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"Wittgenstein's Tractatus" has been decried as unreadable since it first appeared in the 1920's..


I never delved too deeply into Tractatus I had heard about it and carried out a preliminary investigation, in some ways it reminded of another unreadable American tract, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance."

So, I'll refrain from jumping in on the Christian connection too quickly.

Overall, I think Plato's discussion of the Noble Lie (NL) is ironic. It has failed partially if anyone recognizes it as a lie; it has failed completely for the purpose of sustaining a polity if everyone recognizes this. Partial failure eventually leads to complete failure. In other words, the centrality of Story to human life is such that we require a lie that fools us all (and we want this). We have to believe it, but this precludes us from recognizing it as a lie. So, ironically, he is talking about something that is impossible, but which we strive to do inevitably. We can't do it, but we're self-conscious of that fact and also of the fact that we'll do it just as unavoidably, and that's the human predicament in a nutshell.

The trouble is that since it must be a lie that fools us all, nobody can actually give a satisfying analysis of what a sufficient NL would be. To draw an analogy here, you could imagine trying to give a complete account of what makes a rock band famous, i.e., why some become mega stars and others don't, in spite of having more similarities than differences (the musicians in a group that is forgotten may have roughly the same level of talent as the members of a group that goes down in history). Sometimes, people refer to this as an X-factor. This is because it can't be analyzed. It happens, but nobody is quite sure why. We sort of 'intuit' it, and so our answers are never satisfying. If you pick out one feature the superstar group has, there will be a forgotten group that had that feature.

The same goes for the stories that are sufficient to ground a polity, a movement, or a distinct epoch of human civilization. You can pick out the rough edges of what these NL's are, but your apprehension of them IS the lie. Because once you're at the level of analyzing them, they're something other than they were. You can't see past the cave you're in. The concepts you have about the NL are themselves shadows dancing on the wall.

The lesson involves recognizing that the parable of the cave extends across multiple layers. First, you have to discover the lie of society. But once you've done that, you recognize that the 'unity' of the human mind is itself the result of a lie, but one you can't ever reject. When you begin to think about it, you're in falsehood already.

So, there is no absolute truth on which to base any society, and nobody can analyze the myths that have founded societies in the past without making them lies.

In one sense, this is where the 'nobility' comes from. Once you recognize there is no getting out of the cave, the so-called art of attempting to craft such a narrative, i.e., a successful one that actually serves the purpose of unifying a polis, means that a society's elite must become the very thing the escape from which had made a man a philosopher. This seems to be why Plato thinks it noble and that it must be done by philosophers. That is, only the philosopher can do this nobly because (i) he is utterly self-conscious of why he is doing it and (ii) he can ostensibly do it for reasons that serve others, not himself. (Of course, there is additional irony here since Plato would also probably say that history proves no philosopher was ever a king.)

One must try to invent that which cannot be invented, and if it is invented cannot be what one was seeking. (This is still going on with the ruling elite today, the same as it was in Plato's day. Plato could not have anticipated the power of mass-market, broadcast media to accomplish it.)

So, finally, we can sort of express this in a way that Jordan Peterson likes to. There is that psychological 'periphery' where the archetypes of myth live in the human psyche that influence us unconsciously, which the mystics and artists of every society 'contact'. Human cultures are always a program of 'bringing these archetypes out' in some fashion, usually as a story on which a civic religion or religion (proper) is based. But the act of bringing them out for expression is what makes them the lie. They become something other than what they are the moment they are concretized as an expedient for achieving something in the world, and they begin to die, putting a sort of tacit countdown clock on the coherence/cohesion of any myth-society. And human history is kind of a history of people 'chasing this dragon'...the fruit is on the branch, but the second you pick it, it becomes bitter, but you have to eat it.

That's the way I see it. I read philosophy but I don't study it in the sense of reading secondary literature on these things. I don't know what anybody important has said about Plato as far as commentary on these dialogues. So take what I say with a grain of salt, keeping in mind that I usually drift epistemologically and skeptically (I tend to interpret most things from a perspective focused on the philosophical problems associated with our concept of knowledge).

On the topic of Christianity, I'll say something very brief. I think Judaism in the 2nd temple period, at least the Judaism that we're familiar with from the New Testament, was utterly Hellenized. I think significant swaths of the Old Testament even are creative 'borrowings' from things like the Homeric works. Christianity is just a culmination of a process that was already occurring in Judaism that gets its final shape by assimilating the personal savior-God trope that was highly popular at that time in the Mediterranean, combined with some active 'forcing' by Roman political elite to more fully Romanize it. Thus, there is a significant irony when we find Christians shouting 'pagan' for the first several centuries. The dying and rising God idea is utterly pagan. And absolutely Christianity is rife with Platonism - it continued to be influenced by Platonic philosophy well into the late antique period, before the Christians started killing the Platonic philosophers, forcing them to move elsewhere. Neoplatonic philosophy was still influential in Christianity well into the middle ages. Saying that Plato was a proto-Christian is putting the cart before the horse, if you ask me. It's more like: Christianity is one development of Platonic thinking that may or may not have hanged on the existence of a historical apocalyptic prophet.

Interesting. I started responding to this and argued my way into kind of agreeing with you.

It makes sense that there is a flavor of Christianity, because one, the pagan world definitely was able to understand abstract absolutes like an all-powerful god. It seems they just didn't deify it. Platonically you might say that the more absolute something is, the more removed it is from the mundane and thus less functionally useful to humans, so things nearer albeit more flawed made better objects of worship. In a sense this is somewhat analogous to how in early Christianity one would interact with God through his representatives, such as angels and saints.

And second, early Christianity was a rejection of this worldview, and you can't define yourself in opposition to something without accepting some of it's shape. Christianity bore the torch of western civilization for a reason. If you look at the ideas circulating at the time of Christ, like gnosticism, there's definitely this idea that the system of reincarnation is flawed and we should strive for a higher state of perfection beyond it. They, or at least their mystics and prophets, were platonically minded, so Gnosticism and then Christianity seems like an appropriate response to a world that is behaving imperfectly enough.

Now here's the loop that throws me. In The Republic, before Christianity or Gnoisticism or any of those rejections of society, Plato's story is that one soul managed to be reborn without drinking from the waters, which suggests that the system for processing souls was itself imperfect. I find it unlikely that Plato himself wouldn't have caught that. I could be wrong but also can't think of where Plato suggests that humans can experience the plane of forms directly. At least, not with living to tell about it.

So, I suggest that Plato understood that the system he proposed and the religion he lived was necesarily flawed according to his own philosophy, not necessarily a lie but not ever fully conceivable. He grasped the problem and hinted at it, but didn't foree the response to it that eventually became Christianity.