Ur-Platonism

[Simon Adams]

I’m interested what you guys think of this attempt to categorise philosophies into two camps. Although it’s of course on over generalisation, it’s essentially a wider Platonic umbrella versus a nominalist/naturalist umbrella.

In From Plato to Platonism, he suggests that the common core of “Ur-Platonism” can be characterized in negative terms, as a conjunction of five “antis”: anti-materialism, anti-mechanism, anti-nominalism, anti-relativism, and anti-skepticism. Together these elements make up a sixth “anti-,” namely anti-naturalism […]

In Aristotle and Other Platonists, Gerson proposed a positive characterization of the tradition, as comprising seven key themes: 1. The universe has a systematic unity; 2. This unity reflects an explanatory hierarchy and in particular a “top-down” approach to explanation (as opposed to the “bottom-up” approach of naturalism), especially in the two key respects that the simple is prior to the complex and the intelligible is prior to the sensible; 3. The divine constitutes an irreducible explanatory category, and is to be conceived of in personal terms (even if in some Ur-Platonist thinkers the personal aspect is highly attenuated); 4. The psychological also constitutes an irreducible explanatory category; 5. Persons are part of the hierarchy and their happiness consists in recovering a lost position within it, in a way that can be described as “becoming like God”; 6. Moral and aesthetic value is to be analyzed by reference to this metaphysical hierarchy; and 7. The epistemological order is contained with this metaphysical order.

https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2019/1 ... e.html?m=1

One thing I find interesting is that Bernardo often calls himself a naturalist. One definition of the naturalist position is that “all knowledge of the universe falls within the pale of scientific investigation”.

For me this is quite a useful distinction between philosophies. The naturalist camp is the reason we have physicalism. Maybe Bernardo calls himself a naturalist so that he can contest physicalism on it’s own ground so to speak, and this does give it a clarity and rationality that is a strength. However this idea that science can be applied outside the ‘world of representation’ is one of the things I feel uncomfortable about in some of the discussions here. It seems to me that’s like building a shed with hammers and nails, and the trying to paint it with hammers and nails. Once you get to philosophy, reductionism and empiricism seem to take the heart out out of our capacity to reason. Instead for good philosophy, instead of breaking things into the smallest bits (which is fine for science, because you have a pre-existing canvas which is matter), you need to establish a wider frame that everything else relates to.

I would also say that it then leads to mistaken assumptions about god, although I don’t expect anyone here to agree to that. But I am interested what people think about this broad division into to ‘camps’…

[AshvinP]

I’m interested what you guys think of this attempt to categorise philosophies into two camps. Although it’s of course on over generalisation, it’s essentially a wider Platonic umbrella versus a nominalist/naturalist umbrella.

In From Plato to Platonism, he suggests that the common core of “Ur-Platonism” can be characterized in negative terms, as a conjunction of five “antis”: anti-materialism, anti-mechanism, anti-nominalism, anti-relativism, and anti-skepticism. Together these elements make up a sixth “anti-,” namely anti-naturalism […]

In Aristotle and Other Platonists, Gerson proposed a positive characterization of the tradition, as comprising seven key themes: 1. The universe has a systematic unity; 2. This unity reflects an explanatory hierarchy and in particular a “top-down” approach to explanation (as opposed to the “bottom-up” approach of naturalism), especially in the two key respects that the simple is prior to the complex and the intelligible is prior to the sensible; 3. The divine constitutes an irreducible explanatory category, and is to be conceived of in personal terms (even if in some Ur-Platonist thinkers the personal aspect is highly attenuated); 4. The psychological also constitutes an irreducible explanatory category; 5. Persons are part of the hierarchy and their happiness consists in recovering a lost position within it, in a way that can be described as “becoming like God”; 6. Moral and aesthetic value is to be analyzed by reference to this metaphysical hierarchy; and 7. The epistemological order is contained with this metaphysical order.

https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2019/1 ... e.html?m=1

One thing I find interesting is that Bernardo often calls himself a naturalist. One definition of the naturalist position is that “all knowledge of the universe falls within the pale of scientific investigation”.

For me this is quite a useful distinction between philosophies. The naturalist camp is the reason we have physicalism. Maybe Bernardo calls himself a naturalist so that he can contest physicalism on it’s own ground so to speak, and this does give it a clarity and rationality that is a strength. However this idea that science can be applied outside the ‘world of representation’ is one of the things I feel uncomfortable about in some of the discussions here. It seems to me that’s like building a shed with hammers and nails, and the trying to paint it with hammers and nails. Once you get to philosophy, reductionism and empiricism seem to take the heart out out of our capacity to reason. Instead for good philosophy, instead of breaking things into the smallest bits (which is fine for science, because you have a pre-existing canvas which is matter), you need to establish a wider frame that everything else relates to.

I would also say that it then leads to mistaken assumptions about god, although I don’t expect anyone here to agree to that. But I am interested what people think about this broad division into to ‘camps’…

The "anti-naturalism" element he adds there is a result of ignoring the metamorphic progression of Spirit (yes I will continue to be a broken record about this ). It really lies at the heart of so many misunderstandings. For Plato, Aristotle, and even many thinkers up to the Scholastics, the "bottom-up" naturalist approach could not be conceived, let alone advocated. But we live in a different age now with different tools and a qualitatively different mode of consciousness. That is why BK and others can claim to be "naturalists" without ceding any ground to physicalists. In fact, the 20th century has started to make clear that physicalism is not compatible with naturalism, such as we see in Hoffman's Darwinian models of perception, but also in many, many more thinkers over the last 150 years. Those are the conclusions... the arguments for them are in the metamorphic essays. Any metaphysical-spiritual worldview which cannot encompass modern science in its essence (not its materialist-dualist methods and conclusions i.e. what you refer to as "reductionism" and "empiricism") should really be discarded from any serious consideration.

[Simon Adams]

The "anti-naturalism" element he adds there is a result of ignoring the metamorphic progression of Spirit (yes I will continue to be a broken record about this ). It really lies at the heart of so many misunderstandings. For Plato, Aristotle, and even many thinkers up to the Scholastics, the "bottom-up" naturalist approach could not be conceived, let alone advocated. But we live in a different age now with different tools and a qualitatively different mode of consciousness. That is why BK and others can claim to be "naturalists" without ceding any ground to physicalists. In fact, the 20th century has started to make clear that physicalism is not compatible with naturalism, such as we see in Hoffman's Darwinian models of perception, but also in many, many more thinkers over the last 150 years. Those are the conclusions... the arguments for them are in the metamorphic essays. Any metaphysical-spiritual worldview which cannot encompass modern science in its essence (not its materialist-dualist methods and conclusions i.e. what you refer to as "reductionism" and "empiricism") should really be discarded from any serious consideration.

But ‘modern science’ will change completely in 200 years time, and again in another 200 years time. Each generation always thinks that it’s science is right on the edge of understanding the whole of reality, then a couple of centuries pass, and we look back on them as close to fundamentally mistaken. Another part of the world, with a different way of looking at things picks up the mantel, views ‘science’ with a culturally different metaphysical perspective, but also establishes that some things the generations before saw as fundamental, was in fact just a certain appearance of things. Rinse and repeat. It’s a persistent illusion that we have anything more than a very primitive understanding of anything whatsoever, and generally people can’t even imagine what the next Kuhn like revolution will be like, or even about.

At the same time, what you see as a forward evolution of the mode of consciousness, coming to new heights in the 20th Century, from another perspective is going backwards. The culture of duty towards society is being replaced with the culture of self entitlement, the culture of sacrifice with one of immediate gratification, levels of depression rising year on year etc. I don’t see this as the whole picture, as clearly our values and respect for human dignity has been developing slowly over many centuries, but the last century is evidence that we can more easily than ever be convinced by ‘logical’ ideas like eugenics and communism with disastrous consequences. Both of these were based on leading understandings of science and philosophy at the time.

In Isaiah there are some sections where he is told the words are sealed so they are for another time. Some are about a current event at the time, but as Pageau says are written as a pattern, and can apply more than once. Some of them like Isaiah 53 we now know what that is about, but some like this a few chapters before seems to be about a pattern that happens multiple times;

“These people come near to me with their mouth
and honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
Their worship of me
is based on merely human rules they have been taught.
14 Therefore once more I will astound these people
with wonder upon wonder;
the wisdom of the wise will perish,
the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish.”
15 Woe to those who go to great depths
to hide their plans from the Lord,
who do their work in darkness and think,
“Who sees us? Who will know?”
16 You turn things upside down,
as if the potter were thought to be like the clay!
Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it,
“You did not make me”?
Can the pot say to the potter,
“You know nothing”?

[AshvinP]

The "anti-naturalism" element he adds there is a result of ignoring the metamorphic progression of Spirit (yes I will continue to be a broken record about this ). It really lies at the heart of so many misunderstandings. For Plato, Aristotle, and even many thinkers up to the Scholastics, the "bottom-up" naturalist approach could not be conceived, let alone advocated. But we live in a different age now with different tools and a qualitatively different mode of consciousness. That is why BK and others can claim to be "naturalists" without ceding any ground to physicalists. In fact, the 20th century has started to make clear that physicalism is not compatible with naturalism, such as we see in Hoffman's Darwinian models of perception, but also in many, many more thinkers over the last 150 years. Those are the conclusions... the arguments for them are in the metamorphic essays. Any metaphysical-spiritual worldview which cannot encompass modern science in its essence (not its materialist-dualist methods and conclusions i.e. what you refer to as "reductionism" and "empiricism") should really be discarded from any serious consideration.

But ‘modern science’ will change completely in 200 years time, and again in another 200 years time. Each generation always thinks that it’s science is right on the edge of understanding the whole of reality, then a couple of centuries pass and we look back on them as close to fundamentally mistaken. Another part of the world with a different way of looking at things picks up the mantel, views ‘science’ with a culturally different metaphysical perspective, but also establishes that some things the generations before saw as fundamental was in fact just a certain appearance of things. Rinse and repeat. It’s a persistent illusion that we’ve anything more than a very primitive understanding of anything whatsoever, and generally people weren’t even imagining what the next Kuhn like revolution would be like, or even about.

The above is missing a critical aspect of the metamorphic progression - the later scientific paradigms encompass and make sense of the earlier ones. It is not simply that the earlier theories in the old paradigm are declared fundamentally mistaken, but it is also specified how and why they are mistaken and why the corrective measures employed by the later theories successfully bridge the gap between the paradigms. We see that same pattern in philosophy just as in science, although it is not a strictly linear progression, and it only occurs when they are carried out properly, i.e. according to their essential method.

At the same time, what you see as a forward evolution of the mode of consciousness, coming to nee heights in the 20th Century, from another perspective is going backwards in many ways. The culture of duty towards society is being replaced with the culture of self entitlement, the culture of sacrifice with one of immediate gratification, levels of depression rising year on year etc. I don’t see this as the whole picture as clearly our values and respect for human dignity has been developing slowly over many centuries, but the last century is evidence that we can more easily than ever be convinced by ‘logical’ ideas like eugenics and communism with disastrous consequences. Both of these were based on leading understandings of science and philosophy at the time.

We cannot anthropomorphize the metamorphic process in this way. The "forwardness" of the process is not about a 1:1 correspondence between progressive modes of consciousness and ethical values or integrated world outlooks. It is simply about observing the actual development of the later forms out of the earlier forms, as any Darwinian scientist would. What this means for ethical development of values is of utmost importance, but an entirely new question that deserves much more attention. It gets that attention in Steiner's last chapters of The PoF.

In Isaiah there are some sections where he is told the words are sealed so they are for another time. Some are about a current event at the time, but as Pageau says are written as a pattern, and can apply more than once. Some of them like Isaiah 53 we now know what that is about, but some like this a few chapters before seems to be about a pattern that happens multiple times;

“These people come near to me with their mouth
and honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
Their worship of me
is based on merely human rules they have been taught.
14 Therefore once more I will astound these people
with wonder upon wonder;
the wisdom of the wise will perish,
the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish.”
15 Woe to those who go to great depths
to hide their plans from the Lord,
who do their work in darkness and think,
“Who sees us? Who will know?”
16 You turn things upside down,
as if the potter were thought to be like the clay!
Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it,
“You did not make me”?
Can the pot say to the potter,
“You know nothing”?

If the metamorphic implications of ethical development deserves a much more expansive treatment, then it is even more true of the implications for scripture (something else Steiner writes extensively about). Although I would say the above passage speaks very well to the issues we face in the wake of modernity - namely the flipping upside down of what used to be the common metamorphic wisdom of the ancients (up to and including Scholastics). Now we imagine a world frozen in time, where we have progressed in knowledge and wisdom as far as we can go, so we leave the rest of living development up to something external, whether it be the State (think Marx, who famously remarked he "flipped Hegel on his head") or God. One is over-materialized and the other is over-spiritualized, but they are both only dealing with extremes rather than healthy balance.