"All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books."
-Thomas Carlyle

by Kjersten Oligney

After 2,000 years, the Western world has come full circle.

In ancient Athens, science-minded philosophers called Sophists hailed the abolishment of religion as a great step forward, only to discover that they were left with no way of determining moral behavior. Relativism — the epitome of irrationality — ensued. Two thousand years later, the same cycle was repeated. During periods called the Enlightenment and modernism, the Christian religion was rejected by scientific philosophers, but they were also ultimately unable to mandate ethical behavior. The resemblance of these two situations implies that Plato’s philosophy — much of which refuted the ideals of the Sophists — could have a new relevance in the twenty-first century.

First, who were the Sophists? The Sophist movement in Athens arose simultaneously with a new interest in physical science, and it has been speculated that the two movements were prompted by the same spirit.¹ This scientific movement likely gave impetus to the Sophistic tendency to sweep away traditions if they could not stand up to empirical observation. They rejected anything that suggested the transcendent or religious.² The novelty and progressive aura of the Sophists, together with their extravagant promises, propelled them to fantastic heights of success.³

One of the most famous Sophists, Protagoras, taught his students how to argue persuasively for both sides of an issue. Whether he did so to help his students understand the complexity of issues or to promote relativism is unclear, but his students quickly developed a method to make the weaker argument defeat the stronger⁴. Another well-known Sophist was Gorgias, who mocked the few Sophists who did claim to teach truth.⁵ Thucydides was a third famous Sophist. He had traveled extensively and collected enormous amounts of information from various cultures. Seeing the differences in the mores and laws of these cultures contributed greatly to his sense of relativity.⁶

In The Republic, Plato’s Socrates defends the absolute nature of justice against his Sophist acquaintances by showing that the just person is better off than the unjust person. The Sophists had a very cynical view of society and argued that men banded together and agreed not to do one another harm for purely self-interested reasons. Though individuals may not want to act justly to their neighbors, still they do, so that their own property and possessions will be safe. If this is the only reason for justice, it is merely a social construction and the man able to do his neighbors harm and get away with it has the better and happier life.

The Sophists rejected the idea of absolute justice and good by pointing out that even the gods themselves often acted contrary to justice and goodness. Plato’s challenge was to argue logically for the absolute and inviolable nature of justice. He accomplished this so completely that his republic has been accused of being a theocracy.⁷

Plato’s arguments for justice lost their urgent potency when Christianity became widespread throughout the civilized world. Christianity had its own absolute view of justice and injustice, imposed by a just God. Medieval philosophers such as Augustine continued to incorporate Platonic ideas into their theology, but there was no desperate need for them. They looked for rational, non-revelatory proofs for the existence of God, but both they and their audiences were merely looking for a way to justify what they already believed.

With the advent of eighteenth century Enlightenment thought, the Sophist train of thought was reinvigorated. Like the Sophists, Enlightenment thinkers rejected the spiritual and metaphysical as myth and instead glorified science. Enlightenment thought originally lacked the relativism of Sophist thought, but the offspring of the Enlightenment, modernism, eventually supplied this lacking ingredient and finished the rejuvenation.

The Enlightenment was born because of advances in science. Nicolaus Copernicus published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543; Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei expanded on this theory shortly thereafter; and John Newton completed the quartet with his 1687 Principia Mathematica.⁸ Galileo was forced by the Catholic Church to recant in 1633. His run-in with the church and Aristotelian intellectuals was a sign of the growing antagonism between the old church ways and the new science.

The Enlightenment began in earnest in England with the works of John Locke, whose philosophy stemmed from Newton’s Principia Mathematica. This latter work enabled men to explain the world around them according to orderly rules rather than superstition. Locke applied this heady method to the worlds of philosophy and politics. Like the Sophists, John Locke theorized that men banded together solely for the mutual protection of their property and possessions.⁹ He did not see his philosophy as being incompatible with Christianity’s mores, and even authored a work entitled The Reasonableness of Christianity, but most of his followers rejected Christianity in favor of deism. Deism allowed the philosophes to speak of natural rights granted by God without having to adhere to the moral code dictated by the Christian God.

The French philosophes of the mid-eighteenth century — notably Francois Marie Arouet (better known as Voltaire), Claude Helvetius, the Marquis de Condorcet, Denis Diderot, Jean d’Alembert and Jean-Jacques Rousseau — took their cue from their English predecessors. They combined Locke’s empiricism with Descartes and Leibniz’s rationalism to create a new world order,¹⁰ though the most complete reconciliation of the two did not occur until Immanuel Kant took it in hand.¹¹

Voltaire’s biting tongue lashed into the secular and religious elites of Europe, much to the applause of his fellow philosophes. He developed no theory of his own, but championed Locke’s work in France with the belief that science would adequately explain the world and thus make religion obsolete. He blamed religion for the suppression of the masses, and his sarcastic characterizations of corrupt clergymen earned him the reputation of a dangerous enemy of the Church.¹²

The philosophes’ confidence in their ability to construct a superior moral code based on natural law was such that they did not hesitate to dismiss Plato’s writings as superstition. Rousseau alone liked him: Voltaire ridiculed him for being unintelligible, Montesquieu condescendingly labeled him a poet and Thomas Jefferson could barely get through his writings.¹³

Like the Sophists before them, the philosophes were highly critical of anything that could not be proven empirically and were thus suspicious of anything hinting at metaphysics.¹⁴ Their theory of natural law as it dealt with human relationships and society was hardly arrived at empirically, but its association with science kept it from being labeled metaphysical.

As part of their rejection of Christian and Platonic metaphysics, the philosophes created a new paradigm of history: men had risen above myth through the original philosophers in Athens, but then declined back into superstition and darkness with the advent of Christianity, and were just now reemerging into the light — the Enlightenment. They studied the ancient pre-Socratics and claimed them as the founders of Western thought and civilization rather than the Judeo-Christian heritage.¹⁵

The scientifically-based natural law was extremely important to the philosophes as they rejected Christianity. They were eager to destroy Christianity precisely because they believed they could construct a superior moral society on the concepts of natural right.¹⁶ Though the Enlightenment is known as the Age of Criticism, they did not criticize in order to create a void, but in order to make way for a better system. The Enlightened thinkers in France offered a fresh, simple and moral alternative to the corruption of the Church; the philosophes did not think of themselves as promoting immorality but a rather a higher morality than that offered by the established religion.

What was not immediately apparent to the philosophes was that their theory of natural law contained the seeds of its own destruction. The promotion of natural right and the stripping of society to a loose coalition of self-interested people banded together for mutual protection was guaranteed over time to weaken the communal spirit that makes society possible.¹⁷ Also, the essential partnership between natural right and science was broken by Darwinian evolution. Eventually, it pushed the Western world into modernism, and the mechanical and uninspiring view of life taught by the four major figures of modernism — Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche — has proven to be ultimately unfulfilling.

The philosophes abolished the traditional conception of society as an organic being in which each person constituted a different part and relied on the other parts because of their differences.¹⁸ The Enlightenment deconstruction of this body politic, simultaneous with the destruction of the Christian moral code, liberated men to look out for their own interests and to demand that their government do the same. While not apparently negative, the individualistic view disrupted traditional reasons for caring for others and treating them justly. Rousseau realized this and emphasized the beauty of love and relationships in an effort to retain relatedness.¹⁹

The Enlightenment construction of government was long preserved in most parts of the Western world by the restraining doctrines of natural right, in which each person is entitled to certain rights, and residual Christian beliefs. Progressively, however, individualism has come to the fore. This is seen the most clearly in the family, traditionally the strongest source of relatedness. Women look for self-fulfillment outside of the family, insisting that they have the same opportunities as their husbands. Spouses separate when the relationship is not longer fulfilling, whether or not young children are involved. Not surprisingly, children’s respect for and relationship with parents is declining.²⁰ Outside of the family, ethnic groups are re-coalescing, vehemently demanding their rights and denouncing anyone, real or imaginary, who circumscribes them.²¹ Thus it becomes apparent that while natural right provided the rationale for protecting individuals from other members of society, it did nothing to foster a sense of community, without which society has difficulty functioning.

The introduction of Darwinian evolution was far more devastating to and ultimately must sound the death knell of natural right. As already noted, Newton’s expostulation on the rational laws according to which the world operated was translated into the realm of human relationships, and it was claimed that each man was endowed with natural rights. The credibility of natural rights rested on the existence of a god who did the endowing. The Christian God was not needed, merely a creator to set things in motion and grant mankind its rights.

The advent of Charles Darwin’s biological evolution forces science and the philosophy of natural rights to part ways. It is manifestly difficult to claim that monkeys at some stage of advancement mysteriously gained special rights. More specifically, evolution does away with the concept of a Creator-God, and only a God could endow mankind with natural rights. If science is to remain tied to politics, then society must become almost literally a "dog-eat-dog" world (with genetically superior dogs preying on evolutionarily slow dogs) where each looks out for himself and no one intervenes to help the weak. Friedrich Nietzsche recognized this and turned to a full-blooded might-makes-right theory, even incorporating evolutionary thought into his theory.

Darwin was arguably the most important influence in modernism, both because of his direct contributions and his influence on the remaining three modernist leaders. His Origin of Species abolished the idea that men are the creative invention of God; instead, man became the outcome of a brutal process of natural selection. Even man’s moral sense was described in terms of natural selection.²²

The Darwinian view touches on every aspect of life and strips mystery and color from everything it touches. Though pockets of resistance to evolutionary science exist in Christian circles, Darwin’s thought has made deep inroads into religious life. The inerrancy of Scripture is often rejected because of its account of creation, and many religious leaders view Christianity as merely a "highly-evolved species of religion-in-general."²³

Marx extended the Enlightenment deconstruction of the idea of an organic community. He believed that at the heart of any community, other than the theoretical communist one, lies a fundamental conflict between the "haves" and the "have-nots." He optimistically taught that the capitalist societies would become increasingly conflict-ridden until they eventually collapsed, at which point, a paradisic communist society would be born (note the strong Darwinian flavor of this conjecture). Though his hope for a communist heaven has been discredited in the Western world, his view of society as a harsh collation of exploitative individuals has remained. Now, not only is society seen as a voluntary grouping of individuals rather than an organic body, but these individuals are seen exploitative and necessarily at odds with one another.

Marx also concluded that because man-in-general does not exist, a universal code of morality likewise does not exist. He claimed that "communists preach no morality at all," that they merely foretell what the proletariat will be forced to do. Not only did he reject morality, he also rejected the law of reason as an abstract science.²⁴ This rejection struck at the foundations of Enlightenment thinking, working away at both its moral and rational base.

Finally, Marx claimed that the arts, religion and politics were merely a bourgeois superstructure based on the substructure of harsh economic reality. This went far in stripping the arts and religion of its claims to universality and beauty.

Freud’s examination of the human psyche continued the demystifying of life and ultimately killed the idea of genuine love and pure familial relationships. He explained that love is merely sublimated lust and all emotion is at root a brute drive.²⁵ Interestingly, though he did much to continue the modernist point of view, he also began picking at the edges until they frayed. Rather than explaining men as rational, intellectual creatures, he portrayed them as motivated by unconscious desires and complexes. Taken in full measure, this would dispel any euphoric trust in reason; Freud saved himself from this step by presenting his finding about the irrationalities of humans as a science that could be taught.

Nietzsche finished the philosophes’ goal of dismantling divine religion with his claim that religion was the opiate of the masses which drained them of true vitality.²⁶ Nietzsche, ironically, also stands out for his rejection the modernist mindset altogether. Leaning heavily on Darwin’s evolutionary theory, he ridiculed morality and timid altruism as signs of a slave mentality. Those of the master mentality are guided by their "will to power," and they beat the rest into complying with their will. He followed Darwin’s theory to its logical conclusion and claimed that the masters would evolve into a race of superior "overmen." He recognized that Darwin’s theory had killed God, and thus viewed morality and the "safe" Enlightenment doctrines of equality and freedom as impediments to the development of the new race. He argued against the idea that a just society is preferable and claimed that reason is nothing more than the will to power.²⁷

The influence of these four modernists spread to every field from religion to anthropology, from the humanities to the social sciences. By the time they had done their work, most of the beauty and harmony of life had been destroyed to make way for a functional, scientific explanation.

Today, there is widespread confusion as the Enlightenment experiment is failing, suffering at the hands of its modernist progeny. Though there is little sign that the abolition of our cherished rights will be accepted, there is no longer any sturdy ground on which to base them. Religion was blithely cast aside as a determining moral code because it appeared another was in the offing, but the moral code offered by natural right has had its scientific legs knocked out from underneath it. Darwin’s elimination of God not only killed the basis for natural right, it opened the door for Freud’s destruction of love and reason, Marx’s hostile view of human relations and Nietzsche’s will to power. The Enlightenment failed in both of its claims: it has logically disintegrated, and it has not created a better world.

It should be noted in passing that the two world wars of the twentieth century alerted many people to the failure of the Enlightenment and modernist promise of a better world. The blithe assurance of progress was shattered by the carnage of both wars, and the horrific aspect of remaking a "better" world a la Hitler caused many to doubt the innate goodness of science and evolution.²⁸ Suddenly evolution could not be embraced wholeheartedly; natural selection among humans had to be ignored and denied.²⁹ Advanced war machines and the atomic bomb also showed that scientific progress could not be considered inherently good.

The collapse of the Enlightenment metanarrative and its subsequent modernist perspective has led to what many have labeled postmodernism. Though it is defined in various ways and some question if it is truly a movement at all, postmodernism has attracted attention from every field, from philosophy to the social sciences to the arts. Sociologist Axel van den Berg has defined it loosely as "the claim that the singular and self-confident ‘discourse’ of modernity . . . stressing Reason, Science, Progress and Universalism is giving way to a plethora of more plastic, particularistic and precarious ‘discourses,’ based on more frankly ‘local’ and culturally specific identities."³⁰

In the wake of the moral collapse occasioned by Darwin and Nietzsche, various attempts have been made to construct an ethic for living, but they have failed to fill the void. The highly controversial professor, Peter Singer, has attempted in his book Practical Ethics to find a logical basis on which to attack relativism and promote his own (rather draconian) code of utilitarianism, but to do so, he has to make several unproven assumptions. Concern over the lack of morals being instilled into children has led many schools to begin teaching values — but values on what basis? This question is ignored entirely, and the curriculum has yet to produce any discernable effect.³¹

Thus it appears that the Western world has come full circle, back to the ancient Sophists. The debunking of religion in ancient Athens led to the relativism of the Sophists, just as the debunking in Christianity by the Enlightenment and modernism has led to postmodern relativism. The likeness of these two situations suggests rather strongly that the way has been opened for a renewed application of Plato’s moral philosophy.

It might be objected that Plato’s moral reasoning can no longer be taken seriously because of its benighted use of mythology. There are two related ways to answer this objection. First, it has been widely acknowledged that there is much depth and cohesion to Plato’s philosophy that has not always been immediately apparent, especially to the empirically-minded philosophes who were predisposed to reject metaphysics. Allan Bloom has noted that, far from fading into obscurity, the works of Plato are being read with more urgency and intensity than ever.³²

Second, absolute scientism has, in many ways, already passed its heyday. Because science promised a utopia, people rejected the transcendent, but as it has proved unable to follow through on its promise, people are turning back to the transcendent and spiritualism. There is a renewed openness to those things which cannot be definitively proven empirically. Spiritualism is growing by leaps and bounds, and is perhaps typified by the New Age movement. New Agers look for the spiritual in all of nature and often turn to such irrational means as tarot cards, palm reading and horoscopes. In short, the New Age movement in particular and the spiritualist movement in general is diametrically opposed to modern scientific rationalism.

Plato attempts to elucidate a transcendent world apart from the senses. Enlightenment thinkers, of course, rejected this as myth. Postmodernists are more willing to consider it. If it can be logically proven (for even postmodernists demand some degree of rationality) that this unseen world is possible, that could be sufficient.

A new wave of studies on Plato’s philosophies has taken care to examine his thoughts and statements in context, and a new recognition of his remarkable cohesion and brilliance has emerged as a result.³³ Jacques Derrida, in his short work entitled Khora, examines Plato’s conception of the receptacle from which the world emerges. He notes that Plato resorts to myth only when he cannot contain his thoughts in sterile argument, and that he always subordinates the myths to the concept he is attempting to elucidate.³⁴ This analysis of Plato’s work takes seriously Plato’s intent in using myth rather than rejecting it out-of-hand as superstition.

A third objection to Plato’s relevance to today’s world carries more weight — postmodernists no longer accept any universalist reasoning, in whatever form it might come. While this is true, two things must be considered. The first is that it appeared equally improbable in ancient Athens that those who embraced the Sophists’ relativism would ever accept Plato’s metaphysics. Many did, however, and Plato’s influence only increased in the succeeding generations. The second point probably explains the first: people will eventually become exhausted with exhaustion.³⁵ Postmodernism is in a very real sense, an exhausted reaction to the failure of Enlightenment and modernist promises. This will wear off sooner or later, and a new hope will capture the Western world’s imagination.

Why not Plato?

1	Jacqueline de Romilly, The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens, trans Janet Lloyd (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 14.
2	Ibid., 10, 103-107.
3	Ibid., 4, 35.
4	The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists, trans and commentary Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 205.
5	de Romilly, The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens, 70.
6	Ibid., 17.
7	R.S. Bluck, "Is Plato’s Republic a Theocracy?" The Philosophical Quarterly 5 (January 1955), 69.
8	Donald W. Hanson, "Science, Prudence, and Folly in Hobbes’s Political Theory," Political Theory 21 (November 1993), 643.
9	John Locke, Of Civil Government, Second Essay (Los Angelos: Henry Regnery Company, 1955).
10	Peter A. Schouls, Descartes and the Enlightenment (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), 4-12.
11	Roger Scruton, Kant: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
12	Sir Isaiah Berlin, The Age of Enlightenment: The 18th Century Philosophers (New York: The New American Library of World Literature, Inc., 1956), 113-114.
13	Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1976), 82-83.
14	Ibid., 130-140.
15	Ibid., 35, 72-74.
16	Ibid., 8.
17	Andreas Dorpalen, "Man and His Destiny: The Darwin-Marx-Wagner Debate, 1859-1959," in Darwin, Marx and Wagner: A Symposium, ed. Henry L. Plaine (Ohio State University Press, 1962), 4.
18	Lorraine Y. Landry, Marx and the Postmodern Debates: An Agenda for Critical Theory (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2000), 3.
19	Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 116.
20	Ibid., 82-136.
21	Ibid., 331-332.
22	Hutchins, ed., Great Books of the Western World, vol. 49, Darwin, 321-322.
23	Greene, Darwin and the Modern Worldview, 26, 47.
24	Eugene Kamenka, Marxism and Ethics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1969), 4-20.
25	Peter Gay, ed., The Freud Reader (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989).
26	Louis Markos, Lewis Agonistes: How C.S. Lewis Can Train Us to Wrestle with the Modern and Postmodern World (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2003), 32-39.
28	Landry, Marx and the Postmodern Debates: An Agenda for Critical Theory, 46.
29	Dorpalen, "Man and His Destiny: The Darwin-Marx-Wagner Debate, 1859-1959," in Darwin, Marx and Wagner: A Symposium, ed. Plaine, 20; John C. Greene, Darwin and the Modern Worldview (New York: The New American Library, 1963), 50.
29	Greene, Darwin and the Modern Worldview, 90-91.
30	Axel van den Berg, "Liberalism without Reason?" Contemporary Sociology, 25, no.1 (January 1996), 19.
31	Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, 61.
32	Allan Bloom, ed., The Republic of Plato (Basic Books, 1968), vii.
33	Plato’s Dialogues: New Studies and Interpretations, ed. Gerald A. Press (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1993).
34	Derrida, On the Name, 101-102.
35	Todd Gitlin, "Postmodernism Defined, At Last!" in Intersections: Readings in Sociology, ed. D.R. Wilson (Boston: Pearson Custom Publishing, 2001), 31.

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