λόγος

The Logos or the attempt of a non-philosopher and non-scientist to make sense of the world.

or

fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking confirmation) v. dubia intellegentiae inquisition (doubt seeking understanding)

or

A Cowboy comes Home to Plato

Ode to the Logos

Under a patriarchal live oak tree

This is where I first sensed divinity.

Who was the great architect of this thing

that such a joy to all does bring?

Who in his mind’s eye could conceive 

the form of what was then to be

here on earth a glorious tree?

Somewhere in the heavens and skies above

a concept and plan were composed

and then to earth below transposed.

and all my senses sing and dance

each and every time I catch a glance.

And once placed here below,

a pure delight for all to know,

leaving men of thought since antiquity

to ponder over a mystery:

How a thought could become reality.

Heraclitus and Socrates

questioned and searched for the key,

to the secret of this mystery.

But Plato will forever stand at the top.

and the Logos is where we all must stop.

                  I am not a scientist, a mathematician, or a philosopher. I respect all these disciplines, have followed closely new developments in all these fields, and, if I had it to do over again, might well have dedicated my life to the study of one or the other rather than to the study of history.  All of these scientific disciplines are like doors to a deeper understanding of reality, much deeper than the ones provided to me during my formative years by my elders. 

                  I questioned from an early age, and if grownups – even those whom I respected — could not provide satisfactory explanations, I hesitated to accept their pronouncements on faith and struggled to hide my skepticism, which, more often than not, they interpreted as disrespect.  This has led to a dilemma that has accompanied me most of my life. While others around me seemed to accept unquestionably what their elders told them about the world and their place in it, I lived with the curse/blessing of a skeptical bent of mind.  I often look with envy at those who from an early age were more dutiful to their elders and naive about the beliefs handed them. They glide through the twists and turns of life through predetermined paths guided by the hard walls of belief provided them. But something inside me left me with no choice but to go my own way without the benefit of such walls. My envy is tempered, however, by the certainty that they have deprived themselves of the possibility of a higher awareness and a deeper appreciation during their brief tenure of existence.

                  The notion of form or structure (and all other synonyms that apply) also caught my attention from an early stage of my development. But at first, it was a psychological and sociological observation rather than a philosophical insight. I became fascinated that individuals seemed to differ radically in their need for order in their everyday lives and also that different groups, nationalities, ethnicities also seemed to adopt distinctive sensibilities concerning order that were communally reinforced. I shall have more to say about this later, but for the time being the whole idea of form, order, structure, which have since the period of the Greek philosophers been subsumed under the concept of the λόγος (logos), are central to the following speculations.

                  My craving for a deeper understanding guided my studies once I graduated from high school. I rejected practical subjects such as business, law, or engineering, which my parents had fervently hoped I would pursue. After a period of indecisiveness, I began to think that the study of history and literature might be a quicker path to enlightenment than science, mathematics, or philosophy. This came about in part because, by serendipity, I drew several exceptional professors in the liberal arts as an undergraduate, and their examples inspired me to follow in their footsteps and to eventually receive my doctorate in history and teach at a major university. As I look back, the shoe could have just as easily been on the other foot.  Nevertheless, I have continued to follow with alacrity all the amazing revelations and reinterpretations that have occurred in my lifetime provided to us by the sciences. 

                  I feel lucky to have been born when I was, for within my almost eighty years, humanity has witnessed a culmination of sorts. So much that humans hungered to understand since time immemorial has now been answered (or nearly answered). But until quite recently, historically speaking, the curiosity of our predecessors could never be satisfied no matter how assiduously they studied, carefully they measured, or deeply they reflected.  Hard factual knowledge only accumulates over years, centuries, millennia. No matter how brilliant and dedicated, their lives played out in earlier stages, leaving them, with few exceptions, condemned to exit this existence with their questions unanswered and their curiosity unallayed.  

                  By no means are we at the end stage of knowledge, there is still much to be learned, but we do now understand tornados, earthquakes, and eclipses, to name just three obvious natural phenomena that until comparatively recently were a cause for wonder, or terror, or both. One of the most important revelations that has occurred in my own lifetime has been the growing awareness of the sheer size of the universe. That there might be as many suns in the universe as there are grains of sand on the earth would have been mind-blowing even to my parent’s generation. That the study of physics at the quantum level leads to ever-expanding complexities, baffling paradoxes, and just plain weirdness was only appreciated by a select few until recently. And finally, that the complex processes of life can now be explained, manipulated, and even replicated through amazing advances in biochemistry and genetics offers perhaps the most astonishing culmination of all. Human life, indeed, all life, no longer holds the position of an unfathomable mystery, explainable only by an omnipotent deity. And then there is the whole new problem of AI. The implications of this have yet to fully sink in.

                  So, I am grateful to live in a time when answers are readily at hand to so much that until quite recently was unknowable. How lucky to have been born at this stage in human history!  But oddly, many of the really fundamental questions I asked as a youth have remained stubbornly elusive even during this ‘Age of Culmination.’ Hard facts we now have but certain unresolved mysteries remain. It all revolves around the problem of the LOGOS, first explored by the Greeks, with emphasis on Plato and his followers. Our present “Age of Culmination” allows us to reinterpret the astonishingly evocative/ provocative speculations of the Greek philosophers as to the true nature of the LOGOS in light of what science has since revealed. To attempt such a reinterpretation is what I wish to do in this essay. 

                  The Greek philosophers, especially those associated with Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and Plato, explored a profound insight from all sides and at great depth, namely that there appears to be different realities, which, to be sure, relate and interact one to the other in complicated ways, but which appear to be fundamentally dissimilar. On the one hand, there is the reality disclosed through our senses, namely what we can touch, see, and smell; on the other hand, there is a reality that has no physical substance and hence no texture, color, or odor.  We, as humans, seem to have within us a priori knowledge of this alternate reality, and we come by this knowledge as if it were a theia moira, a gift from the Gods, which we can choose to leverage to a higher state of awareness during our brief tenure of existence or to ignore and by so doing to miss a great opportunity. 

                  This knowledge, for those who wish to pursue it, has to be coaxed to a fuller appreciation in various ways, such as by the analysis of mathematics, geometry, and language, and lastly, by an appreciation for logic which underlies the other categories and appropriately derives from the Greek word Logos. A fuller appreciation for this underlying knowledge should be the aim and goal of the good life, for as Socrates put it in the Crido, “an unexamined life is not worth living.”

                  The journey of discovery is difficult, and the first step is to reach a state of aporia (Greek: ᾰ̓πορῐ́ᾱ) or a state of puzzlement or intellectual impasse. Over and over again in the Dialogues of Plato, Socrates, whom we assume serves as the representative of Plato, demonstrates his method of dialectical argument called elenchus (ἔλεγχος) by which to examine and challenge the beliefs of his interlocutors, and to demonstrate that what they hold firm as assured knowledge often emerge as bundles of contradictions and tissues of fallacies, and by so doing leads them to the state of aporia, which prepares them for the next step, of communion with the LOGOS, or the world of forms.

                  The fundamental problem, as Plato recognized, is that our senses are poor judges of the exterior reality that they register. They present us with a picture that we assume is full and complete, and upon this confidence we go about our daily lives. But at best the picture that our senses present us is faint, weak, and incomplete and, at worst, an illusion that only bears little resemblance to the true essence of reality.

                  Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” presented in The Republic (Book VII), uses a powerful metaphor to explore the nature of these different realities, contrasting sensory illusion with intellectual truth, and the human perception of them. It depicts prisoners chained since birth in a cave, facing a wall where shadows cast by objects behind them become their only reality. 

My view on these matters borrows a lot from Plato and the Neo-Platonists, but there is a difference in emphasis. Both Plato and his successors are keen to put man (and his soul) at the center of the discussion whereas my understanding puts consciousness in general, and not just human consciousness, at the center.

For the purposes of this essay, I shall refer to the first reality as the “Logos exterior” and the second reality as the “Logos interior.” And then to complicate matters there is time, change, impermanence, which, in deference to Plato and his epigones, I shall borrow another term from Greek philosophy, the “logos spermatiko,” or the creative drive, or simply “formation.” It calls to mind Heraclitus’ famous formulation, “panta re,” or “everything flows.” Without change, there could be no creativity.

                  All these elements relate and interact with one another dynamically, but what stands at the center of it all in my view is consciousness or the ability of the LOGOS to be aware of itself and to direct itself away from disorder and back to order. That the LOGOS can do this is perhaps the most extraordinary aspect to reality.

This is a work in progress and will be augmented as it grows…