The Significance of Plato
The Significance of Plato
Exploring the Introduction to "Plato's Critique of Impure Reason" by D.C. Schindler
Philosophy is akin to inspecting the “source code” of human reason itself. The human animal is unique in his capacity to reason about himself, others, and his surroundings. As a tool useful for engaging in discovery processes, reason must be directed at ends beyond itself. To energize this engagement, a desire for what is good, or what works, is necessary. The near equivalence of the terms good and works is evidenced in some of our most common English expressions. If I ask you to meet me at the Steel Hammer Steakhouse for dinner tonight at 7:30p, you might respond affirmatively by saying either “Sounds good to me,” or “That works for me.” Both of these responses mean effectively the same thing: that you accept my invitation to dinner. I would argue that this is an extension of the algorithm of evolution by which we have all been refined over eons: if it works, keep it, it it doesn’t work, discard it. Clearly, one considers something good if it works, in the same way one would call something that works (in the sense of well-functioning for a given purpose) good. In this way, all human action is animated by what actors deem to be good. Plato’s work, unsurprisingly, is rather good at conveying this message.
“The key claim in the Republic, and it will be the central focus of this book, is that the idea of the good is the unhypothetical first principle of knowledge, just as it is the cause of being and truth. Reason, as reason, is therefore rooted most fundamentally in goodness. This means more than just that reason is good and that what is reasonable is also good (though of course it also means these things); as we will see, the claim means that reason is a kind of desire for goodness and thus has its proper end in the order governed by the good.”
Philosophy is also often described as something akin to truth-seeking. And for anything to be true in a complete sense, it must be a comprehensive account that leaves nothing out. To authentically engage the faculty of human reason is to reach toward the whole, which is inexorably congruent with the truth. Since the map can never be the territory without becoming a territory itself, this reaching of reason is an inherently desirable—or, an intrinsically good—means in and of itself. The power of reason is rooted in its purposeful alignment to the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, which is equivalent to saying it is always aimed at the good. In this way, human reason is a (dare I say it?) the only intrinsically valuable good, which I would expand to assert that: only human beings can exhibit intrinsic value. (Surely many fiat economists will hate to read these words…)
“To say that reason is ordered to the good implies, in clear contrast to the impoverished form of reason we described earlier, that it is by nature responsible for the whole beyond the fragmentation of its parts; that it, at the same time and ultimately for the same reason, is an end in itself and therefore essentially and intrinsically good (i.e., desirable); and finally that it therefore betrays itself if it seeks to compel by any means other than by simply being genuinely reasonable, which means simply allowing reality to show itself for what it is. To return to the questions posed at the beginning of this introduction, then, reason has a claim on us ultimately only because its telos is the whole, which is the same thing as saying it is founded in the good. Being ordered to the good, in other words, is convertible with comprehensiveness.”
While engaging with these words, and all words, we must always be aware of their limitations: quite simply, words can never convey the magnitude of the realities to which they point (Again, the map can never be the territory). For this reason, and in a masterful exhibition of human reason, Plato infuses his writings with poetry, mythology, dialogue, and other structural elements that amplify the meaning of his written work well beyond what his words could possibly convey alone.
“Wittgenstein once said in a lecture on ethics (1929), “If a man could write a book on Ethics that was really a good on Ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world. The reason for the explosion? The intrinsically sublime matter of ethics lies beyond the sphere of words alone, and so expressing ethics in words would require a total transformation of the words themselves. The same thing could be said about a real book on reason, and the closest book I know to fitting this description if Plato’s Republic.”
Be sure to check out the “Platonic Philosophy Series” where John Vervaeke and I take a ~10 hour deep dive into these essential topics:
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