Thursday, March 23, 2017
The Good and God
I think that there are some fairly obvious similarities between Plato's Good and the Christian God. The most obvious being that for people to live good lives and be happy, their actions must be in pursuit of the Good, or God. In some cases in the republic it almost feels like the two could be synonyms for each other. But, I think their is a huge contrast that between the two that separate them and that is accessibility. Truly knowing and pursuing the Good is extremely difficult. It requires you to have not only a comprehensive understanding of the world around you and how all of these different forms tie into the Good. This serves as a massive barrier to many as even understanding a single form, like we can see in the Republic with justice, is simply too much for many people. This is where the christian concept of God distances itself from the Plato's Good. The christian God does not require understanding, indeed it even mandates a lack of it. The concept of God is built around faith, the idea of believing something without any empirical evidence. To pursue God does not you do not have to understand his nature, you just need to follow some set rules. Maybe this ease of access is why God caught on and the Good didnt. You can hardly expect people to pursue the Good when it is so difficult to grasp some of the most basic concepts of it.
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Good comparison. I think I largely agree, though one might think that from a different angle, access to God is far more difficult than access to the Good, for there's a sense in which (acc to Christianity) a relation to God is totally impossible, given our fallen natures. But notice that Plato doesn't have a doctrine of the Fall, and knowledge for him comes by a process of recollection. So there's a sense in which knowledge of the Good is already present or "immanent" in the Platonic subject, whereas on the Christian picture knowledge of an utterly transcendent God is, of necessity, a gift. (This is the way Kierkegaard sets up the comparison with his two "hypotheses" in his *Philosophical Fragments*).
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