Daybreak of the Idols: A Psychological-Semiotic Examination of Hyperreality and Idolatry

Here's my Torrey paper for the semester. I know it's a bit long, but it's worth the read (or at least I think so, haha). Also, I apologize in advance for the obtuse footnoting, but it was the only way I could figure out how to do it.

In this, our modern age, we pride ourselves on being an enlightened people. Clearheaded and freethinking, acceptant of new ideas, tolerant of our fellow man, and more in touch with the reality of the universe than we have ever been before—and for this, we congratulate ourselves. After all, are we not—we who, as of yet, have carried on our backs the cause of humanism far beyond its previously fervent limits—left deserving of a pat on the back? Truly, were this the case; were we truly enlightened, had we truly done a great service to the human race, I would be the first to offer congratulations. As it stands, however, we may have fallen into the very same trap that has ensnared our kind from the beginning of time. What—is this possible? Surely we have made some kind of progress over the many millennia of our existence; surely we have taken the Oracle’s wise advice, and learned to better know ourselves, in order that we could discover the means by which we might overcome ourselves. But were I to tell you that we have not; that we have fallen prey again and again to the oldest of stumbling blocks—the stumbling block of idolatry—would you believe me? “Surely not!” you would say. “Surely we are better off than those old sots, those ancient fools that deliriously bowed the knee to blocks of wood and stone!” How I wish that this were true, that we had surpassed such foolish behavior; however, in our present condition, we differ very little from those ancient fools. It is true—we no longer bow to blocks of wood or stone, but still we bow to idols of various shape and size. The more pertinent question to ask is not, “Do we worship idols even today, even with all the progress we have made?” but rather, “With all the “progress” we have made, why is it that we still worship idols?” I believe that an answer to this question can be reached in an examination of both the psychological and semiotic theory behind the phenomenon of idolatry. More specifically, in examining the concept of hyperreality as well as the psychological consequences of mankind’s fall from grace as is told in the Biblical narrative of Genesis, it will become more clear that mankind’s tendency to commit idolatry could be more accurately be described as the desire to create hyperreality—this being driven by what I have called man’s drive for safety. (1)

What is Hyperreality?

In order to explicate the concept of hyperreality as it relates to idolatrous behavior, a cursory discussion of basic semiotic theory will first be required. In simplest terms, semiotics is the study of signs and their relation to the objects which are signified by them. More broadly, the field of semiotics examines how meaning is derived from objects in the world, and how those meanings are formed in a manner that is communicable between agents. Here, even from the very outset of the semiotic project, a dichotomy is discovered, a dichotomy highlighting the very purpose of the sign—that of communication. There is the object being signified—which cannot in itself be communicated, as it is not in the mind, but in the world—and there is the sign (or “signifier”), which points toward and is used as a communicable (mental) placeholder for the signified object. The sign, then, fulfills at least three communicative qualifications: it is communally determined, it is conceptual (or formed by the mind), and it is referential to some object. In other words, the sign must have a communally agreed-upon conceptual and referential relationship to the object that is signified in order to act in a communicative manner. This is because information about an object can only be exchanged if the object to which the information refers is one that is commonly known; this communally determined conceptual/referential relationship between the sign and the signified is what is commonly referred to as meaning.

It is on the basis of meaning that every component of language and every item of knowledge are constructed. Language and knowledge thus have a symbiotic relationship, one based upon the communally determined conceptual relation between the sign and the signified. A language is, of course, a collection of words or symbols (which are themselves collections of vocalized sounds and written letters or pictures), but more specifically, it is a collection that has been communally determined to refer to various conceptual relations of signs to their referents for the purposes of communication—a collection that has meaning. Were a language not to have this communally determined conceptual/referential relationship, it would cease to be meaningful, and would therefore effectively cease to be language.

Likewise, knowledge consists of those communal conceptual relations between signs and their referents to which language refers. This is simply to say that an individual’s knowledge—that is, the set of those propositions that one knows—is given meaning by the conceptual relations between signifiers and their signified objects that have been established by their community for the purposes of communication. Was this not the case, knowledge itself would cease to be knowledge because it would cease to have any sort of meaning or conceptual relation to a referent—one could not know a proposition that had no meaning. It follows, then, that because both language and knowledge are conceptually driven into a state of meaning by the consensus of the community that uses them, that which is referred to and communicated by language and knowledge—that being reality—is in some manner also conceptually driven into meaning by the consensus of that same community. Regardless of whether or not there is an actual or correct metaphysical reality independent of our conceptions of it, the means by which we would have access to that reality, language and knowledge, depend fundamentally and irrevocably upon the meanings—that is, those conceptual relations between signs and their referents—that our community has assigned to it.

From this conclusion, we now have the necessary ingredients for what the French postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard labels in his text Simulacra and Simulation as simulation. He claims that we have entered an era where signs no longer point to the states of reality which they originally signified, and that this has caused a lapse into what he calls the state of hyperreality. Within hyperreality, he claims, what we refer to as “real” and “imaginary” no longer exist because any meaningful difference between the two has ceased to exist. (2) But really? The real has ceased to exist? Admittedly, this concept appears somewhat obscure and far-fetched, and this is not helped by Baudrillard’s overly florid and eccentric prose, but I believe that, once examined properly, Baudrillard’s ideas and critiques are quite enlightening, particularly in regards to the phenomenon of idolatry. I shall therefore attempt to clarify the problem at hand with an analysis of simulation and the process of the creation of the hyperreal.

The first stage of the process of simulation is that of the disconnection between the sign and what it signifies. This takes place when a sign no longer refers to that which it used to refer. An example might be useful to clarify. Suppose I have a cat, and after studying my cat very thoroughly, I have learned how to mimic his meow so well, that one can no longer tell the difference between us simply by listening to our meows. Now, the sign of the meow, which used to point to or signify the cat, can no longer be said to be connected to the cat except in an arbitrary fashion, because the meow could just as easily point to me instead. This is what is meant by the disconnection of the sign and the signified. In theory, it is easy enough to say that this is the case, but could something like this actually happen? Make no mistake: it can happen, and—in my opinion—it already has.

Take, for example, the pornography industry. They and those on whom they have their hold have now vividly demonstrated to us that sex no longer need refer to love. What was once a sign of a deep mystical union between two beings can now just as easily point to just another form of masturbation—one that instead uses that other being as a sex toy. Similarly, with the dawn and rise of the age of the Internet and the cell phone, one no longer feels the weight of being in proximity to another person. A person could now easily live in the comfort of his home with the amenities of a king without ever having to go to the grocery store. He is enabled to sit on his couch playing any number of Internet role-playing games and never actually have to verbally speak to another person. Thus, now communication itself, even while attaining heights never before reached, has lost its referent—that of human relationship. No longer do the lines of communication require persons to enter into relationship with each other. Now, they merely serve as the means for the transfer of information, as a highway for ones and zeroes; when communication does still refer to personal relationship, it does so arbitrarily. These are just two examples of how signs become—and already have become—disconnected from their referents.

The next step on the road to complete simulation occurs when referents disappear altogether, and the above examples continue to serve as excellent models for this process. It does not seem ridiculous in the least to assert that it is likely, for most people in Western society, that personal relationships—that is, the actual spiritual connection between persons—are something absolutely unheard of. For most of our society, the referent of both sexual intercourse and of verbal communication, personal relationship, has disappeared. I believe this to be symptomatic of a larger neglect on our part, that being the neglect of the metaphysical and spiritual realms in general. To be sure, the metaphysical and spiritual may still “exist,” but as has been said, if we have ceased to be in relationship to them, either in our language or in our knowledge, how “real” could they actually be to us? They have vanished; to us, they have ceased to meaningfully exist.

At this point, we have effectively entered the state of simulation. Now, there is no metaphysical “behind” or “underneath” to support the infrastructure of signs that make up our picture of reality; these signs have no grounding to give them meaning. This infrastructure no longer points to a referent, it only points back toward itself. For, if there are no referents at which to point, what remains but an infinite regression of signs? Signs no longer refer to a signified object, they can only refer to more signs—and infinitely so. Because signs in and of themselves have no meaning, they have the property of being infinitely translatable. They can be created in any shape or form, and so, without any signified object to give them meaning, without a referent to delineate difference in value between them, they are rendered completely homogeneous.

The entire purpose of meaning—that conceptual relation of sign and signified—is to delineate differences of value between various ideas or objects. However, because of the aforementioned infinite translatability of signs, and the lack of a referent from which to derive meaning, the concept of difference is put to death and value is obliterated. Meaning is completely liquefied and homogenized into a fluid nothingness. There is now no “real” or “imaginary” because there is effectively no difference in meaning between the two—now there is only the hyperreal. We have thus come to definitions of the states of simulation and hyperreality, those being: simulation is the condition of any language code in which meaning has suffered a complete homogenization; hyperreality is, more specifically, the condition in which the signs “reality” and “imaginary” cease to have meaningful metaphysical referents (where the term “meaningful” is indicative of an actual delineation of conceptual value as is made possible by difference), and so are made homogeneous. In both cases, difference is not actual—it is merely simulated—and those signs that continue to feign difference are called simulacra.

Behind the Phenomenon of Idolatry

Now that we better understand the natures of simulation and of hyperreality, we can explore hyperreality in regards to the origins of idolatry. But how might a technical concept of postmodern semiotics relate in any way to the origin of a pseudo-religious phenomenon? I believe that the answer to this question lies buried deep within the human mind, and can be dug out by means of a psychological examination of the origins of man himself. Specifically, in turning one’s attention to the Biblical narrative of Genesis, one finds several particularly interesting passages linking man’s fall from Grace with what I believe to be behavior indicative of the tendency to create hyperreality.

At first glance, the narrative of the Fall is not at all complex. God creates man with the purpose of subduing the rest of the Creation, and gives him only one negatively prescriptive command: to not eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. If man does choose to eat of this tree (for man does have a choice according to the narrative), God says that he will most surely die. Along comes a serpent, who—being among the craftiest of the animals—tricks the woman Eve into eating the fruit of the forbidden tree. Eve, in turn, persuades her husband Adam to eat of the tree as well, thereby disobeying God and plunging man into the grips of sin.

Much has been said in regard to this event and its impact on redemptive history, but what of the psychological implications of this event? For surely, if one can better understand the psychological effects of an event—if one can better understand how it is that an event causes a person to think (especially an event so crucially informative in the history of humanity)—one would have tremendous insight into the behavior of that person, and would thus be able to track possible behavioral patterns arising from the psychological impact of that event. This is a formulation of a standard postulate of the practice of psychoanalysis, and this insight seems to hold true, regardless of the various controversial theories of behavior that have arisen from this practice (for these theories could simply have had incomplete data, or merely been drawn incorrectly with the data they had). With this in mind, we dive into the Genesis narrative, hoping to catch a glimpse into the patterns of thought behind man’s fall from Grace.

Beginning in the sixth verse of the third chapter of Genesis, we find a particularly noteworthy passage in regards to human psychology. It reads,

So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man and said to him, "Where are you?" And he said, "I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself." (3)

What is particularly striking about this passage is that the immediate effect of Adam and Eve’s transgression is their becoming aware of their own nakedness—their reaction to which is the desire to cover themselves, and subsequently, to hide from God in the garden. Many have suggested that this reaction is tantamount to the first experience of guilt. While this may be the case, the reason that Adam gives for his hiding is not guilt at all, but fear; and not simply fear itself, or even the fear of God, but rather a fear caused by his nakedness.

But why would nakedness be something that causes fear? After all, it seems a safe assumption to say that God created man naked, and therefore nakedness could not be something that is in itself evil, or even something to be looked down upon. Earlier in the narrative, it even says, “And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.” (4) It is my belief that, here, man first experienced the reality of his vulnerability, due to his self-imposed spiritual separation from God and His love, as well of the rest of reality. This, in phenomenological terms, was the creation of the Other—that entity (if I may use that term) that exists juxtaposed against the Self as the entirety of all reality that the Self is not. (5) Before the introduction of the Other, man had no reason to fear his state of nakedness because the thought that anything could have taken advantage of his vulnerable state would have been absolutely and completely foreign to him. Post-Fall, however, in becoming aware of his nakedness (coupled with his spiritual alienation from God and the rest of reality), man also became aware that there was something outside himself capable of affecting his own wellbeing. (6) Thus, man first became subjected to the state of fear of the Other. This state of fear results in what I have come to call man’s drive for safety, or, that primal instinct within man that drives him to hide and protect himself from the Other in its many manifestations. This drive is universal in its effects; in other words, there is no man in which the drive for safety has not caused him to seek refuge from the Other.

How might this take place? How might a shelter from the Other be built? The first option that one has is to make himself into a shelter—escaping into a fortress completely unto himself. This path was exercised by the Buddha, as well as the Stoic Sage; in the attempt to free themselves from evil, suffering and strife, they shored up the walls of the Self high enough to block out all effect of the Other completely. The Sage did this by placing an strong emphasis on what the Stoics called apatheia (root of the Eng. “apathy”), or a certain ascetic unaffectedness with which they approached daily life, which was accomplished by the cultivation of inner virtue and the adherence to reason. For the Buddha, escape from the Other was accomplished by the active retreat into and emptying of the Self through prayer and meditation. More contemporary examples of this extreme type of escapism in our culture (7) usually appear far less virtuous than these two ancient philosophies—much more like Narcissus than Chrysippus; not only utterly unaffected by the Other, but also completely unconscious of their spiritual separation from it. They have escaped so entirely that they are unaware that they have escaped, or that there was anything from which to escape.

Most measures taken for protection from the Other are not so extreme; most shelters built for the security of the Self are not as totalizing in their effects. There are, however, key similarities that, while witnessed in the most extreme cases of escapism, remain the same throughout all instances of behavior influenced by the drive for safety. The source of these similarities is an emphasis on familiarity—there is a particular degree of sameness between a person and the object in which that person derives his safety. The person has given this object the capability of causing him to feel not quite so “Other”, thus allowing the person to relax his guard over himself in the presence of the object. He is mistaken, of course; the familiar object technically remains just as much a part of the Other as it has ever been, just as alienated from the consciousness as has it has ever been, and just as unknown as it has ever been. How then can a person find safety and security in such an object? It is through the process of what I have chosen to call psychological assimilation that the Self abstracts and distills the phenomenon of the object into a security-potable phenomenon with which the Self is able to become familiar. In this sense, the person has imbued trustworthiness in the object by psychologically replacing the object with a more friendly and familiar version of itself, and fundamentally ignoring the Other-like nature of how the object actually appears. Essentially, the purpose of this process boils down to a simple matter of ensuring the ability to control reality—to tame the Other. Once this is the case, once the Other is controllable, the Self can rest easy knowing that its safety is also secure. As some have thought, this subjection of the real is not so much a matter of intellectual or psychological pride, or the result of a will to power; this assimilation, familiarization, and taming of the Other is rather the product of the human drive for safety.

Already, we can see the marks of hyperreality creeping in at the door to the human psyche. The Self has distilled phenomenological safety (8) for itself at the expense of the “pure” actuality of the phenomenon. It is important at this point to acknowledge that this act of psychological assimilation does not happen merely once, or even several times—rather, it takes place on a constant basis, at every junction in which the Self comes into contact with the Other. If the human psyche cannot help but view the phenomenon of the Real in terms of its own safety as a consequence of man’s fall from Grace, as I have hypothesized, then it must be the case that the entire phenomenon of reality itself is cast in the mold of the drive for safety of the individual into a coherent, holistic picture representing the specific felt needs for safety of that individual. In short, the Self begins the process of completely systematizing the Other through the lens of the drive for safety.

It is during the process of systematizing that the concept of knowledge is introduced. For, once reality (9) becomes systematic, stable, and static, it becomes able to be known—and once reality becomes able to be known, it becomes able to be controlled. The manipulation of reality through the means of knowledge ensures that the continued and immutable access of reality is made possible, which, in turn, ensures a secure environment in which the individual is able to feel comfortable. However, as was the case with actions of psychological assimilation on the individual level, the Self fools himself when he believes that his systemization of the phenomena that comprise reality has in any way made him safer, that his “knowledge” grants him security, or that the Other is any less unknown than it has always been. His processed and systematized picture of the real—his worldview—lacks any relationship to a referent because it exists entirely within his own consciousness; it has no meaning, and is therefore a hyperreality. Thus, that set of propositions which he calls his “knowledge” bears no conceptual difference of value from any other set of propositions—even from a set of propositions which he would claim to be utterly false. In truth, what he believes he “knows” is not knowledge at all, nor is it even anti-knowledge. (10) As is true for the entirety of the phenomena of his hyperreality, it is rather the simulacra of knowledge, because while it has given itself the semblance of being knowledge, any actual delineation of conceptual value it might have possessed has been liquefied—de-differenced by the homogenization of meaning. And, lest we forget, this has all been concocted out of the obedience to man’s one insatiable desire—the drive for safety.

We now have come to our first understanding of the nature of idolatry, that being: in obedience to the drive for safety, man creates for himself a hyperreality for the purpose of enabling the access of, familiarization with, and control over “reality.” What is truly remarkable about the phenomena of idolatry is that, by its very nature, it possesses an ability to be infinitely modally modified—one can make an idol out of absolutely anything, whether it be money, sex, cannibalism or conservative Christian family values. All of these can be used as a lens by which to subject one’s reality to the systemization caused by the drive for safety, as idolatry can be fitted to suit the felt needs for safety and security of any individual or community. (11) But as if this were not enough; as if the Other was not subjected adequately to the needs of men, idolatry in its truest form takes the process one step further. Man, in creating for himself graven images, uses these images not only to create security for himself, but also uses them to harness meaning for himself. Despite the critiques and arguments of some, man appears completely unable to live without an ideal, something external to himself that he uses to project meaning and value back onto himself, as if he himself could not give an adequate metaphysical justification for his own existence. Even the most infamous of all anti-idealists, Friedrich Nietzsche—he himself was unable to escape the trap of vicarious value! (12) Since his creation, man has required an object, whether it be conceptual or actual, that will grant him the justification for his existence and activity.

Scripture gives us an example of this idolatrous behavior as well in the book of Ecclesiastes. Here, the author describes numerous occasions in which he attempted to find a meaning for life—something that would make life worthwhile—but found that all things under the sun are vanity, nothing more than vapor. Whether one’s idol is one of the pleasures of self-indulgence, (13) hard work, (14) or even wisdom itself, (15) the author claims that (granting that we are honest with ourselves) none of them can truly grant man the justification to live, no matter how great our desire for them may be. The best that one can hope for with these vanities is to use them to psychologically escape our lack of metaphysical justification—to become drunk on wine, women, work or wisdom so as to not think about our deeper problem. Again, if one is truly honest with oneself, as is the author of Ecclesiastes, one cannot even hope for this. One can now easily see how this idolatrous phenomenon is also derived from the drive for safety. In protecting oneself from the Other, the Self must create an idol in which it is either able to escape, or which it can use to secure the reason for its own existence, as well as to ensure its own safety. In all cases, hyperreality is created because the worldview or the idol that has been created is only in relation to the infinite regression on signs—rather than to an actual referent—and it thus becomes subject to the state of simulation.

One need not think hard to see how this is the case. Take, for instance, the religious rites and rituals of a primitive culture of pagan men, and the gods which they worship. Why do they worship them? What do these gods do for their followers that makes them worthy of reverence? Precisely this: their pantheon of gods psychologically fulfills their felt needs for security. They believe that their gods protect them, and help them to prosper when they are obedient to them, but—even more importantly—that they have specially chosen them as the people with which they commune. This provides this community, as well as the individuals living within it, with an account of the metaphysical justification for their own existence. Not only did a community’s patron god(s) provide protection for this people’s way of life, their god(s) gave them a reason to exist—they gave them meaning. Of course, these people were mistaken in their beliefs, because the statues that they worshipped and the rituals that they observed had no actual referent, merely a psychological one. While differing in name, these gods differed in no way from any other deities worshipped out of the observance of the drive for safety, and were therefore only the simulacra of gods. There would have truly been no difference between the real and the imaginary for these people, and so any apparent difference between the two—between their “real” gods and the “imaginary” gods of another culture—would have been simulated.

The same holds true in the idolatry of the present. One man holds up monetary success as his security and existential justification; for another, his sexual exploits grant him value; another, his code of ethics; another, his theology—but all are equally meaningless. All are signs without referents, and are therefore lost in the cycle of the liquification of meaning. All are simply used by men to satisfy their felt needs for safety from the Other, and are therefore all equally idolatrous. Thus, we have come to an understanding of the nature of idolatry: it is the process by which hyperreality is created for the purposes of enabling the access of, familiarization with, and control over the “real”, as well as the metaphysical justification of the particular existence of a given person or people group.

Concluding Remarks

Hopefully, it has been made clearer the ways in which we, in the present, are still able to participate in the practice of idolatry, and the reasons for which we do so. Truly, we hardly differ at all from the pagans of years long past, for we continue to raise up altars on which we place objects of veneration and offer up the real as our libation. Still, we bow the knee to idols of various shapes and sizes—idols of wealth, idols of power, idols of various varieties of gratification, and any other means by which we can secure our security and existential justification. There is an odd and ironic beauty in the amorphous capabilities of idolatry—for an idol can be fashioned in literally any form. It is so easy to become seduced by an idol simply because it is able to appear in any shape for which we may have need, appealing to where we are weakest in spirit. How, then, can we avoid offering up our lives in service to an idol, sacrificing reality on its altar in exchange for safety? Put simply, we must find a way to break free from the cycle of the liquification of meaning; we must find a route that does not end in the death of difference, a path by which we may reach the Referent! How might this be done? How might we transcend our tendency to create hyperreality? We must dash our idols upon the rocks and be put into direct spiritual relationship with the referent of reality, God Himself. This is possible only through a spiritual relationship with His Son and second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ. Only in this way can we escape the trap of idolatry—only in this way can we escape being forever doomed to wander about in the hyperrealities created by our own consciousnesses.

Endnotes:

(1) Here, I wish to make clear that I am in no way claiming my analysis to be the final word on this phenomenon. Rather, I have come to this conclusion based on my observation of human nature, as well as the analysis of both sacred (Christian) and secular texts, and I am more than willing to be corrected in my theories in those places where they require correction. In other words, I am in no way attempting to make my conclusions into dogma—they simply seem to be the case to me.

(2) Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006.

(3) Genesis 3:6-10 (All Biblical references are to English Standard Version (ESV) unless otherwise noted).

(4) Ibid., 2:25.

(5) It would thus follow that the Other had no existence before the fall of man because man had not yet spiritually separated himself from reality. This is a somewhat speculative conclusion, I’ll admit, but one that I believe can be supported here textually, as well as in other passages of Scripture by appealing to the state of the Church through Christ (see Jn. 17 and others).

(6) It should also be said that, in committing an act of disobedience toward God, man gave himself reason to fear the Other. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love” 1 John 4:18 (emphasis mine).

(7) i.e. virtually anyone on an MTV reality television series.

(8) I say “phenomenological safety” both for the reason that the safety is found in the altered phenomena, and because the safety itself is phenomenological, that is, it at least appears to be safe.

(9) I should make clear that the term “reality” is used synonymously here with “the Other.”

(10) That which would negate, nullify, or be the antithesis to knowledge.

(11) The formation of a community is not the subject matter per se of this paper, and so I will not go into great depth as to my thoughts on the issue. However, it should at least be said that community formation has nearly has much to do with the act of psychological assimilation as idolatry does; that is to say, communities of men are formed with the goals of similarity, solidarity, and assimilation amongst their members. Ideals and imperatives are set in place based on the common understanding of how reality is to be tamed and made potable to security (i.e. various tribal/family gods and religious practices, community values of what behaviors are socially/morally appropriate, etc.). And who, above all, is excluded? The outsider, the foreigner, the aberrant, the lawbreaker—the unknown.

(12) While this is highly contested, it is my belief that, though Nietzsche attempted to account for the intrinsic value of life in the present without recourse to “something beyond”, he could not escape idealism. I would argue that even he required the concept of the eternal recurrence of all things—that idyllic imperative that radically affirms the value of the present over all other things, as if it were to repeat eternally—to justify his claim that the present earthly life was to be valued, though he claimed that the value of life was intrinsic to life itself.

(13) Ecclesiastes 2:1-11.

(14) Ibid., 2:18-26.

(15) Ibid., 1:12-18, 2:12-17.

"I Said, You Are Gods!" - A Trans-Nietzschean Perspective on Christian Soteriology (Part IV).

Part IV:
The Death of Morality

But how is this even possible? As I have previously mentioned, and as C. S. Lewis aptly points out in The Abolition of Man, fallen man requires a Law— a moral construct— in order to keep from destroying one another and himself. This is why Nietzsche failed, so how is it that we succeed where he did not? We succeed in this endeavor simply because we have the Superman, Jesus Christ, the man who was “beyond man.” Paul tells us, in his letter to the Romans, of the restoration of man through the great actions of Christ, and likewise, of defeat of sin and the law:

"For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous. Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord."

In fulfilling the Law here on Earth and defeating death, Christ does what we cannot, and lifts up the whole of humanity in doing so. He makes us righteous, bringing us above the Law that could only condemn, giving us new life eternal here and now. Of our absolute freedom in Christ, Paul writes in Galatians:

"But what does the Scripture say? ‘Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman.’ So, brothers, we are not children of the slave but of the free woman. For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery."

Christ sets us free, and we are free indeed! To do anything less than live our new lives in Christ as truly free men would be to turn back to our slave masters, as the Israelites did in the desert when they begged to return to Egypt, rather than face the hardships their new-found freedom brought them.

But how is this new life brought about? How do the life, death and resurrection of the God-man almost two thousand years ago affect our lives in such a way as to bring us freedom, specifically, freedom from morality? Christ himself tells his disciples before he ascends back into heaven: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” Once he has gone back to God the Father Jesus will send us the Holy Spirit who will come upon us in power to guide us in the ways we should go. Christ acted analogously to the Superman, doing what man could not do by himself; restoring man to glory, and, more importantly, restoring man to God. Once that restoration took place, Christ could then send God’s Holy Spirit to dwell within us. In the Spirit, we are set free from the Law in its many forms, as Paul tells us in Galatians chapter five: “But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.” This is true because since we are being guided and empowered by the Spirit, we no longer require moral constructs to curb and control our behavior. We no longer need the Law to act as our schoolmaster, as Paul says.

But what does the Spirit do within us to make us able to transcend our need for morality? Quite simply, He replaces our “will to power”— that product of the Fall that causes us to selfishly exert our own will for our personal benefits and happiness— with the even more powerful “will to love.” This “will to love” was first exerted by Christ himself, when, all for our sake, he made himself nothing, as Paul tells us in Philippians. Christ Jesus, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God as a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross,” and, in the letter to the Romans, Paul tells us that, rather than let us suffer death, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Arguably, in making himself nothing, Christ relinquished his “will to power” (his right to exert his omnipotence in any way he desired). But what an enormous display of power this is! To forfeit one’s will to act as he wished (his “will to power”) out of love, only to gain back the power over death itself, as well as the restoration of man to God, through that same “will to love.” Christ’s “will to love” was indeed much more powerful than his “will to power!” Our selfless “will to love” is similarly even more powerful than our selfish “will to power.” In our “will to love”, we relinquish our “will to power”— that desire to enact change to benefit ourselves— in order to benefit another, only to gain back what we desired: the power to benefit ourselves, the power to flourish, the power to be happy— as well as the ability to live harmoniously in community with other men.

This is the reason that the Law can be summed up in Christ’s simple command: “‘And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength,’” and “‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” Paul says something very similar to the church at Galatia: “For you were called to freedom. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” But what really makes love so much better than the Law? Why does acting in Christian love through the Holy Spirit transcend the moral construct and truly make us free? Within a moral construct, the goal, or the end, of the man that wishes to be “good” is to act in such a way that is considered to be good within that moral construct. This is generally in order to avoid its punishments. To do this he must conform to the construct’s standard of goodness; he must be moral.

Presupposing a man unable to exhibit Christ-like love (as we would have to do pre-Christ), the “good” man is being moral for the sake of being considered morally good within the construct. If the man wants to be good, and therefore remain unharmed, he must conform to the good action X as is defined by the construct. Nietzsche talks about this when writing about the taming of man by society and its moral constructs:

"Those fearful bulwarks with which the political organization protected itself against the old instincts of freedom—punishments being among these bulwarks—brought about that all those instincts of wild, free, prowling man turned backward against man himself. Hostility, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking, in change, in destruction—all this turned against the possessors of such instincts: that is the origin of the bad conscience."

It then follows that if he wants to be good, the “good” man is effectively coerced into committing X. Even if this man “freely” chooses to commit this action X, his freedom to choose his course of action has been removed for the sake of his desired end— being good so as to avoid punishment. These effects of the construct cause man to turn his “will to power” on himself, and thus Nietzsche believes man experiences guilt or “bad conscience.” Therefore, the pre-Christ man cannot be freely good— he must be coerced into being so.

The moral construct then acts as an electric fence that curbs man’s “will to power.” If he wishes to not be shocked, he must necessarily stay within the fence— but this is really all morality can do. Nietzsche says as much in his Genealogy: “That which can in general be attained through punishment, in men and in animals, is an increase of fear, a heightening of prudence, mastery of the desires: thus punishment tames men, but it does not make them ‘better’—one might with more justice assert the opposite.” In this way, morality is insufficient because it cannot reform the “will to power” and therefore it cannot allow us to be freely good. Why then does acting in Christ-like love transcend the moral construct? Because when we come to know Christ and receive the Holy Spirit as a result, our “will to power” is gradually remade into a “will to love” that continually reforms us into the image of Christ. Thus, the law is summed up and surpassed in loving God above all and our neighbors as ourselves. About this, St. Irenaeus of Lyons says,

"And that, not by the prolixity of the Law, but according to the brevity of faith and love, men were going to be saved, Isaiah, in this fashion says, ‘He will complete and cut short His Word in righteousness; for God will make a concise Word in all the world.’ And therefore the Apostle Paul says, ‘Love is the fulfillment of the Law,’ for he who loves God has fulfilled the Law."

The electric fences of morality are gradually removed because we begin to understand where it is beneficial for us to go, and we desire those places rather than the harmful ones. In Nietzsche’s terms, we are no longer guilty, because the “will to power” that was necessarily turned inward against itself within the moral construct, thereby inflicting the “bad conscience,” has been replaced by the “will to love,” against which “there is no law.” Therefore, in the love of Christ lies the death of morality.

"I Said, You Are Gods!" - A Trans-Nietzschean Perspective on Christian Soteriology (Part II).

Part II:
Enter Nietzsche

Skipping ahead to late nineteenth century Europe, we have the entrance of Friedrich Nietzsche, a German poet, psychologist, and philosopher who was very interested in the fundamental nature of humanity and how it related to morality. Contrary to his contemporary Arthur Schopenhauer, who believed that, most fundamentally, all creatures exerted a will for self-preservation, Nietzsche believed that, even more fundamentally, all creatures exert the “will to power.” This was the need of the self to wield and exert power over the self and others according to the self’s interests— a desire for ultimate freedom— and the will for self-preservation was only a product of that. He says as much in his book entitled Beyond Good and Evil: “Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation….” This view is very similar to a Biblical perspective on the fallen nature of man— with the man pursuing his own interests, he will exert power to master both himself and others when it will gain him the freedom to do what he desires, benefiting himself at the expense of others’ subjugation and/or detriment. Nietzsche says earlier in the same section,

"Refraining mutually from injury, violence, and exploitation and placing one’s will on a par with that of someone else—this may become, in a certain sense, good manners among individuals if the appropriate conditions are present…. But as soon as this principle is extended, and possibly even accepted as the fundamental principle of society, it immediately proves to be what it really is—a will to the denial of life, a principle of disintegration and decay."

As he says here, instead of constraining individual “wills to power” for the benefit of the community, as Scripture would have us do, Nietzsche believed that it would be better for humanity to allow those who had strong “wills to power” to dominate and subjugate those who were weaker, because to do otherwise would somehow decay the hierarchy of social structure.

In complete opposition to traditional moral genealogists, who held that the value of “good” was originally developed as a measure of “unegoistic” actions, it was Nietzsche’s view that the value of “good” developed out of those who would be considered the aristocracy, the good people, of a particular culture, the “good” being their own happy condition. They “felt and established themselves and their actions as good, that is, of the first rank.” He believed that this value judgment was made by these aristocrats when they recognized the advantage of their position over the “plebeian” classes, those considered commoners. Nietzsche deduced this from his studies in the etymology of “good,” in which he discovered that in many different languages, the word “good” had its conceptual roots in the same thought. “The basic concept from which ‘good’ in the sense of ‘with aristocratic soul,’ ‘noble,’ ‘with a soul of high order,’ ‘with a privileged soul’ necessarily developed.” Likewise, his studies into the etymology of the word “bad” in various languages showed a very similar relationship to that word and the more common “plebeian” classes, and the terms used to describe them; a tribute to the aristocratic ancestry of social moral values.

Thus, for Nietzsche, the possession of both physical and, more importantly, social power played a fundamental role in the formation of social values. He says of the aristocracy, “They designate themselves simply by their superiority in power (as ‘the powerful,’ ‘the master,’ ‘the commanders’) or by the most clearly visible signs of this superiority…” He believed, literally, that “might makes right,” and also in the one-to-one correspondence of the power of the social nobility to truth. This was especially true, as Nietzsche points out, in the society of ancient Greece, where

"They call themselves, for instance, ‘the truthful’; this is so above all of the Greek nobility…. The root of the word coined for this, esthlos, signifies one who is, who possesses reality, who is actual, who is true; then, with a subjective turn, the true as the truthful: in this phase of conceptual transformation it becomes a slogan and catchword of the nobility and passes over entirely into the sense of ‘noble,’ as distinct from the lying common man…."

The ability to assert one’s (or a group’s) “will to power” was therefore, for Nietzsche, the most essential factor in the formation of moral value constructs, the construct being based most essentially on those values that the aristocratic elements of the particular society valued most highly. Nietzsche coined this moral construct under the title of “master morality.”

Nietzsche goes on to argue that “morality” as it appears today— the “good” being called in general “unegoistic,” and being measured in selflessness— was a reactionary movement against the aristocracy by the common classes, who, wanting to believe themselves happy as well, effectively had to deceive themselves into believing their own wretched condition “happy.” He calls this type of moral construct “slave morality.” This took place most effectively through the priestly institution, who claimed that the weak and lowly were really those who were good, and, to combat the visibly obvious “good”-related happiness of the aristocracy, they convinced the common classes that their happiness lay hidden beyond death, in another more happy afterlife.

This denial of the good of the present life Nietzsche calls the “ascetic ideal,” and, because of their strict religion-based moral construct, he believed that the Jews were the most effective at inspiring it. He says,

"It was the Jews who, with awe-inspiring consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value-equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God)… saying ‘the wretched alone are the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God, blessedness is for them alone—and you, the powerful and noble, are on the contrary the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the godless to all eternity; and you shall be in all eternity the unblessed, accursed, and damned!’"

This grand subversive overthrow of master morality by the Jews and the triumph of the ascetic ideal, Nietzsche believed, was completed by Jesus Christ, and consequently by what followed him: the religion of Christianity. A section later, he states,

"Did Israel not attain the ultimate goal of its sublime vengefulness precisely through the bypath of this ‘Redeemer,’ this ostensible opponent and disintegrator of Israel? Was it not part of the secret black art of truly grand politics of revenge, of a farseeing, subterranean, slowly advancing, and premeditated revenge, that Israel must itself deny the real instrument of its revenge before all the world as a mortal enemy and nail it to the cross, so that ‘all the world,’ namely all the opponents of Israel, could unhesitatingly swallow just this bait?"

Nietzsche condemned this seemingly Christian kind of thinking as ultimately nihilistic and anti-human, because it seemed to him to rob man of the happiness able to be experienced in this life, as well as stifling the excellence of man by denying him the ability to exert his “will to power.” This thereby turned him into a kind of herd animal, a sheep to be led around, and Nietzsche was therefore highly antagonistic toward it.

Because of its embrace of the ascetic ideal and its denial of the “will to power,” Christianity causes those men who are naturally more strong to be suppressed into the herd, and as a by-product, they are kept from exerting their own “will to power” by what Nietzsche calls the “bad conscience,” or guilt—the bad feelings received by not conforming to the system’s conception of “good.” This guilt, as well as the fear of punishment by the system and, more importantly, by God, were the means by which Nietzsche thought Christianity held the world in a vice-grip. Therefore, Nietzsche believed that Christianity was the absolute bane of the existence of mankind, that it ruled mainly by means of fear and deception— much like the moral constructs used in ancient Greece and Socrates’ city in words— and therefore should be rejected at whatever cost was necessary. It is in rejecting this slave morality that has conquered the earth through its cleverness that Nietzsche believes that mankind will be able to progress to a higher state of existence. Man’s complete rejection of the ascetic ideal and its supposed nihilistic tendencies allows him to live fully in the here and now by exerting his “will to power.” This, in turn, will spur on excellence in the whole of humanity, and eventually will give rise to the Superman, a man who is “beyond man,” a man who transcends the moral imperative entirely, a man who goes “beyond good and evil.”

"I Said, You Are Gods!" - A Trans-Nietzschean Perspective on Christian Soteriology (Part I).

Part I:
The Need for a Law

“For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God….” This well-known verse from Romans has become somewhat of a mantra for many Christians when describing the present condition of humanity, and with good reason. St. Athanasius, in describing the state of humanity at present says,

"But men, having turned from the contemplation of God to evil of their own devising, had come inevitably under the law of death. Instead of remaining in the state in which God had created them, they were in process of becoming corrupted entirely, and death had them completely under its dominion."

God created humanity good, but when, in the Garden of Eden, we chose what we thought best rather than what God asked of us, we unalterably corrupted ourselves, marring what God had created in His very own image! Scripture is quite explicit in what form this corruption takes. We all have fallen short of what we were meant to be; we all selfishly go about our own ways, seeking things we thought to be good, all apart from what God had intended for us. King David of Judah said of man, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, doing abominable iniquity; there is none who does good,” and Isaiah says of us, “All we like sheep we have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way.” From this basic presupposition, it is not hard to see that, if left to themselves with no guide, humanity’s many members would soon find themselves destroying one another in the instances in which their self-interests conflicted.

Enter the moral construct: God, in His infinite mercy, gives humanity the concept of the Law: a system of rights and wrongs, goods and evils, that, when enacted, would help govern human-to-human and human-to-God interaction, allowing men to peacefully coexist. The Apostle Paul paints a picture of the law acting toward us much like a schoolmaster or jailer does in his letter to the church at Galatia— “Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed.” On the whole, it seems that most of these moral constructions were macrocosmicly very similar, perhaps owing to that part of man that still knew of God’s divine goodness and the implications thereof. Microcosmicly, however, these moral constructs tended to be culturally relative—that is, particular goods and evils tended to vary from culture to culture.

This, of course, is not to say that goodness is completely relative, but, just as one person can have a correct perspective on reality and another a false perspective due to his limited knowledge, so too can cultures have true or false perspectives on what is truly good, due to their limited knowledge base. Therefore there are possibly many particular “goods”, each varying from culture to culture. In regard to these particulars, the moral construct has indeed taken many particular forms in the history of humanity. Perhaps in tribute to its divine origins, it seems that it usually was created, enacted and enforced by means of local religious systems of belief, most notably in the classical Greek religion embodied in the prophecies of the oracle at Delphi.

Because of this religious connection, piety toward the gods of the particular religious system came to be regarded as the highest good. Likewise, blasphemy and undue pride against the gods and their laws— what, in Greece, was called hubris— came to be regarded as the worst evil one could commit. Thus, man’s selfish instincts came to be controlled mainly by fear— the fear of divine reprisal, inspired by religious tales and myths of men being punished in horrible and grotesque ways for their hubris against the gods.

Euripides, the Greek tragedian, gives a rendering of one of these myths in his play The Bacchae. In this play, Pentheus, the ruler of the city of Thebes, refuses to recognize Dionysus, an illegitimate son of Zeus, as a god. Cadmus, the founder of Thebes, and grandfather of Pentheus, plays the part of the traditional, unquestioning, pious Greek man, who continues to practice his religion because he will not take the chance of offending the gods who may or may not exist. He knows the gravity of offending the gods, and pleads with his grandson:

"My dear son, Teiresias has given you good advice.
Don’t stray beyond pious tradition; live with us.
Your wits have flown to the winds, your sense is foolishness.
Even if, as you say, Dionysus is no god,
Let him have your acknowledgement; lie royally,
That Semele may get honour as having borne a god,
And credit come to us and to all our family.
Remember, too, Actaeon’s miserable fate –
Torn and devoured by hounds which he himself had bred,
Because he filled the mountains with the boast that he
Was a more skilful hunter than Artemis herself.
Don’t share his fate, my son! Come, let me crown your head
With a wreath of ivy; join us in worshipping this god."

Pentheus, however, does not heed his grandfather’s warning, and for his hubris, Dionysus drives him mad, dresses him as a woman and directs him to the hills of Cithaeron, where Pentheus’ mother Agaue and her sisters Ino and Autonoe have been possessed and driven into the Bacchic rituals being held by Dionysus’ followers, the Maenads. At the sight of Pentheus, the Maenads, led by Agaue, are suddenly driven into a violent frenzy by Dionysus. As a result, Pentheus is ripped to pieces by his own aunts and mother as the punishment for his pride against Dionysus. What is the moral of this story? Clearly, it is that the gods take their revenge, and it matters not whether one is a vessel of their vengeance or the one receiving it; all who are prideful toward the gods suffer. Euripides summarizes this moral standard in a warning:

"Though blessed gods dwell in the distant skies,
They watch the ways of men.
To know much is not to be wise.
Pride more than mortal hastens life to its end;
And they who in pride pretend
Beyond man’s limit, will lose what lay
Close to their hand and sure.
I count it madness, and know no cure can mend
The evil man and his evil way."

Thus, the ancient Greek man is held down through the fear of his wrathful gods. Perhaps this is why a Greek tragedian wrote, “Count no man happy until he dies.”

In the City in Words in Books II through XI of Plato’s Republic, Socrates and his interlocutors Glaucon and Adeimantus construct their own system of morality by which the city’s guardians will be governed. In order to convince these guardians that they must live by this moral construct, this system of control— which included a very regimented education, as well as the abolition of marriage and the family unit— replaced traditional tales of the gods with what Socrates called his noble lie:

"And yet I hardly know how to find the audacity or the words to speak and undertake to persuade first the ruler themselves and the soldiers and then the rest of the city that in good sooth all our training and educating of them were things that they imagined and that happened to them as it were in a dream, but that in reality at that time they were down within the earth being molded and fostered themselves while their weapons and the rest of their weapons and the rest of their equipment were being fashioned. And when they were quite finished the earth as being their mother delivered them, and now as if their land were their mother and their nurse they ought to take thought for her and defend her against any attack and regard the other citizens as their brothers and children of the selfsame earth."

Once they accept the story they are told, Socrates believes that the guardians will live by the laws they have set down for them.

Similarly, in Book VII, Socrates likens the inhabitants of his city in words to people at the bottom of an enormous cave. According to Socrates, the inhabitants of the city are stuck at the bottom of an enormous cavern, shackled and facing a wall, their only means of sensory input comes from the shadows of images of men and beasts, cast onto that same wall they face by a fire that burns somewhere behind them. Socrates describes the men holding these images as “exhibitors of puppet shows.” The people of the city are completely placated by all this, because this life— though it consists of only the shadows of false images— is all they have ever known. They remain docile because they have no idea that there is more in existence than just their shadow-puppet realities. Thus, the inhabitants of the city in words are kept under control through deception— those in authority over them, the puppet masters, show them only the shadows of mere images of reality. Since the people cannot see anything else, what choice do they have but to accept the shadows as reality and live their lives accordingly?

Though his intentions are good to an extent, man’s best attempts at constructing a moral system of control are still quite imperfect. Traditional Greek religious mysticism had to inspire fear and false piety in men in order to keep their self-centered natures in check. Even Socrates’ attempts to prove that being in harmony with God and man is good and beneficial for men in itself— as well as being a means of maintaining order— first required that man be deceived into believing in shadows. The reason for these failures seems obvious: man is, by nature, finite, and therefore, his perspective and knowledge of reality is also finite. Man’s moral constructs will always miss the mark in some way because he cannot grasp the whole picture, and thus, man’s moral constructs will always be ontomoralities, because he takes what he thinks to be true from his limited perspective, and superimposes it onto the entire picture. Man is in no position to do such a thing.

An analogy may prove useful in illustrating this point. In order to have a truly correct knowledge of one line in a painting, one must be able to view that line in light of, and in relation to, the whole painting. One must be able to look at it from an objective perspective— from outside of the painting. I would argue that, likewise, man, by himself, can never come to objectively correct knowledge of what is good, because he cannot see the whole of the painting that is reality. This is simply due to the fact that he is necessarily inside of it. Therefore, the only being who could actually have a truly correct perspective on reality is God, and the only means that we, as humans, would have of obtaining truly correct knowledge is through divine revelation. We could know what is really good only if God told us what is really good.

In light of this, the only people to ever have a truly correct moral construct were the Israelites, because their moral construct was given to them directly by God! Since they had this correct perspective to reality (and God), they could live under this morality in devotion to God, rather than in fear or deception. Even so, the Israelites too were still under the dominion of the moral construct, because they still had the tendency to seek their own self-benefit, and therefore were not free. As Paul says it, they were still slaves to the Law.

The Unlikely Story - An Investigation of the Myth of Atlantis and the Ideal Athens in the Timaeus: Part IV.

This concludes my treatment of this particular view of the myth of Atlantis in the Timaeus. If we really are to treat this myth as a kind of case study of the victory of justice over injustice, it seems it is truly a very unlikely story. While one could still choose to view the myth in this rather nihilistic way, I would like to suggest an alternative view, one that is finds its basis in the character of Socrates.

Again, the dialogue of the Timaeus begins with Socrates and Timaeus recalling the conversation they had participated in the previous day, a conversation that sounds suspiciously similar to the conversation found in another of Plato’s works: the Republic. However, the conversation as found in the Republic is only partially repeated, and instead of continuing the entire conversation of Republic, Socrates insists that the city in words should be put to the test in battle, as war is said to be the truest test of a city’s mettle. When reading this passage while working on this paper, I was struck with how adamantly Socrates insists on seeing his creation in action, how excited he was to see his creation go through the adversity of war, and this puzzled and confused me. I began to think about why this notion, not being a particularly happy thought in itself, was so attractive to Socrates. I thought that, perhaps, if I could understand Socrates’ motivation for excitement for the myth, it would give me insight as to why Plato had included it. Thus, I began a character assessment of Socrates’ soul.

Knowing that Plato portrays Socrates as being a virtuous man, I quickly ruled out the option of his being some kind of sadist; it did not seem fitting with what I knew of Socrates to consider him a man who took pleasure in the pain of others. Similarly, I quickly eliminated the thought that this desire in Socrates was some kind of appetitive response to the glory of battle, or for mere entertainment, or of the self-righteous pride in knowing the greatness of his theoretical city. While we do see Socrates fall prey to his appetites, most pointedly in the first book of the Republic, this kind of fall is generally thought of as very uncharacteristic of Socrates, and the circumstances surrounding the conversation taking place in Timaeus seem much different than those found in book one of Republic. Another option as to the motivation for Socrates’ excitement that occurred to me was that of a father’s excitement in seeing his child flourish. Given what I knew of Socrates’ character, it being an example of virtue, this option seemed the most plausible. Yet, even if this were true, and Socrates was merely being proud of his children, it seems odd that he would remain excited over them when the story that Critias ends up telling really is not about them at all. Even if he could remain excited for his children in the midst of this abstraction, it seems even more odd that Socrates could be excited for his children even while the gods inadvertently end up destroying them, as was demonstrated above. Without other plausible alternatives, I was again pressed into agnosticism in regards to Plato’s motives regarding the inclusion of the myth of Atlantis.

It then occurred to me, however, that perhaps the reason that Plato includes the myth of Atlantis in Timaeus did not lay hidden in Socrates’ motivations for excitement, but in the excitement of Socrates itself. Stories are exciting. Stories move not only the head, but the heart as well. Stories take dry concepts and put flesh on them; they contextualize and personalize what would otherwise be considered by us to be esoteric and unimportant. Stories make us become a part of what they are attempting to tell us; they replace ideas with people, and appeal to the humanity within us to resonate with its characters, hoping that if we can understand why an idea matters so much to a person who is in the situation, we can understand why the idea really matters. Therefore, I believe that Plato did not include the myth of Atlantis and the Ideal Athens in the Timaeus in order to communicate to us some deep metaphysical truth about the benefits of justice or injustice’s lack thereof. I believe that Plato uses the myth of the Ideal Athens in an attempt to get us to really resonate with the people of the ideal city. Once this happens, Plato can thereby make us understand that justice is not merely an ideal in the world of the Forms. I think that Plato, in using this story, would have us believe that actually having justice and living justice, for those Athenians who stood between the Empire of Atlantis and the rest of the free world, was truly a matter of life and death. I believe that once we can understand the gravity of that, we can really and truly understand Plato’s conception of justice.

The Unlikely Story - An Investigation of the Myth of Atlantis and the Ideal Athens in the Timaeus: Part III.

Perhaps it could be argued that the hubris of the Atlanteans caused the normal order and justice of their state to become diseased, but this observation fails to be very helpful unless it can somehow be textually shown that such a state of disorder would have a causal relation to the tsunami that engulfed Atlantis. This issue is not addressed within the text, and therefore I believe that any argument would have to rely too heavily upon speculation. This is not to say that parallels between the just and unjust city/soul and Athens and Atlantis cannot be made, or even that a loose analogy can be drawn between them, but merely that this kind of analogous relationship would be too weak to make any definitive claim about the fate of Atlantis in relation to the tyrannical soul. The same could be said about the feat of the Athenians. It does not seem like there is a satisfactory amount of evidence to suggest that the just man or city would triumph over injustice in the same way that Athens does over Atlantis, and, on the contrary, it seems that there is quite sufficient evidence to believe otherwise. Plato himself suggests in book II of Republic that the just man will be subjected to more injustice than any other man.

Also, it is interesting to note that, in the great earthquakes described by Plato and deluge following, it is not merely Atlantis that is swallowed up and destroyed, but also all the “warlike men” of the Athenian army (described as “in a body”) who “sank into the earth.” (25d) This textual observation causes a third problem for an argument stating that Atlantis was somehow analogous to the tyrant of Republic IX. It seems that not only was Atlantis not self-destroyed, but also that the god-decreed punishment for her hubris had direct consequences upon the very people that were defending the earth from her. Perhaps this consequence was an accidental effect of the divine retribution enacted upon Atlantis, but surely, if the gods were punishing Atlantis for her hubris, they could have done so without causing harm to the Athenians, those sole defenders of justice in the world. It seems wrong, or at least very impious, to implicate the gods as the accidental agents of destruction of the sole arbiters of justice on the earth.

This problem is further complicated by our in-class discussion of this myth. We had mentioned that just as the just man, without the help of divine intervention, would have to suffer many injustices, Athens would similarly have to submit to the sheer power of the Atlantean Empire eventually. To be sure, through the internal justice that they possessed, Athens beat Atlantis back past the Pillars of Heracles, but in all actuality, this must have been the equivalent to a slap on the wrist to the forces of Atlantis. Were it not for the utter destruction of Atlantis by the gods, Athens would have eventually had to succumb to Atlantis, merely because of the sheer power Atlantis possessed. The problem of the above paragraph is magnified when we claim both this and that the gods, at the very least, seem to be the accidental agents of destruction of the Athenian army. Even more pointedly, the worry is this: it seems antithetical to claim that in acting to protect the smaller forces of justice, the gods inadvertently cause their destruction. It could be true that I am making too much of this passage, but these observations leave me somewhat baffled as to how this myth is to be used as a kind of illustration of how justice is better to possess than injustice, if the myth is indeed to be understood this way. To be sure, to have a rightly-ordered soul seems intuitively better than to have a disordered soul, but what difference does it make when one is dead anyway?

The Unlikely Story - An Investigation of the Myth of Atlantis and the Ideal Athens in the Timaeus: Part II.

As we have discussed in class, the recapitulation of the Republic in the dialogue of the Timaeus ends at the beginning of what would be book V, just after the group decides that the guardian women shall have everything in common, just like the men, and shall have the same education as the men as well. It is then in the Republic that Socrates suggests to his companions that the system they have created for the guardians of the city in words will “look ridiculous if our words are to be realized in fact.” Again, it is here that the recapitulation of the conversation of the Republic stops in the Timaeus. Here, Socrates describes himself as a kind of creator, someone who, in seeing his creation, wants to see it in some kind of struggle. Instead of continuing the discussion in the manner that the Republic takes, talking about the philosopher-king, the divided line, the cave, or the various diseased states, Socrates wishes to “hear someone tell of our own city carrying on a struggle against her neighbors, and how she went out to war in a becoming manner, and when at war showed by the greatness of her actions and the magnanimity of her words in dealing with other cities a result worthy of her training and education.” Why this is the case for Socrates will be addressed later.

In light of this, it seems likely that, in light of the “ridiculous” nature of the conversation in books V-VII, Plato, rather than continuing the conversation of the Republic, which used complicated and abstract analogies, at the beginning of Timaeus, instead chose to give justification for his ideas in the form of a myth: the myth of the Ideal Athens. If Plato can somehow show that this perfectly just city, along with its strange, but virtuous guardians, is good enough to defeat the greatest military power on earth, then he really has defeated the arguments and ideals held by Thracymachus, and the just city/man really is better than the unjust city/man. Seeing the two cities in action would get rid of the need to theorize about them any longer. Under this view, the myth of Ideal Athens vs. Atlantis is simply meant to functionally replace books VI – X as a kind of case study. Ideal Athens would be acting as the perfectly just city/man (the philosopher-king), while Atlantis would be acting as the perfectly unjust city/man (the tyrant). This comparison would possibly give a muthos to the perfection of the perfectly just city/man, as well as to the various stages of diseased cities, ending in the tyrannical city/man of book IX.

If this view of the myth were true, the fate of Atlantis as recounted in this myth would mirror the account of the tyrannical man, as he destroys himself from the inside out due to the disordered state of his soul. It is here that problems begin to arise for this view: first, this state of affairs does not seem to be the case in the myth of Atlantis. The Atlantean Empire advances on the Ideal Athens, the last great haven of free men, and after being beaten back by this Athens, is destroyed by a tsunami created by a great earthquake. This fate was, it seems, a punishment by the gods, as is assumed in the Critias, and Atlantis is most certainly not destroyed from within due to a disordered soul, but from without by divine intervention. A second, related problem with this comparison arises in the character of the tyrant, who has a fundamentally disordered soul. The internal state of Atlantis is not treated within the Timaeus, and is left for the Critias, but even in that dialogue, this does not seem to be the case. In fact, as Critias describes Atlantis in detail, one gets the sense that there is almost a kind of hyper-order to the Atlantean society, to the extent that the empire begins to look less like a polis made of men, and more like a beehive: a very tightly-knit collective. Still, in my reading of Critias, I see almost nothing other than this that would cause me to really not want to be an Atlantean, but, of course, I am not an Athenian, as Plato’s intended audience most likely would have been.

But again, the text claims that Atlantis was not destroyed by its own injustice. Atlantis was not so tyrannical that it sunk itself into the sea. Rather, the kingdom of Atlantis was destroyed by the gods when the Atlanteans became too proud of the power and wealth that they had come to accumulate. Unfortunately, the dialogue of the Critias ends before Zeus can pronounce his judgment upon them, and as such, we don’t really know the actual state of affairs, as Plato would have told them. However, from what we textually know of both the anterior circumstances (that the Atlanteans were guilty of great hubris) and the end of the story (that Atlantis is engulfed by the sea, never to be seen again), it seems highly plausible that Zeus really would have pronounced some kind of judgment upon Atlantis, thereby causing their destruction.

The Unlikely Story - An Investigation of the Myth of Atlantis and the Ideal Athens in the Timaeus: Part I.

As we are inextricably caught in the world of becoming for Plato, change and motion are the most fundamental principles of physics. All is always in motion; everything is constantly changing. One can never have true knowledge of anything in this world of becoming, because again, everything is constantly changing, and thus the set of data from which we deduce truth is always different than it was, five minutes previously. As our data set is always changing, it is really only possible to have likely stories as to the nature of how things really are. We must create myths to fill in the epistemic gaps in our data, myths that change as our data changes. Therefore, mythic truth holds a very high place in Platonic thought, and as such, the investigation of myth within the Platonic dialogues becomes paramount if we are to understand what Plato is saying. Timaeus, being almost entirely comprised of myth, becomes a kind of bastion of Platonic opinion, where students investigate the likely story contained within the dialogue, as well as the likely story qua likely story.

Considering this, what are we to make of the recapitulation of books I – V of the Republic at the outset of the Timaeus, as well as the myth of the Ideal Athens and Atlantis that follows it? It seems unlikely that, in view of the importance placed on myth by Plato, that this story is merely a placeholder, or a herald for the story of the Critias, or something similar. I would suggest that the brief version of the story of Atlantis was placed in the Timaeus for a specific purpose, although what exactly that purpose is I do not know, and in a way this agnosticism seems fitting, considering that, for Plato, we live in the world of becoming. In this paper, my goal is to exegete the beginning of the Timaeus in hopes to come closer to the truth of why Plato included such a myth, and to examine the myth’s relationship to the Platonic idea of the justice in a city/soul—both in the abstract and in the character of Socrates. Hopefully, this endeavor will help us to create a more likely story for the purpose of the myth of Atlantis and the Ideal Athens as is found in the Timaeus.

An Analysis of Gyges and the Cave. Part IV.

This question, especially in examining the tale of Gyges and his ring, has bothered me for some time, and because of this, I have searched in the tale of Gyges and his ring for some defeater that Plato hid within this tale to show why he thought that Gyges would not be happy in reality, and in comparing this story to the Analogy of the Cave, some interesting observations can be made. First, it can be noted that both stories heavily involve caves or openings into the earth, which were commonly believed in ancient times to be passages into Hades. Here, differences in the stories begin to develop. In the Analogy of the Cave, all of humanity lives in this underworld, and the just man—the philosopher-king—must venture out into the light of the sun and bring that light back down into the darkness, first ascending to the Good, then descending back into the cave, bringing the light of the Good to the masses for the benefit of the masses. In the tale of Gyges, Gyges ventures from the light down into the chasm, then comes back up, ascending eventually up to the throne, bringing with him what he finds down there—descending first into the darkness, then ascending up into the light bringing with him a piece of the darkness. Instead of revealing, illuminating, and making known, as does the light of the Good, Gyges’ ring acts as the darkness does—it conceals who he truly is, allowing him to rise above the shepherd he was previously. I am unsure of this, but I do not believe that this necessarily means that Gyges would not flourish as the tyrant—it could, but I am not convinced by this alone. At the least, it merely casts a shadow on his means of attaining the throne.

What seems to me to be the best possible defeater of Gyges’ happiness in the tale is the description of how he came to find this ring of invisibility. Glaucon first describes Gyges finding a “hollow bronze horse with little doors.” I am unaware of the specific cultural context and significance of this, if there is any, but it sounds dubious at best—perhaps reminiscent of another nice-looking horse in Greek mythology. Glaucon continues recounting the story, saying that when Gyges looked inside this horse, he saw “a corpse within, as it seemed, of more than mortal stature,” who wore nothing else but a ring on its finger. Whether “more than mortal stature” simply means the corpse’s height or general build was greater than a normal human’s, or the corpse still had about it the power of a demigod even after death, one would think that Gyges’ realization of this fact should have set off some bells in his head—not to mention the fact that this ring, though golden, is the only remaining possession of a dead demigod, a corpse who was even more than human. It does not seem ridiculous to assume that this could have served as a warning of the power that was present in this ring—a ring that could very well have been the demise of this demigod; a warning that screamed the Lydian equivalent of, “You can’t handle this!” and, “I am not good news!”

Therefore, the direct correlation of this ring to death and the underworld seems to be the strongest possible defeater that exists in Plato’s version of the tale of Gyges the Lydian. However, I am still not completely convinced that this defeater accomplishes I had proposed for it: to undermine the claim that a very unjust man and/or tyrant can be happy—can flourish as a tyrant, and at the moment, I am still unsure what to make of this predicament.

An Analysis of Gyges and the Cave. Part III.

In contrast to the philosopher-king, who is the example of the perfectly just man, we have Gyges the Lydian, an example of the perfectly unjust man—a man who is unjust in every way possible, but appears to be perfectly just in every way possible. The telling of this story comes about when Glaucon and Adeimantus, being very unsatisfied with Socrates’ treatment of Thrasymachus’ argument—namely, that injustice is better to have than justice—in their dialogue in Book I, ask Socrates to really persuade them that justice is better to have in itself than injustice. They then proceed to make the absolute best case that they can for injustice, hoping that Socrates will be able to knock it down, proving that justice is truly better than injustice. In this defense of injustice, Glaucon says that those who hold the view that injustice is better to have than justice would claim that justice is merely a concession for those people who are too weak both to do wrong and to keep others from wronging them—“a compromise…” he says,

"... between the best, which is to do wrong with impunity, and the worst, which is to be wronged and be impotent to get one’s revenge. Justice, they tell us, being midway between the two, is accepted and approved, not as a real good, but as a thing honored in the lack of vigor to do injustice, since anyone who had the power to do it and was in reality ‘a man’ would never make a compact with anybody neither to wrong nor to be wronged, for he would be mad."

Therefore, Glaucon says that if one has the power to commit injustice freely and without having to worry about being wronged in return, there is no man who would remain just, because he could get away with anything he wanted.

To give evidence for this claim, Glaucon offers the story of Gyges, a shepherd in service to the king of Lydia, who, when after a large rainstorm and earthquake, found a chasm that had opened up due to those events. In this chasm, Gyges found, among “other marvels,” a hollow bronze horse. Inside this horse, he saw “a corpse within, as it seemed, of more than mortal stature, and that there was nothing else but a gold ring on its hand, which he took off, and so went forth.” After some experimentation, Gyges found that this ring, when turned a certain way on his finger, turned him invisible, and using this ring, he seduced the king’s wife, and with her help, killed the king and took over the kingdom. Given this option, Glaucon—in proxy for those who favor injustice over justice—says that no man would continue to choose to be just rather than unjust.

Given that this story was told from the perspective of one who believes that injustice is better than justice, we probably cannot expect to see anything within this myth that explicitly says the exact inverse, but what appears to be really worrisome about this tale is the fact that, in the end, Gyges seems to turn out very well, and even better in histories and other tellings of the story. He bribed the Oracle at Delphi into confirming him as the rightful Lydian king, thereby stopping a civil war, and then proceeded to successfully conquer several other nations, including several Greek cities. He gained a kingdom and a queen, and was the founder of an entire Lydian dynasty, which prospered into its fifth generation—it seems that this unjust man, this tyrant, did very well for himself.

I am unsure what to think of this story, especially in light of our class discussions on the natures of the unjust man and the tyrant—they would be the most unhappy men because their souls are the most disordered of all men. But who are we to say that Gyges was unhappy, that he did not flourish? Perhaps, in gaining the power and glory of the kingship, his soul was satisfied and found its place; perhaps Gyges had a very correctly ordered soul, with his nous ruling his erotic nature by way of his chest, but perhaps his nous—his “little man”—was bent toward evil. Thus he would only act unjustly, and use his ordered soul for his own selfish purposes—to me, this does not seem improbable. But if this is true, if Gyges really was happy, or even if he could have been happy, then what are we to make of the perfectly just man—the philosopher-king—who, after reaching as far toward the Good as is humanly possible, is made to give it up in the name of justice and go back down into the darkness and ignorance of the cave, only to rule over the people of the city—a job he does not want over a people he can only pity? Is his happiness, his flourishing, if he indeed has it, really worth the hard work that justice requires of him, when it seems there is a much easier route to happiness available? Is it possible that some men flourish as—were meant to be—tyrants?

An Analysis of Gyges and the Cave. Part II.

Once this has been established, Socrates describes something truly amazing. He says to Glaucon,

"Consider, then, what would be the manner of the release and healing from these bonds and this folly if in the course of nature something of this sort should happen to them. When one was freed from his fetters and compelled to stand up suddenly and turn his head around and walk and to lift up his eyes to the light, and in doing all this felt pain and, because of the dazzle and glitter of the light, was unable to discern the objects whose shadows he formerly saw, what do you suppose would be his answer if someone told him that what he had seen before was all a cheat and an illusion, but that now, being nearer to reality and turned toward more real things, he saw more truly?"

Here, Socrates tells us of the beginnings of the first philosopher-king, and soon later goes on to describe how this man would have to be dragged out of this cave into the sunlight, and even there, that the man would first have to look at the shadows of the true things, and then into the reflections they made in pools of water, then at the things themselves, and finally, after much habituation, he would be able to look at the Good itself. Once this happens, our philosopher-king will have to be made to go back down into the darkness of the cave in the name of justice so that he may be able to rule over the men who remain ignorant, who would, in return, laugh at his wisdom, and eventually—if he were to attempt to bring another out of the cave—they would kill him , because though the cave is dark, it is familiar and comfortable.

One cannot help but notice how improbable this entire situation is made to be by Socrates. First, the man is inexplicably freed from his bonds and is somehow “compelled” toward the light—necessarily, it seems, by some outside force. But where is this force that frees the man, compels him to look at the light, then drags him out of the cave into the sunlight and eventually makes him to look into the sun? Then, somehow, the philosopher-king would have to be forced back down into the cave in the name of justice, into the presence of ignorant men, who, in all probability, would kill him, and at the very least, would label him a fool and ignore him. But, if somehow, against all odds, the philosopher-king is able to go back down into the cave and successfully rule the people, the city will be harmonious—the city will be just.

An Analysis of Gyges and the Cave. Part I.

In this paper, I will examine both the account of the perfectly just man—as symbolized by the philosopher-king in the Analogy of the Cave in Book VII of Plato’s Republic—as well as the account of the perfectly unjust man—as symbolized in the tale of the Ring of Gyges in Book II—in hopes to determine what exactly separates these two men in terms of their happiness, or their human flourishing. In other words, in looking at these two stories, I hope to see what makes the just man happier than the unjust man. I am unsure as to the exact relationship between these two stories since they are so far spread apart in the dialogue, but I believe that, even if they are not to be so closely related, the similarities and differences between them are such that a comparison between the stories would be beneficial to our understanding of justice.

First, let us look closely at the Analogy of the Cave, as told by Socrates in Book VII, and at his champion of justice, the philosopher-king, as seen in this tale. After discussing various analogies for how the Good can come to be better understood, such as the Analogy of the Sun and the Divided Line at the conclusion of Book VI, Socrates and the interlocutors come to discuss the state of man, and how he can come to know the Good. About man, Socrates says this:

"Picture men dwelling in a sort of subterranean cavern with a long entrance open to the light on its entire width. Conceive them as having their legs and necks fettered from childhood, so that they remain in the same spot, able to look forward only, and prevented by the fetters from turning their heads. Picture further the light from a fire burning higher up and at a distance behind them and between the fire and the prisoners and above them a road along which a low wall has been built, as the exhibitors of puppet shows have partitions before the men themselves, above which they show the puppets."

Basically, it seems that man is in quite a wretched state. He is stuck at the bottom of an enormous cave, chained down and able to look only straight ahead—much like a horse with blinders on—at a wall on which is projected, by the light of a fire behind them, the shadows of images. These images are not what they play either, for they themselves are only false representations of what is true (for example, the man in the cave has never actually seen another man—he has only seen the shadow of the image of a man). These shadows of images are being presented to men by other men who, from Socrates’ description, seem to be a kind of puppeteer; they maintain the illusion that the cave-dwellers see and believe to be reality (this is, of course, not to say that the puppeteers are necessarily malicious, or that the illusion is necessarily evil).

Because of man’s wretched state—chained down and made to believe in the illusion of these appearances, it seems that he has no choice but to believe that this illusion is reality. Socrates confirms this, and says, “Then in every way such prisoners would deem reality to be nothing else than the shadows of the artificial objects.” Ultimately, what choice would they have, since because they are necessarily stuck in this position, it is impossible that they could have knowledge of anything other than the shadows at which they are made to look?