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The difference between the beginner and the philosopher (for the perfectly trained student of Plato is no one else but the genuine philosopher) is a difference not of degree but of kind.

Leo Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Rationalism, p. 68

This is the question for philosophy, for democracy, for humanity. Strauss continues:

Now it is well known that, according to Plato, virtue is knowledge or science; therefore, the beginner is inferior to perfectly trained student of Plato not only intellectually, but also morally. That is to say, the morality of beginners has a basis essentially different from the basis on which morality of the philosopher rests: their virtue is not genuine virtue, but a vulgar or political virtue only, a virtue based not on insight, but on customs or laws.

This is where the question continues to. Finally it arrives at:

And there is a difference not of degree but of kind between truth and lie (or untruth). And what holds true for the difference between the esoteric and exoteric teaching; for Plato's exoteric teaching is identical with his "noble lies."

Strauss says the truth is not what the philosopher says, it is what he doesn't say, and that's why this is from an essay called "Exoteric Teaching," because it's actually about Esoteric Teaching, by someone who says he "can't be a philosopher," (and therefore we may assume he is one).

Modernity is "a problem" according to Strauss because it does not value the esoteric in philosophy, it does not give the philosopher a higher morality over the "uninitiated," it makes no such division of Being. It eliminates privilege and the concept of virtue.

Quantum Physics asserts that there are only divisions of degree, there are no divisions of "kind."

Advaita Vedanta, the Indian philosophy from which Platonism descends, asserts there are no divisions of kind, only of degree. There is truly no virtue, but since there is Unity, the True Knower is incapable of causing harm.

Since both empirical science and Indian mysticism, the most earnest investigations of the outer and the inner, respectively, ever conducted, which proceed from the absolute opposite poles of human endeavor, have finally arrived at the same conclusion, we might say that everyone is capable of knowing the truth and overcoming the impulse to harm others.

Virtue is then an illusion, but a necessary one (like money), and the concept of virtue fades away as one purges their sense of privilege over other beings. The Paramahamsa embraces everything, virtuous and vicious, but also accepts all Being under his protection and has no impulse to harm anything.

What if one understands the illusion of virtue, but does not purge their sense of privilege over others? What if one has merely a vertical enlightenment, but not a horizontal one? What does this person look like? He may be called "The Philosopher," by Plato's definition. 

The secret of Masonry, which seems to be inherently Platonic, according to Strauss in the same essay, is that:

All works, and therefore all good works, are "superfluous" insofar as the level of theoretical life, which is self-sufficient, is reached; and that the requirements of the lower are bound from time to time to conflict with, and to supersede in practice, the requirements of the higher. Consideration of that conflict is the ultimate reason why the "free-masons" (i.e., the wise or the men of contemplation) must conceal certain fundamental truths.

The second part of this disagrees even with Western Occultism, which is the life-blood of Masonry, which holds the tenant: "As below, so above. As above, so below," and therefore there can be no disjunction between morality upper and lower. This is described in The Kybalion, the compendium which reveals all the secrets of Alchemy, whose publication in the nearly 20th century reveals that if ever there were intellectual secrets that needed to be kept for reasons beyond Egoism, those days are behind us.

The "superfluous" nature of good works is explained by Vivekananda in his essay on Karma-yoga. The idea that we are storing up "treasures in heaven" is a useful image, but it is milk for babes, while the meat is for men. Is this a noble lie in the way that Plato lies?

The difference between the Platonic Lie and the Christly lie is this: Plato lied because he felt the fundamental truths were too painful and dangerous for the population. Christ lied, by speaking in parables, because all words are lies, merely signifiers of what lies beyond speech, for the "The Tao that can be told is not the Eternal Tao."

Lucretius put his materialist philosophy inside a poem, so that honey on the rim would make the wormwood of truth palatable. On the other end of the spectrum from materialism, the passion of Christ is a savage event which covers the wondrous transcendental pleasure that comes from selfless devotion to the truth -- it is wormwood which covers the honey, for people have a mean streak and won't eat bread unless you tell them its made from the crushed bones of the innocent.

The Ramakrishna spoke of a sage who promised his would-be followers two gems and a bowl of soup if they followed him. He lied to them, and did not given them two gems and a bowl of soup. He did not lie out of neurotic "concern for them," nor to protect his city. He lied because the bowl of soup he gave them was consciousness of the infinite ocean of the Absolute, and the two gems were their eyes now filled with unending wonder. These lie beyond all words, and so all words are lies when they are offered as reality. Also, people are more interested in tomato bisque and diamonds than they are in truth, until they try it.

Modernity is not a "problem" because history, as a discrete progression of stages, is an illusion. Modernity is only close to being a problem when we reenforce the idea that we are privated from those who valued the transcendent. They are here, and they are always here, for we are them.

But who valued the transcendent the most? Let's say: the ancients. Which ancients? The Greeks of course. Did they value it the most of all ancients? Did they make a concerted survey of the transcendent and reveal the various paths towards it? No, they did not actually do that, they spoke with much obscurity and much attention to holding onto the ephemeral and not the transcendent. Who did make such an investigation? The Indians. And did they find divisions in Being, the likes of which Plato and Strauss talk about? No they did not. But they have castes! They are the modern Indians, and not the ancients, if we are going to be discerning, we must be far more discerning than we have been.

If we say the Philosopher never had such a grounded understanding of Being as the Indians did, then should we not study the Swamis instead and abandon the Philosophers? Perhaps, but why should we submit to the Indians as our teachers? We are Americans, we are our own teachers (and this is indeed a profound place to begin our search for enlightenment, for it is likely where it will end at as well).

Unlike Plato, however, let us look at the place which comes before words. Let us start at a place far more fundamental than where Heidegger started, let us ask "who asks the originating question" without even asking this question -- let us listen to ourselves asking. Perhaps this place is even more at the beginning than where the author of the Gospel of John begins at, which places God at the same beginning as logos. So let us start even before we have a God. It would be starting before "the beginning," before time itself, and therefore not before time, but outside of time. Is this the Realm of the true-Self? Let us hear ourselves ask that to question unto... If we are to be philosophers, if we are to truly love wisdom, we cannot assume anything about wisdom -- and we certainly must not assume it starts, or ends, with words.