Real original.
Heâs conflating on methodology for a starting point of one kind of argument or investigation, with what one must be or not be to be a philosopher. He also seems to have a limited understanding of the kinds of entities that Plato posited. Anyway, it would be silly to pluck out the theists from philosophy, Plato included, even if one were to do this on methodological grounds.
Are you saying you know what people in philosophy, including Plato, believed? Have you had a divine revelation of what went on inside their heads?
And, on a closely related note: what kinds of entities did Plato posit in his own name? Donât you rather mean the kinds of entities his Socrates (or his Athenian stranger) posited?
You evidently have a very limited understanding of philosophical esotericism. This means that, no matter how much you may know about philosophy, you still know nothing, Jon Snow.
Iâm going by what they wrote. Should I take this question to mean that Strauss was claiming to have had divine revelations?
In any case Plato used θξáżÎżĎ hundreds of times, and while his use of that term varied due to context, it was often connected to what we would call religious experience, some ecstatic, where he or one connects to the divine. His texts present positively divine madness as a way to gain knowledge. Or the experiences of the immortal soul remembering divine truths. Or the ascent to a vision of divine beauty is also presented positively. And there are other processes/experiences that fit quite well in the category religious experiences and certainly at the methodological level. Now, I canât know for sure Plato was a theist, but I can say that his text, which do mention divine entities, present precisely those kinds of experiences positively. Sure, perhaps it was a parody and he didnât quite master the tone of parody. Or perhaps he just wanted to present a character through Socrates or âSocratesâ and he really didnât think of these processes/experiences as useful. But I donât think the Straus quote is justified, remotely.
Then thereâs the whole boundary issue around what is a religious experience. Even Democratus was partially a Rationalist, getting direct insights into the nature of reality. As are many philosophers who are not theists, but whose methodologies include epiphanies and direct insight. If it is a methodological issue: then the content is not the issue, itâs the, well, methodology. And so Dionysian approaches, just to bring it back to N, if accepted, open a door that one shouldnât simply close because Straus, say, disagrees with the content.
I think he used the character or âcharacterâ of Socrates as a way to show his own ideas. I do think there is swing room for interpretation around Plato and even his potential theism - and itâs not like a modern Abrahamistâs. But if we want to say it wasnât really his ideas, then we donât really have Plato as a philosopher at all, so Iâll go with what the text he wrote are supporting.
Further I see no reason, to remove from the category philosopher:
Aristotle - however impersonal his deity.
Thomas Aquinas
RenĂŠ Descartes
Baruch Spinoza
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
John Locke
George Berkeley
Søren Kierkegaard
William James
Alfred North Whitehead
as examples. It seems incredibly useful to consider these people philosophers.
.
Oh, ok, youâre one of these jump to the personal ad hommy, insult people. Thanks for doing it early in the interaction. Iâll ignore you from here on out.
Socrates openly mocked it.
May have been a necessary inversion
<>~><exoteric?
Bro, Sauwelios is like the sore old tired asshole of ILP. You can count on him being the same as always, which is to say making no sense whatsoever and being a decent cunt about it. Donât take it personally, trust me he is like this with everyone. Genetic-based intellectual retardation or whatever cute terms the doctors use these days.
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No, that does not follow.
Is divine madness divine, or is that part of the madness?
No such thing as âthe experiences of the immortal soul remembering divine truthsâ or connecting to the divine. Thatâs all exotericism. Heâs not trying to appeal to fellow philosophers with that, but to the ânobleâ. But it seems you belong to the latter.
It does, yes. Over and above exotericism for the ânobleâ, thereâs also a positive aspect for the philosophers:
âThe beautiful is suddenly disclosed and visible, the whole that was perceived only piecemeal and disparately lights up in a flash, insights converge and gain an undreamt of, unforeseeable, overwhelming radiance in whose light things are no longer as they seemed, and life can no longer remain as it was. The prophet will be absorbed in the devotion to the beautiful. He is remolded, transformed, and newly minted in his individuality. He knows himself to be a vessel of God and nothing more. He will trace the happiness of transcending his own limitedness, the subsumption of the particular in the universal, his losing himself in the whole [âŚ] in awe and reverence back to the author of the whole. In his felicity he will become aware of his mission. He will place himself completely in the service of the sovereign authority and, with all the resources available to him, defend the order that it guarantees and that he craves. The philosopher turns his gaze in the opposite direction. He relates the beautiful back to the good. In his felicity he becomes aware of his own activity. In his erotic nature he recognizes the strength that carries him beyond himself and the power that enables him to find himself again in the whole. The experience of the beatitudo [âŚ] encourages him to live the dialectical tension between [âŚ] the necessarily anonymous truth and its individual understanding, between the devotion to the beautiful and the knowledge of our needy nature, which allows this devotion to be good for us.â (Meier, âOn the Genealogy of Faith in Revelationâ; cf. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, âThus Spake Zarathustraâ, section 3.)
Or maybe you have to be a (potential) philosopher to hear his masterful tone.
âHis [i.e., Heraclitusâ] elusive notion of the Logos did not just refer to Reason. Reason is constituted by the principle of identity or, in other words, of non-contradiction or excluded middle; but that is only half the Logos. As I wrote recently:
'âReason has been misunderstood as being opposed to revelation. To be sure, the principle that constitutes it is that A is different from not-A, but thatâs only half of it. The other half is to then see the unity of the two, the whole that is more than the sum of its parts. Not a divine but a natural revelation, if the two are even opposedâa revelation of the divinity of nature.â (Open letter to Leonardo DiCaprio, 7 October 2017.)
'We cannot experience our sober, day-to-day consciousness, with its truisms like the aforementioned principles, as a revelation; but it seems to me that Heraclitus did experience his awareness of the Logos as a revelation: a revelation of the paradoxical character of our phenomenal world.
'âThey do not comprehend how what pulls itself apart pulls itself together: a high-strung² harmony, thoroughly like that of bow and lyre.â (Heraclitus, fragment 51, my translation.)
'[âŚ]
â² ĎιΝίνĎονοĎ, âre-flexâ, as in a reflex bow. Another version has come down to us, which has ĎιΝίνĎĎÎżĎÎżĎ, âre-curveâ, as in a recurve bow.â
Source: https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/t/nature-and-god-are-history/45224
First off, being a philosopher is not about showing, or even just having, ideas of oneâs own. A philosopher is not someone who âhas a philosophyâ, in the sense of an idealogy,ânot even his very own. Itâs someone who has a âlove of wisdomâ and has made a life-long commitment to this love.
âThe crucial point concerns what is meant by a âphilosopherâ. In the older view, it is not simply a person like âyou and meâ, only with a particular interest in philosophy (although there are such people too, of course), any more than a saint is a person with a peculiar liking for religion. Again, philosophy is not a specific subject matter like botany or geology, or a particular technique or expertise, as in the contemporary phrase âa professional philosopherâ. It is above all a distinct way of lifeâsomething that makes one a different type of human being. One is a philosopher not so much because of what one does or is able to do as because of what one most fundamentally loves and lives for. The philosopher is the person who, through a long dialectical journey, has come to see through the illusory goods for which others live and die. [âŚ]
If one person lives predominantly for honor and another for money, they live different lives, but not yet in the radical sense in which the philosopherâs life is different from both of theirs. For (typically) the honor-lover has not arrived at his life through the examination and transcendence of the money-loverâs life. But that is the case with the philosopher whoâmuch like the Buddhist sageâbecomes what he is only by undergoing a wrenching âturning around of the soulâ (in Platoâs phrase, Republic 521c), a kind of philosophic âconversionâ or ârebirthâ, by coming to see the unreal character of the goods on which all nonphilosophic lives are based. Thus, the philosophic life is âdifferentâ from other lives, not because it is one alternative among a number of equally valid alternatives, or even because it represents a higher stage of development along the same, continuous path of life. It is the product of a radical break with nonphilosophic life, a discontinuityâa turning around of the soul. In the famous discussion of the cave in the Republic, Plato depicts the philosopher as living in an entirely different world from the nonphilosopher. Aristotleâs account is no less extreme, suggesting that the philosophic life stands to the nonphilosophic as the divine to the human. This is the classical theory of âthe two livesâ: the vita contemplativa and the vita activa, the lives of theory and praxis.â (Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines, pp. 71-72.)
(Different starting point from the earlier link.)
On a surface reading, perhaps. But what about his exotericism?
Aristotleâs God is first and foremost a symbol of the philosopherâs very self:
Then:
Thomas Aquinas? Exoteric writer, though I have not studied him myself.
RenĂŠ Descartes? Exoteric writer. Did most certainly not believe in God.
Baruch Spinoza? His âGodâ is really zeroth nature deified.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz? Probably an exoteric writer. Have you ever stopped to ask in what historical situations these guys lived?
John Locke? Exoteric writer.
George Berkeley? Probably an exoteric writer.
Søren Kierkegaard? Kind of a Plato without a (single) âSocratesâ.
William James? No Continental Philosopher, but a Pragmatistâthough thereby also no âAnalytic PhilosopherââŚ
Alfred North Whitehead? Somewhat interesting, but no political, esoteric, genuine philosopher.