology ‘brings forth’. Technology comes from two Greek words: Techne, which means ‘knowing’ or ‘knowing one’s way about or in something’ in such a way that one can ‘produce’ knowledge, the ‘work’, and begin the making of something; and logos which is that which makes this knowledge at all possible. We confuse the things or works of technology, the produce of technology, with technology itself. Technology is a way of being in the world. This confusion is not surprising given the origin of the word. The word is not to be found in Greek but comes to be around the mid-15th century.

Leonardo da Vinci was a prolific user of the Divine Proportion in his painting, engineering works, and illustrations. The publication of De Divina Proportione (1509; Of the Divine Proportion), written by the Italian mathematician Luca Pacioli and illustrated by Leonardo is one example. Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” is what is called in Greek an eikon from which our word “icon” is derived. The word means “a painting, a sculpture, an image, a drawing, a reflection in a mirror—any likeness.” The Vitruvian Man is intended to be viewed behind the head as a reflection in a mirror. The notes to the drawing are written backwards. The dimensions of the figure are written in ratios: the length of the arms equals the height of the body, etc. so that one gets a square. The arms and legs of the figure are ‘doubled’, one set touching the circumference of the circle (but notice they remain within the boundary of the square), and one set completely bounded within the square. This is a pictorial illustration of Plato’s Divided Line. The circle is AE while the square is AD. The Vitruvian Man is similar to the Greek Doryphoros as the “perfection” is the result of the perfect ratios. The attempt here is nothing short of an attempt to “square the circle!” (See Republic 509e-510a).

“These things themselves that they mold and draw, of which there are shadows and images in water, they now use as images, seeking to see those things themselves, that one can see in no other way than with thought.” (510e)

Since technology rests upon an understanding of the world as object, an understanding of the world as posable, its mathematics are focused on, for the most part, algebraic calculation which turns its objects into disposables. Whatever beauty an object might have is skipped over (since beauty is not calculable, as much as we may try to do so) in order to demand that the object give its reasons for being as it is. The end of technology is power and will to power, and this is why artificial intelligence is the flowering of technology at its height of its realization. It is a great closing down of thinking for it is, ultimately, an anti-logos. Its roots are nihilism. There is no question that there is some beauty involved in technology, but it is a beauty that is more akin to the handsomeness of Meno, an outward beauty that hides the ugliness and disorder of the soul within. It is a terrible beauty, and it may lead to our extinction as a species.

[i] In modern English the word “knowledge” derives from “to be cognizant of”, “to be conscious of”, or “to be acquainted with”; the other stems from “to have seen.” (This can be related to the names of the “paths of wisdom” on the Tree of Life in an interpretation of the Sefer Yetzirah.) The four sections of the Divided Line correspond to the four worlds of the Sefer Yetzirah: 1. Asiyah: the material world and world of physis or Nature; 2.Yetzirah: the world of formation and making; 3. Beriyah: the world of thought; 4. Atzilut: the world of angels and intellection. The four affections arising in the soul and the four segments of the Divided Line: intellection: ideas; thought: eide; the measure of things: trust (pistis); imagination (eikasia) images. The four affections relate to the four stages of the journey out of the Cave in the allegory of the Cave: the four stages of “truth” as ‘unconcealment’ and the greater clarity achieved at each stage.

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The November 2023 TOK Essay Prescribed Titles

A few notes of warning and guidance before we begin:

The TOK essay provides you with an opportunity to become engaged in thinking and reflection. What are outlined below are strategies and suggestions, questions and possible responses only for deconstructing the TOK titles as they have been given. They should be used alongside the discussions that you will carry out with your peers and teachers during the process of constructing your essay.

The notes here are intended to guide you towards a thoughtful, personal response to the prescribed titles posed. They are not to be considered as the answer and they should only be used to help provide you with another perspective to the ones given to you in the titles and from your own TOK class discussions. You need to remember that most of your examiners have been educated in the logical positivist schools of Anglo-America and this education pre-determines their predilection to view the world as they do and to understand the concepts as they do. The TOK course itself is a product of this logical positivism as are the responses given by artificial intelligence programs such as ChatGPT.

There is no substitute for your own personal thought and reflection, as well as your own experience of being in a TOK course, and these notes are not intended as a cut and paste substitute to the hard work that thinking requires. Some of the comments on one title may be useful to you in the approach you are taking in the title that you have personally chosen, so it may be useful to read all the comments and give them some reflection.

Remember to include sufficient TOK content in your essay. When you have completed your essay, ask yourself if it could have been written by someone who had not participated in the TOK course (or by the Chat GPT bot). If the answer to that question is “yes”, then you do not have sufficient TOK content in your essay. It is this TOK content that will distinguish your essay from an AI response. Personal and shared knowledge, the knowledge framework, the ways of knowing and the areas of knowledge are terms that will be useful to you in your discussions.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-8nWwYRUyV6bDdXZ01POFFqVlU

A sine qua non: the opinions expressed here are entirely my own and do not represent any organization or collective of any kind. Now, down to business.

Prescribed Essay Titles

1. Are facts alone enough to prove a claim? Discuss with reference to any two areas of knowledge.

In deconstructing the key terms of this title, we find that we will need to discuss the ‘facts alone‘, ‘enough‘, ‘prove‘, and ‘claim‘. We will also have to address the word ‘are‘ i.e., the ‘being’ of ‘facts’; for how this ‘being’ is understood and interpreted is the context in which and from which what are called ‘facts’ are derived and upheld, and are the basis in which and from which they will derive their meaning or meaningfulness.

‘Facts’ are considered to be ‘objective’ pieces of information that can be observed, measured, and/or verified. Observation is primarily based on sight and hearing, though the other senses can be involved. The recent discoveries of the James Webb telescope, for instance, are based on observations made of the far reaches of space. They are, and will, revolutionize the theory and thinking in astrophysics; they are an extension of the human eye.

That which is called a ‘fact’ is based on empirical evidence (observation), logical deductions (through the principle of reason), or established truths (axioms and laws that pre-determine how something will be viewed and understood). Facts possess a certain degree of reliability or surety and can be ‘counted on’ to reveal some truths regarding things. These truths are widely accepted within a given framework or area of knowledge, and all that is can be placed (and is placed) one way or another into an area of knowledge. However, facts by themselves do not always guarantee the complete understanding or proof of a claim. They may illuminate the things or situations dimly. The Big Bang Theory of the origin of the universe is being placed into question by the discoveries of the James Webb Telescope, for instance. Evidence and explanations that the theory once provided will now have to be revised. Revisions of the concepts of time and space will need to be provided. Despite this, facts do provide a foundation (but it is only one possible foundation…there could be others); but how they are interpreted and contextualized are crucial in determining their significance and importance.

A knowledge ‘claim‘ is a statement or assertion, the proffering of a judgement. Statements may be made through words or speech or they can be made through numbers. “1 + 1 = 2” is a statement or assertion in which “=” is the judgement. “2” is not the judgement but the outcome which results from the judgement. It is either correct or incorrect. The judgement “=” derives from how a “1” is viewed, interpreted and understood. The viewing and understanding will determine how judgements are to be made within the context of the field that we call the ‘theory of numbers’. “Theory” comes to us from the Greek word theoria which means ‘to view’, and it was particularly related to the theatre, the ‘viewing place’. The viewing and the understanding (interpretation) are prior to the judgements or knowledge claims that are made or can be made within the context from which they are derived. The philosopher Kant once said: “Judgement is the seat of truth”. It is the judgement which determines whether the things or situations about which they are made will be illuminated or not.

We doubt a claim when we are lacking certainty and reliability regarding those who are making the claim, the sources of the claim, or when the things about which the claim is being made are not sufficiently justified; that is, sufficient reasons have not been supplied for the claim. We cannot “count on” them because they are not “grounded” and the principle of sufficient reason supplies the grounds. When we speak of “grounds”, we are speaking about whether the “evidence” or the “explanation” regarding the thing which is being spoken about is “adequate” or justified. This evidence or explanation will find its “grounds” in the principle of sufficient reason. Reasons must be given for the claims being made; that is, we doubt the ‘facts’ of the claim and if sufficient reasons are not given, we doubt the truth of the claim being made. The reasons provide both the evidence and the explanation, the ‘proof’ that the ‘facts’ are indeed facts. But as Aristotle once said: “For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.”

On a shop which sells Antique Hand Bags near here is a sign which reads: “The Shop is not Open because it is Closed”. Such a sign speaks the truth in that the fact is that the shop is closed. However, it does not supply a sufficient reason for the shop’s being closed. The sign is what is referred to as a tautology. No reason is given for the shop’s being closed i.e., is it after hours?, the owner is away on holidays?, the owner is observing a religious festival?, etc. Tautologies are prominent in modern day computer language. We “skip over” knowing the reasons for the things being as they are because we, in fact, believe we already know them for being what they are and as they are. (This is evident in ‘artificial intelligence’ and presents one of its gravest dangers.)

The Greeks began their journey to thought by first “trusting” in that which they were seeking, but they also “doubted”. Doubt was a requisite for thought for it inspired “wonder”. Both doubt and skepticism were requirements for beginning thinking. But the end for the Greeks was to demonstrate why their trust was an appropriate response to the things that are and this trust overcame the doubt and skepticism that initiated their search for knowledge. Our doubt and skepticism, on the other hand, is spurred by the requirement of things and situations giving sufficient reasons for that thing’s or situation’s being what and how it is; and should these not be given, then the thing is not. It becomes something “subjective”. Something subjective does not have being for sufficient reasons cannot be supplied for its being.

We distinguish ‘facts’ from ‘values’ in the Human Sciences and the sciences in general. Science is the theory of the real. This is captured in a quote attributed to Einstein: “Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.” ‘Values’ are seen as ‘subjective’ while ‘facts’ are seen as ‘objective’. ‘Facts’ derive from ‘the world’ and the viewing of that world as ‘object’, while ‘values’ derive from personal choices that individuals make regarding the objects present within that world. ‘Facts’ are considered the stuff of thought, while ‘values’ are seen as the stuff of emotion and action. From Einstein’s quote, we can see that there are ‘values’ already embedded in any scientific viewing of the world. The statements or assertions of science already contain within themselves the ‘values’ that will determine whether those statements will be correct or incorrect.

Van Gogh sunflowers — Van Gogh’s Sunflowers: Pb(NO3)2(aq) + K2CrO4(aq) –> PbCrO4(s) + 2 KNO3(aq)

The choice of the pursuit of science is the human response to a certain mode or way in which truth discloses or reveals itself. Science arises as a response to a claim laid upon human beings in the way that the things of nature appear i.e., the ‘facts’. It is Being that makes this claim (but, then, what is Being, the ‘are’ of our prescribed title?). The sciences set up certain domains or contexts and then pursue the revealing that is consistent within those domains or contexts. The domain, for example, of chemistry is an abstraction. It is the domain of chemical formulas. To attempt to dwell within the viewing of this domain alone would be akin to madness. Nature is seen as a realm of formulae. Scientists pose this realm by way of a reduction; it is an artificial realm that arises from a very artificial attitude towards things. The ‘fact’ of water has to be posed as H₂O. Once it is so posed, once things are reduced to chemical formulae, then the domain of chemistry can be exploited for practical ends. We can make fire out of water once water is seen as a compound of hydrogen and oxygen. In the illustration shown here, we have the chemical formula for the physical composition of Van Gogh’s yellow paint in his “Sunflowers”. While interesting in its being a ‘fact’, it tells us absolutely nothing of the painting itself.

What are the implications of this? The things investigated by chemistry are not “objects” in the sense that they have an autonomous standing on their own i.e. they are not “the thrown against”, the jacio, as is understood traditionally. For science, the chemist in our example, nature is composed of formulae, and a formula is not a self-standing object. It is an abstraction, a product of the mind. (Einstein’s quote again.) A formula is posed; it is an abstraction. A formula is posed; it is an ob-ject, that is, it does not view nature as composed of objects that are autonomous, self-standing things, but nature as formulae. The viewing of nature as formulae turns the things viewed into posed ob-jects; and in this posing turns the things of nature, ultimately, into dis-posables. The viewing of water as H₂O is an example of a Rubicon that has been crossed. There is no turning back once this truth has been revealed. That water can be turned into fire has caused restrictions in our bringing liquids onto airplanes, for instance, for they have the capability of destroying those aircraft, but water viewed in such a way cannot be used for baptisms, for instance.

To see Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” as a ‘painted thing’, an object, is to cease to consider it as a “painting” or work of art that says something more than the mere object itself could possibly say. The “facts” of the painting do not get us closer to what, in fact, the painting is. When art is viewed as an “object”, it ceases to be art; nevertheless, this approach to art as “aesthetics”, or a calculable mode of viewing what is present to the senses, is the prevailing mode of viewing art.

The limitations of facts can be seen in a recent USA Supreme Court decision to strike down Affirmative Action Programs for both corporations and institutions of higher learning citing them as ‘unconstitutional’. The Court viewed affirmative action programs as ‘reverse discrimination’, and that positions on corporate boards or admissions to universities should be based on ‘merit’, since the USA was now (the Court viewed) sufficiently ‘color-blind’ to warrant such a decision in keeping with the ideals presented in the US Constitution. While the Court’s view is a ‘consummation devoutly to be wished’, it ignores ‘the facts’ of the systemic historical racism and oppression of certain ethnic and racial groups that has occurred throughout America’s history. If facts are considered to be objective truths which can be “observed, measured, and verified”, then the Supreme Court’s decision is one that completely ignores ‘the facts’.

The reality of American history can be seen as analogous to the locking of the gates separating 3rd class passengers from 1st class passengers on board the Titanic both before and while the ship was sinking. That most of the survivors were 1st class passengers and most of the dead 3rd class passengers was the inevitable result. The 3rd class passengers did not have access to the too few lifeboats that were available. The building of the USA Interstate Highway system in the 1950s, for example, did not have and still does not have off-ramps to African-American communities in many cases. Examples (evidence) abound of the historical racism that is prevalent in the USA of today. The reality of the USA is that its institutions and infrastructures were, and are, inherently and implicitly racist as was its Constitution. No amount of ‘colorblindness’ will overcome these concrete facts and make them non-racist. Some of the passengers on the Titanic went to their deaths retaining the view that the ship was ‘unsinkable’; the Supreme Court of the USA refuses to recognize and acknowledge (or perhaps it does and would prefer to see the USA as an autocracy) the fact that America has become a ‘failed state’ in its experiment with democracy and that its ship of state is rapidly sinking.

The American Supreme Court example illustrates that interpretation plays a significant role in understanding facts. In our being with others, our politics, our living in communities, different individuals may draw various conclusions or interpretations from the same set of facts that are influenced by their perspectives, biases, and prior knowledge. There are no ‘alternative facts’; there are only alternative interpretations of the facts that are present. Socrates once noted that the opposite of knowledge is not ignorance but madness. In our politics, what is called ‘public opinion’ is shaped by the sources of information that derive from mass media. In considering whether facts are a sufficient foundation for a knowledge claim or assertion, it is crucial to consider the source, methodology, and potential biases when evaluating the validity of the claim based on the presented or selected facts.

Because our understanding of facts is limited in its scope to viewing the world as “object”, their ability to provide a comprehensive understanding of complex contexts and issues is also limited. They often provide only partial information, neglecting the broader context such as was the case in the recent American Supreme Court decision on affirmative action. Facts may answer the “what” and “how” questions, but they often fall short in addressing the “why” and “what then” aspects of a claim. In areas of knowledge like history and the social sciences, facts alone are insufficient to explain phenomena or validate claims, and this is primarily due to the fact that it is human beings who are the creators of these areas of knowledge and are the subject matter of these areas of study. Interpretation, contextualization, and critical analysis are necessary to fill the gaps and establish a coherent understanding in these two areas of knowledge and it is here that errors can occur.

Facts are often misused or misrepresented to support false or misleading claims, particularly in political contexts where power and its maintenance is usually involved and is ultimately the goal. Fraudulent knowledge claims often occur where truth is not what is desired but the power and recognition of social prestige is in operation. Logical fallacies, such as cherry-picking evidence or drawing hasty generalizations (e.g. Fox News’ coverage of the January 6 Capitol riots), can undermine the credibility of an argument, even if it is based on factual information. Therefore, the ability to reason and critically analyze the available facts is crucial to avoid misinformation and reach valid conclusions. (It should be noted that “information” is understood here as “that which is responsible for the form so that that which is generated or produced, perceived and understood can inform” i.e., in-form-ation).

2. If “the mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s and the poet’s, must be beautiful” (G.H. Hardy), how might this impact the production of knowledge? Discuss with reference to mathematics and the arts.

This is a very challenging title for it asks you to consider what the beautiful is and how the “patterns” of mathematics are similar in their beauty to those patterns used by a poet or a painter. The subsequent question is “how this might impact the production of knowledge”. The difficulty arises from the fact that the dominant form and understanding of mathematics today is algebraic calculation which finds its origins in the German philosopher Leibniz’s finite calculus. This calculus is related to our viewing of the world as “object”.

We often hear that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, but this begs the question “What then is beholding”? When such an assertion is made, the assumption being made is that beauty is ‘subjective’ and that its recognition and appreciation is in the ‘holding’ or ‘grasping’ of that which is brought forth to presence, to “being” (“be-“) by the ‘subjective’ ego cogito of the French philosopher Descartes. This “bringing forth to presence” is what we mean by “pro-duction”, and this bringing forth may be natural (“produce” e.g., crops) or through human beings in their “works” (i.e., paintings, buildings, etc.) The Greek word for this bringing forth is poiesis from which our word poetry derives. The process of ‘bringing forth’ or production led to ‘perfection’ or completion, since nothing further needed to be added to or subtracted from the thing or work that was brought forth. The completed work was itself “knowledge” of the thing from which it derived its name.

Among the Greeks, the Pythagoreans are said to have discovered the “golden ratio”, which is also sometimes called the “golden section”, the “golden mean”, or the “divine proportion” (Encyclopedia Britannica). In Greek, the word “mathematics” meant “that which can be learned and that which can be taught”, and it was a much greater and broader concept than what we understand as mathematics today, although the initial meaning still obscurely prevails in what we call technology today. The Greeks more closely aligned what we understand as mathematics with arithmos or ‘counting’ or ‘counting on’, and we have derived our word ‘arithmetic’ from this understanding.

For the Pythagoreans, human beings were considered “irrational numbers”, for they believed that this best described that ‘perfect imperfection’ that is human being, that “work” that was “perfect” in its incompleteness. The irrational number (1 + Square root of√5)/2 approximately equal to 1.618) was , for the Pythagoreans, a mathematical statement illustrating the relation of the human to the divine. It is the ratio of a line segment cut into two pieces of different lengths such that the ratio of the whole segment to that of the longer segment is equal to the ratio of the longer segment to the shorter segment. In terms of present day algebra, letting the length of the shorter segment be one unit and the length of the longer segment be x units gives rise to the equation (x + 1)/x = x/1; this may be rearranged to form the quadratic equation x² – x – 1 = 0, for which the positive solution is x = (1 + Square root of√5)/2), the golden ratio. It should be noted that the Greeks rejected Babylonian (Indian) algebra and algebra in general as being ‘unnatural’ due to its abstractness, and they had a much different conception of number than we have today.

The Pythagoreans and their geometry are not how we look upon mathematics and number today. The Pythagoreans were viewed as a religious cult even in their own day. For them, the practice of geometry was no different than a form of prayer or piety. The Greek philosopher Aristotle called his former teacher, the Greek philosopher Plato, a “pure Pythagorean”.

This “pure Pythagoreanism” is demonstrated in Plato’s illustration of the Divided Line which is none other than an application of the golden mean to all the things that are and how we apprehend or behold them. I am going to provide a detailed example from Plato’s Republic because I believe it is crucial to our understanding of the thinking that has occurred in the West.

At Republic, Book VI, 508B-C, Plato makes an analogy between the role of the sun, whose light gives us our vision to see and the visible things to be seen and the role of the Good in that seeing. The sun rules over our vision and the things we see. The Good rules over our knowledge and the (real) objects of our knowledge (the forms, the ideas or that which brings the visible things to appearance and, thus, to being) and also over the things that the sun gives to vision:

If we put the mathematical statement of the golden ratio or the divine proportion into the illustration (1 + Square root of√5)/2), the 1 is the Good, or the whole of things, and the “offspring of the Good” (the “production of knowledge” of our title) is the square root of 5 which is then divided by 2 (the whole of creation plus the Good or the Divine), then we can comprehend the example of the Divided Line in a Greek rather than a Cartesian manner. Plato is attempting to resolve the problem of the One and the Many here.

The ratio or proportion of the division of the visibles (AB:BC) and the division of the intelligibles (CD:DE) are in the same ratio or proportion as the visibles to the intelligibles (AC:CE). Plato has made BC = CD, and Plato at one point identifies the contents of these two sections. He says (510B) that in CD the soul is compelled to investigate by treating as images the things imitated in the former division (BC). In (BC), the things imitated are the ‘shadows’ of the things as they really are. These are the realms of ‘trust’ and ‘belief’ (pistis) and of understanding or how we come to be in our world.

There is no “subject/object” separation of realms here, no abstractions or formulae created by the human mind only (the intelligence and that which is intellected), but rather the mathematical description or statement of the beauty of the world. In the Divided Line, one sees three applications of the golden ratio: The Good, the Intelligible, and the Sensible or Visual i.e., the Good in relation to the whole line, The Good in relation to the Intelligible, and the Intelligible in relation to the Visible. (It is from this that I understand the statement of the French philosopher Simone Weil: “Faith is the experience that the intelligence is illuminated by Love.” Love is the light, that which is given which illuminates the things of the intelligence and the things of the world. This illumination is what is called Truth. There is a concrete tripartite unity of Goodness, Beauty and Truth.) This tripartite yoking of the sensible to the intelligible and to the Good corresponds to what Plato says is the tripartite being of the human soul and the tripartite Being of the God who is the Good. The human being in its being is a microcosm of the Whole or the macrocosm. (See William Blake’s lines in “Auguries of Innocence”: “God appears and God is Light/ To those poor souls that dwell in night/ But does the human form display/ To those who dwell in realms of day.”)

The golden ratio occurs in many mathematical contexts today and it may give a sense of what Hardy meant in the quote that is the prompt or substance for this title. The golden ratio is geometrically constructible by straightedge and compass, and it occurs in the investigation of the Archimedean and Platonic solids. It is the limit of the ratios of consecutive terms of the Fibonacci number sequence 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13,…, in which each term beyond the second is the sum of the previous two, and it is also the value of the most basic of continued fractions, namely 1 + 1/(1 + 1/(1 + 1/(1 +⋯. (Encyclopedia Britannica)

In modern mathematics, the golden ratio occurs in the description of fractals, figures that exhibit self-similarity and play an important role in the study of chaos and dynamical systems. (Encyclopedia Britannica)

One of the questions raised here is: do we have number after the experience of the physical, objective world or do we have number prior to it and have the physical world because of number? The original meaning of the Greek word mathemata is “what can be learned and what can be taught”. What can be learned and what can be taught are those things that have been brought to presence through language and measured in their form through number. Our understanding of number is what the Greeks called arithmos, “arithmetic”, that which can be counted and that which can be “counted on”. These numbers begin at 4.

The principles of the golden or divine ratio are to be seen in the statue of the Doryphoros seen here. The statue of the Doryphoros, or the Spear Bearer, is around the mid -5^th century BCE. Its maker, Polycleitus, wrote that the purpose or end of art was to achieve to kallos, “the beautiful” and to eu (the perfect, the complete, or the good) in the work. The secret of achieving to kallos and to eu lay in the mastery of symmetria, the perfect “commensurability” of all parts of the statue to one another and to the whole. This is pure Pythagoreanism. Some scholars relate the ratios of the statue to the shapes of the letters of the Greek alphabet.

The Egyptian connection to the geometry of the Pythagoreans is of the utmost importance to Western civilization and also to what we are discussing here. The Pythagorean theorem: a²+b²= c² is the formula whereby two incommensurate things are brought into proportion, relation, or harmony with one another and are thus unified and made the Same i.e., symmetria. What is the incommensurate? Human beings and all else that is not human being are incommensurate. For the Pythagoreans, human beings are irrational numbers. Pi, the circumference of a circle, is an irrational number, and the creation itself is an irrational number because it was viewed as circular or spherical. The human being is a microcosm of the whole of the creation (or what is called Nature) itself.

The meanings of the word “incommensurate” are extremely important here. It is said to be “a false belief or opinion of something or someone, the matter or residue that settles to the bottom of a liquid (the dregs), the state of being isolated, kept apart, or withdrawn into solitude.” An incommensurate is something that doesn’t fit. Pythagorean geometry was the attempt to overcome all of these “incommensurables” in human existence, an attempt to make them fit or to show that they are fitted, to yoke them together. “Fittedness” is what the Greeks understood by “justice”; and the concept of justice was tied in with “fairness” (beauty), what was due to someone or something, what was suitable or apt for a human being. From their geometry, the Pythagoreans were said to have invented music based on the relations of the various notes around a mean i.e., the length of the string and how it is divided into suitable lengths as to allow a harmonic to be heard when it was plucked. This harmony found in music by the Pythagoreans was looked for in all human relations between themselves and the things that are.

When we speak of the “production of knowledge” in the modern sense, we are speaking of technology and the finished products that technology brings forth. “Knowledge’ is the finished or completed ‘work’ that is the result of the “production” that technology ‘brings forth’. Technology comes from two Greek words: Techne, which means ‘knowing’ or ‘knowing one’s way about or in something’ in such a way that one can ‘produce’ knowledge and begin to make something; and logos which is that which makes this knowledge at all possible. We confuse the things or works of technology, the produce of technology, with technology itself. This is not surprising given the origin of the word itself. The word is not to be found in Greek.

Since technology rests upon an understanding of the world as object, an understanding of the world as posable, its mathematics are focused on, for the most part, algebraic calculation which turns its objects into disposables. Whatever beauty an object might have is skipped over (since beauty is not calculable as much as we may try to do so) in order to demand that the object give its reasons for being as it is. The end of technology is power and will to power, and this is why artificial intelligence is the flowering of technology at its height of its realization. It is a great closing down of thinking for it is, ultimately, an anti-logos. There is no question that there is some beauty involved in technology, but it is a beauty that is more akin to a tsunami or a volcanic eruption. It is a terrible beauty and it may lead to our extinction as a species.

3. In the acquisition of knowledge, is following experts unquestioningly as dangerous as ignoring them completely? Discuss with reference to the human sciences and one other area of knowledge.

Title #3 will, undoubtedly, be one of the more popular choices among students this November. Its key terms and phrases are “acquisition of knowledge“, “following experts unquestioningly“, “dangerous“, and “ignoring them completely“. In fact, titles #1, #3, #4, #5, and #6 are all connected and related to each other in a number of crucial ways and this is one of the reasons why I would suggest that the attentive student give consideration to all the thoughts and responses to the titles given here.

“Acquisition” means to ‘get’, ‘to grasp’, to take hold of something and take possession of it. It means ‘that which is responsible for the acquiring or getting of something’. Our wonderful phrase in English, “I get it”, is an example of this grasping and taking possession of something. Usually it is our beginning understanding of something, our “shared knowledge” (historical knowledge) of something. What we grasp or take hold of from others in our discourses with them is “opinion” not knowledge, whether it be from those in our communities who are called ‘experts’ or from those who dwell in the murky communities of QAnon. (The communities are ‘murky’ because they are ‘a-nonymous’ i.e., they have ‘no name’; and, thus, they have no desire to be brought to light, to be brought out into the open. The Ring of Gyges from Republic Bk II and the Ring of Power from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings illustrate the essence of such groups and the desires of such groups. Both rings provide invisibility (anonymity), immortality (or “the desire for long life”), and power, control or domination. The same elements are shown in the three “deathly hallows” of Harry Potter, but Rowling has mistakenly seen these powers as somehow conducive of good i.e., that Harry is capable of destroying the elder wand after the destruction of Voldemort in not something human beings are capable of without the assistance of outside help, or Chance, according to Plato and Tolkien). This acquiring of what we think is knowledge becomes part of ourselves and who we think we are; and this, in turn, will determine the actions that we will choose to take.

An ‘expert’ is one who demonstrates an ‘expertise’, a ‘know how’, someone who knows their way in, around, or about something. This kind of knowledge was called techne by the Greeks. An expert demonstrates a skill which is particular and singular. If I require an appendectomy, I would not ask my next door neighbour to perform it. I would seek out a surgeon, an expert, someone with ‘know how’. Such common sense rules in matters concerning our health. Why does it not also rule in the health of our living with others in our communities i.e., our politics? (Human Sciences) This is a question which the philosopher Plato asked, and this ‘health’ was considered with regard to our souls. Since the number of us who believe we have a ‘soul’ diminishes with technology’s ever increasing impact on our reflection, contemplation and thinking, we look to the Human Science Psychology (from the Greek psyche meaning ‘soul’ and logos understood as ‘the study of…’) which focuses on the human mind and brain (which are both considered to be the same object of research in some areas of this field). We all believe we are ‘experts’ in politics, and we can find the roots of such belief as having stemmed from the thinking of the French philosopher Rousseau.

It would obviously be ‘dangerous’ for me and to me if I tried to perform the surgery myself or looked to someone who did not have expertise in the field to perform it. We take great caution and are very circumspect when we deal with such matters. Why is such circumspection and caution not exercised in our politics?

In the political realm, the great danger coeval with living in communities is tyranny, and it behooves us to try to find experts on tyranny in order to understand the phenomenon. Such an expert was the Greek philosopher Plato. In Plato’s view, the tyrant is someone who is incapable of recognizing the ‘otherness’ of human beings and is, thus, incapable of giving other human beings ‘their due’. Plato considered them the most unhappy of human beings. The best example we have in the English literature on tyranny is Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Giving others what is ‘owed’ to them, ‘their due’, is what we understand as “justice”. Tyrants see nothing due to other human beings, and they themselves expect a ‘loyalty’ which, if it is not received, will be enforced through fear and the exercise of power. Tyranny is a great danger because when tyranny takes hold, the human beings living in that community are not able to realize their full being as human beings, their full potentialities and possibilities, because they are not rendered their ‘due’. Not being rendered one’s due is what we call oppression.

For the human beings who are subject to tyranny, the danger facing them is that, because their humanity is not recognized, they themselves will cease to be fully human beings. The curious fact is that, within the tyranny, many will be satisfied with this condition. In the analogy we have been using here, they will perform the surgery upon themselves.

The “ignoring of expertise” in the matter of politics carries grave consequences. Socrates once said: “The opposite of knowledge is not ignorance but madness”. Madness is rare in individuals but it is the rule in social collectives. The German philosopher Nietzsche once wrote: “Power makes stupid” and politics is the realm of power. Stupidity is a form of madness. Stupidity is a moral phenomenon, not an intellectual phenomenon. It has to do with actions, not thinking. In my 40 years of teaching, I never came across a ‘stupid’ student; I did come across a few stupid parents, though.

The German priest Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged by the tyrant Adolf Hitler in 1945, once wrote: “Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than evil”. He continued: “Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed- in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”

The ignoring of the opinions of ‘experts’ does not grant freedom and independence. As Bonhoeffer wrote before he was hanged: “The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.” As was stated under Title #1, the ability to reason and critically analyze the available facts provided by experts is crucial to avoid misinformation and reach valid conclusions, and this is particularly so in the political realm.

Plato identified five different political regimes which he ordered from best to worst: 1. monarchy; 2. aristocracy; 3. oligarchy; 4. democracy; and 5. tyranny. Democracy was placed next to tyranny because under democratic regimes, human beings will be ruled by their selfish passions and appetites. Such a rule would not be conducive to human beings’ achieving their best potentials and possibilities with regard to their souls, in Plato’s opinion. A legitimate monarchy was the opposite of an illegitimate tyranny. A legitimate monarch would, if he were a good king, exercise the royal techne of statesmanship. His recognition of others would render, as best as possible, to each what was their due. In the regimes ruled by aristocracies, the ‘aristocrats’ would presumably be the ‘experts’ within that society for they would be the ‘best’ that the society had to offer (which is what the word ‘aristocracy’ originally meant). History shows us many ‘aristocratic’ regimes which were not ruled by the ‘best’. With the arrival of capitalism in the post-Renaissance world, the propertied classes were seen as the best to rule and establish the regime. With the advancement of technology, these propertied classes have taken the form of the military-industrial complex and the bureaucracies related to them.

I have focused on the AOK of the Human Sciences in these notes to this title. This is because the greatest danger to life is war, and war is a matter of politics. In the Arts, we can develop our tastes and opinions based on the opinions of experts (critics) or we can ignore those opinions and formulate our own. The worst that can happen is a heated discussion with family members or with those in a bar once we are too far into our cups. Our nation will not go to war over them. The “culture wars” going on in the USA and elsewhere are over politics and power and who gets to eat what, not over truth and beauty in the Arts.

4. Is it problematic that knowledge is so often shaped by the values of those who produce it? Discuss with reference to any two areas of knowledge.

Title #4 exhibits a number of the same concepts and characteristics as titles #1, #3, #5 and #6. Here, ‘problematic‘, ‘knowledge‘, ‘shaped‘, ‘values‘, and ‘who produce it‘ are key concepts and terms. Of course, ‘is’ and how it is understood is problematic in itself!

What is ‘problematic’ when ‘knowledge’ is considered ‘information’? What values are present when ‘information’ is considered knowledge? As mentioned in an earlier title (#1), ‘information’ means that which is responsible for the ‘form’ so that the data or substance of a statement can ‘inform’ (in – form – ation: 1. -ation from the Greek aitia “that which is responsible for”; that which is the “cause of”; 2. -form: the “shape” or outward appearance of something, in Greek, the eidos of something; 3. in-form: that which makes possible the ‘knowledge’ in the form of a statement that is to be passed over to someone because of the ‘form’ in which it has been placed.) From the question of our title, it is the ‘values’ of those who are putting forth the statement that is responsible for the ‘form’, the ‘shape’ or the outward appearance of the thing (knowledge) that is brought forward or ‘produced’.

What, for example, may be problematic about artificial intelligence? What ‘values’ are inherent in its roots that we should be concerned about? To begin with, historically, the fact that the chief funding for artificial intelligence research in the USA was provided by the Department of Defense should make us wary. What might the values of the DOD be in that it would provide funding for AI? How do those values relate to the essence of artificial intelligence itself? What is the essence of artificial intelligence?

If the apex of technology is cybernetics and cybernetics is the unlimited mastery of human beings by other human beings, then artificial intelligence will be the chief equipment or tool in “the technology of the helmsman” to be used by these helmsmen in their mastery and control of other human beings who will be viewed as ‘resources’ and ‘disposables’. The ‘values’ rooted in technology itself have provided the “open region” to allow artificial intelligence to come into being, just as those ‘values’ have allowed handphones and computers to come into being.

The common instrumental view of technology sees technology as a ‘tool’ or ‘equipment’ like any other and that it can be used for good or ill, and this view persists with regard to artificial intelligence which is also seen as an instrument or tool. As is discussed in this blog, we have seen that technology is more of a “fate”; it is a mode (way or manner) of being in the world that has arisen from particular historical conditions (Western European sciences) and social circumstances (contexts). The view of artificial intelligence examined here arrives from the view of reason (the principle of reason, logic, logistics) and nature (the environment as object) that came from those mastering Western sciences. Such a view cuts human beings off from any notion of a transcendent good (the Sun in Plato’s allegory of the Cave, the discussion in Title #2) and from any notion of a transcendent justice (a standard of justice other than that of our own making). One might say that artificial intelligence and its creation of its virtual worlds is a further degree from the truth and the light of the sun that Plato speaks about in his allegory of the Cave.

The situation in which we find ourselves currently seems obvious: we are faced with calamities concerning the environment, population, resources, and pollution if we continue to pursue the policies that we have pursued over the last few centuries. The attempts to deal with these interlocking emergencies will require a vast array of skills and knowledge; and that is what most of you are being educated towards. Technological mastery will need to be used to solve the problems that technology has created. Artificial intelligence will be used in the solution of these problems, so we can say that the primary mode of artificial intelligence will be action, the performance or doing of some task. The thinking involved in it will already have been completed, even the ‘thinking’ that originates from within itself. Its focus will be on applications.

The realization of the cybernetic future will find its place most securely in the medical profession, particularly the bio-medical field where the practical applications of artificial intelligence are being emphasized. What has been called “late stage capitalism” increasingly attempts to establish itself as “the mental health state” with the necessary array of dependent arts and sciences. The difficult choices which will be necessary in the future are discussed within the assumptions of the ‘values’ and ‘ideals’ which shall direct our creating of history, i.e., our actions. If we are to deal with the future “humanely” (that is, in a “human” fashion), our acts of ‘free’ mastery in creating history must be decided within the light of certain ‘ideals’ so that we can preserve certain human ‘values’ and see that ‘quality of life’ and quantity (economic prosperity) is safeguarded and extended. Clearly, the problem of dealing with these future crises involves great possibilities of tyranny[1] and we must be careful that in meeting these choices and decisions we maintain the ‘values’ of free government.

The way we put the questions/themes that relate to the task of the future, the future of our students (your futures) as the leaders of that future, involves the use of concepts such as ‘values’, ‘ideals’, ‘persons’ or ‘our creating of history’. The use of these concepts obscures the fact that these very concepts have come forth from within the ‘technological world-view’ to give us an image of ourselves from within that within. These terms are used “unthinkingly” from within this “world-view” and do not allow us to gain the openness necessary to be able to discuss the questions in any meaningful way.

To carry out this questioning we have to look at “artificial intelligence as a fate” or a destining of human beings. In expressing the instrumental view of technology, we can see that artificial intelligence and the machines to which it is related are obviously instruments because their capacities have been built into them by human beings; and it is human beings who must set up the operating of those capacities for the purposes that they have determined. Artificial intelligence is the next step in that the machines themselves will develop their capacities from the programs installed within them, but those programs were initially written by human beings based on their ‘values’. All instruments or tools can potentially be used for wicked purposes and the more complex the instrument, the more complex the possible evils. But if we apprehend artificial intelligence as a neutral instrument or tool, can we be better able to determine rationally its potential dangers? That is clearly the first step in coping with these dangers. This view comes from those who uphold an instrumental view of technology. We can see that these dangers lie in the potential decisions human beings make about how and where to use artificial intelligence, and not to the inherent capacities of the machines that have artificial intelligence encoded within them. The research and creation of the machines and the creation of the programs for them is expensive; so it will, undoubtably, be the ‘values’ of the wealthy and powerful which will determine the ends for those machines.

This view is the instrumental view of most of us regarding technology and it is so strongly given to us that it seems like common sense itself. It is the box that we are given and which we must think outside of. We are given an historical situation which includes certain objective technological facts. It is up to us as human beings in our freedom to meet that situation and to shape it with our ‘values’ and ‘ideals’.

Despite the decency and common sense inherent in the instrumental view of technology, when we try to think about what is being said in this view, it becomes clear that that the products of technology such as computers, handphones, artificial intelligence and the various other machines and manifestations of technology are not being allowed to appear before us for what they really are.

Clearly, artificial intelligence and computers are more than their capacities or capabilities. Computers, for example, are put together from a variety of materials, beautifully fashioned by a vast apparatus of fashioners. Their existence has required generations of sustained efforts by chemists, metallurgists, and workers in mines and factories. They require a highly developed electronics industry and what lies behind that industry in the history of science and technique and their reciprocal relations. They have required that human beings wanted to understand nature, and thought the best way to do so was by putting it to the question as object so that it could reveal itself. They have required the discovery of modern algebra and the development of complex institutions for developing and applying algebra. Nor should this be seen as a one-sided relationship in which the institutions necessary to the development of the machines were left unchanged by the discovery of algebra

The existence of artificial intelligence has required that the clever of our society be trained within the massive assumptions about knowing and being and making (the values) which have made that algebra actual. Learning and education within such assumptions is not directed towards a “leading out” but towards “organizing within” (“education” from the Lat. educare “to lead out”; and the Gr. aitia “that which is responsible for or occasions” the “leading out”). This means and entails that those who rule any modern society (the helmsmen) will take the purposes of ruling increasingly to be congruent with this account of knowing. The requirements for the existence of computers and artificial intelligence is but part of the total historical situation which is given to us as modern human beings. The conditions of that historical situation are never to be conceived as static determinants (as something which cannot be changed), but as a dynamic interrelation of tightening determinations (the box gets smaller in terms of choices).

Human freedom is conceived in the strong sense of human beings as autonomous—the makers of our own laws and our own selves from out of our ‘values’. This is also a quite new conception. It is first thought systematically in the writings of the German philosopher Kant. It is also a conception without which the coming to be of our modern civilization would not and could not have been. But it is a conception the truth of which needs to be thought because it was not considered true by the wise men of many civilizations before our own.

In our Cartesian view of the world, we hold a view of the world with neutral instruments on one side and human autonomy on the other. But it is just this view that needs to be thought if we are concerned with understanding the essence of technology, and of understanding the essence of artificial intelligence and of modern instrumentality if we are to see these as being a ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’. When one thinks of ‘values’ and ‘ideals’ from within technology, one cannot ignore the continued homogenization of the central corporations in our everyday lives and the tremendous growth in their power over our lives, including the ability of driving us into wars. (The social media and tech giants and their reciprocal relations to the DOD are examples of this.)

Aristotle has pointed out that human beings are the ‘religious animal’, and the religion for most human beings who have lost any kind of transcendental faith in a god is the ‘belief in progress’. This belief can be described as the good progress of the race in the direction of the universal society of free and equal human beings, that is, towards the universal and homogeneous state. They assert that the technology, which comes out of the account of reason given in the modern European sciences, is the necessary and good means to that end. That account of reason assumes that there is something which we call ‘history’ over against nature, and that it is in that ‘history’ that human beings have acquired their rationality and their values. In the thought of the French philosopher Rousseau about the origins of human beings, the concept of reason as historical makes its extraordinary public arrival. Darwin’s Origin of Species is not possible without, first, the thought of Rousseau. Rousseau is the philosopher of the political Left at the moment.

The modern ‘physical’ sciences and the modern ‘human sciences’ have developed in mutual interpenetration, and we can only begin to understand that mutual interpenetration in terms of some common source from which both sciences found their grounding. That common source is “technology”.

To think ‘reasonably’ about the modern account of reason is of such difficulty because that account has structured our very thinking over the last centuries. Artificial intelligence has its roots in this account of reason (logic as logistics). Because we are trying to understand reason in the very form of how we understand reason is what makes it so difficult. The very idea that ‘reason’ is that reason which allows us to conquer objective human and non-human nature controls our thinking about everything. The root of modern history lies in our experience of ‘reason’ and the interpenetration of the human and non-human sciences that grew from that root. It is an occurrence that has not yet been understood, and it is an event that must come to be thought.

The instrumental understanding of technology simply presents us with neutral instruments that we in our freedom can shape to our ‘values’ and ‘ideals’. But the very concepts of ‘values’ and ‘ideals’ come from the same form of reasoning that created artificial intelligence and built the computers upon which it is based. ‘Artificial intelligence’ and ‘values’ both come from that stance which summoned the world before it to show its reasons and bestowed ‘values’ on the world. Those ‘values’ are supposed to be the creations of human beings and have, linguistically, taken the place of the traditional concept of ‘good’ which was not created but recognized (See the discussion in title #2). Artificial intelligence does not present us with the neutral means for building any kind of society. All their alternative ‘ways’ lead towards the universal, homogeneous state. Our use of them is exercised within that mysterious modern participation in what we call ‘reason’, and it is this participation that is most difficult to think in its origins.

[1] Martin Heidegger in 1935 defined the political movement of National Socialism in Nazi Germany as “the meeting of modern man with a global technology”. Today, we define this coming together of human beings and technology as ‘globalization’. Having an opportunity to change this definition of National Socialism in 1953 with the publication of An Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger chose not to do so. This should be a warning to us.

(Note: While the thoughts presented here focus on artificial intelligence, consideration of Titles #1, #3, #5 and #6 will help provide a focus on the particular areas of knowledge that you might choose to examine using the principles in operation here.)

5. Is it always the case that “the world isn’t just the way I is, it is how we understand it – and in understanding something, we bring something to it” (adapted from Life of Pi by Yann Martel)? Discuss with reference to history and the natural sciences.

Title #5 is somewhat tricky in its wording so this response will be directed towards how I interpret the title. We are directed to examine two specific areas of knowledge: history and the natural sciences. From the title, these two areas are to be examined from the role the “I is” plays in “how we understand the world” and what “we bring” to that world so that it may be interpreted and understood. The corollary question asked is “is it always the case?”. This corollary question invites us to examine the paradox or contradiction that is historicism and the nature of truth. Historicism is a way of viewing the world that sees what we call knowledge and any other social and cultural phenomenon as products of human activity in history. It is what we sometimes call “relativism”. Since knowledge is a product of the social and cultural forces at work at a certain period in history, nothing is ever “always the case”. The paradox or contradiction of historicism is whether or not historicism itself is “always the case” and thus the truth of the way and the how that things are including the “I is”.

In the wording of the title, the “I is” is contrasted with the “we are” with regard to what “we understand” and what “we bring” to the world in which we live. How we come to understand and interpret ourselves, the “I is”, is determined by the cultures and societies in which we happen to be born into i.e., the “we”. How we have come to understand what truth is and how we interpret and understand the world around us brings us to our own self-understanding and the questioning of that self-understanding. Our understanding and interpretation of the world will determine what we look up to and what we bow down to. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said: “Everything is full of gods”. Here in Bali, this statement is perfectly understandable. In the West, only a few people would have any comprehension of the statement. If there are no gods in things in the West, what has taken their place? A preliminary answer is: “we” have i.e., human beings as a species for it is “we” who create the things and bring them into being. To illustrate this, let’s look more closely at the areas of knowledge of history and the physical sciences or natural sciences.

We will begin our discussion of the natural sciences with two quotes from two of its greatest representatives: Albert Einstein, the founder of relativity physics, and Werner Heisenberg, the founder of the indeterminacy principle and quantum physics.

“Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.”-Albert Einstein

How we have come to understand and interpret the external world (predominantly in the West, but now worldwide) is through technology. To characterize what modern technology is, we can say that it is the disclosive looking that disposes of the things which it looks at. Technology is the framework that arranges things in a certain way, sees things in a certain way, and assigns things to a certain order: what we call mathematical projection. This is what Einstein means by stating that “physical concepts are free creations of the human mind”. This is what we “bring” to the things. It is a viewing of things in a certain way i.e., within the framework of the mathematical projection.

The looking (the theory) is our way of knowing which corresponds to the self-disclosure of things as belonging to a certain order that is determined from within the framework or mathematical projecting itself. From this looking, human beings see in things a certain disposition; the things belong to a certain order that is seen as appropriate to the things i.e. our areas of knowledge. The seeing of things within this frame provides the impetus to investigate the things in a certain manner. That manner is the calculable. Things are revealed as the calculable. (This is Heisenberg’s ‘manner of questioning’.) Modern technology is the disclosure of things in the natural sciences as subject to calculation. Modern technology sets science going; it is not a subsequent application of science and mathematics, the ‘equipment’ and ‘tools’ of technology. “Technology” is the outlook on things that science needs to get started, the manner of “questioning” that Heisenberg speaks of. Modern technology is the viewing/insight into the essence of things of our world as coherently calculable. Science disposes of the things into a certain calculable order . Again, it is what we ‘bring’ to the things. Science is the theory of the real, where the truth of the things that are, views and reveals those things as disposables.

Technology as our way of being in the world (for both the “I is” and the “we are”) has been accomplished by the determination of what is as ‘object’ and the judgement regarding what we conceive to be the essence of truth, or how things reveal themselves when understood as objects. This is the same for both natural science and history, as well as the human sciences. This technology grounds our age in that through a specific interpretation and understanding of what is (beings/things as objects) and through a specific comprehension of truth (as correspondence, correctness), it gives to our age the basis or ground (its history) upon which it has been and is essentially formed. This basis or grounding holds complete domination over all the things/beings that come to distinguish our age in that it provides the interpretations of what those things/beings are. It is our metaphysics as technology that forms the paradigm that determines how we perceive things/beings in our age and, thus, the methodologies of our sciences as well as our understanding of history. This paradigm is the understanding of the environment, including our whole being-in-the-world (shared knowledge, history) as object. Technology is the meta-physic of the age, the modern age.

History is different from the other Human Sciences, or indeed other sciences in general, in that the knowers or researchers cannot directly observe the past in the same way that the object of research can be observed and studied in the Natural and Human Sciences. We “bring” more of ourselves to our interpretations and understandings of history and its narratives than we do to the narratives of physics, chemistry, and biology, for instance.

“Historiology” is the study of history in general, the search for what its essence is, what its purpose is. It is said by some that the purpose of history is “prophecy”, the ability to predict the future and to prepare for that future. “Historiography”, that is, a study of the writings of history, is not a study of all of the past, but rather a study of those traces or artifacts that have been deemed relevant and meaningful by historians; and this choosing of artifacts and evidence is the most important aspect of the study of history as it attempts to aspire to “scientific research”. This “selection process” is primarily determined and driven by how the “I is” has been previously determined prior to the selection and classifying of artifacts, and it determines what will be “brought” to those artifacts. This is where the importance of “shared knowledge” or “historical knowledge” comes into play; what we call our “shared knowledge” is “history” or “historical knowledge”, and what we choose to select is determined beforehand by our culture.

In the USA, for example, the attempt to give its historical narrative from only a “white selection process” will not shed much light on the truth of that history, particularly its Civil War where more Americans died than in all the wars in which it has since become involved up to the present day. This denial of the history of African-Americans as part of its American history in itself is another indicator of the current American descent towards fascism and tyranny, which begins with the denial of the “otherness” to other human beings, the failure to give other human beings their “due”. (See the discussion in Title #3.)

In the modern, the distinction between the personal or the “I is” knowledge and understanding and our shared or historical knowledge (what we understand and bring to what is called ‘knowledge’) tends to lose its crucial significance due to our belief in progress. It appears that we tacitly assign the same cognitive status to both historical and personal knowledge and this impacts how we understand history and what we feel its importance is to our futures. What we deem to be “historical” first appears and coincides with ratio, calculation, and thought understood as ratio and calculation. What is chosen to be called “history” arises with a pre-determined understanding and definition of what human being is (the animale rationale) and this, in turn, determines what “will be held to account” in the selection of what is deemed to be important in relation to that understanding of human being.

The question of whether history is an art or a science is as old as “historiography” itself. Aristotle in his Poetics distinguishes between the poet and the historian, and the philosopher and the historian. The historian presents what has happened while the poet is concerned with the kind of things that might, or could, happen: “therefore poetry is more philosophic and more serious than history, for poetry states rather the universals, history however states the particulars”. (Poetics 1451a36-b11) The poet aspires to “prophecy”. But isn’t History’s chief purpose to provide guidance for future actions? History might be called pre-philosophic in that it concerns itself with particular human beings, particular cities, individual kingdoms, or empires, etc. The historian must choose between what she has determined to be the important and the unimportant things when writing her report, and in her choices illuminate the universal in the individual event so that the purpose of her recording is meant to be a possession for all times. The acquisition of knowledge is acquired through the universal. You have done much the same in your Exhibition (if you have done it correctly). The presentation is analogical.

The spirit of historicism (the understanding of time as history) permeates every aspect of every text and every approach to the study of and knowledge of the things of our world, and it is particularly present in the IB program. Plato viewed time as “the moving image of eternity”, an infinite accretion of “nows”; we tend to view time as the “progress” of the species towards ever greater perfection, much like how we view the latest models of our technological devices and gadgets as being more “fitted” towards accomplishing our ends and purposes. Our “evolution” and “adaptation”, we believe, are signs of our progress and growth as a species as we move towards ever greater “perfection”, both moral and physical. It is sometimes called “the ascent of man”, but such a concept of human being, as an “ascending” creature, is only possible within the technological world-view.

When we speak of History as an area of knowledge, we are speaking of “human history” not the history of rocks or plants or other objects that are also part of our world. These are covered in the Group 4 subjects as part of the Natural Sciences. History as an area of knowledge deals with human actions in time whether by individuals or communities so it is considered a “human science” for the most part, and the approach to the study of it is a “scientific” one. This attempted approach to the study of history is the same as that carried out in the Natural Sciences wherein history is looked at “objectively” and demands are made of it to give us its reasons. We seek for the “causes” of events. This approach has given rise to one of the complaints against history and how it is studied nowadays: we can only learn about the past; we cannot learn from it. Nor do we today feel that we need to. This dearth of knowledge of history is most in evidence in America, and this is not surprising as America is the heartland of technological dynamism.

6. Faced with a vast amount of information, how do we select what is significant for the acquisition of knowledge? Discuss with reference to the natural sciences and one other area of knowledge.

Title #6 is very similar to title #5, but it differs from that title in that it focuses on the “selection” process involved in the Natural Sciences and another area of knowledge in “the acquisition of knowledge”. In title #5 we noted that the selection process deals with the general or universal and from it comes the acquisition of knowledge i.e., an explanation is provided for the particular object under scrutiny through the application of the categories that correspond with the object.

In Title # 3 we discussed the meaning of acquisition. “Acquisition” means to ‘get’, ‘to grasp’, to take hold of something and take possession of it, to make it one’s own. It means ‘that which is responsible for the acquiring or getting and taking possession of something’. Our wonderful phrase in English, “I get it”, is an example of this grasping and taking possession of something. Usually it is the beginning of our understanding of something, our “shared knowledge” (historical knowledge) of something, and in the sciences this might be the theoretical knowledge that gets the research started. What we grasp or take hold of from others in our discourses with them is “opinion” not knowledge, whether it be from those in our communities who are called ‘experts’ or from those who dwell in the murky communities of QAnon. (The communities are ‘murky’ because they are ‘a-nonymous’ i.e., they have ‘no name’; and, thus, they have no desire to be brought to light, to be brought out into the open which the naming of things does by nature.) This acquiring of what we think is knowledge becomes part of ourselves and who we think we are; and this, in turn, will determine the actions that we will choose to take i.e., the ethics.

Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders of quantum physics, made the following statement regarding the current position of modern physics and the natural sciences in general:

In the natural sciences, the method of questioning which Heisenberg speaks of is determined by the mathematical projection which disposes of nature in itself. Because numbers don’t lie (or so we believe), they are projected towards nature in such a way that an “experiment” can be devised wherein results or outcomes can be determined in mathematical statements and the correctness of the numerical applications can be determined. If the results correspond to the mathematical projections, we believe we have acquired knowledge.

Physics constrains nature in its very way of posing nature, in its theoretical stance. Nature is required to report in a certain way and can only report in this way, and the way is determined by the principle of reason expressed in the mathematical projection. In modern atomic physics, unfortunately, Nature is not reporting according to our expectations and so we speak of the crisis of science as to what it conceives knowledge to be. We cannot have knowledge of nature in the way that we have traditionally understood knowledge and in the way that we have traditionally understood Nature. (See the quote from Heisenberg above).

The rigor of mathematical physical science is exactitude. Science cannot proceed randomly. All events, if they are at all to enter into representation as events of nature, must be defined beforehand as spatio-temporal magnitudes of motion. Such defining is accomplished through measuring, with the help of number and calculation. Mathematical research into nature is not exact because it calculates with precision; it must calculate in this way because its adherence to its object-sphere (the objects which it investigates, its selection process) has the character of exactitude. This is the heart of the selection process. In contrast, the Group 3 subjects, the Human Sciences, must be inexact in order to remain rigorous. A living thing can be grasped as a mass in motion, but then it is no longer apprehended as living. The projecting and securing of the object of study in the Human Sciences is of another kind and is much more difficult to execute than is the achieving of rigor in the “exact sciences” of the Group 4 subjects.

While there are some scientists who are genuinely motivated by the search for truth and the acquisition of knowledge in their “selection process” of what object they will study in their research, many are motivated by “vested interests” (where they will find the greatest source of funding) or social recognition and prestige, what may be called “Nobel Prize-itis”. In Book VI of his Republic, the Greek philosopher Plato stated that those who would receive the highest recognition in the Cave would be those who could predict what shadows would follow in the order that they were displayed on the walls of the Cave. On the other hand, some scientists often select their objects of study based on their personal curiosity and passion. They may be drawn to specific topics or phenomena that intrigue them intellectually or align with their expertise. Such curiosity and passion, however, is rarer in the sciences than it is in the Arts.

There are some scientists who consider the relevance and significance of the object of study within their field and the broader scientific community in general, and thus in their societies. They seek topics that address important questions, fill gaps in knowledge, or have practical applications and such scientists are usually looking at the recognition and prestige which could come from such studies. Researchers review existing scientific literature to understand the current state of knowledge in their field. They look for areas where further investigation is needed, unresolved questions, or opportunities for advancement.

The Human Sciences could be called “The Science of Humans”, the knowledge that we have already grounded with regard to what human being is and what human beings are, the starting points from which we can begin our journey towards understanding Human Being and human beings. This “science” originates in, has its grounds in, what we now call “biology”, “the science of” (“logy”) “life” (bios) or living things. The Human Sciences, Individuals and Societies, must take as their starting point the findings of the Natural Sciences. In order for the Human Sciences to begin their study, what human beings are and how they are must already be defined in some preliminary way through the findings of the Natural Sciences. This way of viewing is Western European in origin. Traditionally, it was known as “psychology”. Human beings, as the selected object of study of the Human Sciences, have been defined as animale rationale, the animal that is capable of reason which is demonstrated in its ability to give reasons . We believe our knowledge, and thus our being, comes from the “rendering of an account” of some thing based on the principle of reason: “I know be-cause”, the cause “is”, the cause “being”. We believe we attain the truth of some thing, knowledge of it, through the principle of reason, primarily through one of its sub-principles, cause and effect, and the logic upon which the principle of causality is based.

Two opposing views are present today and are related to the religions or faiths of both camps and determine the “selection process” of what aspect of human being will be the object of consideration: human beings are either the products of modification and chance (evolution) or human beings are “created” beings that have a purpose and destiny for their being. i.e. they have an essence. This clash shows itself in the views of human beings in the evolutionary camp as “ids” (“things”, “it”s) or “Selves”, or in the “created camp” in the view that human beings are not “their own”, as Socrates expresses so beautifully in the Platonic dialogue Phaedo and elsewhere.

Given the vast possibilities and potentialities of possible objects of study in the Human Sciences, practical considerations, such as the availability of resources, funding, time, and expertise, play a role in selecting the object of study among the many products of human activities. In the work environment, human beings are looked upon as “human resources”, for instance, an innocuous sounding term until thought is given to it.

Since the ultimate goal of the technological viewing of the world is cybernetics, the Human Sciences of most interest to the powerful will be those that aid in the unlimited mastery of human beings over other human beings. These will receive the funding and the ability to assess the necessary tools, equipment, or access to specific environments or specimens to conduct their research in the human sciences. It is this viewing, rooted in the technological, that causes me grave concerns about the advent and outcomes of artificial intelligence.

The saying “One mind is enough for a million hands” indicates what has become of the collaborative function that predominates within the bureaucracies and institutions created through technology and determines what the choice of object of study will be (if it can be said to be a choice) in the Human Sciences. Because scientists and researchers need to eat, funding agencies or institutions will also have specific priorities or grant programs that steer scientists towards particular areas of research.

In many instances, scientists will look to solve the many problems that technology itself has created, and so doing may consider the potential societal impact of their research that will give them the recognition and prestige that they desire. They may choose to study objects or phenomena that have practical implications, such as improving human mental health, since technology has resulted in mass meaninglessness for so many human beings (and the sense of “victimhood” which goes along with it). They may address environmental challenges such as the climate change caused primarily by the applications of technology’s equipment and techniques. In doing so, they may become involved in informing policy decisions through their knowledge and understanding of political science.

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World and Meaning in the Sefer Yetzirah

This is a supplemental writing to a larger “Commentary on the Sefer Yetzirah“. It contains thoughts relevant to an interpretation of the context of the Theory of Knowledge guide as given in its latest release, though those unfamiliar with the text of the Sefer Yetzirah or the Tarot may find some of its references difficult to follow. It may shed some light on the core themes as well as how knowledge, understanding and meaning are understood in the writings on this blog. It also sheds light on how I have come to understand the saying of Simone Weil: “Faith is the experience that the intelligence is illuminated by love.”

The concept of “world” used here is from the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger was an anti-Semite and a Nazi. Heidegger is the only great German philosopher who did not have a Protestant Christian background. Heidegger’s anti-Semitism was a product of the Roman Catholicism of the rural Germany in which he grew up. Heidegger’s “tragedy” is that he did not pay sufficient attention or give sufficient thought to the Delphic command to “know thyself”. Heidegger’s comments were that Jewish “rootlessness” caused them to be be, historically, without “world” i.e., that they were not human beings in the full sense but mere beasts. The Jews were not connected to the “blood and soil” that Heidegger saw as necessary to having a “world”. After the war, Heidegger was silent (for the most part) on the Shoah, but there are some notes he left behind that would seem to suggest that he was aware of the death camps and that he approved of them. What is being said about modern philosophy when its most consummate practitioner found appropriate political expression for his thought in the base inhumanity of National Socialism?

World and Meaning in the Sefer Yetzirah

Being the ‘perfect imperfection’, as human beings we desire to know the “reality” of whatever is, how it “is” as it is whatever it is, and the being of whatever has being. For the Sefer Yetzirah, as it was for the Greek philosopher Aristotle, “presence” (ousia) is what constitutes the reality of the things that are. Two questions predominate: what is the thing’s nature (essence)? what is its source (arche)?

In the Sefer Yetzirah, the study of the first question, the “what” question, is metaphysics. The study of the second question, the “how” question, is theology (“natural theology” as opposed to “revealed theology”, although these, too, are interrelated). For Aristotle, the nature of the being of the real is energeia. The ultimate source of the being of the real is “pure” or “perfect energeia”. Some thing is real if it is, and is some thing. For Aristotle, a thing’s form is its “ideal” way of being; it is what the thing is supposed to be.

We may compare Aristotle’s concept and that which is in the Sefer Yetzirah to the metaphor of the athlete and the ascetic: to athlon “the prize to be won in a contest”; athleo “to contend for the prize”. Contending for the prize requires that the athlete continuously work out in order to get in shape. Being an athlete requires being an ascetic, someone who constantly works to get in form or stay in shape. The Sefer Yetzirah is a training manual for the ascetic, and in this characteristic it shares a number of similarities with the writings of the Gnostics.

To apply the metaphor to the concept of “presence”: the only thing perfectly in shape is the divine, the ideal form. Everything else is striving for its ideal form or shape. To be real does not mean being in one’s form but becoming one’s form. Human beings are not yet in their finished form like a completed work of art. Human being is “still on the way” to a goal. With this view, “being real” can be still becoming one’s ideal form or already being it, either still moving to perfection (kinesis) or already at rest with one’s fully achieved self (stasis). In the Sefer Yetzirah, the ideal forms or shapes are the Sephirot, the Ten. The being on the way for human beings is the achievement of a unity or a harmony with the emanations of the divine that are the real as revealed through the Sephirot.

This unity or harmony is attained by human beings in a lived context within a world where things (such as the Sephirot) are encountered. A “world” is the matrix of understanding which is intelligibly structured by human interests and purposes. In this world of understanding (what is referred to as Binah in the Sephirot of the Sefer Yetzirah) beings become “meaningfully present” in the world of Yetzirah, one of the four worlds of the Sefer Yetzirah. Yetzirah means “formation”, although it is oftentimes translated as “creation”. In our modern context, it is the world dominated by that form of seeing, knowing and making that is called “technological”.

“The world worlds” i.e., contextualizes things, gives meaning to things found within it by providing the medium whereby they make sense. The meaningful and what it is is what appears in understanding and what allows it to appear. The meaningful is what shows up in the understanding of its meaning to human beings. “Presence” is not to be understood as a spatio-temporal “out there” but as what is “significant” to us, meaningful to us. The word parousia, so important in understanding the Sefer Yetzirah, is what means “near to our concerns though far away in distance”. This meaning is also to be considered with its other meanings of “between”, “alongside”.

What constitutes the meaning of things is the context of human involvement within which those things are met, the matrix of human purposes ordered to human interests and to human survival i.e., a world. This is the world of Yetzirah. Each human world discloses or unlocks the meanings that can occur to the things found within a world. A world discloses by providing a sense of possible relations in terms of which the things as they appear get their significance. In the language of the Sefer Yetzirah these are the ‘paths’ or ‘the gates’ that are travelled or met on the soul’s journey. (This is not to deny that the thing itself has its own telos or purpose outside of human involvement. This is dealt with in the discussion of the beauty of the world in another segment.)

Human beings live in many distinct worlds at the same time, but they are encompassed by the One world. A mother can make business calls from home while rocking her baby to sleep. Each world – her job, her parenting – has the function of providing the range of possibilities among the sense-making activities within its specific area.

You will note that meaning is to be derived in the lived world from the practical activities within that world. The Greeks understood this as praxis i.e., the activity of the parent, student, athlete, artist, and it is from these activities that one could attain “splendour” or “social prestige” through proficiency in the knowledge and skills required in those activities, the “know how”. “Know how” was called techne by the Greeks.

A world is any place wherein human beings live out their interests and purposes, the “relations” whereby the things within that domain get their meaning and significance. A world is a range of human possibilities in terms of which anything within that context can have significance. All such possibilities are teleologically (limited, possible of completion) ordered to human beings by way of fulfilling human purposes; however, in the perfection of their imperfection, human beings still hold a belief in the possibility of re-uniting with the Good wherein they will find their own “completion”. The world, the relational context which constitutes the meaning which is ordered by Love, is ordered to the final cause of human fulfillment that lets things in our everyday world make sense. This is the manner in which the relations between the Sephirot, the paths, and the gates are to be understood and interpreted in the Sefer Yetzirah. Meaning is given in the hierarchical order given to things in their relation to the Good. It is the Good which makes us give priority to our world of parenting over our world of business or the job, or to give priority to study rather than to merely whiling our time away in mindless pleasures and activities.

There is a fundamental difference between the meaningful thing and its meaning i.e., between any particular instance and its class, between a Sephirot and the thing or event it signifies, between the Tarot card and the experience it illuminates. Things do not come with their meanings built into them but get made as meaningful. Discursive meaning, meaning that is obtained by knowledge and reason and is able to be communicated to others, is a synthesis between distinct elements that are synthesized into a meaningful whole. Affirming that so and so is an athlete assumes that she does not exhaust the class “athlete” – she and the class are distinct – even though she can be identified, in a synthesis, as being a member of that class. In analyzing “world”, the structure of synthesizing and distinguishing (dianoia and diaresis) relates not only to the random acts of making sense (e.g., “She is an athlete” – an assertion), but also towards the world itself where such athletic acts are performed. Synthesis and differentiation (what Plato termed dianoia and diaresis) is the condition of all discursive sense-making. (See the discussion of Plato’s Divided Line in the Appendix to the “Commentary on the Sefer Yetzirah.”)

“World” is both static and dynamic, at rest and in motion. The world as static is the place of meaningfulness. Viewed dynamically, the world is the placing of things in meaning. This placing of things in meaning is done through the logos: contextualizing things within a set of possibilities that makes things able to be known and used in terms of their possibilities. “Being” as static is “presence”; taken as dynamic it is the “presenting” of things, the act of allowing things to be meaningfully present. This letting things be meaningfully present is done through Love acting as it does through sight which allows the things to be seen meaningfully.

The place where things become meaningful is in “the open that opens things up”. For Aristotle, “the soul” is the topos eidon, “the place where meaning shows up”. In the static world, it is the open field in which all forms of meaningfulness occur. (The Chariot card of the Tarot in the Rider-Waite deck, for example, is placed in an open field, outside the city.) In the dynamic world, this open area opens things up for possible use and appropriation i.e., makes them accessible and significant, lets them “be”. In Greek philosophy, the condition of “being open” indicates imperfection (the circle being the highest form and circular motion being higher than linear motion, for instance). Closure, self-closure upon one’s self would be the realization of all one’s possibilities, perfection, completion, accomplishment. This end is not possible for human beings in time. The meaning-giving-world is open rather than closed. It can never be fully known. Human being is always incomplete and finite.

Our “making sense” is always a partial synthesis for there is always an element of tension or “strife” in the area of “difference” and in the in-betweenness and mediation. Meaningfulness requires mediation (the logos) in order to make possible the relations that connect – these tools to that task, for instance. The pre-requisite for mediation is a medium, a field of possible relations within which the connections can be made. When static, the world understood as the logos, is the medium of intelligibility. In its dynamic state, the world as medium mediates tools and tasks (as well as subjects and predicates in language and reason) to each other with the result that sense or meaning occurs. The meaningfulness is never a perfect unity but always exists within a “strife” or tension.

According to Aristotle, what we understand as “freedom” is the power that “empowers” things in the static world to open themselves up to their various possibilities and potentialities. In the dynamic world, the “free” frees the things of the world and the power “empowers” their significance. In this world of Yetzirah, insofar as the world is one of relations between tools and their possible utility, language and number become the tools that are used to liberate those tools from their “just thereness” by revealing their suitability for fulfilling this or that purpose. For Plato, it is the Good that makes intelligibility possible, for it is the medium between the person’s ability to understand and the ability of the form’s eidos to be understood.

In the static presence of being, the opening is that region which clarifies things, the area of unfolding that lets them appear. Their emergence in this opening is a coming-forth or a stepping-forth. It is the light (love) which brings things to presence; but in order to do so, there must be an opening that allows the light in. In the allegory of the Cave in Plato, the opening is that of the Cave to the light of the Sun; the Cave itself is physis or Nature. In the dynamic state, the light brings clarity to things by letting light shine on them and show themselves as this or that. Aletheia or truth is the self-unfolding of the static world itself. The dynamic unfolding is the bringing of them into meaning. Physis is the world’s arising or self-emergence. In its dynamis, it is the emergence that brings things forth into the open where they can appear as this or that.

What is the source of meaningfulness? The open that opens things up through love (care, concern), the clearing that clarifies them, the ever-present presence that allows things their meaning is determined by what we think our “treasure” is. It can be the freedom that empowers (power itself for its own sake) or it can be the love of the beauty of “otherness” that enables the “letting be” of things to be as they are. In the Gospel of St. John, “In the beginning was the Word…” shows that Christ is both “world” and “word”, and as Love it is through Him that all things come into being. Things that do not come into being through Him are but “shadows”. One question that arises is whether or not the opening of world, the ontological movement of human beings that opens up the clearing for the parousia of being (Christ’s “presence” within the world), is a human doing or whether it is a receiving of a gift from outside of the human being, a gift from the God.

In Aristotle, kinesis or movement is “perfect” when it is a “self-possessed” movement: a thing is perfect or complete when it possesses its telos “wholeness”, “ownness” and it does so by being a finished work. Every entity is perfect to the degree that it has come into its own. The imperfect is what is still striving to fulfill its essence. We participate in a goal without fully possessing it. You speak some French even if not perfect French; you strive in your studies for “A’s” though you have not arrived there yet. Participation without full possession is deficient or a-teles, still coming into its own. Aristotle says “becoming is for the sake of Being”. The telos of the thing actively moves the thing. This is contrary to Plato who states that the Good is beyond Being and the Good is the telos of all Being and beings and moves all beings and Being.

Everything in Aristotle’s universe is either telic (reached its limits) or erotic (deprived, in need). When the thing is telic, it is wholly present informing and fulfilling the thing. When not, it is still drawing the thing from within, not to anything outside of itself, but towards its own fulfillment. Self-fulfillment is what Aristotle means by “the good”. The telos moves by being desired (the good). We are erotic creatures because self-fulfillment is what we long for. A moved thing is drawn on by its telos and human being is self-moved by its own desire for self-fulfillment. Human being is defined by its absence from perfection and is equally its erotic presence to perfection. Absence (relative but not absolute – deprivation – the desired telos) draws us to ourselves. Absence gives (lets be; allows for; is the source of) Presence. Our imperfect presence is the gift of the presence-bestowing-absence.

This ontological condition is shown in how we comport ourselves in our everyday dealings. Ari is studying for the IB Diploma: that is his raison d’etre at the moment. The Diploma is relatively absent yet but, as desired, gives Ari his presence, the world of meaning in which he currently lives, that of being an “IB Diploma student”. The absent Diploma which is desired but still unattained bestows presence. It gives world to Ari.

What kind of presence does human beings’ self-absence give? In the world of Sefer Yetzirah, becoming and perfection are paradoxically tied together. We may understand it in Plato’s words that “Time is the moving image of eternity”. The becoming that is Time is the absence of the perfection of God. God is perfectly perfect having always attained perfection being eternal. There is no becoming in God. God’s absence in His creation is to be understood as such: by withdrawing, God allows the beings to be in their presence. If there is no withdrawal, there are no beings since all would be perfectly perfect, a One. The telos for human beings then becomes unity with the Divine. In the world of Yetzirah, the wood for a table participates in its future perfection, but deficiently. It is still being moved towards its fulfillment, and once it reaches it, the movement of becoming a table will stop.

For human beings, the paradox expresses itself in that we are the perfectly imperfect creature in our incompleteness. Human beings can never attain completeness or perfection in the future because human beings are finite creatures i.e., in Time. Human being is always becoming a this or a that, yet it is always human being. It is itself “a moving image of eternity”. The difference between a table and a human being is that a table’s becoming will cease once the construction reaches its goal, whereas human beings’ becoming is directed toward the Good itself. The question is always whether or not there is such an end or whether human beings’ becoming is an end in itself. Whereas God is always whole and perfect and in a state of rest, his Creation is whole and perfect in its state of infinite motion. Human being is going nowhere because it is always where it is supposed to be, in its state of coming-into-its-own. For the Sefer Yetzirah, Adam is the first human being because he was the first being capable of discourse. Human being is neither progress over time (as in change of place, quality or quantity i.e., “evolution”), nor ontological transformation into something it essentially was not before (as in the case of substantial change). Human beings’ perfection is to be imperfect.

For the Greeks, reality is not only a matter of perfection (coming-into-one’s-own) but also a matter of “showing forth” and “appearing” – being present and accessible. Being and truth are interchangeable. The greater the thing’s degree of being, the greater its degree of meaningfulness in the double sense of its ability to know itself and others and to be known by itself and others. This “knowability” is the danger tied to “social prestige” as the illusion when the Good is mistaken and understood as Necessity.

Meaningfulness comes in different degrees at different levels of perfection. Human being is only partially knowing and knowable. For Aristotle, knowing is being one with that which is known. The erotic desire for the good is bestowed by its absence. For imperfect human beings, the degree of their presence to the relatively absent telos gives them their measure of knowing and knowability. The relatively absent goal, to the degree that it is desired, gives the moving entity its degree of ability to make sense of things. Human beings know mediately by bonding with the knowable in a matrix of mediating relationships. Human being makes sense of itself and others only by way of world (logos).

Insofar as human beings are imperfect, needing beings, that need is a longing and a desire for belonging even if there is nothing to belong to and no some thing else to long for. Human being (best depicted in the Tarot card The Chariot) is held in the strife between difference and synthesis, and human being is this strife. Human being is world – logos the zoon logon echon the living being capable of speech, thought. Eros pulls human being into its openness. As drawn out and opened up by its own need, its imperfection, human being frees things from the area of unintelligibility into the clearing and clarifies them, and the unifying of difference draws them into meaningful entities. When human being appears as what it is, it is not just the place where meaning appears but the very appearing of appearance, and is human being is capable of apprehending the source of meaning: the aitia, arche, and logos – the cause of, source of, and reason for appearance in the first place. This is its salvation. We are moved by eros (not ourselves: it is done to us) and in this moving world occurs. We are the always near but never arriving being.

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Prescribed Titles May 2022

Thoughts on the latest IB TOK Prescribed Essay Titles May 2022

The TOK essay provides you with an opportunity to become engaged in thinking and reflection. What are outlined below are some strategies and suggestions, prompts and prods, questions and possible responses only for deconstructing the TOK titles as they have been given. They should be used alongside the discussions that you will carry out with your peers and teachers during the process of constructing your essay. The TOK essay is a challenging assignment at any time but especially now given the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic and the various learning environments that are a result of that pandemic.

The notes here are intended to guide you towards a thoughtful, personal response to the prescribed titles posed. They are not to be considered as an answer let alone the answer to the question(s) posed by the title and they should only be used to help provide you with another perspective to the ones given to you in the titles and from your own TOK class discussions and research. You need to remember that most of your examiners have been educated in the logical positivist schools of Anglo-America and this education and its social contexts pre-determines their predilection to view the world as they do and to understand the basic concepts as they do. The TOK course itself is a product of this logical positivism though efforts are being made to make it more universally embracing.

My experience has been that candidates whose examples match those to be found on TOK “help” sites (and this is another of those TOK help sites) struggle to demonstrate a mastery of the knowledge claims and knowledge questions contained in the examples. The best essays carry a trace of the struggle that is the journey on the path to thinking. Many examiners state that in the very best essays they read, they can visualize the individual who has thought through them sitting opposite to them. To reflect this struggle in your essay is your goal.

Remember to include sufficient TOK content in your essay. When you have completed your essay, ask yourself if it could have been written by someone who had not participated in the TOK course. If the answer to that question is “yes”, then you do not have sufficient TOK content in your essay. Also, follow the basic format requirements of the assignment: 1600 words, 12-point font, etc. Have the assessment rubric ready-to-hand and use it to guide you in the structuring of your paper.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/0B-8nWwYRUyV6bDdXZ01POFFqVlU/edit?resourcekey=0-n1jVSy4hexafvfYZdPcW8A#slide=id.p4

A sine qua non: the opinions expressed here are entirely my own and do not represent those of any organization or collective of any kind.

Can there be knowledge that is independent of culture? Discuss with reference to mathematics and one other area of knowledge?

We are asked in Title #1 to consider whether there is a knowledge which transcends culture, a knowledge free from the limitations or biases that might be seen in the “values” that a particular culture esteems most highly. We are asked to consider mathematics as the one area of knowledge that appears to transcend cultures since a man working in Moscow, Idaho will have no problems collaborating with a woman who researches in Moscow, Russia on the same topic of research since mathematics is perceived as a “universal language”. It might be better, perhaps, to ask whether there is a mode or manner of knowing that will provide a knowledge for us that is beyond the limits of change that is brought about by becoming (time) and history, what is properly called “historicism”.

“Knowledge” is a product (something that is brought forth) of and through human beings; and individual human beings are the product, or what is brought forth, of and through the societies, communities or “cultures” they happen to inhabit at any given time. Being products of these cultures, they will value or esteem what their particular culture holds most highly or most dear. What a culture values most highly will be based upon or grounded in what that culture has determined is most necessary to its “security” and permanence. The culture’s need for security and permanence decides in advance what the individuals in that culture think experience is and what the things about them are. For us in TOK, this is central to how we understand and interpret our Core Theme of “knowers and what is known”.

Title #1 asks what is considered “knowledge” and asks you to look specifically at mathematics and one other area of knowledge. This is an appropriate question, since in technological societies algebraic calculation is esteemed or valued most highly by those various “cultures” and societies. (I put “cultures” in scare quotes because there is only one “culture” in technological societies since technology is, ultimately, an homogenizing force. That is the point of the example of the man and woman collaborating in different Moscows: they are able to do so because they are working in the same “culture”).

The word “culture” was first used by the Roman orator Cicero where he spoke of “the cultivation of the soul”, the perfection of human beings, what we today would call “empowerment”. Culture is related to the word “cultivate”, to the gathering and securing of a place, to the tilling of it, to being responsible for it, to responding to it, and to attending to it caringly. In the Biology lab, we speak of a “bacteria culture”. Care and its attendant concepts would be a central category or predicate of any discussion of our Core Theme in our attempts to describe who we are as human beings. We are the beings who “care” for things.

The concept of what we mean by “culture” today is relatively new. It came to prominence in the 18th and 19th centuries in Germany, although today it is ubiquitous or commonplace. Today we speak of “ancient Greek culture”, but this is erroneous for the Greeks had no “culture”. Their closest word to our concept of “culture” would be ethos from which we get our word “ethical”. The ethical has to do with actions, with doing something, what the Greeks called praxis, and this ethos was lived out in the polis or the “shared community”. We sometimes call a culture the sum of all the thoughts and actions of the human beings who compose it.

Why does a culture need to secure itself? Because a culture involves the activities that engage the human beings within it, there must be some purpose or goal that provides the ground to those activities, something which gives those activities meaning and stability. The concept of “culture” was necessary because of the relativism that arose with the arrival of historicism. Is there a knowledge that is independent of historicism i.e. a knowledge beyond an historical period, geographical place, localized cultures which in turn are used to give context to theories, stories and narratives, and other interpretations of our being-in-the-world from within those cultures?

The issues present in Title #1 are not new. They have been with us since human beings began questioning and thinking about the world we live in. Historically, the nominalist view thought that universals or general ideas were merely “names” without any corresponding reality or relation to particular objects. Properties, numbers, sets or the mathematical itself were considered merely a way or mode of considering the things that exist and, therefore, they were arbitrary and had no correspondence to the “real world”. It took no less an effort than Immanuel Kant’s three great Critiques: Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of Judgement to overcome this view, and Kant did so through showing how the mathematical was related to nature and to objects in the world around us. The mathematical was embedded in the objects of Nature.

In the AOK Mathematics, the title invites us to consider whether mathematics was “discovered” or “invented”. Until the thinking of the French philosopher Rousseau, reason (upon which the mathematical and mathematics are based) was considered ahistorical and beyond or independent of any cultural limitations such as time and place, etc. After all, it was reason which determined what human beings are ( the animal rationale: the being capable of reason ) and thus determined and made what became called “culture” possible. Reason was prior to mathematics and culture; and the principle of reason (nihil est sine ratione: nothing is without (a) reason) was the ground of both mathematics and culture. If mathematics was “discovered”, it would be beyond the limitations of any particular culture. If mathematics was “invented”, then it would be a product of those particular cultures wherein and from whence it arose. Today, of course, scientists are able to collaborate on projects without regard to the culture in which they are dwelling (or can they? Do they not “dwell” within the same “culture”?). Some research on your part should provide you with examples of the discoveries of the origins of mathematics which occurred simultaneously in China, India and Greece and would seem to suggest that mathematics is not a product of a culture but is more a determiner of what a culture would become. (The Greeks, for instance, rejected Babylonian algebra as being “unnatural” for them.)

Today, we rely on the mathematics of finite calculus and algebra. These define what knowledge is for us. Nature is understood as that which can be measured with exactitude, and through such measurements its “what”, “how”, and “why” can be determined through reason. Our culture esteems mathematical reason, for through it our control over nature (our “knowledge”) provides us with the power to secure our human being-in-the-world (our “culture”) through our sense of caring (concern) and responsibility. Mathematical science is a product of technology , that is, it is a predicate of technology, not vice versa as we commonly think. (See the writings on technology on other pages of this site.) Technology will be used by our culture to solve the problems that technology itself has brought about (climate change, pollution resulting from the use of fossil fuels, etc.).

When considering the Arts as an AOK relating to this title, one does not have to look far to see that the Arts play a secondary role in the estimations of value in our modern cultures. Arts are for our entertainment, amusement, or to provide us with “experiences” in our leisure hours. They help us to pleasantly pass the time when we are not engaged in the more “serious” pursuits that our cultures reward.

Whenever I ask a group of young people if they agree that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the usual response is a one hundred percent hands raised. When I follow up the question with “what then is beholding”, the perplexed looks begin. The more brave will try to give a Cartesian-inspired response along the lines of “subject/object” and of the “subjective” representations of the evaluations of the work of art as an object and the “subjective” values deriving from matters of taste. It is no co-incidence that judgements in the Arts and their truth became “subjective” along with the arrival of the “objective” considerations of algebraic calculus in mathematical physics. Truth lies in the domain of mathematical calculus, not in the works produced by artists. Artistic judgement is now called “the philosophy of aesthetics”. The separation of human beings and their actions (what we understand as their “cultures” and “histories”) from those of nature (Descartes’ concept of the Self as Ego cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am) resulted in human beings being placed at the centre, as the apotheosis of nature, as makers of their own destinies and histories. This was the great paradigm shift of Occidental human beings and it began around the time of the Renaissance and found its completion in the Age of Reason. Human beings became “creators” unlike the “makers” or technites/technes as the Greeks understood them.

We can rephrase our earlier question regarding mathematics by asking: “Is great art discovered or invented?” The most probable response (because it is the easier response) will be that great art is invented or created. Does great art’s truth lie beyond (or is it independent of) the culture of which it is a product?” If great art is “invented”, then it is clearly a product of its time and place, its social contexts, etc. If it is “discovered”, from where does it originate? We often hear of the “timelessness of great art”. And when the artists themselves are asked about their art, they are at many times, at a loss for words to explain it and sometimes refer to mystical or other sources such as “muses” or “possession”, other “spirits” or “daemons”. They are usually not at a loss for words, however, when they speak of their techniques when engaging in bringing forth their works. This suggests that the truth of art and art itself (and I am only speaking of great art here) lies independent of and beyond the culture of which the artist as an individual is a product.

Here in Bali where I live, the people do homage to their gods for the many gifts that the gods have bestowed on them. Those of us from the West and from the technological societies of the East find it “silly” or “superstitious” that the Balinese would pay homage to their gods rather than to Honda, Toyota or Yamaha for the making of their motorcycles and their automobiles. But for the Balinese, it is not Toyota or Honda that have “created” their motorcycles and cars. Motorcycles and automobiles were always already there as gifts from the gods, waiting for “inspired” human beings to “discover”, or more precisely, to “uncover” them and bring them out into the “open”.

2. To what extent do you agree with the claim that “there’s a world of difference between truth and facts“? (Maya Angelou) Answer with reference to two areas of knowledge.

Title #2 asks for a personal response from you: do you agree with the claim that there is a world of difference between truth and facts and to what extent i.e. totally? partially? not at all? So the title is not looking for an academic scholarly recitation on the distinction between “truth” and “facts” (if indeed there is any) but rather, a personal response filled with personal examples (unless, of course, you happen to have made those scholarly opinions on truth and facts “your own”). These notes and thoughts to follow may not be helpful to you in this regard, but the hope held here is that they may prod you along the path to thinking about a possible response to the topic.

Truth is usually discussed from within three main theories: the correspondence theory, the coherence theory, and the pragmatic theory. The correspondence and coherence theories of truth were introduced into Western thinking through the thought of Aristotle and rely basically on the principles of logic. The pragmatic theory of truth finds its origins in the sophist Protagoras (“man is the measure of all things”) and gains further development in the thinking of British and American empiricists and finds its foundations in the Greek word pragma or practical, “material”, concrete things. If you have read any of the other writings on this blog, you will probably have noted that I subscribe to the original meaning of the word “truth” as it is found in the Greeks: aletheia, which means “to uncover”, “to reveal”, “to unconceal”, “to bring out into the open so that something may show itself”, “to retrieve from forgottenness”. This original meaning of the word “truth” is broader and encompasses the other main theories within it. No matter what your response to this topic, your essay will have to contain elements of the correspondence, coherence and pragmatic theories of truth if it is to be successful. Your essay will “bring forth and show” your propositions and assertions (correspondence), your evidence (coherence) and your judgements (pragmatic) regarding the question asked and demonstrate or show your knowledge of the terms used.

What is a “fact” and are there facts that stand alone outside of the systems which create them? Here in Bali, the date on the Balinese calendar posted on my wall is much different than the date and time shown on my computer. The Balinese calendar is a lunar calendar; the computer’s calendar is a solar one. Both calendars are correct but they express different facts. The Balinese calendar shows me when I can anticipate various religious activities to occur here; the solar calendar lets me know when, for instance, the TOK essay titles will be released. The two calendars reference two distinct worlds. Both calendars express “truths” in that they are a “showing forth” of time; it is the same time. Both calendars are attempts to understand what time is. We commonly view time as a series of consecutive “nows” which can be measured with exactitude in discrete mathematical units. We do the same with space. But what time and space are in themselves (their “truth”) remains a mystery for us, hidden from us. The use of mathematics and the facts which it reveals about the nature of ourselves and our worlds (and the world) is the reason why it is so highly valued among technological cultures. The spontaneity of our freedom is made greater through our control and commandeering of the spontaneity of nature.

We as human beings inhabit a number of different “worlds” simultaneously. You inhabit the world of being a student or a teacher; you are a mother or a father, a son or a daughter, a friend or lover in another “world”; you may have a number of different avatars in the virtual “worlds” you may inhabit; you may be a sportsperson, or musician, or inhabit some other “world” in your hobbies. Each of these worlds contain their own facts which are illuminated for you by their “truths”.

In the AOK Human Sciences, a phenomenon that should be of great concern is the assault on truth that is occurring among the populist movements of both Europe and North America, something which the African-American poet and novelist, Maya Angelou, would be greatly concerned about since truth, knowledge and freedom would be inextricably linked for her. The distinction between North American populism and its European counterpart is in the fact that European populism is based on “blood and father/motherland” while North American populism directs its goals to more abstract concepts such as “liberty, justice and freedom”, etc. Europeans and Asians, for the most part, are indigenous or autochthonous peoples: they have belonged to the “father/motherland” from before the time of making the land their own in their “conscious” memory. North Americans are not so. For North Americans, there has always been an historical awareness of making the land their own since they have no history from before the age of progress.

The North American making of the land their own began with the genocide of its Native Peoples, and in the USA, the establishment of the institution of slavery among its white landholders. The truth of these facts is not written in many of their historical narratives (which have been written primarily by white males, though this is changing). The desire to include critical race theory in the curriculum of its schools is divisive for many in the white society which does not want to know itself and which is finding itself becoming a minority and feels itself under threat. North American history texts are filled with facts, but truth is very much lacking in most cases.

North American populists are searching for the roots that they have never had. The search appears to be focusing on what they believe are their “roots” in European fascism where race, “patriotism”, and the need for a scapegoat for their perceived ills (African Americans, later immigrants, any “other” perceived as “alien’) are what they use to give their threatened identities some meaning. This sense of threat is an indication of their underlying weakness. The threat that North American whites feel is the loss of security in their own homeland (their “culture”, if you like), and they are willing to defend themselves against this perceived threat through the use of violence with the many weapons they have ready-to-hand. Any viewing of “right wing” media and its topics of discussion will reveal their concerns. The phenomenon of “alternative facts” is not directed at a desire for truth, however, but a desire for power even if this must be achieved through falsehood. (The Italian political philosopher, Machiavelli, once said that princes gain power through fraud.)

Truth as understood by the Greeks also relates to the individual human being as “one who does not hide or forget”. It referred to a person of candour and frankness, someone who does not dissemble or lie when being with others. It is the person who is “free” to be the person that they are (something that seems to be waning in the worlds of our social media today). Truth is a product of our world: it is given to us; falsehood is the product of human being-in-the-world. The world does not lie; it hides. The denial of truth destroys something essential to our humanity and makes us become more bestial.

Within the Arts as an AOK there is, literally, a world of difference between the truths expressed through the Arts and the facts and their truths given to us through our scientific interpretations of the world understood as nature. Scientific research looks for the “fixing of facts” in a world of constant change. This “solidification” of what are called “facts” is provided by our ability to give an explanation and evidence of the “what” and “how” of things (objects) so that they can be secured, fixed, and commandeered to meet whatever ends or goals that we may have in mind. Our age and culture is grounded through a specific interpretation of what is as objects (facts) and through specific comprehensions of truth (correspondence, coherence, pragmatic), and these grounds have come to determine our age as the technological age. This is the reality of our age; the “world” of our age.

The painting by Van Gogh shown here (one of his many “Sunflowers” paintings) is titled with the chemical compounds that compose Van Gogh’s yellow paint. A chemist familiar with the compositions of the paints would recognize this “fact”, but knowing this fact would not bring her anywhere nearer to the painting’s truth, for its truth lies elsewhere, literally, in another world than that of her laboratory. The chemical composition of the paint, its “fact” does reveal something about the painting, but its truth lies elsewhere. The chemist herself, as a human being, not only occupies the world of her laboratory. She also dwells within a number of other worlds, one of which may be where the beauty of the truth of the painting of the “Sunflowers” enriches her life and gives to her a greater sense of her humanity. To dwell only within the world of the facts of her science would be akin to madness.

3. Is there solid justification for regarding knowledge in the natural sciences more highly than knowledge in another area of knowledge? Discuss with reference to the natural sciences and one other area of knowledge.

To “regard” something is to show “care and concern” for that thing. We send our “best regards” to our near and dear ones when we contact them in order to show our care and concern for them. Since we modern human beings define our “essence”, what we are, as “freedom”, the knowledge that enhances and secures that freedom will be held in the highest regard i.e. it will be given our greatest care and concern (attention) and will be “valued” and esteemed most highly. The knowledge which we have gained from the natural sciences, the knowledge that controls and commandeers the chance brought about by nature’s spontaneity, increases our own spontaneity understood as “freedom”.

The two Greek words techne and logos have been combined by moderns into the one word technology, and this one word captures the knowing (the knowledge) that is present in the sciences (logos) with the making (techne) that is the application of those sciences in the applied and mechanistic arts. Modern medicine, for example, is one area where the discoveries of the natural sciences are applied through the art of healing. Technology is our way of being-in-the-world and through it we demonstrate our care and concern for “life”.

To look at an immediate example of what is being said here: nature has demonstrated its spontaneity with the arrival of the Covid 19 virus and its many mutations, and this virus has limited the spontaneity and freedom of human beings in obvious ways. Through the knowledge that we have from the natural sciences, we have been able to somewhat control nature’s spontaneity through the development of vaccines even though the virus continues to mutate. The ability to secure our freedom (our “lives”, in this case) is the reason why the knowledge that we get from the natural sciences is most highly valued in our technological societies.

This esteeming of the knowledge gained from the natural sciences comes at a price, however, and this price may be seen and understood in the use of the words “solid justification” in the title. Science is “the theory of the real”. In modernity, theory is the viewing of the real, how the real is seen and appropriated, how the world is taken into ourselves by way of experience. Science sets upon the real to set itself up as theory and to set the real up as a surveyable, calculable series of causes. What comes to presence through the viewing is the real, and science throughout its history has been transformed into the theory that entraps the real and secures its objectness, makes it come to a stand, “fixed”, “solid”, “permanent”. Theory makes secure a region of the real. Every new phenomenon emerging within an area of science (physics, chemistry, biology and even the Human Sciences) is refined to the point that it can be defined and fit into the standardized objective coherence of the theory. It becomes “solid”, “fixed” in other words. It is not permitted to change.

“Solid justification” is the requirement of the principle of sufficient reason necessitating that reasons be rendered to others for assertions made regarding the “reality” or “facts” of an object, situation or condition. Human beings are the “rational animals”; to be “irrational” is, by definition, to be less than human, to be inhumane. We believe that we can “justify” our scientific observations of the world through mathematical calculation, and from these calculations make “predictions” of events that will occur in the future. It is this “pre-dictive” power (lit. before “speech”, before the handing over to others) that gives calculative reasoning its dominance since the predictive power provides security and certainty with regard to the way things are. This security and certainty enhances our “preservation of life” and allows us to empower ourselves towards “enhancement of life” through a recognition of life’s potentialities in our freedom. By predicting and controlling nature’s spontaneity, our freedom is enhanced and our possibilities widened.

To “pre-dict” is to make an assertion prior to that speech which renders reasons. When the predictions or results are justified through reason, we believe that we have achieved a correspondence between our minds and the objects, conditions or situations under observation and questioning. To justify is to indicate “that which is responsible for” the “correctness” of the “judgement” made in the assertion. As the philosopher Kant indicated, “Judgement is the seat of truth”, or that upon which truth is grounded or based. “Reasons” bring that which is being spoken about to light and justifies them. Without such reasons, the thing being spoken about remains in the dark, hidden. “Evidence”, or that which is experienced through sight primarily, must be provided and the correspondence between that which is “experienced”, the evidence and the thing, situation or condition must correspond. For example, reasons provide the relations between a criminal and his crime and “justifies” the assertion of guilt. When one asserts a position that Democrats in the USA are really lizard-like aliens preying on children for their blood (just one of many QAnon beliefs) evidence must be provided for making such a statement. When one asserts that “the Presidential election was stolen”, one must provide corresponding evidence to show that that was indeed the case. Believing that a situation or condition is the case is not the same as “justifying” that belief, as many courts throughout the USA have asserted. Conspiracy theorists, in general, lack the corresponding evidence and reasons for their assertions to be taken as true. Their beliefs are irrational, without reasons.

One of the consequences of the type of “justification” required by reason is, some believe, not possible when making assertions about morals or ethics because moral judgements are “values” and these must be distinguished from assertions made about what we call “facts”: i.e. there are no “moral facts” because morals are ephemeral, lacking solidity, and fixity and thus without the possibility of justification. “Values” are what we human beings create through our freedom and willing in the world and through our determination of what things are and how they are and what we think they should be. This separation of statements or assertions of fact from statements or assertions of value is known as the “fact-value” distinction and it is the dominant principle or position in every Human Science. Efforts have been made to make morals subject to the same calculations that are used for scientific evidence such as Bentham’s utilitarianism, “the greatest happiness for the greatest number”, and the use of statistics is the primary language that the Human Sciences use to reveal their “truths”.

To “justify” clearly has relations to its root word “justice”. How does our understanding of the word “justice” relate to justifying and justification? With the modern view of what human beings are given to us by the philosophers Descartes and Kant, human being is that being before whom all other beings are brought before and required to give their reasons for being what they are as beings. This is the domineering, commanding stance of human being before whom all other beings are brought before and “justified” as to what they are as beings. This “justification” is that which is responsible for something being defined as what it is, how it stands in its truth. To justify is to argue for or defend. Our reasons for justifying our mathematical calculations, for instance, are that these calculations give the best explanation of our observations and experiences (experiments).

Our calculations secure our standing in our being-in-the-world and provide the potential for the all-important “life enhancing” or “quality of life” activities that are the purposes and ends of our arts, what we have come to call our “culture”. It is our calculations that give us our domination and control, our mastery of nature; and their “correctness” is demonstrated in the predictability of outcomes. There is a “justification” provided by the mind’s correspondence to the object in question and in the mind’s representations of that object in the mathematical. These justifications are shared in the language of the principle of reason through the belief in the schemata of the technological framing of the things in this world i.e. the world and its beings (things) understood as object. In many parts of the world, there is a turning away from the facts so that we may affirm what is contradicted by the experience of everyday living (climate change denial, for instance, or the need to live in an alternative reality).

In the modern age, beauty has been radically subjectivized so that we have our belief that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. In all of our scientific explanations of things, we are required to discount the “other” as beautiful because the beautiful is not calculable (try as we may to do so). “Love” is consent to the fact of authentic “otherness”: we love otherness not because it is other but because it is beautiful. But what happens to “love” in a world dominated by the view that the freedom brought about through the objectivication of the things that are becomes most highly valued? The Greek philosopher, Plato, places the tyrant (Shakespeare’s Macbeth, for example, but the list could include all of the other autocrats currently parading or ‘strutting and fretting’ around the world’s stage) as the worst human being because in his self-serving, “otherness” has completely disappeared for him.

What I am trying to say here is that the world before us is beautiful and our appropriate response to it is love. However over time, trust in the world has been replaced with doubt as the methodological pre-requisite for an exact science. If we confine ourselves to anything simply as an object, it cannot be loved as beautiful (reflect on the example of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in title #2). The key difficulty is that in loving the beauty of the world as it is (and esteeming it most highly), how does this affect the desire to change it? With regard to our title, what is being maintained here is that one knows more about something by loving it, and it should be this love that should be most highly esteemed because it should determine our understanding of the world. In our age, the knowledge gained in the natural sciences through the principle of reason is exalted above understanding and this is the reversal of the world shown to us in Plato’s Cave.

4. How do historians and human scientists give knowledge meaning through the telling of stories? Discuss with reference to history and the human sciences.

Title #4 is very restrictive in the parameters of its requirements: you are required to confine yourself to the areas of knowledge of history and the human sciences. You will also have to consider what “meaning” is and how it might be understood, and what is meant by “the telling of stories”.

“Meaning” is that knowledge that is handed over to others. It is “meaningful”; it is something requiring concern and care to a greater or lesser degree. It is that knowledge that is intended to be conveyed to another through the use of language, whether that language be in words or in numbers, symbols or signs. Meaning ascribes to something its “de-finition”, its limits or its boundaries so that it may be distinguished from something else which is not intended. The Greeks identified human being as the zoon logon echon, that animal that is capable of speech and thus that animal that is capable of conveying meaning through language. We constantly tell each other stories about our experiences. This telling of stories is the giving of an account, whether it be what we did over the weekend or our view of what the meaning of life is.

Since their inceptions, both History and the Human Sciences have aspired to the exactitude and “truth” that is given to us in the knowledge of our Natural Sciences because the knowledge given to us in the Natural Sciences is that which is most highly valued. This aspiration realizes itself in History and the Human Sciences in what is called “research” as the most appropriate method in the approach to what is called knowledge. The Natural Sciences deal with the objects of nature, those objects which come to presence in their own ways from out of themselves, and those objects tend to remain “fixed” and can be accounted for as masses in motion in time and space for the most part. These movements of coming to presence can be accounted for mathematically through the use of axioms, principles, laws and theories. This is how they are accounted for.

In History, the object of study is not present before us. It is in the past and must somehow be brought to presence, to the present, through a way of viewing (theory) and the selection of either appropriate artefacts or other evidence that will support the assertions or propositions put forward. In the way of viewing, the way of how the first principles have been pre-determined, the objects of History become fixed and can be researched in such a way that what we call knowledge can result. The objects that are studied in the Human Sciences are in constant motion. They, too, must be fixed so that statements/assertions can be made about them. This fixing comes about in the form of statistics which provide the “evidence” to support the assertions that are made based on the first principles that are used.

Whether the world is accounted for through language or mathematics, it must necessarily be accounted for. The giving of an account is the interpretation that provides meaning, that which makes something meaningful. The giving of an account is a narrative, the telling of a story. We must remove from our minds the fossilized conception of a “story” being a “fiction”. Accounts or stories may be simple or complex. A recipe is an account of how to bake a cake. Its step-by-step algorithm when followed correctly will result in the bringing to presence of the end product: a cake. The accounts of History or the Human Sciences, likewise though more complex, are stories which will bring about end results that are meaningful to the historian and the social scientist and their audience. The first principles will determine what will be chosen and how the stories will be told, the methodology. A difficulty in the stories told, for instance, is that many women complain that the stories are told by men, particularly white men for the most part.

History is different from the other Human Sciences, or indeed other sciences in general, in that the seekers of knowledge or researchers cannot directly observe the past in the same way that the object of research can be observed and studied in the Natural Sciences. How the past is to be viewed must be decided on beforehand. “Historiology” is the study of history in general, the search for what its essence is, what its purpose is. “Historiography”, that is, a study of the writings of history, is not a study of all of the past, but rather a study of those traces or artifacts that have been deemed relevant and meaningful by historians; and this choosing of artefacts and evidence is the most important aspect of the study of history as it attempts to aspire to “scientific research”. This is where the importance of “shared knowledge” comes into play: what we call our “shared knowledge” is “history”, and what artefacts we choose to select and what stories we decide to tell are determined beforehand by our culture.

Our ways of knowing are the manners in which we establish a relation between ourselves and our worlds, our communities, and to the things that we encounter in the world about us. One of these ways of relating is through Memory. With Memory, we must also keep in mind “forgetting” and what is forgotten or what is chosen to be forgotten, for memory and forgottenness go hand in hand.

“To forget” in Greek is lethe. It is the opposite of aletheia or the Greek word for “truth” or “a bringing to presence”. To bring something to presence, to bring something to mind, to “regard it” with care and concern, is “truth”. It is a “bringing things to light”. Lethe is to cast something into oblivion, into darkness, or that the something is “not present” for us. In Greek mythology, one must first drink of the river Lethe after death in order to be able to cross over in Charon’s boat into the underworld; remembering is essential to being human and to its “life”. To be good at rote learning, to remember facts and dates or mathematical formulas, has nothing to do with Memory as a way of knowing. Memory is more akin to “commemoration” and is part of what distinguishes human beings from other animals; we are able to “commemorate”; other animals cannot. This is why Memory is an essential part of history, and its elements of story telling for History must take the form of “narrative”, a story.

In the oral traditions prior to the arrival of written narratives and stories, Memory was seen as “saving” and “preserving” the story, but this saving and preserving also gave the story “meaning” by its being supported as plausible. The Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, saw philosophy as more akin to poetry than to science. Both History and the Human Sciences attempt to find their truth through the methodology of scientific research and its first principles, but in the search for meaning and preserving both must resort to stories or the telling of narratives. This is especially so in the USA where there is no collective Memory from before the Age of Progress.

What we call History as an object of study appears simultaneously with ratio, calculation, thought. Thucydides, the first historian of the West, wished in his History of the Peloponnesian War, to give an account of the war without the “adornments and embellishments of the poets” (Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War, for instance) so that he could arrive at his universal main theme: an understanding of the essence of war, all wars. He wished to go from the particular to the universal such as you attempted to do in your Exhibition. The height of Thucydides’ History, however, is “Pericles’ Funeral Oration” and it is a fiction: it is not a verbatim of the actual speech. It was written by Thucydides himself. Some questions could be: does Thucydides’ History as an account of the Peloponnesian War come closer to the essence of war, the universal, than does Homer’s Iliad? Does an historian aspire to make myth? If Josef Stalin is correct in his statement “Only the winners get to write the history”, are not all historians engaged in writing myth (at best) or propaganda (at their worst)? Are modern historical accounts “science” or “myth” since to arrive at their statements of “truth” they must use words (rhetoric) rather than mathematics to make their judgements? Do modern historians give a sufficient account of their first principles?

The basic problem for history in its attempts to be a “science” is that in establishing the past as object and in establishing ourselves as the summonsers for its artefacts to give us their reasons, we can learn about the past, but we cannot learn from the past since our positions as summonsers already establish us as superior to that which is being studied. Since we have seen the kind of societies the “winners” of history have produced, perhaps it is time to look at what knowledge the “losers” of history might have to share with us. This is what “critical race theory” is all about.

5. How can we distinguish between good and bad interpretations? Discuss with reference to the arts and one other area of knowledge.

What we commonly mean by “interpretation” is to provide an “explanation” for some thing that appeals to reason and to common sense. To say that the wildfires in California and Greece are attributable to “Jewish space lasers controlled by the Rothschilds” does not appeal to our reason and common sense, for instance. It is a “bad” interpretation and explanation for the phenomenon of wildfires.

An interpretation is meant to bring some thing to presence in order for it to show what, how and why it is as it is. It is associated with the thing’s “truth”. In Group 1 and Group 6 subjects, you are asked to provide an “interpretation” of a work of art, whether a novel, a poem or painting for instance, and in doing so name it as “such-and-such” or “so-and-so”, but to do so you must first turn that art into an object. In the Human Sciences attempts are made to find fixed, permanent principles that will lead to interpretations of social life which attempt to understand what is present at all times and in all places when living in communities, while in the Natural Sciences “explanations” are looked for through experiments on the “fixed” things that are the objects of nature.

Our lives are pervaded by interpretations both of ourselves and of other entities and things. Our “Core Theme” seeks to interpret how we understand ourselves, while our “Optional Themes” seek to understand other entities in the world around us. Our everyday interpretations or awareness of things is prior to our systematic interpretations undertaken in the Human Sciences and prior to our explanations provided by and given in the Natural Sciences. You need to find your way to the library or the science lab and interpret the contents in those places as books or science equipment before doing any of the activities called science or research. When you walk into a classroom, you do not first see uninterpreted black marks on the white board or hear the sounds of your classmates arriving. You perceive these things right away as printed or spoken words even if you cannot understand them. That you understand speech as speech or a textbook as a book does not mean that your interpretation is unreliable nor that it creates the meaning of what is interpreted. Your understanding of what the things are about you is bound together with your interpretation of them. Understanding is global and general; interpretation is local and particular.

Hermeneutics is a special kind of “interpretation”. In Plato’s Ion Socrates refers to the poets as the “interpreters” of the gods. Hermeneta is Greek for “interpretation”, the disclosing of that which was previously hidden. Interpretation is conjoined with what the Greeks understood “truth” to be. Formally, hermeneutics was the study of how interpretation occurs and is intertwined with “method”. It is the art of understanding written texts; but in it, all things are understood as written texts. The Irish writer, James Joyce, gives us a beautiful example of hermeneutical activity and what we understand as art, and in doing so, of what understanding and interpretation indicates, in the “Proteus” section of his novel Ulysses: Continue reading “Prescribed Titles May 2022”

Plato’s Divided Line: The Two Faces of Thought and Thinking

The Division Between Love (Eros) and Thinking (Logos)

The most popular site on this blog is Plato’s allegory of the Cave. I am somewhat puzzled by this as the Allegory presents many difficulties as far as its understanding is concerned when it comes to relating it to the ethics and morals required by the Core of the Theory of Knowledge course. The Allegory cannot be properly understood without some knowledge of the Divided Line from Bk VI of Republic .(506c – 511e) Also, one requires some knowledge of Plato’s theory of the tripartite soul that he believed is the essence of human beings. For Plato, the human being was the zoon logon echon, the living being that perdures in logos which is language and number. Later, the Latins would identify the essence of human being as the animale rationale, the “rational animal”, the animal the perdures in “reason”. We shall try to come to some understanding of these definitions here and to show some of the consequences of our choosing the Latinate definition of the essence of human beings.

In the illustration above, the human soul’s proper “place” or “site” is at the centre of a sphere that is the being of Time and Space and the created things that are within Time and Space. The sphere itself is constantly in motion. The sphere is what Plato called “the moving image of eternity”, the sempiternal nature of created things.

The realm of “E” is the realm of the Good i.e. the Eternity that encloses or embraces the entirety of the cosmos or creation. The Good begets the Ideas which are in the realm designated by section “D”. The ideas can be approached through the Mind, the Nous, the Spirit, the Intelligence. The Ideas in turn beget the Eidei, the outward appearances of the things that “shine” and which we perceive through the sense of sight because of the “light” that acts as a metaxu or mean between our “eye”, the Sun, and the things that are. This occurs in section “C”. This light, as metaxu, is Eros; the ‘eye’ itself must have a quality that is ‘sun-like’ for there to be a possibility of a commensurable relation between it and the things beyond it.

From this perception occur our axioms and the principles that establish our understanding of the things that are in the world and those beyond it, what the philosopher Kant called the “transcendental imagination”. This perceiving occurs in the “C” section of the Divided Line and establishes our understanding of the things that are. It is the source of our trust, faith and belief in our interpretation of the reality of the things that are that they are as we say and think they are. This we understand as the true. Science, for example, is the theory of the real. “Theory” is a manner or mode of “seeing” and derives from the same root as “theatre”, “the seeing place”. The “theory” is a product or outcome of the “site” or the place from which the seeing is done. Section “C” is equal to section “B” in the Divided Line.

Section “B” is physis or the Cosmos, what we understand as Nature. It is the Cave in Plato’s allegory of the Cave. The Cave is “more real” than the shadows that are “thrown forward” or projected onto the walls of the cave by the artisans and technicians. Even the shadows require light to be produced, but this light is not directly from the Sun. It is a derived or borrowed light (such as that of the Moon, although the light in the cave is due to the fire which has been ignited, presumably, by the artisans and technicians). Fire is a product or derivative of the Sun. In the Cave, there remains a dim presence of the Sun itself but it is ineffectual.

Section “B” = Section “C” in Socrates’ discussion of the Divided Line. It is thought which gives us the things (the techne of the artisans and technicians, “the mind that makes the object” as Kant’s transcendental imagination would have it) and there are no things without thought, whether the thing be natural or artificial or as artefact, as the “work” we produce. The thinking that occurs in Section “C” is that representational thinking that is brought forward or ‘thrown forward’ from Section “A”, the Eikasia or Imagination.

Techne or “know how”, “knowing one’s way about or within something” is but one manner of thinking that the imagination produces. The thinking of the poets is also one manner of thinking that arises from the imagination. Poetic thinking is distinct from the techne of the technicians and still further a different type of thinking than that of the philosophers. This technological thinking of the artisans and technicians occurs on the outer circumference of the sphere, in the realm of the imagination. It is the farthest thinking from that of the philosophers.

Poetic thinking and techne are the diagonals given in the illustration of the sphere provided here. Both proceed from the “I” in the centre of the sphere which reaches out and “projects” to the circumference of the sphere. The circumference of the sphere is the ‘surface’ phenomenon of things, the deception of their ‘outward’ beauty. It is the thymoeidic part of the soul that is at the root of this projection. The thymoeidic part of the soul deals mostly with will, emotions and feelings, what the Greeks understood as pathos. Our projections are given back to us in the form of a ‘lighted up’ of things. It is eros that does the “lighting up”.

If we look at the statement of Aeschylus that “In war, truth is the first casualty”, we can say that war is evil for all evil requires deception, subterfuge, the hiding from the light. This deception is to be found on the surfaces of phenomenon. That which is thrown forward by the ‘self’ at the centre of the sphere to the circumference through the thymoeides is an ‘irrational number’ in mathematics, what we call pi (the ratio between a circle’s diameter and its circumference), since the two diagonals thrown forward comprise the diameter of the sphere. The movement of the soul outward toward the circumference is a widening gyre from out of the depths of the centre to a shallowness or dispersal of being, or a “shadowiness” of being on the circumference. In this shallowness, the soul is more easily susceptible to the influences of evil and to being led by deception and machination. The soul is furthest away from self-knowledge when it is mired in the outer influences of the sphere.

In Preface II to this writing on “The Prince of the Two Faces”, we noted the statement of the French philosopher J. P. Sartre that “Hell is other people” and said that it illustrated the gap between love or eros and intelligence (nous, spirit, mind) as well as “thinking” or “thought” and how these are presented through the logos in the modern age when thinking and thought are understood as “information”. How love and intelligence (nous, spirit, mind) have come to be understood and how they relate to logos and eros is what must be undertaken at this time. Of course, these writings are simply impertinent precis of what are some of the most complex and troubling ideas present in our being-in-the-world today.

Plato’s discussion of the Divided Line occurs in Bk VI of his Republic. In Bk VI, the emphasis is on the relation between the just and the unjust life and the way-of-being that is “philosophy”. Philo-sophia is the love of the whole for it is the love of wisdom which is knowledge of the whole or the aspiration towards knowledge of the whole. The love of the whole and the attempt to gain knowledge of the whole is the call to ‘perfection’, ‘completeness’ that is given to human beings. Since we are part of the whole, we cannot have knowledge of the whole. This conundrum, however, should not deter us from seeking knowledge of the whole and, indeed, this seeking is urged upon us by our erotic nature. It is the urge to be god-like and can lead to tyranny. All human beings are capable of engaging in philosophy, but only a few are capable of becoming philosophers. As human beings, we are the ‘perfect imperfection’. We are ‘perfect’ in our incompleteness.

The whole is the Good (A-E); and that which is is part of the whole so it must, at some point, participate in the Good of which it is a part to some extent. That which we call the ‘good things’ of life such as health, wealth, good reputation, etc. are subject to change and corruption because they are not the Good itself. These are the things that we love. They are wholly in Time. To only love the ‘good things’ is to love the part, and this love of the part channels one off in another direction from that initial erotic urge directed toward the whole or the Good. This is why the ‘good things’ in themselves can become evils and why we can become obsessed with, and succumb to, the urges we feel for their possession. The desire for immortality and the desire for will to power can become hubristic. They can lead to tyranny.

Eros is not the winged cherub or child named Cupid (which is derived from the Romans), nor is it merely the sexual urge which is the modern day focus, thanks primarily through the writings and works of Freud. “Love (eros) is the oldest of all the gods,” says an old Orphic fragment. Another Orphic fragment runs: “Firstly, ancient Khaos’s stern Ananke (Necessity, Inevitability) and Kronos (Chronos, Time) who bred within his boundless coils Aither (Aether, Light) and two-sexed, two-faced, glorious Eros (Phanes), ever born through Nyx’s (Night’s) fathering, whom later men call Phanes, for he was first manifested.” This Orphic fragment is saying the same as the Book of Genesis from the Hebrew Bible: “1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3 And God said, “Let there be light”: and there was light. 4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.” The “light” and Eros are born simultaneously, and this birth is the connection between the Good (God in the Hebrew Bible), the Logos (Intelligence, Mind, Spirit) and Love or Eros between the Intelligence and Love.

Eros is associated with Time; Logos is associated with Space. It is the Logos which grants and gives “form” and “shape” to the void that is prior to Being. Both Time and Space are associated with Ananke Necessity. Ananke is associated with Eros.

Acts of creation are ones that arise out of love, and sometimes that love can be misguided if it is not properly directed by the Logos. Love requires withdrawal and the allowance of things to be if it is to be true. It is an ‘owning’ that is a ‘disowning’ that allows care and concern to grow within its ‘space’, its site. Both Love and the logos allow themselves to be given shapes and forms that are necessarily further from the real truth of the things that are. These shapes Plato calls the shadows.

Plato’s Divided Line from Bk VI of his Republic is a visual representation of the journey of the individual soul that is outlined allegorically in Bk VII of the text in the allegory of the Cave. The Divided Line is the logos as a representation of enumeration or number, while the allegory of the Cave is the logos as mythos or “word” i.e. poetry, and in both cases we are meant to “behold” that which the logos reveals. Both the Divided Line and the Allegory of the Cave are abstractions. The Allegory is intended to be more ‘moving’ emotionally than the speeches outlining the Divided Line. In the Allegory, for instance, there is an emphasis on the physical pain that is involved in the turning toward the Good since we are beings in bodies. There is an emphasis on eros as pathos.

The Divided Line distinguishes between the two faces of the Logos and the two faces of Eros. This distinction is done with regard to how ‘reason’ or the logos (that part of the soul which is called the logistikon by Plato) is to be understood and, subsequently, how eros is to be understood in the concrete details of human living. These details are made even more explicit in the speeches related in the Platonic text Symposium. From these concrete details we can understand the gap that exists between Intelligence and Love in our modern understanding. One face of the Logos is language as rhetoric which is the language that informs the many. Artificial intelligence and its “reason” is rooted in “rhetoric”. The other face of the logos is rooted in dialectic: the “informing” that occurs between two or three individuals that assists the soul on its way to self-knowledge.

For Plato, Eros as Love is what distinguishes the higher Eros from the lower eros. While the higher Eros emphasizes withdrawal and “letting be”, the lower eros is a possessing, holding and consumption of that which is “loved”. The higher Eros emphasizes an engagement in but not a possession of that which is loved. In some of the myths regarding Eros, Psyche the human soul, first hopes to catch a glimpse of Eros and then to hold and possess him. When she does so, Eros disappears and she must begin a long and painful journey to find him again.

Love has no place in the political; it is anti-political in that it is primarily a private act and the political deals with public acts which are associated with the thymoeidic part of the soul and the community at large. The thymoeidic part of the soul is torn between the public and the private spheres. The political emerges out of the private individual things, just as the city emerges from out of the household, the community from out of the family, the family from the individual body.

The root of the agon or conflict between philosophy and the political, as it is for philosophy and poetry, is how Love or eros is understood and interpreted. Alcibiades, the ‘political beast’ who shows up uninvited in the Symposium, has a passion for Socrates, but this passion is not Love. Socrates knows who Alcibiades is and what his nature is so he spurns Alcibiades’ advances and yet at the same time tries to lead him to philosophy because Socrates is aware of Alcibiades’ exceptional nature. Socrates recognizes the greatness of Alcibiades’ ‘spiritedness’ (thymoeides) and tries to lead him to philosophy but fails to do so. Alcibiades’ failure is the result of his love for the polis and for the favours he receives from the many. That many historians attribute the fall of Athens to the Spartans to Alcibiades’ betrayal of the Athenians illustrates to us the importance of this event in the lives of the participants in both Republic and the Symposium and to the history of the West in general. It signified nothing less than the end of what we call the Golden Age of Greek civilization and culminates in the imperialism of Alexander the Great.

Thinking, thought and self-knowledge are co-related. The openness to love and intelligence are co-related. Where true thought is not present, there is no self-knowledge, there is no “intelligence”. Where there is no self-knowledge, there is no sense of ‘reality’. Where there is no sense of reality, there is no knowledge or recognition of good and evil. Where there is no knowledge or recognition of good and evil, there is no possibility of “human excellence” or arete. Without a sense of “human excellence”, there is no polemos or strife within the individual soul to resist the temptations to succumb to evil actions through the many urges of the lower eros and one is unable to move to a higher state of consciousness nor, in many cases, does one desire to move to a higher state of consciousness. One finds the pleasures of the lower eros enough. This satisfaction was found among the Epicurean philosophers and the later Empirical philosophers.

In its urging towards an ascent, Eros’ affect is to make us love the light and truth and hate darkness and falsehood. Care and concern for others and our sense of “otherness” develops from this higher Eros’ erotic urge. The ascent from the individual ego and its love of the part, experienced in the love of a single, beautiful other, to a knowledge of the whole and the love of the whole of things is a process that the immortal part of the soul (logistikon) undergoes in its journey towards “purification” from the love of the meeting of our own necessities and urges (epithymetikon) to the love of the Good. “Depth” arises from the ascent which is toward the centre of the sphere. The descent brings about our desires for the surfaces of things, which is the lower form of eros. These are located on the outer circumference of the sphere. Evil is a “surface phenomenon” and eros is a part of it, and evil is located and thrives on the outer circumference of the sphere. It is the given of the human condition, of its being-in-the-world.

The content which is given to us in the image of the Divided Line in Bk VI of Republic is emphatically ethical for it deals with deeds, not with words. The philosophic way-of-being is erotic by nature. To be erotic is to be in ‘need’; sexuality is but one powerful manifestation of the erotic in our lives and it illuminates our desire for immortality through the procreation of children. The procreation of children is the recognition of the ‘otherness’ that is our being- in- the- world. In general, the two faces of Eros have to do with mortality and immortality. They are bound together like two sides of the same coin. It is the awareness of our mortality that makes the desire for otherness a need.

The ‘spirited’ (thymoeides) part of the soul acts as a mediator or metaxu between the logistikon or “rational” part and the epithymetikon or “appetitive” part of our souls which in turn determine our various “militaristic” and sexual passions which manifest themselves in our love of sports and competition or our love of wealth among many other varied activities and pursuits in the various worlds that we participate in. This is eros as pathos in our human natures.

When such drives dominate the soul, there is a predilection for politics, for power within the community or polis to make such an acquisition of such goods or objects easier. Such a desire for power is rooted in a desire for immortality through ‘honour’ and ‘fame’ through the thymoeides part of the soul. The ‘procreation’ that is the root of sexuality is the desire for immortality through offspring. This desire for immortality through offspring is the desire for the Incarnation, the ‘procreation’ of the Good, the begetting of the Good in beauty. The separation of the desire for offspring from the orgasm that is the result of that sexuality is but one manifestation of that gap between intelligence (nous, mind, spirit) and love that is revealed in Sartre’s “hell is other people” statement noted above. It is a manifestation of the tyrannous soul.

The philosophic soul reaches out for knowledge of the whole and for knowledge of everything divine and human. It is in need of knowledge of these things, to experience and to be acquainted with these things. This noetic knowledge is a gnosis, an en-owning of the knowledge of which one has taken “possession”, not through consumption but through participation. It is an active being-in and concern-with and yet, at the same time, a “letting be” through a contemplative consideration of what is close at hand. The non-philosophic human beings are those who are erotic for the part and not the whole. They are deprived of knowledge of what each thing is because they see by the borrowed light of the moon (the images of the imagination that are our representations) and not the sun; their light is a reflected and dim light. They wish to control, commandeer and consume that which has emerged into being. The hubris of human beings, and their great danger both to themselves and to otherness, is to try to commandeer and control being itself.

Eros is the “sun-like” quality of the “eye” that allows the eye to perceive the Sun’s goodness. Eros acts as the metaxu or the “between” or the “in between”, the mean proportional of geometry, the “open” space that occasions or establishes a relation between two incommensurate properties or things. In the prison cells that are our ’embodied souls’, the ‘form’ that the logos takes acts as a barrier but it is also a way through. The metaxu are ‘means’, what we call the ‘goods’ of the world. As such, they are the ‘bridges’ to the Good itself.

Metaxu can also be translated as “among,” “in the midst of,” or “in the meantime”, the “in-between” space or that “open” region that is the realm of mediation between two distinct realities or concepts such as is shown to us in each segment of the Divided Line. “Metaxu” can be seen as a space of mediation between the divine and the human, or between the earthly and the spiritual. It is a bridge. It is Eros as the “space” or “site” of the longing and striving for the something that is beyond the immediate. It is the meeting point or place of Eros (Time) and Logos (Space) and from within it, truth as aletheia or ‘unconcealment’ occurs in the revelation of the beauty of the thing being observed which is further extended to the beauty of the world or the whole. The beauty of the world is the parousia or “presence” of the Good yet, at the same time, the metaxu form the region of good and evil. They act as barriers to the Good.

In the Allegory of the Cave the prisoners see the shadows of the artifacts carried before the fire that the artisans and technicians have ignited and tend. They have no clear pattern or ordering in their souls, and they lack the experience (phronesis or wise judgement) that is tempered with sophrosyne (moderation) that they have acquired through the experience of suffering or strife. The purpose of suffering is self-knowledge which is revealed, ironically, as the destruction of the “ego” or self. The best example of this that we have in English literature is Shakespeare’s King Lear. In the play, King Lear has become an “0”, a ‘nothing’, and the destruction of his pride and his loss of place in society allows him to gain a new sense of otherness and to be reborn. In his rebirth, the first thing that he apprehends is Cordelia, the living embodiment of truth and truth-telling in the play. From the play, it is clear that the process of re-birth is not an easy one.

The philosophic soul is one that has an understanding endowed with “magnificence” (or “that which is fitting for a great man” and is thus distinguished from the understandings of those who are not “great men”) and is able “to contemplate all time and being” (486a) i.e. the understanding that is in the soul of the philosopher is ‘prophetic’. The prophet speaks ‘the highest’ speech. The philosophic soul has from youth been both “just and tame” and is not “savage and incapable of friendship”. The philosophic soul is not ‘rough’, but ‘smooth’. The meaning of the statement above Plato’s academy is not that “No one enters unless he knows geometry” as a specific study of the mathematical arts, but that “No one enters unless he has the capability of being a friend”. (See the connection to The Chariot card of the Tarot where the two sphinxes, one white and one black representing the mystery of the soul, are in contention or strife polemos with each other.)

In looking for the philosophic way-of-being-in-the-world, Socrates concludes: “….let us seek for an understanding endowed by nature with measure and charm, one whose nature grows by itself in such a way that as to make it easily led to the idea of each thing that is.” (486d) The philosophical soul is as it is by nature. It grows by itself from out of itself. It is not a product of education alone, although education can assist it on its way in the same way a farmer attending his crops assists his crops on their way. Socrates sees his main task as being a mid-wife.

Is this all souls or only some souls? Are all souls capable of attaining the philosophical way of being? The modern answer to these questions, through the impact of Christianity and the modern philosophers, is a “yes” while the ancient answer appears to be a “no”. Saints and philosophers are rare plants to the ancients.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet may be said to be a play regarding this conflict in the thymoeidic part of the soul. Hamlet’s ‘doubt’, his need for certainty and surety, prevents him from seeing the reality in which he has been placed and from taking the proper action necessary which is the fate that has been given to him. Hamlet’s doubt gives him an ‘unbalanced soul’. In contrast, Horatio is shown by Hamlet to be an example of the ‘balanced soul’ who is in possession of what Aristotle called phronesis:

“…for thou hast been
As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing,
A man that fortune’s buffets and rewards
Hast ta’en with equal thanks: and blest are those
Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled,
That they are not a pipe for fortune’s finger
To sound what stop she please.” (Hamlet Act III sc. ii)

Horatio is an example of a ‘just man’, for his “balanced soul” allows him to take actions that are well-considered, wise. He is able to take life’s goods and evils with equal thanks, and this dispassionateness allows him to make the proper judgements at the appropriate time. This ability to make proper judgements is the proper relation of the logistikon and thymoeidic parts of the soul. The epithymetikon part of the soul creates distortion and chaos for the judgement when it dominates. The flute or pipe, the wind instrument, is the musical instrument of Dionysus, the god of tragedy, while the lyre or stringed instrument is the instrument of the god Apollo. Apollo is the god associated with the Sun and with truth.

Socrates uses an eikon or image (A-B of the Divided Line) to indicate the political situation prevalent in most cities or communities. The eikon uses the metaphor of the “ship of state” and the “helmsman” who will steer and direct that ship of state. The rioting sailors on the ship praise and call “skilled” the sailor or pilot, the “knower of the ship’s business”, the man who is cleverest at figuring out how they will get the power to rule either by persuading or forcing the ship-owner to let them rule. Anyone who is not of this sort and does not have these desires they blame as “useless”. They are driven by their “appetites”, their hunger for the particulars which they perceive as ends i.e. what Plato describes as human beings when living in a democracy, oligarchy, or a tyranny. In the modern age, we have killed off the ship-owner and replaced him with the ‘helmsman’, the cybernaut.

This is the reason why Plato places democracy just above tyranny in his ranking of regimes from best to worst, tyranny being the worst since both these regimes, democracy and tyranny, are ruled by the appetites and not by phronesis and sophrosyne or what we understand as ‘virtue’. (Democracy’s predilection for capitalism is a predicate of the rule by the appetites and the lower form of eros. The soul’s power to distinguish between self-interest and the common good becomes weakened or corroded under democracy so that tyranny is the ultimate result. It is the destruction of the sense of otherness in the soul. Human beings are, as individuals, tyrannic by nature and this is primarily due to the influence of eros. Technology has a great impact in increasing this tendency toward tyranny and towards the tyrannic soul. We seek the ‘gigantic’ and ‘intense’ rather than the ‘pure’.)

The erotic nature of the philosophic soul “does not lose the keenness of its passionate love nor cease from it before it has grasped the nature itself of each thing which is with the part of the soul fit to grasp a thing of that sort, and it is the part akin to it (the soul) that is fit. And once near it and coupled with what really is, having begotten intelligence and truth, it knows and lives truly, is nourished and so ceases from its labour pains, but not before.” (490b) The language and imagery used here is that of love, procreation, and childbirth, and this indicates its connection to both the lower and higher forms of Eros.

The world of the sensible must be experienced through the body, the epithymetikon part of the soul. With regard to the Divided Line, the world of the sensible, the Visible, “is equal to” the world of Thought: the mathemata or “that which can be learned and that which can be taught”. That which can be learned and that which can be taught is initially the visible, that which can be sensed and experienced. Socrates sees himself as a mid-wife, helping to aid this birthing process that is learning. It is a birthing process because it is a poiesis or a “bringing forth”.

At Republic Bk. VI 508 b-c, Plato makes an analogy between the role of the sun, whose light gives us our vision, to the visible things to be seen and the role of the Good in that seeing. The sun rules over our vision and the things to be seen. The eye of seeing must have an element in it which is “sun-like” in order that the seeing and the light of the sun be commensurate with each other. Vision does not see itself, just as hearing does not hear itself. No sensing, no desiring, no willing, no loving, no fearing, no reasoning can ever make itself its own object. Eros as pathos cannot be grasped through human reason but can only be spoken of through human language.

The Good to which the light of the sun is analogous, rules over our knowledge and the real being of the objects of our knowledge (the forms/eide) which are the offspring of the ideas or that which brings the visible things to appearance and, thus, to presence or being, and also over the things that the light of the sun gives to vision: “This, then, you must understand that I meant by the offspring of the good that which the good begot to stand in a proportion with itself: as the good is to the intelligible region with respect to intelligence (D-E) and to that which is intellected (C-D), so the sun (light) in the visible world to vision (B-C) and to what is seen (A-B).” This “begetting” of the Good hints at its connection to Eros and to Logos.

Details of the Divided Line: Section A-B

Eros and Logos manifest themselves in the A-B section of the Divided Line as the mediation points or metaxu that unite the tripartite soul of the human being to the things that are. “A” of the Divided Line is Eikasia or Imagination. These are the likenesses, images, shadows, models, imitations, and icons that our vision produces. They are the “schema” and “plans” that human beings put forward in order to create their understanding of their worlds. “To produce” is to “pro-create”, to “bring forth”. The end of all procreation is the desire for immortality. Nature’s procreation is sempiternal: it exists eternally within Time. For Plato, Time is the moving image of eternity. Our desire for children is the desire for immortality on the natural level. Eternity is that which exists outside of Time. Eros functions as that desire for immortality through procreation manifested in sexuality on the physical level. When the desire for children is divorced from sexuality, this is but one example of where human beings enter that stage where their sense of “otherness” is gradually eroded and their desires become “tyrannous”, self-serving. For human beings, children are the fact of “otherness”. In literature, for example, the tyrant Macbeth and his wife have no children.

Section A-B of the Divided Line is what we understand as ‘civilization’, those artefacts created by human beings that are distinct from nature because they are made by human beings. They are the shadows on the walls of the Cave. Nature and convention are in opposition to one another, and it is by nature that we are measured even though we believe that it is we who do the measuring. This is why eikasia or imagination is placed below Nature on the Divided Line; Nature is of the higher order or a higher dignity when it comes to Truth and its unconcealment.

In the illustration shown, the two diagonals that emerge from C and culminate on the surface of the sphere at B are two types of thinking associated with techne that occur in the C section of the Divided Line: poetic thinking or the thinking of the arts, and the thinking that is the know-how of the artisans and technicians. In both types of thinking, there is a metaxu that is needed, a ‘light’ that is required, and that ‘light’ is studied through geometry and the dialectical discussions that surround geometry. “Depth” occurs by a movement towards the centre of the sphere, not from the “height” that is the sphere’s surface. This movement is provided by eros. Goodness is at the sphere’s centre; evil is on the surface.

In the cosmology of the poet and and painter William Blake, the scientist Newton is depicted at the bottom of the sea sitting upon a rock (which oddly looks like a urinal or toilet) creating a geometric cone upon a scroll. He is surrounded by darkness. There is a polypus or octopus swimming by, and this creature is equivalent to the Great Beast of Plato i.e. the political, or the social. The fact that Newton is not putting his geometry down in a book or in stone but on a scroll indicates that Newton is using the creative imagination. As a scientist, or rather the scientist for Blake, Newton is joined with Bacon and Locke who, as seekers of truth and despite their errors, appear in the heavens on the day of the Apocalypse among the chariots of the Almighty, counterbalancing Milton, Shakespeare, and Chaucer, the greatest representatives of the the Arts. Theses philosophers and poets are all English-speaking.

Plato has a similar line up in his Symposium with the greatest representatives of the arts and scientists present at the banquet in which the topic of Eros will be discussed. The subject of both the Arts and the Sciences is the beautiful: order, proportion, harmony. The Sciences deal with these in the realm of the suprasensible and the necessary while the Arts are concerned with the sensible and contingent. Chance and evil, necessity, are present in both.

The essential urge of Eros is the desire for immortality and this is shown in Eros’ affect on all three parts of the Platonic soul. The epithymetikon (appetite or desire, which houses the desire for physical pleasures, especially sexuality) partially realizes this desire through the begetting of offspring. This ‘begetting’ mirrors the begetting of the eidos through the ideas: the offspring, while appearing to be the same are different . In all cases, the ‘image’ of Beauty in the outward appearances of the mortal things is what attracts and urges us to ‘possess’ and ‘consume’ those things which we desire. Our belief is that in possessing and consuming such things, immortality will follow. It is Khronos (Time) who eats his own children.

The image of a thing of which the image is an image are the things belonging to eikasia or the “imagination”. This is what we understand as ‘civilization’. These are the things ‘procreated’ by human beings through the logos whether the logos be understood as representational thinking such as mathematics or logic, or the creative works of the technites or artists and technicians, such as writings or shoes. The idea that is to be the next pair of Nikes was always already there. It was waiting for the artisan and technician to give birth to it, to “pro-create” it, and bring it forward into being. This is the distinction between the procreation of Nature and that of human beings: nature’s procreation is in itself from out of itself, while human beings are a combination of this (sexuality, nature) and “in another for another” (techne) i.e. the next pair of shoes derives from materials that are not of human beings nor of human making.

We are ‘reminded’ of the original by the image: the Beauty of Nature is the “image” that reminds us of the Good. Just as Nature is sempiternal, eternally in Time, the Good is eternal, eternally outside of Time. Nature is a mirror-image of the Good while Nature is, at the same time, dominated by Necessity Ananke. Necessity is Time. And there is a great gap separating the Necessary from the Good; that gap is the whole of Time and Space. That gap is mirrored in the separation of Love from the Intelligence in the A-C section of the Divided Line. The mediation of what we call “Intelligence” (mathematical calculation, the principle of reason) is a mirrored image of the mediation of Love and the things that are. The Intelligence that is the principle of reason is a “possessing”, commandeering logos, while the Intelligence that is Love is a ‘letting be’ and a contemplation of the things that are. In our being-in-the-world, we wish to consume the objects of our senses. The beautiful is that which we desire without wishing to eat it. We desire that it simply should be. To do so requires the renunciation of the imagination and the products of the imagination. This is not an easy thing to accomplish.

The sphere of Space encloses the beings that are in Time. It is the logos that encloses beings within Time. It is the Logos that establishes limits and brings the things that are to a ‘stand’. The soul, psyche, of human beings is eternally in Time. When the soul is assimilated into the One that is the Good, it ceases to be in time. Nature is eternally in time. Time is the moving image of eternity. Eros is a moving image of the Good that is beyond time. Nature is sempiternal, everlasting, endless.

The thymoeides part of the soul (spiritedness, which houses anger, as well as other spirited emotions), realizes the desire for immortality in its desire for “eternal fame and glory”. There is a “beauty” (kalon) in the carrying out of great deeds. We cannot, for example, deny that there is no beauty in the site of the Three Gorges Dam. Public care and concern (“spiritedness”) is linked to self-interest and it is here that we find the motivation of the politicians. The desire for immortality is in the desire for the doing of great deeds which will bring the individual before the public in some manner. Whether through military campaigns, the creation of ‘works’, or sporting achievements, this recognition is another way in which the soul tries to achieve a partial immortality, eternal fame, just as children are a ‘partial immortality’ in the physical realm.

The techne or artisan is the servant of the people: “in another, for another”. His “work” illustrates his mastery of a ‘part’ of knowledge, his own art, his “know how”, that knowledge that the philosopher aspires to for the whole of things. This mastery is driven by the thymoeides part of the soul, that which is driven for the mastery (thymus) of the eidos (the outward appearances of things).

The logistikon is that part of the soul that is the smallest part of the soul, and it is the only part of the soul that is beyond Necessity because it is part of the Good itself. In the illustration provided below, the logistikon is the centre point of the sphere that may be said to be within Time and out of Time, or it is at least the closest one can come to in being out of Time. References to the logistikon are found throughout our literature in myth and fairy tales as the ‘smallest’ of things that grow that have the greatest consequence. The sphere itself is as a great Wheel of Fortune that is in motion. This is Necessity. The only way of escaping the turnings of the Wheel is by being at the centre of it (King Lear Act V sc. iii).

In the A-B section of the Divided Line, the logistikon acts as that which ‘ties things down’, the logos that gathers things together and holds them in place. The ‘knowing’ and ‘making’ of the artisan and the technician (technology) is the interaction between the logistikon and the thymoeides parts of the soul of the artisan and technician. It is the face of the logos that is the principle of reason, of logic, and the language that forms our collective discourse (rhetoric). One of the faces of the Logos is that it is the “form” that makes the “informing” possible.

Section B-C of the Divided Line: Technology as Shadow

Section B-C of the Divided Line corresponds to physical things and to that which can be ‘counted on’ i.e. it represents trust, confidence, belief, faith (pistis). The physical things are those that can be seen or perceived with the senses. It is eros as ‘light’ that provides this capability. They are the things that are at our disposal, the ready-to-hand. In the Divided Line B = C: the physical things and our trust/belief in them is equal to the thoughts that we can think of those things through the representations of our perceptions of those things with our senses i.e. the Forms or Eidos of the things, the “outward appearances of the things”.

We have two definitions of what human beings are that have come down to us historically from the Greeks and the Latins. From the Greeks, human beings are the zoon logon echon, “the living being that dwells and perdures in language”. From the Latins, humans are the animale rationale, the “rational animal”. From the Latin definition arises the principle of reason, and this is what is in operation in section C of the Divided Line and determines one type of thinking and the logos from which it is derived.

A principle contains within itself a ratio, a reason for something else. The principle of reason is the ground/reason for all other principles and that means for what a principle is per se, for what a statement is, for what an utterance is. That about which the principle of reason speaks is the ground of the essence of language, of logos. This ground or essence is what we understand as one of the faces of Eros. Principles are derived from axioms. In Greek, axiom means “to find something worthy”. “Worthiness” is the trust, belief given to us by the “self-shining forth” of the axioms. Given our illustration, the problem is that the principle’s ratio is itself an ‘irrational number’, a contradiction.

The axioms determine the principles that have been derived from them. In Greek axiom is “to let something repose in its countenance and preserve it therein”. It is related to representational thinking and to eidos. Principia
are the sort of things that occupy the first place, that stand first in line.
Principia refers to a ranking and an ordering. They are our objects of sophia.
The ordering realm (Section A-C) is the realm of principles (sophia). We have determined that the sole purpose of axioms is to secure a system that is free of contradictions. The axiomatic character of axioms is to eliminate contradictions. Our concepts, axioms, principles (fundamental principles) serve the axiomatic securing of calculative thinking. What we call science is axiomatic, but for Plato science does not think in the manner that philosophers think.

For the philosopher Leibniz, the principle of reason is the principle of rendering sufficient reasons. To render in Latin is “to give back”. Our “cognition” (ways of knowing), “consciousness” is the rendering back of reasons. In Latin, cognition is representatio: the object, what is encountered, is presented to the cognizing “I”, presented back to and over against it, and thus made present. “Ob-ject” comes from ob-“against” and jacio “that which is thrown”.

Cognition must render to cognition the reason for what is encountered—and that means to give it back to cognition if it is to be a discerning cognition. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” because a sufficient reason, a ratio, cannot be given in an account of what is considered to be “beautiful”, although we have the theory of aesthetics which attempts to do so and which itself is based on the principle of reason. Under the principle of reason, eros becomes stifled, exsanguinated.

The principle of reason is reached only when it is understood as the fundamental principle of demonstrations: i.e. the fundamental principle of statements such as those given in our research, experiments, essays, presentations, etc. It is the principle of reason which is the dominant form of the logos in section C of the Divided Line in our modern age. The principle of reason is a Principle for sentences and statements i.e. for what is called “philosophical” and scientific knowledge (methodologies). The principle of reason is necessary for the rendering of reasons in the true statement/sentence. The principle of reason is the fundamental principle of the necessary founding of sentences and principles. This is what makes the principle of reason the essence of what we call Artificial Intelligence and the meta-languages associated with it.

What is empowering about the Principle is that it pervades, guides and supports all cognition (ways of knowing) that express themselves in sentences and propositions. The principle of reason is valid for everything which in any manner is. Cognition, our “ways of knowing “, is a kind of representational thinking. In this “presentation” something we encounter comes to a stand, is brought to a standstill as object. For all modern thinking the manner in which the things “are” is based on the objectness of objects. For representational thinking, the representedness of objects belongs to the objectness of objects. This is what Plato understood as “the shadows” and this is represented by the square in the illustration provided above.

“Ob-ject” comes from the Latin which means “the thrown against”. The “against” of the object must be a founded one: how the object is. Something
is, which means that it can be identified as being a being, only if it satisfies the fundamental principle of reason as the fundamental principle of founding. The principle of reason is the fundamental principle of cognition (ways of knowing) as the Principle for everything that is. It establishes our “under-standing” of what and how things are in the world that is ready-to-hand. It is the reason why “beauty must be in the eye of the beholder”.

We are who we are as human beings only insofar as the rendering of reasons empowers us. This is what makes us the animale rationale. It is from this “empowerment” that we judge what is human and what is not, what is sane and what is not, what is just and what is not, etc. This empowerment, the demand to render reasons, threatens everything of humans’ being-at-home and robs us of the roots of our subsistence i.e. of everything that has made human beings great up till now . It is the nihilism that threatens civilization, the ceasing of concern for what “human excellence” is, for what “virtue” is. There is a connection between the demand to render reasons and the withdrawal of roots, and the subsequent rootlessness of modern humanity.

For the Greeks, ousia or presence was understood as the thing’s way-of-being in the world. The city or society came about because of the body and the needs of the body. The city is a product of the procreation of eros writ large. The city was, thus, the individual writ large. The city represented the individuals which composed it in that its regime would reflect the opinions of those who are predominant in the community, those who hold power. It is because of this power that Plato considers it the Great Beast.

B-C in the Divided Line is the point where we see the two faces of Eros as well as the two faces of the Logos. The wants and the needs of the body for the individual are radically private and at the same time require other human beings for their fulfillment. The city or polis is an artefact brought forth by human beings and it has both the characteristics of being a natural thing and those of an artificial thing. Plato’s Cave in his Allegory is both a natural thing and a product of human invention and production. As the law of necessity controls the realm of nature, so too do laws control the ‘life’ that is shown in the polis. The walls of the Cave reflect the projected shadows of the interpretations of the Cave given through the representational thinking that is the Eikasia or “imagination” of the cave-dwellers. It is here that the essence of technology as “information” or the “form that informs” finds its source.

In the image of the Divided Line, the first thing the dweller inside of the Cave sees are the reflections of the shadows upon the walls of the Cave. These shadows or images form our views of the things that are. These provide us with our “understanding” of things whether they are the things of nature, the artefacts which human beings produce, or the things that are the products of our representations of them such as our sciences or our arts. Our “understanding” is an interpretation of the things, not an under-standing of the things themselves. Eros is not satisfied with these understandings and longs for the things in themselves. This is due primarily to Eros’ chief desire which is the achievement of immortality, that which is beyond change; and the things and our interpretations of them are subject to change.

In the B-C section of the Divided Line, the mind or logistikon part of the soul (the intelligence which became translated as ‘reason’ and so its connection to logos) is aided by the thymoeides or ‘spirited’ part of soul to attain to that object to which the appetitive part of the soul is directed. The appetitive part of the soul is urged by the thing’s “goodness” or perceived goodness, be it in food, drink, sex or whatever, and that this goodness will assist the body to survive and promote the soul’s search for immortality. The soul as a ‘one’, a whole, is directed or attracted by the kalon or beauty of the thing, to possess or ‘consume’ that which it perceives as beautiful. That which is perceived as beautiful is that which is ‘perfect’ or complete. Sexually, this is the individual beautiful human being at the beginning stages of the journey that leads to the perfection that is the Good (or immortality). The individual desires to “consume” the other human being so that the two may become one in a literal sense.

The word beautiful (kalos) is distinct from good (agathon) and it also means ‘fair’, ‘fine’, ‘noble’. Everything outstanding in body, mind or action can be so designated, and the aspiration for these qualities can be related to the thymoeides part of the soul and the eros which drives it. We have designated this quality as “human excellence” among human beings, arete, what we call “virtue”. What is loveable either to sight or mind is beautiful. It is what we designate as “moral” with the distinction that it is beyond obligation or duty, what we cannot expect everyone to perform. It is of a higher rank than the just, which every human being can be expected to perform. The core of a just political order was defined by “virtue” for the ancients, while today “freedom” is believed to be at the core of the just political society. Both of these views may be said to be present in A-C section of the Divided Line. This emphasis was directed by the eros that is the thymoeides part of the soul.

In earlier writings on this blog, it was recognized that the evil or wicked were not alone the individual criminals but those who wished to rule for their own self-assertion. Such people were more destructive of justice than those who ruled simply in terms of the property interests of one class. Because tyrants were the most dangerous for any society, the chief political purpose anywhere was to see that those who ruled had at least some sense of justice which mitigated self-assertion. This was at the core of earlier education systems. The IB, too, has this mitigation of self-assertion at its core. The great danger of the thymoeides part of the soul was its tendency to tyranny. This tendency is also part of Eros.

In Section A-B of the Divided Line, the logos of the logistikon of the soul is concerned with the calculation from which knowledge is derived. This calculus has shaped what we understand by modern science and is at the heart of what we understand as technology. It finds its place or site in that field of mathematics that we call algebra. Money, technology, algebra are analogous as signs of our worship of power.

As Eros is two-faced so, too, is the logos in the realms of the physical and imaginative. The “mathematics” (“that which can be learned and that which can be taught”) of the logos is of two types: the arithmos of the particular things, those things that exist in Time, those things that can be counted and counted on, and the geometria of that which exists in Space, those things that are the works of the Logos. As logos understood as the “calculable” through algebra comes to predominate so, too, does the notion of justice as “calculable” come to predominate (this is the modern view of justice i.e. “the greatest good for the greatest number”).

The thymoeides part of the soul is concerned with “passion”, and it is this passion which unites with the logistikon part of the soul and brings about the urge to attempt to attain immortality through ‘noble’ and ‘fine’ deeds or works. The understanding of what ‘fine’ deeds are is part of the ‘cognition’ or perception of how ‘human excellence’ is understood beforehand. We ‘love’ the beauty of ‘human excellence’ when it is shown to us. It is the passion to possess this beauty that compels us to perform excellent deeds in whatever context those deeds may be performed.

Section C-D of the Divided Line

Many will find the proposition that science does not think the most controversial put forward in this writing. What does it mean for Plato (and Heidegger) to say this? How does this statement cast a light on what we understand as artificial intelligence and on rationality in general?

The Forms or eide (the outward appearance of things) are begotten from the ideai which, in themselves, are begotten from the Good. “Begottenness” is of Eros. The forms give presence to things (ousia) through their outward appearance. The “seeing” of this presence is dependent on “sight” which, in turn, is dependent on the light of the sun. In order for this to occur, the eye must have something “sun-like” in it just as the soul must have something like “the good” in it to be able to “bring forth” the representations of the things that are in the mind or intellect.

There is nothing without thought; there is no thought without things. In the Divided Line, B = C. “Otherness” is a condition of being. Human beings are essential for being to be. Being needs human beings to be. Being is reality. What we call science is the theory of the real, the “seeing” of the real. (“And would you also be willing,” I said, “to say that with respect to the truth, or lack of it, as the opinable is distinguished from the knowable, so the likeness is distinguished from that of which it is the likeness?”) The “images” and “shapes” of things, the eide, such as the city or society is the individual writ large. The polis or city is a city of artisans and technicians, of technites. The “knowing one’s way about or within something” begins in the household and caters to the production of novelty, efficiency. The logos, like Eros itself, is two-faced or of two types. The jumping off point or the leap is the recognition that the Sun in the realm of Becoming (Time), like the idea of the Good in the realm of Being, is responsible for everything that is. The Sun is Time as the moving image of eternity, and all that is in being owes its existence to Time. The Good is eternity, and all that is in Being and Becoming owes its existence to the Idea of the Good.

Dianoia is that thought that unifies into a “one” and determines a thing’s essence. The eidos of a tree, the outward appearance of a tree, is the “treeness”, its essence, the idea in which it participates. We are able to apprehend this outward appearance of the physical thing through the forms or eide in which they participate for these give them their shape. The understanding, the hypo-thesis (dianoia) is the “standing under” of that seeing that is thrown forward, the under-standing, the ground. Thought under-stands the limits and boundaries of things and gives them “measure” through the use of number or language logoi. The giving of measure to the seeing is geometry and geometry deals with ratios; and from it, the hearing of the harmonia of music, the music of the spheres, is recognized and produced. The music of the spheres is the recognition of the whole of which each being is a part, and how that part is related to the whole. Thought comprehends the “measure” of the things that bring about “harmony” and unites the individual being or thing to the whole. The proportionals are arranged about a “mean” which is “hidden” or “irrational”. The principle of stringed instruments and their ratios is applicable to the whole of the universe, both the visible and invisible.

Section D of the Divided Line is the Ideas Ideai which are begotten from the Good and are the source (archai) of the Good’s presence parousia amidst that which is not the Good, both in being and becoming. The Good is seen as “the father” whose seeds (ideai) are given to the receptacle or womb of the mother (Space) to bring about the offspring that is the world of A-E (Time), within the whole of things within Space. The realm of A-E is the realm of the Necessary. (Timaeus 50- 52e). The dialogue of Timaeus occurs the morning after the dialogue that we call Republic. It is the continuation of an ascent from the eikasia of the imagination and opinion of Section A (Republic) to the physical reality of Section B of the Divided Line (Timaeus). Timaeus is a revealing of the Ananke, what the Greeks understood as Necessity. The dialogues of the Sophist, Theatetus and The Statesman illuminate Section C of the Divided Line. Symposium and Phaedrus are dialogues that help to illuminate Section D.

Because the ideas are begotten from the Good, the ideas are the essences of things, their “oneness”, that which they really are. The ideas in turn beget the eidos which bring things to presence in their ready-to-handedness in time for human beings. The things come to a stand through the eidos and give us what we call our “understanding”. The nature of this understanding is pre-determined by the logos within being, by the “frame” or the “form” that is a product of the logos.

Noesis is often translated by “Mind” but “Spirit” might be a better translation. Contemplation, attention, “dialectic” are the activities of noesis. Knowledge (gnosis), intellection, the objects of reason (logoi but not understood as logistics but as noesis, ideai, episteme) is what is understood as “knowledge” in this section of the Divided Line. “Knowledge” is permanent and not subject to change as is “opinion”, whether “true” or “false” opinion. Opinions develop from the pre-determined seeing which is the understanding of the essences of things prevalent at a certain time. Understanding is prior to the interpretation of things and the giving of names to things.

The Idea of the Good (agathon) is what provides “the truth to the things known (i.e. their “unveiling”, their “showing forth”) and gives “the power to the one who knows… and, as the cause of knowledge and truth, you can understand it to be a thing known; but, as fair as the two are – knowledge and truth – if you believe that it is something different from them and still fairer than they, your belief will be right.” (Republic 508e – 509a) The Idea of the Good is the essence of things that come to be whether in the Visible or the Invisible realms. The Good is beyond both Time and Being. When the soul is in direct contact with the Good, gnosis is achieved and the soul is no longer in Time for it becomes part of the One of all that is. The Good is responsible for (aitia ‘the cause of’) the knowledge and truth (aletheia, unconcealment) of all that is. Without it, knowledge and truth could not be attained. Everything would be ‘irrational’. Eros as Love and the Beautiful is this face of the two-faced Eros.

The whole of the Divided Line (A-E) is the Good’s embrasure of both Being and Becoming, that which is both within Time and Space. This embrasure is spherical in shape. The Good itself is beyond this sphere that is Being and Becoming (i.e. space and time) and there is an abyss separating the Necessary (which is both Space and Time) from the Good. Within the Divided Line, that which is “intellected” (C-D) is equal to (or the Same i.e. a One) as that which is illuminated by the light of the sun in the world of vision. (B-C)

Details of the Divided Line

Below is a summary of the points made regarding the Divided Line:

E. The Idea of the Good: Agathon, Gnosis “…what provides the truth to the things known and gives the power to the one who knows, is the idea of the good. And, as the cause of the knowledge and truth, you can understand it to be a thing known; but, as fair as these two are—knowledge and truth—if you believe that it is something different from them and still fairer than they, your belief will be right.” (508e – 509a)
D. Ideas: Begotten from the Good and are the source of the Good’s presence (parousia) in that which is not the Good. The Good is seen as “the father” whose seeds (ἰδέαι) are given to the receptacle or womb of the mother (space) to bring about the offspring that is the world of AE (time). The realm of AE is the realm of the Necessary. (Dialogue Timaeus 50-52 which occurs the following morning after the night of Republic)	D. Intellection (Noesis): Noesis is often translated by “Mind”, but “Spirit” might be a better translation. Knowledge (γνῶσις, νοούμενα) intellection, the objects of “reason” or the logos (Logoi) (νόησις, ἰδέαι, ἐπιστήμην). “Knowledge” is permanent and not subject to change as is “opinion” whether “true” or “false” opinion. Opinions develop from the pre-determined seeing which is the under-standing of the essence of things.
*C. Forms (Eide): Begotten from the Ideas* (ἰδέαι) . They give presence to things through their “outward appearance” (ousia). There is no-thing without thought; there is no thought without things. Human being is essential for Being. Being needs human being. “And would you also be willing,” I said, “to say that with respect to truth or lack of it, as the opinable is distinguished from the knowable, so the likeness is distinguished from that of which it is the likeness?”	*C. Thought (Genus)* Dianoia is that thought that unifies into a “one” and determines a thing’s essence. The eidos of a tree, the outward appearance of a tree, is the “treeness”, its essence, in which it participates. We are able to apprehend this outward appearance of the physical thing through the “forms” or eide in which they participate. Understanding, hypothesis (διανόια). The “hypothesis” is the “standing under” of the seeing that is thrown forward, the under-standing, the ground.
B. The physical things that we see/perceive with our senses (ὁρώμενα, ὁμοιωθὲν)	B. Trust, confidence, belief (πίστις) opinion, “justified true beliefs” (δόξα, νοῦν). Opinion is not stable and subject to change. The changing of the opinions that predominate in a community is what is understood as “revolution” or “paradigm shifts”. “Then in the other segment put that of which this first is the likeness—the animals around us, and everything that grows, and the whole class of artifacts.”
*A. Eikasia* Images Eikones:** Likeness, image, shadow, imitation, our vision (ὄψις, ὁμοιωθὲν). The “icons” or images that we form of the things that are. The statues of Dedalus which are said to run away unless they are tied down (opinion). It is the logoi which ‘ties things down’.	*A. Imagination (Eikasia):* The representational thought which is done in images. Our narratives, myths and that language which forms our collective discourse (rhetoric). Conjectures, images, (εἰκασία). The image of a thing of which the image is an image are things belonging to eikasia. We are “reminded” of the original by the image. “Now, in terms of relative clarity and obscurity, you’ll have one segment in the visible part for images. I mean by images first shadows, then appearances produced in water and in all close-grained, smooth, bright things, and everything of the sort, if you understand.” The Platonic “imagination” is distinguishable from the “transcendental imagination” of Kant. For Kant, the “transcendental imagination” refers to a “blind yet indispensable function of the soul” which is responsible for synthesizing sensory data into coherent experiences (logos) making the objects of experience possible (eros). Human consciousness and self-awareness is both sensibility/sense perception and understanding, and the “transcendental imagination” transforms mere sensations into conscious perceptions. Here, Kant is speaking about the ‘form’ that ‘informs’ i.e. technology. Like Kant, for Plato the imagination is not merely reproductive but is productive in that it makes experience, in general, possible through the coming together of the logos and eros. Unlike Kant, for Plato Eros is not “blind”.

Mathematics and Ethics

Technology as Information

We will be discussing how “mathematics” provides the principles for our actions i.e. how mathematics determines our ethics. We shall examine some considerations of the differences between what is called calculative thinking and what is called contemplative thinking. In this examination we will come to a closer understanding our technological being-in-the-world. Mathematics is understood as “what can be learned and what can be taught”.

What we call mathematics is a theoretical viewing of the world which establishes the surety and certainty of the world through calculation. Calculative thinking determines that the things of the world are disposables and are to be used by human beings in their various dispositions. This commandeering challenging of the world and the beings in it is what we have come to call “knowledge”, and is made possible by what we call “knowledge”. This under-standing (i.e. that which “stands under” or grounds) is that upon which all of our actions are based. This surety or certainty that beings are in the way that we say they are through calculation arises through the viewing and use of algebraic calculation in the modern world. Algebraic calculation is a language of signs and numbers. The results of what is and what has been achieved through this calculative thinking are what we have come to determine what knowledge is in our day and what is best to be known and how it is to be known. What is the relationship between these calculations and what we call “information” and how does information relate to ethics?

Ethics are based on what Aristotle called phronesis: our careful deliberation over what best actions will ultimately bring about the best end result. We call this end result our happiness or what Aristotle called our eudaimonia. But how can happiness be the end result of what is, essentially, a hubristic way of viewing and being in the world? What we choose to be through our doings in the worlds of our projections is that which demonstrates our skills, aptitudes, and fitness to bring forth the “work” that is the “product” or outcome of the activities in those worlds whether those outcomes or “goods” be works, services or ideas. It is eros that urges the soul to “hear” that calling from the logos that sets us upon the journey to self-knowledge that allows us to adapt to the inevitable change that is a re-birth that seeks for that which is fitting to the soul.

A Reading of King Lear

We shall reflect on this question of self-knowledge and how the mathematical impacts self-knowledge by examining the passage below from Shakespeare’s King Lear Act V sc. iii.

CORDELIA
We are not the first
Who, with best meaning, have incurr’d the worst.
For thee, oppressed king, am I cast down;
Myself could else out-frown false fortune’s frown.
Shall we not see these daughters and these
sisters?

KING LEAR
No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out,
In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon.
EDMUND
Take them away.
KING LEAR
Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,
The gods themselves throw incense. Have I caught thee?
He that parts us shall bring a brand from heaven,
And fire us hence like foxes. Wipe thine eyes;
The good-years shall devour them, flesh and fell,
Ere they shall make us weep: we’ll see ’em starve
first. Come.

Explication of the Passage from King Lear

To attempt a summary and explication of the whole of the greatest work in the English language is impertinent. But a brief introduction is necessary to understand the play as it appears in the scene above.

At this point in the play, Lear and Cordelia, supported by French troops, have lost the civil war for Britain to Edmund’s forces. Lear, as King, has been ultimately responsible for this civil war. At the beginning of the play, he has disowned his ‘truthful’ daughter Cordelia and fallen victim to the flattery and machinations of his two eldest daughters, Goneril and Regan. He has divided the kingdom in two giving each sister control of half, the intention being to avert future strife. Lear, at the same time, wishes to retain the appurtenances of a king, the appearances of a king, while retaining none of the responsibility: Lear is satisfied with the appearances rather than the realities of things. It is this satisfaction with the appearance of things that leaves Lear open to the machinations of his two daughters, Goneril and Regan.

Lear’s responsibility is, chiefly, a moral one. Goneril and Regan soon work together to remove from Lear the power and possessions that he once held. Lear becomes an “O”, “a nothing”. In his “nothingness”, Lear becomes mad and rages against the ingratitude shown by his daughters and the injustice that he sees in the nature of things and in the created world as it is.

This scene from Act V above is Lear’s anagnorisis or moment of enlightenment, the moment in tragedies when all tragic heroes recognize the errors of their ways and the consequences of their hubris. These consequences we call nemesis or just desserts.

Lear ends up houseless and homeless and wanders on a heath in the heart of a terrible storm. Lear’s physical, mental and spiritual sufferings soon drive him mad. The storm’s effect is a purification of Lear: Lear removes his clothing to become naked, to reveal human being as a mere ‘bare forked animal’; his ego is destroyed in the madness; he no longer focuses on himself but is able to see the ‘otherness’ of human beings and to feel compassion and pity for them (in the characters of Edgar as Poor Tom and the Fool) because he sees himself and his humanity in them. Edgar, too, has become a ‘nothing’ due to the machinations of his bastard brother Edmund and is a parallel to Lear in the double plot of the play.

Lear has gone from King to nothing and he is ready for re-birth. His ego has blinded him to understanding what his true relationship to his god is: initially he looked upon this god and his power as being something which he, Lear, himself possessed. Lear believed that only he himself possessed this truth. He dismisses the truth-tellers in the play: his Fool and his daughter Cordelia. In Lear’s kingdom, truth is not to be revealed. Only those who flatter are those that are heard.

The play King Lear is a play about the consequences of not knowing who we truly are, as individuals and as a species, as human beings. Lear, focused as he is on his ego, his Self, is willingly duped by machination in the play; he is willingly duped by flattery as this flattery is recognition of his social prestige. His later suffering and madness bring him to a true understanding of his relation to the god and to other human beings, and this relationship is Love expressed through the care and concern that he later shows to Poor Tom and the Fool. Love is, as Plato describes it, “fire catching fire”. It is recognition that in the most important things, all human beings are equal in that all are capable of the capacity for Love. Given the inhumane nature of human action in many cases in the real world, it is not without reason that Love has been described as a homeless, houseless beggar in our mythologies. Our literature sometimes refers to him as Eros.

Many critics suggest that this play is atheistic; Lear has lost his faith in God. The above passage suggests that such is not the case: what Lear has come to understand is his true relationship to his God, the true relationship of all human beings to God. Lear has lost the illusion of what he had once understood as God and what his relationship was to that God. It is this illusion that is the trap cast for those who believe that they are in possession of the truth or that truth is a product of their own creation or doing. Such a belief gives the individual the illusion of power. The God in King Lear is absent: He will not perform some miracle preventing the hangings of Cordelia and the Fool by the Captain later in the play. The essence of human being and of our humanity is to reveal truth. Great catastrophes are the result when we do not do so. In King Lear, the truth is destroyed. Good does not triumph over the evil of human actions in this play and we, too, by our very silence, are made complicit in the deaths of Cordelia and the Fool. In King Lear, human beings are not “beyond good and evil”.

In the play, the god exhibits Himself by His absence. Absence is not non-existence. It is the absence of God in the play that gives reason to those who interpret the play atheistically. One of the many themes of the play is what happens to human beings when they ignore the truth and persecute the truth-tellers. They, too, become subject to machinations and gaslighting. It is the tyrannous element present in all human beings. In their ignorance, they become victims in the struggle for power. When we show our astonishment at the discoveries of the James Webb Space Telescope, we are actually witnessing the withdrawal of the God into hiddenness in order to allow those distant galaxies to be. As Being comes to presence, the God withdraws.

Pythagorean circle — *In relation to King Lear, the above should be viewed as a sphere with each of the triangles being wheels within wheels or spheres within spheres.*

The play King Lear shows that the purpose of suffering is to allow for the de-creation of our selves, the de-struction of ourselves, our “I”s or egos. We today see no purpose in suffering, particularly the suffering of the innocent. One of the purposes of suffering is the destruction of the ego or self through affliction. This same decreation of the self was behind the geometry of the Pythagoreans. For the Pythagoreans, the study of geometry served an identical purpose: the purification of our selves or souls through a contemplative understanding of the things that are. When we stand on the circumference of the sphere above and are subject to its spinning, we suffer the ups and downs of Fate. We are beings in Time. Being at the centre of the sphere allows us to be free of its spinning. The spinning of the wheel or sphere is Time.

There is a Wheel of Fortune motif that runs throughout King Lear: Fortune is personified in the passage through alliteration ‘false fortune’s frown’ to illustrate that it is, in this case, one of human making: even with the best of intentions one can incur the worst: good does not triumph over evil in this sphere but is subject to the same necessity as are rocks and stones. To decreate one’s Self is to have the Self replaced by an assimilation into the divine; it is to become one of ‘God’s spies’, to see all with God’s eyes and to see all for God. God requires human beings “to see” His creation. His creation is Necessity; and there is a great gap separating the Necessary from the Good. Being requires human beings. When a human being sacrifices the Self, the ego, his most treasured possession, for assimilation in God, “the gods themselves throw incense” upon this sacrifice. We believe our Self to be our most precious possession; the renouncing of this possession is the purpose of our lives, and this renunciation is not pleasant: it is done through suffering. Few people are capable of it. I am not sure that one would want to be the parent of a saint. It is a pain-filled event much as ‘the turning’ in Plato’s allegory of the Cave is a pain-filled event.

Simone Weil — “Suffering (affliction), when it is consented to and accepted and loved, is truly a baptism”

The centre of the sphere is both in time and space and out of time and space. The Self as center here is indifferent to the size of the prison, the size of the circle, the size of the sphere. For Lear, imprisonment will be a liberation, not a restriction. “Suffering (affliction), when it is consented to and accepted and loved, is truly a baptism” (Simone Weil, “The Love of God and Affliction”). This is similar to Hamlet’s praise of Horatio (Act III sc. ii) where Hamlet says:

Horatio has what we may call a ‘balanced soul’: each of its parts does what it is supposed to do. Having this balanced soul is what we understand as “self-knowledge”. This self-knowledge allows one to accept the buffets and rewards of fate with equal thanks. Of course, it is easy for us to be thankful for the goods that we receive from fate. It is not so easy to accept the inevitable afflictions that come with being alive with equal thanks.

Baptism is a spiritual re-birth. It is usually associated with the element of water. The purification of the soul is associated with fire, with alchemy. Love is ‘fire catching fire’. On the heath, Lear experiences both the baptism with water and the purification through fire. The spiritual rebirth for Lear is clear from this passage in Act V sc. iii as well as from Act III onwards in the play where he experiences both a physical and spiritual re-birth. In order to do so, he must lose all that has attached him to his world and his ego must be destroyed. He must, in a real sense, ‘die’ and become a ‘nothing’. This is the purpose for Lear’s nakedness and madness in the play.

The attempted suicide of Gloucester in the play due to his suffering is a counterpoint to this: suicide is a sin against the gods because we falsely believe that our self is our own and of our own making. Gloucester’s realization that this is not the case results in his finding Edgar again and having ‘his heart burst smilingly’. His death is the counterpoint to Lear’s death: Lear’s heart will break due to the depth of his affliction at the loss of his Fool and Cordelia. Death is the inevitable end for us all. Contrary to our view, in the world of Shakespeare some kinds of suffering have a purpose and some suffering simply does not, and human beings are not beyond the good and evil that is present in the suffering that has no purpose or meaning. My saying this is in opposition to that statement recently by a Republican congresswoman who said that death is inevitable in order to justify her voting for the cuts that would be made to healthcare for the poor.

Our “personal knowledge” is our ‘sphere of influence’ on our worlds and on the other human beings who inhabit our worlds. The impact of our spheres of influence will be determined by the amount of self-knowledge we possess, and on the skills, aptitudes, fitness (techne) that we possess for the tasks. Those spheres that we inhabit in our lives should be seen as composed of wheels within wheels with our actions the spokes of the wheels. The spokes are our ‘projections’ and provide support for our spheres. The spokes reach out to the circumferences of the wheels: from the diameter, the right angled triangle cannot exceed that circumference. The sphere created by the circumferences may be large or small; most of our lives are spent in our attempts to enlarge this sphere. The spokes that are the radii of the self are the whorls of a gyre initiated by the soul and projected upon the world that we are in in order to create a world. In the whorl that is the motion within our sphere, we are ’empowered’ to carry out our activities, but the prison of ourselves is still a ‘prison’ beginning with our bodies and our egos which are placated by the social prestige which comes from the fulfillment of our urges and desires. At each stage on the whorl, there is a leaping-off possibility that presents itself through the metaxu or relation of the logos.

We become and are satisfied in being the ‘poor rogues’ and ‘gilded butterflies’ that Lear and Cordelia will chat with. The outer edges of the sphere in its spinning indicate the fates of those who are ruled by Fortune: ‘who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out’. It is the fate of all of us who are dominated by the wish for social prestige, recognition. This fate and our desire for this fate is part of the ‘mystery of things’, the mystery of being: to see this we must remain at the centre of the sphere where we are not moved by the wheel’s or the sphere’s spinnings, nor are our desires dominated by the wish for social prestige and recognition.

Lear, through his madness and suffering, has been re-born (see other sections of the play particularly Lear’s awakening when he sees Cordelia as an angel, a mediator, and in the play she is, from the beginning, representative of truth). His self, ego, I, has been destroyed. He becomes a “nothing”. In this scene from Act V, Lear demonstrates the friendship that is the love between two unequal yet equal beings. Lear’s ‘kneeling down’ when asked for his blessing in order to ask for forgiveness is his recognition of this equality. It is no longer the view of the Lear who said “I am a man more sinned against than sinning”, a false view of Lear’s at the moment of its occurrence in the play for it is the view of most of us with regard to our own sufferings. We see ourselves as victims.

It is with a great and terrible irony that after these speeches of Lear’s and Cordelia’s, the following occurs:

EDMUND: Come hither, captain; hark.
Take thou this note. (30)
[Giving a paper] Go follow them to prison:
One step I have advanced thee; if thou dost
As this instructs thee, thou dost make thy way
To noble fortunes: know thou this, that men
Are as the time is: to be tender-minded (35)
Does not become a sword: thy great employment
Will not bear question; either say thou’lt do ‘t,
Or thrive by other means.
CAPTAIN: I’ll do ‘t, my lord.

EDMUND: About it; and write “happy” when thou hast done. (40)
Mark, I say, instantly; and carry it so
As I have set it down.
CAPTAIN: I cannot draw a cart, nor eat dried oats;
If it be man’s work, I’ll do ‘t.

The Captain’s final words are a statement for all of us motivated by social prestige. That Edmund should give the Captain a paper or document instructing him is a particularly ironic note. Human crime or neglect is the cause of most suffering. On the orders of superiors we carry out acts that we believe are “man’s work” i.e. they are not the work of Nature but we ascribe the moral necessity for our actions to Nature: “I cannot draw a cart, nor eat dried oats”. We believe that we are compelled to commit immoral actions because we believe Nature imposes its necessities upon us; and, at times, Nature does indeed do so. We believe such actions to be our ‘duty’. But if we live with a thoughtful recognition that there are simply acts which we cannot and must not do, we are capable of staying within these limits imposed by the order of the world upon our actions.

Such words as the Captain’s have been used by human beings to justify to themselves and to others the reasons for their actions from the committing of petty crimes to genocides. They see their crimes as performing a duty, just “following orders”, or as Adolf Eichmann said: “I was just a scheduler of trains; I didn’t kill anybody”, or as Elon Musk in his destruction of USAID does not see himself as responsible for the possible deaths of 15,000,000 human beings. It is indicative of a loss of a sense of ‘otherness’. It is the Ring of Gyges: the invisibility and anonymity we seek in order to dispel any responsibility for our actions. We allow this committing of crimes to ourselves when it is accompanied by an increase in our ‘good fortunes’.

The root of all crimes is, perhaps, the desire for social prestige whether that is achieved through position, money or recognition. The root of all sin is the denial of the light, the denial of truth, the denial of what is the essence of our humanity. This denial results in our becoming increasingly inhumane and cruel. For the Captain, it is Edmund who will determine what ‘happy’ will become for him by his giving to the Captain ‘noble fortunes’; and the Captain believes it. He does not see his act as “inhumane” but calls it “man’s work”. He will achieve his noble fortunes through the committing of an ignoble act, a heinous act.

One would need to look far across the breadth and depth of English literature to find two more contrasting views of humanity in a work than that which is presented here in these two brief scenes from King Lear. Human beings are capable and culpable of both forms of action: we have an infinite capacity for Love and forgiveness as well as a finite capacity for committing the most heinous crimes; only Love is both beyond and within the circle or sphere, and all human action is done within the sphere (or the realm of Necessity). At bottom, all sin is the sin against the light, or truth.

Contemplation and Calculative Thinking: Living in the Technological World

The passages from King Lear give us an entry to understanding a practical alternative way of being-in-the-world to the current conditioning or ‘hard-wiring’ of our way of being under the technological world-view operating as it does within the principle of reason. This alternative way involves contemplative thinking as opposed to calculative thinking. This contemplative thinking is open to all human beings: it is not a special mental activity. It is an attitude toward things as a whole and a general way of being in the world. It is the attitude that Lear proposes for himself and Cordelia on how they will spend their time in prison: while they will still be in the world, they will not be of the world. While they will be involved with the “poor rogues” and “gilded butterflies”, the world of those rogues and butterflies will not be their world.

What does this mean for us? It suggests that we are in the technological world, but not of this technological world; we are here in body but not in spirit. This is not a Ludditian rejection of technology. We are free in our relation to technology. We avail ourselves of technological things but we place our hearts and souls elsewhere. This detachment involves both a “being-in” and a “withdrawal-from”. Like Lear and Cordelia, we let the things of the technological world go by, but we also let them go on. Like Lear and Cordelia, the detachment is both a “no” to the social and its machinations, but it is also a “yes” to it in that it lets that world go on in their entertaining of it.

What is Calculative Thinking?

10 spirals should be seen inside of this cone. The spirals are projected to the circumference of the sphere.

The illustrated gyres on the left are an example of our ‘projections’ of our understanding of our being-in-the-world. These projections are a product of Eros expressed as ‘need’. Being is the essence of technology: Eros as time adapts itself to the Logos as “form” (space) and is thus able to “inform” and to be of use in the meeting of those ‘needs’ that are the projections of Eros.

Calculative thinking is how we plan, research, organize, operate and act within our everyday world. This thinking is interested in results and it views things and people as means to an end. It is a viewing that sees human beings as “human resources” or “human capital”. It is our everyday practical attitude towards things. Contemplative thinking is detached from ordinary practical interests. From where does calculative thinking originate?

Our “spheres of influence” are in a relation to and occupy the spheres of others

Calculative thinking is illustrated by the spirals or gyres illustrated above. From the centre of the sphere that is our site in our being-in-the-world, we send out or ‘project’ what plans, research, activities we are involved in and these create a world that is itself sphere-shaped. These plans and activities are ‘echoed’ back to us. It is the logos as language and enumeration (mathematics) which establishes those spheres that are the worlds of our experience. These spheres are the worlds of the ‘poor rogues’ and ‘gilded butterflies’ whom Lear and Cordelia will entertain. These spheres are sometimes called “bubbles” today, and various types of human beings may occupy and share the same bubble or sphere or part of a bubble or sphere much like in a Venn diagram. We speak of a “sphere of influence” that we attribute to the powers of various individual human beings. This is the projection that they have over and into the spheres that are projected by others. We measure our freedom by how much of our sphere is truly in our possession and not under the influence of powerful people. The amount of this freedom is determined by the self-knowledge that we may have at any given time.

It is language and enumeration that are the metaxu or media that establish our relation to everything that is and to everything that is not. It is language, with the assistance of eros, which entraps us into seeing presence and the things that presence as “data” and this “data” must then be transformed into a “form” so that it may “inform” and thus become a “resource”. This is why our age is called the Information Age.

The piety that is religion establishes what should be looked up to and what should be bowed down to. Aristotle called or implied that human beings are ‘the religious animal’ in his discussions of piety in both his Politics and his Nichomachean Ethics. In other days, this piety was indicated by that object or site which held the highest point and dominated one’s view. In the West, the highest point was dominated by the spire of the cathedral or the minarets of the mosque from which the imam made his call to prayer. These indicated the way of being of the individuals who lived within those communities. In the East, it was the statue or temple of the Buddha, or it was in the prohibition that no human construction was to be higher than the highest coconut tree within the sphere of site of a Balinese person. These are now not the most dominant points. The most dominant points are the communications towers that are the logistics and infrastructure of our Information Age and these are global in influence.

“Information” develops into the setting in order of everything that presences as “data”, and information establishes itself in the “resources” that result, and rules as “resource” itself. This is the essence of artificial intelligence and it is the danger of artificial intelligence. The algorithm rules and determines the understanding and thinking of the spheres of the individuals whose spheres have been created from that algorithm which are made manifest in their projections. While living within the world of technology, human beings are physically, mentally and spiritually changed by that technology.

The danger of the tyranny embedded in technology is obvious: the creators of the algorithm will determine the understanding and thinking as well as the actions of those who are subject to the algorithm. They are the new sophists who use rhetoric as their meta-language. They will pre-determine their spheres and thus their actions. This is the essence of cybernetics, the unlimited mastery of human beings by other human beings. Cybernetics provides a framework, a form which determines the principles of communication (the form that informs and how it informs, similar to the rhetoric of the sophists of ancient days), the control, and the feedback (the algorithm). Cybernetics determines future actions. The term cybernetics originates from the Greek word “kybernētuēs,” meaning “steersman” or “governor”. Cybernetics is political. It deals with the control of the many. One should be reminded of the many analogies Plato makes in his dialogues with regard to ‘the steersman’ or the ‘helmsman’. Cybernetics is the technology of the helmsman or steersman.

What we choose to be in our doings in the worlds of our projections is that which demonstrates our skills, aptitudes, and fitness to bring forth the “work” that is the product or produce of that world be it goods, services or ideas. We feel ‘at home’ in these worlds. This ‘at home-ness’ is what is understood as ‘justice’; our being in those worlds is something we are ‘fitted for’, what is suitable for us. The ‘unbalanced soul’ driven by the desire for power or prestige will seek to occupy all of the space (logos) within the world that the sphere represents. These are those who do not have the skills, aptitude or fitness (the techne) for a world that they have become involved in and so they must use deceit, machinations and lies. Their product will be injustice.

Human beings come to presence as the ‘perfect imperfection’ dominated by Eros as need (Time). In the perduring of their presence, they are the zoon logon echon. Their perdurance is in language (logos): word and enumeration. In their perdurance, human beings adapt and change, but these adaptations and changes are appearances only. They are ‘surface phenomenon’ and are subject to evil, the denial of the good and the denial of the light. The coming to presence of the ‘form’ that ‘informs’ is the algorithm that is the principle of reason. The principle of reason is a principle of Being: it is Eros present as ‘need’ and shows one of his faces.

“Stupidity” is a moral phenomenon, not an intellectual phenomenon. “Intentional ignorance” is the giving over of responsibility for one’s actions, much like the story in the ring of Gyges. There is a parallel between invisibility and anonymity, and this invisibility shows itself in the inability of the individual who believes in the “invisibility” of their anonymity to think or relate to the consequences of their actions. Moral decay and depravity, the lack of self-knowledge that involves the uncertainty of what it means “to be a man”, what is “male excellence”, are all results of the failure to live within the essence of being human by revealing truth. These make the individual less “humane”. These social phenomenon are all connected and rooted in the sin against the light: the failure to bring things to light and the denial of the light.

The essence of technology which presents itself in the appearance of information correspondingly changes the essence of human being by closing down those open regions that are possibilities of freedom for human beings both in thought and action. The various worlds of human beings become closed down because they are limited in possibilities, and reality becomes replaced by fantasy, an empty, unthoughtful wishing that constructs “virtual” worlds. These virtual worlds are essentially nihilistic in nature and mirror the worlds of the rhetoricians and sophists from ancient days. The virtual worlds are the outer reaches of the gyre that has been projected from the central position of the self. The aspirations of those who wish to colonize Mars, for instance, are an example of this nihilism in action. These fantasy worlds are a diminution of the temporal and spatial limitations of necessity or reality, and they accentuate the immediate, the gut reaction. This places the viewer/hearer in the center of the action or the sphere. In the Aristotelian context, pathos or emotion discourages critical analysis fostering an immediacy that endures long enough to inspire one to action (or simply to purchase a product). This is the opposite of Aristotelian phronesis.

The ‘tech bros’ and ‘cybernauts’ are those who have lost all sense of ‘otherness’ and who have come to the conclusion that there are some human beings to whom no justice is due for they are merely ‘resources’ and disposables or they are ‘useless’. That technology as information grounded in the principle of reason is Being itself, then technology will never allow itself to be mastered either positively or negatively by human doing alone. Technology cannot be overcome by human beings for that would mean that human beings have overcome Being i.e. immortality. It is from within the Eros and the Logos that we must look for salvation from the way of being that is technology.

H.L. Mencken-8x6 — “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.”

One type of calculative thinking is that thinking we call ‘machination’. It does not require computers or calculators and it is not necessarily scientific or sophisticated. It would be better understood in the sense of how we call a person “calculating”. When we say this we do not mean that the person is gifted in mathematics. We mean that the person is designing; he uses others to further his own self-interests. Such a person is not sincere: there is an ulterior motive, a self-interested purpose behind all his actions and relations. He is engaged with others only for what he can get out of them. He is an “operator” and his doings are machinations. His being-in-the-world may be said to rest on the saying attributed to H. L. Mencken: “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.” The ‘calculating’ person seeks empowerment or an increase in the influence of his sphere that has intersected the spheres of others.

Calculative thinking is, then, more of a general outlook on things, a disposition, a ‘way of life’. It is an attitude and approach that the things are there for what we can get out of them. People and things are there for us to exploit. This general outlook is determined by the disclosive looking of technology, how it reveals truth, and its impositional attitude towards things. The transforming of the world that is, our reality, into ‘data’ kills both eros and logos and creates a sterile, homogeneous world from which we flee into the realm of ‘virtual worlds’ which, too, are a product of that same limited imagination that constructed the understanding of that reality that is always before one. Calculative thinking inevitably requires moral obtuseness.

There is no lack of calculative thinking in our world today: never has there been so much planning, so much problem-solving, so much research, so many machinations. TOK itself is a branch and flowering of this calculative thinking. Indeed, what is called critical thinking is but another example of the calculative thinking found in other areas of what is called thinking. But in this calculative thought, human beings are in flight from thinking. The thinking that we are in flight from is contemplative thinking, the essence of which is to reveal truth, the very essence of our being human and the way in which we engage in our ‘humanity’. In this flight, we are very much like Oedipus who, after hearing the omen from the oracle at Delphi and its prophecy, rashly flees in the hope that he can escape his destiny. As with Oedipus we, too, are blind and unable to see in our flight from thinking and in our rash attempts to “change the world”.

What is Contemplative Thinking:

Contemplative thinking, on the other hand, is the attention to what is closest to us. It pays attention to the meaning of things, the significance of things, the essence of things. It does not have a practical interest and does not view things as a means to an end but, much like Lear and Cordelia, dwells on the things for the sake of disclosing what makes them be what they are. It is an engagement which is a disengagement.

Contemplative thinking allows us to take upon ourselves “the mystery of things”, to be “God’s spies” in the two-way “theoretical looking” of Being upon us and of ourselves upon Being. To be “God’s spies” we must remove our own seeing and our own looking, that looking and seeing that we have inherited as our “shared knowledge”, our “perspectivism”, and allow Being to look through us. This seeing and looking through is not a redemption that is easily achieved or bought. The pain-filled ascent in the release from the enchainment within the Cave to the freedom outside of the Cave or Lear’s suffering and de-struction on the heath in the storm are indications of the kinds of exertions that are required. King Lear in his anagnorisis has arrived at the truth of what it means to be, as such, and of his place in that Being. Contemplative thinking is a paying attention to what makes beings be beings at all, but contemplative thinking is not a redemption which can be cheaply bought.

The word “con-templation” indicates that activity which is carried out in a “temple”. It is that which is responsible for a communing with the divine. A common word for it is “prayer”. The temple is where those who gather receive messages from the divine. Our ’embodied souls’ are temples. Lear and Cordelia’s prison is, as such, a “temple” to Lear. Within a temple, one receives auguries. An augury is an omen, a being who bears a divine message which must be heard by those to whom it is spoken. In and through this hearing, one is given to see the essence of things and to “give back” those essences to Being.

Contemplation is the observing of beings just as they exist and attending to their essence. It is a reserved, detached mode of disclosing that expresses itself in gratitude, the giving of thanks: we give thanks to Being for being. This attention is available to all human beings who through their love, like Lear and Cordelia, are open to the otherness of beings without viewing those beings as serving any other purpose than their own being. For human beings, it is the highest form of action directed by what the essence of human being is, the revealing of truth through the logos. It is arete or virtue, what we understand as ‘human excellence’. As the highest form of human being itself, it must be available to all since it is our very nature as human beings. It is the height of what the Greeks called arete “virtue”, “human excellence” and signifies the height of being human.

Eros, Logos and the Tripartite Soul

“Spiritedness” and Human Excellence

Eros is the “procreator” of “true virtue”, and true virtue comprises courage, moderation, wise judgement and justice. It was believed that these qualities were the ‘highest’ that a human being could attain and comprised human excellence, the ideal, the model, the paradigm. It was believed that these qualities could be attained through eros as Love. Each of the speakers of the Symposium addresses these four virtues in some way, and in their logoi reveal themselves as individuals as well as the nature of all human beings to some extent.

In Alcibiades’ speech in Symposium, we have his criticism of the love of the philosopher which he asserts is beyond the human. In this, he is in agreement with Aristophanes. Alcibiades’ intense ‘love’ and ‘passion’ for Socrates is contrasted with Socrates’ dispassionate attitude towards him as a result of Socrates being in love with what Socrates calls the Beautiful rather than the ‘beautiful’ Alcibiades himself. The example of Alcibiades is used as a warning by Plato of the disaster that can result if we do not develop our eros in an appropriate way. But from what and where is this ‘appropriate way’ and how is it to be ‘appropriated’? How are we as ordinary human beings going to achieve the state of not “wanting” the things that we have come to desire and of knowing the difference between what is truly desirable and what is not? How do we develop the way of thinking that discerns this?

Since Eros is described as ‘fullness’ and ‘need’, we may look at Socrates through such a lens. As “Need”, Socrates’ outward appearance is ugly and far from beautiful; he is ‘ugly’ like Silenus, the satyr, according to Alcibiades (203 c; 215 a-b). It is ironic that Socrates puts on make up before he goes to Agathon’s symposium, and we must think about this detail in the drama that we are about to read. This is not the only ‘mask’ that he wears in that drama that he is about to participate in; Diotima is also a mask adopted by Socrates. According to Alcibiades, Socrates is “dirty and barefoot…always sleeping on the ground without blankets” (203 d, 220 b 3-5). He is “poor” and disdains material resources. He is unique and unlike any other human being that Alcibiades has encountered. The outer appearance of the ‘mask’ hides the beauty within that is far more lovelier and this is the beauty that Alcibiades is after.

As “Fullness”, Socrates is a “schemer after the beautiful and the good” as he likes to be around beautiful young men, according to Alcibiades. His military actions at Potidaea and Delium suggest that he is “courageous, impetuous and intense”. (203 d) He is “passionate for wisdom and resourceful in looking for it, philosophizing all his life” since he is ceaselessly reflecting. According to Alcibiades, he is “a clever magician, sorcerer and sophist” since he charms all kinds of people with his words (203 d). Is Alcibiades referring to Socrates’ use of rhetoric or his use of dialectic? Socrates is a “daimonion” man, capable of being an intermediary or a metaxu between the divine and the human for other human beings. Socrates is capable of producing or ‘bringing forth’ true virtue and not the image of it, and this is what attracts Alcibiades to him. Socrates tries to encourage Alcibiades to gain self-knowledge and to care for his soul which in Alcibiades’ case means that he must give up his ‘love’ of the hoi polloi which Alcibiades is unable to do for it is the root of his power, and Alcibiades’ first love is power. According to Alcibiades, Socrates is a “babushka doll” with many hidden layers. Inside one Socrates, one will find another. For Socrates, Alcibiades is possibly a great man who has chosen to remain with his love for the surfaces of things.

The “lower eros” or the “pandemian eros”, the eros common to all, moves human beings to seek for a kind of immortality, an image of immortality, while the “true Eros” leads human beings to seek for a “true immortality”. The “lower eros” also leads human beings to seek for images of immortality rather than the true immortality which Socrates believes is to be found in the Good. Alcibiades is the “democratic man” who leads a dissipated life governed by an unrestrained indulgence of the appetites. The consequences of Alcibiades’ immoderation ultimately lead to his impiety and his failure to lead the Sicilian expedition which ultimately leads to Athens’ downfall in the Peloponnesian War. An undisciplined Eros can lead to the complete loss of all that one ‘loves’ and can lead to consequences far beyond one’s self. This principle is as true today as it was in ancient times.

Who and what an individual is is shown by the leading passion of their lives or their eros. For most of us, this is shown in our “love of one’s own” and in the tasks which we choose to do. Some desire “procreation” in beautiful bodies leaving the “produce” behind as offspring. Others feel the desire for immortal fame and honour in the procreative production of “works” or of deeds or of the enactment of laws.

Poets who produce images of the gods but who have no knowledge (gnosis) of the gods provide the horizons for the lives of the many who live in their “opinions” under the laws enacted by those in power. They live in the service of the Great Beast which Plato outlines in Bk VI of his Republic. Others are individuals who are destroyed by their passions giving us the essence of tragedy as will be the case with many of the participants in the drama that is the Symposium. At the time the drama of the Symposium is retold to us through Apollodorus, only Aristophanes and Socrates have survived.

The Tripartite Soul

Plato’s tripartite soul is revealed to us in Bks IV, VIII, and IX of Republic, but its principles operate throughout the whole text. The ‘appetitive’ part of the soul is called the epithymetikon and it is primarily related to the objects that are our physiological needs and these require ‘wealth’ or power or an agency of some type to be appropriated. The ‘spirited’ part of the soul is called the thymoeides, and it is that part of the soul that is primarily concerned with the polemos or strife for victory and honour or just the struggle to be alive which is the primary reason for our focus on ourselves. The thymoeides is primarily concerned with ‘will’ and ‘will to power’. The logistikon is that part of the soul which desires the revealing of truth, and with the truth the genuine Good.

What a person’s soul or character is and how it will manifest itself depends on early experience and education and which desires come to govern our lives. The development or deterioration of the logistikon or ‘noetic’ part of the soul will occur when reason is only used as a calculative tool that determines which ‘appetites’ are stronger or more intense; but this reason in itself is unable to distinguish what is really good on its own. If the appetitive part of the soul predominates, the epithymetikon, it has to calculate according to how best to meet those appetitive aspirations (see Pausanias’ speech in Symposium). When the thymoeides comes to predominate, the technological way-of-being in the world comes forward. The thymoeides part of the soul will primarily be a product of and reflect the regime which rules in our being-with-others in our communities. In all of these cases mentioned, the soul will be unbalanced.

The “philosopher” is the person who achieves the maximum development of the desire for truth and the revealing of the Good and achieves the true essence of what a human being truly is. Human beings desire truth; not to do so is to become inhumane. Where the logistikon fails, the thymoeides part of the soul comes to predominate as a desire for power and as will to power. This will show itself in the desire for wealth and the possession of goods or that which can be “consumed”. The thymoeidic part of the soul acts as an intermediary with the other two parts and is pliable enough to let either of the other two parts come to predominate.

Knowledge of the Good is a condition for knowing what the Good is for the individual as well as the community, and it is a condition of social justice and individual justice which is the self-knowledge arrived at when the individual has the sophrosyne to see the relations of the parts of the soul to the whole i.e. knowledge of the parts to the whole. This knowledge brings about a balance to the soul and allows the individual to be just. Eros (as the cosmic whole of things) is the order (necessity, Time) in which a human being comes-to-be and through his good or evil actions is punished or rewarded accordingly.

Today, we refer to the three parts of the soul as the ‘personality’. Psyche is denigrated through the use of this word. The id, ego, and superego of Freud is a characterization of the lower eros of Plato only. The “blind love” of Freud replaces the love of the Good that is the Platonic Eros, and the Platonic Eros is driven by the “intelligence”, “mind” or “spirit” which he refers to “as fire catching fire”. For Freud, love is a case of contingency and chance. For Plato, Love is that infinitesimal element of the logistikon part of the soul which transcends necessity and chance. For Plato, the human being is like a chimera which has different forms of animals molded into one, such as a sphinx. The desires of the logistikon part of the soul are what reason considers as ‘the right thing to do’ for our actions and it is often at odds with the appetitive part of the soul.

The logistikon of the soul is two-faced: it is both calculative for the appetitive part which it receives from the thymoeidic part of the soul, and it has an impulse all its own which historically has been rendered as “reason”. Its calculative part reveals itself in our algebra which further becomes our way of controlling and commandeering the world we dwell in. The conflict in the soul is the manifestation of the aggressiveness and desire for victory that comes from the thymoeidic part of the soul and which can be used to fight against the appetites forming an alliance with reason or it can seek honours and victory against reason’s advice. This strife occurs in Section C of Plato’s Divided Line described in Bk VI of Republic. The choice involves our desire for immortality through love of one’s own that is the product of one’s own body or through “immortal fame”. The conflict manifests itself in that conflict that we have identified as “critical reason” and its conflict with the appetites.

The erotic “needs” to meet the physical, appetitive part of the soul i.e. drink and thirst, food and hunger and this “need” causes us to focus on ourselves only. These drives are for the objects themselves in order to “consume” them. These objects are “good” in themselves (and we call them “goods” in economics), but some are not good though they may appear to be good. The appetitive part of the soul relates to its ‘physical embodiment’, that which is subject to Necessity. The Necessary never desires the good in itself and in its blindness can choose the bad. The choice belongs only to the logistikon. The logistikon is ‘consciousness’. The “strife” occurs when the logos drives towards the good and the appetites seek objects independent of their goodness. The inability of the appetitive part of the soul to discriminate between what is good and bad is that it cannot establish a “limit” by itself but needs the logistikon with its desire for the good if it is to establish the appropriate limit.

The drive towards what the logos considers good and the appropriation of the goods that are the desires of the appetites is decisive for each human being because it determines what is to be done at a certain moment, which desires will lead our lives, and whether or not we become lovers of truth and whether we are able to get closer to the genuine Good. It is how we participate in justice.

The Soul and the Regime: Republic Bks IV, VIII and IX

Bk IV of Republic discusses the soul’s “physical embodiment”, its attachment to Nature and its significance as a mirror of the political order which surrounds it. In the Symposium, the speaker Phaedrus represents this level of the soul as it relates to eros. Phaedrus’ speech shows his membership in the oligarchic, timocratic social class to which he belongs. He is today’s “literary aesthete.”

Phaedrus’ name is significant in its meaning: it derives from the original Greek word phaino, which was one of the original names of Eros. The Greek word “phainesthai” (φαίνεσθαι) means “to seem”, “to appear”, or “to be brought to light”, thus it is associated with the Greek idea of “truth” (aletheia) but only with the truth’s idea of “seeming” to be true as “presence” (ousia) or appearance. It is the passive form of the verb “phainein” (φαίνω), which means “to show” or “to make appear”. Essentially, “phainesthai” describes something that appears to be or that is revealed but may not be really there.

These namings are significant in their relation to the epithymetikon part of the soul: the individual is led to the “appearance” or the “seeming” of that which, at first, appears to be good or beautiful. The “making” of the technites in the city will be of such a nature that they will use the images and representations given to them by that which is in order to bring into being things that are unnecessary needs for the soul and for the city. This is the underlying idea behind Socrates’ censorship of the poets from his ideal city, for the poets promote freedom as ‘license’ rather than freedom as thoughtful contemplation. Since Plato was a poet himself, we may presume that not all poets are included in this prohibition but only some types of poets. The Imagination as outlined by Plato in the Divided Line may be said to indicate the two-faced nature of the Logos: the imagination as a kind of thinking done by the lesser poets and technicians, and the Divine Imagination as used by the great poets (such as Plato himself) and the philosophers.

For Socrates, the analogy of the city and the individual (435a-b) proceeds from the three analogous parts in the soul with their natural functions (436b). The four virtues of the individual (by which “human excellence” is defined) are also shown in the polis by its organization. By using instances of the polemos or conflict in the soul, he distinguishes the function of the logistikon or thoughtful part from that of the epithymetikon or appetitive part of the soul (439a). Then he distinguishes the function of the thymoeidic or spirited part from the functions of the two other parts (439e-440e). The function of the logistikon part is the two-part thinking understood as rational calculation and as meditative, reflective, thankful consciousness. The spirited part, the thymoeides, is the two-fold experience of emotions driven by rage and anger or the care and concern that is love and the sense of otherness. That of the appetitive part or epithymetikon is the pursuit of material and bodily desires, the pursuit of beauty’s “surface”. Since this pursuit is the root cause for the creation of the city itself, it becomes a question of how this pursuit will be carried out as it is given in the city’s laws.

Socrates explains the virtues of the individual’s soul and how they correspond to the virtues of the city (441c-442d). A well-ruled city reflects the well-ruled souls of the individuals that comprise it. As a corollary, the poorly ruled city will be shown in the nature of the individuals who rule it and who are members of it. Socrates points out that one is just when each of the three parts of the soul performs its function (442d). Justice is the natural balance of the soul’s parts in performing their functions, and injustice is an imbalance of the parts of the soul in the subsequent actions that the individual carries out. (444e). With imbalance in the soul comes a subsequent loss of a sense of otherness. Socrates is now ready to answer the question of whether justice is more profitable than injustice that goes unpunished (444e-445a). To do so he will need to examine the various unjust political regimes and the corresponding unjust individuals in each (445c-e).

Socrates is about to embark on a discussion of the unjust political regimes and the corresponding unjust individuals but is prevented from doing so by Adiemantus and Polemarchus. He will return to this topic in Bk VIII. Instead, Socrates discusses the role of women as guardians and the need for the “ideal city” to sever ties to love of one’s own (which is an indication of the first of the impossibilities of the creation of the lower eros-free state and the possibility of its coming into being). The imposition of Polemarchus and Adiemantus is an indication of our need to compromise with the being of others in our worlds. One needs to also consider the relation between the ideas contained in the numbers 5 and 8 when reflecting on the content that is being discussed in both Bks V and VIII of Republic since the numbers as ideai will illuminate the content being discussed.

An example of the imbalanced soul is given through the story of the Ring of Gyges from Bk II of Republic. The story is related by Glaucon, the very “erotic” older brother of Plato, who is himself an “imbalanced soul” at the time of the dialogue. The purpose of the Republic is to instruct him. The premise of the story of Gyges is that we only act justly because we fear punishment should we not do so. Acting justly is not a good thing in itself. The ring gives one the “gift” of invisibility and anonymity. The ring provides one with the “ability” to dismiss one’s responsibility for one’s actions and thoughts, one’s words and deeds. It creates a gulf in the soul between one’s words and one’s deeds.

This “overlooking” of responsibility may be seen as analogous to what we understand as “intentional ignorance” which appears to be exacerbated by the “anonymity” that some believe the Internet provides today. “Intentional ignorance” can be seen as both a failure of the “imagination” (as outlined by Plato in the Divided Line) due to the lack of self-knowledge and an ironic desire for the “15 minutes of fame” that public recognition provides them. In the modern, 15 minutes is the best we can do, not believing eternal fame or glory are possible.

The belief in the anonymity which some think the Internet provides has given rise to those imbalanced souls being given a voice which allows them to obscure and obfuscate the truth regarding the real world about them, and this imbalance carries over to their being-in-the-world or worlds which they happen to construct and occupy. The avoidance of the recognition by many Christians (or those who wish to call themselves Christians such as J. D. Vance and the MAGA Christians in the USA) of the immorality of their immigration policies is an example of this “intentional ignorance”. This ignorance allows one to retain a belief in their own moral imperfections in spite of the Christian call to perfection (the cruelty, the racism, the inhumaneness of their dehumanization of their fellow human beings). Their evil is the outcome of self-deception and their lack of self-knowledge.

This intentional ignorance opens the door to lawlessness and licentiousness. Human beings who have become ensnared in this way of being-in-the-world behave irrationally and incoherently wherever the social, collective emotions rule. The social prestige that is given to a position of power becomes predominant in one’s desiring. One’s crimes and sins, one’s “stupidity”, are disconnected. “Stupidity” is a moral not an intellectual phenomenon. The metaxu, the eros, is destroyed. The metaxu as justice consists in establishing relations and connections between analogous things identical with those between similar terms, even when the things concern us personally (one’s own) and are an object of attachment for us. This is what the geometry of the “dialectical” purification of the logistikon is all about. It involves an act of will and an act of choosing.

In Bk VIII, the soul’s being with others in communities and its sense of justice is the focus of discussion. The first deviant regime from just kingship will be timocracy, the regime that emphasizes the pursuit of honor rather than wisdom and justice (547d ff.). The aristocratic individual, whose thymoeidic part of the soul is primarily concerned with honour and fame, becomes the oligarchic individual due to the soul’s desire for wealth over honour and fame. Wealth is more easily attained than honour and fame.

The oligarchic soul devolves into the democratic soul when the desires of the appetites come to predominate. The democratic soul then becomes the tyrannical soul. The order of the regimes presented is a descent of the soul of the individual and of the eros of that soul. The timocratic individual will have a strong spirited part in his soul and will pursue honor, power, and success (549a). This city will be militaristic. Socrates explains the process by which an individual becomes timocratic: he listens to his mother complain about his father’s lack of interest in honor and success (549d). The timocratic individual’s soul is at a middle point between the logistikon and the thymoeidic or spirited part of the soul.

Oligarchy arises out of timocracy and it emphasizes wealth rather than honor (550c-e). Socrates discusses how it arises out of timocracy and its characteristics (551c-552e): people will pursue wealth; it will essentially be two cities, a city of wealthy citizens and a city of poor people; the few wealthy will fear the many poor; people will do various jobs simultaneously; the city will allow for poor people without means; it will have a high crime rate. The oligarchic individual comes by seeing his father lose his possessions and feeling insecure he begins to greedily pursue wealth (553a-c). Thus he allows his appetitive part to become the more dominant part of his soul (553c). The oligarchic individual’s soul is at middle point between the spirited and the appetitive part.

Socrates’ discussion of democracy illustrates its relation to the epithymetic part of the soul. Democracy comes about when there is a gap between the rich and poor; the rich become too rich and the poor become too poor (555c-d). Too many unnecessary goods and desires make the oligarchs soft and the poor revolt against them (556c-e). In a democracy most of the political offices are distributed by lot (557a). The primary goal of the democratic regime is freedom understood as license (557b-c). People will come to hold offices without having the necessary knowledge (557e) and everyone is treated as an equal in ability (equals and unequals alike, 558c), and incompetent individuals will feel themselves entitled to offices for which they have no ability or fittedness. The democratic individual comes to pursue all sorts of bodily desires excessively (558d-559d) and allows his appetitive part to rule his soul for he is without limits. He comes about when his bad education allows him to transition from desiring money to desiring bodily and material goods (559d-e). The democratic individual has no shame and no self-discipline (560d).

Tyranny arises out of democracy when the desire for freedom to do what one wants becomes extreme (562b-c). The freedom or license aimed at in the democracy becomes so extreme that any limitations on anyone’s freedom seem unfair. Socrates points out that when freedom is taken to such an extreme it produces its opposite, slavery (563e-564a). The tyrant comes about by presenting himself as a champion of the people against the class of the few people who are wealthy (565d-566a). The tyrant is forced to commit a number of acts to gain and retain power: accuse people falsely, attack his kinsmen, bring people to trial under false pretenses, kill many people, exile many people, and purport to cancel the debts of the poor to gain their support (565e-566a). The tyrant eliminates the rich, brave, and wise people in the city since he perceives them as threats to his power (567c).

Socrates indicates that the tyrant faces the dilemma to either live with worthless people or with good people who may eventually depose him and chooses to live with worthless people (567d). The tyrant ends up using mercenaries as his guards since he cannot trust any of the citizens (567d-e). The tyrant also needs a very large army and will spend the city’s money to obtain it (568d-e), and he will not hesitate to kill members of his own family if they resist his ways (569b-c).

Bk IX discusses the differences between the tyrannical and the philosophic soul. Socrates begins by discussing necessary and unnecessary pleasures and desires (571b-c). Those with balanced souls ruled by the logistikon are able to keep their unnecessary desires from becoming lawless and extreme by imposing limits (571d-572b). The imposition of limits is done through the logistikon. Today, this tyrannical aspect of the soul is manifested in our desire for the “novel”, the “new” and in our creation of unnecessary desires.

In Bk VI of Republic Plato, in his discussion of the Divided Line, shows that the “know how” of the artists (poets) and technicians (scientists) devolves from the production or bringing forth of the products of their expertise to the bringing forth of ‘novelty’ or the ‘new’ with regard to those products in order to satisfy the desires of the appetites of those individuals who have bowed down to their tyrannical natures. The lust for the ‘new’ imposes itself on the eros of the poets and scientists so much so that it becomes a form of enslavement to production itself for its own sake. In the Republic, the search is for a form of thinking that will rise above this enslavement to the calculation of pleasures directed to the satisfaction of the desires and appetites that have been created. The tyrannical individual feels a sense of entitlement to the possessing of these objects of pleasure through wealth or other means.

The tyrannical individual comes out of the democratic individual when the latter’s unnecessary desires and pleasures become extreme; when he becomes full of the lower form of Eros or lust for power (572c-573b). The tyrannical person is mad with lust (573c) and this leads him to seek any means by which to satisfy his desires and to resist anyone who gets in his way (573d-574d). Some tyrannical individuals eventually become actual tyrants in the various worlds in which they happen to be (575b-d). Tyrants associate themselves with flatterers and are incapable of friendship because they are incapable of “dialectic” having lost contact with the logistikon parts of their souls. (575e-576a). The loss of a sense of otherness leads to an imbalance that results in a loss of any sense of justice.

Applying the analogy of the city and the soul in Bk IX, Socrates proceeds to argue that the tyrannical individual is the most unhappy individual (576c ff.). Like the tyrannical city, the tyrannical individual is enslaved (577c-d), least likely to do what he wants (577d-e), poor and unsatisfiable (579e-578a), fearful and full of wailing and lamenting (578a). The individual who becomes an actual tyrant of a city is the unhappiest of all (578b-580a). Socrates concludes this first argument with a ranking of the individuals in terms of happiness: the more just one is the happier (580b-c) for he possesses a sense of otherness.

Socrates distinguishes three types of human beings: one who pursues wisdom (the philosopher, driven by the logistikon part of the soul), another who pursues honor (the individual driven by the thymoeidic part of the soul), and another who pursues profit (those who are driven by the epithymetic part of the soul) (579d-581c). He argues that we should trust the wisdom lover’s judgment in his way of life as the most pleasant, since he is able to consider all three types of life clearly (581c-583a). Those who live the other types of lives are lacking in self-knowledge and do not know who they are. Because they do not know who they are and in their “intentional ignorance”, like Gyges, they have divorced themselves from any responsibility for the acts they do and they commit acts of evil ‘unknowingly’ for they are unable to distinguish the necessary from the good.

In his third argument regarding the happiness or unhappiness of the tyrant, Socrates begins with an analysis of pleasure: relief from pain may seem pleasant (583c) and bodily pleasures are merely a relief from pain but not true pleasure (584b-c). The only truly fulfilling pleasure is that which comes from an understanding that sees the objects which it pursues as permanent, that is, a way of being-in-the-world that moves beyond the images of that which is impermanent to the forms and ideas of that which is permanent (585b-c). Socrates adds that only if the logistikon part rules the soul will each part of the soul find its proper pleasure (586d-587a).

He ironically concludes the argument with a calculation of how many times the best life is more pleasant than the worst: seven-hundred and twenty nine (587a-587e) or 9 to the third power (9 x 9 x 9 or 999). This calculation outlines the difference between the Logos as number as we understand it in arithmetic, and the Logos as number understood as idea. Socrates discusses an imaginary multi-headed beast or chimera to illustrate the consequences of justice and injustice in the soul and to support justice (588c ff.). The physical characteristics of the soul and its desires produce a multi-headed hydra which the soul can vary and produce from out of itself. The bestial urges of the soul are the multiple appetites which constitute it. (See Blake’s illustrations of The Beast from the Sea.) The chimera which is the human soul in Bk IX is akin to, but not the same as, the Great Beast of Bk VI. The Great Beast of Bk VI (his number is 666) is the ‘social’ towards whom the political is directed while the beast of Bk IX is the individual soul of all human beings.

Education and the Training of the Soul

“Spiritedness” (anger, wrath, rage, emotions generally) is aligned with the logistikon in its polemos or strife against the appetites in its decisions on what is “the right thing to do” in order to defeat the urges of the appetites by imposing limits on them. The “spirited” part of the soul predominates when the lower part of the logistikon, that part which calculates, is ruling over the appetites. The calculations deal with the intensities of the pleasures which the appetites can give rise to. Today, what we understand as our technological way of being-in-the- world originates the activities that we pursue from the influence of the thymoeidic part of the soul. What we understand as evil originates in the thymoeides part of the soul, but human excellence also resides there.

Training the appetites is one of the aims of childhood education through the stimulation and weakening of the desires and wants in appropriate ways. The intention is to try to make sure that the individual can overcome the focus on the self in order to gain a sense of otherness and be able to participate in justice. The tyrant has released his lawless appetites not in dreams but in life: he is a “wolf”. The tyrant requires lawlessness in order to better achieve his ends. We are all potential tyrants. Unnecessary appetites can be gotten rid of in most cases. The creation of unnecessary appetites is the eros of the democratic regimes ruled by oligarchic capitalists who engage in these activities in order to increase their power through wealth. These unnecessary appetites show up as the desire for ‘novelty’ or the ‘new’ in the creation of ‘wants’ that are unnecessary for the human being.

The “timocratic man” becomes desirous of wealth and the possession of material things when he has found that the search and struggle for human excellence in itself is too difficult and he is too timid to achieve it in military campaigns. This love of possessions (the lowest form of “love of one’s own”) focuses on the “consumption” of the beauty of those things. The consumption of beauty is driven by the misguided belief that somehow one can find “immortality” through the possessions themselves. The corruption of an aristocratic regime and its descent to an oligarchic regime is due to the admission of the desire for wealth by its rulers: “He (the aristocratic man) secretly runs away from the laws like a child from his father” (549 a-b).

The love of wealth develops from the lack of a “musical education” in childhood, and the lack of a musical education then requires training by “force” and not “persuasion”. “Musical education” is contact with beauty and goodness, the mathemata (what can be learned and what can be taught) or what we understand as “reality”. Without training in “geometry” (“music”), the appetites grow without limits, especially the desire for wealth.

The logistikon part of the soul is trained through music (mathematics, geometry). The child is to receive ‘right stories’ in order to inculcate ‘right beliefs’. In democratic regimes, these stories are directed towards a sense of “entitlement” to the satisfaction of unnecessary appetites. “Democracy” has its evolution in this desire for wealth: the unnecessary appetites, created by the artisans and technicians, come to predominate. Power is the root of all evil and is most manifest in the desire for wealth. All worthy opinions and appetites are destroyed and the tyrant emerges. The philosopher and the tyrant are on opposite poles.

The thymoeides part of the soul, which has “anger” as a chief emotion and aggressiveness to confront the dangers of the world, is where andreia or will is to be found, and the will can be directed by will to power or the love of wisdom. For the Greeks, andreia is an episteme or way of knowing, so animals cannot have it. How is will connected to the logos?

At 588 d in Republic, the soul is depicted as a lion. The lion seeks and desires renown and predominance. “Spiritedness” is the desire for victory. It is “irrational”. It is the desire for competitive success and the esteem from others and oneself that comes with it. The tendency to form an ideal image of oneself in accordance with one’s conception of what is fair and noble requires social recognition to be confirmed. But this image is a false image of “self-knowledge”. This error is the reason so many individuals become involved in cults or movements that erase the hope of attaining a true sense of “self-knowledge” or “consciousness”. The “spirited” nature is incapable of discerning the good and the bad on its own and so attaches itself to the changeable, the physical. It makes the logos hold false opinions and judgements. The “uneducated” spirited nature becomes hard and ruthless instead of brave. At the same time, “artistic education” must be combined with sports so that the person does not become too soft and gentle. The greatest crimes are performed by natures of great eros in the thymoeidic part of the soul, but these natures are corrupted by deficient education which is usually the inability to impose limits on the epithymetikon part of the soul through the logos. The logos as rhetoric (the language of the masses) appeals to the thymoeidic and epithymetic parts of the soul.

The desire for wealth is the root of the appetitive part of the soul when it is “unlimited” by the logos. If knowledge does not confer honour, it is worthless. This gives importance to rhetoric as the logos of the timocratic, oligarchic and democratic man. Flattery and meanness of spirit result from subjecting the “spirited” soul to the “mob-like beast” (590b 3-9). With the desire for money and the constant satisfaction of the beast’s needs, the spirited element gets used to being trampled on so that it turns into a monkey instead of a lion. A sense of “victimization” results.

The two-fold nature of the thymoeidic part of the soul might be captured in the phrase “the call to arms”, for the call can be either the call from another human being whose beauty attracts one, or it can be the call to attain renown and glory in military deeds. Without proper training, the “spirited” part of the soul will behave in a beast-like way i.e. “irrational”. The logos is not merely reason as calculation. This is but one face or aspect of the two-faced Logos which relates to the two-faced Eros. The lack of moderation (sophrosyne) gives the terrible creature, the great beast with many heads, too much freedom (590 b). The individual is a microcosm of the polis of which he is a member and a further microcosm of the universe of which he is a part.

The epithymetikon part of the soul, because it is unlimited and seeks the satisfaction of unnecessary desires and appetites (what we would call “novelty” today) pulls the soul in their direction. Even in the best souls, the best one can do is to contain the appetites through the measuring of the logos and its imposing of limits. The appetites do not help the soul in its attempts to obtain the good.

If the “spirited” part of the soul is aptly trained by participation in “sports” and the logos trained “musically” to perceive the harmony of “right opinion” for what is good and what is not, what is honourable and what is not, what is worth fighting for and what is not, what is to be feared and what is not, “spiritedness” can then help the logistikon to achieve both individual and political goods founded on an understanding of reality (self-knowledge).

Courage is the knowledge of what is to be feared and what is not to be feared. The pull of the appetites towards bodily pleasures is what is to be feared most of all for it can become obsessive. It is destructive of right education which teaches right opinions and is destructive of the logos/logistikon as a whole. The highest courage is required for ‘gnostic’ knowledge of the Good which will give knowledge of political good as well as self-knowledge.

Animals have a kind of ‘rationality’, but it is not the rationality that reflects and calculates. The “aristocratic man” who lacks the right “musical education” and who is highly “spirited” does not have the “consciousness” to distinguish good from bad, true from false, and considers fighting and winning as ends in themselves. He has a distorted understanding of reality as a whole. The logos is in contact with the things that change and this leads to false judgements about what is honourable and what is not. The aristocratic man does not fight against real enemies i.e. the appetites and the enemies of the polis. The logos is poorly developed and the appetites are not trained to stay within ‘limits’. When this occurs, the person becomes wild and savage, a “beast”. The oligarchic, democratic and tyrannical men who have no “musical” training are incapable of restraining the appetites to stay within limits for they are overwhelmed by a need for will to power and do not remain within the limits of the necessary. The person becomes a ‘coward’. The timocratic man becomes psychologically unstable and becomes a lover of wealth. The overdevelopment of the appetites in the timocratic man are not governed by the logos. The environment provides the wrong conception of what is good.

The will that fights for victory and fame without the direction of the logos becomes pure savagery; and its corruption, weakened by the appetites, becomes a lover of wealth. With the proper training, the will becomes an ally of the logos in the search for truth and the Good. Courage is the manifestation of proper training supporting the right beliefs which are to be able to identify what is to be feared and dared. The most fundamental fight is that against the appetites.

The Logos/Logistikon

The logos is that through which we learn, reason and judge. It is most broadly what we understand as word and number. As word it encompasses rhetoric (the speech to many) and dialectic (the speech to a few). As number it encompasses number as calculation (arithmetic, algebra) and as geometry (mathemata that which can be learned and that which can be taught). Its dual aspects allows it to become an ally of the thymoeides in its making judgements regarding what is good or what is bad.

“Dialectical knowledge” (gnosis, Love) is the highest knowledge achievable. The logos is common to all human beings. It manifests itself in the desire for love and friendship. “Knowledge” exists in all of us, as do the appetites and the desire for recognition of our selfhood. What is understood as “reason” is a particular form of desire, a desire that compels the individual into finally achieving contemplation of the form of the Beautiful through to the idea of the Beautiful itself.

In its urging towards an ascent, Eros’ affect is to make us love the light and truth and hate darkness and falsehood. Care and concern for others and our sense of “otherness” develops from Eros’ erotic urge. This is what we understand as justice and is our participation in justice. Justice is experienced in both the thymoeidic and logistikon parts of the soul when these parts are in balance and are effectively carrying out their work. The ascent from the individual ego and its love of the part, experienced in the love of a single, beautiful other, to a knowledge of the whole and the love of the whole of things is a process that the immortal part of the soul (logistikon) undergoes in its journey towards “purification” from the love of the meeting of our own necessities and urges to the love of the Good. The tyrannic and democratic soul wishes to possess and consume all that comes before it. “Depth” arises from the ascent which is toward the centre of the sphere in the illustration provided. The descent brings about our desires for the surfaces of things, which is the lower form of eros. This descent is towards the outer circumference of the sphere. Evil is a “surface phenomenon” and eros is a part of it.

Eros and Logos: The Prince of the Two Faces: Preface

This writing will explore the two faces of Eros and Logos. These two faces or aspects indicate that the eros and logos are “Janus-faced”, and their aspects involve some duplicity when involved in the day-to-day lives of human beings. The duplicity is the manner in which both Psyche and Eros deal with truth as revealing and the bringing into the light and the hiding or concealment of truth in our experience of the reality of world.

The soul, Psyche, is wed to Eros and is composed, according to Plato, of the logistikon (head), the thymoeides (heart), and the epithymetikon (appetites, gut). Eros may be said to be concerned with the ontical or the material and the concrete, that which is physical and accessible or revealed through the senses. Logos is concerned with the ontological or the manner of being of human beings within language, either as word or number i.e. the “knowledge” that gives rise to the politics and the ethics that come-to-be as a result of the challenging Eros upon human beings so that our lives are ones of ordering that which is revealed through the various parts of the soul and how that which is revealed comes to its essence. This ordering revealing stance gives the world to us as “data” and is what we call “information”. “Information” is that which is responsible for the ‘form’ (ordering, gathering) so that it may ‘inform’. The data must report in a way that makes whatever is revealed compatible with the ‘form’ for the ‘form’ rules in the ordering of the data. The ‘informing’ is possible through the form in which the data is brought to light and revealed as a ‘resource’. This ordering gathering is what we call technology.

Though Eros and Psyche are wed to each other, they are not Identical. We can say that they are the Same and their relationship distinguishes what we mean by the Identical and the Same. Also, in saying that Logos and Eros have two faces, we are nevertheless insisting that both are one just as the tripartite soul is a one or individual. If we count up the parts, they will total 7. Plato’s drama Symposium has seven speakers and the drama itself reflects the nature of the human soul.

The tripartite soul of Plato can be held in contrast to the tripartite theory of the “person” of Sigmund Freud. For Freud the id, ego, and superego compose the concrete reality of the human psyche, the persona, the “personality”. In Freud, there are no souls. Love, for Freud, is blind and is a matter of contingency and chance. For Plato, Love and the Intelligence are connected in the essential human activity of revealing truth and of living well in communities, how we participate in justice, and what we are “fitted” for as human beings. The dialectical or ‘conversational friendship’ that is the essence of the Platonic relationship of the soul with the presence-at-hand of ‘the other’ that leads to the perfection that is its proper end is mirrored in Freudian psychotherapy by the relationship between the therapist/analyst and the patient which, hopefully, leads to “good mental health”. For both, the end is eudaemonia or “happiness”, “good spirits”. Whereas Freud sees human beings as “persons” (“masks”) and ids or “its”, Plato sees human beings as “souls”. Where Freud sees the essence of sacred love as profane, Diotima in Symposium sees that what we understand as profane love is, in its essence, sacred. This is what is meant here when we say that through our natural desire or urge for procreation or giving birth to children, we are showing our desire for the Incarnation, for immortality.

Plato’s tripartite soul consists of the logistikon (reason, thought, nous which has to do with the head), the thymoeides (spiritedness, that which houses anger, hate, care, concern and love as well as the other “spirited” emotions which has to do with the heart), and the epithymetikon (appetite or desire, which houses the desire for physical pleasures, the desire for “possession” and “consumption” which has to do with the gut and genitalia).

While for Plato the ’embodied soul’ of the human being is a three, it is also a ‘one’. Since each part of the soul is ‘two-faced’, the three parts combine with the one to produce a seven. Human society, our culture and politics, are the institutions and conventions that mirror the three parts of the soul, each type of regime or institution from which they originate highlighting an aspect of the human soul the development of which through education will bring about what is conceived as human “excellence” or “virtue”, what the Greeks called arete, within that society. It is the political regime which the community has chosen or which rules in the community that creates the character of the human beings who live within that regime and the “culture” of the worlds in which those human beings will be immersed. It is the political regime that is ultimately the determiner of the ethics or the actions of the members of that regime. For the ancients, religion and the state, the ethics and the politics, were not distinct. This must be kept in mind when trying to understand what is currently occurring in regimes throughout the world. “Human excellence” is not a matter of taste or fashion.

The sub-title of Symposium by Plato is “On the Good”. The coming to be of technology as a way of being-in-the-world has required changes in what we think is good, what we think the good is, how we conceive sanity and madness, justice and injustice, rationality and irrationality, beauty and ugliness. The word “technology” in its unique combining of the Greek words technē and logos illustrates the “two-faced” character of its etymological roots: “knowing”(logos) and “making” (technē).

“Making” is a kind of “procreation”, but unlike Nature’s “procreation” which is from within itself, technology’s “procreation” is “in another and for another”. Nature’s procreation is presence-at-hand and we apprehend it through our viewing of the beauty of the world in the flight of a butterfly or the awe we feel in the presence of some natural phenomenon such as Niagara Falls. Technology’s procreation is the ready-to-hand world that gives and views the “other” as “resource”, as “data”.

This technological bringing forth was called poiesis by the Greeks, and our word “poetry” is derived from this word. Poiesis is a “bringing forth”; technology is also a bringing forth, but they are not the same. The “bringing-forth” that is technology is the eros that is present in both the arts and the sciences, and this bringing-forth, this pro-duction, is what we call ‘knowledge’. The poiesis of technology is distinct from that of poetry, and this distinction is indicated in its use of “imagination” or eikasia as illustrated by Plato in his Divided Line in Bk VI of his Republic. The eikasia or imagination is shown in that which is present in the bringing-forth that is the technology of the technicians and it is distinguished from that bringing-forth that is the work of the true poets.

How does technology become the anti-Eros and the anti-Logos that it is in the modern age? Or perhaps we may question: how does technology show itself as one of the faces of the Janus-faced entities that we call eros and logos? The writer J. R. R. Tolkien once referred to technology as “black magic”. “Magic” is the attempt to control human beings’ relation to the divine as well as to Necessity, and the colour black is indicative of the lack of revealing light. “Magic” is a form of hubris and is condemned as such. While technology is able to reveal Necessity with great affect, it cannot do so with the divine. It is the mastering, commandeering urge or desire of technology in its ordering (which is but one face of eros) that distinguishes it from the Eros that leads upward. The other face of eros leads in the other direction towards the material and virtual worlds that technology creates.

The nearing and the withdrawal of the gods is related to humanity’s relation to being, and this is indicative of our relationship to Eros. The ‘bringing forth’ and ‘revealing’ that is manifested in technology’s relation to the world requires an indifference towards the things that are in their reality. The gods make themselves known through their “revelatory” relations to human beings which are dependent on the Logos (the Ten Commandments, as an example). It is not up to human beings to decide whether the divine will reveal itself. The role of human beings is simply to be prepared for the possibilities of such revelations through the calling and the hearing. The attempts by human beings to control and commandeer the gods causes the gods to withdraw into concealment. An example can be shown in the discoveries of the James Webb Telescope: as the furthest extents of the universe are revealed, the god simultaneously withdraws from that revealing.

Both Eros and the Logos contain within themselves the potential for the complete destruction of human beings but also the potential for their redemption and salvation. Both the Logos and Eros are present in the human soul simultaneously. If the essence of human being is in our capacity to reveal truth, if we are the being that reveals (eros) through language (logos), the zoon logon echon: the living being that perdures in language, then we as human beings may potentially lose our essence and become less human, more inhumane, if we do not do so. When we do not do so, the world about us becomes ‘soulless’ and Eros takes flight because that which he loves, the most Beautiful of mortals Psyche, has ceased to respond to him. The world becomes, essentially, ‘unerotic’ and we ourselves are in danger of becoming somnambulistic zombies.

Our challenging demand that the world reveal itself in such a way that it can be placed within “the form that informs” as ‘resource’ are both aspects of one face of eros and the logos. This challenging demanding arises from our desire to possess and consume, a desire that arises from within the epithymetikon part of the soul. In the story of The Garden of Eden, it is Eve’s eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil that brings about the fall of human beings. It is a ‘grasping’ and ‘consumption’. Due to this fall, human beings must survive by the sweat of their brows, by their work. It is this knowledge that our very survival depends on our procuring efforts that brings about the anxiety of insecurity, and the procurement of goods allays this anxiety. The coming to presence that is technology gives to human beings a way which allows the revealing of eros to the Otherness which human beings can neither invent nor make so that human beings come to perceive this Otherness as ‘resource’ so that human beings will feel “secure” and more “at home” in this Otherness.

With the coming-to-be of Artificial Intelligence, there is the danger that all the revealing of eros will be consumed in the ‘form’ that ‘informs’ so that all that is present must reveal itself as data that must be transformed into usable “information”, to ‘resource’. The data that resists such transformation will be overlooked as meaningless and ignored. There is much in this writing, for example, which AI will ignore as the data cannot be transformed into a useable resource.

With this situation, Eros takes flight. We as human beings become lost in our attempts to master and control technology because we see technology (and Artificial Intelligence) as an instrument or tool that we can commandeer in our modes of revealing. How our understanding of technology as instrument has come to pass through our understanding of the world as guided by the principle of reason is illustrative of our essence as human beings which is to reveal truth through the logos. This ambiguity lets us see the mystery of all revealing, of truth, as our participation in the presence of eros and the logos in every waking moment of our everyday lives.

The challenging forth that is the manner of revealing of one side of the face of Eros is counter-balanced by the revealing as bringing forth that the Greeks understood as poiesis. The distinction between the two is indicated by Plato in his Divided Line in Bk VI of Republic. The two exist side-by-side, but the challenging forth manner of revealing that is to be found in technology blocks the Eros who shows himself in the revealing as poiesis.

The revealing of the world as resource blocks the revealing of the world through poiesis because the revealing of the world as resource demands that nature respond to the form that it has imposed so that what is revealed may inform. The logos and the eros perdure in their standing side-by-side just as the revealing of the world that is done through the logistikon can manifest itself in either the logos that is the commandeering calculation of the form that informs or through the logos that poetically reveals that world to us. The role of the logistikon in the thinking involved in commandeering calculation (the principle of reason), the thinking that reveals itself to us in our sciences, and the thinking involved in our revealing of the beauty of the world that is found in our poetry (or all true language) exist together simultaneously in our being-in-the-world. Our fondness for acronyms indicates that language is eroded, decayed and deadened in the world that is dominated by the logos of commandeering calculation.

In Plato, the essence of what human beings are is the soul, and this is manifested in their actions through their being possessed by the logos and eros. Notice that I did not say that they are ‘possessed of’. The Otherness that is Nature is sempiternal: that which permanently endures in Nature and as Nature is Necessity. Human beings are ’embodied souls’. In being so, they share in that permanence and change that is manifested in Nature. They are subject to Necessity in all their being except for that infinitesimal part of the soul that is beyond Necessity and makes their being in language and longing possible.

The Ideas of Plato give birth to the eidos or the ‘outward appearances of things’. The Ideas and the eidos are not the Same nor are they Identical. The things in their outward appearance do not reveal their essence. In their ‘shining’ as ‘presence’, they reveal the eros that is present in all beings that exist, but they reveal themselves as only ‘shadows’. These ‘shadows’ become replicated in the representations of the thinking of human beings that bring forth the ‘produce’ that technicians and ordinary poets carry out in their day-to-day activities.

The essence of Nature is its manner of perduring as Necessity through all of its apparent changes on the surface. The eidos reveal to us this manner of perduring. The ethical being of human beings, the actions that human beings engage in (what is called their ‘ontology’), reveal their essence through all of the multivarious changes in those actions. Human excellence or arete is revealed through the highest actions of human beings and these become models for those that follow. These ‘highest actions’ are not matters of taste nor subject to the whims of the times.

Logos and Eros are in constant strife with each other, for the logos attempts to put forward those frames of reference that make eros understandable and so provide our ‘understanding’ of the world we experience as we experience it and what its essence is, while the eros constantly urges a moving on from that which wants to find itself permanently settled in the flux that is human existence. While the logos strives for the stable and the settled, the ‘ordered’, eros strives for the ‘novel’ and the ‘new’. Eros is messy. Both of these strivings come to human beings from ‘beyond’ the being that is humanity itself.

Eros and Logos are coupled together in the impenetrable mystery that is Being and Becoming, or as the poet William Blake would say: “The human form Divine”. The poetical brings the true as the revealing that is present in Eros and in the Logos into the splendour of “that which shines forth most purely” (Phaedrus). Eros is present and pervades all bringing-forth or ‘production’ that is the coming to presence into the beautiful. The logos is present as the techne, that ‘know how’ that allows us to be at home in our worlds and provides us with our understanding and meaning of those worlds. It gives us our ‘faith’ and ‘trust’ in those worlds (see Plato’s Divided Line).

However, the logos when understood purely as techne strives to view art as ‘aesthetic’ only, that is as a ‘calculable’ thing in its historicity. This aesthetic-mindedness kills what we may learn from the art; it kills eros. Our faith and trust become ossified in the principle of reason that is one face of the two-faced Logos, so much so that Eros flees and we are left bereft of that revealing that is our essential nature as human beings. We dwell in the condition that is somnambulism, what William Blake refers to as “Newton’s sleep”.

Eros, Logos and World as “Information”: “Information” as the Essence of Technology

In our modern age, the world is given to us as “data” which we then transform into “information”. This “giving” is the work of Eros; the transforming is the work of the Logos. We may understand the meaning of information as ‘that which is responsible for the form so that it may inform’. The ‘form’ is what the Greeks called eidos, the outward appearance of a thing. We have shown that one of the aspects of eros is that of the ‘outward appearance’s’ coming to presence and enduring as the beautiful. This coming to presence and enduring is ‘truth’, and truth as essence is a revealing from hiddenness which is done in the ‘shining’ of Eros as the beautiful.

If the essence of “information” is that which is responsible for the ‘form’ that ‘informs’, that which is as ‘data’ can only respond in the way that the challenging command of the ‘form’ allows that data to come to presence as that which may ‘inform’ as ‘resource’. The essence of the challenging is one of the faces of Eros. The truth that is revealed from the coming to presence of the form itself hides the essence of ‘information’ as the essence of technology. The entrapping of world as data disguises itself in its setting in order everything that presences, all of which we perceive as data, as resource and establishes itself as ‘resource’ and rules all that is regarded as ‘resource’. This is the essence of Artificial Intelligence; and AI may be said to be the apogee of technology.

The danger of AI is not that some day machines may come to think for themselves and, as imagined in the film The Terminator, come to destroy human beings. The very danger of AI lies rather in the construction of this image itself: that as long as we view technology as a means, or as an instrument or piece of equipment, or a tool rather than that form that allows instruments, equipment and tools to come into being makes us unaware that technology is now ordering how the coming to presence of human beings will be conducted and revealed. Some of us may be reminded of the words of T. S. Eliot from his poem “The Hollow Men”: “This is the way the world ends/ This is the way the world ends/ This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper”.

It is Eros that must rescue human beings from this danger; for it is Eros, both in its coupling with the Logos in its giving the coming to presence of being itself and in its coupling with the revealing of truth as the beautiful through that light that is his essence, that is responsible for the true ordering of the essence of human beings. This rescue will be carried out through Eros as Love.

What is Called Thinking

“The answer to the question “What is called thinking?” is, of course, a statement, but not a proposition that could be formed into a sentence with which the question can be put aside as settled…The question cannot be settled, now or ever…Thinking itself is a way. We respond to the way only by remaining underway.” (Heidegger: What is Called Thinking?)

“Just as it is with bats’ eyes in respect of daylight, so it is with our mental vision in respect of those things which are by nature most apparent.” Aristotle (Metaphysics Ch. I, Bk 2, 993b)

“The conditions of the possibility of experience in general are at the same time conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience.” Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, A 158, B 197) (Plato’s Divided Line: B=C)

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘morning, boys. How’s the water?’ and the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘what the hell is water?'”- David Foster Wallace. Kenyon. 2005.

Thinking and TOK

This writing on Thinking attempts to show how thinking is not so much an “act” or “activity” as it is a way of living or dwelling or, as North Americans would say, “a way of life”, a “lifestyle”. It is a remembering of who we are as human beings and where we belong. It is our struggle to gain self-knowledge and conscious awareness of our being-in-the-world and our being-with-others.

This writing builds on what has been discovered in the reading of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and attempts to continue on the path to understanding the relationship between “education” and “truth”.

To begin with, thinking is not “having an opinion” or a notion about something. It is not representing or having an idea about something or about some state of affairs. Thinking is not “ratiocination”, developing a chain of premises which lead to a valid conclusion. Lastly, it is not conceptual or systematic. “We come to know what thinking means when we ourselves try to think” (Heidegger).

Thinking involves a questioning and a putting ourselves in question as much as the cherished opinions and doctrines we have inherited through our education or our shared knowledge. Putting in question is not a “method” that proceeds from “doubt” as it was for Descartes. The questioning or inquiring is a “clearing of the path” (and anyone who has had to ‘clear a path’ through dense jungle in this part of the world knows the difficulty of “clearing a path”) with no destination in mind. Questioning and thinking are not a means to an end; they are self-justifying.

But the paths often become “dead-ends”: and our age abhors “dead ends”. The approach to thinking that is thought here is to bring to light what is currently called thinking and to “awaken” a new approach to “what calls for thinking” which is the essence of what you are asked to do in the TOK course.

How is thinking to be distinguished from “method”? What is the relationship between memory as a way of knowing and thinking? Does any “thinking” take place in the areas of knowledge of TOK? Is there room for thinking in TOK i.e. an openness to thinking?

The great work of literature on the relationship between thinking, method and memory is Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Polonius’ observation of Hamlet: “Tho’ this be madness yet there is method in it” could be used as an opening or a way into an analysis of our times. “Rationality” as method may not necessarily be sane…

What is thinking? What Calls for Thinking?

“We all still need an education in thinking, and first of all, before that, knowledge of what being educated and uneducated in thinking means. In this respect Aristotle gives us a hint in Book IV of his Metaphysics (1006a if.): . . – “For it is uneducated not to have an eye for when it is necessary to look for a proof and when this is not necessary.”—Martin Heidegger “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking”

To examine what thinking is and to ask the further question of what calls for thinking, we shall examine what is called thinking and what the philosophers have thought on thinking. We shall try to stay mindful of how the understanding of thinking’s essence and what is called thinking today is a result of the manner in which Plato’s allegory of the cave came to be interpreted, primarily by the Greek philosopher Aristotle. When we are exhorted to think “outside of the box”, the manner of the thinking that we are exhorted towards still remains within the “box” in which thinking has been traditionally framed. This thinking remains an “active doing” upon the objects that present themselves before us.

The 20th century’s great philosopher, Martin Heidegger, said: “Most thought-provoking is that we are still not thinking – not even yet, although the state of the world is becoming constantly more thought-provoking.” (What is Called Thinking? 4) For us, thinking is traditionally thought to be “rationality”, “reason”, “judgement”. Heidegger, somewhat provocatively, says: “[M]an today is in flight from thinking.” (Discourse on Thinking 45) Not only do we not think; human beings are actively avoiding thinking.

For Heidegger, all the scientific work today, all the research and development, all the political machinations and posings, even contemporary philosophy, represents a flight from thinking. “[P]art of this flight is that man will neither see nor admit it. Man today will even flatly deny this flight from thinking. He will assert the opposite. He will say – and quite rightly – that there were at no time such far-reaching plans, so many inquiries in so many areas, research carried on as passionately as today. Of course.” (Discourse on Thinking 45)

But for Heidegger, science does not think: and this is its blessing. “This situation is grounded in the fact that science itself does not think, and cannot think – which is its good fortune, here meaning the assurance of its own appointed course.” (What is Called Thinking? 8) What Heidegger is saying is that if science actually thought, we would cease to have science as we know it. And if this should happen, we would no longer have clean toilets, penicillin, and all of the wonderful discoveries of science.

We shall never learn “what is called swimming”, for example, or “what calls for swimming” by reading a book on swimming. Only a leap into the deep end of the pool will tell us what is called swimming and what calls for swimming. The question of “what is called thinking?” can never be answered by proposing a definition of the concept thinking.

Historically, in the West, thought about thinking has been called “logic” which we have associated with “reason as a way of knowing”. This “logic” has received its flowering in the natural and human sciences under the term “logistics” and the preponderance of the algorithms that rule our social media. Logistics, today, is considered the only legitimate form or way of knowing because its results and procedures ensure the construction of the technological world. Logistics is an interesting word in that its use as a noun implies “symbolic logic” (mathematical algebraic calculation) and the conduct of warfare. Its use as mathematical calculation is found in what is called logical positivism which is a new branch of the branch of philosophy that was previously known as empiricism. The thinking here is the thinking expressed as algebraic calculation: only that which can be calculated can be known and is worth knowing.

To elaborate how this has come to be the case would require an analysis of 17^th century philosophy and mathematics beyond what we intend in this writing. Suffice it to say that this is part of our inherited shared knowledge that we have received from the philosopher Rene Descartes. It is called Cartesianism.

Calculative Thinking:

Today we think that thought is the mind working to solve problems. We can see this in many of the quotes that are looked to as words of inspiration for young people. Thought is the mind analyzing what the senses bring in and acting upon it. Thought is understanding circumstances or the premises of a situation and reasoning out conclusions, actions to be taken. This is thinking, working through from A to B in a situation. Thoughts are representations of the world (real or not doesn’t matter, only the mind’s action does), or considerations about claims or representations (knowledge issues or questions), and the conclusions that are made. We think we know exactly what thought is because it is what we think we do. And as the animal rationale, the “rational animal”, how is it possible for thinking to be something we can fly from as it is our nature? Any examination of materials for approaching TOK illustrates, rather clearly, that we assume we already know what thinking is, what knowledge is. This is shown in the “to what extent…” beginnings of so many questions that are asked in TOK.

When we use the word ‘thinking’, our thought immediately goes back to a well-known set of definitions that we have learnt in our life or in our studies, what we have inherited from our shared knowledge. To us thinking is a mental activity that helps us to solve problems, to deal with situations, to understand circumstances and, according to this understanding, to take action in order to move forward. Thinking for us also means to have an opinion, to have an impression that something is in a certain way. Thinking means reasoning, the process of reaching certain conclusions through a series of statements. Thinking is “a means of mastery” or control over the ‘problems’ which confront us in our achieving of our ends.

On the special kind of thinking that occurs in science, Heidegger says that it is true that “[s]uch thought remains indispensable. But – it also remains true that it is thinking of a special kind.” (Discourse on Thinking 45) That is, reasoning, rationalization, analysis by concept, logical operation are all part of a particular form of thought, one with presuppositions and operational rules. This is, and has been called, “method”. It is the thinking that you are required to do in order to be successful in the TOK course. It is not, however, a universal way of thought. Nor is it the oldest means of thought; human beings of the past did not approach the world in the manner given by Aristotle, but rather human beings (Aristotle, specifically) had to think in this manner after reaching certain conclusions about the world and human nature. For Aristotle, this view came from his understanding and critique of the Greek philosopher Plato.

The kind of thinking we are probably accustomed to is what Heidegger names “calculative thinking”, and it is the thinking proper to the sciences and economics, which we, belonging to the technological age, mainly — if not solely — employ. Calculative thinking, says Heidegger, “calculates,” “plans and investigates” (1966b, p. 46); it sets goals and wants to obtain them. It “serves specific purposes” (ibid., p. 46); it considers and works out many new and always different possibilities to develop. The apogee of such kind of thinking is Artificial Intelligence.

Despite this productivity of a thinking that “races from one aspect to the next”; despite the richness in thinking activities proper to our age, and testified by the many results obtained; despite our age’s extreme reach in research activities and inquiries in many areas; despite all this, nevertheless, Heidegger states that a “growing thoughtlessness” (1966b, p. 45) is in place and needs to be addressed. This thoughtlessness depends on the fact that man is “in flight from thinking” (ibid., p. 45).

“Thoughtlessness”, Heidegger states, “is an uncanny visitor who comes and goes everywhere in today’s world. For nowadays we take in everything in the quickest and cheapest way, only to forget it just as quickly, instantly. Thus one gathering follows on the heels of another. Commemorative celebrations grow poorer and poorer in thought. Commemoration and thoughtlessness are found side by side. (1966b, p. 45)

In the writing on Technology as a Way of Knowing, I have tried to show an example of this by comparing the “making” of the Japanese tea ceremony cup with the ubiquitous Styrofoam cup. The ‘creator’ of the Styrofoam cup, the patent holder, is Dow Chemical, the provider of the funds for Harvard’s “Project Zero”, and they, in turn, provide a number of IB educational institutions with their expertise on “what is called thinking” and are giving the techniques of thinking that will be used in the classrooms of those institutions. What/how are the ends of Dow Chemical, as a corporation, in alignment with the ends of the student learner outcomes as in the IB Learner Profile? How do Dow Chemical’s end contribute to our understanding of what “human excellence” is?

Calculative thinking, despite being of great importance in our technological world, is a thinking “of a special kind.” It deals, in fact, with circumstances that are already given, and which we take into consideration, to carry out projects or to reach goals that we want to achieve. Calculative thinking does not pause to consider the meaning inherent in “everything that is”. It is always on the move, is restless and it “never collects itself” (Heidegger 1966b, p. 46). This fact, paradoxically, hides and shows that humanity is actually “in flight from thinking.” Now, if it is not a question of calculative thinking, then what kind of thinking does Heidegger refer to when he speaks of another way of thinking that might be possible for human beings? And why, if at all, is there a need for it? A possible answer might be that because we have no problem in understanding the importance of calculative thinking, we probably are not so clear about the need, in our existence, for a different kind of thinking.

What Heidegger is saying, however, is something else. His thesis is that “reasoning” is not what thought really is. It is not the essence that defines thought. This is not to say that scientific thought is faulty, as Heidegger reiterates again and again. “The significance of science here (in the modern) is ranked higher here than in the traditional views which see in science merely a phenomenon of human civilization.” (What is Called Thinking? 22) How did science come to have this higher ranking?

Another Way of Thinking: “Poetically Man Dwells…”

Heidegger distinguishes from the traditional concept of thought (what he calls calculative thinking) a second form of thinking, ‘poetic’ thinking (meditative, contemplative thinking). Contrary to what it is commonly thought of, ‘poetic’ thinking is not a kind of thinking that is to be found “floating unaware above reality”, losing touch with reality. Nevertheless, the thinking he is proposing “is worthless for dealing with current business. It profits nothing in carrying out practical affairs.” (Discourse on Thinking 46)

In the “Memorial Address,” Heidegger speaks of two kinds of thinking: the above mentioned “calculative thinking” and “‘poetic’ thinking” (1966b, p. 46). ‘Poetic’ thinking is a kind of thinking man is capable of, it is part of his nature; but nevertheless it is a way of thinking that needs to be awoken. When Heidegger states that man is “in flight from thinking” (1966b, p. 45), he means flight from ‘poetic’ thinking. What distinguishes ‘poetic’ thinking from calculative thinking? What does ‘poetic’ thinking mean? It means to notice, to observe, to ponder, to awaken an awareness of what is actually taking place around us and in us.

‘Poetic’ thinking does not mean being detached from reality or, as Heidegger says, “floating unaware above reality” (1966b, p. 46). It is also inappropriate to consider it as a useless kind of thinking by stating that it is of no use in practical affairs or in business. These considerations, Heidegger states, are just “excuses” that, if on the one hand appears to legitimize avoiding any engagement with this kind of thinking, on the other hand attests that ‘poetic’ thinking “does not just happen by itself any more than does calculative thinking” (1966b, p. 46-47). ‘Poetic’ thinking requires effort, commitment, determination, care, practice, but at the same time, it must “be able to bide its time, to await as does the farmer, whether the seed will come up and ripen” (Heidegger 1966b, p. 47).

‘Poetic’ thinking does not estrange us from reality. On the contrary, it keeps us extremely focused on our reality, on the essentials of our being, ‘existence’. To enact ‘poetic’ thinking, Heidegger says that we need to:

dwell on what lies close and meditate on what is closest; upon that which concerns us, each one of us, here and now; here, on this patch of home ground; now, in the present hour of history. (1966b, p. 47)

Even though “man is a thinking, that is, a meditating being” we need to train (“educate”) ourselves in the ability to think ‘poetically’, to look at reality, and thus ourselves, in a ‘poetic’ way. The cost of not doing so would be, Heidegger states, to remain a “defenseless and perplexed victim at the mercy of the irresistible superior power of technology” (ibid., p. 52-53). We would be – and today, more so than sixty years ago, when Heidegger gave this speech – victims of “radio and television,” “picture magazines” and “movies”; we would be “chained” to the imaginary world proposed by these mediums, and thus homeless in our own home. It is fairly clear that Heidegger has Plato’s allegory of the Cave in mind here. Heidegger further states:

all that with which modern techniques of communication stimulate, assail, and drive man – all that is already much closer to man today than his fields around his farmstead, closer than the sky over the earth, closer than the change from night to day… (Heidegger 1966b, p. 48)

It is very easy to see how much further from the openness around us we are when we are dwellers in our cities or see ourselves as avatars in virtual worlds on our computers given the pastoral description that Heidegger provides here.

If we view our current thinking in the light of Plato’s Cave, we can see that the risk for humanity in our current approach to thinking is to be uprooted not only from our reality, from our world, but also from ourselves and from our natures as human beings. If we think ‘poetically’, however, we allow ourselves to be aware of the risk implied in the technological age and its usefulness, and we can hence act upon it. We can experience some of the freedom which is spoken about in Plato’s allegory when we are brought out into the Open where the light of the Sun shines and things are shown to us in their own being as they really are.

When we think ‘poetically’ we do not project an idea, planning a goal towards which we move, we do not “run down a one-track course of ideas” (ibid., p. 53). When we think ‘poetically’, we need to “engage ourselves with what at first sight does not go together at all” (ibid, p.53).

In order to understand what this means, think of the comportment (disposition) we have towards technological devices. We recognize that in today’s world technological machineries and devices are indispensable. We need just think of computers and their usage in daily life activities to be convinced, beyond any doubt, that “we depend on technical devices” (Heidegger 1966b, p.53). By thinking calculatively, we use these machineries and devices at our own convenience; we also let ourselves be challenged by them, so as to develop new devices that would be more suitable for a certain project or more accurate in the carrying out of certain research. (Think of the “madness” regarding the release of Apple’s latest IPhone or IPod.) We even allow our language to be determined by the machines and devices that we use (see Language as a WOK).

If calculative thinking does not think beyond the usefulness of what it engages with, ‘poetic’ thinking, on the other hand, would notice and become aware of the fact that these devices are not just extremely useful to us. It would also notice that they, by being so extremely useful, are at the same time “shackling” us: “suddenly and unaware we find ourselves so firmly shackled to these technical devices that we fall into bondage to them” (ibid., p. 53-54). If human beings, not being aware of this, are in a situation of being chained to their technological devices and tools, then by becoming conscious of this they find themselves in a different relation to them. They become free of them. With this awareness human beings can utilize these instruments just as instruments, being at the same time free to “let go of them at any time” (ibid., p. 54). And this is so because once we acknowledge that their usefulness implies the possibility for us to be chained to them, we deal with them differently; we “deny them the right to dominate us, and so to wrap, confuse, and lay waste our nature” (ibid. p.54). It is a matter of a different comportment (disposition) towards them; it is a different disposition to which Heidegger gives the name “releasement toward things” or “detachment” from the things (ibid, p.54). This “releasement” and “detachment” means an “openness” or “availability” to what-is so as to allow that which is to be present in its mystery and uncertainty. (See Plato’s Cave and the “openness” required to view the beauty of the forms and ideas in their “outward appearance” on the outside of the Cave.)

“Releasement” toward things is an expression of a change in thinking and, similarly to Plato’s prisoners in the Cave, a change in their being in the world. Thinking is not just calculation, but ponders the meaning involved and hidden behind what we are related to and engaged with. This hiddenness, even if it remains obscure, is nevertheless detected – by a meditating thinking – in its presence, a presence that “hides itself.” But, as Heidegger states:

if we explicitly and continuously heed the fact that such hidden meaning touches us everywhere in the world of technology, we stand at once within the realm of that which hides itself from us, and hides itself just in approaching us. That which shows itself and at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the mystery. I call the comportment which enables us to keep open to the meaning hidden in technology, openness to the mystery. (1966b, p. 55)

“Releasement towards things” and “openness to the mystery” are two aspects of the same disposition, a disposition that allows us to inhabit the world “in a totally different way.” But as we already mentioned, this disposition does not just happen to us. It develops through a “persistent courageous thinking” (ibid., p. 56), which is ‘poetic’ thinking.

The traditional concept of thinking intends thinking as a representing, and therefore as belonging to the context of willing (action). It is still involved with a subjectivism. Subjectivism is “setting up the thinking ‘subject’ as the highest principle of Being, and subordinating everything to the dictates and demands of the subject”. It is what we have come to call “humanism”.

Probably when we hear the word “acting” we immediately relate it to a familiar concept of action, such as the one that thinks of action as that which produces some kind of result, which means that we understand action in terms of cause and effect. To understand what Heidegger means by “higher acting,” we need to refer to the essential meaning that, according to Heidegger, pertains to ‘action’.

In the “Letter on Humanism” (1998b), Heidegger defines the essence of action as “accomplishment”, and he unfolds the meaning of accomplishment as “to unfold something into the fullness of its essence, to lead it forth into this fullness – producere” (1998b, p. 239). “Higher acting” is not, therefore, an undertaking towards a practical doing, but is a ‘higher’ acting as accomplishment, in the sense of leading forth of some thing into the fullness of its essence.

Releasement itself is what makes this available to man. For Heidegger, “higher acting” remains a techne, but it is “making”, a producing or accomplishing, that is more of a poiesis (poetry, for lack of better word) than the cheap, quick making of our production lines. In poiesis, human beings allow something to be in its mystery while at the same time bringing forth of that ‘some thing’ from out of the hiddenness in which it once resided.

Heidegger’s ‘poetic’ thinking is contrasted with the thinking that is present in Aristotle’s four causes: the material cause, the formal cause, the final cause and the sufficient cause.

The conventional view of perception is what is called representational. Representation “places before us what is typical of a tree, of a pitcher, of a bowl . . . as that view into which we look when one thing confronts us in the appearance of a tree, . . .” (Discourse on Thinking 63) Objects are there; they are perceived in both their form and idea (the mathematical as something which can be known).

Heidegger does not think of perception in this manner. Heidegger also includes something called horizon (time), which is, in keeping with the definition, the horizon or limits of that which we perceive (space). Objects are within a horizon, but we do not place them there; rather they “come out of this (openness of the horizon) to meet us.” (Discourse on Thinking 64) For Heidegger, “the Open” that we discussed as outside of Plato’s Cave is that area or realm in which objects can be perceived. Rather than actively search out objects to represent, or passively allowing things to enter into our sense experience, Heidegger believes that we have a sort of “active reception,” where that which is present “comes out to meet us.” The proper state towards that which is perceived is called “unconcealment”; thinking is “in-dwelling in unconcealment to that-which-regions.” (Discourse on Thinking 82) For Heidegger, this thinking is not a “grasping” or an “apprehending” but a “releasement” that allows the thing to be in its being as what it is in the “Openness” of the horizon of its being.

If we think of Heidegger’s “Open” as the region outside of the Cave, we will be close to what Heidegger means by this term (but it should be remembered that for Heidegger, the Cave is our “home”). Whereas Plato emphasizes the “open” as that region outside of the Cave, and thus focuses on “space”, Heidegger’s focus is more on Time as the region where the “Being of beings” is “sighted”. Our conventional thinking is an “active doing” whose purpose is to “change” or to “apprehend” what is in being and to make it a part of our “standing reserve” or as some thing disposable for our use at a later time. Heidegger’s thinking is more related to the Vedanta ananda or “bliss” as being in thinking itself.

What Calls for Thinking:

We cannot properly address the question What Is Called Thinking? without answering the question What Calls For thinking? This distinction between the two questions and the priority given to “what calls for thinking” over “what is called thinking” will be the focus of these discussions on thinking, and this will focus on “rationality” as what has come to be called thinking.

According to Heidegger, one is not thinking if one does not rank the objects of thought in terms of thought-worthiness. This point flies in the face of many contemporary accounts of rationality, for they suggest that one can be thinking well as long as one is following the right method. The emphasis today is on the method of what is called thinking. What one thinks about does not provide the standard for the role on such “ratio-inspired” accounts of thinking (see below for the contrast to legein-inspired or language-inspired models); indeed, critical thinking has come to mean critical whatever method-following thinking instead of critical whatever essential thinking. Heidegger’s point is that such means-end accounts involve and indeed propagate a distortion; a life spent rationally researching the history of administrative memos and emails is not a thoughtful life. In rationally pursuing anything and everything we are not thinking.

Meta-analysis, meta-cognition, meta-linguistics and all other “meta”-prefixed approaches to thinking remain in the realm of “method” thinking and need to be contrasted with “logos” thinking. This is because these “meta” forms of thinking remain in the realm of the traditional thinking in Western “metaphysics”.

You will notice in many of your classes that you are encouraged to become “inquirers”. This is an attempt to re-introduce philosophy of some kind into the curriculum. The philosopher differs from the chess player, biologist, and politician in that the philosopher’s calling is to think about thinking as such. Moreover, to think philosophically about thinking, is to come to a confrontation with a mode of existing–“being-thoughtful”–and thereby with Being and how you stand in Being.

The Greek experience of thinking was grounded on a link between thinking and Being. This link is present in the earliest Greek thinking and carries over into the works of Plato and Aristotle. With Socrates in particular one catches the notion that built into thinking was a directedness towards order (particularly order within one’s self), goodness, beauty, truth, and Being. Aristotle’s remarks on God and nature also underline this link. It is more revealing, Aristotle holds, to consider the relation between God and the world in terms of God as idea rather than God as creator or cause. God as idea can explain the striving of natural substances; the acorn seeks to become an oak, and thereby reproduce, and thereby the acorn mimics God’s eternality. In the same way, the human infant is on its way to becoming a thinking being, and so the human’s telos (purpose) is to mimic the highest being’s thinking. Moreover, Aristotle wonders what God would think about, and concludes that thought thinking thought is the only befitting topic for the most divine activity. The philosopher par excellence thus mimics the highest being (God) not only by thinking, but also by thinking about thinking.

What calls for thinking in our time? What is it that you should think about to be “educated”? The present age is the technological age, the age in which brain currents are recorded but the beauty of a tree in bloom is forgotten. What is thought-provoking about our time? Heidegger claims that what is thought-provoking about our time is that we are still not thinking. But what is it about our time that explains why we are still not thinking?

Heidegger diagnoses this age as the time of nihilism. The dominant characteristic of our time, then, is the forgetting or withdrawal of Being, and it is this that explains why we are still not thinking–even as we attempt to mimic intelligence via computer programs or connectionist (social) networks. We call to mind that in the allegory of Plato’s cave, “beauty” and “truth” must be “apprehended” as they will slip into “forgetfulness” or “forgottenness”. Our focus is on a “beauty” that withdraws (the physical appearance; the beauty in the “eye of the beholder”) the beauty that is “subjective” and belongs to the “subject” rather than on the Beauty that presences right before our very eyes in all that is in Being.

We are more distant from Being because the experience of thinking–in our technological age–has been shrunk to that of using a tool to operate within an already-fixed network of ends. This age, in other words, is more thought-provoking because in it ratio has triumphed over legein; thinking has become so severed from the being-thoughtful that the thoughtful being is in danger of being entirely eclipsed. This triumph of ratiocination is discussed further in imagination as a way of knowing.

We are still not thinking–despite Plato’s directive–because we have missed the object and source of thinking—Being, that thinking which occurs in the region of the “Open” outside of the Cave. We will continue to miss this thinking as long as we merely use thinking and do not dwell as thoughtful. All genuine thinking arises from and returns back to thoughtful existence; “thinking” that is not so anchored is homeless “thinking”, e.g., calculating, computing, or even reasoning, or all of the “meta” approaches to thinking that were mentioned earlier. Thoughtful dwelling in the region of the “Open” is the existential ground of thinking; in such a mode we can hear what calls for thought.

The loss of thoughtful dwelling can be “remembered” by looking back to the Greek thinking experience in order to recover that which has been lost in the translation of the Greek legein into the Latin ratio. Legein carries with it two significations that are not preserved by the Latin ratio: thinking as speaking and thinking as gathering. Thinking moved from that which is bound in sense perception as a way of knowing to thinking that thinks in language as a way of knowing is the direction for thought.

Thinking as speaking, as language. Being calls for thinking, i.e., for articulation, and thus to let Being be in language is thinking. William Blake’s Songs of Innocence, for example, houses the carefree Being of playing children. The language of thinking plays a crucial role in the poetry of Blake. That we are not thinking because we are not “mindful” of the language of thinking can be seen in how our technology is taking over the role of language in our being. A full elaboration of this idea is impossible here, but the claim, roughly, is that to be thoughtful is to exist as authentically immersed in language.

To begin, “the language of thinking”… all of these phrases can be taken either in the subjective or objective genitive, and those are possibilities on which we should reflect in our thinking. The phrase, “the idea of God”, for example, can mean “God’s idea” in the subjective genitive and “the idea about God” in the objective genitive. In like manner the phrase “the language of thinking” means “thinking’s language” or “the language found in thinking” in the subjective genitive and “language about thinking” in the objective genitive. The difference, then, is between the language found in thinking generally and the language found in thinking about thinking.

Thinking as gathering. Legein signifies gathering and the gathered. Thinking demands…that we engage ourselves with what at first sight does not go together at all.

Thinking is the gathering of that which calls to be gathered–the modes of our existence and Being as such. Thinking can begin when we hear that which calls for thinking:

Joyful things, too, and beautiful and mysterious and gracious things give us food for thought…if only we do not reject the gift by regarding everything that is joyful, beautiful, and gracious as the kind of thing which should be left to feeling and experience, and kept out of the winds of thought. Only after we have let ourselves become involved with the mysterious and gracious things as those which properly give food for thought, only then can we take thought also of how we should regard the malice of evil. (Heidegger: What is Called Thinking? P. 31)

Thinking, then, is not so much a matter of being an expert or technician in a field–even if the field be philosophy–as it is being responsive to the various ways of being of who we are, and this points to the existential modality or disposition of “being thoughtful” as the ground of thinking.

We may now state some conclusions about thinking:

Those who take as the object of their theories a purely mental activity, “thinking”, are missing the richest part of the phenomenon: being-thoughtful.
Being-thoughtful is not essentially a mental activity; it is rather the encounter with Being (the manifesting of meaning which occurs in the ‘showing’ through the beautiful).
Means-end analyses sever thinking from its existential ground; one can be “means-end” rational and yet not thoughtful (and this is the thinking which occurs in the technological world view of logical positivism).
Receptivity is the distinguishing mark of thoughtful being; the mastering thinking of the human sciences and the natural sciences in their demanding stance towards being and beings do not think; Nietzsche, who stated that what characterizes contemporary science is the victory of scientific method over science, the victory of method over thought.

Thinking and Language:

What is it that is named in “thinking”, “think”, “thought”? The Old English thencan, to think, and thancian, to thank, are closely related; the Old English noun for thought is thanc or thonc–a thought, a grateful thought, and the expression of such a thought; today it survives in the plural “thanks”. The “thanc”, that which is thought, the thought implies thanks.

Is thinking a giving of thanks? Or do the thanks consist in thinking? What does thinking mean here? “Thought” to us today usually means an idea, a view, an opinion or a notion. Pascal, the French mathematician and contemporary of Descartes, in his journals given to us as Pensees, searched for a type of “thinking of the heart” that was in conscious opposition to the mathematical thinking prevalent in his day. Thought, in the sense of logical-rational representations (concepts), was thought to be a reduction and impoverishment of the word “thinking”. Thinking is the giving of thanks for the lasting gift which is given to us: our essential nature as human beings, which we are gifted through and by thinking for being what we essentially are.

“The gathering of thinking back into what must be thought is what we call the memory”. (Heidegger).

Today, some perceive that the task facing thinking is the overcoming of what is now described as its weaknesses:

Thinking does not bring knowledge as do the sciences;
Thinking does not produce usable practical wisdom;
Thinking solves no cosmic riddles;
Thinking does not endow (or empower) us directly with the power to act.

These observations of thinking’s weaknesses overrate and overtax thinking.

The question “What is called thinking?” can be asked in four ways:

What is designated by the word “thinking”?
What does the prevailing theory of thought, namely logic, understand by thinking?
What are the prerequisites we need to perform thinking rightly?
What is it that commands us to think?

Resources

References:

—— (1966a). Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking. In: Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking. Trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund. New York: Harper and Row.

—— (1966b). Discourse on Thinking. Trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund. New York: Harper and Row.

——(1968). What is Called Thinking?. Trans. J. Glenn Gray. New York. Harper and Row.

The November 2025 TOK Essay Prescribed Titles

A few notes of warning and guidance before we begin:

The notes here are intended to guide you towards a thoughtful, personal response to the prescribed titles posed. They are not to be considered as the answer and they should only be used to help provide you with another perspective to the ones given to you in the titles and from your own TOK class discussions and research. You need to remember that most of your examiners have been educated in the logical positivist schools of Anglo-America and this education pre-determines their predilection to view the world as they do and to understand the concepts as they do. The TOK course itself is a product of this logical positivism.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-8nWwYRUyV6bDdXZ01POFFqVlU

A sine qua non: the opinions expressed here are entirely my own and do not represent any organization or collective of any kind. Now to business…

The Titles

For historians and artists, do conventions limit or expand their ability to produce knowledge? Discuss with reference to history and the arts.

The first essay title asks us to define and understand what “conventions”, “limitations” and “expansion”, “the ability to produce”, and what “knowledge” is in the arts and history. Examining these terms closely will help the student to get their bearings within the areas of knowledge of history and the arts and of the perspectives from which the questions unfold from out of those areas of knowledge.

First of all, the title indicates that “knowledge” is something that is able to be “produced”. To “produce” is “to make” or to “bring forth”, to bring into existence something from out of materials or components that are ready-to-hand and already in existence. To “produce” can also mean “to cause or bring about a result”. This “causing” indicates that something is responsible for an end result.

For example, if we look at our word “information”, we will see that its suffix is “-ation” which derives from the Greek aitia meaning “that which is responsible for”. So the word “in-form-ation” may be said to mean “that which is responsible for the “form” so that it has the ability to “inform”. The “form” that was responsible for creating the ability to “inform” was called logos by the Greeks. We translate logos as “reason” or “rationality”, a type of thinking. When Albert Einstein complained to Werner Heisenberg that “God does not play dice”, Einstein’s position was based on his belief that the universe was ‘rational’, a “conventional” belief that he had inherited from Newton’s physics. The conventions of science are expressions of the ‘faith’ based on our belief in the axioms and principles of mathematics and how they relate to Nature.

The ‘forms’ of our thinking are what we understand as the ‘conventional’. The conventional from this thinking is where we get our “knowing”. “Making” and “knowing” is our word “technology”: techne being the craft of the artist, the artist’s “know-how”, the “making”, and logos being the “knowing” itself, that which allows the “making” to be possible. The “knowing” or logos establishes that “open region” that allows for the making of the tools of technology such as computers and handphones. “Information” is a type of knowledge that has been ‘brought forth’, and for many it is the only form of knowledge.

“Conventions” are the “opinions” of the many and they will always be found to be surrounded by politics, particularly in History, but also in the Arts. They provide the horizons, the limits, in which understanding and meaning are given to human beings in their lives. In our being-in-the-world, we are at the same time living in a number of “sub-worlds”. You are an IB student or teacher, but this is only one of a number of worlds that you occupy simultaneously and each of these worlds has a different logos with which you are familiar and within which you are “at home”. Other human beings live in other sub-worlds in which you are not at home because you lack the logos or the ‘expertise’, the “know-how” required to fit comfortably within that world.

For our title, the sub-worlds are the worlds of the arts and history, and each of these worlds has a specialized vocabulary that distinguishes those who live in these sub-worlds. Each of these sub-worlds has a logos which is unique to itself and the purpose of education is to provide the learning so that one may be able to enter into the various ‘sub-worlds’ or areas of knowledge as a ‘specialist’ and to be able to dwell comfortably and be ‘at home’ in that world . “Conventions” are the ways and the contents of the knowing that provide the base of understanding that allows one to enter into a sub-world. They are the sub-world’s “history”. They provide the horizons or limits within which the sub-world operates. When one decides to operate outside of the conventions of the sub-world, one will then use ‘imagination’ or ‘fantasy’ to do so. These two types of ‘thinking’ are not the same.

The AOK of History attempts to deal with a world of “facts”; and from that limited world, the logos or perspective of the historian builds from an understanding, which is given to him/her from “convention”, how those facts are to be interpreted, selectively choosing and shaping the meaning of those ‘facts’ into a ‘rational’ whole or form so that others may come to understand the significance of the events being discussed. History deals with the past, present, and future. Its concern is with Time. The purpose of studying history is to gain knowledge of the actions of others in the past so that we in turn will gain self-knowledge so that we can come to an understanding of our place in history so that we will be able to make ‘informed’ decisions in the future. In order for history to inform us, some ground rules must be followed in its telling. This is what is known as ‘convention’, and ‘convention’ is both limiting and at the same time liberating.

The historian relies on ‘rationality’ as that which brings the ‘facts’ to light to show them in their “truth”. The first historian of the West, the Greek Thucydides, wrote: “I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.” History of the Peloponnesian War bk. 1, Ch. 22, sect. 18 (tr. Richard Crawley, 1874) Thucydides is saying that while his work is history, his writing of that history is “trans-historical”. His work rises beyond the rhetoric that is the logos of those who wish to gain fame in the present. He believes that his work will have something to say to those who wish to understand the essence of war and of power and so be able to ‘interpret’ these phenomenon in the future. Such knowledge will possibly prevent future cataclysms. His history outlines the end of that era known as the Periclean or Golden Age of Greek history due to the failure of the Athenians’ war against the Spartans. If Thucydides is right, reading his history should be helpful for us if we wish to understand the essence of, say, the USA at this moment in its politics. Thucydides is a ‘true historian’.

The propagandist, on the other hand, relies on ‘fantasy’, the ‘big lie’, the gaslighting that questions the reality of the facts themselves and is, thus, the ‘false historian’. Since we have ‘facts’ as a reality, we also have ‘interpretations’ of facts. The propagandist limits himself in the interpretation of facts by his lack of imagination or thoughtlessness. The interpretations of facts is the discourse of historians. Thucydides believes he has gotten to the ‘truth’ of the facts in his interpretation that is a product of his understanding. His truth ‘defines’ or places limits on the things which he is speaking of so that they can be understood, brought forth, and be capable of being spoken about. He must convey this truth through language (which is also another meaning of the Greek term logos) providing sufficient reasons for his interpretation of the things he has chosen to speak about.

The propagandist’s view, however, is “unlimited” according to the rules of convention for his view relies on ‘fantasy’, and fantasy is opposed to ‘rationality’ and to the ‘imagination’. The propagandist will not have evidence or sufficient reasons to support his perspectives on the facts that he has chosen. The propagandist is ‘anti-rational’ and abhors thinking in any form for thinking gives light to the lie that he is trying to propose. The propagandist requires thoughtlessness. Defining the propagandist as ‘anti-rational’, one can go so far as to say that the propagandist speaks the ‘insane’, the ‘irrational’ to the insane and irrational. The propagandist requires the ‘unlimited’ and the ‘unconventional’. Truth brings the facts to light. The lie obscures, hides, deceives and does so in an irrational logos. The end purpose of the lie is the achievement of power i.e. it is political, and all writing is finally political for it involves our being-with-others and our speaking to others. This is the reason why propagandists appeal to the ‘anti-rational’ emotions of the many to achieve their ends. The propagandist relies on the emotion of the moment, while the true historian attempts to rely on the timelessness of truth. The propagandist ultimately has no respect for his audience; and since this is the case, there can be no “expansion” of knowledge.

In the USA today, the “unlimited” is shown by those who believe that they are capable of living in the various sub-worlds that have been constructed without having the specialized logos required for true participation in those sub-worlds, for being ‘at home in’ those sub-worlds. They lack the techne, the know-how or skill required. They are like poor cobblers who bring forth nothing but ill-fitting shoes. One may think one has “knowledge” where, in fact, none exists. (See the quotation from Plato’s Laws noted below).

The most famous quote of Thucydides not only applies to geo-politics, it also applies to the actions of individual human beings: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” (History of the Peloponnesian War bk. 5, Ch. 89) The philosopher Nietzsche once said “Power makes stupid”, and this “stupidity” rests on the lack of self-knowledge that the “strong” exhibit in their lack of respect for conventions and laws. The propagandist has no ethics or morals and his will to power leaves nothing but wastelands in its wake. Thucydides’ quote applies to both individual human beings and to states.

Where ‘fantasy’ rules and dismantles the role of convention providing the illusion of ‘freedom’ in the ‘unlimited’ worlds of the propagandists, ‘imagination’ is the faculty that rules over the worlds of the arts. Fantasy and the imagination are not the same thing. “Novelty” is the end for “production” in the arts (“that which is responsible for”: -tion aitia; for that which is brought forth: pro forward, ducere to lead). “Novelty” is the bringing forth of the Same even though it may be considered “new”: a shoe is a shoe is a shoe. The ‘true artist’, like the ‘true historian’, attempts to change the way in which we view our human condition, to bring about a new or fresh perspective on the things that are. In our cobbler and shoe analogy, the true artist attempts to change the manner in which we view our feet!

Both fantasy and the imagination relate to our manner of viewing the world in which we live and give us our understanding of that world. How we first see our world will determine what can or will be brought forth from that world. (See Title #2) We cannot have hand phones and computers without first viewing the world “technologically”, and our viewing provides a space for the tools of technology to come into being, to be produced. The cobbler views a shoe differently than those who are not cobblers because he views a shoe from his techne.

The English poet William Blake speaks of the “Divine Imagination” and he contrasts it with “Newton’s sleep”. “Newton’s sleep” was Blake’s view of convention: how the principle of reason (nihil est sine ratione: “nothing is without reason”) dominated our world of understanding and thus of ‘science’ or ‘knowledge’. It was and is the way in which we view the world. Today we might think of it at its apogee, which is Artificial Intelligence.

While we may view AI as ‘unlimited’ in its scope and possibilities, for an artist like Blake this is merely an illusion. Today, ‘imagination’ is a polite way of saying that something is false, and it is a common statement of the gaslighters. For Blake, however, the imagination is the central faculty of both the Divine and of human beings in contrast to ‘rationality’. Whereas the “conventional” seeing of Newton keeps us in a somnambulistic state, the imagination is all-embracing and liberating: “In your own bosom you bear your Heaven and Earth & all you behold; tho’ it appears Without, it is Within, in your Imagination, of which this World of Mortality is but a Shadow” (Jerusalem 71:17) For Blake, the imagination was the basis of all art and in the creative act, it was the completest liberty of the spirit. Many of Blake’s contemporaries thought he was ‘mad’. In Blake, the Daughters of Memory (convention, tradition) are often contrasted with the Daughters of Inspiration. “Imagination has nothing to do with memory.”

2. What is the relationship between knowing and understanding? Discuss with reference to two areas of knowledge.

(Any response to this title should also look at some of the points made in title #1 and title #3.)

For any “relationship” to be established, there must be something in common between the things that will allow that relationship to be possible. What do knowledge and understanding have in common and how are they related to each other? What do knowledge and understanding have in common with the limitations that are given within the horizons of the knowing and understanding of historians and the artists?

For the Greeks, the term metaxu is a word that means “between”, “among”, or “in the midst of”. It can also mean “meanwhile”, “in the meantime”, or “afterwards”. This ‘between’ has something to do with being and time for its meaning is adverbial in nature while also containing elements of the gerund. We could say that it is the ‘relationship’ itself that is ‘between’ knowing and understanding and dwells in the midst of what knowing and understanding are. It is a constant presence between the two and must be present for both to occur.

“Understanding” may be said to be “something in which you have a reason to believe”. It involves “faith” to some degree. Understanding may be said to precede knowledge, for there is no knowledge possible without first understanding. Understanding is “consciousness”, “awareness”. Understanding is our projection of possibilities for our being-in-the-world. Once understanding is established, one then proceeds to knowledge. Understanding is the prosthesis which allows knowledge to come to be.

Understanding is the horizons that are the limitations that are present in what is called knowledge in the areas of knowledge. Understanding is always present or ‘in the midst of’ what we call knowledge, just as knowledge is always present in how we understand some things. Understanding is the axioms or “common sense” from which we proceed to gain knowledge of some other thing. Under-standing is the grounding of our seeing, our vision, or how we view the world or worlds in which we happen to be involved. What is it that “stands under” what we think knowledge to be? How does this standing under provide a prosthesis for our moving forward in the quest for knowledge?

If for example we believe that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, our understanding is our belief in what we think ‘beholding’ to be. The understanding is the ‘beholding’ itself. From this, the possibilities for how we understand the Arts proceeds, and our ‘knowledge’ of those Arts will be spoken of in a language which shows what we think that ‘beholding’ to be i.e. it “proceeds” from out of that beholding itself and that ‘beholding’ is a projection of its possibilities.

If we think about the word ‘behold’, we can see that it is a viewing or a looking that creates a ‘grasping’, a ‘holding’ that gives ‘being’ or reality to something: be-hold. “Viewing” or “looking” is what the Greeks understood as theoria, and our word “theatre” “the viewing place” derives from it. The theory is produced from the manner of the “looking”. For the theory to proceed from the looking, the looking must give various possibilities. When this looking provides the being to things, ‘reality’ is given to things and then knowledge of the thing is made possible. This knowledge will then be expressed in a language that arises from out of such “be-holding”, and so we see that it is language or what the Greeks called logos that is the “relationship” between knowing and understanding. We translate logos by “reason”, but it is also language or ‘word’. The manner in which we view things is given justification through the provision of evidence. We know more about the things we have made than about the things we have not made. The evidence which is required for the being or existence of things are the sufficient reasons demonstrated in the results or outcomes that have occurred.

The giving of reality or being to something is to give that thing meaning or significance. The giving of meaning is to provide the thing with “significance” for us. Where ‘significance’ is lacking, meaning is lacking and some things become overlooked or ignored because they are believed to contain no possibilities. This giving of meaning to things provides us with the ‘know how’ that allows us to occupy our worlds securely. This is done through the axiom of the principle of reason (“Nothing is without a reason”). An axiom is a statement or proposition which is regarded as being established, accepted, or self-evidently true. It is based upon “faith”. It is the foundation of the area of knowledge we understand as mathematics. Mathematics is “that which can be learned and that which can be taught” i.e. the projected “possibilities” of reason. The axioms of mathematics are the logoi that derive from the principle of reason, “that which is thrown forward”. “Mathematical projection” is the realization of the possibilities of the things which we encounter in our day-to-day lives.

A principle is much like an axiom. It can be a fundamental truth or rule that serves as a basis for something i.e. a prosthesis, an under-standing, a support. Principles can be used in various contexts including science, ethics, and everyday life; for example, “The principle of relativity” in physics or “The principle of fairness” in ethics. Principles are statements that can be derived from observation, experience, or other principles, unlike axioms which are statements based on the self-evidently true. “Statements” are what we understand as the logoi, which is the relation between what is said about the thing and the thing said. We understand this saying about things as “judgement”.

“-Logy” is a suffix that follows the naming of many of our areas of knowledge e.g. “bio-logy”, “psycho-logy”, etc. That the self-evidently true can be ignored is shown in USA’s Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Such a statement expresses a “faith” that can provide the motive or motion for an action that is an expression of a “belief” if it is taken to be true. If not taken to be true, it can simply be ignored. Self-evident truths are often ignored in our day-to-day lives if they are not convenient for us. This is particularly so in Ethics and Politics.

Through understanding, we disclose the meaning and the significance of the entities (things) and the experiences that we have not by simply knowing facts but by grasping their significance within the context of our being-in-the-world. Language is the fundamental tool for understanding as it allows us to express and share our experiences and interpretations of the world (the whole) and the worlds of which we are a part, the contexts and details that make up the experiences of our lives. In its broadest sense, language can be understood as both word and number. The axioms of mathematics and the rational discourse of the principle of reason are both “relationships” between knowing and understanding that are established by the logos be it word or number.

3. Should knowledge in an area of knowledge be pursued for its own sake rather than its potential application? Discuss with reference to mathematics and one other area of knowledge.

A well-known gangster saying has it that ‘Blood is very expensive and bad for business.’ In the world of academic research for its own sake, “Truth, like blood, is very expensive and bad for business”. The poet John Keats once wrote: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

In mathematics, as well as in many other areas of knowledge, those who are engaged in ‘pure mathematics’ do so because they find that what they do (the pure disinterested use of number) fills them with a sense of the overwhelming beauty of the world. The ‘true’ mathematician and the ‘true’ artist are engaged in what they do because of the beauty of what they encounter through their work. This encounter with beauty fills their lives with joy. In Sanskrit, the word is ananda or “bliss”. We may say that this encounter is the experience of the relationship between knowledge and truth and how truth illumines the reality of the world which the mathematician or artist inhabits (its beauty). The mathematician or artist will always be tempted by the ‘big bucks’ on offer for the ‘practical applications’ of the knowledge that they have. They have the choice to succumb to that temptation or to remain true to their ‘faith’. This choice is not an easy one for the simple reason that one needs to eat.

The propagandist, be they an historian or an artist, abhors the truth for the truth seeks to bring things to light while the propagandist wishes to hide the truth for it is a threat to his real interest, which is power. This power manifests itself most often in public prestige often showing itself in the form of money. Human being, in its nature, reveals truth. When it does not do so, it becomes ‘inhumane’. Corporate interests and their propagandists (their media advertisers) are not interested in truth or education since their end is to produce the mass society of mass consumption, the ‘city of pigs’ as it was designated in Plato. The artist who designs the media campaigns for the large corporations is not a true artist just as the historian who works as a gaslighter for political entities is not a ‘true’ historian since he does not report the truths as they relate to the facts.

Earlier, I spoke of the English poet William Blake’s identification of the thinking of the scientist with what he called “Newton’s sleep”. For Plato (and Blake), science does not think in the way that thinkers think. This is science’s blessing for if it did think in the manner in which thinkers think we would cease to have all of the wonderful discoveries that science’s applications have produced. The thinking required to combat the general “thoughtlessness” of the sciences is not the kind of thinking that is to be found in the sciences. The thinking upon which the sciences are grounded is a form of nihilism since it is the principle of reason, the science itself, that gives being or reality to things. Elon Musk’s thinking, for example, is not the thinking of a thinker. It is the thinking of a technician. What is it that distinguishes the thinking of a technician from the thinking of the philosopher?

In Plato, the ideas give being to the things that are and cause them to come to appearance in their ‘outward form’ (eidos). The ideas are the logoi be they “word” or “number”, and the ideas as number are distinguished from the ones, twos and threes that we usually think of as numbers in our calculations. The ideas as “word” are different from our usual understanding of “words, words, words” as ‘information’. The thinking of the technician or the artist uses the ‘imagination’ or eikasia in order to enable his ‘know how’ or ‘technical skill’, his techne, to construct the product or end that he has in mind and bring that product into being be that product a pair of shoes or a poem. In the Divided Line of Plato from Bk. VI of his Republic, B=C: the ‘material world’ (B) is equal to that world that we understand through rational thought (C). Rational thought (C) is capable of ‘procreating’ an infinity of possibilities within the sempiternal character of created Nature (B). This is what we understand by ‘materialism’. There will always be new Nikes as there will always be new poems, but neither creation will be ‘great’. It will be the procreation or the bringing into being of the Same.

The knowledge that we understand as episteme or ‘theoretical knowledge’ is dependent on, and in a relation to, the higher section of the Divided Line that Plato outlines in Bk. VI of his Republic (D:C). Socrates (534 a 4-5) relates that dialectical noeisis, “the conversation between two or three that runs through the ideas, is to pistis (faith, trust, belief) as natural and technical dianoia is to eikasia (imagination).” Socrates distinguishes the logos of the ‘spirit’ or nous that is used by the ‘dialectician’ from the logos of the imagination which is that used by the technician and the artist. The numbers and words of the ‘spirit’ are distinguished from the numbers and words of the creative artist and technician. For example, Socrates did not write books; Plato wrote books. Jesus Christ did not write books; his followers wrote the books. The Buddha did not write books; his followers wrote the books. These writings of the followers were the products of the “imagination”. They represented a knowledge of the individual (Socrates, Christ, the Buddha) that was a product of a gnosis or ‘direct experience’ of the individual; but in the writing this knowledge becomes ‘true opinion’, an ‘interpretation’.

The ideai are the logos: the ideas give to things their essence, their ‘whatness’, and thus their being, while the eidos (whether of word or number) gives them their “outward appearance”. The ideas are not the products of human beings but something which has been given to human beings. They are much like the axioms which we discussed under title #2. We have come to call these outward appearances of things “beauty”. The “outward appearance” of the thing is merely its ‘shadow’ i.e. it is the thing without its ‘light’, its logos, and it is its light (truth) which illuminates its truth and its ‘true beauty’. (That is why the Sun is a metaphor of the Good in the allegory of the Cave). According to Plato, the thinking which seeks the essences of things is that “noetic thinking” that we have come to call ‘geometry’. Geometry is now what we understand as ‘spacial relations’ between things but Plato understood ‘geometry’ as the possibility of the thing being brought into a relation of ‘harmony’ and friendship.

Over his academy Plato had the statement, “No one enters unless he knows geometry.” By this he meant that no one enters (gains knowledge) unless he knows “friendship” and is capable of friendship, of relationships. This knowledge of friendship is a gnosis or a knowing by direct experience and is a by-product of that self-knowledge which allows one to have the capability of being a friend.

The natural dianoia or ‘gathering together into a one’ which is the product of scientific rationalism (the turning of the thing into an object), is a ‘mirroring’ of that thinking that is dialectical noeisis. The “seeing” for one’s self becomes a ‘hearing’ from others on the ‘method’ or ‘plan’ that is to be used to bring about a desired result. While it is not knowledge as gnosis or direct possession or experience it, nevertheless, is ‘true opinion’. The distinction is shown in the example of the road to Larissa in the dialogue Meno of Plato where one has been given correct instructions on how to get there but has not personally undertaken the journey for themselves: if one follows the directions, one will get to Larissa.

The ‘should’ of the title implies an ethical choice: the humanity of human beings always implies ethical choices; they are what make us ‘humane’. If scientists thought the way that thinkers think, then we would not have the many wonderful discoveries that science has been able to produce through its applications, its techne. If the poet Keats is correct, then these discoveries have some ‘beauty’ in them and, therefore, truth. They are part of our ‘humaneness’.

The writings of a Plato and a Blake are not the usual writings that have been given to us. The ‘creativity’ of a Blake and a Plato, their use of the imagination, is different: their art leads to that thinking and that direct experience of beauty and truth which is not the product of the imagination. But the Blakes and Platos, like the philosophers and saints, are few and rare among us.

4. To what extent do you agree that however the methods of an area of knowledge change, the scope remains the same. Answer with reference to two areas of knowledge.

“Methods” may be said to be a particular form of procedure for accomplishing or approaching something, especially a systematic or established one such as the ‘scientific method’. Historically, the scientific method is said to have been given to us by the English materialist Francis Bacon. “Methods” are among some of the ‘conventions’ spoken of earlier in these essay titles particularly title #1. The “scope” is the “seeing” or “viewing”. A micro-scope means “to see small”; a tele-scope means “to see far”. The “scope” is what produces the theoria, the theory that determines how one is to see in a certain manner. The “scope” is what gets things going in an area of knowledge and determines the theories that arise from within it.

The answer to the question, for example, “why has algebraic calculation become the paradigm of knowledge for our times” (the “mathematical projection” that results in the “to what extent” type of questions that we ask) is not a proposition: it reveals a transformed basic position, a transformation in the “scope”, or a transformation of the initial existing position of human beings towards things, a change of questioning and evaluation, of seeing and deciding, a transformation of what we are as human beings and what we think we are as human beings in the midst of what is. This transformation is a true paradigm shift and it occurred during the transformation of the age known as the Renaissance to that known as the Age of Reason in the West. In the William Blake example used here, it occurs is the ‘cruel materialism’ of the English philosopher John Locke, the science of Isaac Newton, and the method of Francis Bacon.

We cannot use science to tell us what science itself is: we cannot conduct an experiment or use the other methodologies of the sciences to teach us what science itself is. The question concerning our basic relations to nature (including our own ‘human nature’, our own bodies), our knowledge of nature as such, our rule over nature is itself in question in the question of how we stand in relation to all the things that are. This questioning will lead to the ‘abyss’, and our response to our questioning can only come through discussions that will make us mindful of the implicit assumptions which we hold with regard to what we call knowledge.

In connection with the historical development of natural science, things become objects, material, and a point of mass in motion in space and time and the calculation of these various points. When what is is defined as object, as object it becomes the ground and basis of all things, their determinations as to what they are, and the kinds of questioning that determine those determinations. This grounding is the mathematical projection and we may call this grounding a “knowledge framework”. This “knowledge framework” itself is grounded in the principle of reason: nothing is without a cause, or nothing is without reason (reasons).

The determination of things as objects is the “scope” of our projection of things. That which is animate is also here in this determination of object: nothing distinguishes humans from other animals or species (Darwin’s Origin of Species). Even where one permits the animate its own character (as is done in the human sciences), this character is conceived as an additional structure built upon the inanimate. This reign of the object as material thing, as the genuine substructure of all things, reaches into the area that we call the “spiritual”, into the sphere of the meaning and significance of language, of history, of the work of art, and all of the areas of knowledge of TOK. It is what we call our culture. Works of art, poems and tragedies are all perceived as “things”, and the manner of our questioning about them is done through “research”, the calculation that determines why the “things”/the works are as they are. The difficulty from such a position is that while we may learn about the thing that we call history, for instance, we cannot learn from the thing that we call history because we perceive ourselves to be in a superior position to it from the outset.

When the “scope” of what and how we are attempting to gain knowledge changes, then we have what we call a true “paradigm shift” in the study of what we have been historically observing. The German physicist Heisenberg once said: “What we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Our scientific work in physics consists in asking questions about nature in the language that we possess and trying to get an answer from experiment by the means that are at our disposal.” When quantum physicists study laser light to try to understand its properties, it is not a thing of nature that they are studying. Laser light does not occur naturally. Why is the knowledge arrived at in the Natural Sciences considered to be “knowledge” in its most “robust” form and what is it knowledge of then? Technology is the “scope” of what we have come to call knowledge and it is technology which provides the “space” for the objects and methodologies of technology to come into being.

To characterize what modern technology is, we can say that it is the disclosive looking (the scope) that disposes of the things which it looks at. Technology is the framework that arranges things in a certain way, sees things in a certain way, and assigns things to a certain order: what we call the mathematical projection. The “looking” (the theory) is our way of knowing which corresponds to the self-disclosure of things as belonging to a certain order that is determined from within the framework itself. From this looking, human beings see in things a certain disposition; the things belong to a certain order that is seen as appropriate to the things i.e. our areas of knowledge.

The seeing of things within this frame provides the impetus to investigate the things in a certain manner. That manner is the calculable. Things are revealed as the calculable. Modern technology is the disclosure of things as subject to calculation. Modern technology sets science going; it is not a subsequent application of science and mathematics. “Technology” is the outlook on things that science needs to get started. Modern technology is the viewing/insight into the essence of things as coherently calculable. Science disposes of the things into a certain calculable order (the knowledge framework as based on the principle of reason). Science is the theory of the real, where the truth of the things that are views and reveals those things as disposables.

The “scope” or the idea that nature is a calculable framework of forces stands at the beginning of experiments, or prior to the experiments, and is not the result of experiments. Galileo’s rolling of balls down an inclined plane does not result in a view of nature as calculable forces; Galileo must first see, must first have the “theory” in view in advance of what he believes that things in general are like.

The grounding of this theory, this looking, the “scope” is beautifully encapsulated in the title of Newton’s great work Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which we translate The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. “Natural Philosophy” is science of nature or what we call knowledge. Modern science must possess this disclosive looking, these mathematical principles or axioms, before it sets to work, before it conducts experiments. In the light of this mathematical view, science devises and conducts experiments in order to discover to what extent and how nature, so conceived, reports itself. Experimentation itself cannot discover what nature is, what the essence of nature is, since a conception of the essence of nature is presupposed for all experimentation. Without the conception of nature in advance, the scientist would not know what sort of experiments to devise.

The rigor of mathematical physical science is exactitude. Science cannot proceed randomly. All events, if they are at all to enter into representation as events of nature, must be defined beforehand as spatio-temporal magnitudes of motion. Such defining is accomplished through measuring, with the help of number and calculation. Mathematical research into nature is not exact because it calculates with precision; it must calculate in this way because its adherence to its object-sphere (the objects which it investigates) has the character of exactitude. In contrast, the Group 3 subjects, the Human Sciences, must be inexact in order to remain rigorous. A living thing can be grasped as a mass in motion, but then it is no longer apprehended as living. The projecting and securing of the object of study in the human sciences is of another kind and is much more difficult to execute than is the achieving of rigor in the “exact sciences” of the Group 4 subjects.

Today’s word for “method” is algorithm. An algorithm is based on the principle of cause and effect and the principle of contradiction, both of which come together under the principle of reason. The grounds of any algorithm are the algebraic calculations projected onto a world conceived as object, including the human beings who occupy that world. A method may be said to be the application of the principle of reason (which is the “scope”, the “seeing” that is the understanding: see Title #2), which provides the form for the orderliness of thought or behavior or the systematic planning that precedes action. This is what is understood here as the logos. We speak of the ‘experimental method’. All of these may be broadly understood as ‘logistics’ for they centre on providing the efficiency and accuracy necessary for our technological way of being-in-the-world. When we think of our word “information”, we see that it is composed of in-form-ation: that which is responsible for the “form” (-ation from the Greek aitia) so that it may “inform”. Without the form, which is the logos, it cannot inform. The “form” is what we call the “mathematical” and this is what the Greeks understood as one aspect of logos as it is used in these writings.

5. In the pursuit of knowledge, is it possible or even desirable to set aside temporarily what we already know? Discuss with reference to the natural sciences and one other area of knowledge.

Should we decide or attempt to ‘set aside’ what we already know for any period of time would indicate that we desire that we are not ‘conscious’ for that period of time i.e. we are without any understanding of our world we live in and thus are ‘machine-like’, motion without consciousness. Such a position is ‘thoughtless’ and as should be clear from the earlier discussions on these titles, it is a position not possible for human beings. There is always an a priori understanding of the world in which we live and this a priori understanding will determine how we will view that world.

In earlier titles I spoke of the English poet William Blake’s notion of “Newton’s sleep” and indicated that it was the kind of thinking that was done in the rational (natural) sciences for it focuses on the material world and fails to take into consideration the ‘spiritual’ or ‘noetic’ realm of the world inhabited by human beings. Blake spoke of the ‘cruel philosophy’ of materialism that had spread from England throughout the world: “I turn my eyes to the Schools & Universities of Europe and there behold the Loom of Locke, whose woof rages dire, wash’d by the Water-wheels of Newton: black the cloth in heavy wreathes folds over every Nation.” (Jerusalem 15:14) In the painting of Newton by Blake, we can see that Newton writes upon a scroll which proceeds or ‘projects’ from the back of his head. He does not do his calculations upon a rock tablet or in a book (which come to establish the conventions spoken about in title #1), and such writing upon a scroll is indicative of “imaginative creation” which is from the realm of eikasia in Plato’s Divided Line from Bk VI of his Republic which was discussed under title #3. The “imaginative creations” of the artists and technicians create the objects that are paraded in front of the fire in Plato’s allegory of the Cave.

In Blake, “Newton’s sleep” is that ‘unconsciousness’ which arises from a materialistic mechanistic conception of the world; and in Blake’s mythology, this materialistic conception is comprised of the triune figures of Newton, Bacon, and the English philosopher John Locke. This trinity of figures of naturalistic rational science, or empirical science, are opposed to the creative figures of John Milton, Shakespeare and Chaucer in Blake’s mythological world. Both the scientific and poetic figures use the logos whether as number or word in order to construct their creations or projections. With Newton, we have the law of gravity for instance, while with Shakespeare we have King Lear.

The understanding, which makes a tabula rasa position impossible in the pursuit of knowledge, is the “projection of possibilities” onto the world in which we live. We call such projections “projects”, so we speak of the “mathematical project”. To pro-ject is “to throw forward”, into the future. The outcome is to be anticipated in the future. In the Blake painting, the “project” is the scroll which is thrown forward and upon which Newton is doing his calculations. Our desire to “overlook” or “skip over” what we already know comes from our urge towards “novelty”, the “new”, in our desire to create. This desire for the new proceeds from the possibilities that are already present in our initial projection. (See response to title #1) The initial projection or understanding ensures that the results from such ‘new’ creations will always be the Same.

In the natural sciences, the theory of relativity of Einstein is not a new “projection” of physics but, rather, stands upon the shoulders of Newton and what are called “classical physics”. The other great discovery of modern physics, the indeterminacy principle of Heisenberg, also stands upon Newton’s shoulders but it is a much more radical rejection of Newton’s findings and calculations. With our new technologies, we are discovering that Heisenberg’s calculations have a greater precision and exactness than the findings of Einstein.

The natural sciences deal with the world as a “surface phenomenon”, their physical presence. As a surface phenomenon, the natural sciences deal with the world in which we live as a ‘power phenomenon’ and that world’s meaning lies in the relations of these manifestations of force. The workings of the artist also deal with the world as a ‘surface phenomenon’ but in doing so attempt to get at the ‘depth’ of the physical object that they are trying to portray. Both the natural scientist and the creative artist use the imagination to make representations of the phenomenon of which they wish to speak in order to convey the ‘essence’ or truth of the phenomenon. Such use of the imagination will be determined by thinking in which the artist or technician is engaged in their manner of seeing and understanding their worlds.

6. Is empathy an attribute that is equally important for a historian and a human scientist? Discuss with reference to history and the human sciences.

The French philosopher Simone Weil once wrote: “Faith is the experience that the intelligence is illuminated by Love.” I have spent a good part of my life trying to understand what she meant by that. Empathy is part of love; we cannot love unless we have empathy for that which we encounter in our everyday being-in-the-world. Empathy is one of the bridges that we have to overcome our experience of the world as separate from ourselves. Empathy is a self-conscious awareness of the feelings, experiences, and emotions of the other human beings around us.

In relation to the other titles discussed here, “empathy” is a part of a state of consciousness that is of a higher order than rationality. It requires a state of some self-consciousness or self-knowledge on the part of the individual involved. Empathy is distinguished from sympathy in that one can be sympathetic towards another’s condition without feeling any empathy for that individual at all. Empathy is an emotion which helps overpower the subject/object distinction that dominates modern technical thinking. Sympathy is an emotion of superiority while empathy is not and we are quite capable of sympathy even though we may be in a position of power.

The difficulty for the historian and the human scientist is that they must cease to be “scientists” if they wish to have “empathy” for that which they are studying or researching because that which they are studying and researching must first be turned into an object; and in both of these specific cases, the objects that are being studied are other human beings. The objects of their study need to be enframed within a statistical matrix so that an answer to the “to what extent” type of questions can be put forward. The “objects” of study must be “dead” in a very real sense.

The researchers, whether in history or the social sciences, must observe the fact/value distinction: the fact-value distinction suggests that facts are objective and values are subjective, and that values cannot be derived solely from facts. The great danger for historians when they do not observe the fact/value distinction is that they can become mere propagandists for their vision is dominated by the empathy they feel towards “one’s own”. As the dictator Josef Stalin said: “Only the victors get to write the history.” Social scientists merely become ‘morally obtuse’ in their political recommendations due to their reluctance to recognize something as ‘good’ or ‘evil’, or good or bad. The historians and social scientists must attempt to rise above that subjectivity that stresses that “one’s own” is the “otherness” that is the world in which we live.

What we believe “science” or “knowledge” to be is founded upon or grounded in the understanding that is the subject/object distinction: that we know more about something by turning the thing into an object and making it “useful” and “disposable” to us and for us in some way. In history and the social sciences, this requires the use of the fact/value distinction since these sciences have always tried to mirror the natural sciences in their methodology. (See title #4)

That which distinguishes philosophers and saints (and makes them so rare and few among us) is their ability to rise beyond our very “common sense” love of our own to the love of the Good. This conflict is very much alive today in all of our encounters within our being-in-the-world and our being-with-others. Our being-in-the-world involves our constant struggle to ‘know ourselves’ and to know what is ‘good’ for ourselves. Our being-with-others involves politics, and politics involves power.

In the USA, Pope Francis made a pointed critique of J. D. Vance’s erroneous exposition on medieval theology regarding the ordo amoris, the ‘ladder of love’ or the ‘steps of love’ which were originally outlined by Diotima the prophetess in Plato’s Symposium. Vance stated: “There is a Christian concept that you love your family; and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” In the X post, he called his view “basic common sense.” Of course, Vance has left out ‘the love of self’ which is prior to all of the steps that he has outlined. The love of self that lacks ‘self-knowledge’ colours all of the subsequent viewings of family, community, country and world.

The ordo amoris initially outlined by Diotima in Symposium is about the order of love and the justice that is due all human beings which involves caring and concern for all in need. This care and concern arises from an ’empathy’ for all human beings. It involves the distinction between love as eros and love as agape. To quote from the Pope’s letter, “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception. But worrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations, easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth.” The Pope added, “What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.” The question which needs to be explored is what is it about human beings that makes justice (“equal dignity”) their due and what are the consequences for human beings when this equal justice is not upheld? How does this relate to love of one’s own and love of the Good?

Plato in his Laws indicates the problem of an overreaching “love of one’s own”: “For the lover is blind to the faults of the beloved, so he is a poor judge of what’s just and good, because he believes he should always honour his own, above the truth. But a man who is to be a great man must cherish, not himself or what belongs to himself, but what’s just, either in his own actions or indeed in the actions of others. From this same fault is born the universal conviction that our own ignorance is wisdom, and so we who, in a sense, know nothing, imagine that we know everything. And since we don’t rely on others to do whatever we ourselves don’t know, we inevitably make mistakes in doing this ourselves. That’s why everyone must flee from this intense self-love, and always keep with someone better than himself, without feeling any shame in doing so.” The Laws (731D-732B)

Human beings are by nature empathetic. When human beings lose their ’empathy’, they become inhumane, bestial. Justice is the recognition of “otherness”, and this sense of otherness begins with empathy. The tyrant is the most unjust of human beings because his/her sense of “otherness” has all but disappeared. Macbeth is the best example of this that we have in our literature, and his “Tomorrow and tomorrow…” speech (Act V sc. v) indicates the nihilism that befalls all those who succumb to the tyranny of their own injustice or lack of a sense of otherness. Macbeth’s speech is by someone who is incapable of learning from history, and so for him, life has come to have no ‘significance’. Life is “a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing.” This view is that which is held by a person who has violated life’s laws; nevertheless, it is a view held by many today.

Today, Elon Musk’s actions in the USA indicate a similar lack of recognition of otherness and a similar lack of recognition of the thinking that is necessary for justice, what the Greeks understood as phronesis or “good judgement”. “Empathy” is lacking in his actions and his thinking. As the philosopher Nietzsche noted: “Power makes stupid”; and stupidity leads to arrogance and the other hubristic failings that prevent human beings from achieving arete or “human excellence”. Musk, who many consider a ‘great thinker’, a ‘genius’, is incapable of the thinking that is exercised by the philosophers and the great artists and his recent actions have caused the whole of his thinking to become questionable.

Plato’s discussion of the Divided Line which occurs in Bk VI of his Republic distinguishes between the thinking that is done by philosophers and the thinking that is done by technicians and artists . In Bk VI, the emphasis is on the relation between the just and the unjust life and the way-of-being that is “philosophy”. Philo-sophia is the love of the whole for it is the love of wisdom which is knowledge of the whole. The love of the whole and the attempt to gain knowledge of the whole is the call to ‘perfection’ that is given to human beings. Since we are part of the whole, we cannot have knowledge of the whole. This conundrum, however, should not deter us from seeking knowledge of the whole and, indeed, this seeking is urged upon us by our erotic nature. All human beings are capable of engaging in philosophy, but only a few are capable of becoming philosophers. As human beings, we are the ‘perfect imperfection’. While the top of the mountain may be obscured in clouds, we are still able to distinguish a mountain from a molehill and so we are able to reach beyond that thinking or consciousness that is the fact-value distinction.

The May 2025 TOK Essay Prescribed Titles

A few notes of warning and guidance before we begin:

The TOK essay provides you with an opportunity to become engaged in thinking and reflection. What are outlined below are strategies and suggestions, questions and possible responses only, for deconstructing the TOK titles as they have been given. They should be used alongside and along with the discussions that you will carry out with your peers and teachers during the process of constructing your essay.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-8nWwYRUyV6bDdXZ01POFFqVlU

A sine qua non: the opinions expressed here are entirely my own and do not represent any organization or collective of any kind. Now to business…

The Titles

1. Do historians and human scientists have an ethical obligation to follow the directive: “do not ignore contradictory evidence”? Discuss with reference to history and the human sciences.

Title #1 asks us to discuss whether there are any “ethical obligations” in our study or research of human history (presumably, would we lie about the history of rocks?) and the human sciences, and whether or not these ‘ethical obligations’ involve the consideration of ‘contradictory evidence’ that might arise during that research. It asks the question: what are the ethics of the world of academic research? The title implies that ‘contradictory evidence’ can be, and is, overlooked in many cases in the worlds of the human sciences and history.

The ‘ethical worlds’ of history and the human sciences are shaped by the ‘moral principles’ the individual researchers happen to have. Morals are universals; ethics are particulars. Morals are universal principles based upon a distinction between good and bad (good and evil, if you will) which determine the essence (the ‘whatness’) of the particulars that are the ‘ethical obligations’ or the principles of actions that human beings take in their living within communities by establishing a hierarchy of from bad to good, from worst to best. Morals are of the world; ethics are of the many ‘worlds’ that we as human beings participate in. Morals point to a perfection that human beings in their actions attempt to attain. They are the ‘virtues’ that comprise ‘human excellence’.

In your TOK essay here, you are asked to look at contradictory evidence to the thesis that you are going to propose on the title that you choose. Is this the IB’s attempt to educate you to be “ethical” while developing your critical thinking skills and your research? Why should you/we be ‘ethical’? What does the ‘ethical’ have to do with research and ‘truth’? and what does ‘truth’ have to do with our being human, with our humanity, with our being-with-others? What is the impact of our being ‘untruthful’ on our humanity and on our being-with-others in communities?

“Ethical obligations” are duties imposed on manners or ways of action, the ‘ways and means’ of action, what someone ‘should’ do in their conduct. They are limitations on ‘freedom’. Here, the action being considered is the conduct of research, how the research is to be carried out, and how it is to be reported. In the carrying out of research, ‘contradictory evidence’ “should” be considered. Notice that I am not using the word “must” here. Is the consideration of contradictory evidence a ‘should’ or a ‘must’ for human beings? Are all human actions considerations of the questions of ‘should’ and ‘must’? Such considerations regarding research and its findings involve questions regarding what the nature of truth is (i.e. what is a ‘fact’) and how truth is related to justice ( to our being with others in communities). They are essentially political questions. Why should we as human beings be concerned about truth, especially if and when it is not convenient for us to have such a concern?

An historian’s or social scientist’s findings are not known until they are written down and given some permanence of some kind, until they are “revealed” through shared discourse. “Truth” is a revealing, an uncovering. Until such a time, the findings are only known to the historian or social scientist. The revealing is through a ‘hearing’: we hear what others have said regarding the nature of something. Such a question as the TOK asks here is to look at the grounds of the ‘viewing’ from which the research is undertaken and the purpose as to why the research is undertaken in the first place. This ‘viewing’ first came from a ‘hearing’. These ‘hearings’ determine the manner in which ‘judgements’ will be made regarding what is under consideration. These judgements determine the interpretation of the facts. If there are contradictions to the judgements then we are ‘ethically’ bound to change the manner of the ‘viewing’. It is not sane to continue on knowing that one will make the same mistake over and over again.

Is there a hierarchy in existence in which the importance of the research matters? In cancer research, for example, the vested interests of the researchers will sometimes cause them to overlook the ‘contradictory evidence’ that may be present in their findings, for the consequences of such evidence may result in a loss of prestige or power or money. The ‘vested interests’ predetermine the judgements and thus the manner of ‘viewing’. Cancer is primarily a ‘white’ disease. The same efforts are not given to the eradication of malaria and other diseases that plague the world’s coloured populations.

‘Contradictory evidence’ questions the ‘viewing’ or hypothesis that has been put forward to account for the thing that is being questioned and so questions the interpretation. It questions the grounds. The ‘viewing’ is not whole. The deeper question being asked is whether or not there is such a thing as ‘objective knowledge’ and what is the nature of this ‘objective knowledge’. Is ‘objective knowledge’ possible? Without the inclusion of contradictory facts or evidence then we can be certain that what is being given to us is not knowledge. It is opinion. Does this matter? If the results ‘work’, do we care? Similar questions should be considered regarding Title #5.

The question asks us to distinguish between propaganda and knowledge, particularly with regard to history and the human sciences. In all cases, it involves our being-with-others. An ‘ethical obligation’ is something that binds or obliges a person to do or not do certain things, often based on duty, law, or custom. Duties, laws and customs are things which societies create and develop through their histories. They are based on opinion. All of the concerns regarding obligations involve our being with others in a particular community at a certain time i.e. they concern other human beings and our relations to them. The duty or obligation may differ from community to community depending on how the value of truth is regarded within that community. A tyrannical regime will regard the value of truth differently than a democratic or oligarchic regime. Uttering the truth in a tyrannical regime can sometimes result in prison time or death.

Are there obligations that are binding on the individual that have no political considerations? Do hermits have ethical and moral obligations? There are many who believe that ‘morals’ are ‘subjective’ i.e. they are ‘values’ belonging to the single individual. Such a statement dismisses the notion of good and evil, good and bad, as nothing other than a ‘subjective value’. After all, ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, is it not? Such a belief accounts for the lack of a “moral compass” among many of the so-called ‘educated’ and results in moral obtuseness.

Do I have certain obligations that apply to myself only? We are constantly in a battle not to deceive ourselves when it comes to the meaning of the experiences that we have. “Stupidity” is a moral phenomenon that becomes an ‘ethical’ phenomenon when it involves our being with others. It begins with self-deception and then proceeds to the deceiving of others. There is not such a great distinction between morals and ethics as is commonly made out to be. “Stupidity” is not an intellectual phenomenon. The ignoring of contradictory evidence is ‘stupidity’. We ‘owe’ it to ourselves as human beings not to be stupid. It is human nature to reveal truth. We are not fully human if we do not do so.

This ‘owing to ourselves’ implies a state of ‘indebtedness’. To whom or what is the debt owed? Why? This sense of indebtedness is how we conceive justice. If I am a researcher in the human sciences or an historian, I must first have the desire to reveal truth before I can do so. If I am lacking a ‘moral compass’, my desire or goal may be to obfuscate the truth since there are many times when what the truth reveals is inconvenient for me. There are many examples of whistleblowers that can be used to show researchers who have gone against the prevailing powers that be in order to ‘reveal’ the contradictory evidence that their institutions or corporations wished to hide in order to meet the ends that those institutions or corporations had determined which usually involved money or power. In the USA, racists and bigots promote the idea that Haitian immigrants are eating their dogs and cats. The greater bestiality is in the perpetrator of the lie.

In the arts, do the consequences of contradictory evidence have a significant impact on the community? When critics make judgements regarding the latest film and we find the film not entertaining, are there any consequences involved? Artistic views are simply a matter of taste since art is only concerned with our ‘entertainment’, is it not?

In medicine, on the other hand, the consequences can be quite serious. Nowadays, the purpose of the arts is to entertain. They either do so or they do not. All art is ethical at some point since all art involves an audience of some kind. In the human sciences and medicine, consequences arising from not giving contradictory evidence sufficient attention can be devastating. Think of the opioid crisis as an example. Are there examples of bad works of art killing anyone? (Propaganda, for example?) There are many examples of ‘falsehoods’ resulting in the deaths of human beings. Certainly “the art of rhetoric” has resulted in the deaths of many human beings, both currently and historically. Many concrete examples of such cases can be found. In the USA, the “January 6th Insurrection” is a possible example of contradictory evidence that is overlooked and the overlooking involves the deaths of other human beings.

“Ethical obligations” are restructured under the political regime that happens to be in power at the time. Fascists feel they have an ‘ethical obligation’ to re-write history because the revision of history is necessary for their empowerment, and power is their ultimate end. As George Orwell correctly observed, he who controls the past controls the future. To do so requires the telling of lies, an obligation to ‘intentional ignorance’ when it comes to history. The algorithms of fascism require an interpretation of things that is ultimately a shadow of their reality (Plato’s allegory of the cave). These algorithms determine the design of the plan which in turn determines how things will be arranged in the hierarchy of true or false and, thus, how things will be understood and viewed and then communicated.

2. Is our most revered knowledge more fragile than we assume it to be? Discuss with reference to the arts and one other area of knowledge.

“Our most revered knowledge” is what we bow down to or what we look up to. We could use the word ‘piety’ to describe our relation to this knowledge. Piety is a way-of-being in the world. It is that which encompasses all our thoughts and actions. For the majority of us in the West, technology is what we bow down to or what we look up to, and our “piety” is our technological way-of-being in the world. Is the knowledge embraced by this piety ‘fragile’?

“To revere” is to respect someone or something deeply. This reverence with regard to knowledge is based on how that knowledge reveals truth for us. If that truth is seen as empowerment, what ‘works’, then that which increases our power, our freedom, is what we revere. Technology ‘frees’ us from nature. Our dominance of nature increases our ‘freedom’ allowing us to change that which we see before us. This ‘freedom’ to change is what is revered.

There are many who ‘revere’ the knowledge that is most useful to us in the name of our freedom. For the ancients, the ‘useful’ was considered the ‘good’ of something. For example, many people hold Elon Musk in high esteem for his discoveries based on the applications of the mathematical sciences that are proving useful to human beings’ activities. These activities usually deal with the expansion of the technological itself or the dealing with problems that technology itself has created.

With the development of useful tools which are used to dominate nature comes a corollary tendency to authoritarianism in political thinking. This reverence, the emanation of empowerment, is based on how we represent technology to ourselves as an array of neutral instruments, invented by human beings and under human control. This is considered a common sense view of technology. But this ‘common sense’ view hides from us the very technology we are attempting to represent to ourselves and undermines our efforts to bring it to light. The coming to be of technology has required changes in what we think is good; what we think the good is, how we conceive sanity and madness, justice and injustice, rationality and irrationality, beauty and ugliness. These changes indicate the ‘fragility’ of that knowledge that we revere.

In the past (and in a few places in the present), it was quite easy to recognize what the “revered knowledge” of a community was. One simply had to look for the highest point of that community. In Canada, the steeples of Roman Catholic churches once dominated the villages of the French-Canadians who dwelt within them as one travelled along the banks of the St. Lawrence River. Today, it is the telecommunications tower that is the highest point in those communities. In Thailand, a statue of the Buddha usually dominated the highest point. Once again, a telecommunications tower will always be found towering over the Buddha in many Thai communities today. Clearly “information”, data and its transfer, is what we hold most dear, and the nature and interpretation of “information” is very fragile. Information and data transfer is the life-blood of technology and of the technological way-of-being in the world. Our piety rests in our reverence for this information transfer and the technology and the tools that accompany that technology.

What we conceive and judge our greatest art to be is that art which reveals the truth of human life at its deepest levels. This unconcealment of the deepest levels of our humanity is what we conceive truth to be as it reveals to us our human nature and humanity. In the biological sciences, we hold Darwin’s theory of evolution to be the height of perception of what we are as a species. In our arts, something greater and deeper than the truth of Darwin is given to us about the nature of our humanity.

All societies are dominated by a particular account of knowledge and this account lies in the relation between a particular aspiration of thought (“ends”) and the effective conditions for its realization (“means”). The paradigm for our account of knowledge is that which finds its archetype in modern physics. Our account is that we reach knowledge when we represent things to ourselves as objects, summonsing them before us so that they give us their reasons. This summonsing of the things of the world is what we call “research”. What we call AI is the ‘whole’ of the results of that summonsing applied to the ‘world’ of that type of knowing. This summonsing requires well-defined procedures which we call ‘research’, and this ‘research’ is embedded in the algorithms which carry out the actions of the research in AI.

The word “information” may be defined from its roots: “-ation” is from the Greek aitia “that which is responsible for” > the “-form” > so that it may “in-form”. It is the manner in which the data is gathered and of how the data is uncovered so that it reveals its truth i.e. the form that the data is in. ‘Research’ is not then something useful for some ways of knowing and not for others. It belongs to what we think the essence of knowledge is for it is the effective condition for the realization of any knowledge.

In history and the arts, the past and the ‘work’ of art are represented as objects in which the procedure is to order the object before us to give us its reasons. The past is represented as an object. The difficulty with history and the arts is that when we represent something to ourselves as an object, only as an object does it have any meaning for us. History and the work of art become ‘dead’ for us. We stand above it as “subject”, the transcending summonsers. We guarantee that the meaning of what is discovered is under us and in a very real way dead for us in the sense that what is summoned cannot teach us anything greater than ourselves. The chemical compounds of Van Gogh’s yellow paint are interesting, but they tell us nothing about the truth of the painting “Sunflowers”.

In the Arts, we wish to separate the techniques of Art from the work of Art itself, just as we wish to separate the tools of technology from the technological itself. Shakespeare himself said “The art itself is nature”. Means and ends are not so easily separable. As Aristotle has shown us, the ends are not separable from the means for the ends determine the means.

The German philosopher Heidegger has shown that the place experiment plays in the sciences is taken up by a critique of historical sources in the arts. Previous scholarship was a waiting upon the past so that we might find truths which might help us to think and to live in the present. This was why it was once ‘revered’ knowledge. Today, research scholarship in the humanities cannot wait upon the past because it represents the past to itself from a position of its own command. From that position of command you can learn about the past; you cannot learn from the past. The stance of command necessary to research kills the past as teacher. You may watch a performance of King Lear and know all the data that has gone into the production in front of you, but with this knowledge you will not learn anything from the performance in front of you. This is an example of the fragility of our most ‘revered knowledge’: the purpose of the work of art is lost.

3. How can we reconcile the relentless drive to pursue knowledge with the finite resources we have available? Discuss with reference to the natural sciences and one other area of knowledge.

“The relentless drive to pursue knowledge” in today’s world exhibits the sheer ‘will to will’ of a will to power that continues to strive out of the meaningless nihilism of its own making. The questions of “what for?”, “where to?”, and “what then?” are not asked or pondered since the willing itself is all i.e. the ‘relentless drive’. This willing is focused on ‘novelty’, the attempt to bring about the new and the strange.

“To reconcile” means to restore to friendship or harmony. The “pursuit of knowledge” is our desire to turn the world into “resource” so that we may be able to commandeer those resources to our ends. How are we and nature to be ‘reconciled’? To reconcile this relentless “erotic” drive, our need to pursue knowledge, what forms will the pursuit of this knowledge take? Since the Renaissance, our pursuit has been to change the world to realize the goals that we have set for ourselves as human beings. We have placed ourselves at the centre of the world and have summoned the world to give us its reasons. The remarkable achievements of this summonsing make us reluctant to reconcile ourselves to nature. Climate change is nature’s attempt to fight back at this one-sided view of things.

Another meaning of ‘to reconcile’ is to ‘settle, resolve’, to ‘reconcile differences’. How are we to reconcile the differences between subject/object that is the foundation of our stance in the natural sciences? Is there any desire to do so? The incongruities of any possible reconciliation are political questions: how will the finite resources be allotted and who will get to eat what? Examples from history will help to clarify how these questions have been answered by different political regimes.

If “knowledge” is the finished product that we make through the process of our commandeering the world as resource, we can see this ‘relentless drive’ as the making of the total technological world, the turning of the world of becoming into being. This knowing and making has been called ‘absolute knowledge’ by the philosophers. Technology is the highest form of will to power and empowerment. In this stance, there can be no reconciliation.

“Self-knowledge”, a prerequisite for knowing, appears in the form of ‘wise-uppedness’ today, a cynical ‘know-it-all’ attitude that really knows nothing. 54% of Americans cannot read prose beyond the Grade 5 level according to a 2020 report from its Department of Education , while at the same time countless billions of dollars are spent on conquering space as it is seen as the ultimate site of the warfare of the future. In our arts, ‘novelty’ in the outcomes of the production of a ‘work’ is exalted above all other forms of knowledge (the ‘work’ being what we understand as ‘knowledge’) calling itself ‘creativity’. This ‘novelty’ as ‘creativity’ is part of the ‘knowing’ (techniques) and ‘making’ (the work) that is technology.

Our will to power shows itself in our ‘need’ to dominate and commandeer the world conceived as ‘object’, the world conceived as ‘resource’. The world is a ‘finite resource’. The ‘drive to pursue knowledge’ is what we understand as our eroticism at its deepest level: the “need” to have something to will, to domineer, and to consume. The rich are willing to pay exorbitant sums of money to own a work of art that rightly belongs in the “public domain”. Such a desire for the private “consumption” of beauty is what is meant by eroticism. This is what the myth of the Fall out of Paradise is all about.

Modern science is ‘technological’ because in the modern paradigm, nature is conceived at one and the same time as algebraically understood necessity and as ‘resource’. This algebraic understanding is the root of the algorithms of artificial intelligence. Anything apprehended as ‘resource’ cannot be apprehended as beautiful. I objected quite strongly when my principal (a most well-meaning man) referred to his staff, my neighbours and colleagues, as ‘human capital’. This is just another name for ‘human resources’ and for the viewing of the human beings around you as ‘resources’ that can be commandeered and directed. One can see what has been lost and found in our modern conception of the world through the unthought use of these terms.

As is the case with Titles #1 and #2, Titles #3 and #4 are similar in nature. The ‘finite resources’ are the costs of the ‘tools’ and ‘equipment’ necessary to carry out “research” and the reconstruction of the world. This is seen most clearly in our astrophysics and our health sciences. Because we have such advanced tools and equipment in the areas of health, unnecessary uses of that equipment are impelled on those who possess them in order to cover the costs of the equipment. The equipment must be put to use. This is analogous to the bitcoin and crypto-currency rage at the moment.

Liberal arts programs are being cut back because of their costs in many parts of the world. Truth is “expensive”, especially the conveying of truth into the public discourse. The costs of carrying out research in the sciences (the pursuit of knowledge from title #2) are exorbitant; they need to be met by outcomes that will eventually cover their costs (the exorbitant profits of the drug makers that result from the drugs that are produced). The cost of pharmaceutical products is a concrete example of this. ‘The man of peace’, Elon Musk, is the richest man in the world because his discoveries using algebraic calculation aid in the logistics for the future conduct of war. Musk believes that he is in control of his discoveries, but his ‘common sense’ view of technology does not grasp the nature of the reality of technology itself (see Title #2). In a very real and deep way, Musk’s “thinking” is not thinking, in the same way that ‘artificial intelligence’ is not ‘intelligence’ as the ancients understood this term. What kinds of thinking are required to reconcile these differences?

4. Do the ever-improving tools of an area of knowledge always result in improved knowledge? Discuss with reference to two areas of knowledge.

Title #4 directs us to think about what we call “knowledge” and whether or not knowledge can be improved or is improved through the use of better tools. Our understanding of what tools and equipment are arises out of an understanding and interpretation of our world, and refers to our world as the “ready-to-hand”, that world which has become ‘objectified’ and made to stand as ‘resource’. Different equipment and tools belong to the different ‘worlds’ that human beings have created. This bringing to a stand as resource in those worlds is the end result of what we have called ‘research’ in this writing. The key tool of ‘research’ in the modern is the computer, and the apogee of ‘research’ is artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence will direct and determine the science of cybernetics, “the technology of the helmsman”. Artificial intelligence as the science of the ‘steersman’ will come to be present in all other sciences.

What is meant here is that the objective arts and sciences come more and more to be unified around the planning and control of human activities within the human sciences. Technology is the pervasive mode of being in our political and social lives, our being-in-the-world and our being in our various ‘worlds’. With the attempt to dominate the logos (language, the word) through the meta-language that is artificial intelligence comes the corollary dehumanization of our being-in-the-world and an inevitable coming forth of tyranny. The future tyranny will be a ‘happy’ tyranny because there will be no thought capable of coming-to-presence to question it. A sign of this is that with the increasing development and sophistication of communication tools, human discourse (or what I refer to as dialectic in other writings on this blog, the conversations between two or three) is weakened and rhetoric (the language of the one thrown to a many) as a means of communication comes to dominate.

“Knowledge” indicates something that has been brought to light, revealed, unconcealed. It is the ‘truth’ of the essence of the thing. That which has been ‘pro-duced’ or brought forth by our making is ‘knowledge’ and we know more about the things we have made than those things which we have not made. We know more about IPhones, for instance, than about the lilies of the field because we have made the IPhone and (as of yet) not made the lily. One of the goals of the bio-sciences is to make the lily as well as other life forms. The things we have made have been ‘brought forth’ or ‘brought forward’ from out of something else and it is in their making that they are known to us, whereas the things from which they have been brought forth remain in the shadows for us.

In our common sense understanding of “improved knowledge”, there is no question that the greater sophistication of our tools and equipment brings to light, ‘reveals’, ‘unconceals’ the historical facts and artefacts of archeology and history with greater clarity. But notice that what we call “knowledge” is associated with “truth”. The revealing and unconcealing of things requires a hierarchy, for there are different levels at which things may be revealed. In the allegory of Plato’s cave, for instance, the firelight of the artisans and technicians reveals the ‘shadows’ of the artefacts of those things which they themselves have made and casts these shadows on the cave’s walls. We know more about the things which we have made than of those things which we have not made. The cave itself is Nature, the cosmos. What is revealed are images, not the reality of the cave itself for the light of the sun is dimly seen. The allegory of the cave is an image of the truth of things and how this truth is revealed.

Today, the widening gyre of technological innovation and novelty is focused upon solving many of the problems that technology itself has created. The internal combustion engine of the automobile will eventually be replaced by the electric vehicle. The rare metals required for the batteries’ construction, the weight of the batteries themselves, etc. are problems that have, as of yet, not been properly thought through in relation to the pollution they will cause, the energy that they will consume in their making, etc. This is but one example of the issues faced when thinking about ‘improvements’ in technological innovation.

5. To what extent do you agree with the claim “all models are wrong, but some are useful” (attributed to George Box)? Discuss with reference to mathematics and one other area of knowledge.

Models are products or the ‘works’ of hypotheses and speculations; that is, they are the products of opinions. They are images; creations of the imagination. Because they are the products of opinion, they may be either true or false; they may be right or wrong. To say that “all models are wrong” is an example of hyperbole. Some models ‘work’ and some do not. The “usefulness” or utility of a model, whether it works or not, is how we judge its “trueness” and its “goodness”: this “truth” is related to its “correctness”, and the “correctness” in this essay title is related to the phrase “to what extent”. When we ask about the “extent” of something, we are asking a mathematical question which will be answered by way of statistics which will be arrived at by calculation. The calculations will be gathered through research. A statistical nexus is a metaphor; it conveys the degree of “truth” that may be contained in a statement or assertion. It relies on the “calculability” of the thing. A model, too, is a metaphor.

In mathematics, an axiom, postulate, or assumption is a statement (logos) that is taken to be true prima facie, “on its face” or its ‘outward appearance’. It is the arche or starting point for further reasoning and arguments. The word comes from the Ancient Greek word ἀξίωμα (axíōma), meaning ‘that which is thought worthy or fit’ or ‘that which commends itself as evident’. “Mathematics” for the Ancient Greeks was “that which can be learned and that which can be taught”. What can be learned and what can be taught is that which is present (ousia) or “what shows itself” to us. What shows itself to us is its ‘face’. It is that which ‘commends itself as evident’.

The truth or falsity of an assertion, which is a statement (logos), was to be found in its ‘fittedness’ or ‘worthiness’. The ‘fittedness’ of something was based on a judgement of the thing: “Yup, these are a good pair of shoes” is a judgement based on a statement of the ‘aptness’ or ‘fittedness’ of the thing to its use. Its ‘fittedness’ was its ‘goodness’. Because they were ‘fit’ for the purposes of what shoes are supposed to do, the shoes were ‘good’. The ‘worthiness’ of the thing was the thing’s ‘value’ or ‘suitability’ related to its intended use. Some shoes are better or more worthy than other shoes and are more expensive. The ‘worthiness’ of a thoroughbred racehorse was in its ability to run fast. It was not ‘worthy’ if it could not. The worthiness of a good meal was the pleasure of its deliciousness and the satisfaction of the hunger of the individual enjoying it. If the meal is not delicious, it is not ‘good’. The ‘worthiness’ of a human being was to live well in communities and to be open to the whole of things. It is this last statement which is gravely under threat at the present time.

Today, the goodness or ‘value’ to be found in a work of art is related to its ‘entertainment’ value, how delightfully it occupies our attention in the present. This is quite different from ancient idea that a ‘work’ of art was meant to be an object of contemplation and reflection so that we might learn from it what was ‘useful’ for our living in the present. Works of art provided the models, the ideals, that the civilization was based on. Think of Achilles and Ulysses in Ancient Greece, Caesar in Rome, Moses in Judaism, Christ and Mary in Christianity, Mohammed in Islam (even though representations of Mohammed are forbidden in Islam. Why?), Michelangelo’s “David” in the Renaissance. What modern figure do we have as a model upon which our civilization can be based? The artists themselves? What ‘fittedness’ applies to modern models in the Arts today?

The confusion over our use of models in the arts is the result of our confusion over the place of morals and ethics in our day-to-day activities. When one looks at discussions regarding ‘designer babies’, the eugenics which will be possible with our discoveries in the biological sciences, Einstein and Mozart are two names mentioned as possible models for these new human beings. The choices clearly indicate that the technological is what we bow down to and what we look up to, the knowing and making of the arts and the sciences. One does not hear the name of Mother Teresa mentioned in these aspirations. Does the world need more Einsteins and Mozarts or more Mother Teresas?

In the West with the arrival of the new sciences, many Christians felt that Roman Catholics were “pagans” in their appearance to worship the idols and icons of Christ and Mary that had been produced by the artists of their times. This “error” in seeing of these critics indicated that a changed vision had arrived over what thinking was and how thinking was to be seen as distinct from what contemplation, prayer and attention were. While the prayer to the realities represented by the icons or images of the statues was that contemplation that looked for guidance and grace as to what to do in one’s daily life, the literal rational thinking of those who changed the view and understanding of what reality was was beginning to dominate what was to be understood as rationality and thought. The models used for an understanding of what human excellence is underwent a great transformation at that point in time in the history of the West.

6. Does acquiring knowledge destroy our sense of wonder? Discuss with reference to two areas of knowledge.

A “sense of wonder” is a pre-requisite and a necessity for thought and thinking. It is “wonder” that gives rise to thought, which begins with the asking of questions. “Wonder” begins with the sense of mystery that arises from our being-in-the-world. In the English language, wonder is associated with the ‘new’. The ‘new’ is that which is strange and unfamiliar. Does the “wise-uppedness” of many today with regard to the ‘new’ and the ‘novel’ indicate a condition of modern democratic nihilism and thus the destruction of the sense of wonder? What sense of wonder do we have regarding the ‘novelty’ of that world which is all around us? What is the ‘novelty’ of our technological society and what does it portend for our future?

The dominance of ‘novelty’ shuts down “wonder”. The achievements of the modern project in science and medicine are a source of wonder. The world as object has given its reasons as it has been summonsed to do. All of us in our everyday lives are so taken up with certain practical achievements in medicine, in production, in the making of human beings and in the making of war, that we are forgetful of the wonder necessary for the realization of what has been achieved. What is referred to as AI, artificial intelligence, is the apogee of that achievement. AI should and must instill in us a great sense of wonder.

The word ‘novelty’ as a non-countable noun means “the quality of being new, different and interesting”. As a countable noun, novelty means “a thing, person or situation that is interesting because it is new, unusual or has not been known before”. At the same time, a ‘novelty’ is a small cheap object sold as a toy or a decoration. How do we reconcile these opposing meanings of the word? The word itself seems to contain a sense of our being over-satiated by the sheer volume of the novelty that is all about us. We are further from knowledge the more we are overwhelmed with “information” and with the ‘novelty’ of our ‘making’ in our technological way-of-being in the world. If one were to do an illustration of Plato’s allegory of the Cave today, one would have to put laptops and handphones in the hands of the prisoners to indicate a level still further removed from the reality of the good and the beautiful.

When we represent technology as an array of instruments (tools and equipment) lying at the free disposal of the species that creates them, this apparently true account of technology prevents us from experiencing the ‘wonder’ of the novelty of the current situation of our being-in-the-world. Defenders of artificial intelligence, for instance, will make statements such as “artificial intelligence does not impose on us the ways it should be used”, and statements such as these are made by people who are aware that artificial intelligence can be used for purposes which they do not approve, for example, the tyrannous control of human beings. Elon Musk is a primary exponent of such a view.

The ‘should’ of such a statement goes beyond the knowledge of those who are involved in the making of artificial intelligence and of the machines and computers that will drive it. These discussions of artificial intelligence separate means and ends. The “ends” are within the making of the artificial intelligence itself. Because Musk and others like him are aware of the possible good and evil purposes for which artificial intelligence can be used, he and others like him express what artificial intelligence is in a way that goes beyond its technical description: “It is an instrument made by human skill for the purpose of achieving certain human goals. It is a neutral instrument in the sense that the morality of the goals for which artificial intelligence will be used is determined outside of the artificial intelligence itself.”

All of us are aware of the myths of Frankenstein in one form or another. These imaginary myths are part of our sense of wonder. All tools and instruments can be used for bad purposes; and the more complex the capacities of the instrument, the more complex can be its possible bad uses. Artificial intelligence has an infinite potential for both good and evil. The danger involving artificial intelligence is that while we may think that it is a neutral instrument or tool in a long line of neutral instruments and tools which we in our freedom are called upon to control, the liberation of that control to the machine itself means that we are not in a position to rationally come to terms with the potential dangers which this instrument imposes on us. (Think of the examples of Musk’s long line of misadventures with his self-driven cars.)

“A sense of wonder” should be piqued in us when we consider the existence of artificial intelligence and the events which have made its existence possible. Artificial intelligence has been made within the new modern science and its mathematics. This science is a particular paradigm of knowledge that involves the principle of reason (“nothing is without reason”) used to gain ‘objective’ knowledge; and modern reason is the summonsing of anything before a subject and putting it to the question so that it gives us its reasons for being the way it is as an object. With artificial intelligence, we ourselves are the objects of that summonsing. And this should give us cause to wonder…The adjacent emotion to “wonder” is fear and a sense of awe at the ‘terrible’.

From the Online Etymological Dictionary we are informed that the word “monster” is from “early 14c., monstre, “malformed animal or human, creature afflicted with a birth defect,” from Old French monstre, mostre “monster, monstrosity” (12c.), and directly from Latin monstrum “divine omen (especially one indicating misfortune), portent, sign; abnormal shape; monster, monstrosity,” figuratively “repulsive character, object of dread, awful deed, abomination,” a derivative of monere “to remind, bring to (one’s) recollection, tell (of); admonish, advise, warn, instruct, teach,” from moneie- “to make think of, remind,” suffixed (causative) form of root men- (1) “to think.” A “monster” instills a sense of fear and wonder in us, a warning to us to think and to recollect. The advent of artificial intelligence should make us think, ‘wonder’, but the continuous ‘novelty’ that artificial intelligence inspires prevents such wondering and thought.

Because artificial intelligence uses the false logos of the meta-language which is based on the primordial approach to the world as object (“rationality” understood as the principle of reason where “number” as calculus is prior to “word”) and the “reserve” of the stored information that has been gathered through “research”, the particularities of the objects that are the stored information of AI is abstracted so that they may be classified. “Information” is about objects and comes forth as part of that science which summons objects to give us their reasons. This requires classification.

This requirement for reasons and the classification of objects when directed towards human beings impacts how we will come to understand justice in the future. To relate what is being said here to the Human Sciences of politics and economics: AI can only exist in societies where there are large corporate institutions. AI will exclude certain forms of community and discourse and permit others. The portends for the future, the “monster” that is AI, indicate that AI will require authoritarian, tyrannous regimes where human activities will be dictated by a centralized controlling power. As “wonder” showing itself as questioning and thought will not be present, such dictatorial ruling will be a ‘happy’ tyranny to those who are subject to it. At the present time, we are ‘happily’ giving over our privacy and our freedom.

In the Human Sciences, the questions concerning justice which will arise within the summonsing will be determined within three dominant political regimes: capitalist liberalism, communist Marxism, and national socialist historicism. The account of reason outlined here is that the reason which produced the technologies also produced the accounts of justice given in these modern political philosophies. Our accounts of society came forth from the same account of reason and reasoning that brought forth technology and the technological with AI as its apogee. Our entanglement within this complex nexus should bring forth ‘wonder’: ‘what for?’, ‘where to?’, ‘what then?’. AI and the standards of justice are bound together, both belonging to the same destiny of modern reason understood and realized as AI.

AI is the technology of the helmsman, cybernetics, the unlimited mastery of the mass of human beings by the few. AI will ultimately control human activities gathering them so that they are focused on itself and on the making of the fully technological world. This mastery will be freely given over to the few if the desire for freedom and the wonder of a sense of ‘otherness’ is not present in human beings.

Afterword to the Commentaries on the Sefer Yetzirah and “The Thirty-two Paths of Wisdom”

Some Notes on Republic, Symposium and Phaedrus and Their Relation to the Texts

Bk VI 505e: “(The Good is) what every soul seeks, the motive of all its actions, whose importance is sensed, but the soul, being at a loss, is unable to completely grasp its essence. Thus, concerning the good, the soul cannot have a firm belief as it has about everything else. This is the reason why the soul lacks other things also, and the usefulness which they may have.”

The Sefer Yetzirah, or Book of Formation appears to rely on the ideas and concepts of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the geometry and numerology of the Pythagoreans which its writers most likely discovered in the discussions with the Neo-Platonists, Stoics, and the early Hebrew Kabbalists. The Hebrew Kabbalists used this knowledge to understand its own esoteric interpretation of the Torah. Both Plato and the Sefir Yetzirah compare the love of the good which is always in us, to the power of sight; and the revelation of good is compared to “light” or “sunlight”. From this concept of the good as light or sunlight, the metaphorical description of the manner in which the soul is urged to pursue a particular path (such as are described in “the paths of wisdom”) is rooted. We find these metaphorical expressions in the Sephirot Netzach (Splendour) and in the Tarot card The Chariot #7. They refer to what “human excellence” is, what the completion of the human being should be.

Bk VII 518b: “The instruction (education) (of the soul) is not what some declare it to be. For they affirm that knowledge, not being in the soul, they will put it there, as if one might put sight into blind eyes. Whereas the theory which I will expound teaches that the faculty of understanding, and the organs of the faculty, is innate in the soul of each one. But it is as if one were unable to turn one’s eye towards the light, away from the darkness, without turning the whole body. Likewise, it is with the whole soul that one must turn oneself from what is becoming (temporal) until the soul becomes strong enough to endure the contemplation of reality, and all that is most luminous in that reality; which we have already declared to be the good.

The art of the turning around of the soul consists in this, that it is the easiest and most efficient method of bringing someone to turn around. This is quite a different thing from a method for putting sight into the soul, which we know it already has. But that sight is not well-directed, and it does not look where it should. It is this that the soul must find a means to learn.“

Many commentaries on the Sefir Yetzirah equate the soul with the “personal self” or “ego”, the “personality”, the individual, but it is these aspects of human beings that are precisely those that indicate human beings’ “deprivation” or “absence” of the good and are at the root of the “urges” to discover the good or to fulfill those “needs” that human beings constantly feel. What is called “egoism” is a defect of perspective, a defect in the viewing or sight. How an individual views the world, how they perceive the arrangement of the world from the point where they are in time and space, determines for them what they will consider to be the good or evil of things. The murders of the six million that took place during the Shoah or Holocaust during WW2 hardly alters the order of the world as they perceive it, but if a colleague should get a slight raise in pay while they do not, or a fellow receives an “A” when they have been given a “B”, then the order of their world is turned upside down for them! This is not egoism or “love of self” but an indication that human beings as finite beings only apply the idea of a legitimate order to the immediate domains of their hearts.

As is indicated in 7^th Sephirot Netzach, (and in the Chariot card #7 in the Tarot, as well as in Bk VII of Plato’s Republic), the individual human being has the power of choice of transposing their heart to where their treasure is. (For as Christ said: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”. Matt: 6:21). We see human beings who are absolutely devoted to another human being, to a wife, a child, to a party, to a nation, to whatever collectivity, to no matter which cause. This is not “egoism” or “love of self”. This is part of the erroneous perspective to which both Plato and the Sefer Yetzirah refer. The “treasure” has been misplaced. This is not to say that the things mentioned above are not “good”; it is to say that they are not The Good. The reason why there are only a few saints and philosophers is that ordinary human beings find it impossible to give up a “love of one’s own” for a love of the Good.

The Great Beast of Bk VI of Republic (or the Devil card which I have numbered #16 of the Tarot) is human society and any collectivity contained within that society. The Beast’s likes and dislikes are studied and assembled into treatises on virtue (human excellence) and morality by the human beings who have charge in caring for him (The Hierophant card #5 in Tarot is the caretaker of the Beast in whatever form he manifests himself). What the Beast approves is good; what it disapproves of is evil. In the tradition, the Beast has been called the Anti-Christ, but we may gather a sense of the Beast’s possible greater impact if we refer to it as “the Anti-Eros”, for there is something definitely anti-erotic in our will to technological mastery of the world, a will that will ultimately lead to the loss of Eros and of something essential to our being as human beings. That which the Beast thinks is just and beautiful are those things that are necessary (the connection between power and force) being incapable of seeing or showing others to what degree the essence of the necessary differs from that of the good. For both Plato and the Sefer Yetzirah, to perceive the true morality requires the intervention of a god:

Bk VI 492e: “For a character (“person”, “individual”) receiving an education contrary to theirs does not, has not, and will not become differently disposed toward virtue, a human character that is, my friend, for the divine, according to the proverb, let’s make an exception to the argument. You should be well aware that, if anything should be saved and becomes such as it ought to be in regimes in this kind of condition, it won’t be bad if you say that a god’s dispensation saved it.”

We all choose for treasure those “values” that have their root in social prestige. The power that is rooted in social prestige is illusion; it is but “shadows”. This is why social prestige is the second temptation of Christ i.e., it is in the hands of the Devil, the Great Beast. (Luke 4:5-8)

“Then the devil took Him up and revealed to Him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. ‘I will give you the glory of these kingdoms and authority over them,’ the devil said, ‘because they are mine to give to anyone I please. I will give it all to you if you will worship me.’ Jesus replied, ‘The Scriptures say, ‘You must worship the LORD your God and serve only Him.’” The root of the second temptation is the desire or “urge” for social prestige. The shadows on the wall of the Cave are provided by the technites who produce them. The technites are the leaders of the social institutions, the caretakers and tenders of the Great Beast.

There is a difference between illusion and convention. Conventions have a reality of a secondary and artificial order in both Plato and the Sefer Yetzirah. It is convention, for example, which provides the “good” of the office of the Presidency of the USA, but it is also convention which results in the error of Capitol being referred to as a “sacred chamber”. There is, of course, nothing “sacred” about it as the corruption, immorality and injustice of its members provide evidence regarding this every day. In all human institutions (indicated in the Sefer Yetzirah under the pillar of Boaz), there are images of the spiritual world of Atzilut and Beriyah but these “representations”, these various types of ‘clothing’ and models, derive their power from the prestige associated with them.

The desire for prestige, whether recognized or not, is at the bottom of most of our “urges”, including those we may have for other human beings. It is the desire for recognition and prestige which is at the heart of religious fundamentalism, political fanaticism such as “nationalist” movements, and the popularity of our social media. This urge in human beings for social prestige is why Plato compared statesmanship to “legislating for a madhouse”.

The beauty that shows forth as social prestige is a false beauty and it is associated with the “kingdom” that is Malkhut in the 10^th Sephirot. It is a beauty ruled over by the Devil #16. It is the “reflected light” of the Moon and not the true light of The Sun that is in Tiferet #6. Malkhut is the only Sephirot on the Tree of Life that is not in a relation to or touched by Tiferet. Plato knew that real and perfect Justice must be without social prestige. A person who is persecuted and criminally charged for their loyalty to a cause, to a collectivity, to an idea, or to a faith for national, political or religious reasons, does not undergo a total loss of prestige, and in some cases are transformed into martyrs and heroes for their causes or beliefs. All of these things and events are ruled over by Necessity and illusion.

When the Sefir Yetzirah speaks of the “assimilation” of the individual soul into the Divine Soul, or into the various Sephirot, this assimilation should be understood in a Pythagorean sense i.e., it is an assimilation understood as “resemblance”. We may compare it with two different maps with two different scales wherein the distances are different but the relationships are identical. “Assimilation” is a geometrical term which refers to the identity of relationships, to proportion. Assimilation into the Divine is one of proportion. No proportion is possible between human beings and the Divine except by mediation. The perfectly just man that is Tiferet #6 is the mediator between the “righteous” and the Divine.

The rupture that is present between appearance and reality is the experience of the “absence” or deprivation of the Good or the Divine. Because we are beings in bodies, assimilation to the Divine is prevented or hindered by our choosing of those “treasures” that are false. True vision is only possible through the intervention of the Divine through Grace. We ourselves are incapable of merely “gazing” and not “consuming” that which we gaze upon. It is most difficult for us to give up the common sense ‘love of our own’ for the higher perfection.

In the Sefer Yetzirah, the Sephirot Yesod #9 is the “foundation” for what we refer to as “carnal love”. The desire or urge for reproduction is what is most indestructible in animal life; we call it the “survival of the species”. The desire for eternity (immortality) in us goes first to this error of the material image of eternity. The urge for carnal procreation is aroused by beauty. Today, we have separated sexuality and procreation from the desire for children, the desire for immortality (or what we see as our best and only option for an image of immortality), and we view sexuality as the enjoyment of the pleasure of the moment. This separation of sexuality from procreation places us on an abyss poised above the very gates of hell itself. Correspondingly, spiritual beauty excites a desire or urge for spiritual generation. Thus, love is the source of virtues, understandings, and works of the spirit. (This is its association with the Sephirot Binah.) Love is the source of “world”. However, in the world today there is a great gap separating that thinking where the intelligence is illuminated by love. This gap is shown where reason is that thinking that is supposed to illuminate the world before us. This is the interchange of Logos and Eros.

Symposium 211b – 212b “He who undertakes the contemplation of this beauty has very nearly attained to perfection…he knows at last what beauty is. Do you believe that the life of a man who searches into such a matter, who uses the appropriate organ to contemplate and to unite himself with it, can be mediocre? Consider this, what we have here is the only being who sees the beautiful with that faculty capable of seeing it. To him it will be given to beget, not sham virtues, for he has not laid hold upon a phantom, but real virtues, because he has laid hold on the real. And in creating and nourishing true virtue, it is accorded to him to be the friend of the god; and if ever a man become immortal, that man will become so. In this work it would be difficult for human nature to find a better collaborator than Love.”

In the Sefer Yetzirah as in Plato’s Symposium and Bk VII of Republic (and with card #7 The Chariot in the Tarot), we are dealing with the spiritual marriage of the soul with the beautiful, by the grace of which the soul truly begets virtues, or that which is excellent in human beings. The Beautiful is not a predicate of any thing, nor a category or an attribute. It is subject itself. With Chakmah and Binah, the beautiful “is itself, by itself, with itself” and is thus the parousia which represents two relationships within a unity. The Beautiful is the arche (the first principle), the aitia (that which is responsible for) and telos (the place or site) for the being that is finite i.e., human being.

The Symposium is a dialogue composed of seven parts, each part representing an ascent to a higher level which, ultimately, collapses with the entrance of a drunken Alcibiades, that most passionate and imprudent of human beings. It is a dialogue which is being told for the third time and relies very heavily on Memory as none of those “present” in the dialogue were actually at the symposium or banquet itself. On the second telling, the person receiving the dialogue is Glaucon, Plato’s brother, who also receives from Socrates the dialogue that is present in Bk VII of Republic. Both dialogues are from the time of the 4^th century BCE, three centuries prior to what the scholars agree was the time of the writing of the Sefer Yetzirah.

In both Plato and the Sefer Yetzirah, he who contemplates Beauty itself has almost reached the goal. In the allegory of the Cave, the object of contemplation immediately before the Sun is the Moon. Prior to this, the light from the fire of the artisans and the technicians is that through which things are dimly seen. The Moon is the “reflected light” of the Sun; and in the Sefer Yetzirah, it is the “reflected light” of the kingdom of Malkhut. The Sun is the Good; the Moon is associated with the beautiful. Tiferet #6 is the supreme beauty; Netzach is where is found the lower forms of the beautiful. (The Moon: the myth of Osiris, a bull whose horns are the shape of a crescent moon [the High Priestess Tarot card #2, Isis, the bride of Osiris]. Osiris’ body is divided into 14 parts, the number of days separating the full moon from the new moon. Isis gathers and assembles 13 of these, the number of lunar months in the year. Isis = Demeter, Chakmah to Binah, the mother goddess of the Earth. The ascent must go via the Moon.)

Absolute beauty is seen with “supernatural” sight. After a long spiritual preparation (which is the journey through the Tree of Life), one has access to it by a revelation, a “rending of the veil” that is drawn over the beautiful things that come into being and pass away. It is in the Sephirot Netzach that one finds the veil drawn over things. The Love that is supernatural Love allows one to place one’s “treasure” and heart beyond the reach of all evil. No evil does harm to the Good. The order of the stages or paths enumerated by Plato: from sensible beauty to the beauty of souls i.e., moral beauty, the splendour of virtue (note the paths that speak of the “splendour” in “The 32 Paths of Wisdom”). We praise actions that touch us with “That is beautiful” which indicates the relation of the beautiful with the just. Virtue only touches us insofar as it is beautiful. How are these two analogous? i.e., social institutions and necessity; social relations and harmony? The Pythagorean idea of harmony as the union of contraries: the combination of that which limits (Binah) and that which is unlimited (Chakmah). Pythagorean geometry is a method of meditation and prayer.

For Plato, we are capable of seeing the Beautiful Itself here below. It is accessible to the human senses. The beautiful is made manifest to the human senses through the beauty of the world. The beauty of the world is the Divine’s own beauty just as the beauty of the body of a human being is the beauty that belongs to that being. Our “absence” that we experience as human beings is that we are incapable of distinguishing between “gazing upon” and “consuming”, and in our desire to possess through consumption, we commit sin.

*This long excerpt below from Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus shows the process of initiation in the individual soul. From it, one can see the teaching of the Sefer Yetzirah and “The Thirty-two Paths of Wisdom” and their relation to the Tarot.

Phaedrus 246e – 250d Now the great leader in heaven, Zeus, driving a winged chariot, goes first, arranging all things and caring for all things. He is followed by an army of gods and spirits, arrayed in eleven squadrons; Hestia alone remains in the house of the gods. Of the rest, those who are included among the twelve great gods and are accounted leaders, are assigned each to his place in the army.

There are many blessed sights and many ways hither and thither within the heaven, along which the blessed gods go to and fro attending each to his own duties; and whoever wishes, and is able, follows, for jealousy is excluded from the celestial band. But when they go to a feast and a banquet, [247b] they proceed steeply upward to the top of the vault of heaven, where the chariots of the gods, whose well matched horses obey the rein, advance easily, but the others with difficulty; for the horse of evil nature weighs the chariot down, making it heavy and pulling toward the earth the charioteer whose horse is not well trained. There the utmost toil and struggle await the soul.

For those that are called immortal, when they reach the top, [247c] pass outside and take their place on the outer surface of the heaven, and when they have taken their stand, the revolution carries them round and they behold the things outside of the heaven. But the region above the heaven was never worthily sung by any earthly poet, nor will it ever be. It is, however, as I shall tell; for I must dare to speak the truth, especially as truth is my theme. For the colorless, formless, and intangible truly existing essence, with which all true knowledge is concerned, holds this region [247d] and is visible only to the mind, the pilot of the soul.

Now the divine intelligence, since it is nurtured on mind and pure knowledge, and the intelligence of every soul which is capable of receiving that which befits it, rejoices in seeing reality for a space of time and by gazing upon truth is nourished and made happy until the revolution brings it again to the same place. In the revolution it beholds absolute justice, temperance, and knowledge, not such knowledge as has a beginning and varies as it is associated with one [247e] or another of the things we call realities, but that which abides in the real eternal absolute; and in the same way it beholds and feeds upon the other eternal verities, after which, passing down again within the heaven, it goes home, and there the charioteer puts up the horses at the manger and feeds them with ambrosia and then gives them nectar to drink.

Such is the life of the gods; but of the other souls, [248a] that which best follows after the God and is most like him, raises the head of the charioteer up into the outer region and is carried round in the revolution, troubled by the horses and hardly beholding the realities; and another sometimes rises and sometimes sinks, and, because its horses are unruly, it sees some things and fails to see others. The other souls follow after, all yearning for the upper region but unable to reach it, and are carried round beneath, [248b] trampling upon and colliding with one another, each striving to pass its neighbor. So there is the greatest confusion and sweat of rivalry, wherein many are lamed, and many wings are broken through the incompetence of the drivers; and after much toil they all go away without gaining a view of reality, and when they have gone away they feed upon opinion.

But the reason of the great eagerness to see where the plain of truth is, lies in the fact that the fitting pasturage for the best part of the soul is in the meadow there, and the wing [248c] on which the soul is raised up is nourished by this. And this is a law of Destiny, that the soul which follows after God and obtains a view of any of the truths is free from harm until the next period, and if it can always attain this, is always unharmed; but when, through inability to follow, it fails to see, and through some mischance is filled with forgetfulness and evil and grows heavy, and when it has grown heavy, loses its wings and falls to the earth, then it is the law that this soul [248d] shall never pass into any beast at its first birth, but the soul that has seen the most shall enter into the birth of a man who is to be a philosopher or a lover of beauty, or one of a musical or loving nature, and the second soul into that of a lawful king or a warlike ruler, and the third into that of a politician or a man of business or a financier, the fourth into that of a hardworking gymnast or one who will be concerned with the cure of the body, and the fifth [248e] will lead the life of a prophet or some one who conducts mystic rites; to the sixth, a poet or some other imitative artist will be united, to the seventh, a craftsman or a husbandman, to the eighth, a sophist or a demagogue, to the ninth, a tyrant.

Now in all these states, whoever lives justly obtains a better lot, and whoever lives unjustly, a worse. For each soul returns to the place whence it came in ten thousand years; for it does not [249a] regain its wings before that time has elapsed, except the soul of him who has been a guileless philosopher or a philosophical lover; these, when for three successive periods of a thousand years they have chosen such a life, after the third period of a thousand years become winged in the three thousandth year and go their way; but the rest, when they have finished their first life, receive judgment, and after the judgment some go to the places of correction under the earth and pay their penalty, while the others, [249b] made light and raised up into a heavenly place by justice, live in a manner worthy of the life they led in human form. But in the thousandth year both come to draw lots and choose their second life, each choosing whatever it wishes. Then a human soul may pass into the life of a beast, and a soul which was once human, may pass again from a beast into a man. For the soul which has never seen the truth can never pass into human form. For a human being must understand a general conception formed by collecting into a unity [249c] by means of reason the many perceptions of the senses; and this is a recollection of those things which our soul once beheld, when it journeyed with the God and, lifting its vision above the things which we now say exist, rose up into real being. And therefore, it is just that the mind of the philosopher only has wings, for he is always, so far as he is able, in communion through memory with those things the communion with which causes the God to be divine.

Now a man who employs such memories rightly is always being initiated into perfect mysteries and he alone becomes truly perfect; [249d] but since he separates himself from human interests and turns his attention toward the divine, he is rebuked by the vulgar, who consider him mad and do not know that he is inspired.

All my discourse so far has been about the fourth kind of madness, which causes him to be regarded as mad, who, when he sees the beauty on earth, remembering the true beauty, feels his wings growing and longs to stretch them for an upward flight, but cannot do so, and, like a bird, gazes upward and neglects the things below. [249e] My discourse has shown that this is, of all inspirations, the best and of the highest origin to him who has it or who shares in it, and that he who loves the beautiful, partaking in this madness, is called a lover. For, as has been said, every soul of man has by the law of nature beheld the realities, otherwise it would not have entered [250a] into a human being, but it is not easy for all souls to gain from earthly things a recollection of those realities, either for those which had but a brief view of them at that earlier time, or for those which, after falling to earth, were so unfortunate as to be turned toward unrighteousness through some evil communications and to have forgotten the holy sights they once saw. Few then are left which retain an adequate recollection of them; but these when they see here any likeness of the things of that other world, are stricken with amazement and can no longer control themselves; but they do not understand their condition, because they do not clearly perceive.

[250b] Now in the earthly copies of justice and temperance and the other ideas which are precious to souls there is no light, but only a few, approaching the images through the darkling organs of sense, behold in them the nature of that which they imitate, and these few do this with difficulty. But at that former time, they saw beauty shining in brightness, when, with a blessed company—we following in the train of Zeus, and others in that of some other god—they saw the blessed sight and vision and were initiated into that which is rightly called [250c] the most blessed of mysteries, which we celebrated in a state of perfection, when we were without experience of the evils which awaited us in the time to come, being permitted as initiates to the sight of perfect and simple and calm and happy apparitions, which we saw in the pure light, being ourselves pure and not entombed in this which we carry about with us and call the body, in which we are imprisoned like an oyster in its shell.

So much, then, in honor of memory, on account of which I have now spoken at some length, through yearning for the joys of that other time. But beauty, [250d] as I said before, shone in brilliance among those visions; and since we came to earth we have found it shining most clearly through the clearest of our senses; for sight is the sharpest of the physical senses, though wisdom is not seen by it, for wisdom would arouse terrible love, if such a clear image of it were granted as would come through sight, and the same is true of the other lovely realities; but beauty alone has this privilege, and therefore it is most clearly seen [250e] and loveliest.

Now he who is not newly initiated, or has been corrupted, does not quickly rise from this world to that other world and to absolute beauty when he sees its namesake here, and so he does not revere it when he looks upon it, but gives himself up to pleasure and like a beast proceeds to lust and begetting…

I will try to delve deeper into an attempt to understand the two-faced nature of Eros and of the Logos in another writing. To do so will help to distinguish between thought and thinking, to distinguish between rhetoric and dialectic, and so give some further insight into these writings that have come to us through the ages.

A Commentary on “The Thirty-two Paths of Wisdom” Chapter Ten

The Emanations to and from Malkhut

Path 10. Scintillating Intelligence (Consciousness) (Sekhel MitNotzetz): It is called this because it elevates itself and sits on the throne of Understanding. It shines with the radiance of all the luminaries and it bestows an influx of increase to the Prince of Face(s).

The Tenth Path is the Resplendent Intelligence, because it is exalted above every head, and sits on the throne of BINAH (the Intelligence spoken of in the Third Path). It illuminates the splendor of all lights, and causes a supply of influence to emanate from the Prince of Countenances.

Alt. Trans. “The tenth path is called the resplendent consciousness because it is exalted above every head and sits on the throne of Binah. It is illuminated with the splendour of all the lights and it causes an influence to flow forth from the Prince of Countenances.”

Wescott trans. The Tenth Path is the Resplendent Intelligence, because it is exalted above every head, and sits on the throne of Binah (the Intelligence spoken of in the Third Path). It illuminates the splendour of all the lights, and causes an influence to emanate from the Prince of Countenances (Metatron, the Intelligence of the First Sephira, and the reputed guide of Moses.)

Case trans. The tenth path (the tenth Sephirah, Malkhut) is called the Resplendent intelligence and is so because it is exalted above every head. and sits on the throne of Binah. It illuminates the splendour of all the lights, and causes the flowing forth of influence from the Prince of Countenances.

Genesis 1.10 And Elohim called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters called He Seas; and Elohim saw that it was good.

The Tenth and Eleventh paths must be held together and viewed simultaneously for they represent both the presence and absence of the Good that human beings experience in their being. As the Eight path of Hod deals with “artistic consciousness” and the making of things from something else and bringing those things to completion, the Ninth path, Yesod, deals with “scientific consciousness” or “theoretical consciousness”, the principle of reason, the foundation of the design or plan, the “knowing” that allows the things to be brought forth into their truth. The Tenth path deals with the whole of our knowledge and understanding of the created world and combines both the influences of Hod and Yesod with the Sephirot of Malkhut. Malkhut and the tenth path are both an end and a beginning. Malkhut is referred to as ‘Kingdom’.

The “Prince of Countenances”, the Ain Sof, the Sephirot Tiferet (Metatron, an archangel who was reputed to be the guide of Moses in some commentaries) is the “beauty of the world” given to us in its outward appearance, its “countenance”, its “look”, and it is this beauty, this light, “which illuminates all lights” that are present in the “truths” that we discover of our world when we understand the essence of the Sephirot. Truth is One. This brings about the “supply of influence” or Love that emanates from the “Prince of Countenances” which illuminates all things through their beauty. He is Eros. When we refer to the beauty of things, we are not speaking of ‘aesthetics’, for aesthetics refers to objects and the objectification of things and to their viewing as objects. This is a sterile viewing. The experience of the beauty of the world is an erotic experience, for from it we experience the need and the longing for that which we lack which is the perfection with our union with the One.

Malkhut is the root of the central pillar of the Tree of Life and receives the light of Keter through the logos or letter of the Alef as it passes through the Beauty (Tiferet) and Foundation (Yesod) of the created worlds of Beriyah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah. Malkhut is the only Sephirot not directly connected to Tiferet in some way. Nevertheless, it is indirectly connected. This indirect connection is through the ‘reflected light’ of the Moon that derives from the Sun.

Malkhut may be said to stand at or rest upon the boundary or as the boundary between the enumerated worlds of time and space, the throne of Binah (Beriyah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah), and the world prior to, or more primordial than these three, called Atzilut which is composed of Keter, Chalkmah and Binah. Chesed is that world that can be understood through numbers, the sequential world of cause and effect, past, present and future when we are viewing the creation side of the Tree of Life. Chesed and Gevurah represent the two poles that separate the contraries i.e. unity (identity) and difference, absence and presence, deprivation and fulfillment, in fact all ten of the contraries that the Pythagoreans are said to uphold as the nature of the things that are.

The Unity that is present in and is the essence of all things can be understood as the ‘friendship’ between God and His creation. This ‘friendship’ is experienced in the Now of Time, in every waking moment of one’s life. The distance separating God from His creation can be understood as cases of deprivation. They are indicative of the concealment of Truth. There are no true opposites, only cases of deprivation (time) and distance (space). In God’s withdrawal from Creation allowing it to be, the process of creation appears as an “expansion” of ever-widening gyres, and ever-widening expansion of space allowing the place for physical things to come into being. This illusion of “expansion” is mirrored in the narrowing of the gyres in the decreation that brings one closer to the Divine and whose journey is upward on the Tree of Life. Both of these processes occur simultaneously in the NOW.

The decreation of the self, which is a journey of de-gyring down to essence of the Divine, is shown in the principle of self-effacement or humility. It is done through the purification of the fire of Shin. God gives being to us in order that we should give it back to Him. If we compare it to fairy tales, it is like those points in the stories where the characters are tested, initiated, and baptized (Path #25 The Intelligence of Trials) where the acceptance of the gift given is bad or fatal. The character must experience a “death” of some kind and be reborn into a new self. These are referred to as “conversion” and “baptism”. (“Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. ²This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.” ³Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” ⁴Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” ⁵Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. ⁶That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. ⁷Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ ⁸The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” John 3: 1-8)

The virtue of humility is present in our refusal to accept the gift offered (see the George Herbert poem “Love” spoken about in Chapter Nine). It is captured in the Spanish proverb or saying: “Take what you want (the gift) said God; take it and pay for it”. God allows us to exist outside of Himself and it is for us to make the decision not to do so. This is part of the reason why The Fool #0 is represented along with The Wheel of Fortune #10. The Fool is an indicator of the journey both upward and downward. Humility is the refusal to exist outside of God, and this is why it is among the highest of the virtues. Humility is represented in those letters which can be reshaped into something else; Love can only penetrate where it is ‘soft’ as our myths and fairy tales tell us (Apollodorus in Symposium is described as a ‘softy’). The Fool’s choice is to become The Magician #1 (Will) or the Strength #11 (Love). In choosing to become The Magician #1, the Fool #0 chooses will to power; in choosing to become Strength #11, The Fool chooses mercy and kindness. Both are possible responses to the world.

“The throne of Binah” is the root or foundation of the “sanctifying intelligence” which is the foundation of faith. From this we may understand Simone Weil’s remark: “Faith is the experience that the intelligence is illuminated by Love.” Since science is not able to “measure and weigh” beauty with any precision or exactitude, it removes any concept of beauty or love from its understanding of things and turns things into “objects”. The ‘measuring and weighing’ of things is at the heart of the principle of reason, and the principle of reason is at the heart of power and of will to power.

It is not possible to love an object. When we turn things into objects, Beauty then becomes “in the eye of the beholder”, something subjective; love becomes “blind”, not what it is in fact in its truth: a way of being and of seeing in the world. The removal of our response to the beauty of the outward countenance of things, or rather, the making of this response “subjective”, has resulted in the oblivion of eternity, the loss of the “holy” or sacred, the death of God, and the resulting loss of faith for many human beings. In the justice of our desire for mass learning, mass meaninglessness has been the result. What we have in its place is the sterility of the sciences, the nihilism of the will to will for its own sake (what we call “novelty”), and the devastation that is the wasteland that continues to grow and expand. But for all this, it remains a matter of choice in how one views the world as it is given to us. Beauty is not the enemy of rationality as that rationality is conceived to be in the modern, but is the foundation of that rationality that is our understanding and knowledge of the things that are. That foundation is the Law of Necessity from whence the principle of reason arises. This paradoxical relationship of Necessity and Beauty is the great mystery of Life.

Another name for Malkhut #10 is “The Bride”. This is to indicate that Malkhut includes the human body through the influence of Yesod. Christ says: “I am the Bridegroom and you are the Bride”, and the Bible speaks of “the bride of the Lamb”. Individual religious sects have interpreted this to refer to themselves exclusively i.e., that they are the “chosen ones”, they themselves and only themselves are “the bride of the Lamb” who will be united with the Redeemer and fulfil His covenant. In the Sefer Yetzirah, it is the whole of creation that is the Bride of Christ, including Jerusalem and Israel (although, of course, the Sefer Yetzirah does not refer to the Messiah or Christ directly since it was written before the birth of Christ). The original Sefer Yetzirah as well as the geometry of the Pythagoreans were intimations of Christianity prior to the birth of Christ historically. Christ’s historical birth is but one of many Incarnations of the Divine in history since the Divine is the parousia in the NOW. How these Incarnations have been ‘clothed’ is that which calls for understanding from all human beings.

The other face of Malkhut is Leviathan or the beast dwelling in the depths of the seas. As an “embodied soul”, human beings dwell within “the belly of the beast”, and it is through our understanding and knowledge (Binah) that we can extricate ourselves from the beast. But whether or not this extrication occurs is up to the grace of God. The Renaissance English philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ book Leviathan is appropriately titled since it deals with the materiality of the Kingdom of Malkhut; and Hobbes, being an atheist, relies on “laws with teeth in them” (the offspring of Shin) to deal with what he perceives to be the reality of the human condition, that human life is “nasty, brutish and short”.

It is appropriate that the path from Hod to Malkhut, and Malkhut to Hod should have “teeth” as its symbol and The Fool #0 and The Magician #1 as its Tarot cards. The letter Shin means “teeth”, and it is the grinding of teeth that is symbolic of the decreation of the material world necessary to making progress on the upward path of the Tree of Life. Shin is also the goad or prod that urges human beings on their journey to seek their perfection which is their completion. The deprivation of this perfection is the letter Qof which indicates a submission to the bestiality of our human being and the need to choose that which is higher in us.

There are a number of similarities between the Wheel of Fortune card and The World card #21 in the Tarot. The World is signified by the letter Tav ת which means ‘good’; some commentaries have ‘torah’ as its meaning since they understand the Torah as the good. Tav is the last letter of the alphabet and is its completion. The whole is indicated as ‘good’. In The World card, The Wheel has been replaced by a wreath of laurel (?) leaves which signifies victory. The leaves are bound together by three ouroboros. There is a singular ouroboros at the top and two at the bottom. The single ouroboros is the boundary of the realm of Atzilut while the double represent the boundaries of Beriyah and Yetzirah.

The female figure in the centre holds two wands in her hands indicating that she holds both the directions of the life-force in balance, the creative and decreative aspects, the ‘buffets’ and ‘rewards’ of Fortune spoken of earlier, the movements upwards and downwards on the Tree of Life. She has a banner of purple, representing ‘majesty’ or ‘kingship’, moving in the TARO direction (from The Wheel of Fortune) indicating that she has mastery over the influences of the heart, body, mind and soul. The illustrator of the cards has chosen to include the four evangelists in this card as they are presented in The Wheel of Fortune. These are not necessary for the figure herself has achieved the position of being both in Time and out of Time simultaneously and she is capable of the gift of prophecy herself. It is interesting to note that the last letter of torah is Heh meaning ‘jubilation’, while the last letter of tarot is Tav meaning ‘good’. Both indicate a joy in the completion of the journey and both are possible ways of completing the journey.

The Letter Tav and the 30th Path: The General Universal Collective Intelligence

Path 30: Yesod to Malkhut/ Malkhut to Yesod

The Thirtieth Path is the Collecting Intelligence, and is so called because Astrologers deduce from it the judgment of the Stars, and of the celestial signs, and the perfections of their science, according to the rules of their revolutions.

(Alt. Trans.) “The thirtieth path is called the universal consciousness because through it, masters of the heavens derive their judgments of the stars and constellations, and perfect their knowledge of the celestial cycles.”

Path 30. General Intelligence (Consciousness) (Sekhel Kelali): It is called this because it is the means by which the astrologers collect their rules regarding the stars and the constellations, forming the theory that comprises their knowledge of the Ophan-wheels of the spheres.

The Law of Necessity rules the realms of Time and Space, and the principle of reason is a result of the Law of Necessity. The path of General Intelligence deals with Space and Time as pre-requisites for the possibility of the things that are. The things that are do not exist outside of these realms, and so Space and Time are the “foundation” (Yesod) for the things that are. Yesod represents Path #9, Pure Intelligence which we have equated with the theoretical viewing of the sciences based as it is on the principle of reason. The Sephirot of The Hermit deals with calculations and reckonings of the movement of the spheres; and from these, predictions can be made, ‘prophesies’ if you like. In the calculation and reckoning, the astrologers, “the masters of the heavens”, are capable of having foreknowledge of the outcomes of things, both in the world at large and within the individual. The Hermit dwells within a dark, sterile world and his knowledge places him “on top” of that world for he can commandeer and manipulate the contents of that world. It corresponds to the study of Physics.

The Law of Necessity is the harsh Justice of the left-hand side of the Tree of Life; it is a Justice without Mercy, and knowledge of it is knowledge without Love or Beauty. Thus, we have the darkness, solitude and coldness represented by The Hermit #9 card. It is apt that the “new human being” created from such knowledge is a golem or “zombie”, for this it the ultimate result of this knowledge when it is not accompanied by the spiritual elements that are love and beauty.

Malkhut deals with the physical, material universe, Asiyah. Here, the world is conceived of as a combination of elemental forces capable of being grasped through calculation. It is the world of objectness and of cause and effect. It is world as text prior to the word, a world of numerical calculations. As Case points out, it is ruled by both Mercury and the Moon, calculation and illusion.

The 30^th path deals with astrological knowledge or knowledge of space and time, cause and effect, what we today would call physics. The astrologers or Magi, through their calculations based on the geometry that supplies the division of the sphere into 12 “houses” and the movements of the seven visible planets through those houses, derive pre-dictive knowledge of human beings and beings. Their knowledge is inductive: moving from the particular to the universal. As predictive knowledge, it is the forerunner of what is now called science. Their knowledge is based on a ‘cosmic theology’ through their understanding of the divine circular motions of the luminaries of the heavens.

The mind is perceived as a “secondary organ”, not the ego cogito of Descartes, the supreme subjectum, but the combination of Fire, Water, Air to bring about Earth; the combination of mind and spirit embodied. Fire and Air embodied in Water produces Earth. The “dust” of the Earth was originally conceived as snow in the Sefer Yetzirah. Humas, the root of “humanity”, “human being”, relates to the creation of human beings. Historically, the search for the formula to invent a golem was founded in the various letters and incantations that were made by those who wished to do so. The golem is a being deprived of a soul and also deprived of language. Is the forgetfulness of language a foretelling of how human beings will become golems in a possible future?

Tav derives from “and Elohim saw every thing that He had made, and, behold, it was very good.” 1:31

ת Tav is the last letter of the Hebrew Alphabet. Meaning “mark”, “sign”, “omen”, or “seal”, it is the symbol of truth, perfection, and completion. It represents the restoration Tikkun תיקון of all of existence. It is a return to the essence and purpose of one’s life. It represents completion, before beginning again with the original Oneness of the Aleph. Few human beings achieve this goal.

The Tav shows us that the end was set from the beginning, as Tav is the final letter of בראשית Beresheet, “In the Beginning”, the first word of the Torah/Bible. It is the idea that the Creator set in motion all of existence in order to reach a final state of perfection, the fulfillment of all of creation. It is also the completion of Truth אמת Emet.

However, as soon as the Tav is reached, we begin again immediately by going back to the Aleph, the one source of everything. Or in the Tarot, we move from The World #21 to The Fool #0. The end is never really the end, but the beginning of something new.

Tav represents the restoration Tikkun תיקון of all of existence and that is why it is associated with the path of Continuous Intelligence #31 and signifies both an end and a beginning. In the journey up the Tree of Life, it is a return to the essence and purpose of one’s life which is the restoration of the soul to the Divine. The Tav represents completion of the Creation cycle, before beginning again with the original Oneness of the Aleph and beginning the process of Decreation which is primarily the work of Shin. The design of Tav contains both Dalet and Nun, both suggesting endings, beginnings, and transformations. Dalet means either ‘riches’ or ‘poverty’, while Nun relates to ‘deceit’, death, transformation.

The idea that the Creator set in motion all of existence in order that it reach a final state of perfection, the fulfillment of all of creation which will be its cessation brings about the great contradiction of the Sefer Yetzirah. The Tav as the completion of Truth אמת Emet, or the Truth revealed is something to be experienced in the NOW. The Creation is viewed as an evolutionary progress towards perfection rather than being the image of that perfection itself i.e., the ‘moving image of eternity’.

The 32^nd path, along with the 30th and 31st paths are the outline or nexus of the realm of Necessity. All created things must “serve” the law of Necessity whether it be seen as the force of gravity or those forces which operate within the realm of social interactions. The Law of Necessity is the Divine Will. The 32^nd path is also a warning to those who are unable to distinguish between the Necessary and the Good because those who are unable to do so usually worship power.

The Letter Qof and the 31st Path: The Continuous Perpetual Intelligence

Path 31: Netzach to Malkhut

The Thirty-first Path is the Perpetual Intelligence; and why is it so called? Because it regulates the motions of the Sun and Moon in their proper order, each in an orbit convenient for it.

Alt. Trans. “The thirty-first path is called the perpetual consciousness. Why is it called this? Because it directs the movements of the sun and moon according to their natural order, each in its proper orbit.”

31. Continuous Intelligence (Consciousness) (Sekhel Timidi): Why is it called this? Because it directs the path of the sun and moon according to their laws of nature, each one in its proper orbit.

The Thirty-first Path of Wisdom is represented by the letter Qof and connects Malkhut to Netzach, Kingdom to Victory, or Victory to Kingdom. It emphasizes the animality or the embodiment of the human spirit or soul. The Law of Necessity is that which is permanent or “perpetual” in the laws of Nature amidst the metabole or change that is apparent in the growth and movement of created beings. It is one of the key types of knowledge in the universe of Asiyah. Along with the “serving knowledge” of the 32^nd path and the calculative thought and knowledge of the numbers of the principle of reason in the 30^th path, it illustrates the manner in which the realm of Necessity is to be understood. In the Hebrew, it refers to “perpetual time”, and we are reminded of Plato’s statement that “Time is the moving image of eternity”. It also seems to indicate the sempiternal world of created things in the manner understood by Aristotle.

It is Time which directs the movements of sun and moon and gives to us our solar and lunar calendars. Time and Space are the ‘plan’ and components of Necessity and these determine the movements of the planets, the sun, and the moon. From this we may understand what Plato means when he says that “Time is the moving image of eternity”. As a ‘moving image’, Time is subject to change and this relates to its relationship with illusion and shadows. The Sun is the planet of Tiferet; the Moon is the heavenly body associated with Yesod. Here, the Justice of Necessity is seen through the Sun’s light i.e., the Beauty of the world. Qof translates as the ‘back of the head’, that which is hidden: in the Western tree, it connects Netzach to Malkhut. In the Hebrew tree, Qof is that world dominated by the reflected light of the moon and implies a will to power to transform the world in which human beings live. To see what is behind the back of the head requires a mirror.

ק The letter Khof (also spelled Kuf, or Qof) originally meant the back of the head, or the eye of a needle. Khof also means “monkey”. It is the symbol of both the sacred Kedushah קדושה, and the profane – the Klipah קליפה, the peel, cover, or husk which represents the negativities in the world. Khof has to do with the requirement of removing the husk of the superficial to reveal the holiness within. The human body is a “husk” that encircles the part of the divine that is the soul within.

In Hebrew, Khof means monkey, a creature which resembles a human but is purely animalistic, with none of the higher capacities of a human. This indicates the requirement for human beings to overcome their purely animalistic nature and to emulate the image of the Creator, to realize their true spiritual nature beyond just the physical. The Khof is the only letter which extends below the line of the other letters, indicating descent into the lower world, but also the ability to ascend from there. The human body is the ‘cross’ that we all must bear.

Kuf is also הקפה – “circle”, “go around”; and I believe it indicates the beginning of the gyring motion that is necessary for movement within the Tree of Life itself. Khof represents all the cycles of nature, changing seasons, monthly and yearly cycles. It is the constant movement, circulation, and change of life. It could also represent that through the cycles of life that we see – evolution, growth, change, suffering, happiness, life experience – we are constantly worked on in order to evolve and realize our true spiritual nature.

The letter Khof (also spelled Kaf, Kuf, or Qof) originally meant “the back of the head”, or “the eye of a needle”. (“Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” Matthew 19: 24) Khof also means “monkey”. It is said to represent “unholiness”. It is the symbol of both the sacred Kedushah קדושה, and the profane – the Klipah קליפה, the peel, cover, or husk which represents the outward presence of the things that emerge from the khôra, the ‘countenances’ of the outward appearances of things. Khof has to do with the requirement of removing the husk which hides the truth of that which lies within. The outward appearance is this husk.

In Hebrew, Khof means “monkey”, a creature which resembles a human but is purely animalistic, with none of the higher capacities of a human which are related to the logos i.e., language and number. In the Kabballah, this indicates the requirement for a human being to overcome their purely animalistic nature and to emulate the image of the Creator (the Logos) that is their true nature, to realize the true spiritual nature of their being an ‘embodied soul’. It is the essential strife of life. The Khof is the only letter which extends below the line of the other letters, indicating descent into the lower world, but also the ability to ascend from there. As such, it is related to the Sephirot Yesod (Foundation) and to the material world of Malkhut (Kingdom). The revealing of the true essence of what human beings are is in their wresting of truth from the husks of the world that hide it. When human beings cease to reveal truth, they succumb to their bestial, animal natures.

The design of the Kuf is similar to that of the Hei, the fifth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, but while the Hei is said to represent holiness and jubilation, the Kuf represents Klipah, or unholiness and despair. Both letters have three lines, two vertical and one horizontal. These three lines, depicting thought, speech, and action in the Hei, are also represented in the letter Kuf, but its three lines represent unholy thoughts, profane speech and evil actions. These negative qualities are illustrated within the actual form of the Kuf. Its long left leg plunges beneath the letter’s baseline. It represents one who ventures below the acceptable, an individual who violates the circumscribed boundaries of the laws of Necessity (primarily with regard to the social) and, thus, commits hubris for which an eventual nemesis must be paid.

It is also significant that the head of the Kuf is a Reish (in contrast with the Dalet that comprises the Hei). The difference between the Dalet and the Reish is the Yud in the right-hand corner of the Dalet, representing the individual while the Reish represents the collective . The Zohar, one of the principle sources for the medieval interpretations of the Sefer Yetzirah, calls the Kuf and the Reish the letters of falsehood and impurity. This associates the letter with The Moon #18 card of the Tarot. If the Reish represents the choice which has to be made regarding spiritual matters, then the Qof represents a false choice.

When Christ said that “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark: 10:25), He is referring to the difficulty that arises when one forgets to remember that “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also”, and this is dependent on how one sees the world which, in turn, determines how one will be in the world. Christ follows his statement on the heart with “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light” (Matthew 6: 21-22). This would suggest a connection between Kuf and Ayin.

Kuf is also הקפה – circle, go around, cycle. Khof represents all the cycles of nature, changing seasons, monthly and yearly cycles. It is in the realm of Time. It is the constant movement, circulation, and change of life. Kuf represents the ‘buffets and rewards of Fortune’ which are to be received with equal thanks (as Hamlet says of Horatio in the play, and this represents Horatio’s ability to be ‘just’ and in so doing, his capability of being a ‘friend’). The Kuf could also represent that through the cycles of life that we see – evolution, growth, change, suffering, happiness, life experience – we are constantly worked on in order to evolve and realize our true spiritual nature, the grinding of the teeth that are represented by the letter Shin which decreates that which we are and the suffering that we undergo. The gematria of Kuf is 100 and this aligns it with The Fool, The Wheel of Fortune, and The Magician cards of the Tarot. Because Kuf is associated with beginnings and endings, it is also associated with the Death card. This death can be both spiritual and physical and is significant of the need for conversion, baptism and rebirth.

To see ‘the back of the head’ one requires a mirror, and with a mirror all things are seen in reverse. As discussed earlier, the symbol of Venus is a mirror and the danger of mirrors is that they can lead to narcissism. The point of the Shin is the destruction of this narcissism through the purification brought about by fire. Suffering and affliction are symbolized by fire, and the eschatological destruction of the world through fire is symbolic of this. The ‘world’ is the narcissistic ego of the Self that is the barrier to the unification with the Divine One. This may signify that viewing the material world only is a reversal of the true state of affairs i.e., there are realms beyond the material or the world of Asiyah.

The Letter Tzaddi and the 32nd Path: The Administrative, Worshipped, Serving Intelligence

Path 32: Malkhut to Hod

The Thirty-second Path is the Administrative Intelligence, and it is so called because it directs and associates, in all their operations, the seven planets, even all of them in their own due courses.

Alt. Trans. “The thirty-second path is called the serving consciousness because it directs the motion of the seven planets, each in its own proper course.”

The Thirty-Second Path is the Worshipped Intelligence (Consciousness) (Sekhel Ne’evad): It is called this because it is prepared so as to destroy all who engage in the worship of the seven planets.

The Thirty-Second path indicates the difficulties that are present in trying to determine what is the original text of “The Thirty-two Paths of Wisdom”. The first two translations above seem to indicate an awareness of, or consciousness of, the Law of Necessity, but the next translations indicate that this is what is ‘worshipped’ by those who are unable to distinguish the Necessary from the Good.

This is the path proceeding from Malkhut to Hod, from Kingdom to Splendour. Here the Splendour referred to is that which is bestowed by social recognition and prestige, and we would like to consider this ‘justice’, that this prestige and recognition are somehow ‘apt’ or ‘fitting’ and that we are deserving of it. The Tower #15 card illustrated on the left shows the crown of the Kingdom blasted by the thunderbolt of Zeus, and with it the twelve Yods (perhaps representing the 12 houses of the Zodiac or the twelve houses of Israel) and the ten Sephirot of the Tree of Life. The illustrator has chosen the letter Peh to signify this card. In the interpretation offered here, the letter Peh refers to language as rhetoric, the language of assemblies. The lightning bolt is the nemesis which is the judgement of the Divine which is true Justice, and it proceeds from the Sun in the shape of a ladder that indicates the traditional interpretations of the movement along the Tree of Life.

The 32^nd path is the outline of the realm of Necessity. All created things must “serve” the law of Necessity whether it be seen as the force of gravity or those forces which operate within the realm of social interactions and institutions. The Law of Necessity is the Divine Will. The 32^nd path is also a warning to those who are unable to distinguish between the Necessary and the Good because those who do so usually worship power.

Tzaddi is the 18^th letter of the Hebrew alphabet and corresponds to the 32^nd path of Wisdom or the Administrative Intelligence. It signifies both “righteousness” and the “hunt”. Its literal meaning is “fish hook” and it is with the hook that one hunts and catches the “fish”, signified by the letter Nun. In Greek mythology, the goddess of the hunt is Artemis. She is also the goddess of the moon. The shape of the Tzaddi is a Nun with a Yod riding on top it. The gematria of Tzaddi is 90 suggesting a connection with Yesod and The Hermit card #9: 9 X 2 is 18, the number of The Moon. The contrary to The Moon is Justice (‘righteousness’) which is card #8 in Tarot. This seems to suggest that the ‘righteous’, the just, can be deceived by the ‘false speech’ and become hooked as a fish is deceived by the bait on the fish hook. There seems to be an alignment between the ‘false knowledge’ that belongs to The Hermit card of the Tarot and the ‘reflected light’ that is The Moon’s as opposed to the direct light of the Sun. The deception, the deceit and fraud, is also related to the ‘hiddenness’ that is an element of Tzaddi and of The Moon.

Tzaddi as ‘fish hook’ indicates the way in which we can become ‘hooked on’ or entrapped by the materialism of created things. ‘Fish’ is a sign of nourishment and fertility. Is Corporeal Intelligence (materialism) the first temptation of Christ : the turning of stones into bread? Is this the reality of what has been understood as ‘materialism’ in the West? This is, metaphorically, the belief at the bottom of the technological worldview.

Path	Letter	Meaning	Symbol
Path 10. Scintillating Intelligence (Consciousness) (Sekhel MitNotzetz): It is called this because it elevates itself and sits on the throne of Understanding (Binah). It shines with the radiance of all the luminaries and it bestows an influx of increase to the Prince of Face(s).		Kingdom. The understanding determines the General Intelligence, the Corporeal Intelligence, the Palpable Intelligence, and the Continuous Intelligence. The world of materialism.	The wheel. Movement of time within space.
Yesod to Malkhut Path 30. General Intelligence (Consciousness) (Sekhel Kelali): It is called this because it is the means by which the astrologers collect their rules regarding the stars and the constellations, forming the theory that comprises their knowledge of the Ophan-wheels of the spheres.	Tav ת	The beginning in the end and the end in the beginning.	The figure holds two wands in the shape of coils indicating she is able to draw energy from both sides of the turning sphere. She is a ‘prophet’. She is the opposite of The Hanged Man who is suspended from Chet. It is the Good which directs the paths of the sun and moon in their orbits according to the Law of Necessity.
Path 31: Continuous Intelligence (Consciousness) (Sekhel Timidi): Why is it called this? Because it directs the path of the sun and moon according to their laws of nature, each one in its proper orbit.	Qof ק	“Monkey”, the back of the head, the eye of the needle.	18 Yods, the collective, society. The camel (Gimel) has an easier time passing through the eye of the needle than a rich person.
Path 32. Worshipped Intelligence (Consciousness) (Sekhel Ne’evad): It is called this because it is prepared so as to destroy all who engage in the worship of the seven planets.	Tzaddi צ		The magi or ‘wise men’ form their theories from the principle of reason which is based on, or finds its foundation in, the Law of Necessity. From the principle of reason, the ‘rules’ i.e., the laws, axioms, etc. of the universe are created according to human beings. From these rules, the “Apparative Intelligence” Path 24 can operate.

A Commentary on “The 32 Paths of Wisdom” Chapter Nine

The Paths Emanating From Yesod

9. Pure Intelligence (Consciousness) (Sekhel Tahor): It is called this because it purifies the Sephirot. It tests the degree of their structure and the inner essence of their unity, making it glow. They are then unified, without any cutoff or separation.

The Ninth Path is the Pure Intelligence so called because it purifies the Numerations, it proves and corrects the designing of their representation, and disposes their unity with which they are combined without diminution or division.

Alt. Trans. “The ninth path is called the pure consciousness because it purifies the essence of the Sephirot. It provides and adapts the design of their patterns and establishes their unity. They remain united, without diminution or division.”

Wescott trans. The Ninth Path is the Pure Intelligence, so called because it purifies the Numerations, it proves and corrects the designing of their representation, and disposes their unity with which they are combined without diminution or division.

Case trans. The ninth path (Yesod the ninth Sephirah) is called the Pure intelligence and is so called because it purifies the essence of the Sephiroth. It proves and preserves their images and prevents them from loss by their union with itself.

The Letter Yod and the 9th Path: The Pure Intelligence (Consciousness)

The Ninth Path of Yesod is called the “pure intelligence” and it is represented by the Hebrew letter Yod in some commentaries. It is also called “Foundation” because it deals primarily with the material world and the “mathematical” in the sense that, similar to the purification that occurs in the alchemical processes, the extraneous elements are separated from the essential element as the “waters” are separated from the “earth”. The activity of the intelligence in the mathematical “measures and weighs” the numbers to assure their “correctness”, and combines the rationality of their relations with the images or representations given in the eidetic forms or the appearance of things. It is Plato’s “correctness of the glance” and references the relation between the outward appearance of things, the Ideas of the things, and the essences of the things which, in the Sefer Yetzirah, are the Sephirot themselves. The text of “The Thirty-two Paths of Wisdom” is contemporaneous with Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and the ideas of the “pure intelligence” and Kant’s “pure reason” are very similar in nature.

To “purify” is to reduce something to its essence. The essence of the multivarious things which make their appearance in Creation is the unified One that is the manifestation of the Sephirot themselves. This purifying process is decreation. In this purification, the revealing of the truth that is the essence of the Sephirot is accomplished. It has characteristics in common with inductive reasoning, but it is more than this. The “correcting” and “proving” of the design of their representations is what we have called the “mathematical projection” of our world here. But this is only one way of viewing the world and its roots are in the world of Yetzirah. The mathematical projections are preserved from loss through Memory, and from having been written down. The memory element is derived from the path of the crossover of Mem from Netzach to Hod where it meets the fire of Shin emanating from Hod. This crossover is the mediating point of Alef which is received through Tiferet to Yesod. This mediating point is crucial to the understanding of the whole of the Sefer Yetzirah and “The 32 Paths of Wisdom”.

The “numerations” are the numbers assigned to the Sephirot, their representations in geometry, and the combination of their various individual representations into a unity when applied to the things of the world of the senses. It is the diaretic (separation) and dianoic (unification) types of thought which were spoken of earlier. It is the thinking conducted by the sciences and it is concerned with the universe of Asiyah, the physical universe, as well as the world of formation that is the realm of Yetzirah. The foundation of the thinking found in the mathematical projection of the world is itself grounded in the principle of reason which embraces the principles of contradiction and the principle of causality in itself. It is the thinking of the sciences and the predominant thinking of our world today. The principle of reason is a principle of Being. The algorithms that have emerged out of the principle of reason have given us our artificial intelligence which I have said is a ‘second Cave’ of Plato and a further remove from the truth of the things of the world and of the things that are.

In another translation of “The 32 Paths of Wisdom”, the translation states that the “pure consciousness” purifies the Sephirot by testing the structure and essence of their unity, “making it glow”. The “glowing” is the light that is the inner essence of the things, a metaphor for the physical materials that glow in the alchemist’s crucible as he attempts to ‘purify’ them. The thinking that purifies is the thinking that moves beyond the “mere shadows” or “apparitions” given of things by the reflected light of Malkhut that is the representational thinking of our sense organs and apprehends the things as they shine in the light of the sun. This thinking of our senses is called “representational thinking” for it relies on images or representations in order to make visible the abstract content of the thought being carried out. This is why the thought is expressed in metaphors and the like either through words or numbers. The “pure intelligence” of Yesod is a “know of” knowledge or a “knowledge by acquaintance” acquired through the experience of the senses. The Perfect Intelligence of Hod is a “know how” knowledge which is acquired through action or The Apparative Intelligence of Path 24 (which is sometimes referred to as The Imaginative Intelligence).

Yesod is related to the sexual organs of human beings and it is in this connection that we have the “two-faced” nature of the appearance of things. We in the modern world have become satisfied with the outward appearances of things, the beauty of their uses, including other human beings, and so we turn all beings into “objects” that can be controlled or manipulated either through our sciences and their results or through our machinations in our relations with others either politically or within our other social relationships.

The god Eros is said to be “two-faced” or “Janus-faced”. We have become satisfied with the “reflected light” of things rather than the true light of their essence. Within this satisfaction we “descend” to the physical world of Malkhut rather than “ascending” to the higher levels of spirituality that are our true nature. This is the relation of the Sephirot Yesod to the Sephirot Tiferet. They are connected by the letter Alef and the middle path of the Tree of Life from Keter; and these in turn are indicated in the path of “trials” or tests, represented by Reish. It is at this point that we make our choice of where we place our “treasure”, what we will come to “value”.

Besides the direct path from Tiferet, three other paths lead to the Sephirot Yesod. They are represented by the letters Yod, Nun, and Resh. The “pure intelligence”, through its “measuring and weighing”, discerns and distils the influences from these three paths and “purifies” them (relation of the emanations to water) and brings them into a relation so that they can become a “one” even though the number assigned to them is other than one. The “pure intelligence” of Yesod determines how the “eye” of Ayin will see the world (as “object”?) and how the individual personality will conduct itself in its day-to-day affairs. The “trials” of the path of Resh are the strife that life is made of, but it is the “pure intelligence” founded upon the principle of reason that determines other aspects of the individual and the community in which the individual dwells.

From Yesod to Malkhut is a single path only and this is related to the letter Tau/Tav. Yesod is the Foundation and Malkhut is Kingdom. The letter Tau is the seventh double as outlined in the Sefer Yetzirah. It can be represented by the two Tarot cards: The World #21 and the Fool #0 for it is both an end and a beginning, and it indicates the circular or spherical nature of the Tree of Life itself. It can be both the beginning of the journey (The Fool #0) or the end of the journey (The World #21). The letter Tav itself means “good”. When it is related to The Fool, it is the beginning of the journey of decreation up the Tree of Life. When it is related to The World, it signifies the knowledge and understanding that is related to “prophecy” and to the knowledge of the whole of things contained within the realms of Time and Space which is the Creation itself. This knowledge confers the gift of prophecy. This is what is meant by self-knowledge. The figure of The World has a banner of purple (the royal colour) in the shape of a Beth across her signifying her knowledge of the whole of things.

Yesod means “foundation”: it is the instinctual animality of human beings, but it is also the foundation of human being in Time, the principle of reason as a principle of Being as we now understand it. The interpretations of the images of the Sephirot are written down, literally “written in stone”, so that they are preserved and are unified with the “physical” itself (materialism). How the outer world appears is determined by these interpretations. This is why this realm is called “the sphere of the Moon”, the sphere of “reflected light”. This is the realm of what we call the “historical”, and the things come to be and pass away giving the illusion of “historical relativism”. Is this what we have come to understand as Hell? The focus on the Ego? When Sartre says that “Hell is other people”, his statement indicates this egoistic hell itself, the choice that separates Love from Intelligence.

The starkness of The Hermit #9 card aptly depicts this region. The letter Yod associated with The Hermit is the letter “I” in English and iota in Greek. In The Moon card, there are eighteen Yods surrounding the face of the Moon indicating the social, the collective. (Mathematically: 9 + 9 = 18 / 2 = 9; or 9 x 2 (the High Priestess) = 18 / 2 = 9.) Our bodies are the “cross of Christ” and He says: ““If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” Matthew 16:24. It is through our bodies that we experience existence and the body is our infallible judge through this experience.

The 10th Hebrew letter Yod is a dot or point. There are a number of contradictory interpretations for the letter Yod, and these contradictions rest in how different interpretations of the nature of the Divine and the nature of human beings have come about. For some, the Yod represents the Creator, the single point from which all of creation emerges, the Unity within the multiplicity of things. But is this not a duplication of the understanding of the letter Alef? The letter Alef is composed of two Yods and a Vav suggesting a Trinity. A singular Yod would place God at an infinite distance from His creation, or conversely, place God within His creation in such a way that He is mistaken for the Necessary and all that occurs within Necessity. The Yod itself is considered the foundation of all foundations, and this is why it is associated with the Sephirot Yesod. Is the key to understanding the significance of the Yod is that it is the 10^th letter of the Hebrew alphabet and thus a new beginning of some kind?

Yod is a symbol of the Holy One, the Creator, since the holy name starts with Yod (YodHehVavHeh). Small in form, the meaning of the Yod is great. According to Kabbalistic tradition, all of creation came forth from a single point – a point which represents God’s infinite presence inside of the finite world. This interpretation seems to be fine if it is remembered that this single point is infinitely small in relation to the macrocosm about it.

Yod also represents the idea of Unity within Multiplicity, of one whole that is comprised of parts. Yod, as we see, is a single point, but its value is 10. It shows us that many grains of sand are used to make one pot, many pages make up one book, many drops of water make up the ocean. There are many parts that comprise the individual human being and all of these parts belong to Necessity, but at centre of the human being is an infinite point that does not belong to Necessity. It belongs to God because it is part of Him.

There are many occurrences and experiences in the world, but they all stem from One God, perfect and indivisible. But if this is the case, how can events and experiences which are clearly deprivals of the Good be attributed to God? One cannot so easily dismiss the Book of Job. The Yod also is said to represent the ten Sefirot (but if this is the case, what is the significance of the Alef and what is the relation between the two? The letter Alef is composed of two Yods and a Vav. It is a ‘trinity’. The Yod that contains the ten Sefirot is beyond comprehension). In Yod, the multiplicity returns to unity.

In the Sephirot Yesod, it can be said that Being is the foundation, the ground/reason. The principle of reason speaks to us as a principle of being from within the Yesod and the Yod itself can be mistakenly understood as this principle of reason only. The Fool stands before the abyss of Being, the world of Asiyah; he/she makes a leap into that abyss. The result becomes The Magician: the techne, the “showman” and the resultant theatre that is the world of Yetzirah. Shakespeare understood this when he said: “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players”.

The Yod is an infinite dot, the essence of all life, when it is understood as the ‘soul’ of the individual. As such, it is the foundation of all foundations since it is related to, and brought into a relation to and with, the Logos, the Word. In it is the power of the spirit to govern and guide the matter of the material world and this is why it is mistaken for empowerment today. Everything comes from it and returns to it.

The soul is that hidden dot beyond the imagination – formless, the source of all thought, beyond all thoughts, beyond time and space, beyond the representational thinking that is our modern understanding of what knowledge and sensibility are. It is the secret hidden principle of the universe that we cannot perceive, and because of this hiddenness is mistakenly taken for will to power through the principle of reason.

So why then is it related to the Palpable Intelligence here? It is related to the Palpable Intelligence “because the intelligence of things is created (is “made”) under the entire upper sphere, as well as their sensations, were created through it.” Here one can see the connection of the Yod to the Logos understood as Word, as well as the connection of the Yod to the principle of reason as a principle of Being and as will to power. The Palpable Intelligence is also translated as the “Exciting Intelligence” and this demonstrates a connection to eros and to the recognition of need and to the condition of deprival.

The Yod represents both the Creator and the individual soul, the single point from which all of creation emerges, and that Unity within multiplicity that makes up the Divine and humanity. It is the foundation of all foundations, the hidden Divine spark which causes everything to be whether it be from natural or human production. It can represent the power of the will to govern, commandeer and guide the matter whether that matter be physical or spiritual. It is associated with the “ego” or the human being when viewing themselves as individuals. As shown in the letter Alef, two Yods are separated by a Vav, and this Vav is Necessity itself.

Yod is a symbol of the Holy One, the Creator, since the holy name starts with Yod. The significance of the shape of yod is that it is small in form, but the meaning of the Yod is great. This is in conformity to a number of fairy tales, myths, and parables where the smallest item is the most important. According to Kabbalistic tradition, all of creation came forth from a single point – a point which represents God’s infinite presence inside of the finite world. Between this infinite presence and the individual human being’s presence is an abyss, the abyss of the whole of Creation itself.

The Yod is an infinite dot, the essence of all life. As the foundation of all foundations, we can say it is the image of the Good. As was discussed in the structure of the letter Alef, everything comes from it and returns to it. It is a hidden dot beyond imagination, the vanishing point – formless, the source of all thought, beyond all thoughts, beyond time and space. It is the secret hidden principle of the universe that we experience in our ‘perfect imperfection’, and are unable to perceive. It is the Light that the Darkness cannot comprehend. It is the Divine spark of life that is in every single being. It cannot be grasped, but is in every cell of our bodies, causing us to be. It has no mass or density, time or space. In it is the spirit to govern and guide the matter of the material world and yet it is beyond the world. It is, thus, the Law of Necessity. When we have a false view of it, we see it as Will to Power.

The appearance of the Yod is as a flame suggesting the fire of Shin and the purification process of alchemy. Shin itself is composed of three Yods, the three-personed God. Its movement is upward. This aligns it with Path #9 The Purifying Intelligence. This suggests that the movement on the Tree of Life is clockwise with the downward movement of Mem as water, meeting with Alef as air and Shin as fire producing the earth that is the Foundation and Kingdom, the bottom two Sephirot of Yesod and Malkhut. Most commentators see this movement of water in the shape of a lightning bolt zigzagging downwards, and as a ladder of fire moving upwards. I have presented it as ever-widening gyres in its movement downwards, and in narrowing gyres in its movements upwards. In the movement downwards, the movement that is upwards is seen in a mirror image, just as the movement upwards sees the movement downwards in a mirror image.

The human soul may be seen in the symbol of the eagle or falcon which, in its flight, widens its gyres to ascend upward and then narrows its gyres upon its return. It is in its upward movement that we may understand Plato’s statement that Love is “fire catching fire”. Also, as the smallest letter of the alphabet, the Yod indicates the principle of the various stories of fairy tales, parables, and myths where the least is most important. The princess and the pea; “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took, and sowed in his field, which indeed is smaller than all seeds. But when it is grown, it is greater than the herbs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in its branches.” Matthew 13: 31-32; “Even the smallest person can change the course of the future” The Lord of the Rings.

The Letter Nun and the 28th Path: The Natural Intelligence

Genesis 1. 9 And Elohim said: ‘Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so. (The Pure Intelligence) Nun – And Elohim “blessed them [male and female].” 1:28 (The Natural Intelligence)

Path 28. Natural Intelligence (Consciousness) (Sekhel Mutba): It is called this because the nature of all that exists under the sphere of the sun was completed through it.

The Twenty-eighth Path is the Natural Intelligence, and is so called because through it is consummated and perfected the nature of every existent being under the orb of the Sun, in perfection.

Alt. Trans. “The twenty-eighth path is called the natural consciousness. Through it is completed the nature of all that exists beneath the sphere of the sun.”

Case trans. The twenty-eighth path (Tzaddi, joining Netzach to Yesod) is called the Natural Intelligence, because by it is perfected the nature of all things under the orb of the sun.

The 28^th path appears to be related to technology, to human “knowing” and “making”, which completes the “purpose” or end, the telos of the “created things”, through a process of making them “pure”, or through what we believe is a dis-covery or uncovering of their essence, their truth. This is the principle of reason as a principle of Being. This is a difficult concept for it involves what has become known as the history of Western metaphysics. This history may be summed up by our inability to separate the Necessary from the Good because, paradoxically, by establishing the duality of subject/object and the ‘objectification’ of all beings, we have dispensed with the Good as ‘values’, something we create in our willing. We cannot love an object. My understanding here is that it is contained in Shakespeare’s idea that “The art itself is Nature” i.e. that the art is a principle of being as is the principle of reason.

Initially, the good as action was seen as that which enabled some one or some thing to be capable of carrying out an action to bring an end about. It is good for animals to breathe, for instance; it is not good if they do not do so.

The 28^th path has many similarities to how Aristotle understood dynamis. In the Sefer Yetzirah, the good may be seen as the light which enables both the being of created things and that which enables human beings to see what their ends or purposes are for. For both Plato and Aristotle, the proper direction for human beings is the directedness of their vision toward the divine, toward the whole. This directedness of vision was contemplation, reflective thought. On the other hand, the 28^th path may refer to how dynamis, potentiality, becomes energeia or the completed product or work. This would seem to suggest that the universe is ”rational” and its rationality is akin to our own rationality. This is the ground of the principle of reason, and the principle of reason is a principle of being.

There appears to be a connection between the Bible’s giving human beings a central role, as an acme, as the point or purpose of creation (as is shown in the Sephirot Yesod), and the giving of power to human beings over all created beings so that they may be “completed” in their nature through the power of human beings’ making. (1.28 And God blessed them; and God said unto them: ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that creepeth upon the earth.‘) The power that is given to human beings is realized in their “knowing” and “making” that has become the stand and directedness of human beings’ being-in-the-world. The question is whether or not this dominion over the earth is one of the shepherd filled with care and concern or one of the tyrant filled with commandeering and domineering.

There is here present the view that the created things themselves are not complete in some way. This view of human beings and their role in creation later becomes the “humanism” of Western philosophy, and the consequences of humanism have become far-reaching. The question must be asked: is this view of human being, a product of the Renaissance, a correct understanding of what is said in the Sefer Yetzirah, and is it a correct understanding of what human beings are in their essence? The absence of God, experienced as the God’s silence through which human beings realize their “imperfection” in their affliction and need, devolves into the oblivion of eternity and into the view that the essence of human being is human existence itself and human will (freedom), that human beings will themselves to seek to realize human perfection and determine what Justice is and what Justice will be. Are we as human beings ‘our own’? In the completion of creation, there is no need for a God. The transformation that is spoken about by some commentators regarding Path #28 does not occur within the individual human personality only, but in the way in which human beings are in their worlds. It involves the whole human being, including their bodies. (That is why the conversion in Plato’s allegory of the Cave involves the turning of the whole body.)

But Path #28 suggests another kind of way of looking also. If one looks at this “ascent of man” in the history of Western thought through the lens of the Sefer Yetzirah and “The Paths”, one can see that it involves the yoking together of the worlds of Asiyah, or Sensation, and the world of Yetzirah or “Formation/ Creation”. This yoking may be done through the “reflected light” of Malkhut, the light from those objects that are present in the created world, or it may involve the light that descends from Keter, through the beauty that is Tiferet, to the foundation that is Yesod. This yoking requires the presence of Shin, one of the three Mother letters of the alphabet as outlined in the Sefer Yetzirah. The yoking is one of “unity”, not identity. There is a possibility of ascent as well as descent within it. The universe beneath the “sphere of the sun” involves the Sephirot Netzach, Hod, Yesod and Malkhut, and the links between them may involve either Tiferet or Netzach, the Divine or the human.

Our being-in-the-world is the primordial “foundation” (Yesod) which, through the reflected light of Malkhut, is how we view or how the world will be disclosed or “opened up” to us. Our disclosure or opening up to this world can be either true or untrue, and this disclosure or opening up is exclusive to human beings as that which has been gifted to them from God. The truth or falsehood of the disclosure or opening up of the world is dependent upon this primordial viewing of the world in which human beings find themselves placed. Human beings disclose or open up themselves to themselves by the manner in which they disclose or open up their worlds. This “opening up” is what we understand as “freedom” in which we are able to view our possibilities and potentialities. The world in which we find ourselves is already opened up to us; how we view this opening and our own openedness determines what we will conceive ourselves to be in our essence. This determination arises from what we conceive the truth to be i.e. openedness itself.

In commentaries on the Sefer Yetzirah and “The 32 Paths of Wisdom”, the word “initiate” and “initiation” are often used to describe the journey through life through the Tree of Life and its paths. This word can be seen as a simile or metaphor for our word “education” which comes from the Latin educare, “to lead out”, and “that which is responsible for the leading out”. The “initiate” and his or her “initiation” is a “leading out”. The initiate is not capable of this action alone; a guide is necessary. The images of paths and guides are apt here. We are concerned with what is authentic thinking here and how it may be achieved. Every “leading out” begins with an “opening up”. In this open region, both truth and untruth are possibilities. Untruth is the deprivation of truth, not the opposite of truth; just as evil is the deprivation of good, not the opposite of good. How one views the world is a choice to be made. Because we are beings in bodies, we become preoccupied with the things that are and how those things may be able to fulfil our needs, whether those needs are hunger and thirst or empowerment.

Shakespeare himself says: “The Art itself is nature”, and one is very hesitant to disagree with the wisdom of the Bard. “Human nature” is completed through “natural intelligence”, through the ‘light of the Sun’, i.e., through Tiferet, not through the ‘reflected light’ of the Moon that dominates the world of Asiyah, (Malkhut/Yesod) and the world of Yetzirah or Formation (Hod/Yesod/ Malkhut/Netzach). This is a key point in the Tree of Life for at this juncture, human beings make the choice of becoming more fully human/humane or simply residing on the “bestial”, appetitive level of existence. It is here that one fully experiences the “severity” of Hod and how and what we think shapes our perceptions of the world about us.

When rationality or the principle of reason dominates our view of the world and becomes our principle of being-in-the-world, we are less than fully human; and this foreshadows the coming into being of the technological worldview which dominates the world of Yetzirah, the world dominated by the Gestell, the “system”, the “plan” which brings about one’s attempts to bring justice to the world through our commandeering of nature. This is why technology may be viewed as ‘black magic’.

The letter Nun has a number of contradictory meanings just as the Death card of the Tarot contains a number of contradictory meanings. It can mean “deceit”, “kingship”, “fish”, “miscarriage”, and “miracle”, and at the same time be the symbol of faithfulness (ne’eman נאמן), soul (Neshama נשמה), and emergence. The gematria of the nun is 50.

The “fish” is the being that makes its “home” in the “house” that is the water of Mem and in the waters of Chakmah. Mem is associated with the Moon, and the Moon is associated with deception. (Notice the moon on the crown of the High Priestess card). It can be thought of as the fish that swims in the dark waters of the created world, represented by Mem מ. The fish may be caught with the ‘fish hook’, (the letter Tzaddi צ) or ensnared in a net (the letter Chet ח.) The greatest error that we human beings can make is to mistake the Necessary for the Good for this is how we are hooked or ensnared, and this is the point of Path #25, The Intelligence of Trials. We, too, may feel at home in our world where we have plenty of our needs met by the good things of the world. Those who do not do not feel in this way. This situation is entirely due to circumstances and Chance. This may be said to be analogous to the beautiful woman who looks in the mirror and believes that that is all that she is for she has been chanced with physical beauty, while the ugly woman who looks in the same mirror knows that she is more than that image which she sees. We can become forgetful of where our true being lies; and when we do so, we become less humane. This is the temptation and trial of looking into the mirror and how one is to look into the mirror.

Nun’s related meaning to “miscarriage” can be understood as “injustice”, since all miscarriages are connected to processes that are not brought to their true completion. We all feel that our own death is an injustice. Nun is also connected to fertility, continuity, and the ability to increase and multiply. Its contradictory nature can be represented by its association with Binah (the Empress #3), for it shows that Life must have its completion in Death and yet this Death is a “miscarriage”. Nun is also said to stand for the 50 Gates of Wisdom of Binah, which would again show its connections to Mem and to Chakmah.

Nun indicates constant presence, the being of the world experienced as presence. The Nun shows that we are bound to the Creator’s will (the Law of Necessity), even though we may become bound in our own personal egoistic way. This is a difficult situation to overcome. Life requires us to focus on ourselves in order to survive, and yet its great teaching is the overcoming of ourselves. The philosophers, in general, agree that life is the preparation for death. Nun shows the relationship between the body, which is impermanent, and the soul, which is eternal. This is its association with “miracle”, for it is a matter of faith that the soul will be reborn in its unification with the One.

Nun can also teach us about the nature of time and space since it is associated with the Time that is Binah and the Space that is Chakmah. Time and Space are the containers of the Law of Necessity. Nun also represents flow, and is thus associated with water. Its movement is downward and suggests both creation and humility.

The Letter Reish and the 25th Path: The Intelligence of Trials/Strife

Yesod to Tiferet: Path 25. Testing Intelligence (Consciousness) (Sekhel Nisyoni): It is called this because it is the original temptation by which God tests all of His saints.

The Twenty-fifth Path is the Intelligence of Probation, or is Tentative, and is so called because it is the primary temptation, by which the Creator (blessed be He) trieth all righteous persons.

Alt. Trans. ” The twenty-fifth path is called the consciousness of trial because it is the primary test by which the creator proves the compassionate (Khasidim).”

Reish “and Elohim saw that it was good” (the beasts of the earth) 1:25

The Reish, the 20^th Hebrew letter, means “head”, “leader”, and “beginning” and appears to have some loose connections to the letter Tzaddi. The leader or head is that of the collective, so in the paths of wisdom, Reish is the symbol of choosing between whether one is to complete one’s journey individually and achieve greatness of soul, or whether one will succumb to the second temptation and become degraded by the power of social prestige and the trappings of material things.

Reish is the word for “poor” רש Rash, but this poverty is the deprivation of spirit not the poverty of being without the goods of this world. When Christ says that the rich “have their reward”, He is referring to that point where the choice is made to be satisfied with the material comforts and pleasures that such a choice brings.

Reish is similar to the letter Dalet; but whereas Dalet contains a Yod, the Reish does not. This may signify the individual who loses themselves in the collective so that the “I” ceases to exist. Such a loss of the “I” is a false choice as one can choose (or may not have a choice) to lose their “I” through decreation or one may choose to lose their “I” in a collective. This choice is representative in Reish being one of the double letters and its meaning as being “the head”. The head can represent a leader or that place or site where the choice has to be made.

Reish is a container, just as Beth (2) and Khaf (20) are containers, but while Khaf represents forms such as a cup or house, Reish(200) represents the containment of the infinite, the life-force, the ‘embodied soul’ or spirit. Reish represents the strife of the constant transition, the flow and change of life and is, thus, related to Time. It is like a constant flow of energy, breaking through, breaking down into pieces, and building anew. This is its kinship with Shin. Reish is also associated with the will to power as that which is ever-present to stop the process of decreation.

The Reish also relates to the “head”. It contains the secrets of Beresheet בראשית, the beginning and is, thus, associated with The Fool #0 card where choice is strongly indicated. As the word ראש Rosh Head, it also refers to the secrets of the Crown Keter כתר, the highest of the Sephirot but also to the Kingdom Malkhut, the lowest of the Sephirot.

The Twenty-fifth path is related to the letter Resh, ר meaning “head”, and is the sixth ‘double’. The path intersects the path established by the letter Mem. The Sefer Yetzirah seems to indicate that the created world is already ‘a garden of Eden’ since in the eyes of God (Elohim) all created things are good. The “primary temptation” is to view the world as not good but incomplete and it is conceived as incomplete because it does not conform to our wishes or desires.

The Tree of Knowledge in the garden has always been viewed as “knowledge of good and evil”, and the great temptation for human beings is to view themselves as the ‘creators’ of good and of justice, to see good and evil as constructs of their own viewing and valuing, and thus tempts them to ‘turn stones into bread’. The ‘righteous’ or the ‘just’ are those who are able to obey the will of God and able to avoid the temptation of seeing themselves as the creators of good, and the only creators of good. Clearly those who are just, show compassion to all that is and are mindful of the affliction that is part of the root of existence.

The path of Resh is the test or trial i.e., the polemos or confrontation that the individual must face with regard to “egoism” and the recognition of Otherness, the choice between power or compassion, between severity or loving kindness. The choice results in these opposing forces being brought into equilibrium, where love and will, the ego and the Other meet in harmony and friendship and become a unity.

The path of Resh links Tiferet to Yesod, the Beauty of the world to the Foundation of the physical world. It intersects the path of Mem, the horizontal mother letter, and forms a “cross” (“Pick up your cross and follow Me” Matthew 16: 24-26; “What God has joined together let no man put asunder” Matthew 19:6). The “putting asunder” of what God has joined into a unity through his mediatory powers is “the sin against the light”, that sin which is the root of all sin, the sin against the Truth. All denial of what one knows to be true is a sin against the Light. As Socrates said, “No one knowingly does evil”. This is the darkness that is current in America at the moment, and it accounts for its rampant corruption, immorality and injustice in the public sphere.

The equilibrium between the self and others, the unity between the “inner” and “outer” worlds is given by the light of Tiferet. (This is the unity which Socrates prays for at the closing of the dialogue Phaedrus and it mirrors the passage of Matthew 16: 24-26). The balance conferred by Love illuminates both Netzach and Hod, ethical action and justice, with the command to be compassionate.

The ”severity” of institutionalized religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam in the West) arises from their desire for power, from their being in possession of the “revealed texts” understood as Law and from their belief that they are in possession of the truth. The Divine Revelation becomes ossified in stone, literally, and ceases to be a “living God”. Their God becomes a “jealous God” who seeks retribution for sin. However, “the god who sometimes does and sometimes does not wish to go by the name of Zeus” demands payment in blood for the worship of false gods as is seen in the histories of these religions. (This is the tarot card The Tower #15 or #16, the card of revolution, the lightning bolt of Zeus).

The point of equilibrium is Tiferet which brings into a relation the Sephirot Yesod, Netzach, and Hod simultaneously. This equilibrium is not something permanent but must be wrested from the darkness that attempts to hide it. The wresting of truth is the constant strife of life and is the trial for the ‘righteous’.

The Letter Tav and the 30th Path: The General Universal Collecting Intelligence

30. General Intelligence (Consciousness) (Sekhel Kelali): It is called this because it is the means by which the astrologers collect their rules regarding the stars and the constellations, forming the theory that comprises their knowledge of the Ophan-wheels of the spheres.

The Thirtieth Path is associated with the letter Resh in the Western Tree of Case, and the Sephirot Malkhut #10 in the Hebrew Tree. In the W.T., it joins the Sephirot Hod to Yesod, or that which links the Tarot of Justice #8 (historical study) to that of The Hermit #9. The Law of Necessity rules the realms of Time and Space. The path deals with Space and Time as pre-requisites for the possibility of the things that are. The things that are do not exist outside of these realms, and so Space and Time are the “foundation” (Yesod) for the things that are.

The Sephirot of The Hermit Yesod deals with calculations and reckonings of the movement of the spheres; and from these, predictions can be made. In the calculation and reckoning, the astrologers or magi, “the masters of the heavens”, are capable of having foreknowledge of the outcomes of things, both in the world at large and within the individual. The Hermit dwells within a dark, sterile world and his knowledge places him “on top” of that world for he can commandeer and manipulate the contents of that world. But that world is very dark, as is depicted in the Tarot card used in the illustrations here.

The Pure Intelligence of Yesod gathers together or “collects” the particular data of the movement of the stars and planets to arrive at the General or Universal Intelligence from which is derived the theoretical intelligence or knowledge and from which principles can then be determined. Knowledge of the movements of the stars and planets is knowledge of Time and Space. Knowledge of Time and Space is knowledge of Necessity. The Law of Necessity is the harsh Justice of the right-hand side of the Tree of Life; it is a Justice without Mercy, and knowledge of it is knowledge without Love or Beauty. Thus, we have the darkness, solitude and coldness represented by The Hermit card. It is apt that the “new human being” created from such knowledge is a golem or “zombie”, for this is the ultimate result of this knowledge when it is not accompanied by the spiritual elements that are love and beauty. The spiritual elements are represented by the Tav and The World #21 card.

The 30^th path deals with astrological knowledge or knowledge of space and time, cause and effect. As has been stated, this knowledge is what is determined through the principle of reason, and the principle of reason is a principle of being or way of being in the world. The astrologers or Magi, through their calculations based on the geometry that supplies the division of the sphere into 12 “houses” and the movements of the seven visible planets through those houses, derive pre-dictive knowledge of human beings and beings. Their knowledge is inductive: moving from the particular to the universal. As predictive knowledge, it is the forerunner of what is now called science.

The mind is perceived as a “secondary organ”, not the ego cogito of Descartes but the combination of Fire, Water, Air to bring about Earth; the combination of mind and spirit embodied. Fire and Air embodied in Water produces Earth. The “dust” of the Earth was originally conceived as snow in the Sefer Yetzirah. Humas, the root of “humanity”, “human being”, relates to the creation of human beings. Historically, the search for the formula to invent a golem was founded in the various letters and incantations that were made by those who wished to do so. Through the principle of reason as a principle of being, it will now be possible to do so.

Path	Letter	Meaning	Symbol
Path 9. Pure Intelligence (Consciousness) (Sekhel Tahor): It is called this because it purifies the Sephirot. It tests the degree of their structure and the inner essence of their unity, making it glow. They are then unified, without any cutoff or separation.		The “pure reason” of Kant? The alchemical processes of purifying through fire and the beginning of the decreation of the human ego so that it may be unified with the Divine.	In the illustration here, the lamp of the Hermit is a modest light given as a reflection of the Moon behind it. The world depicted is a sterile one.
Path 25. Testing Intelligence (Consciousness) (Sekhel Nisyoni): It is called this because it is the original temptation by which God tests all of His saints.	Reish ר	An indication that the three temptations: turning stones into bread, the desire for the power of social prestige, and the temptation to suicide are really one original temptation.	The site where the choice has to be made. The possibility of conversion, baptism, and re-birth.
Path 28. Natural Intelligence (Consciousness) (Sekhel Mutba): It is called this because the nature of all that exists under the sphere of the sun was completed through it.	Nun נ	The completion of all that is created or made is its passing away.	The Hermit is the realm of completion by the light of the Moon, while Death is the completion of all that is made under the Sun. Is it a rising Sun or a setting Sun?
Yesod to Hod Path 27. Palpable Intelligence (Consciousness) (Sekhel Murgash): It is called this because the intelligence of things created under the entire upper sphere, as well as their sensations, were created through it.	Yod י	In The Palpable Intelligence we are looking at the Mind as that which determines the appearance and the sensation of things. This brings about the ‘completion’ of things for those who view the world materialistically.	The thinking that is derived from the light of the Moon.
Path 30. General Intelligence (Consciousness) (Sekhel Kelali): It is called this because it is the means by which the astrologers collect their rules regarding the stars and the constellations, forming the theory that comprises their knowledge of the Ophan-wheels of the spheres.	Tav ת	Tav as one of the double letters indicates either descent or ascent, an ending or a beginning. The letter itself means ‘good’, but it can also mean ‘torah’. The ways can be either TORA or TARO.	Prophecy (represented by the four evangelists). The ways represented by the wands which appear as coils or gyres. The royal purple Kaf representing dominance in the realms of Yetzirah and Asiyah.

The Titles

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Text:

Commentary on 2.1

Text 2.2:

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Text 2.3:

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Text 2.4:

Text 2.5:

Commentary on 2.5:

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Christian Nationalism and Machiavelli’s “Armed Prophet”

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Donald Trump and the USA

Gaslighting and the Media

Trump and “the Big Lie”: Gaslighting in Operation

Trump and the American Collective

Trump and the Fact/Value Distinction:

Trump and the Christian Nationalist Movement

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Adolf Eichmann of Nazi Germany

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Section V: The Collective and Evil

The Great Beast

Section VI: Christianity and the Three Temptations: Contours in the Portrait

Section VII: Language and the Collective

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Section I: General introduction

Section II: Evil and the Individual: Thinking and Thoughtlessness

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The Golden Ratio

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The Division Between Love (Eros) and Thinking (Logos)

Details of the Divided Line: Section A-B

Section B-C of the Divided Line: Technology as Shadow

Section C-D of the Divided Line

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Technology as Information

A Reading of King Lear

Contemplation and Calculative Thinking: Living in the Technological World

What is Calculative Thinking?

What is Contemplative Thinking:

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The Tripartite Soul

The Soul and the Regime: Republic Bks IV, VIII and IX

Education and the Training of the Soul

The Logos/Logistikon

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Eros, Logos and World as “Information”: “Information” as the Essence of Technology

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What is thinking? What Calls for Thinking?

Calculative Thinking:

Another Way of Thinking: “Poetically Man Dwells…”

What Calls for Thinking:

Thinking and Language:

Resources

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The Titles

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The Titles

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Some Notes on Republic, Symposium and Phaedrus and Their Relation to the Texts

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The Emanations to and from Malkhut

The Letter Tav and the 30th Path: The General Universal Collective Intelligence

The Letter Qof and the 31st Path: The Continuous Perpetual Intelligence

The Letter Tzaddi and the 32nd Path: The Administrative, Worshipped, Serving Intelligence

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The Paths Emanating From Yesod

The Letter Yod and the 9th Path: The Pure Intelligence (Consciousness)

The Letter Nun and the 28th Path: The Natural Intelligence

The Letter Reish and the 25th Path: The Intelligence of Trials/Strife

The Letter Tav and the 30th Path: The General Universal Collecting Intelligence

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