english arabic
 

DIALOGUE WITH PLATO ON IDEOLOGY AND NATURE

 

Henryk Skolimowski

 

[This approach is different. Instead of discoursing myself, I have allowed myself to invite Plato for a symposium. When I have difficulties in grasping the fundamental, the root of the problem so to speak, I occasionally evoke the spirit of Plato and simply ask him: “You, Plato, tell me what is the real issue.” And obligingly, most of the times, he does. So I shall have Plato help me with my discourse on ideology and nature.]

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Plato:   The problem of ideology vis-à-vis nature has little to do either with ideology or with nature. Rather it has to do with people being lost.

After this explanation, I was a bit puzzled. I asked:

HS: What do you mean by people being lost, Plato?

Plato: That is simple [he replied]. You Western people are lost. You first lost your soul, then you lost your ability to think integrally: with your mind and heart together. You also lost the fluency of your bodies: your bodies so often look like a sack of potatoes. In the process, you lost touch with each other. You finally lost nature—the intimate and sustaining relationship with the living kingdom around you. In your fancy way, you talk about alienation. The situation is at once more simple and more profound. You have been squandering the spiritual heritage of mankind. The loss of soul signifies the loss of corresponding sensitivities among others the ability to see more diversely than your physical instruments can acknowledge. Your recent invocations to nature are but a groping attempt to restore your lost balance. You have lost the centre and your mind is confused.

H.S.: You are rather sweeping and unjust Plato. Would you mind going a bit slower and analyse in some details your allegations so that we can trace out the causal links and connections.

Plato: You with your analyses, your details, your causal links and connections. Don’t you realise that unless you get the whole picture right, you can’t get your details right. I have tried to present to you the whole picture. Very well. I will give you some details. Already in the 18th century you were on the downward slope. This whole concept of material progress, which signified but mere improvement in the material standards of living

H.S.: You should not be so scathing about our material progress. People did suffer hunger and destitution and were enveloped in abject poverty. Their lot has improved!

Plato: It may have improved in one sense, all right. But in actual fact, they have exchanged one form of misery for another. For look at then now, at the ‘improved’ lot. Theirs is a life of spiritual blight and economic anxiety… As I was saying, already in the 18th century you were on the sliding path. Rousseau was wise, hut he did not have enough personal integrity. He was right that man is born free and wherever we look, we see him in chains. He was also right that civilization and its artificial needs mutilate and imprison people; rob them of their autonomy. Already, at the end of the 18th century you lost nature—the sense of unity with the rest of the cosmos. Then in the 19th century you invented ideology as a substitute for your lost unity with the cosmos. A tremendous process of the falsification of consciousness occurs. You are literally sanctifying technology and economics as your new gods. This is, in a sense, understandable, but pathetic never the less; you had to fill the vacuum caused by the collapse of religion. Disoriented and confused, you not only relinquish religion, but also philosophy. The 19th century is not so much the age of science, or progress, or the industrial revolution, but the age of ideology running rampant: whether you take the Marxist ideology, or the ideology of Scientism, or the ideology of Capitalism as embedded in Western institutions, including the institutions of learning, they all serve the cause of secularism. They all address themselves to the human being, which is already alienated, estranged, derascinated.

H.S.: Plato, you are being too general and rather evasive. I asked you about the relationship between nature and ideology, and you are rambling about alienation and the fact that, in the 19th century, ideology replaced religion and took upon itself the role of the messiah.

Plato: With your permission, I am not rambling. I told you at the beginning that the real issue is that people have lost themselves. Such abstractions as ‘ideology’ and ‘nature’ are desperate attempts of modern man to find new existential bearings. Let us be clear about that. These two concepts, ‘ideology’ and ‘nature’ are abstractions of the modern mind. We did not have the idea of nature in Greek philosophy. We were at one with nature. Why are present Western people so desperate about nature? Because they are desperate about themselves. Your grand design—the mechanistic conception of the universe—is now a shambles. Your ideological designs—the heritage of Marxism and other ideologues from Hegel to Marcuse—all attempted to accomplish salvation on the wheels of ideology. In each case we are confronted with a form of ‘secular eschatology.’ In short, all these ideological designs are an insidious opiate for the masses; as insidious an opiate as any past religion has been; sadder still is the fact that none of these ideologies can prov­ide sustenance which many of the past religions could provide.

H.S.: Let me get it straight, Plato. You are saying that we lost nature in the 18th century and that as a substitute we brought in ideology in the 19th century. And then, in the 20th century we discovered that ideology was bankrupt too; particularly as an alternative eschatology. And now we are looking longingly at nature, in a sense resurrecting nature, in order to find in it our lost roots, and also in order to find in nature our spiritual bearings.

Plato: This is close enough. But still fundamentally misconceived.

H.S.: What do you mean by ‘misconceived’?

Plato: Simply, that while you attempt to overcome the limitations of your atomistic thinking and thereby recover your soul and your wholeness, you once again slip into this atomistic thinking and those objectivized modes of reasoning. Why is your strategy inadequate? Because you put a frame, or should I say a strait-jacket on to your thinking by saying: let us talk about ‘ideology’ and ‘nature.’ You treat these as distinctive categories, separated from all, two things in themselves. At the same time, you presume that some significant elucidations will follow which will enable you to have a better grasp of the present, and will give you some meaningful vistas of the future. What do you want to accomplish? Understanding in depth or another analytical scrutiny of two interesting concepts? Look at this pile of analyses of concepts performed by those technicians who call themselves ‘analytical philosophers’ . Has this mountain of analyses helped anybody in a real understanding of the world and in the process of living? No, so what is your purpose? I take it, it is understanding in depth.

Now, let us be conscious of the fact that by looking at reality and our own destiny through the frames of the two concepts ‘ideology’ and ‘nature’ which are so to speak our conceptual windows, you want to see new paths; you also hope to have a clearer view of the familiar landscape. This is justified, but be aware. Those windows, which are your frames, are themselves, as it were, distorting lenses. All ideologies are loaded. Any concept of ideology is more likely than not to be loaded in favour of a specific Ideology. The concept of nature itself is not innocent either. It is a loaded concept. If you consider it within a mechanistic framework, it is one thing; if you consider it within a Rousseauian framework, it is another thing; if you consider it within the framework of your Ecological Humanism, it is still another thing.

U.S.: Thank you, Plato, for reminding me about my idea of nature as expressed in my early treatise called Ecological Humanism. I maintained there (and later in my book Eco-Philosophy) that Ecological Humanism marks the return of the unitary view in which the philosophy of man and the philosophy of nature are aspects of each other.

Plato: This unity you talk about—it is all in my philosophy. You do not need to unify the philosophy of nature with philosophy of man. That is if you have got a unitary cosmology in which man and his soul have their rightful place in the scheme of the cosmos; if, in other words, the cosmos is not reduced to this stupid inanimate stuff but instead is conceived as all encompassing, generous and admitting man as its essential component.

H.S.: It is exactly the point. It was easier for you Plato to spin out these unitary cosmologies when you lived in those primitive societies of the past.

Plato: Primitive societies of the past? My dear fellow you are under some dreadful illusions. We had culture and the respect for the whole man. You are barbarians in comparison.

H.S.: My apologies, I didn’t mean to say ‘primitive’ in the derogatory sense, but rather in the chronological sense. To return to my argument: once you have got science which has imposed its reductionist scheme on all, it is not that easy to entertain old fashion unitary cosmological schemes... “Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone…” So we must re-unify things on a new level, under new auspices. I have been trying to accomplish this reunification within the new ecological perspective.

Plato: This is all right. Let me tell you however that you are introducing not so much an ecological perspective but rather a new religious perspective. I must grant you, though, that this is not a traditional religious perspective—particularly of the Christian variety.

H.S.: You may have a point here. But I would still call it a reverential perspective rather than a religious perspective per se. Let me say it in another way: the ecological perspective, as embodied in ecological humanism, is pervaded with the reverential attitude that borders on the religious.

Plato: What do you do with ideology within this perspective?

H.S.: The function of ideology within Eco-Humanism is to create social, political and existential structures to assure the validity of the idea that the universe is home for man; to assure in other words that the reverential universe becomes a reality.

Marx and neo-Marxists were the ideologues on behalf of society; we might add on behalf of a ‘good’ society. However, their entire scheme was marred from its inception, for society was meant to be antagonistic, based on the idea of class struggle. Through the war of the classes, progress meant to be accomplished and ultimately the classless society arrived at. The very conception of society, which is in continuous war with itself, vitiates against the idea of a good society. This is an important point that we must emphasise. Since antagonism and class warfare are built into the very structure of modern society, our thinking and attitudes, guided and conditioned by the ideologies based on conflict and antagonism, are filled with poison, distrust and hatred. Not much room in these ideologies for reverence and compassion. Our distrust of each other and our defensive, antagonistic attitudes are, to a large degree, imposed on us by the ideologies of class warfare. In this scheme of things, we cannot create the universe that is home for man, we cannot create harmony.

Plato: Should you also not be aware that since Marx, ideo­logy has been almost solely concerned with the socio-political superstructure. This superstructure attempts to de-mystify the deceptions and exploitations concealed in the capitalist societies. True enough, ideology in the Marxist frame of reference serves as an instrument of de-mystification. But it also serves as an instrument of mystification particularly when it is used as a political weapon of class struggle; all in all ideology is not a force of reconciliation but an instrument of class warfare.

H.S.: This is quite so, but not so within Ecological Humanism, which first of all conceives of itself primarily, not as a socio-political superstructure but rather as a cosmo­structure. We are therefore broadening the scone and shifting the centre—from society, as if it were independent of the rest of the cosmos—to the conception of man in the entire cosmos. Once we accept this, then the door is open to a new idea which I term cosmocracy.

Plato: Hmm… cosmocracy. Explain it to me a bit, will you?

H.S.: Let me start with some terminological comments con­cerning the meaning of cosmocracy. For Rousseau (as you know) Democracy is so perfect a system that “if there were a nation of gods, their government would be democratic. So perfect a govern­ment is not for men.” (The Social Contract, chapter IV). Rousseau may have been right that we are not mature enough for Democracy. For this reason (and many other reasons) Democracy as a form of government and a social ideology has been battered out of shape in the twentieth century. In the Soviet Union it has been replaced by so-called Socialist Democracy, which is another name for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat; as far removed from the ideal of Democracy as the sheep from the wolf. In the U.S.A. the image of Democracy still lingers on, but the system has been subverted by another form of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which is symbolised by Mr Consumer. In fact, in the United States Democracy has been replaced by Infantocracy. The immaturity of the whole American political system stems from its shallow ideology of consumerism, which can be best described as Infantocracy.

Plato: You are quite right. The whole Western world is turning into infantocracy. And it seems there is little you can do about it, including your idea of Ecological Humanism.

H.S.: Perhaps not so. Ecological Humanism wants to shift its emphasis from society, and its surface needs, to the cosmos. Man in the cosmos, conceived as a rightful inhabitant of it, and a steward of the cosmos (in the sense discussed before) implies a new ideology, which I call Cosmocracy. But this ideology is so different from existing ones that we perhaps should not use the term.

Plato: Now your concept of Cosmocracy strikes me as OK, particularly as it attempts to weave back the human being into the tapestry of the cosmos. No doubt in the process you will want to give back to the human person the attributes that have been taken away from him/her in the process you call reification. This is perhaps easier said thin done. You postulate this new cosmological unity, which will provide the basis for man’s existential coherence and wholeness. But you say nothing about the process, the all-important agonising existential process which your cosmology will require.

H.S.: What do you mean by the agonising process that my new cosmology requires?

Plato: New states of being do not come by themselves. They require a stringent and systematic process whereby by working on ourselves we transform ourselves. Eastern philosophies and religions knew that well. They call it yoga—the process by means of which you can transform your recalcitrant body and your often scattered brains and your atrophic heart into a pointed flame of compassion; and whereby also you transform your mind into an agency of understanding based on wholeness and empathy. Let me mention in this context that during the last two centuries at least, and particularly during the last few decades, you have been subject to the reverse process, that of reification—whereby through the irresponsive and often irresponsible institutions (as well as social relationships that serve these soulless institutions) have been slowly turning you into objects. With the corresponding loss of wholeness and other qualities that make you distinctly human, you have been denuded, washed out of the fertile sources of your being, just as topsoil is often denuded and washed out of its nutrients by careless and irresponsible husbandry. In this sense, Heidegger may have been right when he said that the dreadful has already happened. You are now hoping for a miracle. You want to go in the opposite direction: from reification to transcendence whereby you will build your psyche again and reabsorb into it the nutrients which alone can sustain the human being in his quest for meaning. You don’t know how to go about this process. You had lost religion first. You lost nature more recently. In a roundabout way, by rediscovering nature, and yourself as a part of it, you want to re-establish yourself both as a creature of nature and as a spiritual being. This is alright. But a bit sheepish and cowardly; at any rate, not really adequate.

H.S.: Why is it sheepish and cowardly and not really adequate?

Plato: Simply, you are groping towards the divine, you want to re-sacralise your broken souls. But you don’t have enough courage. My search for the divine was undertaken without any evasion and apologies. Indeed, my entire philosophy is but a journey in the quest for the divine. You are still confused. And you have no guts. In a cryptic way you evoke nature. You want to be saved through nature and renewed by it. You should have more courage and look deeper into your souls and ask yourself what will be required to mend your souls and make them sing again. If Heidegger is right that the dreadful has already happened, then what you need and secretly hope for is that the wonderful happens. The wonderful does not happen by nostalgic incantations. It can happen, but only through a deep inner reconstruction. It won’t be easy, as you don’t have philosophies adequate to the task, philosophies that would provide a grid and a necessary support. Your ideologies more often than not, serve the demon of reification.

H.S.: What do you mean by saying that we don’t have philos­ophies adequate to the task, and that our ideologies do not help the matter?

Plato: Marcuse, Adorno, Habermas and the whole lot of modern ideologues are not really philosophers. They are completely bogged down; unable to conceive of larger philosophical designs. They are obsessed with justifying their partisan allegiances; in a sense, they are obsessed with their smallness. In analysing the pathologies of our times, they do not help the matter fundamentally. They only add some spices to the already poisonous stew. Wittgenstein, too, got lost in his fly-bottle along with his flies.

Only Heidegger stands as a man apart and from his Olympian heights has the courage to speak on behalf of all humanity, to speak on behalf of Being, and our participation in Being, which in simple terms means participation in our wholeness while our soul is alive and singing.

H.S.: Plato, you are forgetting some names. You are forgetting Whitehead and especially Teilhard de Chardin; the latter too, stands as a man apart; a man who has the courage to speak on behalf of evolution, of all life: past, present and the future. And Plato, I have to tell you that both you and Heidegger must really rethink your position on being. You are both mystifying being. The real story of life, of evolution, and of the spirit (which you call soul) is that of becoming. The pursuit of the divine did not start with the first amoeba. It came about as the result of innumerable acts of transcendence. Transcendence is the stuff of becoming. Your being without be­coming is a lifeless pile of petrified forms of life. As I see, the dreaded process of reification happened not as the result of the fall from grace—well, the fall from grace was a by-product; at the root cause of the process was, how shall I put it: an unfortunate epicycle on the spiral of becoming. We went into a cul-de-sac. It is the spiral of becoming that we must attend to, transcend the cul-de-sac and start a new cycle. Really return to the spiral which is congruent with evolution. Perhaps the way to recovery lies not through the heroic individual self-mending, but through the evolutionary process whereby the human race, while transcending itself, leaves behind yet another skin. There is a bit of a mystery how this is done. But snakes do shed their skins periodically. This is perhaps what we mean to do as a human race at the present time.

Plato: Well, yes. Teilhard is OK. Pity I did not have his writings at the time I was shaping my philosophy… But I wonder whether his idea of transcendence and his whole philosophy of becoming constitutes solid enough ground for our quest for permanence. We must be rooted. We must belong.

H.S.: This is all right. But let us not get imprisoned in old forms. We must rethink what we mean by ‘permanence,’ ‘belonging,’ ‘rootedness.’ If our journey is one of continuous becoming, then what we need is not a permanent, rusty anchor, but a good, reliable floating spaceship. Now, Plato, what are our conclusions concerning ideology and nature?

Plato: As I told you at the beginning, our discussion about ideology and nature, if it is to have any deeper significance, is about the integrity of our being. In this context, what has gone on in the twentieth century under the name of ideology is but a corrupt philosophy, philosophy crippled in its scope and crippling us as the result of its myopic concerns.

H.S.: And by our recent invoking of nature, we timidly attempt to build a new ladder to heaven, although we still lack the courage to call heaven by its proper name.

Plato: This is about right. Courage is ultimately what you will have to have. For without the courage to be and the courage to become, you are simpletons of the Paleolithic age.

H.S.: Plato, you should not be so unkind to Paleolithic people. They had plenty of integrity.

Plato: Yes, I know. But they could not play with symbols. They did not have enough stars in them and too much clay. We should not envy them. And you should not pity yourself. The human condition is one of nobility and of the courage to reach the stars.

H.S.: What do you think is going to happen to us within the next century?

Plato: I don’t want to be a prophet of doom. But you will probably blow yourself to pieces. You have got too much of this lethal nuclear stuff laying around. But no. You will muddle through. The wisdom of the race will prevail. You are coming through a very bad patch. But on the evolutionary scale it is just a tiny ripple. Those transitions from one evolutionary cycle to another are quite agonizing. The future never emerges out of simple designs, for it is as complex as life and evolution itself. Your technological forecasting has invariably been wrong. In any case ‘the future’ emerging out of it is so one sided and simplistic that it is not worth having it. You must use your imagination more and not be too obsessed by your agonies. At such periods of transition we must not look too obsessively at our trembling feet. May the stars guide you.

H.S.: Plato, we haven’t finished our discussion yet. I know you would like to finish in a crisp and elegant way. But we must not sacrifice content for the sake of elegance. We should really say more explicitly what we mean by nature, don’t you think? Even if we are unable to give a succinct definition of nature—for she is such an extraordinarily rich and elusive character—we should at least attempt to outline some of her essential characteristics.

Plato: A definition of nature you want) do you? To give a definition of philosophy was not that easy as you remember from the Symposium and my other texts; but nature, how can I define ‘nature.’ How can I define my own skin? Well, nature for me is my outer skin.

H.S.: Not very informative, Plato. People with a pedantic and analytical bent of mind might even scorn at the looseness of your metaphors.

Plato: Alright, you try.

H.S.: Let me begin with a story. Some years ago, I was in the Tatra mountains, one of the most dramatic ranges in Europe. A group of tourists went from a lower lake to a higher lake renowned for its austere beauty. Then one person from this group was asked what he saw up there. He replied: “Nothing, a heap of rocks.” I was inwardly outraged by what I thought was a reaction of a Paleolithic man. Only the de-natured man, de-sensitised man could see this marvellous landscape in which you were surrounded by natural cathedrals, as a heap of rocks. Later on, however, I was troubled by my high brow attitude and asked myself whether this fellow, who perceived the environ of the higher lake as “nothing but a heap of rocks,” was not as correct, or at least as justified as I was who saw in those mountains magnificent cathedrals.

Plato: You are not serious, are you? You are not saying that any denuded, half-formed halfwit, a sorry product of your artificial civilisation, is as good a judge and perceiver of nature as those endowed with exquisite sensitivities who can really see the whole grandeur of nature. I won’t have this kind of relativism which signifies the perversion of standards as well as the debasement of sensitivity. We in antiquity knew better than that!

H.S.: You are rather getting hot under the collar, Plato.

Plato: Of course I get irritated when by design or inadvertence the very heart of beauty is being brutalised. Without beauty, you are as good as dead. Without the experience of the sublime you are a crawling insect.

H.S.: I was actually leading in another direction. While reflecting on the experience of this “half-formed half wit,” as you call him, and many other people who see strange things in nature—who reduce it to economic resources; who sometimes claim, as a former President of the United States did, that once you have seen one redwood tree you have seen them all—I have come to the conclusion that somehow we must be able to judge the whole range of perspectives of nature without granting the half wit and the greedy the right to determine what nature is. We can do that by developing a new persp­ective on nature, a new way of viewing her. Instead of maintaining that it is an object for our exploitation—the approach of economists and physical scientists; and while avoiding the other extreme, that is of maintaining that nature is part of our subjectivity, we can, and I think we must, take the middle position by maintaining that nature is an intentional object, in the sense in which objects of art are. In our perception of nature, we bring our context, our intentional context to bear. What we perceive there is not simply what is out there but what we can elicit, what we bring to nature. It is the power of our intentional act of deciphering that makes nature either “a heap of rocks” or an exquisite, unforgettable experience.

Plato: You are extending here the idea of your country man, the Phenomenologist Roman Ingarden who, in his Das literarische Kunstwerke (or whatever its title, an incisive piece of work, anyway) has claimed that all works of art are intentional objects.

H.S.: Perhaps I am extending Ingarden’s idea and applying it to nature.

Plato: Ingarden has maintained that every work of art has several layers. There is the physical layer—the actual physical bits of paint with which a poem was printed; or the actual marble of which a given statue was carved. There is the next layer, the literal meaning of words within a poem, of a discernible female form which the sculpture depicts. And there is also the symbolic layer, the deeper meaning of the poem, or on the other hand, the symbolic attributes of the female form whether she purports to be Athena of Aphrodite. The symbolic aspect of the work of art goes beyond all its previous layers. In this aspect, the human intentional activity comes to play a most important part: we intentionally decipher the symbolism contained in physical artefacts. This is what culture is about—symbolism and the way we play with it. Now this phenomenological approach to objects of art works very well with regard to 20th century art. I am less certain whether it works so well with regard to classical or representational art. I am still less certain whether it can be applied to nature in its totality.

H.S.: I think it can and it does. After all, we are talking about the same activity, the activity of the mind. All mind’s activities are, in a sense, intentional. The mind always brings its context, its intentions to whatever it perceives and deciphers for it perceives and deciphers within its own web. It elicits rather than discovers and merely describes.

Plato: All right. But let us return to nature and your phenomenological or intentional approach to her. Will this approach not be another form of justifying subjectivism and relativism?

H.S.: Not really, for we can analyse the content of these acts of deciphering and determine intersubjectively which of them are crude and primitive and why. It is simply not the case that any simpleton has as much right to assert what is beautiful as those with exquisite and refined sensitivities; it is simply not the case that anything goes.

Plato: You are now reiterating some of my views expressed in my dialogues.

H.S.: Not so, Plato, for you postulated unalterable forms from which all stems and in which the essences of all things reside. My approach is evolutionary. We must acknowledge that as evolution unfolds, both on the biological and cultural level, our perspective on nature changes. Nature as an object of our intentions is not given to us, once and for all, in the same form or essence (as you would imagine). Our intentional acts of deciphering her, in certain ways and not in other ways, are culturally conditioned. Different cultures elicit different aspects from nature; indeed often find in nature incompatible things.

Furthermore the act of intentional deciphering is rooted in our biology: we have certain biological propensities which make us relate to nature in specifically human ways; not as frogs would do it or donkeys but as humans do. Also the act of intentional deciphering is related to and rooted in our emotional structure. An important aspect of our culture and of our emotional make up is our aesthetic experience. Nature has been an inexhaustible source of our aesthetic inspiration—because we have been able to read so much into it.

Thus nature is an intentional object in many senses: intellectual aesthetic, emotional, but also in the mythic sense—as the womb and the source of it all. Now we can see that the enormous variety of man’s conceptions of nature is the result of our multifarious intentional activities, the activity that elicits from nature what we are capable of entertaining. This activity involves not only our minds but also hearts and guts.

Plato: And now you would like to say that the variety of intentional activities performed by any particular man should be judged vis-à-vis total human heritage and in relation to those highest achievements which make the species worthy of the name human beings. Therefore, we shall find some approaches to nature degrading to the human condition, and therefore degrading to nature. And there will be other approaches, which bring enhancement to the human condition and are, therefore, in a sense upgrading nature. This is not a bad scheme at all, particularly as on best interpretations nature will be co-extensive with the highest reaches of man’s spirituality. Finally, you will want to say that every intentional act of perception of nature (even when we deal with so called ‘objective’ perception) is a normative act.

H.S.: This is all true. Our mind is always active, always reconstructing, always co-creating. Even in so-called objective acts, mind invariably moulds and reconstructs, presents things in a uniquely human way. For our objectivity is but human objectivity. We don’t know what God’s objectivity might be like. Within the human universe, if there is no mind, there is no knowledge, no perception, no intentional act of any sort; finally no conception or perception of nature. But mind is an evolutionary creation. The mind of the fish could conceive less of nature (in less richness and variety at any rate) than the mind of the monkey… which in turn is less versatile in the power of its conception—put otherwise, in the power of its intentional activity—than the human mind; which in the future may become more and more evolved, as we take evolution in our own hands and become evolution conscious of itself, thus consciously striving to broaden the scope of our spirituality and the total scope of our mental powers.

Plato: You are bringing this fellow Teilhard back again, with his conviction of the inexorable unfolding of evolution, aren’t you?

H.S.: This is true. My only excuse is that I believe that Teilhard’s influence will grow as the time goes on. We are only at the beginning of the understanding of our role in articulating evolution. Now Plato should we not attempt to clarify the concept of ‘ideology’ as we have done it with ‘nature.’

Plato: No, this would be tedious and unnecessary. Ideology is a pernicious thing. I told you at the beginning, ideology arises out of the corruption of philosophy. When you evolve a right kind of philosophy, that is all encompassing and spiritually sustaining, you won’t need any ideology. Even Heidegger was wrong: philosophy is not dead. And will arise as a phoenix to inspire and guide. For philosophy is our wings without which we can only crawl.

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