But neither term [to einai or ten ousian] allows for the inference that the Good causes to exist in the sense of bringing into being the Ideas. That would be disastrous for the entire doctrine. Socrates must mean that the Good is a necessary condition for the being of Ideas, but a condition that always obtains. It would be very difficult to say exactly what this means, but I take the general sense to be this: Being (in the sense of beingness, not existence) is good; it is better that the cosmos exist than that it not exist, for more than one reason but primarily because this makes philosophy possible, and it is philosophy that redeems and sanctifies life. On the other hand, if there were no life, such redemption would be unnecessary. Plato's view is very likely that philosophy itself justifies the existence of the cosmos.Did Plato ever give a definition of the pious? In the Republic, where we can turn for definitions—albeit provisional ones—of the other virtues. But we can find no definition of piety there, or even in the dialog of which piety is ostensibly the theme. The closest the Euthyphro will bring us is to suggest that piety is that part of justice (complete virtue) which concerns care of the gods, intending by this service of them. But Euthyphro categorically refuses to speculate on what work of the gods we might give our service to, recurring instead to a feeble catalog of pious observances.
This marked silence on the work of the gods is perhaps endemic in Plato's works. At least, it is notably omitted in the Republic as well as in the Euthyphro. When Plato considers the ways in which a god might turn falsehoods to use, he considers only whether a god has a need [to supply gaps in the historical record] or something to gain [by protecting himself from enemies or mad friends] (the two possibilities which remain for piety after service in the gods' work is left behind). The gods have no ignorance of history, no enemies or mad friends. But what of their work? Is it not embattled on an earth in which the bad outweighs the good?
A world, if Rosen is correct about Plato's vision of it, which is an egregious (even logically impossible) error on the part of its sources, unless by some miraculous rescue it comes to bear philosophy—which is up to us.
If we cannot distinguish "the piety of thinking" from this sort of anthropogenic redemption of the divine origin of the world, we must reject it (even if this means rejecting our beloved Plato) as blasphemous.
I assume you also have that more recent employment of the phrase "the piety of thinking" in at least the periphery of your thoughts when discussing its relation to a sort of Platonic cosmology ---especially when this discussion relates towards a possible redemption somehow effected by thought ---indeed, we might even say the possibility of an 'other beginning'. But it is here where Rosen himself doesn't seem to give enough interpretive possibilities --and, of course, I would suggest his 'nemesis' (why? Maybe its the Straussian in Rosen? --but then again even Stauss reads Heidegger with much greater care) Heidegger does. In other words, if, as you put it, the world is an "egregious error on the part of its sources", and if for this reason it is desperately and unexpectedly in need of something entirely useless, namely, philosophy, there is still no reason for us to assume the final condition necessary for this recipe for blasphemy; philosophy should not be assumed to be something clearly "up to us." Or to put it another way, why should this redemption, as you put it, be "anthropogenic"? Maybe this very determination of that to which philosophy belongs (i.e. man or something else) is precisely what is at stake in the question of whether it could be redemptive in any way whatsoever. the very efficacy of philosophy would then depend directly on its own philosophical self-understanding, its own comprehension of the dynamics and limits of this efficacy. And it would seem that this tension is very much alive in Plato, even if it later suffers a tragic alleviation; Socrates' divine sign is only one of these many indications of its life. So...Philosophy: man's atonement for the gods and their folly? Or the very thing capable of allowing the gods to claim what is their own (eigen), an event (ereignis) which, first seeming to belong to man, turns out to be the manner in which the true ownership of thinking is slowly and errantly allowed to announce itself. I am reminded of that anecdotal account of one of Heidegger's students...the squinty-eyed sage from Messkirch once said to his beginning students: the question (a question which we ourselves and no one else presumably must ask) is not what you will do with philosophy, but "what will philosophy do with you?"
ReplyDeleteIf it's not too shameful that I'm replying to your comment two weeks later, would you distinguish Heidegger's piety of thinking from the move which Strauss attributes to Plato, in which "philosophy replaces piety?"
ReplyDeleteYes (absolutely) --and I would say there is more than ample support for the claim that Heidegger himself, and with no little emphasis, distinguishes "the piety of thinking" from the philosophy which, at least, 'thinks' it has replaced piety. As a textual point of reference, the passage from "Was Heisst Denken?" should be mentioned which I will reproduce here and which I have commented on at Seynsgeschichte under the post "Ent-gotterumg":
ReplyDelete"The μύθος is that appeal of foremost and radical concern to all human beings which makes man think of what appears, what is in being. Λόγος says the same; μύθος and λόγος are not, as our current historians of philosophy claim, placed into opposition by philosophy as such. On the contrary, the early Greek thinkers (Parmenides, fragment 8) are precisely the ones to use μύθος and λόγος in the same sense. Mύθος and λόγος become separated at that point where neither μύθος nor λόγος can keep to its original nature. In Plato's work, this separation has already taken place. Historians and philologists, by virtue of a prejudice which modern rationalism adopted from Platonism, imagine that μύθος was destroyed by λόγος. But nothing religious is ever destroyed by logic; it is destroyed only by the god's withdrawal." (Was heißt Denken?)
On the other hand, as I also alluded to in the aforementioned post, Heidegger does not simply indict Plato, as perhaps Strauss does (even if his indictment is, like that indictment of the Apology, really for a positive charge). In order to understand then, in what way Heidegger's piety of thought could on the one hand distinguish itself from, say, the onto-theo-logical history of philosophy while at the same time maintain that, even in the Platonic beginning, Plato's directive to think towards the luminosity of philosophy, departing from the chiaroscuro of pre-Socratic thought, was a directive given by the same source that assigns thinking to the possibility of piety in the technological age, one must first understand the distinction between philosophy and thinking --and especially how this is not a clean distinction. I will post on this --this week.