Postscript to the Previous Entry

 

With the way of thinking about metaphysics (i.e., the nature of the whole of reality or Being, seen as a limited whole sub specie aeternitatis) seems to make it immune to reason or argument, like we are in bubble, solipsistic. Here I draw on Plato's Good - as a symbol - as to the heart at least and the rational mind informed by the heart, as self-evident, when perceived sublimely, unmixed with ego-consciousness. The sublime is the key to reality. Vincent and House are metaphysically blind, or meaning-blind to put it in other words.

     On the one hand, there is the danger revealed by Vincent in Collateral: metaphysical pictures becoming closed psychological systems, self-protective interpretations rooted in woundedness, fear, pride, or despair. If this is all metaphysics is, then every worldview becomes merely autobiographical fate. Reason becomes powerless because arguments are always absorbed back into the deeper orientation of the self. One ends near solipsism or Nietzschean genealogy: every philosophy is just disguised temperament. On the other hand, there is the danger in what I wrote about Vincent of reducing truth to merely subjective projection. This implication I deny because I am certain that there are experiences in which reality discloses itself with a kind of self-evidence as to put them beyond real doubt.

    For Plato, the Good is not merely another object inside the world. It is that by which intelligibility/morality itself becomes possible. In the Republic, the Good is compared to the sun: not simply something seen, but that through which seeing occurs. And importantly, the ascent toward the Good is not purely deductive. It involves conversion of the soul, purification of attention, liberation from illusion, reorientation of desire.

      This is where the connection to the sublime becomes philosophically important. The sublime, in the tradition from Immanuel Kant through Iris Murdoch and even Raimond Gaita, is often an experience in which ego-consciousness is interrupted. One is seized by something that exceeds utility, control, self-interest, or conceptual reduction. The self becomes decentered.

In such moments, reality is not merely “constructed.” One feels addressed by Being itself. The experience carries an authority prior to argument, yet not irrational. It is closer to vision than inference.

      In A Common Humanity, Gaita tells the story set during his work in a psychiatric hospital of his encounter with a nun whose matter-of-fact love toward those patients revealed their humanity. The contrast is with some of the institutional attitudes around him: certain doctors, nurses, and caretakers who treated the profoundly disabled patients as if they were beneath full human concern, objects of management rather than persons, even when they tried to treat them as equals. The nun’s greatness lies precisely in the fact that she did not merely behave “kindly” toward them in a paternalistic or professionalized way. Her love was uncondescending. She responded to them as fully human beings, not as defective approximations of humanity. And this is what Gaita means when he says, in effect, that she “proved” their equal humanity. Her way of seeing exposed the spiritual blindness implicit in the colder institutional attitude. She did not construct their dignity through theory. She revealed it.

      That is why the example is sublime. It is not merely morally admirable behavior. It discloses reality. It shatters ordinary ways of seeing. One suddenly perceives that the worth of a human being is not dependent upon intelligence, productivity, beauty, autonomy, or social usefulness – like a “leak from another world” as Gaita put it in another context. The sublime experience has the character of revelation rather than deduction. (And this is not sentimentality. The nun does not romanticize suffering or deny the terrible realities of disability and institutional life. The sublimity lies in her truthful attention: she sees through degradation without denying it.)

 

. . .

 

   The sublime is a key, perhaps the most important key, to reality. The sublime breaks the enclosure of the ego. It reveals that meaning is not simply projected outward from consciousness but encountered. The beautiful face, moral holiness, profound love, sacrificial goodness, the starry heavens, liturgy, tragedy, music, even deep silence — these can function as disclosures of reality that relativize the smaller self.

     This also explains why the moral and metaphysical are inseparable. Ego-consciousness distorts perception. Pride, resentment, despair, and instrumental thinking flatten the world. But love, humility, attention, and reverence disclose deeper aspects of reality. In that sense, metaphysics is not immune to reason, but reason itself depends upon moral and spiritual orientation. That is close to Plato’s deepest insight: the condition of the soul affects what can be known.

     And perhaps the sublime matters because it momentarily frees one from captivity to the self. Not permanently perhaps, but enough to glimpse a world that is not organized around one’s wounds, appetites, or defensive narratives. The experience becomes a kind of phenomenological evidence that reality is richer, deeper, and more meaningful than nihilism allows.

     I think of Socrates arguments with Polus and Callicles in the Gorgias, how exasperated they became at the thought that it was better to suffer evil than do it. The emotional reaction of Callicles and Polus is philosophically revealing. Socrates is not simply presenting them with an abstract paradox. He is confronting an orientation toward reality and human flourishing. The claim that it is worse to do evil than to suffer it sounds absurd to them because they begin from assumptions tied to power, success, domination, self-preservation, and worldly injury. Harm is understood externally: loss, humiliation, weakness, pain. Socrates relocates the center of gravity inward, into the condition of the soul itself. That is why they become exasperated rather than merely unconvinced. If Socrates is right, then the tyrant, the manipulator, the successful predator, the person who “wins” outwardly while corrupting his soul, is actually miserable. And conversely, the victim who suffers injustice but remains inwardly ordered may be less damaged in what most truly matters. To Callicles this sounds almost pathological. He experiences Socrates as overturning the obvious structure of reality. One can feel in the dialogue that Callicles is not only intellectually resistant but existentially threatened. Accepting Socrates’ position would require revaluing everything: ambition, masculinity, pleasure, rhetoric, political success, even the meaning of freedom itself. It would turn the world on its head, as Callicles puts it.

     This connects directly to what I was saying about metaphysical pictures and fate. Callicles’ worldview is not merely a theory he could casually abandon after hearing a better argument. It is intertwined with desire, ego, social aspiration, pride, and identity. Socrates is challenging not just propositions but the structure of his soul – confronting it with the Good, with reality.

 

      Plato clearly thinks argument still matters. Why? Because argument can sometimes awaken recollection, unsettle self-deception, expose contradictions within a life. But argument alone is insufficient if the soul resists seeing. That is why the dialogue has such dramatic tension. The issue is not simply “Who has the better logic?” but “What kind of person is capable of recognizing the truth here?” Socrates seems to stand within a vision of reality in which the Good possesses a kind of luminous self-evidence. The integrity of the soul appears more real to him than bodily suffering or social success. Callicles cannot yet see this aspect of reality. He experiences Socrates almost as someone speaking from another world.

 

     Which returns me to Wittgenstein’s line: the world of the happy man and the unhappy man are different worlds. Or perhaps Plato would say: the just and unjust man inhabit different orders of reality because they love different things and therefore perceive differently. Plato never portrays this merely as subjective preference. One vision is truer than the other. But access to that truth requires transformation of attention and desire, not only formal reasoning. The Good is not simply an abstract metaphysical entity or construction. It illuminates beings so that they appear rightly. The nun’s love is a kind of participation in that illumination.