Platonism Returns

Years ago, it was decided to bury Platonism under neoplatonism, which grafted on middle eastern concepts of good/evil and another world beyond this one which is so different from it that this one can be discarded. This was the basis of Christianity and ideology.

This model began to fail because it had no relation to daily life. Increasingly its adherents were telling us to do what was illogical and unrealistic, leading to our doom, all in the name of the sacred symbols from the pure Heaven which secretly ruled us all.

As our society comes out of this form of induced schizophrenia, we are returning to more of a “scientific” view of metaphysics like the original Platonism advocated:

Plato, who taught in the fourth century BCE, argued that each person has an intuitive capacity to recognize the truth. He called this the highest form of understanding: “noesis.” Noesis enables apprehension beyond reason, belief or sensory perception. It’s one form of “knowing” something—but in Plato’s view, it’s also a property of the soul.

Lower down, but still above his “dividing line,” is “dianoia,” or reason, which relies on argumentation. Below the line, his lower forms of understanding are “pistis,” or belief, and “eikasia,” imagination.

Pistis is belief influenced by experience and sensory perception: input that someone can critically examine and reason about. Plato defines eikasia, meanwhile, as baseless opinion rooted in false perception.

In Plato’s hierarchy of mental capacities, direct, intuitive understanding is at the top, and moment-to-moment physical input toward the bottom. The top of the hierarchy leads to true and absolute knowledge, while the bottom lends itself to false impressions and beliefs. But intuition, according to Plato, is part of the soul, and embodied in human form. Perceiving reality transcends the body—but still needs one.

Part of this is the Galileo-esque transition to relativity and quantum mechanics. What you see can no longer be assumed to be absolute and universal, and the consistency of the material world implies a consistency to any worlds beyond.

Even more, quantum mechanics hints at a substrate to all reality that shows an informational order which is not enwrapped in ancient religion, but instead logical like all the other processes we see out there.

However, in the longer-term view, the Christian idea of living for a life beyond this one detached us from reality, and its morality of being good to everyone allowed the bad to prosper and eventually take over.

As a result, people are looking for a naturalistic description of the world that includes the metaphysical, and the Platonist view makes sense.

Our inner selves and inner knowing come from intuition which is wired in our blood. We cannot be other than what we are. And we need to walk alone, to preserve what that is and is becoming.