12 November 2022

“At the center of the Phaedo beats an anti-modern, or rather a premodern heart, whose rhythm radiates the following lesson: to attain metaphysical truth one must resist the intellectual assumptions of modernity (i.e., empiricism, materialism, and misology); to resist modernity one’s soul must be healthy; a healthy soul is a pure soul; purity results from purification, which is the practice of philosophy as a disciplined way of life that everywhere yields to the authority of the natural hierarchy of being and value.”

(Mark Anderson, Pure: Modernity, Philosophy, and the One, Sophia Perennis, San Rafael, CA, 2009, ISBN: 9781597310949, pages 98 and 99.)

 

A few comments stimulated by this quote:

1. ‘Empiricism’ is the view that everything that is real is that which the senses can experience.  It is the view that everything can be quantitatively assessed.  'Materialism' is the view that only material things exist.  From the perspective of materialism abstract entities are derived from material experience.  In Platonism material things are understood to be instantiations of abstract entities such as forms and other hypostases.  ‘Misology’ is a distrust, or even a hatred for, reason, reasoning, dialectic, and philosophical inquiry.  In Platonism such approaches are tools used to help with the ascent to higher realities and, ultimately, The One.

2. I like the way that Anderson links Phaedo to both an ‘anti-modern’ and a ‘premodern’ stance.  In a sense, being a contemporary Platonist means returning to a way of comprehending the cosmos, and a way of life consistent with that comprehension, that existed widely in the premodern world.  However, such a way of life will not look exactly the same as it did in the premodern world.  There will be differences as to how it manifests; my suspicion is that we are not at a point where we can know exactly what it will look like in the future.  But a sense of continuity with Platonism’s premodern presence will be observable.

3. Anderson refers to a healthy soul and that highlights one of the difficulties of being a Platonist in the midst of modernity.  For in modernity the existence of the soul is questioned, whereas in the premodern world it is taken for granted.  It’s not that no one in modernity believes in the existence of the soul, or in its immortality.  It’s that the dominant cultural institutions and what they teach do not.

4. This quote brings back to me my great fondness for Phaedo.  This is evidently shared by Anderson as his long essay ‘Pure’ is kind of a paean to Phaedo.  For a long time, I have thought of spending a year just on this single dialogue.  Perhaps 2023 is the year for doing this.