Tag: Plato

My son is 7 and has his doubts about Santa. He’s kind of been fooling himself for years because he wants to believe.

Not believing in Santa is a rite of passage and not considered a big deal. But Ollie immediately concluded that if there is no Santa there is no soul and that when you die, you’re gone.

I don’t know what I believe about the soul but I was upset to see my son throw the soul out with Santa. Should we throw Santa under the bus to preserve the soul? Would that be honest? Can I honestly make a case for Santa? Can I honestly make a case for the soul if I deny Santa?

I let it go. We all go back and forth on these issues and as sure as he sounded the day he declare there is no Santa and no soul, he’s likely to change his mind as time goes by. But when the issue comes up again, I want to have thought the thing through.

I am unlikely to be alone in this situation. I offer the dialogue below to anyone is a similar bind.

I resolved the soul-Santa dilemma with Plato. That’s right: Plato. A platonic dialogue on Santa.

Ollie did say much of what I have him quoted as saying, about Santa and the soul, about the light in the trees… only I didn’t have Socrates to help me out at the time.

An amusing little philosophical bon-bon having zero relationship to anything political. We might as well  amuse ourselves from now till election day, because after that I expect we’ll be back to work trying to change the country. So take it for what it’s worth and have a little mental fun with it …

Originally published at http://www.rescogitans.sdu.dk/…

Introduction

American mystic and writer Robert M. Pirsig struggled mightily with the question of

how to interrogate the Unspeakable within the mental constraints of Western logical discourse. This struggle took him on an internal journey far from his Midwest, mid-century home, eventually pushing him into the unknown country of mental illness and involuntary commitment. I believe that what Pirsig was pursuing was not an empty Nothing, a no-thing. It was a full, even overfull Nothing, for which he struggled in vain to find a name and a vocabulary. I have taken to calling it the ‘over-full Nothing’ and will continue to use that term here to indicate when we are speaking of Nothing as an ontological term. Pirsig would come to believe that the closest approach to what he was trying to articulate could be found in the Tao, and indeed the Tao’s mapping to the characteristics of this ‘over-full Nothing’ was quite close. However, he failed to latch onto the full significance of something he noted in passing: the striking similarities between his thought and the system of the important Pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides. We will look in detail at the most influential deployment of the Parmenidean ‘over-full Nothing’, in Plato’s infamously obscure dialogue The Parmenides. Plato’s attempt to wrap it in logical discourse runs aground for the same reason that Pirsig’s attempt to do so ran aground 2500 years later. Both of their attempts to encapsulate the ‘over-full Nothing’ within language and logic eventually collapse into silence in the face of that of which nothing can be said.