Abstract: THIS IS NEITHER AN ELEGY NOR A EULOGY. Every time metaphysics has been declared dead, it arises phoenixlike from its own ashes. Something very much like that is now occurring in American philosophy. The signs of its resurgence are evident in papers delivered at this conference. At its beginnings in Greece and Asia saw as its duty obligation to respond to difficulties of everyday life. It neither was nor was ever meant to be something that was out of reach of common person who dealt with life's vicissitudes on an everyday level. My address is an endeavor to restore to its rightful place a way of thinking that is sorely lacking in our times. But there is a deeper source for these reflections on generosity of good. I wish to meditate on Socrates' still haunting declaration that good is superior in strength and in dignity to being itself: Therefore you should also say that not only do objects of knowledge owe their being known to good, but their existence and being are also due to it; although good is not being, but something yet beyond being, superior to it in rank and power. (1) These are strange, even uncanny, words for they declare a level of reality beyond that which is. Furthermore, they state quite definitively that all we know and are is due directly to this good. These days these words fall on deaf ears. We live in an age of great deceit. The institutions that were created to safeguard real, true, and intelligible have swallowed what Buddha called the three poisons--greed, hatred, and delusion. (2) The political process, churches, universities, institutions of commerce, and health care industries--to name but a few--have revealed their dishonesty. If first philosophy cannot address these sorry failures, then it, too, has swallowed some sort of poison In 1781, Kant told us that we cannot know being directly but only as it appears to us. (3) In 1811, Hegel told us in Science of Logic that being is most empty of words. (4) In 1927, Heidegger told us that not only have we forgotten meaning of being, but that we do not even know how to raise question of meaning of being. Heidegger's last utterance on being was that meaning of being is ereignis, an event that we must await with an open mind. (5) In these latter days story of meaning of being has shifted to France. Here Derrida declares that meaning of being is an ineluctable differance that is due to our inescapable bondage to language, which in itself is structured according to differences. (6) The conclusion is now drawn that speaking of being is a hopeless endeavor and effort to express the Metaphysics of Presence is a contradiction. So here we are in year 2008, unable to utter a word about being. Certain consequences follow. The following vignette captures those consequences quite nicely. In a conversation with an intelligent, young proponent of school of deconstruction, I used word truth. She immediately replied, Oh, I never use word truth anymore. For me things are either interesting or uninteresting. She had no response when I asked her if Custer thought it was interesting that Crazy Horse was riding right at him with a loaded rifle. It may not be Crazy Horse himself that rides this evening, but there is still much riding on words of Republic. Plato tells us that without goodness, nothing can be real or true or known. What could be meant by such a connection among good, real, and intelligible? We know that Plato explores these relations by means of a web of images, allegories, and analogies. There is Analogy of Sun, Simile of Divided Line, and Myth of Cave. Countless commentaries have been written on these tropes (to use current term of art). We know that Socrates refuses to give a direct answer to question, what is good? …
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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