FOR THE SHORT INDEX OF MY PHILOSOPHY POSTS, SEE:

The Joy of Philosophy (Postscript and Poetry)

• Heraclius: “physis kryptesthai philei” (Being/The Nature of things loves to hide)

• Hegel, in his inaugural address, Heidelberg, 1816, says “The Being of the universe, at first hidden and concealed, has no power which can offer resistance to the search for knowledge; it has to lay itself open before the seeker — to set before his eyes and give for his enjoyment, its riches and its depths.”

• Heidegger: “Both scientific and prescientific comportments are a knowing in the sense of uncovering what is previously concealed, of revealing what was previously covered up, of disclosing what so far was closed off.”

For the Greeks, “Truth” was “Aletheia (un-hiding)” with the grammatical alpha privative (“A-letheia” = disclosing from hiddenness”). For example, in circumspection, a doctor deliberates about all the patient’s symptoms and possible causes and remedies until the doctor comes to an “insight (noein)” in a blink of an eye about how to proceed, after which the doctor acts (carry out treatment). Philosophy is similar in such an insight, but there is radical individual freedom in Philosophy in that the teacher can lay down the arguments at your feet, but no one can have your insights for you.

For the Greeks philosophy was a remedy for the restlessness and disorder of the soul because while everyday thinking connects to what is transitional and can be otherwise, philosophical contemplation (theoria) is a kind of godly life (what Aristotle calls “a-thanatizein,” again with the alpha privative) where the thinker is attuned to that which neither comes to be nor passes away, but simply is – like the idea of Beauty or Justice. And so, we do not invent the idea of justice out of whole cloth when we come to think it, but rather initially and ever more fully understand what Justice is and always was, such as when the once-prized and admired traditional definition of marriage is overcome and re-thought because we realize it does violence to LGBTQ+ rights.

This is what Plato means when he says philosophical thinking is a kind of remembering: ever increasing recollection of what an idea is and always was and always will be. For the Greeks the philosopher was thus similar to the mystic seer who (the mystic) divined both past, present and future. As Aristotle notes in The Physics the Philosopher thus “sees (noein) ” after such a process “Now that is Justice!,” also like when we experience “Now that is Nature!” of the eagle magnificently circling in the sky, or “Now that is Art!” when we see a Da Vinci painting for the first time. For Plato the idea was to be “defined/un-hid,” whereas for Aristotle the particular thing re-defined the idea, like the Picasso painting redefined what “Art” was and defined/opened a new field – eg impressionism, cubism, etc. Consider this short video on a movie that redefined the genre of film: