Why the world needs Platonic love now more than ever (Ep. 17)

Never have truth and unity been further apart than in our post-Enlightenment world--and it's killing us. We’re at an impasse, and it doesn’t seem like a problem that science, our default problem-solver, will be able to solve.

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If scientific rationality vis-a-vis existential dread has reached an impasse, it is because of the inherent limits determined by Its proper, that is innate, or native axiological disposition. Its own self-definition obtains in virtue of truth - that is what it seeks, and arguably, what it finds. Its relation to the good, a primary Platonic concern, has never been clearly articulated; nor has its relation to beauty. It is then certainly possible that we are looking in the wrong place to overcome this impasse; all the more so if modernity accepts the Nietzschean project of reaching a 'beyond' good and evil. (Of course Nietzsche says nothing a propos of the same beyond applied to the other Socratic values: beauty and the good. That is Nietzsche's philosophical funeral.) Are truth and goodness competing claims? And what of the relation 'between' truth and beauty; are their claims incompatible in some degree and/or kind? The answer to both questions is yes and no. Would Plato agree with Iris Murdoch concerning 'the sovereignty of good'?