Philosophy: when it all doesn’t come together… or ‘God, Plato, and Morality’

It was another ‘philosophy forum’ day in my happy little life today, and I saw:

It sounded like a fascinating topic (which it is, in a way), trying to toe the line between our world and that beyond without getting caught up in the particulars of the former or fall into hopeless abstraction in the latter: the ‘line of ideality’.

It’s kind of like the Christian God: firstly He is outside our world, He existed before it and created it. But then He could get in it and mess around with things and people (e.g. Job) if he felt like it. And then he actually done-got-himself born into it (sort of) in the person of Jesus who was totally flesh and blood, like you and me. So where and what the hell is going on with this God in the end? Well, you’ll get crazy stories from all directions, but the point is that there is something rather mystifying about toeing that line between being beyond the world and in it.

Plato had some fancy ideas of his own (actually called ideas/eidos) which he thought were outside of the world and fixed: the idea of a chair has nothing to do with particular chairs, he argued (destroy every chair and we still have the idea). The physical chair just shares in the form of the idea: chair. So philosophers, even without God, can have crazy stories for things, which brings us to today’s forum.

Really, sadly, I can’t say much for it. Dr. Catton was not all there. It could have just been a bad plane ride into the city or a bad night’s rest, or some momentous event on his mind, but something severely hampered his presentation (and he could tell, too). The brilliance of his ideas, however, did shine through the rusty, distracted exterior, to some extent. I could see that spark in his eyes as he thought about Newton’s method or Plato’s moral understanding, and it remained a bit as he began to speak, but every time, somewhere in those first words after a pause, the spark would fade.

It was strange, almost torturous to watch: sensing the genius just below the tattered surface writhing, trying to burst forth. But the high point was when Dr. Borgmann (the professor who facilitates the event) asked: (paraphrasing)

‘if we are to think of morality as somehow lawlike on the same grounds as physics, then why have the great moral philosophies not swept the world as physics have? Each claims universality, cutting through gender, race, geography, etc: but only physics seems to make good on this.’

As one who believes in morality which is similar to the laws of nature (i.e. physics), this is a troubling question, and one that I have asked myself before, never arriving at a satisfactory answer. ‘Historical chance’ is the closest thing to an actual answer that I have. No… That isn’t good enough. Perhaps it is that ‘good physics’ can be used to give us something tangible whereas ‘good morality’ only gives goodness. In a way it may be a question which begs the question: has physics really swept the world while morality really has not? The question itself might just suggest where the asker is looking in the first place: if she looks to the stuff of the world, the cars, TVs, and microwaves, then yes, physics is doing great; but if she looks into the eyes of the humans in the world, not even necessarily those of the Thomas Mertons, Mother Teresas, or Dalai Lamas out there, but to simple, everyday folks, then maybe she will see the morality of which Kant and others speak.

The fact remains, however, that the morality we see there is to quickly shuffled away, set aside in the hustle and bustle of life (that is, commitments in the world of physics). It’s not that it isn’t there, always and unchanging, but that the minutia of life (made all the more minute by the advances in physics and the corresponding advances in the demands made us in our daily lives), simply obscure it like clouds in a bright blue sky. And why we so fail in seeing this is not exactly clear to me. I suppose it is for lack of ever seeing a blue sky, so to speak, never actually seeing the morality which shines forth in the eyes of another. For, once we know it is there, it is impossible to overlook.