Socrates' Daemon

Kenotic Mysticism and Sanity

[This is an excerpt from a longer series of essays I wrote in 2022 entitled “A Geneology of Our Current Insanity”. There’s a lot of seminal stuff in it, but it is also oppressively prolix—it’s me just thinking out loud without an editor. Generally not a good formula for readability. Nevertheless, from time to time I’ll excerpt (and try to compress) parts that have what seem to me, anyway, to have some vitality. I’m posting this today because it sets the stage for what I want to say about a very similar theme developed in Arendt’s The Life of the Mind in her section entitled “Metaphor and the Ineffable”. I’ll have more to say about it soon. BTW, the more Arendt I read, the more I’m blown away by her. I had no idea.]

Now it’s pretty obvious to me that Socrates and Plato were mystics. I hesitate to use the word, because of its connotations of flakiness or associations with the New Age. But all I mean by it is experience on the vertical dimension. People have such experiences all the time, which they used to recognize as experiences of the sacred. They still do, but the current fashion is to call them “aesthetic” because that is more compatible with the hegemonic rationalist materialist imaginary. But that’s changing.

But when Socrates/Plato talks about Justice, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness as transcendentals, he is not talking about abstract concepts, but about an encounter with the sacred. They are transcendentals because they intersect with the everyday horizontal experience on the vertical dimension of depth. There is something about them through which the divine shines. They are numinous, and they inspire. If you have ever been deeply moved when learning of or witnessing a particularly inspiring manifestation of these transcendentals, you’ve had a mystical experience, an experience that comes from the vertical dimension. There are all kinds of mystical experiences, but the experience of the transcendental archetypes is entry level for most people. So such experiences are common enough, but less so in a culture that has become increasingly simulacral. And obviously there are different ways of understanding or interpreting their provenance. ¹

But the point I want to make here is that the experience of the divine or the sacred is something that is rather common. The interpretation of their meaning or significance is where it gets tricky, and this is where a wisdom tradition becomes critical, because while clearly some experiences might ‘feel’ sacred, many are not. They are delusional. If they are genuine, they are disclosive at varying levels of depth of the Living Real, while others are just counterfeit. I think that many, if not most, of the people storming the Capitol last year sincerely experienced it as a participation in a sacred event. Clearly it was not.

How do we tell the difference? Well, assuming we have good moral instincts and a modicum of intellectual honesty, we can all find out for ourselves by trial and error. But while you can teach yourself the violin, your chances of becoming a good violinist are significantly increased if you have a teacher or a tradition as a resource that makes learning more efficient. It helps to have someone in your life who “knows”, who can say, No, that’s not it. Try again. The aspiring violinist is more likely to make progress if there is a trellis on which his or her development as a violinist can climb and a gardener who checks things from time to time to prune what otherwise drains vitality. The same is true in moral development or In the life of the spirit in general. To have such a teacher/gardener can save time, and it might even save your soul.

Our situation now as late moderns after the collapse of the vertical is that there are no longer any teachers--at least any that are public facing. None that break through all the noise, anyway. That along with the destruction/disappearance of customary culture means that there is no cultural trellis to climb. We’re all on our own. And mostly we’re not doing very well. If we’re lucky we find someone along the way who is a little farther along in his or her learning how to navigate on the vertical, but even so, this has no significant impact on our larger cultural, political, and economic life. That just keeps doing its rationalist-materialist thing, and dragging us all along with it whether we want to go or not.

We can learn from Socrates how to teach ourselves and one another. There have been--and still are--extraordinary people like Socrates who were/are able to find their own way. And we need to learn from them as best we can. They had or have no one to teach them, but they have an interior moral compass that guides them. For Socrates his teacher was his daemon², and I suspect it’s the same for many people today, whether they think of their inner teacher as a daemon or not. For Socrates his daemon had an apophatic or negative influence. It was an inner voice that warned him when he was going off track, when he was being seduced. His daemon only said No, it had nothing to say about how to proceed positively. Socrates had to find within himself a positive way forward, and he had to choose it and then act on it.

Socrates’ transposed the daemon’s negating, apophatic function as an inner experience into outward teaching practice in his dialectical method, or elenchus. His goal was not to tell people what to think, but to get them to say, for instance, that No, justice isn’t this, and it isn’t that, and No, Socrates, it can’t be that. Then what is it? Well that’s for the individual to discover for himself once the field has been cleared of all the things that Justice cannot be. Only then is it possible, or at least more likely, to see, or better, experience what it is.

A wise teacher must have discovered for himself what the truth is, but she can’t tell you what you must discover for yourself. But she can help you see why x, y, and z are not it. She can help you strip away wrongheadedness to create a space for the Living Real to reveal itself to you, to allow you to learn what you can do on your own while at the same time warning you against dead ends and bad habits that will make the task more difficult or to take longer. And once you’ve cleared away all that is wrongheaded, in the empty space thus created, aka, the Socratic aporia, it becomes possible for the Living Real to disclose itself to you. This is as true now as it was 2400 years ago. Heidegger’s ‘aletheia‘³ owes more to Plato and Socrates than I’m aware he gave them credit for. The Socratic elenchus makes no sense if it’s just a method for debunking conventional wisdom and abstractly defining certain concepts.

Well, in part it was for Socrates a debunking exercise, and that’s what got him into trouble with the citizens of Athens. But Socrates would be no better than the Sophists if he were only a debunker. The elenchus makes sense only if it is a way to prepare the soul for a revelation, a theophany, an encounter with, or better, a “remembering” of the Truth that discloses itself as sacred knowledge, the Living Real, on the vertical dimension.

Socratic logic is used not to reveal what’s true, but what cannot be true. As Socrates’ daemon doesn’t tell him what to do, it tells him only that that’s not it--don’t go there. That’s what all good teachers should do. Wisdom on the vertical dimension comes from learning, first, what to say No to, and then, second, saying Yes to what emerges or discloses itself when a space is cleared for it. This is why the beginning of wisdom is to know what you don’t know. The biggest problem that we have in truly knowing is that we think we already know when we just don’t. And the biggest problem for people who live captured within a rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary is that they think their knowledge on the horizontal is the only knowledge that’s truly worth knowing, and that’s why they lack wisdom.

If you don’t have this disclosive experience, and you only just believe what others tell you what the truth is, you remain in a state of alienation from the Living Real.⁴ At best, believing in the testimony of others who have vertical knowledge predisposes you to obtain such knowledge for yourself. You’re unlikely to do the preparatory work if you don’t believe there’s anything that will emerge once you’ve cleared a space for it. This is what the Christian mystical tradition calls kenosis. You must first create a space for something new to arise and fill it. And if you knock, the door will be opened; if you ask in good faith, you will be answered. But you have to develop the vertical kenotic capacity to hear the answer. A ‘mystic’ is someone who simply has developed some measure of vertical capacity, some level of wisdom. That vertical capacity was something one encountered in prominent public figures quite frequently before forty years ago. It’s very, very rare to encounter it anywhere these days in our mainstream public discourse.

1. The Heideggerians, Dreyfus and Kelly, try to make the case for a retrieval of a pre-Axial sense of the sacred in their All Things Shining, and I am sympathetic to what they are trying to do, but they bend over backwards to avoid any reference to the vertical in the post-Axial sense I’m trying to articulate here.

Even in their description of the most intensely vertical, i.e., mystical, of the gospels, that of St. John, they reduce Christianity to a “mood” of agape. They see no reason to explain what the origin of this mood is, or whether it has more validity than any other mood or whim. It’s just part of a smorgasbord of moods that you can choose from those that call to you on a menu on which all choices are equal. I think their book also makes it clear, if unintentionally, why Heidegger was seduced by the “mood” of early Nazism, and why without a transcendental or vertical dimension to ground our ideas of the Good, there’s no real reason to say he was wrong. They try to, but fail, imo. Heidegger is an important, corrective thinker who must be taken seriously, but he is an incomplete, and to say the least, flawed one. Arendt defended him to the end. She described him a naive, not evil. Maybe.

2. For the Greeks the word ‘daemon’ does not mean demon or have anything to do with what is colloquially thought of as the ‘demonic’. The daemon is closer to what we think of as a muse or guardian spirit. When Aristotle talks about ‘eudaemonia’, he’s talking about a life that has achieved a level of happiness because it’s a life lived well aligned with one’s daemon. The daemon is something important in Jungian psychology—see James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code. Another very interesting book is Charles Stang’s Our Divine Double. Not too long ago this stuff was very fringe, but it’s the kind of thing Harvard and Yale University Press are putting out these days.

3. The Greek word for truth frequently used by Heidegger that means the unveiling or disclosure of what was before hidden. Unpacking this where Arendt wants to take us. Life of Mind is the first book I’ve read by her where she’s openly acknowledging her debt to Heidegger and her ideas about ‘thinking’ are distinctly Heidegerian.

4. This goes to my point in my last post regarding how fashionable groupthink too easily becomes thoughtless wickedness.