Fate

1) Irony

The knowledge of fate allows you to take responsibility in actualizing it.

My lack of freedom to determine my destiny gives rise to the responsibility to bring it about. The freedom to self-determine the specifics of the destiny gives rise to the responsibility.

Freedom is exercised through choice, and choice is the result of the interactions of the conditions which limit our freedom with those that allow it.

2) Persons

Persons are the unfolding of ideas in the world. People are just embodiments of ideas that are unfolding in the world of ideas.

The world is just the artifact of ideas, interacting with the progression of ideas.

The world of things are just historical artefacts of the things that are thought and brought into existence by persons, who become themselves as ideas through the chanelling process.

It is the receptacle of the potentiality of ideas, as the residual of that process of incorporation.

Becoming what one is = Embodying the idea that one is

The world supports this process of embodiment because it is itself idea; and the process of that embodiment is itself idea.

The phenomenology of idea-unfolding is just the historical world itself, that is, agency is the relation of the active idea to the systemic totality of ideas.

Problem: Defoundationalization of the systemic totality. How do we reconceptualize it, and therefore our relations to it?

Eg. I will not be an asset manager because I do not embody the idea of one. But I will be a philosopher because I am the idea of philosophy in person; I am philosophy itself.

The primary function of man is to embody the idea that they are in the world.

In so doing, they create their own religion.

In this sense, there are two types of persons: those who create their own religion, and those who follow the creations of others. Other distinctions are irrelevant.

Euthyphro

Plato's short dialogue on piety culminates in negatives; its greatest insight is to expose the fundamental incompatibilities of two disparate cosmological propositions: that of a universally valid standard of meaning and the good, against the standards seen to derive from the caprices of the Greek pantheon. This contradiction has come to be known as the Euthyphro's dilemma.

However, the present interest lies in the fact that this incompatibility was not in itself the main focus at the point where it was raised. Socrates introduced the issue in his attempts to examine and disprove Euthyphro's assertion that the pious is that which is God-loved. For simplicity's sake, we will take that to mean that a necessary but insufficient aspect of the pious, is that it is God-loved.

Socrates's arguments run as such:

1. A thing is God-loved because God loves the thing, not because it is inherently God-loved. (The adverb sequentially succeeds the verb. Being God-loved is not a quality inherent in the thing).

2. The pious is God-loved because of its piousness. (Being God-loved is a quality inherent in the definition of piousness).

3. From 2, it follows that (all?) God-loved things are God-loved because they are inherently God-loved.

4. This in opposition to 1., therefore only one of the statements, 1 or 2, can be true; being mutually exclusive, they cannot be true at the same time.

Now, the fishy points in the argument lie in 2 and 3. It becomes apparent after some thought that in the course of the argument, Socrates must commit the implicit assumption that if piousness was pious not because of God's love (but due to some external standard), then God's love of piousness must derive not from God's act of loving, but from the implicit inherency of God's love as a quality in the thing. In other words, it assumes that the only way in which God can love the pious is if that which God-loves (namely, the pious) was, in essence the God-loved. By that score, nothing that is God-loved can be anything else but THE God-loved. Again, in other words, it assumes the truth of the bracketed statement in thread 2 of the above argument, when of course, requiring God's love by definition certainly does not mean in any way that something is God-loved in its original state. It is a complex form of the age-old straw man fallacy.

This would then trap Euthyphro in the depths of the Euthyphro dilemma which is in fact not bound up directly with the argument at hand.

Musing

If the reason of the founding of a city is the recognition that mutual benefit, materially and in terms of security, can arise, then the basis of the necessity of noble lie must lie in the belief that the established rational basis for the allocation of power within the city is precarious against human greed and striving.

By associating the citizens of the city with a higher order, the noble lie widens the range of those whom the individual identifies with as his own to include the whole city, thereby dissipating self-interest. However, this is but a preparative to Socrates's wider goal to dispel material wants completely within the perfect city. The identities of clan and self contain tacit boundaries which exclude those beyond; in such divisions lie the source and justification of private possession, both of knowledge and of goods. Socrates significantly neglects the needs of the body in attempting to reshape the way citizens expect their needs to be met in the city; he realizes that the bodily wants, of which a majority are in a nature of private goods, reconciles human greed with human selfishness; poisons the nature of identity and man's need to belong. Socrates overhauls both the impacts of identities on men's choices and the identities themselves.

The new identities Socrates propose attach themselves along the defining characteristics of vocation and their attending class. The mode of creation, rather than consumption and need, becomes the flag to which men rally by. He lends it the allure of divine fulfillment, aiding men's necessarily selfconscious tempering of his bodily wants.

At this point however, one must consider if Socrates indeed saw moderation as a virtue worthy of huge sacrifices beyond the material, or if the impetus to turn his citizens into purely political creatures reached an end in itself. For it would be surely draconian and unjustifiable to go to such lengths, indeed, breach the limits of human nature, in the name of moderation. Perhaps Socrates attempted to align human lifestyles to divinely virtue, therefore requiring religious observance in his subjects.

The necessity of the noble lie should be debated as well. Enlightenment thinkers believed in channeling of human self interest into activities that would fulfill an alternative set of moralities and result in mutual benefit. The worker and the consumer benefits. In contrast, the noble lie seeks to limit the meaning and concept of the consumer. Socrates attempts to reverse the demand and supply driven relationship between consumer and worker; in his city, the consumer exists for the worker. Such a lie is therefore necessary, it seems, if human survival and human invirtue derive from the same source, bringing forth yet another example of Platonic tragicomedy. Nevertheless, it remains to be seen if the replacement of self-interest with self-neglecting loyalty marks any real progress.

In certain conceptions of Enlightenment societies, the "common good" does not extend beyond the sum of individual good. Society merely acts as enforcers of laws that maximize individual good. For Plato, individual benefit is sacrificed in the name of checks and balances against injustice. Therefore it must arise out of a deep suspicion of the citizens in the city; a strong belief in their potential to be corrupted and manipulated. In proposing draconian static laws, the role of institutions are diminished into enforcers: warriors, not philosophers.