Thursday 12 August 2010

Truth and Illusion

Welcome to my campaign for real philosophy.    Over the coming weeks I'll be posting a series of short essays about the nature of Truth and arguing that modern philosophy has lost sight of this.   Today the topic is truth and illusion, and the idea that because reality is not quite what it seems to be to become acquainted with the truth requires a process of inititaion.    We start, as all good philosophy should, with a look at Plato.


Plato famously said that the world as it appears to us is an illusion, and that truth exists not in this world of phenomena, but in a transcendent world of ideal form.   It’s an idea that is treated nowadays as archaic and primitive, and it is assumed or taken for granted that our thought has in the two and a half millennia that have passed since this idea was proposed developed a greater and surer understanding, even though there is little coherent criticism of Plato’s view.    Instead modern philosophy pretty much started from scratch, from Descartes’ tabula rasa, thinking in pure isolation as if the foundation of the discipline of philosophy in Plato’s Academy had never happened.

Illusions however are powerful things and perhaps what has happened is that the illusion has taken over, and the effort required to see through it has been abandoned in favour of the much easier business of just acquiescing in the illusion.    In fact I want to argue that this is exactly what has happened.     This is not because I am a Platonist, but I do take the view that Plato should be regarded as the true founder of philosophy, or the founder of true philosophy, and that we should take his work as our starting point in thinking about the truth.    If we do not, we quickly run into a problem of defining what philosophical thinking is, what it is about and what is its purpose, a problem which thoroughly pervades modern philosophy which seems no longer to have any clear idea of what its purpose is.

When Plato says that the world of appearances is illusory, this is not some curious personal position, but a very fundamental part of his thinking which although it is expressed directly only in a few places in his work, is present in all of it and indeed most of his dialogues and especially the so called early Socratic ones can be regarded as intended to support this position, and little else.

The fundamental distinction for Plato is between Sophism, which claims to have knowledge, and Philosophy, which seeks knowledge but does not claim to have it and for which awareness of its own ignorance is a fundamental prerequisite.    If Sophism is right, things are really what they appear to be and we possess knowledge of them directly and unproblematically, then there is no place for philosophy and no need for it.    For Plato therefore it was of fundamental importance to demonstrate that claims to possess true knowledge are false, and his early works do little more than this.    They are frustrating to modern readers as they reach no positive conclusion, and modern commentators often wonder if Plato’s views might have become clearer if only he had pursued the arguments a bit further, failing to understand that the whole point is that a firm conclusion cannot be reached, at least following the type of thinking that comes under scrutiny in the dialogues.

The illusion then is that it seems to us that we have knowledge, and the point of philosophy at least at its Platonic/Socratic inception is to show that this assumption is in fact illusory.    The early dialogues examine ideas like beauty, courage, justice, or truth itself – big ideas you might say and ones that define what it is to be human.    We all feel comfortable with such ideas and feel certain that we know what they mean, as indeed we do.     Yet the dialogues show that when we try to define them, we invariable run into problems.    Every definition is smaller than the thing it seeks to define and is therefore inadequate.    To take a modern example, we could define justice as fairness, and indeed perhaps the best selling work of political theory of the 20th century John Rawles’ Theory of Justice is based entirely on such a definition.   Yet it is clearly inadequate.   We speak for example of justice “being done”, and mean by this that it contains an active element of retribution and vengeance, but there is no such notion in the idea of fairness which is a passive standard.    Fairness is therefore less than justice and it does not help us to understand the notion of justice to reduce it to something smaller than itself.    Modern analytical thinking takes this further and believes essentially that all problems of philosophy are simply problems of definition and resolved by clear understanding of the meaning of words, by linguistic analysis.    But each definition is in fact smaller than the thing it defines, and quickly the definitions reduce back to two things,­­ or rather two aspects of one thing, namely on the one side the ego, the Cartesian cogito, which apprehends the definition, and the abstraction of pure reason on the other which admits of no difference so is completely empty.   It’s not even necessarily a long journey, and just in the single step of Rawles’ reduction of justice to fairness, it is apparent that this has already happened.    Fairness is just a notion of pure reason which has no content, and anything is fair if it conforms to the requirements of abstract reason, one of which is that it must apply equally to all things, and by the same token cannot apply to anything in particular (if it did it wouldn’t be pure reason).   And the person making this judgement is the abstract ego, equally without content.   Not John Rawles, but all or any of us.    It’s pure abstraction and as such pure emptiness.    No useful judgement about our notion of Justice can come from pure emptiness.

It makes sense then to say that if we imagine that by reducing justice to fairness we are adding to knowledge or expressing a truth, then we have fallen into an illusion, because we have done the opposite.    So what should a philosopher do instead?    The first step is to respect the object of our enquiry, in this case justice.    We could then ask where does it come from?    We automatically assume that we learn it from experience.    We imagine that we see examples of it, hear them associated with the word justice, and gradually we build up a picture from these different experiences of the general idea of justice.    What could be more natural – surely this is how we acquire all knowledge?    But a little reflection tells us that it’s not so simple.  How can we recognise an example of justice, if we don’t have the notion of justice in the first place?   This is an instance of the eristic paradox, which asks, if you seek knowledge, how are you going to recognise it when you find it?    If you recognise it, it must be because you already have it, so you don’t need to look for it;  but if you don’t have it already then there’s no point looking because you won’t recognise it when you find it, and you won’t know what to look for.

The notion that our idea of justice comes from experience then turns out to be illusory, because we cannot have an experience of justice unless we first have the notion of justice which allows us to recognise it.    To a being which has no concept of justice, perhaps an animal or even conceivably a human, it is not possible to create that notion from experience, because it is not possible to have the experience without the notion.    But we resist this conclusion very strongly as it seem to go against everything we believe and we much prefer to gloss over the inconvenient truth of that observation and assert instead that everything is at it appears to be and appearance is the true reality.    After all that’s what it appears to be, which may be why we call it appearance.  But for there to be appearance, something must be appearing and what is appearing is not itself appearance, but the ideas which we use to make sense of, no, to constitute that appearance.    The object of philosophical enquiry then must be not the appearances of those ideas, but the ideas themselves.   Experience rightly understood is the application of ideas to sense data which make those data comprehensible and allow us to experience appearance as something meaningful.   Locke said that there is nothing in thought that did not first come from experience, meaning sense data, but this is the precise opposite of the truth and a profound misunderstanding, because sense data and ideas are fundamentally different substances and there is no conceivable way that sense data can give rise to ideas.    Locke is fully in the grip of Plato’s illusion.   Specifically he confuses sensation with experience.   Sensation gives us data, but not experience which only comes when we question the data, which means applying ideas to them or interpreting them.

A (true) philosopher takes a further step and grants these ideas their full independence.   A sophist, or a modern philosopher (with a few notable exceptions) does not.   They think ideas belong to them and are created by their reason, whereas a true philosopher sees reason as a tool we can use to help us to understand and get to know ideas, but not as something that plays any part in their creation.    The relationship between a sophist or modern philosopher and ideas is analogous to a disfunctional personal relationship where one party seeks to dominate, possess and control the other, instead of respecting them and letting them go free.    And the true philosopher, in his relationship with ideas, knows that he will never fully know them, just as we never fully know our friends and loved ones who are always capable of surprising us, even though we may know them very well and perhaps better than anybody else.   It’s an infinite journey, and that’s what makes it worthwhile.    Reading classical philosophy I certainly do pick up a sense of common purpose and warmth, while the moderns always seem to give the impression that their aim is to produce an argument that brooks no opposition.   It’s not exactly a friendly approach, but it stems from assumptions that are made – without normally the awareness that any assumption has in fact been made – about the nature of truth.

So what is philosophy?    For many people this is a question we hardly need to ask.   Just as we are sure we know what we mean by an idea like justice, we are sure we know what we mean by philosophy.   It’s a certain type of writing about a certain subject matter.    We know who writes it, what we study in philosophy courses, and what it looks like.   What further definition do we need?    But actually huge swathes of this material on closer examination are not the same as philosophy, because they do not respect truth, grant it its independence, understand that appearance is not reality but an illusion – all these things are necessary prerequisites for the study of philosophy and without which that study has no purpose, and does not in fact ultimately make any kind of sense.

Before the birth of “modern” philosophy, which for the sake of convenience we can say began with Descartes, philosophy was largely defined by the classical theories of Plato and Aristotle, and though there was plenty of diversity the basic purpose of philosophy, and its strong links with religion, remained clear.    It knew what it was about and what it was for.    With Descartes everything changed and quite suddenly a new creature appeared.   Quite abruptly, philosophy ceased to be a quest for truth that respected its independence, and instead became ratiocination.    It was all about a subjective logic, analogous to and arguably indistinguishable from mathematics.

Pretty soon this developed into the movement that became known, perversely, as the Enlightenment.    The basic principal of the Enlightenment is the same as that of sophism, namely that appearance is reality.    This is not so much a result of a considered rejection of the classical view that it is illusion, as a straightforward unreflecting acceptance of the illusion itself.    Enlightenment says what you see is what you get, and there is nothing more to worry about.    It’s a view which to a philosopher is exactly the opposite of enlightenment – it’s a welcoming, indeed an exaltation of pre-philosophical darkness and ignorance, and a rejection of the profound insight that makes philosophy both possible and worthwhile.   And this view totally dominates philosophy as taught in universities worldwide, and particularly in British universities where an extreme version developed into what has become known as “analytical” philosophy.   By calling itself enlightened it implies that older thought is primitive and superstitious, and that thinkers like Plato were too contaminated by the ignorance and prejudices of their times to be capable of pure rational thought, but that in our modern world we can (for reasons that aren’t quite clear) escape such pernicious influences and at last follow pure uncontaminated reason to find perfect truth.   There is an important kernel of truth in this idea which we will return to as the ancient world is indeed fundamentally different from our own, but the idea that that difference is that the ancients couldn’t think rationally is not a convincing one.

One of the great tenets of the enlightenment, set out by Hume, is that there are only two types of statement, relations of ideas and matters of fact.     Relations of ideas are analytic meaning that they depend only on themselves for their truth and can be deduced from each other, like the propositions of mathematics.    Matters of fact are synthetic meaning that they are connected only externally by observation.    Any statement that does not fall into either category is “metaphysical” and meaningless.    Philosophers have questioned this view and Kant notably thought he had found another category of valid judgement, the synthetic a priori, but for the most part the distinction has been accepted as axiomatic, and developed into an extreme form in particular by A.J.Ayer and other founders of the analytic tradition.

A consequence of this view is that the notion of truth becomes lost.    You can see this at various levels.   At an informal level, most people who study philosophy just don’t believe in the idea that doing so can reveal any kind of truth any more, and are not encouraged to do so.    There are so many schools of thought in modern philosophy espousing different versions of truth, all reasonably consistent, but as they conflict they cannot all be true, and most students end up concluding that philosophy can’t decide between them.    If there is a purpose to philosophy at all it has to do with learning a certain style of abstract thinking (as if abstraction were a good thing).   The phrase “sharpening your wits” is often heard.   You can judge for yourself whether you think the typical analytical philosopher is sharp-witted or not, but in their own view this is what they are and what justifies their profession.    It is considered a wise and enlightened view nowadays to say that we no longer believe in Truth, Absolutes and so on.   After all we live in a pluralist society and have largely defeated the horrors of totalitarianism with its dogmatic concepts.    Surely it is wise, enlightened even, to say that there is no such thing as absolute truth and to aspire to it is misguided and dangerous?    Isn’t this what Socrates meant by being aware of our own ignorance?    But Socrates would make short work of such a view.    If we don’t believe in absolute truth, do we believe in relative truth, or is nothing true?    If something is relatively true it’s also relatively untrue, so that won’t do as truth, and if there is no truth at all then there is no knowledge, and that’s hardly acceptable either.

            If we look more closely at the axiom that there are only relations of ideas and matters of fact, we can see at a more formal level how the notion of truth has disappeared.    Relations of ideas, provided they are correctly reasoned, are as certainly true as any mathematical proposition.    We know 2 and 3 are always 5 and we don’t need to check this with any observation because we know it from the definitions of the numbers.   But at the same time, while this observation has the comfortable certainly of abstract reason, and we may not reasonably doubt it, this is not the same as saying it expresses a truth, because it has no content, and a truth must tell us something real.    The abstraction and formality of pure reason means it can never express any truth about the reality that lies outside it, and it is that reality that we live in and which interests us.   On the other hand when we turn to the synthetic judgements, the matters of fact, we have to admit that these depend on our senses and that these may be wrong.    Even if they are right, our statements amount to no more than working hypotheses about the nature of out experience which we accept so long as nothing occurs that conflicts with our hypotheses.    The model here of course is natural science, which we know has been through and rejected many hypotheses that seemed impregnable in our lifetimes.    A hypothesis is not a truth and can never become one –  at best it’s just something that hasn’t yet been disproved. 

            So in this way “enlightened” thinking dispenses with the notion of truth not just through the plurality of conflicting truths it seems to lead us to, but formally and at the very heart of its thinking.     There simply isn’t a place in this scheme for truth.    Perhaps this is right?    That’s a question I’ll come back to, and certainly many “enlightened” thinkers would want to make the argument  that it is wise in fact to reject the notion that there is such a thing as wisdom.   Firstly though let’s think about the consequences for philosophy of such a view.     Philosophy was defined originally as love of truth, or love of wisdom.    With truth as object and goal, it is clear what philosophy is for and about.    But if there is no truth, then is there any point in doing philosophy at all?    The question answers itself and this does create real problems for contemporary philosophy.     It no longer has its original purpose.   So what can it do, and why?    Analytical philosophers tend to answer this by saying that philosophers are trained in thinking in a certain abstract way and in particular can be precise in use of language, definitions of words, and analysis of concepts and can bring this skill to bear to resolve both ethical questions (which they tend to argue are misunderstandings that evaporate under careful analysis) and to aid in more practical disciplines like science, as scientists and other practical chaps lack the training to be able to think abstractly and accurately about their experimental work – a view the practical chaps themselves receive with remarkable equanimity, given that they are certainly intelligent enough to be aware of the implication that they can’t be trusted to think for themselves about the theoretical aspect of their own disciplines.

It’s not, in short, a pretty sight and it’s hard to escape the suspicion that philosophy as currently taught is indeed what it seems to be to many looking in from the outside, that is, a pointless, self indulgent waste of time with no connection to ordinary reality.    I don’t actually subscribe to that view myself, and I think that properly understood modern philosophy has a great deal to offer.    But I do think that in order to get anything out of it it is necessary to go back to the classical roots of philosophy and remember what the original purpose was, and to revisit modern thought with this in mind.    This applies to modern philosophy in general – contemporary analytical philosophy I do think one can comfortably say is a pure waste of time with no content and no hope of ever attaining one.   And unless you have the misfortune to be signed up for a philosophy degree, you needn’t worry about it because there is little chance of it impinging on your life.   It has disappeared, to coin a vulgar phrase, up its own backside and there we can safely leave it.

Philosophy depends on the idea that what appears to us is an illusion.   That doesn’t quite mean that it’s unreal, but more that it misleads us in specific ways.    Plato chose to talk about the illusion of knowledge, and the idea that knowledge comes from experience, whereas the truth is the opposite, that it is knowledge that allows us to have experience.    Experience is a way we access that knowledge, as Plato put it, “remembering” it.    Commentators have interpreted this as meaning that our conceptual knowledge is “prenatal”, because Plato seems to imply that we are born with it.   This may be true but it carries the possible implication that it is a kind of pre-programming, like preinstalled software in the brain, perhaps encoded in DNA (for lack of any other materialist explanation).   This is perhaps not impossible but I don’t think it is the case and I will come on to an argument that suggests otherwise.    For the time being I think it’s more useful to use Plato’s language and say that ideas exist in another world, the world of forms, and set to one side for the time being the way that we access that world.    Let’s not hide from the basic fact though that although Plato reaches his conclusions through simple reason, or more accurately dialogue or to give a fancier but sometimes abused name, dialectic, nevertheless his view is profoundly counterintuitive and the view that all knowledge is remembering, that nothing can be new, expresses a profound mystery.    It is not possible to understand this point without also being fundamentally changed by it.   Like quantum physics, it’s fundamentally spooky, and if you are not disturbed by it you probably haven’t understood it properly.   Rightly understood it turns everything you assumed about the nature of reality on its head.

There are other illusions in the way we see the world, related to the one Plato describes but distinct from it.    One which is perhaps most prevalent today could be called the Rationalist illusion, or to say the same thing from a slightly different standpoint, the individualist illusion.    This hold that reason and the individual is or should be the measure of everything (= the Absolute) – although those who fall into this illusion do not believe that they hold any particular view.   They just think that this is the nature of reality – that’s how illusions work.    To give a concrete example at the level of philosophy, perhaps the clearest would be the theory of the social contract.     This hold that states (i.e. political bodies) are formed as a result of an agreement made between people who recognise that it is in their best interest to give up the pure freedom of a state of nature in order to live in secure regulated communities and thus create government, law, and all the machinery of the state.    It is hard to find any modern political theory that does not hold this in some way or another – Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Rawles, all base their thinking on the notion of a social contract, and it seems that there just isn’t any other mechanisms they could refer to to give a philosophical account of political life, because for them it is the individual – abstract, isolated, absolute – that is the building block of social life.   On the other hand, like Rawles’ account of justice, it is hardly difficult to spot some fundamental problems with it.   For one thing there is an empirical problem, as with only a very few exceptions political entities come in to being in practice not as a result of agreements but as a result of acts of war.    It is argued that even so we can imagine a contract being made even if it never or only rarely happens in practice, and that this gives us a useful way of talking about the state.    It’s defended as an asbstraction, a convenient fiction, and it’s the privilege of philosophers to be allowed to think at a level of abstraction that doesn’t need to be supported by anything so vulgar as evidence.    But this is a misunderstanding of the nature of philosophy which rightly understood has nothing to do with abstraction which should be an abhorrence to it (and related perhaps to the illusory view that knowledge is acquired by “abstracting” general principles from our experience).     That a theory could be put forward that is so plainly contradicted by reality shows not so much poor thinking, as the power of an illusion, which is so great that its adherents will hold to it firmly in spite of the fact that it is plainly contradicted by the evidence.    Another more modern word for illusion here would be ideology, and ideology so profound that almost all modern philosophers buy into it without having any awareness that they are making a choice, let alone a wrong one.    In terms of the contract theory, the illusion is that we are each isolated individuals and political association can therefore only be understood as a type of relationship between individuals (individual = absolute, association = relative), which is indeed the way things appear to us; but the truth is the opposite, that we gain our individuality through participation in the universal and it is only through participating in the state, the family, and other institutions that our individuality becomes real,.  The Enlightenment confuses our individuality with our particularity.   As particulars we are just specimens of a type or species with some accidental characteristics that distinguish us from other specimens, and from this point of view we can reasonably be viewed as isolated atoms, essentially identical and treated as building block of our culture.   We become individuals through participation in the universal, by taking on ideas from the world of the ideal, and we are really different from each other - not just abstract rational egos as we are for contractarians, but real people.   Individuality, to put it aphoristically, is a synthesis of the universal and particular, not another name for the particular.

For a second thing the theory of the social contract is not a new one invented by the enlightenment but one which also was used in the ancient world by sophists and it was tackled by Plato in the Republic.    After all if political life is created by an agreement beween us then there is little more to be said by philosophers about the state, and the only reason to study it would be the practical one of learning the art of government.    But the ancients held a different view and Aristotle was clear that the state is both natural and prior to the individual.    We gain our individuality as citizens through our participation in the state – we don’t create it, it creates us, just as ideas create experience, not vice versa.    In the modern world a political theory needs to account for the element of power in politics, not just as an add-on, as it is in social contract theory, but as an essential part of political life.   But this contradicts the happy illusion that the state is as it is because, though actually we had no part in creating it, our reason tells us that we would have done had we had the opportunity and therefore we can imagine that we did create it and it is in fact a product of pure reason.   And this is a pure illusion, because it isn’t.    It’s a product not of reason but of history, which includes rational thought but also passions and ambitions, bloody conflicts and persecutions as well as wise and courageous actions, and a philosophy that comfortably “abstracts” from all this is a philosophy that is disconnected from reality, and in a specific way we will come back to in a later chapter.

The thought of the Enlightenment then is fundamentally empty, and even Kant, surely the greatest thinker of the Enlightenment, gives us a philosophy which for all its merits is devoid of any real content.   The Categorical Imperative for example gives us only a formula for resolving moral issues (act so that my action can always be equally willed for everyone) which does not tell us what to do, or even why to do it.   Why should I always act rationally and against my inclinations?   It seems an arbitrary choice and I could just as well assert that my inclinations are more important and real than the purely formal considerations of reason.    And yet the whole body of modern thought is based on a vitally important principle, the freedom of the individual.    The demand that I, the free thinking subject, should be the measure of all things is not only valid but essential.    The human spirit, the realm of the ideal, can only exist for a subject which is free and we can even define that spirit as freedom.    This has some very significant consequences.

For Plato, freedom is important but different.    A free man is defined for him as one who fears slavery more than death.   Yet this is by no means a universal principal but something that distinguishes the free man from the slave and slavery for him and for the ancients in general was an entirely natural condition.    When we consider the Spartan conditions Plato expects his guardian class to live under in his ideal state it is clear that the freedom of the individual is of no consequence or even interest to him.    We could say that the freedom he values is objective – not being a slave – but not subjective, being the author of one’s own fate and that it is the latter freedom that defines the modern age.

In terms of the aim of philosophy this has significant consequences.    Plato’s main aim we could say is to demonstrate the core truth of idealism, namely that it is the ideal that is real, not the phenomenal which is mere appearance.   He seeks to show this as a fact,  albeit a counterintuitive one.   From a modern point of view, because of the principle of subjective freedom or the freedom of the individual, this is no longer enough.    We need to show not just that the ideal is what is real, but more than this, that it must be real.    The quality of this “must” is the difference between two worlds.   We could express it by saying that while for Plato the ideal has no need to exist, in the modern world the ideal does have this internal drive and must become real as a matter of necessity.    The task of the philosopher then is to show this necessity.   Paradoxically then, the principal of the individual freedom that powered the enlightenment, and which divorced from recognition of the reality of the ideal results only in emptiness, when united with that recognition introduces a new requirement, that we must demonstrate that necessity if we are to be satisfied with the basic proposition that the ideal is what is real.   |It’s not enough to say it looks like it may be so – subjective freedom demands that we must show that it is necessarily so.

Because the world of phenomena is an illusion and misleads us into taking it to be true and away from the truth that makes philosophy possible, that it is the ideal not the phenomenal that is real, to become a philosopher it is necessary first to adopt this position and because it is a profoundly counterintuitive one, to become a philosopher requires an initiation.    Plato’s work is about this initiation, and little else.    In much of his work he is concerned to demonstrate that the opposite view, that the phenomenal is real, is incoherent when examined in detail.   In other more mature works like the Republic, he also works directly with the ideal, with concepts such as the cardinal virtues which he treats as real independent entities.   The two approaches however are not linked, or only linked externally.

The modern approach, the fact of subjective freedom, requires that we link the two.   This means that a true initiation into the philosophical viewpoint has to take a specific form.    We need to start not from the ideal, but from phenomena, because phenomena are what appear to us to be real.   We start in other words from the illusory.   We don’t say to those who live in the illusion that they are mistaken and that our view that the ideal is real is a better one.   Ultimately that’s just a matter of opinion and won’t resolve things either way.   Instead we enter into the illusion and look at it from the inside and in its own terms, knowing that what we need to find, if we are right about the reality of the ideal, that we can show this as a matter of necessity from the point of view of the phenomenal.

Now, the illusion is by its very nature a claim to knowledge.    That is to say, it is the nature of the illusion itself to present itself as being real and that the person to whom it appears takes it to be the truth, and to realise that it is not in fact knowledge is to escape the illusion.  But where does this lead us?    Let’s take an example.    In modern philosophy, a popular idea is that the good is that which leads to the greatest happiness.   It’s easy to criticise such a view as reductive (clearly the good is more than this) tautologous (if what people want is happiness saying that there should be maximum happiness just says people should get what they want, without saying anything about what this is or should be), empty, without meaning, and ultimately self contradictory and incoherent (what if people want things other people don’t?   If we have to go to war is that creating happiness?).    This criticism however does not take us closer to understanding what the good is, only what it is not.   For those of us inititated into the philosophical view, we know that the good is an ideal with an independent existence that appears in phenomena, and is part of the human spirit, what makes us what we are.   But for the uninitiate this view is closed, indeed seems ridiculous and impossible.   So the dilemma is how do we show the uninitiate not only that his philosophy is empty and untrue (for the most part, he knows that much as we have seen and even argues for this position with some pride) but also that there is necessarily a truth he doesn’t yet acknowledge?

As we have seen, it is not enough to assert that the ideal is real, as Plato did, because however strongly he may have supported that assertion in his work, the existence of the entire body of modern philosophy, which simply denies and passes over this fact, and which is entirely dominant, is enough to show that the contrary view, that it is the phenomenal that is real, is equally strong.    If we agree that the great power of the Enlightenment, which may be not so much the power of its thinkers as it is the spirit of an age, is the recognition of the power of the individual and the absolute character of the freedom of the individual, of Fichte’s I=I, of Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception, or Descartes Cogito, then the challenge is to unite this conception of the Absolute with the Platonic view of the absolute as the world of ideal form.      We need to understand the Absolute, or the True, not only as Substance – the platonic view – but also equally as Subject, indeed everything depends on this.    At the level we are working at at the moment, this is just an assertion, suggested by the lack of content of modern philosophy compared to ancient, as well as by inadequacies in the ancient.    The project of showing the truth to be both substance and subject seems an impossible one requiring us to unite two completely opposed views of the nature of truth.   How can the truth be both “out there” in an independent realm of ideas and  equally and absolutely in the human subject?   To prove the point we have to go further and show how the realm of the ideal, of the human spirit, which is also the divine spirit, is not just suggested by our experience, and there to be acknowledged or not as we please, but that it must necessarily be so, and it falls to us as philosophers to demonstrate that necessity.

Now, because the illusion starts with the world of phenomena, of things as they appear to us, we also have to start there if we are to engage with those who fall prey to the illusion and have not yet taken up a philosophical point of view that recognises the primacy of the ideal, the standpoint of idealism.    Because those who fall prey to the illusion do so in the misapprehension that it is truth, to engage with them is necessarily to engage with a claim to the truth, that the truth lies in the phenomena they observe.   Should such a claim turn out to be valid, then we need go no further (and philosophy would have no point).   If it is not, we must demonstrate to the uninitiate two things.   Firstly we must show that his claim to have the truth is false.    This in general is easy enough and we have already seen that some of the central tenets of modern philosophy are at best empty and mostly self-contradictory.   But we must also show how this can lead us to an understanding that it is the ideal that is real, and to a concrete understanding of what that ideal is – its structure and meaning.     To go beyond simple assertion of a different point of view towards a philosophical understanding of the truth therefore is to move from the phenomenal towards the absolute through a process of dialectical necessity.    If you like a Germanic turn of phrase, you could say that the route to philosophical initiation must be a Phenomenology of Spirit, and indeed the one great modern philosopher who understood this called the introduction to his system, his initiation, exactly that, and I will be following closely in his footsteps in what follows.