personal-blog/content/post/obedience-and-the-intellect.md

title	date	tags	topics	image	draft
Obedience and the Intellect	2021-07-14T22:42:57Z		philosophy theology	img/aquinas.jpg	true

"Obedience is first a virtue of the mind, rather than the will" ~Thomas Aquinas

This is the Platonic understanding of virtue. As Socrates often argued, once one knows the truth, one cannot help but move toward it. If you move away from it, you do not know it, but a semblance of it.

But there is a further implication. Truth is only available in dialectic, in which the commander and the commanded share the same knowledge of the truth. Obedience for its own sake (aka "blind obedience" ), therefore, is a similar form of corruption to willful rebellion.