Alban Arthan

[readoldthings]

The Winter Solstice has arrived. On this night of Alban Arthan, the longest night of the year, I want to thank everyone who has read and supported my work here over the years. The readership of this blog has, from the beginning and consistently been a group of very smart people. I always get a lot out of the comments here, even or especially when it's readers who come from a different perspective from my own.

Over the coming season the series on reincarnation is going to continue to its natural conclusion, and then I'm probably going to go in a completely different direction again. I've never thrown this blog open to suggestions before, but if there's anything that anyone wants to hear about, feel free to let me know in the comments section. More astrology? A return to the Gospel of Matthew? Another readthrough of an ancient and arcane text? Whatever it is, feel free to share. (If not, I'll probably just pull another random book off the shelf and start writing about it).

In any case, I want to wish everyone reading this a blessed Winter Solstice, health and prosperity in the season to come.


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Comments

[jprussell]

Happy winter solstice, and thanks for all you do!

As for a suggestion, I was reading a critique of Platonism recently, so some kind of address to those kinds of criticisms would be welcome.

Cheers,
Jeff

[readoldthings]

That's an interesting idea, and worth pursuing, though it will be a long project. Can you send me a link to the criticism you were reading? Most of the attacks on Platonism I've read from modern writers are straw-men who equate Platonism with Marxism, Corbussian Modernism, and the like, and that's probably worth a post to deal with. There are better criticisms to be made, however, and I wouldn't mind reading one.

[jprussell]

Sure thing! This critique doesn't quite go for the strawman equations you mentioned, but does basically say Platonism was a different flavor of the same sickness affecting the modern world (the writer is very right wing): https://imperiumpress.substack.com/p/was-plato-really-gay

Despite the politicized framing and the use of language from that end of the twittersphere, I thought the critiques were fairly well thought out and showed actual familiarity with Plato - but I don't have enough of my own familiarity to address them, other than feeling like "I think you're missing something, guy."

[readoldthings]

I'll take a look after Epiphany-- I'm off everything political til then. In the meantime, though... I'm familiar with right-wing anti-Platonism. I didn't understand it at all, until I discovered that it was a mainstay of the thought of Ayn Rand, along with a hatred of traditional architecture and, for some reason, Beethoven. I think a lot of our New Right is downstream from Rand without realizing it.

[readoldthings]

Ugh. I decided to quickly check it out, with the idea of engaging with it in a little while. As I thought, cheap stereotypes and totally misunderstanding. One at at ime:

Anamnesis is not the only corrosive idea in Plato—he offers a buffet of them, and as Dave Martel pointed out at the time, the main reason why Plato is taken as an authority is because we’re starved for legitimate authority. If I came to you today as a guru offering doctrines like that the moral and political guide is in each of us individually,2 that traditional myth must be substantially recast or abandoned,3 that all things must submit to human reason,4 that sensible nature is icky and wrong,5 and that we must abolish the family and private property,6 I would be run out of town before sunset.

Let's look at these all:

1. Anamnesis is connected with the idea of reincarnation. You're free to accept it or not.

2. The "moral and political guide" is Socrates's guardian daimon. The doctrine is literally identical to the Christian Guardian Angel and probably the source of it.

3. The "traditional myths" in question are things like Saturn castrating Uranus and eating his own children, and the horrific behavior of Acchilles in the Iliad. The actual argument is that most people aren't able to handle stories like these because we tend to take them literally, and then to act upon them. It's very easy to fail to understand the gravity of this in 2023. In Plato's time, regular human sacrifice, meaning the killing and often eating of people, including children, in honor of the gods was still a widespread practice. Imagine if your standard American Bible-thumper had Hesiod instead of Genesis as his inerrant and literally true history!

3. "All things must submit to human reason" is a misread based on a misunderstanding of the word "nous," which, as I've pointed out on hundreds of occasions at this point, doesn't mean "reason." Moreover, Plato doesn't tell us that all things must submit to the human nous either, but rather that it is the forms or ideas, which exist at the noetic level of reality and are perceptible by the human nous, which determine the material world, and the Idea of the Good which determines the ideas.

4. "Sensible nature is icky and wrong" is a cheap misrepresentation of Plato's actual view, which is that the material world is a shadow of a higher and more permanent reality. Platonism shares this idea with many forms of Christianity as well as Buddhism and Hinduism. Again, one is free to accept or reject it. But, A. this is a typically childish misrepresentation and B. it's a view widely held by many traditions, so the idea that a "guru" who came along proclaiming it would be "run out of town before sunset" is nonsense.

5. This understanding of the Republic is not derived from Plato but from Aristotle. Aristotle is a terrible source for understanding every philosopher who is not themselves named Aristotle, because he deliberately misrepresents every view that he wants to critique. In fact, he tells us directly in his book On Rhetoric that this is what one should do when trying to win an argument!

If you actually read the Republic, you'll find that, A. The ideal city is intended as a representation of the soul, and that, B. We're also told that it could never exist in the real world. Then, later, in the Laws, Plato specifically states that the form of government presented in the Republic is not possible for human beings, but only for gods! He then presents a form of government which is quite different, though suspiciously similar to Second Temple Judaism. And then he tells us that even that form of government is probably impossible for humans to attain, and so in the real world we'll be left with the "third best" form of government.

I'm guessing by the title of his post that he's upset about the gentle treatment of homosexuality in most of Plato's works, and never got around to noticing that in the Laws, any man caught with anyone other than his own wife-- including another man-- is to be punished by loss of citizenship.

Okay, maybe I shouldn't have spent the time on that. Back to work!

[jprussell]

I'm sorry for pulling you into political things before your deadline! Please enjoy the rest of your holiday season.

I'm glad to hear that my intuition that this guy was maybe off seems to have been right. In another article, his argument struck me as wildly off, so I'm not shocked that he's wrong here too.

None of your critiques surprise me, but I'm happy to hear them from a more authoritative source. Thanks for getting after it, even if some of what you critiqued came from bad translation.

Cheers,
Jeff

[readoldthings]

Well, the thing about the "bad translation" is that it wasn't accidental. He's basically repeating late 19th/early 20th century ideas about Plato, rooted ultimately in the work of an 18th century German whose name escapes me. C.S. Lewis made fun of this perspective in an address on Biblical criticism--

One was brought up to believer that the real meaning of Plato had been misunderstood by Aristotle and wildly travestied by the neo-Platonists, only to be recovered by the moderns. When recovered, it turned out (most fortunately) that Plato had really all along been an English Hegelian, rather like T.H. Green.

His line, "Plato was far too brilliant to have ever been a Platonist" is not original, but comes from another Professor in this tradition.

The discussion of what Plato was up to in the Parmenides is also a modern and very serious misunderstanding. But it happens that it's one that I've been putting off dealing with for some time now. So I'm grateful for having read this, because it's going to force me to sit down with Parmenides again...

[jprussell]

Hah! I think you had shared that quote before, but it's still quite funny. It's also somewhat ironic, given the author's anti-modernist stance. I find him interesting because he's a heathen that takes spirituality seriously and has problems with the modern worldview, but where he goes with those positions doesn't always work out so much for me. I haven't read The Ancient City by Coulanges yet, but this guy treats it as pretty much the be-all, end-all of authentic polytheistic religion, and so sees later Greco-Roman religiosity, like the Platonism of Julian, as a departure from the "true" religion of their ancestors, if that helps put this in context.

I'll look forward to your thoughts on Parmenides! I'm still working my way through Plato's dialogues, in the slightly-modified Iamblichus reading order you recommended to me on a Magic Monday some time back, so I'm not up to it yet, but maybe soon!

Cheers,
Jeff

[readoldthings]

Well, you'll have fun with Parmenides when you get to it. Either that, or it will make you want to put your head through a wall. Or both.

As for Coulanges, I enjoyed the Ancient City a great deal, and certainly it's influenced my way of thinking as well. But where I think both Coulanges and this particular blogger go astray is with the idea of a kind of permanent tradition that endured-- the phrase recurs regularly in The Ancient City-- "through long ages." This is also the error of people like Guenon and Evola. There is no "traditional man"-- there are traditions, which always originate somewhere and somewhen, change over time, are lost, abandoned, rejected, revived, and repurposed based on the needs of real people.

[jprussell]

Yeah, exactly. One of the things about his writing I have found valuable is the continuity he attempts to trace from modern, liberal views of the world straight back through the entire axial age. I don't know that he's right, and I suspect it's far over-simplified, for the reasons you say and others, but it's a perspective that spurs some thinking.

I'll have to keep that in mind about Coulanges when I get to him, and about other sources on the misty border between history and pre-history: just because a practice, belief, or something else is the oldest we can reconstruct/infer/have a record of doesn't mean we can project it unchanged to the beginning of time. There was likely a ton of change we have no idea about because no one wrote it down!

[deansmith]

I’m always game for more Platonism and Barddas. Merry Christmas!

[readoldthings]

Well, you know that's a given!