How Philosophy Overcomes Tyranny

[Omnious]

This essay provides an answer to the question that so many of us are presently asking: In the face of presumably invincible fascistic tyranny, what can we do? That a seemingly powerless entity such as philosophy is actually able to overcome tyranny is indeed surprising and heartening.

It requires a discerning mind to grasp how philosophy is able to conquer unrestrained repressive power. But the potency philosophy possesses to overcome tyranny is real--not some ethereal metaphysical conjecture meant to soothe and befuddle the credulous.

We´ll first locate philosophy within a larger domain: the Perennial Tradition. Following that, we´ll see how modern tyranny is attempting to destroy the genuine teaching and learning of Platonic philosophy. Last, we´ll examine precisely how philosophy is able to conquer tyranny and what part we can play in this cosmic struggle.


Philosophy As a Disclosure of the Perennial Tradition

In earliest times certain sages discovered the fundamental nature of ultimate reality. Their successors have taught select students how to reawaken organs of perception, resulting in a higher state of consciousness. This higher consciousness enables the student to discern that what we take to be reality is actually a kind of illusion and that there are higher dimensions of being.

Perennial Tradition Embodiments

* The Hermetic Writings

* Hinduism

* Buddhism

* The Jewish Wisdom Tradition

* The Pythagorean System

* Plato´s Philosophy

* Esoteric Christianity

* Neo-Platonism

* Sufism

* Bernard of Clairvaux,
the Knights Templar, and Cathedral Mysticism

* The Cambridge Platonists

* The Eighteenth Century Enlightenment


The secret legacy which teaches this transformative process, the single stream of initiatory teaching flowing through all the great schools of philosophy and mysticism, is the Perennial Tradition. 1

Perennialist teaching material and teaching methods are the outcome of creative adaptation by initiated teachers of the identical stream of Perennialist truth to contemporary needs.

Each Perennialist teacher develops a different embodiment of the fundamental truths, not because she is borrowing from her predecessors and building her own philosophical system on the basis of their ideas, 2 but because the needs of her students, relative to their own time and place in history, require new compilations and techniques.

Plato, 3 who originated the disclosure of the Perennial Tradition named philosophy, taught select students how to attain a state of higher discernment that was termed wisdom. Instruction in attaining this state was named philosophia, the quest for wisdom.

From the records of early Greek, Arabic, and Persian Perennialist teachers who practiced philosophia, it´s clear that for these individuals philosophy was a way of life, not merely an intellectual pursuit. Some of them--Pythagoras, Socrates, and Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi, among others--paid for their pursuit of wisdom with their very lives.


"Suhrawardi´s life (1154-1191 CE) and Suhrawardi´s thought were intimately connected, just as they were for Pythagoras and many later philosophers who believed that philosophy required a philosophical life. Philosophy for him was the love of wisdom and implied the obligation to live his philosophy; it was not simply the love of talking about wisdom. To pursue the Illuminationist philosophy, it is necessary to seek enlightenment from the divine lights."

John Walbridge. The Leaven of the Ancients:Suhrawardi and the Heritage of the Greeks

Tyrannies 4 of many stripes have--throughout history--attacked Perennialist teachings in general, and philosophy in particular, because they understood them to be inimical to their ruthless manipulation and exploitation of the masses. A partial list would include:

1. Political tyranny:
* The murderous Athenean senate that sentenced Socrates to death on trumped-up charges

* The Jewish Sanhedrin and the Roman ruler Pontius Pilate who sentenced Jesus of Nazareth to death as a terrorist

2. Religious tyranny:
* The "Christian" oppressors and the "Christian" Emperor Justinian who in 529 CE closed down the Platonic Academy, claiming that it was a pagan establishment

* The "Christian" Roman Catholic and Protestant tyrants who murdered Bruno and Servetus, among many others

3. Modern scholastic tyranny:
* Anti-intellectual pseudo-scholars such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche who claimed that Plato destroyed an original Greek nature-philosophy and replaced it with a deformed system in which the real is made subordinate to thought

* Contemporary crackpots such as Martin Heidegger, Karl Popper, and Leo Strauss who have been created by fascist rulers to try to destroy philosophy in general and Plato´s thought in particular

To understand why tyrannies throughout the ages have attacked philosophy, we´ll examine in detail the murderous attack on Plato by agents of despotism.

The Quintessential Plato

A great number of the enlightening and transformative concepts and institutions that constitute the heritage of our modern world originated in Plato´s writings. It´s impossible to determine just how debased human life would now be had these teachings not been available to enlightened thinkers.

Political and religious tyrannies overwhelmed humankind in the Dark Ages. It was only when Perennialist teachings such as the Hermetic corpus and Plato´s writings again became available that we were able to pull ourselves up out of barbarity and depravity to a more enlightened existence.

In earlier essays, we´ve seen how the underlying bases of our political systems in the world today are founded on Plato´s concept of a natural, divine law which humans must follow to achieve justice and right government. We´ve examined his ideas concerning the human powers of reason, self-awareness, and language--which have shaped our entire Western civilization.


The Degradation of Philosophy

Immediately following Plato, beginning with his student Aristotle, the degradation of philosophia into scholastic philosophy began. Philosophia, properly understood, involves a transformation of one´s inner being, a pursuit that rules every aspect of one´s life. This acquisition of mystical knowledge does not come from doing research in a university library; it involves a special method of meditative contemplation and an entire way of life.

Plato understood that only a few people are able to practice philosophia--the love of and the search for wisdom--in a genuine manner.

"The genuine practitioners of philosophy will be but a small remnant. . . . Those who belong to this small class have tasted how sweet and blessed a possession philosophy is. . ."

Plato elaborates on how difficult it is to practice true philosophy, resulting in a very small number of genuine philosophers. He also explains that even this small number of true philosophers are not recognized or used by the masses.

"Suppose you now take this parable [of the mutineering seamen] to the gentleman who is surprised at finding that philosophers have no honor in their cities; explain it to him and try to convince him that their having honor would be far more extraordinary. I will. Say to him, that, in deeming the best votaries of philosophy to be useless to the rest of the world, he is right; but also tell him to attribute their uselessness to the fault of those who will not use them, and not to themselves. The pilot should not humbly beg the sailors to be commanded by him -- that is not the order of nature; neither are ´the wise to go to the doors of the rich´ -- the ingenious author of this saying told a lie -- but the truth is, that, when a man is ill, whether he be rich or poor, to the physician he must go, and he who wants to be governed, to him who is able to govern. The ruler who is good for anything ought not to beg his subjects to be ruled by him; although the present governors of mankind are of a different stamp; they may be justly compared to the mutinous sailors, and the true helmsmen to those who are called by them goodfornothings and stargazers."


Modern Attacks on Plato

Modern tyrants who´ve seized illegitimate political, economic, and military power--the group I´ve delineated as the criminal cabal--recognize the continuing force of Plato´s influence--and hence its danger to their depraved manipulation of human minds and their insane imperialstic ventures. 5

They´ve deliberately established counterfeit "philosophers" such as Martin Heidegger, Karl Popper, and Leo Strauss and others to try to distort, obfuscate, and obliterate genuine teaching of the Platonic philosophy from our universities and colleges. In this, they have been exceptionally successful--so much so that the only genuine teachers of the Platonic philosophy today are to be found outside academia.

To give too much attention to these counterfeit sophists would be to bestow on them an importance totally beyond their true worth. But we must understand why these attacks by tyranny have been made on philosophy and how they can be counteracted--how philosophy ultimately defeats tyranny.


Philosophy´s Current Bad Reputation

Orthodox "philosophy," beginning with Aristotle, became a process of weeding out, as they put it, the esoteric and mystical and proclaiming logic as the supreme methodology. Aristotle and his successors believed that they were purging human thought of mythical rubbish and replacing it with hard-headed, rationalist explanations which met the tests of logic and common sense. So, from that time till today´s inert, punctilious college course in analytic philosophy, the counterfeit has been sold as the genuine.

Modern academic philosophers have a deservedly bad name throughout the world at present--much like their ill repute during the time of Plato. In the Republic, Socrates explains how spurious philosophy--sophism--has turned people off, because of its counterfeit nature. Since unthinking people identify sophism with philosophy, they think it is useless.

"The modern philosopher is a professional pedant, paid to instruct the young in philosophical doctrines and to write books and articles. He is a professor of philosophy, not so very different from a professor of biology or of marketing. He need not reshape his inner being to the model of the doctrines he discusses in his classes. If pressed, he will perhaps claim that he is useful because he teaches the young to think more clearly and, less plausibly, that he forces his fellow professors in other departments to clarify their concepts. The proud cities of metaphysics were long ago abandoned as indefensible and have fallen into ruin. The philosophers have for the most part retreated to the safer territory of language and logic, creating for themselves a sort of analytical Formosa."

John Walbridge. The Leaven of the Ancients:
Suhrawardi and the Heritage of the Greeks


Contemporary philosophy--and other academic disciplines--are only fossilized remains of the genuine tradition called philosophia. We have almost entirely lost the ability to distinguish an authentic teaching from a petrified scholastic husk. With our present state of "learning," we are largely the product of ossified systems which teach us to pile opinion on top of assumption.

We´ve been trained to try to blow back to life the mere imagination of long-dead coals called Classical Philosophy or Classical Science until these areas of study have become mere "disciplines" within a university curriculum, the dead seeking to resurrect the dead.

A number of thinkers--including Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Russell, Heidegger, Rorty and Derrida--consider Western philosophy at a dead end. Their various accounts of the bankruptcy of that tradition range from seeing it as springing from intellectual fallacies at long last exposed and refuted, or as the long-standing corruption of an original human wisdom now standing in need of radical reconstitution.

While we must surely acknowledge the bankruptcy of modern academic philosophy into inane word analysis (P implies ~ ~P) or pop psychology (everybody has his own conception of reality), it´s necessary to distinguish this counterfeit type of philosophy from genuine philosophy--as Plato did during his own time. Through many centuries of identifying casuistry, polemics, and scholasticism as philosophy, along with the loss of the ability to recognize or understand genuine philosophy, most contemporary thinkers lack the capability of grasping the true nature of the teachings of Perennialist sages such as Plato.


Modern Anti-Philosophy

Though modern academic "philosophy" has been deliberately debased and disfigured to the point of almost total uselessness, the continuing, pervasive influence of Platonic philosophy is so powerful a force for reason and just government, that the agents of tyranny feel it necessary to try to destroy it in any way possible.

"The task to which post-Hegelian thinking thus enthusiastically applied itself was the discovery of the adequate critique of the Western spiritual and intellectual tradition, such as could lay the basis for a new ultra-spiritual standpoint both comprehensive of it and liberated from it. The common metaphor is a ´return to nature´ in some fashion, whether through the romanticist invocation of an ante-historical spirit--the preeminence of culture--or the substitution of natural science for metaphysics as absolute knowledge. The former seeks to disclose and rehabilitate a pristine life and wisdom alleged to have been suppressed and corrupted by a domineering modern intellect which ´murders to dissect.´ The latter opposes any such great leap backward and proposes a revolutionary emancipation from everything past, appealing to a new theology and psychology of the natural, Darwinian man. But the wish common to both is altogether to have done with the reason-ridden, idea-world of philosophy and to rediscover (or open up) entirely aboriginal (or entirely new) territories beyond the realm of the rational and a merely moral good and evil.

"This ultra-modernist program is of course ambiguous at its core. It is one thing simply to abandon thought as empty and useless activity. But how could it ever be possible to demonstrate the invalidity of philosophical reason; by what new standard and in what other form of discourse could the case be made against it?


The fake philosopher Heidegger was a long-term member of the Nazi party


"In spite of its prima facie implausibility, this tragic, high-operatic account of the intellectual history of the West still exercises enormous influence upon contemporary thinking; the more recent heroes of continental philosophy still perpetuate it.6 With both Nietzsche and Heidegger the beginning is typically made with a claim to an epoch-making insight into the essential ´nihilism´ of modernity as the final embodiment of a legacy of spiritual degeneration going back in time.7 The root cause of this cultural decay, or at least its crucial symptomatic expression, is declared to be epitomized in the historical cult of philosophy which as a matter of course elevates thought above life, plays down the sensible world as ´mere appearance´, and seeks to comprehend and subordinate living reality under intellectual principles, the so-called ideas. The history of philosophy is thus, as Nietzsche puts it, the history of a lie whose consequence is just nihilism, the culture-negative culture of modernity."

Francis L. Jackson, The Post-Philosophical Attack on Plato


The incompetence and incoherence of these critics of Plato is plain for anyone to see. Academic philosophy has become completely infested with such learned imbeciles. I recommend Francis L. Jackson´s essay referenced above, which intelligently refutes the Plato-critics´ specious arguments and exposes them as pretentious frauds.


Fear and Loathing of Leo Strauss

One other misfit merits a brief mention, because he is the "philosophical godfather" of some of the vilest thugs in power within the Bush II junta.

Leo Strauss (1899-1973) began his career in Nazi Germany. He was powerfully influenced by three philosophers admired by the Nazis: Friedrich Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt. The Nazis worshipped Nietzsche as their hero.

As a young man, Strauss fell under Heidegger´s influence. Heidegger was an avowed Nazi and continued to teach in Germany under the Hitler regime.


The Rockefeller-funded Leo Strauss:

Carl Schmitt, the Nazi philosopher of law, arranged a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship for Strauss to study Thomas Hobbes in France in 1932 and in England in 1934. Strauss entered the United States in 1937, ending up at the University of Chicago in 1949.

Using such frauds as Leo Strauss, the Rockefeller-dominated criminal cabal deliberately set out to destroy the genuine teaching and learning of the Platonic philosophy, just as they purposely attempted to destroy American education in general.

[haselhurst]

I agree - philosophy / true knowledge of reality can change the world. However, there are valid reasons for the current postmodern age of no absolute truths - related to 2,500 years of failure to work out reality. I think we now know reality (wave structure of matter in space) and that the errors are related to assuming matter to be 'particles' moving about in space-time, rather than spherical waves in Space (which cause matter and time).

I cannot agree that Plato was the end of philosophy (though i agree with much he writes about the importance of philosophy to humanity).
I think Aristotle was much closer to the truth, that analytic philosophy founded on correct metaphysical principles does in fact work (as Aristotle hoped - see our website for more on this).

Anyway, thanks for posting - very interesting, and important.
Geoff