David Jones
Sep 5, 2018 · 2 min read

…thanks, another question — could the blue church be characterised as based on a thorough anti-platonism … say along most of these 6 dimensions (Badiou)

  1. Vitalist anti-Platonism (Nietzsche, Bergson, Deleuze): the assertion of the real of life-becoming against the intellectualist sterility of Platonic Forms — as Nietzsche put it, “Plato” is the name for a disease …
    2. Empiricist-analytic anti-Platonism: Plato believed in the independent existence of Ideas; but, as Aristotle already knew, Ideas do not exist independently of sensuous things whose forms they are. The main counter-Platonic thesis of analytic empiricists is that all truths are either analytic or empirical.
    3. Marxist anti-Platonism (for which Lenin is not blameless): the dismissal of Plato as the first Idealist, opposed to pre-Socratic materialists as well as to the more “progressive” and empirically oriented Aristotle. In this view (which conveniently forgets that, in contrast to Aristotle’s notion of the slave as a “talking tool,” there is no place for slaves in Plato’s Republic), Plato was the main ideologist of the class of slave owners …
    4. Existentialist anti-Platonism: Plato denies the uniqueness of singular existence and subordinates the singular to the universal. This anti-Platonism has a Christian version (Kierkegaard: Socrates versus Christ) and an atheist one (Sartre: “existence precedes essence”).
    5. Heideggerian anti-Platonism: Plato as the founding figure of “Western metaphysics, ” the key moment in the historical process of the “forgetting of Being,” the starting point of the process which culminates in today’s technological nihilism (“ from Plato to NATO …”).
    6. “Democratic” anti-Platonism in political philosophy, from Popper to Arendt: Plato as the originator of the “closed society,” as the first thinker who elaborated in detail the project of totalitarianism. (For Arendt, at a more refined level, Plato’s original sin was to have subordinated politics to Truth, not seeing that politics is a domain of phronesis, of judgments and decisions made in unique, unpredictable situations.)

Are there any aspects of the blue church structure or beliefs that could be described as Platonic?

    David Jones

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