Plato for Troubled Times

“What is the great end of all…is soul, one in all bodies, pervading, uniform, perfect, preeminent over nature, exempt from birth, growth and decay, omnipresent, made up of true knowledge, independent, unconnected with realities,with names, species and the rest, in times present, past and to come. The knowledge that this spirit, which is essentially one, is in ones’ own and in all other bodies, is the wisdom of one who knows the unity of things.”

– Krishna, quoted in Plato, by RW Emerson

..”the believers in action” grow impatient with me.  The line of a still unsatisfied seeker which I have followed, the idea of self-transformation… is…at variance with the perfect self-satisfaction in my class, the middle class…

–Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy

If our habits make it hard for us to come at the idea of a high best self, of a paramount authority in literature or religion, how much more do they make it hard in the sphere of politics!

– Ibid

The absolutely most embarrassing thing I can reveal about myself is that as an undergraduate I majored in Philosophy.  I’m embarrassed because I know nothing about philosophy and I’m terrified someone may make a knowing epistemological or ontological reference and I will have no clue what they’re talking about.  (I also know next to nothing about the Bible, although I’m a Div School graduate – There! I’ve made a clean breast of it all!)  Though I was drawn to that realm of “pure thought,” to things spiritual, or metaphysical, philosophy after the Greeks was, well, Greek to me. To this day, I rely on others who can tell me what Hobbes or Hume, Hegel or Heidegger were talking about.  Neither institution should have granted me their degree.

For a time post-graduation, I faked it.  Not the philosophy degree, but the Divinity degree.  I preached Sunday sermons for 9 years.  I was even a worse representative of that profession than the poor fellow Emerson pilloried in his Divinity School address.  Inwardly, I knew I was empty as the bucket with a hole in it, but I knew not how to get out of the hole I’d found myself in.

The way out of that hole, I discovered many years later.  It – I say this unboastfully – was to find capital T-truth for myself.   Once I’d found it, that Truth connected me with a tradition, outside the mainstream but nonetheless a tradition one can trace through the history of western thought that had so far baffled me and left me alienated, believing I could not think.  In fact, I continue to find – or be found by –  antecedents,  individuals who made this same discovery – and wrote about it.  Some wrote religious text, some poetry, some philosophy, some urged revolutions.   I had found it by means of intense inward “archaeological excavation,” urged on by the New Age-influenced times of the 1980’s and 90’s.  For a time the antecedents came mainly through my readings in psychology, prominently Dr. Jung and those influenced by him,  whose championing of imagination and gnosticism opened a world of spiritual possibility where there’d previously been a closed door.  More recently, as I’ve floundered in the wake of the loss of our Cafe, that haven for souls in Utica,  I’ve been finding the antecedents in common  humanities texts, not new to me but part of what at least once was ordinary liberal arts education, “hiding in plain sight.”

Examples of such  “finds” are my recent rediscoveries of Emerson with his powerful idea of “self-reliance” (not at all about self-sufficiency but about “trust thyself,” and, “the test of genius is connection”) and of Hannah Arendt for her powerful act of identifying herself as a Jew and as “pariah.”  Reading Emerson’s essay on Plato, I learned that Plato may be the original ancestor of this truth in western history,  the truth that imagination – or spiritual reality –  is real.

Reading Emerson on Plato, I learned Plato’s thought wasn’t just interesting stuff about shadows and caves, or  about love (the Symposium).  I did not know his ideas can ignite belief in the real connection, the real relatedness of everything which we call “love.”   But neither Emerson’s nor Plato’s words would have meant anything to me had I not first discovered that soul who knows “the unity of things” in myself.

From Emerson, too,  I’ve learned that Eastern spiritual thought entered western tradition way before people took acid in the 1960’s, before the Beatles made their pilgrimage to India!   And there could be no more essential dissenting input to Western rationalist supremacy than the knowledge that “this spirit, essentially one, is in ones’ own and in all other bodies.”  Would it have made a difference if we’d been taught this from an early age, if this wisdom present in Plato, the revered philosopher,  the very fountainhead of western democratic thinking, had been taught to us properly by teachers who’d been properly transformed by it? Might it not have led logically to a preference for solidarity over the benefits of affluence, to  everyone knowing the revolutionary Wobblie mantra “An injury to one is an injury to all?” –  “Liberal education” then,  not just an avenue to privilege, but an initiation into in-common humanity?

Well, admittedly, far better for learning this foundational truth if one were connected with its basis from infancy, learned first from the constancy of parental tenderness and protection, from the sensual reassurance of uninterrupted safety.  That is, much better if there were no disconnect from the soul to contend with, better if trauma were the exception rather than the rule.  Realistically, fewer and fewer people in western society learn this connective truth from a thoroughly protected infancy. (In the 1970’s, Sebastian Junger reports in Tribe (2016), “mothers maintained skin-to-skin contact as little as 16% of the time”). Fewer escape the trauma of early soul wounding which then is compounded by liberal society’s near total denial of the reality of the soul and its necessary condition of in-person community, let alone of wounds to it (other than in “the exceptions” – the survivors of combat and child abuse, which are granted limited recognition).  Thus it has come to pass that it’s the “normal people” (which in a sense is how everybody thinks of ourselves)  who are perhaps most resistant to influence by the soul’s truth, the unity of all.

But, still, here it is, in Plato, and Emerson, a truth that points to the same essential connectivity as the mother’s constancy, making appeal to reason that matches the embodied need for the skin-to-skin assurance of safety, the truth that is One, the truth that assures the soul’s needs are real.   Fortunate for us indeed, given the decidedly anti-soul bias of liberal society, truth has persuasive power as idea, as well; it can be learned.  Emerson warns, however, that Plato emphasized truth could not be learned through coercion, the inequality of power, that is, in being “schooled.” He cites from Socrates’ dialogue with his student Theages: “…if it pleases the God, you will make great and rapid proficiency; you will not, if he does not please. Judge whether it is not safer to be instructed by some one of those who have power over the benefit which they impart to men, than by me, who benefit or not, just as it may happen.”  (Emerson points out, it’s as if Socrates were saying, “You will be what you must.” )

Liberal education by itself will not work to convey the soul’s truth, its power to transform.  Rather, there needs to be in communities some kind of socially agreed upon process or discipline, an initiation,  through which the change can work.   The teacher-pupil relationship can work “if it pleases the  God,”  that is, if it affirms individual freedom, which is freedom in-the-connection-that-is-God.

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A review by William Davies of a book (When the Clock Broke: Conspiracists and the Origin of Trumpism, by John Ganz,  London Review of Books (9/25/25) about the rise of Trump emphasizes the fact there were ideas behind the eventual triumph of Trumpism, not just aggrievement.  While the ideas were not congenial, and were even loathsome – even crack pot and quintessentially evil to the liberal mind – they were nonetheless ideas.  Although, when first articulated they attracted few, gradually, by connecting with several other crackpots with a different take on the larger political picture, thanks largely to the Internet and social media, they were able to enter a new paradigm of conservatism that connects with the aggrieved, illiberal masses and lit a match to the ever-present embers of racism. With Trump’s second term, his following of the plan laid out in Project 2025, the noose on the remaining shreds of democracy tightening, the liberal world has to see at last that ideas may not be left out of the opposition to Trump-ized America.

It’s never too late. And now, when thinking is subservient to the market, what might those ideas be? It is up to individuals, to each finding his/her way, now, to the ideas suitable for a democracy, to that  ideal collectivity of free, free-thinking individuals.  Not that it may not be necessary for practicable ideas to be hammered out among groups of citizens.  But individuals who’ve not earned their freedom in the Emersonian sense of self-reliance, or the Platonic sense of “if it pleases God,” or “you will be what you must,”  will not be able to arrive at ideas powerful enough to meet the challenge from fervently aggrieved people.  These have powerfully persuasive ideas for the channeling of their wrath. We call them wrong, but that does not reduce their power.  They do not care what we think of their ideas.  The powerful persuasion left to me and you is that of having one’s own ideas, influenced by the soul’s reality not the world’s,  and living according to them.

Which is to say, the necessary ideas are those from the quintessential outsider, the soul.  Though “it exists in all bodies,” it is known to and heeded by a tiny fragment of the whole among those who have the choice to conform or not, that is, excluding indigenous people and many of those whose otherness has been defined by skin color and caste.  In that tiny fragment of those who by choice are aliens,  marginalized and dismissible, there are artists and poets, here and there perhaps a religious leader, whose ideas are not conforming to the liberal status quo, that are original to themselves.  The outsiders with potential to lead are those who are not merely eccentric, and are led, not by aggrievement but by something more powerful; we could call it love (and why not? If I call the rightwing extremist the hater, hadn’t I better be the lover?)  But it is, simply, the overarching, inclusive truth of unity, of connection of all, that exists in every soul.  By one way or another,  the qualities of leadership depend upon having powerful ideas, based in the wisdom of the unity of things and upon living in a way that affirms soul truth, a sacrifice – like that of a constantly loving parent – for real community.

I know I’m asking too much of people already feeling pressured by the ceaseless demands and stresses of living in capitalist reality, but one doesn’t have to be a yogi to know this truth.  However, to have powerful ideas, one does have to know this.  The truth is there, in every soul, but more is needed even than having had the experience of it. To know it is to obey it.  This is spiritual reality; there is no point to its existence otherwise than if it authorizes human (moral) action entailing sacrifice.

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Every liberal left-leaner knows racism is an evil, that the rights of LGBTQers and immigrants and other minorities should be defended,  that we should fund schools and healthcare not war, etc.  These are not ideas.  An idea ignites the fire that makes it possible to change one’s life in order that one’s very act of living is on the side of unity with the underclass, the forgotten, the powerless. There is an attraction to this fire that no liberal with a “Haters-Are-Not-Welcome-Here” lawn sign can match.

So far, in containing its “ideas” to anti-Trump reaction, and continuing on board with faith in progress and the rule of markets, the liberal left avoids powerful ideas.  Nobody in 2025 wants to make herself sound silly uttering words about peace, love and understanding!  Thus there is only liberal conformity, the seething at the latest Trump outrage, joining the Indivisibles’ orchestrated protests, the wait for the next election cycle.  The question that needs urgently to be answered is what else, besides resentment, can give power to an idea?  In fact, the answer cannot come from the liberal collective.  The idea must come from outside not only the Democratic party but outside the entire liberal reality, from a different sort of “crackpot”  than the Trump kind.

Here I offer my crackpot idea : for the liberal end of “the spectrum,” the powerful idea  must ignite at the level of identity, it has to make sense personally.  It must come from the soul that cannot assimilate in liberal reality because liberal reality is antagonistic to its goals of peace and justice.  It must come from the awareness that, though capable of being compliant in it, of obtaining middle class comfort and of being liberal in my sympathies,  I am incapable of successful assimilation without being fundamentally unhappy, disempowered, self-hating, controlled by my neurotic compulsions and obsessions, possibly sociopathic – that is, without disconnection from my soul.  Thus, assimilation to liberal reality not only discounts the goals I profess, it causes displeasure to ‘the God.’  Like Hannah Arendt who declared herself Jew and pariah both, in identifying as an other, I subvert this baseline unhappiness, this trauma-based/trauma-denied sense of wrongness that threatens continuously to characterize me to myself –  by identifying myself as other.  I am one with the other because I am other.  This is not a stretch.  It is not simply an intellectual position; other is truly how my soul is in God-forsaken neoliberal reality.  Claiming one’s otherness is simply a coming home.

For some people, home is what needs to be defended against the liberal program.  This is an idea, but we can have a different one, a more inclusive, cosmopolitan one,  and still be champions of homecoming and belonging.   Identification as other does not predict what side of the political spectrum one takes.  It predicts one will be a thinker and insist on the inalienable right to have ideas that are agreeable to one’s soul and obedient to it.  This is basis for a politics of love that begins “at home,”  home not insular, but opened out.

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