On Wisdom
essay and verse
ON WISDOM
“This power they identify with the world soul, and also with intellect, and with the perfect wisdom which they call god, and with a sort of providence, as it were, over all the things which fall under its control, one which above all governs the things in the heavens, but secondarily, on the earth, those things which relate to mankind. Sometimes they also call it ‘necessity’, because nothing can be otherwise than has been established by it amidst what is, as it were, the fated and unchangeable continuation of an everlasting order. Sometimes too they call it luck, because it produces many things which to us are unforeseen and unexpected because of the obscurity of their causes and our ignorance of them”1
It’s tempting to want to suspend disbelief when studying the work of the ancient luminaries of the western (or indeed, eastern) Indo-European philosophical tradition. It might be comfortable to regard their words and phrases, their formulae and descriptions, their doctrines, as if they were unvarnished utterances from the presiding deity(ies) of the realm of ultimate reality….
….They are not so, and such an interpretation goes against, and indeed closes off the genuine power of the teachings. This power- and it’s intent- is to awaken the student to their already knowing, or enlightened, nature. The words, phrases, formulae, descriptions, and even doctrines, however dogmatic in appearance, are really nothing more than instruments and devices, flint and matches, to kindle or rekindle the mind of the student to ‘remember’. To remember what? to remember the presence of the source of all wisdom and knowledge, indeed of all that exits, in themselves. When such tools cease to be liberatory and become instead fetters of oppression, they cease to be genuine and true to their task.
The “Forms” or “Ideas” in Plato’s philosophical tradition are together such an explanatory device. Apart from the fact, baldly announced by Plato himself in his non-dialogue work, that reading his dialogues should not at all be with the assumption that they contain his unalloyed or literally articulated thoughts on the matters discussed, there is also the high probability that his ‘true’ doctrines were in a state of continuous development. The “Forms” may be, and if his immediate successors are anything to go by, were no exception.
It is generally taken as accurate by scholars of Plato that his real teachings, the so-called unwritten doctrines, were concerned with the principles of the “one” and the “indefinite”, or the Monad and Dyad. The “Forms” in contrast were explanatory entities, and seem to have been introduced into the general discourse of the Academy, to account for the relationship between the world of fluctuating appearances (as in, the sensual world of our ordinary experience) and the true realm of unchanging Being,
The basic inspiration for the above, in the context of the tradition of Parmenides in which Plato probably considered himself as working, was that the perceived world, despite constant change, arising and passing away, seems to be rooted in a matrix of steady, constant types, or forms, of which each and every individual thing is a composite instance, or manifestation. Thus, the ‘look’ that things share, for instance, different birds, informs our faculties of perception that there is something in common between the various individual birds. There is the ‘look”, the eidos, the Idea, the Form of “birdness”. Sounds like an odd way to say that there are species of animals? Indeed, it seems that Platonists such as Antiochus of Ascalon did make an equivalence between the concepts of Form and Species.
But again, what is the purpose of the theory of Forms? Just this; to account in some way for the intuition that while the world (including ourselves) is a flux of kaleidoscopic change, there nevertheless is, or are, things which are constant. The vista of things that are fluctuating and changing (the world of ordinary experience) seems to contain hints as to what these things that don't change, but indeed, that underlie all change are; namely, a certain set of pervasive principles. The proper subject matter of philosophy, of the practice of engaging with wisdom, includes both the contents of perceptions of the world of changing phenomena, along with that which recognises the principles underlying and pervading all of these phenomena and changes. And that is the identity around which the discourses concerning “soul” “logos” “mind”, “intellect” “nous” and indeed “god, or the gods” were built, as explanatory articulations of this basic philosophical ‘revelation’.
To bring it all back to the aforementioned Platonic principles; there is that which doesn’t change, the Monad, and that which accounts for the appearance of change, the Dyad. In their interrelationship, in their combination as ultimate coordinates (in a sense, their non-duality) , they were seen to account for the nature of the world, the World-Soul, which if anything, was the supreme deity of early Platonism.
The vast richness and diversity manifest throughout the Platonic tradition is the working out from these basic insights or intellectual revelations of their potential implications. The logos, to use an apt term, of the Platonic tradition is not “the word” as in the kind of literal interpretation of written texts common among fundamentalists of the Abrahamic religions. It is rather the spoken word, from teacher to (adult) student, from friend to friend, that helps one unlock what is already available to them, present in them, present as them. That is wisdom.
FROM THE WELL OF SEGAIS2
“Yet nothing trouble, none dismay
my friend, becoming overwrought,
for bubbles only, foam and spray,
this rendering of world is naught
***
What other then, you ask is real,
if not the phantom plenum here?
O brother, let the task reveal;
to cease believing what appears”
From the “Academica” of Cicero
A well of oracular wisdom in Irish mythological tradition