1. Classic: Philosophy is the endeavor to advance from opinion (doxa) about the order of man and society to the truth of reality; the philosopher is not an opinion-giver. Modern: No truth in such matters is possible, only opinion; everybody is entitled to his opinions; we have a pluralistic society.

2. Classic: Society is man writ large. Modern: Man is society writ small.

3. Classic: Man exists in a spiritual tension toward the divine ground of his existence. Modern: He doesn’t; for I don’t; and I’m the measure of man.

4. Classic: Man is disturbed by the question of the ground; by nature he is a questioner, and seeker for the direction and meaning of his existence; he will raise the question: Why is there something, why not nothing? Modern: Such questions are vain and empty; don’t ask them; questions to which science can give no answer are pointless.

5. Classic: The feeling of existential unrest, the desire to know, the feeling of being moved to question, the questioning and seeking itself, the direction of the questioning toward the ground that moves us, the recognition of the divine ground as the mover, are the experiential complex in which the reality of divine-human participation becomes luminous. Modern: The modern responses to this central issue change with the “climate of opinion.”

6. Classic: Education is the art of turning around and leaving the cave; Modern: Education is the art of adjusting people so solidly to the climate of opinion prevalent at the time that they feel no “desire to know.” Education is the process of preventing people from acquiring the knowledge that would enable them to articulate the questions of existence

7. Classic: The process in which participatory reality becomes conscious and noetically articulate is the process in which the nature of man becomes luminous to itself as the life of reason. Modern: Reason is instrumental reason. There is no such thing as a noetic rationality of man.

DETAILED DISCUSSION

1. In the first point, the tension emerges in the struggle between truth and opinion, whether or not we can say anything that is universally true other than there is nothing we can say to the point. It is a thoroughly modern position to say that all statements or views are nothing but opinions and no opinion is more valuable than any other, or that no opinion can advance upon the truth of reality. Even the laws of nature seem amendable. That assertion not only makes all opinions equal but all minds separate and free from any sense that there might be truth.

Certainly everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, but it doesn’t make all opinions equal or, for that matter, any of them true. The effort of philosophy is to advance from random opinion to a science of truth, meaning that valid statements can be approached with some empirical validity. In the Classical view this approach to validity also includes intuitive insight using the higher faculties of mind. The Modern view would of course hold that such insights are nonetheless still opinions because there is no such thing as higher mind. Students love

to debate this question because it strikes at the heart of their contributions to class discussion and seems to raise the question of the authority of textual “opinions.” What, they ask, is the measure of truth? Advice: Keep asking. Modernity holds that all perceptions are relative to the position of the observer, and all perceptions change when that position changes to whenever and wherever the observer is. If there is no still point beyond the sifting worlds of opinion, then all so-called truths are made invalid when removed from the relative positions of time and place. This attitude fueled the excesses in the Seventies and Eighties of Deconstructive criticism and the end to all textual authority.

2. In point two, The Classic view is that society is an embodiment of the human/divine hierarchy and that its laws and systems of justice naturally reflect human participation in that structure. A just society is also a reflection of the status of human understanding of the same structure. The Modern view, by contrast, supposes that human nature is a reflection of human laws created by the dynamics of social structure. It also denies that humans properly participate in any viable hierarchy whatsoever. In this view all hierarchies are fascist in character.

If a human being possesses a body, mind, and soul, and the soul is that which forms the connection to its divine source, then a just society will be a model of that connection. The aim of human life is to integrate the faculties of human structure into coherence, the result of which will be to integrate these faculties into a harmonious society.

The danger inherent in this view is that dictators and oligarchies seize upon the model of divine hierarchy to gain power and promote their own private visions of order under a god of their own invention. The modern vision, as we shall see, is suspicious of the classic view for this reason. Modernists claim that classic structures promote fascism in which the promise of human freedom is by definition and practice curtailed by hierarchal, or top-down, structures. As Plato understood only too well, his Republic required the leadership of a philosopher-king, a wise leader whose soul was aligned with the divine order, but whose possession of power did not pervert divine law. More often, Plato came to realize, tyrants simply rule in such a way as to preserve and consolidate their own power.
History is replete with examples of the perversion of the divine order by kings claiming the Divine Right to rule as they saw fit. As a result, postmodernism refers to any hierarchal structure as fascist in character. What has not been so clear, however, is that the real objection rests on the ignorance of what is called Classic Reason. Thus, it is not hierarchy itself which is at fault, but a perversion of its natural structures.

It is for these reasons that the Classic view must begin, and perhaps remain, an inner structure. For example, if we read Plato’s works as a monodrama, that is, aiming at individual progress toward the ground of being, then we can let go of criticizing him for trying to create a fascist state ruled by a philosopher/king who may or may not be a just ruler. The question then becomes what exactly is the nature of an inner hierarchy? The philosophers we have studied all answer this question but have different variations in their answers. And, of course, the mysteries and the Delphic oracle make a contribution as well.

3. The Platonic vision of erotic tension toward the ground defines the Classic view of the human quest. Plato describes a distinct “place” where the human and divine intersect: the metaxy, or in-between. This intersection is reached, in Plato’s terms, through an erotic tension between the human and divine realms. Eros, for Plato, is that emotional faculty that is the life force and the spiritual force interacting, fusing, intersecting, and establishing the only contact possible for human beings with the Beyond. The metaxy is the means, then, by which human beings participate in the full structure of the cosmos.

The “I” of the modern view is the existential ego, separate, alone, denying any reality except its own isolated sensibility. In the crisis of fifth century Athens, man devolved to the measure of all things, and the divine disappeared from active participation in human affairs. This break from Archaic intimacy, which signaled the final “freedom” from divine intimacy, was the misunderstanding of philosophy in which Mind was seen as cut loose from Being. Properly understood, Being was present in the hierarchy of human nature, and Mind, or Nous, was a faculty of Being.

As a result of the disconnect, Universal Mind became merely “my private mind,” and as the modern view has it, since this “I” is no longer connected to Being, this “I” of mine no longer subsists in erotic tension toward the divine, and since “I” personally don’t, then nobody does. The modern view denies vehemently the notion that any human being exists in erotic tension towards the divine ground of his existence. This conviction seals forever the question of the death of God and prompts some to say that as a result, man is condemned to be free. It is Sartre’s existential freedom.

4. The “disturbance” referred to in point four suggests a shaking loose or breaking out of this postmodern prison of ours so as to begin the questioning of the nature and source of the ground of Being. The Classic view accepts and promotes the need to question, to explore, to know. As Aristotle said, it is our nature to want to know. This fundamental nature requires the existence of a means, a metaphysics, a “science” of the quest for the nature of being. The modern denial of the validity of metaphysical inquiry has effectively ended philosophical speculation in this domain.

Religion is allowed, even required, to say that God created the universe and participates in its continuing existence. Modern philosophy is forbidden by its semantic rules to make similar statements. Psychology has taken upon itself the flexibility to speak of the unconscious as an unknown territory still crammed full of metaphysical potential. As one leading analyst has recently written, “Perhaps we can say, then, that the analytic quest is not so much for insight alone but for the patient to become freed up enough to risk unconcealment of the true self, that is, the self-conscious, pain-feeling, abject, ontological self, the one that analysis is designed to draw to the surface.” It is within the still unexplored wilderness of consciousness that at least a part of this true self may be found to exist.

The final point of the Modern view is the most damaging for the health of a potentially healthy human psyche: i.e., “these questions are vain and empty.” In other words, modernism asks us to make our peace with a material world which offers little or nothing to the so-called “higher questions” of existence. This position is not only arrogant but ignorant. How can any observer be so certain that questions of the transcendent ground, as the Classic view puts it, are so vain and empty? The modern position in this case hopes to cut off all further debate on the issue by drawing a line in the sand, but ends by slashing its own toes off in the process.
It is not simply a question of keeping possibility alive. The issue goes much deeper than saying, “Well, you never know.” By keeping open the great metaphysical questions, of which the nature of the ground is certainly one, we keep pushing back the temptation to shut down, to lapse into a frozen, inanimate state where existence ceases to offer transcendent possibilities. Such reductionism confines us once again to Plato’s cave, to stare at shadows and absorb ourselves in the game of watching, watching, to no end, until the fire finally goes out.

5. The Classic view affirms that the great metaphysical questions are the core of philosophy. This is denied, with vehemence, by the Modern. If human beings do not live in the realm of participatory reality, with its experiential boundary in the metaxy, in what he calls the pathos of existence, then life is diminished.

The word “luminous” refers to the effects of noetic experience, the enlightenment within which we “see” and comprehend spiritual experiences. The luminous is the sensory context of an individual’s insights made visible and is denied by the Modern view, by the “climate of opinion” as it shifts toward further reductionism. This Modern phrase is as self-explanatory as it is deadly. Again, we are returned to the context in which all views are mere opinion and like the seasons, they change.

To return to an earlier point, we can say that “existential unrest” is the condition brought on by the differentiation of consciousness in the process of Individuation. It is the pathos of human existence, shunned by most but eagerly engaged by a few. That it is also a dislocating experience tells us something about the territory we explore in the “participatory reality.” We are outside the comfort zone of ordinary life, which is the territory inhabited by the moderns in their shifting climate of opinion.
It cannot be within the scope of this lecture or course to examine in any detail the relationship of Plato’s use of myth in the philosophical effort. Suffice to say that myths like the allegory of the cave and the central myths of the “Timaeus” help to create images with which our minds are enabled to grasp more vividly the actual movement of the quest.

7. The clearest and saddest indication of the loss of Classical values is manifest in education, where the modern vision is supreme and its victory all but complete. For Plato, the idea of philosophical turning expressed the task and the art of philosophy as instigation, not explanation. Classically, a student is “drawn out” rather than fed the current diet of opinion. Instead of preventing the student from acquiring knowledge of the self and the quest for the ground, true education seeks to tear down wall of forgetfulness and to awaken the desire – the erotic tension – of the quest, to awaken the student to the fundamental questions of existence.